Homily on Jeremiah and the Potter
September 5, 2010
After reading our Old Testament passage, in which God commands Jeremiah to go down to the potter’s house to watch him work, I was inspired to go over to Polly’s (our neighborhood potter) and take my first-ever pottery lesson. Prior to that, I’m afraid to say my only exposure to a potter’s wheel was by watching Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore in the movie Ghost (and I wasn’t exactly focused on the mechanics of pottery making).
Which is inexcusable in any case, but especially because the metaphor of God as a potter occurs at lot in the Bible and a decent priest should be at least somewhat familiar with it. It even starts the Bible off. At the very beginning with the book of Genesis, God molds Adam out of the dust – or clay – of the earth like a potter. The Psalmist, too, makes several references to God shaping us out of the elements or the miry bog, which is thought to be a reference to or perhaps another version of the Genesis story.
We also get the image a lot in the prophet Isaiah, Jeremiah (as we saw today), and even the New Testament, where Paul compares us to perishable vessels made of clay.
Of course, in the Biblical world, clay was much more a part of people’s everyday life than it is now. Clay was used for storage of food and valuable items, for serving and warming food, for things like lamps, children’s toys, and writing materials – basically it was a cheaper alternative to more expensive materials like metal or glass ware. So you would expect such an everyday image to appear so often in Scripture. But it was also popular, no doubt, because there are so many great spiritual lessons in this image, as I learned from my pottery class this week.
One lesson is that clay has to be pliant in order to work with it at all. When attempting to make my first pot, I was surprised by how wet you have to keep the clay lest it gets too dry and catches on your hands while it’s spinning on the wheel. I couldn’t seem to remember to moisten the clay until it was too late, so Polly taught me the cheater’s method of putting a sponge in one hand so I had the water nearby. This helped me understand one reason the Bible likens people to clay: like clay, we have to be supple and pliant in order for God to shape us into something useful and beautiful. I imagine that means not rushing to judgment, listening to new ideas and points of views, not letting our despair about the world harden us.
I also learned, with every new beginner, that a lump of clay has to be centered in order to even begin the process of shaping a vessel. I had read previously that one of the harder things about throwing a pot is this process of centering it at the beginning, which involves spinning the wheel really fast and applying a lot of pressure to the clay so it finds its balance. For me, it was the most time consuming part of the process; but until that clay stops wobbling you simply can’t do anything with it.
Maybe something like this is meant by the Christian idea of getting yourself centered – of cutting out the things that throw us off balance. And I’ll just add here that, while it’s a lot of work, it’s also a wonderful feeling when the clay suddenly goes from a stubborn wobbly lump to a smooth, perfectly balanced sphere.
Another lesson I liked in this passage, though not directly related to the craft of pottery, is how God speaks through everyday work. We tend to think that the prophets received their messages from God in sacred or remote spaces like Temples or mountaintops – and sometimes they did. But more often, God spoke to them as they walked through the streets, shopped in the marketplace, chatted at their version of coffee hour – or, in this case, as they watched people go about their everyday work. I wonder how often we look for God to speak in churches or in our time apart from the rush of everyday life, when God speaks to us more in our encounters outside of church or our fortresses of solitude - even (and especially) our everyday work.
Finally, I liked how the potter in this passage responds to his collapsed pot, not fretting over his failure but simply reworking it into another vessel “as seemed good to him.” During our lesson, Polly explained to me that everybody has a shape – some way their pot tends to turn out, whether it’s a lip that curves outward, inward, or is top-heavy. My recurring “shape” was a thin, weak band about 3/4 of the way up the side of the pot, and what happens when you have a weak spot like that is that the top of the pot collapses in at some point and you have to start over. The first time this happened, we just tossed that whole lump aside for later use; but the second time, sort of like the potter here, Polly just cut off the collapsed portion and helped me make with what remained a respectable little bowl - not what we’d planned to make starting out, but lovely all the same.
This also put me in mind of a trip Andrew and I took last week to the Noguchi Museum in Queens. Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese-American sculptor who worked a lot with these large heavy stones, which he would often partially cut and sculpt, leaving parts of the stone sculpture in their original rough-hewn condition, and other parts polished and carefully sculpted. A lot of his work was inspired by the Japanese idea of “wabi-sabi,” which incorporates ideas like impermanence and incompleteness into what it means for something to be beautiful.
Along the way, we watched a video about Noguchi’s life and work, and I was struck by one part in which his assistant (now himself an old man) said that, sometimes, Noguchi would make a wrong cut into a big stone – these solid stones being, of course, much less forgiving than supple clay. And instead of trying to fix it, since that was impossible anyway, he would put the stone out in his garden or in his studio and then return to it months, sometimes years, later, once he saw in it something different – a new sculpture, or perhaps a sculpture in what it was after years of rain and sleet had slowly transformed it. (He referred to this as the stone “healing” itself.)
That emphasis on improvisation and fluidity in one’s work and life is, I think, something that comes through in Jeremiah’s encounter with the potter (even if that’s not exactly the lesson Jeremiah draws from it!). And that’s an important spiritual lesson, as well. We can seldom anticipate where something will end once we’ve begun – our work, our relationships, our children. But when things take a turn we didn’t plan or want, perhaps God calls us to see it not as failure but as part of the work of one’s life. It’s a fluid wabi-sabi approach to life, and it says hold loosely to your plans, for tomorrow they may change. And probably for the better.
