The Potter's Touch (Jeremiah 18:1-11)

Jesus often described living a life with God in ways that radically upended commonly accepted notions of what was fitting, right, and proper for good God-fearing people.

For example, he once left a learned man named Nicodemus scratching his head when he told him that “no one can see the kingdom of God without being born again.”

Likewise, in a passage passed on by Saint Luke that we’ve read today, Jesus spoke of hating one’s family as a basic ante for following in his steps, a teaching that must’ve made his own mother do a double take, not to mention the two pairs of brothers he counted among his twelve closest disciples.

And then there’s what probably sounded like the most ludicrous thing he ever said.

“Take up your cross and follow me.”

A cross? The ultimate symbol of the Roman Empire’s violence and oppression? A tool of state sponsored execution? This was Jesus’ invitation to would-be disciples?

When Saint Paul wrote that the cross was “foolishness to the Greeks” it was an incredible understatement.

Jesus repeatedly described discipleship in ways like this, ways that assumed great tension existed between his teachings and what his audience would’ve understood as common sense and practical wisdom.

And, of course, he was right.

While it’s important to acknowledge that Jesus did use hyperbole and exaggerated figures of speech in order to make his points, he obviously understood that God expected a higher level of righteous behavior and holiness of heart from his followers than that which came easily or without intention, formation, or revelation.

Remember how Jesus once told a parable about the dangers of putting new wine in old wineskins which was basically his way of telling the people that trying to fit him and what he had to say into a neat and tidy box of religious things just wouldn’t work.

In this way, Jesus stands as the fulfillment and source of the Bible’s prophetic witness, the crucible in which God’s Word and human experience intersect and react with one another.

Over the next several weeks we’re going to explore that same prophetic witness by taking a closer look at the ministry of one of ancient Judah’s greatest prophets, Jeremiah.

Jeremiah was a priest-turned-prophet who ministered among God’s people about 600 hundred years before Jesus was born during an era defined by the ferocious threat and ultimate defeat Judah faced at the hands of the Babylonian Empire.

Jeremiah and his neighbors witnessed the horrors of war and famine. They saw Jerusalem conquered, King Solomon’s magnificent temple destroyed, and thousands of their own forcibly deported.

A team of archeologists recently excavated a site from Jeremiah’s era that shines a light on the terror Judeans faced. Working within ancient Jerusalem’s city limits, the team found in the remains of a Judean house layers of ash, Babylonian arrowheads, and, quite tellingly, a piece of gold and silver jewelry.

The dig’s co-director, Shimon Gibson, noted, “the combination of an ashy layer full of artifacts, mixed with arrowheads, and a very special ornament indicates some kind of devastation and destruction. Nobody abandons golden jewelry and nobody has arrowheads in their [household trash].” Imagine for a moment the circumstances that could lead you to lose your most precious and valuable possessions in the pile of ashes and weapons that used to be your home, and you get a sense of what Jeremiah’s community went through.

This is the context and background for the scriptures we’ll read this season.

And we begin with a scene that brings us back to that same principle that Jesus so often articulated–the principle that faithful discipleship often requires us to reject, or to hold ourselves at a distance from, or to radically change our perspective about what once seemed like good advice and wise counsel.

We start in Jeremiah, chapter 18.

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.

God led Jeremiah to the potter’s house where the shaping and remolding of a vessel on the wheel held a promise of good news for Jeremiah. God’s people were still a work in progress. Change and transformation were still possible. The way things were was not the way things needed to stay.

However, the bad news for Jeremiah was that the way things were wasn’t good at all. Not only were the people up against it with the Babylonians, but, even more important to the prophet were the choices and behaviors that lined the path leading to the people’s present troubles.

Faithfulness to God’s covenant, keeping God’s law, honoring the poor, working for justice–these pillars of the Faith had fallen to the wayside long before Jerusalem’s defenses.

It seems as though the people had given their hearts over to all manner of beliefs and practices based only on their ability to generate profits and material gain.

As a consequence, what counted as wisdom to the people was, in fact, foolish.

Jeremiah explained this in chapter 8.

How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us’, when, in fact, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie? The wise shall be put to shame, they shall be dismayed and taken; since they have rejected the word of the Lord, what wisdom is in them…because from the least to the greatest everyone is greedy for unjust gain”?

Like a spoiled vessel in the potter’s hand, the people needed to be shaped anew and reformed.

Now, therefore, [Jeremiah,] say to the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem: Thus says the Lord: Look, I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you, from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.

The thought of God “shaping evil” against anyone is a challenging concept, like so many things that Jesus said, but I think what’s translated “evil” here in English, brings to mind something like a broken relationship or perhaps even an intervention.

It’s as if God was telling the people, “You need to own the fact that you’ve caused some harm here and the time to make amends is now.”

Because, as God said, even though they had messed up terribly, the substance of their hearts was still malleable, able to be refashioned, like clay.

We can learn a lot from Jeremiah’s visit to the potter’s house.

You and I, the Church, and our country, like the people of Judah, are works in progress.

Some things have definitely gone wrong with us and we need to get them fixed even if that might feel a whole lot like starting over.

Like the prophet’s people, we, too, may look at the circumstances in which we find ourselves today and wonder, how did we get here? How are we going to get through this?

Are lockdown drills in our schools and masked federal agents on our streets really the best we can do?

Have we lost the ability to see any issue–from polio and measles to the legacy of January 6 and the ongoing killing of civilians in Gaza–through anything other than our own partisan looking glass lenses?

Are we not willing to acknowledge that while this nation and the Church in this nation was travelling down the path to where we are, we accepted as wise the foolishness that values profits over virtue, tribe over truth, and shortcuts and quick fixes over disciplined and often difficult work?

With cruelty in the ascendency and a threadbare social fabric, someone might say we need to be born again or that we need to take up our cross and follow Jesus.

As people of Faith, we must confess that God expects a higher level of righteous behavior and holiness of heart from us than that which comes easily or without intention, formation, or revelation.

When the whole world seemed to be spinning out of control, God took Jeremiah to the potter’s house.

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.

It was a bit of good news for Jeremiah and his neighbors, good news that God’s people were still a work in progress. Change and transformation were still possible. The way things were was not the way things needed to stay.

And that’s still good news for you and me today.

“Can I not do with you just as this potter has done?” says the Lord. “Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand,” so let’s open our hearts and our lives, our church and our world, to the potter’s touch.

Thanks be to God. Amen.