All Saints by the Lake, Dorval
September 8, 2019
Pottery seems to be in fashion these days; I have lots of friends who have tried it out with varying degrees of seriousness. Many of them have gotten really good, and I regularly see pictures on my Facebook of mugs and bowls that could easily be professionally made. But even the best potters sometimes run into a lump of clay that just won’t behave, that seems to insist on doing its own thing and defying the potter’s plans for its new shape.
In Jeremiah’s prophetic metaphor about the potter’s house, he seems to be contradicting himself a bit. God, comparing himself to the potter, warns the people that if they, the clay, are spoiled in God’s hand, they can be reshaped at any moment. And yet at the same time, they are not entirely helpless: it is within their power to turn from their evil ways and choose the good, avoiding the fate God has in mind for them.
This passage, in fact, raises the age-old question of God’s power and our free will: if we believe that God is the sovereign authority over creation, do we mortal, limited human beings really have any power at all to shape our fate? Do our choices mean anything? In other words, can the clay affect the form of the final pot?
Jesus certainly seems to imply that our choices matter; in the Gospel passage, if anything, they seem to be alarmingly loaded with meaning and importance. Jesus presents stark alternatives, using hyperbole to insist that God must be our first priority. He challenges our tendency to idolize family and possessions, and asks his followers to soberly count the cost before making the decision to follow him. Jesus does not feel the need to pressure people into the choice if they’re not ready; quite the contrary, he wants the choice to be made freely and with an understanding of what the disciple is undertaking.
Likewise, in Paul’s letter to Philemon, Paul deliberately refrains from directly ordering Philemon to make the choice to free Onesimus, his runaway slave (although he certainly makes it very clear what he thinks the right choice is!).
Whether or not God could force people to do things, God seems determined, for whatever reason, not to do so. Our freedom to choose is real. Even if the results of those choices are disastrous, God allows us to make them – and then to live with the consequences.
Sometimes it’s tempting to wish that we didn’t have this burden of free choice and action. That we could just turn things over to God, like helpless clay, and let ourselves be formed into a useful vessel without having to make an effort. But God will have none of this: God wants us as active co-creators of the world, not as automatons who have no choice but to be good.
When we sing “Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way: thou art the potter, I am the clay,” we are asking God to help us do something hard – to make the difficult choices that accord with God’s hope for the world, rather than the easy ones that cater to our own selfishness. We are, in fact, asking God to help us take up our cross, just as Jesus says in the Gospel.
God may be able to shape the clay however God wants. But the clay is still clay. It’s not Play-Doh or glass or yarn; if you put it in a furnace or try to knit with it or give it to a two-year-old, you will be sorely disappointed. The nature of the clay must be taken into account in what you try to do with it. And when God invites us to participate in co-creating the world, God will never ask us to do something that fundamentally goes against our nature. And if our calling is to take up our cross, the cross we are to take up will be our cross, the unique burden that we are most suited to bear, and the bearing of which yields, in the long run, goodness and growth; God does not lay crosses on us purely to make us suffer.
Someone called to be an artist is called by God to be the best artist they can be, but God will never ask them to be a brain surgeon; that would be disastrous for all concerned. Our God-given task is to figure out what kind of clay we are, individually and as a community, and then cooperate with God in doing exactly what that kind of clay is intended to do.
As usual, Dorothy L. Sayers has said it already, and far more eloquently than I can:
The Architect stood forth and said:
“I am the master of the art:
I have a thought within my head,
I have a dream within my heart.
Come now, good craftsman, ply your trade
With tool and stone obediently;
Behold the plan that I have made –
I am the master; serve you me.”
The Craftsman answered, “Sir, I will,
Yet look to it that this your draft
Be of a sort to serve my skill –
You are not master of the craft.
It is by me the towers grow tall,
I lay the course, I shape and hew;
You make a little inky scrawl,
And that is all that you can do.
Account me, then, the master man,
Laying my rigid rule upon
The plan, and that which serves the plan –
The uncomplaining, helpless stone.”
The Stone made answer: “Masters mine,
Know this: that I can bless or damn
The thing that both of you design
By being but the thing I am:
For I am granite and not gold,
For I am marble and not clay,
You may not hammer me nor mould –
I am the master of the way.
Yet once that mastery bestowed
Then I will suffer patiently
The cleaving steel, the crushing load,
That make a calvary of me:
And you may carve me with your hand
To arch and buttress, roof and wall,
Until the dream rise up and stand –
Serve but the stone, the stone serves all.
Let each do well what each knows best,
Nothing refuse and nothing shirk,
Since none is master of the rest,
But all are servants of the work –
The work no master may subject
Save He to whom the whole is known,
Being Himself the Architect,
The Craftsman and the Corner-stone.
Then, when the greatest and the least
Have finished all their labouring
And sit together at the feast,
You shall behold a wonder thing:
The Maker of the men that make
Will stoop between the cherubim,
The towel and the basin take,
And serve the servants who serve Him.”
The Architect and Craftsman both
Agreed, the Stone had spoken well;
Bound them to service by an oath
And each to his own labour fell.
May we choose the hard but life-giving path of co-creation, taking up our cross in the sure and certain hope that God will bring beauty out of it.
Amen.
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