It’s hard to look away from that spinning, centered mass of clay. Watching a skilled potter at work is mesmerizing.
The kick, kick, kick, of the foot maintains the wheel’s rhythm, propelling a vase or bowl or jar to rise upward and outward, guided by steady hands.
God calls the prophet Jeremiah to stand mesmerized watching a potter at work. God calls Jeremiah into the potter’s studio so that Jeremiah can be re-centered to hear and wrestle with and proclaim God’s message.
Jeremiah is an anguished and isolated prophet of lament, sharing God’s word of repentance to a people besieged by empire and distracted by idolatry and injustice. Jeremiah’s message of impending doom is discouraging, his word that the people must surrender to Babylon sounds like treason. But God’s word kept coming to Jeremiah, this time telling him to “Go down to the potter’s house and I’ll give you instructions about what to do there.”
And so there Jeremiah stands, mesmerized by what is happening in this creative dance between wheel and clay and the hands of the potter. What is going on inside this artist’s shack is a very old dance. There’s a playful creativeness alive here that’s been spinning since the dawn of humanity – when God reached into the rich fertile clay-ey soil of this planet and formed humanity and breathed the breath of life into us.
Jeremiah knows this not only because he comes from a priestly lineage but also because when God first called him, God reminded Jeremiah that God had been an artist in Jeremiah’s life from before the beginning. “Before I formed you like a potter in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.”
I like this kind of comforting, creative metaphor of God as an artist – a weaver, a potter – who delights in stitching together and molding us and each of us and our communities. But the crux of our passage from Jeremiah 18 – isn’t about marveling at the beautiful things God creates – it’s an anguished lament, wrestling with what to do and say when things go wrong, horribly wrong.
What does a potter do when the spinning piece on the wheel is flawed and not able to be salvaged? What is God to do when God’s people worship false gods and entrap themselves in political alliances and commit injustice that preys on the vulnerable and enriches the wealthy?
What are we to do when parts of our own life or family or community are cracked and destabilized? What do we do when the mesmerizing creation at the center of the potter’s wheel appears to be falling apart?
Jeremiah watches as the potter takes a ruined pot and reworks the clay into another vessel. God tells Jeremiah that so too can God dig up and pull down nations and kingdoms, God can bring disaster to a nation, and to the people of Jerusalem. A measure of destructiveness and reworking seems to be a part of God’s creative process.
In one sense – I’m encouraged by this image of God. God the potter can constrain the power of nations and empires and their injustice, making them seem small in the hands of God. It gives me hope that God brings creative good out of the chaos of this world. But in another way – I’m terrified by this metaphor from Jeremiah, that depicts God the potter as a disaster artist – wreaking havoc with any that disobey the way of God:
Is God that disconnected from what God has made? Does God have that kind of power?
As I’ve wrestled this week with this image from Jeremiah of God as a potter who both builds up and tears down – my mind has wandered back to my junior year of high school when I spent a year in an introductory ceramics class with our legendary teacher Mrs. Olias.
In particular – I remember how Mrs. Olias was always on patrol for illicit creations that us highschoolers would be making. Mainly, but not exclusively, a number of the boys of the class would craft all manner of different things that were prohibited by school policy. I can’t describe them here – but I’ll let you imagine the kind of things that juveniles might make in a ceramics class. People would go so far as to try to hide their creations within a larger pot to escape Mrs. Olias’ watchful eye.
But she always seemed to find them before they could be fired in the kiln – and she would ceremoniously smash them up.. She’d take the dried pieces of unfired clay and dump them back in this big watery bin with all the other scraps and trimmings and discarded pots that had flaws in them. All sorts of things could go wrong with the clay it turns out – clay could get air bubbles if you don’t knead it well enough, it could not be plastic enough to hold its shape and crack, it could get spoiled by other little crusty bits of clay.
All of these rejected scraps and those smashed illicit creations went into that watery bin. And once the bin was full – we would recycle it back into usable clay, running it through a mixer and a pug mill machine – until it was malleable and ready to return to the wheel, ready to become new works of art.
The key detail in our scene from Jeremiah is that this clay the potter is working with – is clay that has not yet been fired and turned into hard and brittle ceramic. It is clay whose air bubbles and flaws and cracks can be yet be reformed and thrown back into the scrap bucket and reworked again and again.
And for all the harshness of this text – with God’s speaking of the power to destroy nations and kingdoms – the possibility of grace and redemption in the story hinges on the reality that the potter works with clay that has not yet been fired. Even in the harshness of God’s message of looming disaster – the clay retains the ability to change and adapt. Nations can turn from their evil ways. And even God can course correct …. “But if that nation I warned turns from its evil,” God says, “then I’ll relent and not carry out the harm I intended for it” (v. 8).
But by the next chapter, in Jeremiah 19 – despair has gotten the worst of God and of Jeremiah – the looming desolation seems too horrible to be averted, and God commands Jeremiah to go out and buy a finished clay jar and to smash it publicly, a sign of the disaster that awaits the people and the city of Jerusalem.
Sometimes that’s how we might feel about the prognosis of our lives or of this country or this world. Like it’s a jar whose form and future is permanently and irredeemable fractured and broken. Jeremiah is a prophet who invites us to ask where God is in that tension – is the clay jar irredeemable or can it yet be reworked?
I can’t resolve that tension but I do invite us to hold onto the hope of the potter’s shed, the hope of the high school art classroom – which are places that remind us that God’s creative love still has the power to rework our lives. God is able to work like an artist in our lives and world because for better and worse – we are not fixed creatures, our communities are not static. We are dust and to dust we will return – and that is good news.
Because to be dust, to be clay, means that there is the possibility that we can be shaped and formed and reformed and even our most foolish and fraught designs still have the possibility to be tossed through a clay bin and reworked. To be clay is not to be an inert substance – but it is to be part of this good, good earth, through which God continues to create. To be clay is to be a participant in the mysterious work of God’s wildly spinning creation.
Pottery wheels are messy, watery, wild places. And our text from Jeremiah leaves us not with a single perfect vessel to put into the kiln to be fixed forever – but the scene from the potter’s studio in Jeremiah – leaves us with an invitation to be co-creators with God.
We have hope as clay because we are not fixed in stone, fired beyond repair – but we remain open to the future, open to what God may yet do and what we may yet become.
We have hope because we are participants in the creative work of God.