The Potter’s House 

Jeremiah 18:1-6 

September 18, 2016 

Mark S. Bollwinkel 

(This sermon is delivered from a potter’s wheel as the preacher “throws” pottery…)

            Jeremiah was called to be a prophet of God at an early age.   He would preach for more than forty years, surviving a number of kings and crises.   He began his work during the exciting and positive reforms of King Josiah and ends it leaving Jerusalem in ashes, destroyed by the Babylonian armies which also carried off the royalty and intelligencia of Israel into slavery.  It was Jeremiah’s job for those forty years to warn the leaders and people of Israel that there were consequences to breaking the covenant with God.  He warned them that their corruption and injustice would result in calamity for “God’s Chosen People”.  He especially called to task the King and royal priesthood for their complicity in the injustice that was violating their relationship with the One God.

            As you can imagine, Jeremiah’s personal life was a disaster as a result.  His friends abandoned him.  The leaders scorned him and threw him in the stockade.  The royal priests decried his preaching and labeled him a heretic.   Life was lonely and painful for Jeremiah, prophet of God.

            But it would be this same “prophet of doom” who would see on the horizon of history the coming of a new covenant and a new messiah.  As clearly as he could see the destruction of his beloved nation, he could also see that God was using these historical events to create something new.  A “new covenant” would arise out of the ashes of Israel’s apostasy, a covenant not written on stone or paper but on the human heart (Jeremiah 31:31-34).  A covenant of love and forgiveness sealed by the authority of a new messiah unlike the faithful had ever seen.   It would be a new day.  It would be a “second chance” for God’s people.

            [The scripture lesson is read and the piece of pottery collapses on the wheel at the “appropriate time”!]

            In our lesson this morning, the prophet is wandering the streets of Jerusalem searching for some sign of hope in the midst of the coming destruction and his own personal sufferings.   He sees a “potter’s house” and goes inside.  There while watching the craftsman form a vessel, Jeremiah is amazed at how the potter can re-build yet another pot even after the one he was working on collapses in failure.

            In that metaphor Jeremiah finds the hope for which he was searching, as God, like a potter, can re-form our lives again and again with strong and loving hands.

            The formation of clay into domestic ware is an almost universal craft among human cultures.  Clay, made mostly of alumni and silicates, is one of the most common resources on the surface of the planet.  Since the beginning of human history folk have fashioned useful items from it and burned it at high temperatures to vitrify the silica into a substance impervious to water. 

            One of the amazing properties of clay is its ability to be re-generated.  Mined, ground and then mixed with water it becomes the plastic material which we recognize as clay.  But when it dries out either as a failed piece or as scrap material, it can be reground and rejuvenated with water and used all over again and again.  Even after it is fired at high temperatures, the vitrified clay can be ground into what we call “grog” and added to wet unfired clay to make it stronger.   You’ll note that at archeological digs thousands of years old that the most common antiquity discovered is pottery and that by studying the dating, shapes and uses of such pottery experts can determine much about the culture.

The bowls I am making this morning will be trimmed, fired and glazed to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit. I’ll donate these pieces each year for the Wayfarer Women’s Craft Sale which will be held in November. If you treat them right, archeologists will be digging them out of the ruins 5,000 years from now and marveling at the legend of the “pastor potter”, a minister who could walk and chew gum at the same time!

To me it’s no accident that in the second creation poem of Genesis, God takes a handful of dirt…or dust…or clay…and breathes spirit into it to create the first human being (2:7).    Our bodies are made of the same stuff as clay, the same stuff as the stars (Psalm 8).  When Jeremiah marvels at the ability of the potter to re-fashion another vessel out of the failure of the first, seeing God’s hand in Israel’s history in the re-creation of its future hope, it’s no accident to me that we, too, can know the God of the “second chance”.

If there is a common theme in the preaching of Jesus, it’s in the redemptive power of love and forgiveness.  He offers it to an immoral Samaritan woman at a well (John 4), to a corrupt collaborator with the Roman occupation tax system by the name of Zacchaeus (Luke 19:1-10) and a zealous religious official by the name of Saul in charge of persecuting Christians on the road to Damascus (Acts 9).  

And God offered a second chance to Bob.

Bob picked up a hitchhiker by the name of Marcie on his motorcycle and fell immediately in love.  He was a struggling screenplay writer in Hollywood.   She was a young, beautiful woman with a deeply troubled past from which she was trying to run.  Bob honorably offered her shelter and time to think things through before she went back to her home.  They continued to keep in touch and build a relationship.  Bob hoped that Marcie would fall in love with him, too, but it just wasn’t the time.  For all the talent and good intentions of Marcie she was a magnet for troubled men, probably the result of what her father and uncle did to her as a child.  Bob was overwhelmed with the stress of one professional failure after another.  Eventually Marcie would marry John and they would have a beautiful son together.  She and Bob kept in touch in a loving and appropriate way throughout those years, even when John went to prison for drug dealing.  After that divorce, Marcie responded to the constant grace in Bob’s life for her and they married, giving birth to a beautiful baby girl.  Bob struggled financially as a writer and Marcie worked as the children’s music director for a United Methodist church. 

Marcie was Bonnie Bollwinkel’s best friend and college roommate.  They worked together in a bi-lingual preschool in the barrios of Southern California.   Bonnie and Marcie were more like sisters than friends.  Bonnie was one of the first to hear Marcie’s news that she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. To make a long story short, it was also Bonnie who stood by her bedside just hours before Marcie died of cancer at the age of 36.

Bob was left to raise the kids.  Frankly nobody thought he had it in him. Yet after she died he hung in there offering security and stability for two brilliant children whose mother was taken away all too young.  Church was a big part of that household.  Now both college graduates, Bob has amazed all of his friends at the strength and love he was able to provide those two kids.   He’d be the first to tell you that it was God who gave him the second chance to love Marcie when and how she needed it the most…as the father of her two children after she was gone.

God does not control each and every moment in our lives as if some Universal Puppeteer.  Rather God’s spirit lures us in each and every moment to what is best and most lovingly possible.  That lure is powerful indeed and if we yield ourselves to it we can find ourselves re-made and re-formed and renewed again and again.

Like the potter’s hand can remake a little bit of clay, something so common it may seem worthless, into something precious and useful indeed.

The hymn has us sing, “Have thine own way Lord, have thine own way.  You are the potter I am the clay.  Mold me and make me after thy will, while I am waiting, yielded and still” (UM Hymnal # 382, “Have Thine Own Way Lord”).  God sees each of our lives as something well worth saving, even if we need to be made over again and again and again.

Amen.