Clay - Jeremiah 18:1-11, Psalm 139, Philemon, Luke 14:25-33
Yesterday my family walked a trail with some friends, following an old road trace in the Ozark mountains. Here and there, gullies had been washed out, exposing slick red clay. An annoyance to adults--a sign of erosion and potential road repairs—the clay was a delight to the children on the hike. We had to stop at the gullies to allow time for digging; the wet clay taking shape into new forms from the zoological to the scatological.
There are some who say that clay is the spark that began the unfolding of life on our planet. Reactive and volatile, scientist theorize that clay formed amino acids and proteins through its churning, and took on the properties of proto genes to replicate itself.
I love to think of this theory, and how the scientific imagination and ancient religious insight come together. In the poetry of Genesis, it is from the ground that God forms the creatures of the earth. And in our Psalm today, we have the beautiful and loving image of our bodies “being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth.” Theories of life’s origins aside, the point of these texts is that God formed us and gave us life, that God knows us more deeply than we can even know ourselves.
This is a profound truth, one worth sitting with Psalm 139 to ponder. And at its heart is the message that we are created with care and beloved of God. Each of us is made in the profound light of God’s good gifts. And it is simply in being, living into the graces of our creaturely lives as best we can, that we answer our call as God’s beloved.
Having children has been a wonderful lesson in this call. I love watching the unfolding of my daughters’ personalities, their gifts, their wonder. It is clear that within them, often surprisingly apart from my own self, there is a beautiful reality that is ready to shine through. We have a children’s book that illustrates this wonder, called When God Made You by Jane Meyer. Page after page God calls children into being, relishing in their gifts—“Bigid, DANCE,” “Alia, SING,” “Elina, PRAY,” “Theodoor, PAINT.”
All too often, though, we do not embrace the gifts of our belovedness in ourselves or in our children. Instead of living in awe and wonder at God’s creative grace, we reduce the world to the safe confines of our control. Instead of encouraging our children to live into the gifts of life, we pressure them into molds of preparation for a world without abundance. Instead of living into the gentle realities of God’s provisions, we seek to secure ourselves through an economy that maintains its wealth by violence and exploitation.
Israel was God’s child, born in grace and freedom, knit to live into a life of wonder and care. But by the time of Jeremiah, the people of God had exchanged their identity as beloved gifts for programs of purchased happiness. Rather than receiving God’s blessings, they sought their own means of power and control, their own economy of safety. Because they did not trust God, they chose to exploit the poor and the earth. Because of their fear and anxiety, they gave up their freedom in exchange for protection by foreign empires.
And how often have we done the same, giving up our identity as God’s beloved, knit with wonder, in order to achieve some standard of success offered by society? How often have we sold our freedom in God’s love in order to find a fleeting security through some earthly power?
These choices shape us, bending us away from the marvelous life for which we were formed. Imagine a lump of clay, tossed around in the chaos of the world, shaped by selfish hands that bend it for their own ends. What we need in response, Jeremiah saw in his visit to the potter, is for God to sit at the wheel and take the clay of our lives to form it again into beautiful vessels for God’s good gifts. It might be painful, the reshaping may alter everything about how we’ve been formed by our society or ourselves, but our work is to be pliable in the potter’s hands, trusting the goodness we know lies at the end.
To allow ourselves to be shaped into beloved vessels of God’s grace, we may find that that our greatest obstacles are all the forms our lives have taken, all the mishappen patterns into which we so easily bend. Those shapes may have been molded by our families. They may have come from our schooling, our work, or even our churches. All too often, those false patterns find their origin in our own hearts, where our desires and fears and anxieties draw us away from the bold and beautiful design God has for us.
It is for that reason that Jesus told his disciples that they must give up all of those pressures that form us into something other than God’s beloved. He knew that God could not shape the clay of our lives unless we were willing to let go of all the forces trying to mold us into other forms. The promise he gives is that if we surrender our will, if we allow God to shape us into something wonderful, then we can be an outpost of the new creation God is ushering into all the world.
There is a story of that new creation that happened some decades after Jesus offered this teaching. In it there was a man named Philemon whose name, translated, means Loving. Loving was a disciple of Jesus, but was also well off, secure in the economic and power structures of his time. Like most in his class, he had a number of household slaves who took care of the basic labors of life—the cleaning, the cooking, the care of children. Among those slaves was a man named Onesimus or Useful. But Useful took a risky move, one that could have left him among the many crucified bodies that dotted the roadways of ancient Rome. He ran away.
The story could have ended there, with a successful freedom on the run or a violent capture. That was the standard mold for such a story. But something unusual happened, a different potter sat down at the wheel. Useful met a teacher named Paul, someone his master Loving had once known. Paul was imprisoned and Useful lived up to his name, helping bring food and taking care of Paul’s basic needs. But Paul knew that things couldn’t stand as they were—that God’s mercy called for a new reality to be born from the old, like a potter reshaping a lump of clay. That reality, Paul believed, was happening right now in the gatherings of Jesus’s disciples that dotted the Roman empire. So it was that a runaway slave and his master needed to have their relationship transformed into a shape no one could have imagined.
Paul wrote a letter to Loving, nearly the whole of which we heard this morning. With a gentle and profound rhetoric, Paul sought a transformed relationship, Loving and Useful reunited, not as master and slave, but as brothers joined in the new family of God. It would have been an affront to many, some neighbors may have complained that it undermined the whole institution of slavery. It was enough that some in the family might have asked why Loving hated them, so out of step with their ways would be this reconciliation. And yet that is what Paul called for him to do in submission to the shaping hands of God.
We don’t know what happened, whether Loving answered Paul’s call or not. All we have is Paul’s letter to Philemon, a letter the church felt useful enough to pass down to us. But there is evidence that in the place where Philemon lived the church ordained a bishop named Onesimus who had a faithful career as a leader of God’s people in an outpost of God’s reign, a man who was no longer a slave but a vessel of God’s new creation.
God is at the wheel, gathering all those beloved lumps of clay that have been twisted and turned by a world bent toward selfishness. Like the new life God knit in the depths of the earth, God is again forming vessels of grace and wonder, ready to fill them with love to pour out into the world. Our work is to step away from all those hands that would form us otherwise, promising security, power, and affection that are not theirs to give. Like Philemon, like Onesimus, like Paul himself, we must learn to be pliable in the potter’s hands, trusting that God is shaping us into a new creation, even in the midst of the old and broken forms. It is marvelous. It is a wonder. And for it we should give our thanks and praise. Amen.