Month: 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.

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

Fr. David Curry
AMD Service of the Deaf
Christ Church, Windsor
October 25^th, 2009

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“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth”

“Have you considered my servant Job?” God asks. He has but have we? The Book of Job is a wonderful drama, almost a play, that bids us consider the relation of human suffering to the goodness of the created order and the goodness of God. Job has become proverbial for his sufferings, the so-called patience of Job. His sufferings, we might say, are ‘biblical’ in proportion. He suffers the loss of everything in terms of family and wealth and sits on a dung heap, afflicted by boils, on the one hand, and afflicted, too, it seems to me, by the so-called comforters, on the other hand. They have become as proverbial as Job’s patience.

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them. There is the question, of course, about what it means to be a good person. For Christians there is no goodness in us apart from the goodness of God declared most fully in Jesus Christ. But the point is that the quality of the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. No. It is rather the setting in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question is whether we will be defined by circumstances or defined by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us, come what may in the world around us.

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“The wedding is ready”

What does it mean to be ready for the banquet, for the wedding feast? What is the wedding-garment without which, it seems, we are not ready; without which, it seems, we are out even when we think we are in; without which, it seems, we shall be “cast into outer darkness” where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth”? It is a frightening prospect.

The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them. There is the question, of course, about what it means to be a good person. For Christians there is no goodness in us apart from the goodness of God declared most fully in Jesus Christ. But the point is that the quality of the times in which we live cannot be the measure of virtue and character. No. It is rather the setting in which virtue is shown and character is proved. The question is whether we will be defined by circumstances or defined by grace. By grace, we mean the highest perfection of human virtue which is God’s work in us, come what may in the world around us.

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“Then opened he their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures”

We have had occasion to remark upon the significance of St. Luke as the Church’s spiritual director for over half the year in terms of the quantity of the readings from his Gospel appointed to be read at Holy Communion. We have had occasion, too, to mention the quality of those readings, captured best, perhaps, in Dante’s evocative phrase about St. Luke as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. How wonderful then that his feast day should fall upon a Sunday and command our attention in our weekly celebration of Christ’s death and resurrection. That is, after all, the main focus of each Sunday’s worship. The intent is the deepening of our understanding of that fundamental mystery of Christian faith and identity.

Consider the Gospel reading from St. Luke appointed for today. “He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.” But then, what is that understanding? “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name among the all nations.” Powerful words which provide us with a sense of the tenor of his Gospel. Death and resurrection, repentance and forgiveness. Could anything be more concise, more clear, and more complete?

We know precious little by way of biographical detail about St. Luke. As the Collect notes, his “praise is in the Gospel”, meaning that St. Luke is mentioned in the Scriptures of the New Testament, quite apart from the attribution of the third Gospel and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles to his mind and pen. Our Epistle reading specifically places him in the company of Paul. “Only Luke is with me,” he says in the context of a discourse about evangelism.

The Collect identifies St. Luke as both “an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul”. A healer, to be sure, but by way of something which must strike us as rather strange. The healing is by way of “the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him”. Healing by way of teaching? I wonder what sense we can make of that.

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