A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

August 25, 2002 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Potter’s House

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 139:1–6, 13–18
Matthew 16:13–20
Jeremiah 18:1–11 Beyond Bethlehem

“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.”

Jeremiah 18:3–4 (NRSV)

Almighty God, under whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit that we may perfectly love you and worthily magnify your holy name through Christ our Lord. Amen.

The ancient communities from which the scriptures arose never wavered in their sense of wonder over the creative capacities of God. They knew nothing of the Big Bang theory or evolution or black holes in the cosmos, but they never failed to honor the Almighty as the source of all that was or that ever would be. The pages of scripture are laced with their joyful affirmation that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. . . . For it was you who formed my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am wonderfully and fearfully made.”

What a striking image: God as weaver. One biblical commentator I came across in my study of Psalm 139 noted that he had often watched his mother-in-law knit Norwegian sweaters. It seemed to him to be a very complicated process, until he began to imagine how much more complicated it must be to knit together a Norwegian.

The psalmist’s wonder at his divinely knit-together self is equaled only by his glad amazement that just as his life had originated, so it finally would be woven into the fabric of God’s eternal love. I can think of no more beautiful sentence in the entire Bible than this sentence from Psalm 139: “I come to the end—I am still with you.” In the meantime, there is no place we can go that will be outside God’s presence and power.

So for the awestruck psalmist, God was the master weaver. For the prophet Jeremiah, God works in an entirely different way. For Jeremiah, the crusty, ill-tempered prophet, God was the potter who worked at the wheel. The vessel that the potter was making was spoiled in the potter’s hands, so he reworked it into another vessel. The potter had no need to alter the substance with which he was working, the “clayness” as the Greek philosophers would say. The problem was that which was inherently good had become misshapen, so the flawed vessel had to be collapsed in order for the potter to begin again. (1) For Jeremiah, the pot that needed to be collapsed and remolded was none other than the people of Israel, for whom pride and self-centeredness and rejection of God’s will had become a way of life. The fact that Jeremiah was so cranky was really no excuse for the people’s stubbornness. They had genuinely convinced themselves that it was enough to go through various religious rituals. That would be more pleasing to God than exercising justice and treating other people with compassion. “Can I not do to you, O house of Israel, just as this potter has done?” says the Lord. “Like clay in his hands, so are you in my hand.”

I like the thought of God the weaver, but my heart does not soar at the thought of myself as a lump of mud. Neither does it soar at the picture of God the potter remaking me into something other than I am. And yet, I have to wonder if this particular story is not just about the most encouraging story in all the Bible.

I do not know why you came to church today. Perhaps you came after the peace that is found in this beautiful sanctuary on a busy city corner. Perhaps you are a stranger staying across the street at a hotel and because worship is a part of your life, you slipped across the street into the sanctuary of Fourth Church. I do not know why you are here—maybe your mother made you come, I don’t know. But I have a working hypothesis about the presence of God’s people in church on the Sabbath day, and it is that deep down on some level, all of us share the desire to be made new again. Because we are relatively intelligent and honest people, we have faced the fact long ago that neither we nor the world we inhabit will ever become new without divine intervention.

The world-weary writer of Ecclesiastes said, “There is nothing new under the sun,” but I do not believe that. I believe that God makes all things new. Here on this last shining summer Sunday, we ought to be filled not with despair about ourselves or the society in which we are a part. We are duty bound as people of faith to be people of hope. One of my contemporary heroes is Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic. He has said, “I am not an optimist. I do not necessarily believe that everything is going to turn out alright. I am not a pessimist either. I do not expect everything to turn out badly, but I do carry hope in my heart.”

Jeremiah might have been cranky and irritable, but he was a man of hope. He offered to the people of Israel a vision so that they could hope for a future that would be different from the past. It was out of hope that he shared the story of the potter who would not give up on the pot.

I believe there are such things as true graces. I believe they are not created by human beings, but are instead gifts from God. I believe the purpose of our lives is to be shaped more and more by the true graces that come from above. Our souls, our spirits, the values and habits of our society are shaped by the grace of God. I do not know whether you brought any hope into this sanctuary with you today, but I do believe that there is nothing more important about the Christian faith than the core conviction that there is a reality known as the transforming, life-giving power of God revealed to all the world in Jesus Christ. Whether we believe that reality is a thousand times more important than whether or not we understand the virgin birth or the doctrine of atonement.

Again and again I go back to something Yale Divinity School Professor Margaret Farley once wrote about the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead: “Whatever else the Christian faith has stood for across the centuries, it has always maintained that what has been, does not necessarily determine what will be.”

If God’s mighty hand can roll away the stone that sealed the tomb in which Jesus’ body lay, then surely God can roll away the stones of hopelessness and cynicism that would keep you from becoming the full, beautiful, faithful, alive person God always intended for you to be, or, as Jeremiah might have put it, God’s mighty foot is pedaling away at the potter’s wheel. God’s creative hands are molding the clay that is you, the clay that is us, the clay that is the church of Jesus Christ, the clay that is human society.

