September 9, 2007 Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Sermon Title: “Clay in the Potter’s Hand”
Series: None
Text: Jeremiah 18:1-11
Dr. Steve Jackson
Delivered on September 9, 2007
“Turn now, all of
you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings.”
Jeremiah 18:11
Clay in the Potter’s Hand
We’ve all heard them before…old jokes that start with, “I've got good news and I've got bad news...which would you like first…” Good news-bad news jokes are as old as the hills and usually dark, but they do remind us that most news we get has both a good side and a bad side. Maybe some of you here this morning know a funny “good news-bad news” joke? I’ve never been a good joke-teller, I always mess up the punch line, but I found a few of these jokes online that are clean enough to share in church….
In one a doctor is speaking to his patient and he says, I have some good news and I have some bad news.
Patient: What's the good news?
Doctor: The good news is that the tests you took showed that you have 24 hours to live.
Patient: That's the good news? What's the bad news?
Doctor: The bad news is that I’ve been trying to reach you since yesterday!
In another joke, we overhear this exchange between a lawyer and his client:
Lawyer: I have some good news and some bad news.
Client: Well, give me the bad news first.
Lawyer: The bad news is that the DNA tests showed that it was your blood they found all over the crime scene
Client: Oh no! I'm ruined! What's the good news?
Lawyer: The good news is your cholesterol is down to 130!
The best good
news-bad news joke I found is one where the slave master aboard a Spanish
Galleon comes down into the hold where the slaves are rowing the oars --
stroke, stroke, stroke... He says, “Listen
up everyone! I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is,
everyone gets a double ration of grog!” The slaves all cheer. “The bad news is... the captain wants to go
water skiing.”
So why am I starting this sermon by telling corny jokes? It’s because the more I read this week’s text from Jeremiah, the more it occurred to me that the basic question that these 11 verses raise is this: Is the message of this passage good news or is it bad news? Is the vision of the potter and the clay a picture of hope, or is it one of despair? Does the image depict God’s grace, or does it depict his judgment and wrath?
Since many of
you are reading this passage for the first time with me, perhaps I should begin
by sharing my thought process with you so we can get on the same page. When I read the suggested texts for this
Sunday I was immediately drawn to the familiar image of the potter and his clay
which I believe most perceive as comforting words. The reading from Jeremiah is
one of the most loved and familiar texts from the prophet where God is compared
to the potter, and we are the clay to be molded. We even have songs about it,
we sang one this morning. But after I read over the text and what comes after
it more carefully, I began to wonder, why it is we like this passage so much? I
believe it’s because most of us have a touchy-feely, peaceful image of God
gently molding us into the wonderful vessel that he created us to be. But then I remembered visiting a pottery
studio while I was in
On top of that, even the good vessels, those that he finishes on the spinning wheel and is satisfied, end up going into a kiln, a giant oven to be fired. There they are superheated in temperatures up to 500°F. Who wants that done to them?
But what really got me to questioning whether this is good news or bad news is the way the story ends as we read it this morning. Did you notice? Look at the last verse…God is not acting as potter out of a loving desire to perfect his people here, God says, “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” (Jer. 18:11)
God is angry with His people in this passage, angry, because, again, they have failed to be obedient, failed to be disciples, failed to put God and God only at the center of their lives. God wants to tear them (and perhaps us) down and start from scratch, which, as the story indicates, is God’s sovereign right to do.
Again I ask, is
this good news? Or is it bad? To
determine this, perhaps we should differentiate between the original hearers of
this word, and ourselves. When we do that, we can say, without reservation,
that it was bad news for the people of
But what about
us? What about you and me? What about the church today? The “new”
The answer of whether we will find ourselves in the hands of a loving, merciful God who compassionately continues to reshape us despite our repeated failings, or whether we will find ourselves “sinners in the hands of an angry God” who is forced by his own righteousness and justice to smash us into a lump and start all over remains to be seen.
Let’s look at how the story unfolds here and then I’ll conclude with some insights from the other passages from this Sunday’s lectionary as we decide.
The Divine Word of the Lord
In vv 1-6 of
this passage the divine word of the Lord comes. God sums up his message to
Jeremiah with a rhetorical question in verse six, “Can I not do with you, O house of
Two Hypothetical Nations
Then, in vv 7-10 God describes two hypothetical kingdoms or nations in which he gives the two basic ways God relates to humans. The first example is about divine blessing where God intends to pluck up, break down and destroy a nation but they turn from their evil and God changes his mind (thus they are blessed). The second example is about divine judgment where God plans to build up, or plant a nation, but then they do evil in God’s sight and so He changes his mind and does not do the good he planned to do to it (thus they are judged). In one the reversal came as a result of repentance, in the other the reversal came as a result of human evil.
Present and Personal
In vv 11-12 God
continues the contrast about whether the image of the potter is good news or
bad news by getting up close and personal. Here, instead of the generic
“kingdom or nation” he makes it clear he is referring to the present moment and
to
And here’s the kicker – whether the “potter-clay image” is a positive or negative one, a blessing or a curse, good news or bad, depends on their, and our, response? What will it be? It’s up to us. What will your answer be?
