Vessels of Clay
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
September 5, 2004
Jeremiah 18:1-11; Luke 14:25-33
My father recently retired after almost 40 years of teaching art. When we were kids, my sister and I would sometimes visit him at his school and hang around in his artroom. There were a lot of cool things in there, but one of the things that I always thought was interesting was the kiln.
I don’t know if you know what a kiln is. A kiln is an oven, in which clay is cooked until it is hard. A potter or an artist takes a handful of soft, malleable clay. She shapes it with her hands. She makes out a cup or bowl item that she wants. When she has it in the shape she wants at, she puts it in the kill fires it. It is hard its inflexible can’t be reshaped. It is often more usable this way, but is also much more breakable this way.
In the text from the Old Testament, we are given an image of God as the potter. It is in the midst of a prophetic message to the Kingdom of Judah from the prophet Jeremiah. He is warning them that their ignoring of justice and their propensity toward violence will have consequences. God formed Israel as a potter forms clay. God is free to reshape the clay if he doesn’t like how the project is turning out. God will shape the fortunes of Israel as he sees fit. Jeremiah is reminding the people that they are ultimately clay in God’s hands, and God will reshape them if necessary.
When we start out our lives we are much more like soft malleable clay. Over the course of our lives, we become much harder. The things we learned, the things we find familiar, the things we experience, had a tendency to harden us. In many ways we become more useful, but we also become a much easier to break.
College is the time you get to say, “Am I the person everyone has always said that I am?” For at least 18 years you’ve had friends, family, teachers, and relatives, and everybody else telling you who you are, giving labels to you, telling you what your culture is: what it means to be from your particular part of the country or ethnicity or class. You’ve had people telling you what shape you are. This is the first time, these four years, you get decide if that’s true. You get to decide if that’s the shape you want. You get to decide what influences will shape you. It’s a time when you are free to shape yourself and you are free for God to shape you into the person you need to be. Not the person other people tell you you are. The person you need to be. That’s what college is.
Yeah, you’re going to learn a lot of stuff. You’re going to study for a lot of tests and learn a lot of things, but you’re not always going to remember any of it. There’s a classes here and there you remember, but it won’t always be because of the fact you learned, it’ll more often be because of the kid who sat next to you and talked all the way through it. But what will really make the difference for you is that this is the time you get to decide what it means when I say “I”.
And part of that conversation in a life of faith is “how is God trying to shape me?” and “what does God see in that lump of clay?” “What is God trying to bring forth from me?” It’s the kind of thing, in order to do it, you have to keep something of an open mind. You won’t graduate with the same ideas and opinions you came in here with, and if you do, you missed the point. You can ask an upperclassman if they are the person they were at the beginning of their freshman year, ask yourself if you’re the same person you were when you started. You won’t be, that’s how this whole thing works. It’s a little bit intimidating, but it’s also a really good thing, because sometimes we need reshaping in our lives. Otherwise we become sort of stagnate. We don’t really move much.
Sometimes what we need in addition to an open-mindedness is a willingness to break with the things that have come before, a willingness to let go to the things we always thought we knew. There’s something about that in the Luke text.
There are a number of things about this text that make us uncomfortable. We don’t like the idea of having to hate our mother and father, sister and brother. I don’t know if I’m comfortable with that. Even those of us who might not be particularly fond of our family members, are nevertheless disturbed about Jesus telling us that “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.”
I don’t know They have a name for people who tell you to give up your family and friend connections, give up all your possessions for the true faith: they’re called cult leaders. And we tell you to stay away from those people on campus.
It’s a little bit disconcerting to us when we come across Jesus saying words that are so difficult because it doesn’t sound like Jesus to us. Never mind that it’s in the Bible, it’s confusing to us. Part of it is we’re looking at this book from two thousand years and ten thousand miles away from where it was written in context. We need to remember that the Bible was not written by 21st Century White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. I know we forget that, and Hollywood forgets that all the time and Jesus is blonde-haired and blue-eyed, but we need to remember that the people who produced this scripture lived in a different culture context than us and for them the words “hate” and “love” did not mean despise and adore. They didn’t have a way of saying you like something or you dislike something. They didn’t have a way of saying “I prefer” and “I reject.” When we read in the Scripture “God loved Jacob” and “God hated Esau”, God didn’t hate Esau. God blesses Esau abundantly as we read in the scriptures. It just means that God picked Jacob to be the father of the people of Israel.
So Jesus isn’t saying to us, “You’ve gotta hate your old man” “You should despise your mother.” What he’s saying is, when it comes down to discipleship, when it comes down to carrying your cross or staying home where it’s comfortable you’ve got to pick the hard one. That is, a life of faith is the willingness to go beyond the things we are comfortable with, a willingness to follow God wherever God is going to take us. It may mean God leaving us where we are and everything is fine. It may mean God challenging us in ways we’ve never even considered, but part of a life of faith is allowing ourselves to be that malleable clay that God will turn into something. That we stay open to possibilities, that we exist here in a life of community we don’t come in with all the answers. I went to three years of seminary and I don’t have all the answers. We don’t have all the answers here, we are just open to the possibilities of what God is looking for in our lives.
When Jesus said you can’t be my disciples unless you give up all your possessions, he’s not talking about our laptops or cars, though for some people he may be. What he’s talking about is the baggage, the stuff we carry with us that is of such great value to us, that we would rather keep that than risk being in closer relationship with God and one another; our prejudices and preconceived notions. All of that stuff can weigh us down, sometimes even more than money. It keeps us from being the people that God is calling us to be- that soft malleable clay He’s looking for. We sometimes in our lives can get a little baked in those kilns of experience. I almost thought of naming this sermon “Don’t Get Baked” but that’s a whole other sermon. When we do, what happens is we are unable to deal with the changes life throws at us. We become hard-edged and break.
All we have to do is think about the anniversary that is coming up this Saturday. It’s the third year anniversary of September 11th. Just think what happened to us as a people. It was as if we were a clay vessel that was thrown down on the ground and shattered. And we’ve spent a lot of time trying to put those people back together. We as individuals and as a community of faith cannot afford that kind of shattering. We have to be malleable and soft so God can reshape us.
We know some things, once broken, cannot be put back together. And in our lives, sometimes that’s the good thing that happens: old ways of thinking, old barriers need to be shattered. As for ourselves, in a life of faith we try to stay soft and meltable and flexible. Because we are just all vessels of clay ultimately, formed out of the clay of the earth by a loving creator. We are ultimately made in God’s likeness: soft, earthy. It is a little scary, a little undefined. Clay is not as solid as baked pottery. Clay is easily shaped by others, perhaps we wonder how we will know who is shaping us right. it’s a little dangerous, a little risky. But that’s why we do this together, why we come together as a community, identify ourselves as a people, so that we as the Body of Christ become the hands of Christ and help to shape ourselves and each other. It’s how we remember what it means to be made of earth, made of clay. It helps us to remember who we are as a people when we speak of God as a loving potter, with his hands in the clay.
