Christ Church

Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, 2:00pm service for Atlantic Ministry of the Deaf

admin | 25 October 2009

“Arise, and go down to the potter’s house”

“Arise, and go down to the potter’s house,” God says to Jeremiah in The Book of Jeremiah, “and there I will let you hear my words.”(Jeremiah 18.1-2)

Jeremiah’s image of the Potter and the Clay is a commentary on the foundational stories of Creation and the Fall in The Book of Genesis. In Jeremiah’s view, God is the Potter and we are the clay. He shapes us and not otherwise. The struggle of our age, perhaps, is to overcome the dogmatic skepticism which refuses to the Potter what belongs to the “rational” clay of our humanity, namely the acknowledgment that we are the creatures whom God has made.

Left by itself, the idea that we are the vessels whom the divine Potter has made and shaped would be an unbearable truth. It would be unbearable because scripture and experience reveal us to ourselves as just so many broken pots – broken through no fault of the Potter but because of ourselves and because of the things which can just ‘happen’ to us. Both are things which belong to the reality of the Fall, the reality that we are not at home in the world and with one another because we are not at one with God.

At this point the image of the Potter and the Clay deepens into mystery. We are broken pots because we have failed to will the intent of the Maker. Something is required of us. We are not simply passive receptacles of God’s will and purpose – unassuming, inert and unmoving clay. No. We have to will the shape that the divine Potter wants for each of us. The quality of our being in Christ, in the Christian understanding of things, is about how the divine Word takes shape in us to his glory and for our endless good.

And yet, that we are but so many broken pots also would remain an uncomfortable and inescapable truth were it not for the grace and mercy of God. A deeper humility, a profounder openness to the Poet/Maker and Shaper of Souls is required of us. Jeremiah hints at this. “The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to do.”

What is the grace and the mercy? It is the deep and simple truth of God with us, God made man, the Potter who becomes himself the clay.

‘Twas much that man was made like God before, but
that God should be made like man, much more,

as the poet/preacher John Donne puts it. But it is another preacher, John Hackett, who drives the point home even more surely, perhaps.

The Potter may make what vessels do like him best out of his own clay. But how strangely was the wheel turn’d about when the clay did make the Potter; was it not enough to make man after the image of God, but moreover to make God after the image and likeness of man? Was it not enough that the breath of the Lord should be made a living soul for man, but that the eternal word of God should be made flesh…O that as the Word was made flesh, so our stony hearts … may be made flesh.

“How strangely was the wheel turn’d.” The Word made flesh, the clay-shaped Potter, enters into the struggles of our lives and turns the wheel about to shape his redemption for us and in us. He turns us to himself.

We live by the Word of God written and said and by the Word of God made flesh. For then we are in the hands of the Potter who has himself become clay to reshape us “as it seemed good to [him] to do.” Such is the nature of redemption itself.

Our Churches are Potter’s houses, the places where we are being shaped in the things that belong to our lives in Christ. Sunday after Sunday, as it were, we “arise and go down to the potter’s house” where the divine Potter says, “I will let you hear my words,” words which shape our lives and days to his endless glory and praise.