Clay in the Potter’s Hands
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
May 10, 2008–Baccalaureate Service
Jeremiah 18:1-10
Jeremiah 18:1-10 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.”
I. BEGINNING
Around 18%.
That’s how much of your lives you have spent in college. Just under one-fifth of your life. Eighteen percent. Four years out of 22.
It’s a fairly significant percentage.
During that time, the things that the Class of 2008 has seen: One presidential election and the beginning of another. Changes in university administration…. Changes in university buildings, construction, both on campus and around the city. World crises: wars, strife, tsunamis, cyclones. A new baseball team in town. An NCAA bid for our men’s basketball team. All kinds of things you have seen in that 18% of your lives thus far.
You have survived much: TDR food, the long walk from the Berkshires, crowded shuttle rides. Many of the challenges that university experience has to offer. It has been a full 18%.
It’s an even greater percentage of your adult lives, perhaps half depending on how you count. If you reckon that you usually become politically and socially aware in high school, then you have spent half of your adult lives in college.
And yet for all that, the time has gone by in the blink of an eye. It seems like just yesterday you were wide-eyed freshmen. Only yesterday, it seems when you were coming in to this campus, already knowing everything you needed to know.
II. THE POTTER’S HOUSE
The scripture lesson from Jeremiah we heard read this afternoon happens to be one of the first scripture lessons I preached on on one of the first Sundays of the fall semester of 2004, when the members of the class of 2008 were freshmen. I won’t check to see how many of you remember that. In fact, I won’t even check to see how many of you have been regular attendees since then. I promise that in the receiving line after worship, for those of your putting on appearances for your parents, I will act like I know all of you.
The passage from Jeremiah is a prophetic passage in which the prophet reminds the nation of Israel that it is like clay in the potter’s hand, capable of being reshaped by the potter “as seemed good to him.” A prophetic warning to the people that they are completely in God’s hands, subject to God’s determination about what is good for them. It was a metaphor reminding Israel not to be complacent, not to take their position for granted, but to realize that God can remold them as God sees fit. The imagery of clay is also a reminder of our mortality, as we are ultimately made from the clay of the earth.
This text of Jeremiah’s is an appropriate one to look at both at the beginning and the end of one’s college career. Four years ago I told you that college is the time you get to say, “Am I the person everyone has always said that I am?” For at previous 18 years friends, family, teachers, and relatives, and everybody else told you who you were. College is 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.
College is a time of formation. In the same way that the clay is shaped by the potter’s hands, so too have you been shaped by your time here.
You have been shaped by the things you have learned here. Interestingly, you probably feel as if you know less now than when you came into college. (It’s the freshmen who know everything, right?) But the more you’ve learned, the less you probably feel you know. If so, you’ve been shaped by wisdom.You’ve been shaped by what you’ve learned and what you know has been left unlearned. Shaped by encountering people from different parts of the country, different races, political beliefs, religions, sexual orientations, cultures, worldviews. You’ve been shaped by that experience.
You’ve been shaped by having to question yourself and who you are. You’ve been shaped by relationships. You’ve been shaped by community. You’ve been shaped by so much.
You came into college and you have been shaped and formed. Like clay in the hands of a potter.
III. THE CLAY
As many of you may know, my father is an art teacher. When I was a kid, my dad used to take me and my sister into his art classroom on weekends and over the summer and he would often take the time to teach us art lessons. The thing that I always found fascinating was the kiln. It was the cylinder shaped oven where you baked the clay you had molded and turned it into pottery. You’d take your clay, you’d shape it however you’d like, then you’d put glaze on it and put it in the kiln to be fired. At the end of the process you had a nice solid piece of pottery.
But once fired, the clay was unchanging. Once baked, the clay was fixed in what it was supposed to be.
Many of you may feel that that is why you came to college—to get baked. Let me rephrase that.
There is a temptation to think that everything from here on out is set, fixed. That the things you learned were to prepare you for some job or career that you’re supposed to have. There is an increasingly common belief in our country today that a college education is a career building device.It’s a product. It’s practical. And so, many leave college thinking they are finished with learning.
But your education is not a static thing. You did not come to college as lumps of clay to be fired in a kiln, you came to be formed. And to learn how to be formed.
For what you have learned is not so much the various bits of information—much of which will slip away very quickly—but you have learned how to learn. To engage in the process of discovery and self-discovery. To engage in the process of constant formation and re-formation.
In effect, you have learned not how to fire the kiln but how to keep the clay flexible.
Part of the anxiety that many graduates have is that they feel that they should have everything worked out. I’m going to let you in on a little secret: all the people you’ve looked up to, your parents, teachers, employers, all the people who look like they have it all together—for the most part, they’re faking it. We all are. Most of us are making this up as we go. Because we never have it all worked out. Our lives are constant and continuous journeys of learning and growing in wisdom.
But there is another, even more important reason to stay flexible, to allow yourselves to continue to be molded.
We live in a world that is hurting. It is a world beset by violence, fear, poverty, hopelessness. A whole host of political and social challenges that await this generation. A world that needs people who will be leaders and help to guide us in a new direction—that needs you. In order to be the kind of servant-leaders the world requires, you will need to be flexible, you will need to keep the clay malleable. To leave your hearts open.
Do not im agine that your education is over. Do not imagine that there is nothing left to learn. Ask any of the alumni if they’re done learning.
You all have learned so much. You came into college unformed, deciding who you are. Over the past four years you have been shaped, given senses of self, given knowledge and wisdom.
IV. END
But God isn’t through with you yet.
The potter who formed you, who has shaped you these past years, continues to work and rework the clay. God continues to form us, guide us, shape us, through all the days of our lives.
But in order for God to do this, we must be open to the prompting of the Spirit. So, keep your clay malleable and moist–not fired in a kiln of what we assume we need to be–but soft, so that it can be reshaped by the potter.
Life can be challenging. There is much that lies ahead that is unknown. But God continues to form us and shape us to meet the challenges that arise. To reach out to a world in need, to speak out for justice, to extend our arms in compassion, to live lives of love and meaning. For we are clay—and dwell in the potter’s loving hands.