As I conclude, let me refer briefly to some of the other texts for the day to provide some insights as you make up your mind whether this is good news or bad. Here are a few things to consider.
YOU CAN’T HIDE
First, according to Psalm 139 verses 1-5 (just below the Jeremiah reading on your hand-outs), understand that you can’t hide from God. Whatever you do, realize you can’t hide, or run from God because he knows when you sit down, and when you rise, and even before a word is on your tongue, God knows it completely. Verse 5 says, “You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.” Again, is that good news or bad? Either way, realize that you can’t run or hide, you can’t fool God, God knows.
I’m frequently amused when I have to run to Wal-Mart after church, or if we go out to eat after church and we happen to run into someone from NewSong at the store or restaurant who skipped church that day. Actually, many times I see the person before they see me, but I seldom initiate contact unless it’s unavoidable. More times than not I’ll notice the person see me out of the corner of my eye and I swear sometimes I think they’re going to break a leg dashing out of the store or slumping under the booth of the restaurant. Listen, if that happens to you, don’t worry! I won’t turn you in! It’s not about what I think as your pastor, it’s about what God thinks and God already knows you skipped church, even when I don’t! You are “hemmed in” by God. Good news or bad? Either way, don’t try to pretend that God doesn’t know, because God knows all.
YOU CAN CHANGE
The second thought I want you to consider as you decide whether or not this is good news comes from the passage in Philemon (on the back of your sheets). The thought is, you can change. Philemon is a letter from Paul to a guy who owned a slave named Onesimus. Onesimus ran away from his owner and eventually came to know and serve Paul. Now Paul is sending Onesimus back to his rightful owner with this letter. The key verse to me is verse 11, which reads, “Formerly he was useless to you, but now he is indeed useful both to you and me.” What Paul was saying is since Onesimus ran away he has become a believer and since he’s become a believer he is now a brother and not just a slave to Philemon. A change has come over this man—a change that came as a result of his faith in Jesus Christ.
I have no doubt that there are people in this room today that are slaves. Slaves to their careers, slaves to their addictions, slaves to their mortgages, to their spouse or children, and worse. And because you are that way you see yourself as a useless lump of clay that can never change. But the truth is, you can change…You can do all things through Christ who strengthens you (Phil. 4:13). Do you believe that? You are not a slave, you are not condemned to an endless cycle of being built up into something beautiful on the potter’s plate only to have that same dreaded flaw reappear again and again, thus causing you to be smashed back into an ugly lump. Where the Lord is, there is freedom! (2 Cor. 3:17). You can change, you are no longer a slave—and so in that sense, is God’s shaping of you with his strong hands—good news or bad?
THERE IS A COST
The final thing
I’d like you to include in your thinking as you decide if the image of the
potter and the clay is good news or bad comes from the gospel passage, Luke
14:25-33 there at the bottom of your sheets. There we learn that there is a cost associated with being a
follower of Christ. Jesus makes that
clear when he says, “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. Whoever does not carry the
cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”
Jesus isn’t saying we should literally hate our family here, even though some have used these verses to justify their feelings toward a few family members. What he is saying is we can’t let our love for our family, or anything else, even life itself, be stronger than our love for God. And notice also in the second verse he doesn’t say we have to carry “his” cross, but “the” cross — the truth of Christ, his life, death, and resurrection, in order to be a disciple. But what he clearly is saying is, there is a cost associated with being a God-follower and we should count that cost before we even begin.
Your faith may cost you your friends, your job, and forgoing certain things others do freely and with little or no conscience. It’s true that God will, can, and does provide us with His grace. And His grace is sufficient! But there is a cost to being a believer.
In one of his books author Scott Peck describes how as a little boy of nine he spent much of the summer on his bicycle. About a mile from his house the road went down a steep hill and turned sharply at the bottom. In time he began to realize how coasting down that hill faster and faster really pleased him. And so he started going faster and faster down that hill. One day he decided that to give up this ecstasy by applying his brakes as he’d been doing seemed an absurd self-punishment. So he decided to fly down the hill without applying his brakes at all, and then to still negotiate the curve at the bottom of the hill. Peck describes how his ecstasy ended seconds later when he was propelled a dozen feet off the road and catapulted off his bicycle into the woods. When he came to his senses he was badly scratched and bleeding, and the front wheel of his new bike was ruined from smashing into a tree. He says that from then on he decided he was unwilling to suffer the pain of losing it, for the simple pleasure of speed. The goal was to finish the bike ride while maintaining his balance throughout the ride. He summed up his lesson by saying that he learned, even then as a nine-year old boy that as we negotiate the curves and corners of our lives, we must continually give up things that, at the time feel supremely good, in order to avoid that which feels supremely bad.
So was Scott Peck’s bicycle ride down his “thrill hill” good news that morning, or bad?
I close this morning by saying the jury is still out for most of us whether the “potter’s principle” is good news or bad. I’d like to spoon feed you the answer, but the truth is, it’s up to you. The choice is yours. What will you decide? Do you need to change? Will you change? Clearly you CAN change with God’s help. There is a cost to pay, but in the end that cost will seem insignificant compared to the peace, joy, beauty and contentment that awaits you on the other side of a decision to become a Christ follower. What will you choose to do today? Let’s pray.