One has to wonder how the human community looks from the potter’s perspective these days, as fear, religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and war are threatening to carry the day. Who can doubt that the world needs help? In our own nation, more and more families seem to be losing their tenuous grip on keeping their homes together and their lives together and are falling into homelessness. I understand from friends who work in hunger ministries around the country that food banks and food pantries are being flooded with increased demands. Certainly that is true with the Social Service Center here at Fourth Presbyterian Church, as our neighbors who are poor, neglected, excluded, and mentally ill are showing up at our door at unprecedented levels.

I read recently that the great paradox of this thriving city of Chicago is our city is both a magnet for the wealthy and a warehouse for the poor. (2) I wonder how that suits the potter. I think about the fact that half of the inhabitants of the planet earth live on less than $2 a day, and one billion live on less than $1 a day. (3) This growing gap between the rich and the poor is a chasm into which all of us might fall, the rich and the poor.

In 1983, I went on a trip to the Congo, the area called Zaire. I was a guest of Presbyterian missionaries in the Kasai region, a place where hunger was real and malaria vicious. I can only assume that things have gotten worse now, since at least three million have been killed in the wars that have taken place since I was there. I stood one afternoon beside the bed of a child who was dying of malnutrition. I must confess to you that I thought the boy was already dead. He was entirely still. I said a prayer, then turned to walk away, but I heard the faintest whisper of a voice. As I turned back to the bed, I realized that it was the boy who was speaking to me. He said the one word that I knew in the Chaluba dialect. It is the word Moyo, and it means “I wish you life.”

That was the message of the prophet: “I wish you life, but you are never going to find it unless you change your ways, unless you open your eyes to the needs of others.” God judges, but God judges in order to transform. “Do you want another chance? I will give you another chance,” says the Lord. To have indifference destroyed, to raise up a new capacity for compassion—these are the purposes of the potter at work at the wheel. We simply have got to care. We cannot as a nation, as a church, as families, or as individuals close our doors and our hearts. I remember how it was last September as Americans lined up for hours to give blood in the wake of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. One of the ushers described to me that after the service here, the ushers were overwhelmed with the abundance of the offering that was placed in the offering plates. But now as time has passed, we have been lured back into our own little worlds where we get up in the morning worrying how we are going to look today; what we are going to wear; what we shall have for supper tonight, and how in the world are the Dow Jones and the NASDAQ doing? To live a life with ourselves at the center of our concern is to live a life that is antithetical to the ways of God.

Peter, the disciple of Christ, had a moment of utter clarity when he saw for real what authentic life looks like. “You are Christ; you are the Son of the living God!” At that moment, he surrendered the centrality of himself and entered into the new reality of living and being. Jesus pulled no punches as he described what genuine surrender looked like. “If you want to follow me, you will deny yourselves and take up your cross and follow me. For those of you who lose their lives for my sake will find it.” This is a radical kind of reorientation, and for most of us it takes a lifetime, but I know of no better time to begin than here and now this last Sunday of summer, when all things are still possible.

Have you signed up to tutor this fall? Could you be a volunteer at the Center for Older Adults? When you go to Jewel or Treasure Island, would you consider picking up every week a half dozen cans of tuna fish or salmon to put in the lunch sacks that we give away to dozens and dozens of our hungry neighbors every week through the Social Service Center?

I think of a lawyer I knew in my first church. He was with a silk stocking law firm and had been one of the stars on America’s team at Wimbledon. He was a dad, with two little boys and a wife. One Sunday, we invited a guest to speak at a luncheon after church. The guest was a man named Ron Sider, who had just written a book entitled Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. The lawyer attended the luncheon on Sunday. The next week he called me and said, “Joanna, I am in trouble.”

“Oh?” I said.

“Yes,” he replied. “I just can’t hear the kind of thing I heard at church on Sunday and keep living the way I have been living.”

Within three months, he had set up a law practice in a little building near a housing project, where he represented clients who were poor in criminal court and in family court. That little project started by that Presbyterian lawyer has just celebrated its twentieth anniversary. It is called the Georgia Justice Project, one of the finest legal clinics for the poor in the nation.

I love the thought of the church as the potter’s house. Here is Fourth Presbyterian Church in all its Gothic majesty. Think of it also as the place where God is at the workbench laboring over the new creation that is you.

One quick story as I close. In a church in another city, a new Sunday school class began in the fall entitled “Spiritual Formation.” After the class had been going on for several weeks, a woman in the church asked the teacher if it was alright that she join the class. The teacher said, “Of course! Why would you ask?”

The woman replied, “Well, I am 94 years old. I just wondered if it were too late for me.” (4)

I have wonderful news for all of you today. It is never too late for God to get his hands on you and to help you become what God intended you to be all along.

Notes
1. Cousar, Ganenta, McCann Jr., and Newsome, Texts for Preaching (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 498.
2. Chicago Tribune 25 August 2002.
3. Ted C. Fishman, “Making a Killing,” Harper’s, August 2002, 34.
4. Heidi Husted, “Matters of the Heart.” Christian Century, 16-23 August 2000, 828.