Community

ne of the things I do in the summer with some of my time away from the church is to plan sermons for the year to come. I never get as much planned as I would like, but at least I reconnoiter some of the sermonic land ahead so I don’t have to start from scratch each week.

My planning always begins with the lectionary. As you know, the lectionary lists scripture for each Sunday: an Old Testament lesson, a psalm, a lesson from one of the Gospels, and a lesson from elsewhere in the New Testament outside the Gospels. Following the lectionary helps us explore more of the breadth of the biblical landscape. In other words, a lectionary keeps us out of timeworn ruts in the road where we just look at the same old scenery again and again and again.

Sometimes, however, the lectionary takes us places where we don’t want to go and today is one of those times. The Old Testament lection for today is from the prophet Jeremiah and he can be a real downer. So here it is — Startup Sunday. We want to get the new church year off to a good start. We want things to be positive and happy. But old Jeremiah is going to tell us about God being a potter who sits at a potter’s wheel to make a pot or a bowl or a vase or something useful. But if the pot is crooked or not turning out right, then the potter smashes the clay and starts over. This doesn’t seem like a good way to begin the year.

There is a positive aspect to this image and that’s the direction we’re going to follow this morning. But there is also judgment, particularly when we know the story of Jeremiah. He was the prophet who had to announce the demise of the ancient Jewish nation. They had disobeyed God and the punishment of the Babylonian exile was just around the bend. God was tired of the crooked pots the Jewish people had become. So for Jeremiah, the potter’s wheel was a harbinger of imminent judgment. Not a positive message but maybe one we sometimes need to hear. Let’s read it in Jeremiah 18.

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.

Then the word of the Lord came to me: Can I not do with you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done? says the Lord. Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel. At one moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom, that I will pluck up and break down and destroy it, but if that nation, concerning which I have spoken, turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it. And at another moment I may declare concerning a nation or a kingdom that I will build and plant it, but if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it. Now, therefore, say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.

Were we to read on in Jeremiah, we would see that it was already too late for the Jewish people. They were not about to turn away from their evil ways. In fact, in the very next verse, they say, “It is no use! We will follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of our evil will.” (Jeremiah 18.12) They were called to repent and they didn’t. We’ll talk about repentance next Sunday.

Today I want to talk just very briefly about who we are. What kind of people are we who listen to this story and grapple with this text? And first I want to talk about the kind of God who says he is like a potter. What kind of God is that?

The Hebrew word for potter, yotzer, almost rhymes with the English word. A yotzer takes the most common, seemingly worthless element of the earth, the clay itself, and transforms it into something functional, valuable, even beautiful. A yotzer is someone who gets his hands dirty making things. It was as a yotzer that back in Genesis 2 God got down into the dust to form the adam, the human one, out of the stuff of the Earth and then to breath life into him. In other words, the God who is a yotzer isn’t remote or aloof. A yotzer God is close, intimate, and loving.

Contrast the common image of God as Creator. We tend to think of the Creator as long ago. We tend to think that God created untold eons in the past and then stopped creating. But this is the old deist view of god — the clockmaker god who wound things up and got them started. Then the universe has gone on ticking by itself ever since. Yet we know creation is ongoing — this is the truth evolution teaches about God — and the God who is yotzer continues to be hands-on, reaching right down into the dust and the DNA and the details of life.

A yotzer God thinks, plans, and devises that which is created. God’s own hand remains upon the creation, as the potter’s own hand shapes the clay. God labors over creation to transform us from dust into creatures who sing praise to their maker, to their yotzer.

And the potter image isn’t just about creating. It’s also about recreating. For with the potter nothing is wasted. If the pot isn’t turning out right, the potter reshapes it again and again until it becomes what is intended. As I noted at the beginning, there is a judgment element about this. God can do what God wants with the clay. Disobedience brings judgment and in the historical circumstances of Jeremiah’s time we know judgment happened. But the potter image also holds out hope that God will reshape us into the creatures he intends. Nothing is wasted.

I read recently about what you could call ultimate recycling. For most of its history under Castro, the country of Cuba was heavily reliant economically on the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Cuba’s economic crisis became even more severe. Poverty was pandemic and Cubans were forced to engage in some truly inventive coping. Since they had nothing new to work with, they found creative ways to make something out of nothing.

• One person took an old rotary-dial telephone and turned it into an electric fan.

• Another took an empty plastic bottle, one that had contained antifreeze, and transformed it into a sign for his taxicab.

• Still another person took a little plastic bear, a child’s old squeeze toy, and attached it upside down to a set of bicycle handlebars so that it became a bike horn.

That’s real recycling. Not simply putting out on the curb a blue bin with old newspapers or bottles. Real recycling means nothing is wasted.

That’s what a yotzer God does. The potter did not give up when the first pot was spoiled. He reworked it into something that was good and useful, like a Cuban recycler turning a phone into a fan, or a plastic bottle into a taxi sign.

A Cuban designer named Ernesto Oroza noticed the creative reinventions of his fellow citizens — their fans, signs, and horns — and he gave them a special name: “Objects of necessity.” He told a journalist, “The objects of necessity represent the world I live in, and they express our desire to invent and not let ourselves be overwhelmed by our problems.”[1]

Objects of necessity. I like that. What a great term for us as we come to see ourselves as lumps of clay in the hand of our potter God. We are God’s objects of necessity, the creations that God has chosen to make and to remake. Nothing is wasted. Not even our stupid mistakes and sinful disobedience. God forgives and remakes us because he is our yotzer God and we are the clay.

We know this because of the people in the Bible. We tend to think of Bible people as special, unique, holy. But here’s how one writer described some Bible characters, accurately if somewhat facetiously. Noah was a drunk, Abraham was too old, Isaac was a daydreamer, Jacob was a liar, Leah was ugly, Joseph was abused, Moses had a stuttering problem, Gideon was afraid, Sampson was a womanizer, Rahab was a prostitute, Jeremiah and Timothy were too young, David had an affair and was a murderer, Elijah was suicidal, Isaiah preached naked, Jonah ran away from God, Naomi was a widow, Job went bankrupt, John the Baptist ate bugs, Peter denied Christ, the disciples fell asleep while praying, Martha worried about everything, the Samaritan woman was divorced, more than once, Zacchaeus was too small, Paul was too religious, Timothy had an ulcer ... AND Lazarus was dead![2] Jesus raised him and then sometime later he had to die again. Once is enough, don’t you think?

Some bits of this are exaggerated for humor’s sake but the substance is true. The Bible is filled with broken, hurting, and sinful people whom God created and recreated to be useful and occasionally beautiful vessels of God’s grace.

Which brings me in closing to my second point today. Who are we that tell and listen to this story? We are just like the people in the Bible — not in all the details about murder and such, but broken and hurting and sinful people. And God is still creating and recreating us into useful vessels of grace. That’s why I named this sermon “Community.” We are a community who gathers together each week to hear the truth. Sometimes it’s a painful truth but always it’s a joyous truth because God is not done with us yet.[3] We are a community of people who celebrate that God still creates and recreates, even folk like us. Thanks be to God.

[1] Fiona Haley, “Viva recycling.” Fast Company (Feb. 2004): 37.

[2] Timothy F. Merrill, ed., “No Waste,” Homiletics 16.5 (2004): 14.

[3] A simple praise song written by Eddie Espinosa called “Change My Heart Oh God” expresses simply what the sermon probably makes too complicated. “Change my heart, O God / Make it ever true / Change my heart, O God / May I be like You / You are the potter / I am the clay / Mold me and make me / This is what I pray.”