"Go down to the shop where clay pots and jars are made, and I will talk to you there. I did as he told
me and found the potter working at his wheel. But the jar that he was forming didn’t turn out as he
wished, so he kneaded it into a lump and started again. Then the Lord said: O Israel, can’t I do to
you as this potter has done to his clay? As the clay is in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand.
(Jeremiah 18:2-6, Living Bible)"
Recently in one of my discussion groups at the parish, we were discussing
this reading from the standpoint of the seventh of the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics
Anonymous which says, “We humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings.”
The excellent little devotional 1 we regularly use to start our discussions
quoted this scripture to illustrate how hard it is for us to give up control, reminding
us of the third step, that “we made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to
the care of God as we understood God,” in other words, “let go and let God.” We
can’t manage how God will decide to remove our shortcomings. How that all
happens is up to him. He knows better how to do that than we do. We’re not the
potter, God is.
Why God sent Jeremiah to the potting shed was to observe how the potter
[read: God] worked his craft. Not every pot he molded always turned out perfect
the first time. Whenever that happened, while the clay was still moist and
malleable, the potter would just toss it back into his molding clay, reshape it,
remake it, and remold it.
The message for us is clear: God does not throw anything or anyone away.
He begins all over again to reshape, to reform his creations as necessary, and he
does this while his clay [read: you and me] is still moist and malleable. If he were
to delay and not act promptly, perhaps place the malformed object aside planning
to come back later, then it might be too late. An inferior product might have sat on
some shelf so long that it hardened and became rigid, brittle. Should that object
have fallen off the shelf onto the concrete floor of his studio, that malformed pot
would have shattered into a thousand shards, eventually to be swept up and
discarded in the trash.
But does Jeremiah’s message end there without redemption? I think not.
A participant in my group brought up something to address that question in a
marvelous way, something I had never thought of. There is an ancient Japanese art
which puts back together again the shattered pieces of a vase using liquified gold
as glue. The process is referred to as kintsugi.
What a great iconic answer to this question not addressed in the story in Jeremiah:
“What happens when for so long we keep resisting God’s attempts to re-create us
that we eventually rigidify, experience a sort of rigor mortis and fall off our shelf?
Such a fall from grace will cause us to shatter into untold shards? Are we then just
trashed?
The clue is the glue, the golden glue of God’s grace abundantly present in
the potting shed. Even if we shatter (and we may), all is not lost. Our potter is
always eager to glue our brokenness back together again. In fact, we will be
stronger and more resilient than ever before because we’ll be held together by
strands of gold. Amen.
1Stoop & Arterburn, The Twelve Step Life Recovery Devotional (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale, 1991).