Sermon 9/9/07
Mold Me, Make Me - Jeremiah 18:1-11
(view lectionary notes for this text)
“Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way! Thou art the potter; I am the clay. Mold me and make me after thy will, while I am waiting, yielded and still.” We have many different images we use to describe God – some comforting and some challenging – and this image of God as a potter who molds us is a popular one. Aside from “Have thine own way,” where we claim that we are “waiting, yielded and still” for God to work mold us like clay, we also have “Spirit of the Living God,” where we sing for God’s spirit to melt us and mold us, or the contemporary worship song, where we sing about putting things in our life “In the Potter’s Hand,” just to name a few.
Most of these songs draw this ‘God as Potter’ imagery from the text from Jeremiah that we have shared today, a passage that is well loved – God calls Jeremiah down to the potter’s house, and there Jeremiah watches the potter working a vessel. I wonder, though, if we look at this text more carefully, why it is we like this passage so much? We have, I think, in our minds these peaceful images of a God who gently molds us into this wonderful vessel that we have the potential to be. Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever watched a potter at work, but when a vessel goes wrong, the process of correction is usually anything but gentle. The clay pot may be completely smashed down, until it resumes a non-descript clay lump form. If things have gone too wrong, if the design is too far off from what was planned, the potter may simply start over again. If we really want God to be a potter, and if we really think we are clay to be molded, then it means that we’re saying we are giving God control over who we are and what we will become. Is that what we’re saying? “Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way! Hold o’er my being absolute sway!” Absolute sway! Are we giving that power to God? Do we want to? Are we able to?
I don’t know about you, but I’m a planner. That’s not to say that I’m particularly organized, or neat, or detail-oriented, because I’m not. Right now since I’ve just been unpacking, I can pretend that my desk is just messy because I’ve been moving things around. But when I’ve been here long enough, you’ll know that my desk is almost always that messy. But still, I am a planner. I like being prepared, and I like figuring out what will happen, what I want and hope to have happen. I remember getting my course catalog when I started college, and immediately I sat down and mapped out which classes I would take each semester for every semester of my entire college career. This was all before classes actually started my freshman year. That’s what I mean when I say I’m a planner.
Of course, even for those of us who are planners, real life, real life events have ways of breaking in. I did take a lot of the courses on my map for college, but some of them I took at different times than I expected, some I just never took at all, and some classes I never dreamed of wanting to take I took and loved. And my life is richer for those unplanned experiences. Are you a planner? Even if you don’t think you are, I’m guessing that you’d rather be responsible for planning your own life than letting someone else do it for you. My roommate in college, for example – her mother had a copy of the course catalog, and I remember vividly my roommate on the phone with her mother while her mother tried to pick classes for her. It’s one thing for circumstances to have made some classes unavailable for me. It’s another for someone else to want to make my decisions for me. That wouldn’t sit very well with me.
And yet – “Have thine own way, Lord.” As people of faith, one of the things we seek to do is to let someone else make decisions for us. We say – we sing, we claim – that when it comes to plans and futures and hopes, that we’re letting God guide us, show us a path to follow. As people of faith, we’re committing to hand ourselves over, as unformed lumps of clay, into the Creator’s hand, asking God to shape us and mold us, because we believe and trust that God can draw out of us something more beautiful than we can imagine and plan for ourselves. Do we mean it? Do we really want God to be the potter that shapes us?
I think people of faith are always making such wonderful plans. Church people make great plans – we have committees to make plans, and conference about our plans, and teams to figure out how to plan. We plan all these different ways that we will serve God, share God’s love. And plans are important, they really are. We wouldn’t go very far without them. But I wonder, how often do we do what we think is best, what we have planned, and then ask God to bless our work instead of letting God decide what we should do and so already being blessed in the path we’re taking. If we’re the clay, and God is the potter, then we need to stop asking God to be with us where we are, and start trying to follow where God is going, where God is calling, where God is leading.
When I first received the appointment to Franklin Lakes, the district superintendent shared with me your church profile. All clergy and churches are responsible for filling out a profile, something that gives a quick picture of the priorities of a congregation or pastor, a picture of the gifts and graces of a pastor and congregation, so that appointments can be made that will bring out the best in both the clergy and the lay people. When I got the profile for Franklin Lakes UMC, something jumped out at me – the profile said that you as a congregation are trying to move from a membership model to a discipleship model of ministry. I was pretty impressed by this statement, and it drew me in to wanting to know more about you. At our first meeting, Craig Gipple explained to me that this statement came from Michael Foss’ Power Surge, a book that many of you studied and a book that in part helped shape the Spiritual Push effort that you all committed to last year. Of all the exciting things I read in your church profile, that single sentence excited me the most – working toward a culture of discipleship rather than a culture of membership.
To me, that phrase, that priority you’ve claimed says that even if it’s hard to do, what you want to do is let God be the potter while you are the clay. A membership church is a church that can function well as its own potter. A church that has plans that keep it going on the same path like clockwork, a church that is more of a social organization than anything else – that’s a membership church that can take care of itself pretty well, and invite God to join in sometimes. There are many churches that can be successful for quite a long time doing that. But Jesus never mentioned membership. Instead, he called people to be disciples. The word disciple means students, pupils. It signifies people who are ready to learn, to be taught, to follow, to take instruction. A student doesn’t write the curriculum or create the lesson plans. A student learns and is shaped by the teacher.
What we want to do is be disciples. And so we’re starting off in the right place, because we’re signaling that we’re trying to be open to God’s will for us. And who better to set a path for us than God who created us? No two vessels a potter creates with his or her own hands is exactly alike. Each detail has come from the potter’s own touch. Each curve and pattern and shape is a result of the potter’s work. If we are clay, and God is the potter, then we are intimately known by the one who has created us, and all that we can be is there in God’s creative, creating mind. And when we fail – and we always will struggle and stumble – if we are clay, if we are open and flexible and moldable, God can always and will always start over with us, create again from us, rework us into something new.
It’s hard, being the clay, when we are so used to be being potters, so used to being in control and in charge. But it is the only way I know of that we can be disciples. And in God’s hands, we’ll find much love and much grace as we let God shape our lives. “Have thine own way, Lord! Have thine own way! Thou art the potter; I am the clay.”
Amen.