"I believe in God the potter almighty, maker of heaven and earth." That's the beginning of The Apostles' Creed, as Jeremiah might have written it: I believe in God who has created heaven and earth, and you, and me, like a potter at work at a potter's wheel.
That's a biblical image that still makes sense for you and me. At craft shows, in art classes, in hobby shops, you can still find a potter's wheel. And you can take classes in making pottery. If you do, you'll find that these days the potter's wheel has an electric motor, with variable speeds and is run by electricity. In Jeremiah's day the potter's wheel was made of stone and run by foot power. A small stone, on which the pot was made, was connected to a lower, larger stone that the potter turned with his feet. The potter literally had to throw his whole body into throwing a pot. Leaning over the wheel, kicking with his feet, forming the clay with his hands. That's what the potter was doing on the day Jeremiah came to call.
After watching for a while, Jeremiah said that's what God's been doing all along. God, like a potter at his wheel, is at work in his world, shaping, forming, stretching, pushing, pulling us into shape. And not just any shape. Into God's shape. God's form. God's image. (See Genesis 2:7.) In the creation story in Genesis when it says that "...the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground ..." the Hebrew words suggest a potter forming or molding clay.
And the prophet Jeremiah would have known the psalmist's words: "O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth! ... When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? Yet you have made them a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honor" (Psalm 8:1, 3-5).
Lew Smedes puts it this way: "Common clods of clay we are, (yet) God invests his gift to humankind with us."1
God's doing his thing with us and for us on the potter's wheel that we call life. As a hymn that I love says: "God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year ... God is working his purpose out, and the time is drawing near; nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be, when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea."2
Watching the potter at work at his wheel Jeremiah perceived God at work in his world: even in Jeremiah's world which according to Jeremiah wasn't too different from our world in the way people lived with each other and with God.
Jeremiah perceived two things down at the potter's place.
First, that God's in charge of this world. The theological term for that is the "Sovereignty of God": the "rule" of God. Jeremiah says: "... The word of the Lord came to me: can I not do with you, O House of Israel, just as this potter has done? ... just like the clay in the potter's hand, so are you in my hand" says the Lord (Jeremiah 18:5-6).
Jeremiah perceived in the potter's work the primary place of God in the affairs of people. That whatever we're doing, what God is doing is what will be "on earth as in heaven" in good time.
That belief is very Presbyterian. It is, perhaps, one reason that Presbyterians have historically been so willing to risk so much for the life of this world. We believe that this world and our lives are in God's hands. And that he handles us with care.
On the cover of our weekly church Newsfold recently, in remembrance of Independence Day, we printed some facts and figures about the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. Men who changed the whole world as they put their lives on the line.
The article notes that "They were not wild-eyed radicals." Thank goodness, because a lot of them were Presbyterians! Of those 56 men who pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the cause of freedom, 12 were Presbyterians.
They did what they did "with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence;" (says the Declaration), with a sense of certainty that God would see them through; that he was in charge. That "... in the course of human events ..." there is a heavenly potter who, having created all men equal, is still active in creation, working his purpose out. Molding us, making us, into the likeness of God.
One of those men was the only minister to sign on the dotted line, Presbyterian minister, The Reverend John Witherspoon. He and they put their hand to that document, secure in the belief that they were held in the hand of God. That come what may God's purpose for his people would be served and advanced by what they were doing.
Jeremiah's message to the people of Israel was that God's purpose for his people would be served and advanced if they were to stop doing what they were doing! That's the second thing that was clear to Jeremiah that day in the potter's shop. That our will is not always God's will. During the American Civil War when asked if he thought God was on his side, Abraham Lincoln responded: "I am not so much concerned as to whether God's on my side as to whether I am on his side" (source unknown). Another time he said: "In the present Civil War, it's quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party."3
God's purpose is not always the purpose we had in mind. And when we are at cross purposes with the will of God, God's still at the wheel like the potter who when "the vessel he was making of clay was spoiled (in his hand) ... reworked it into another vessel as seemed good to him" (Jeremiah 18:4).
The word that Jeremiah heard from the Lord and spoke to the people of Israel was that they were about to get a good working over. That the pot on the wheel, the people in their lives, were not acceptable to God, the potter, in the shape they were in. God said to Jeremiah "... when you tell this people all these words, and they say to you, 'Why has the Lord pronounced all this great evil against us? What is our iniquity? What is the sin that we have committed against the Lord our God?' Then you shall say to them: it is because your ancestors have forsaken me, says the Lord, and have gone after other gods and have served and worshiped them, and have forsaken me and not kept my law; and because you have behaved worse than your ancestors, for here you are, every one of you, following your stubborn evil will, refusing to listen to me" (Jeremiah 16:10-12).
Throughout his writings Jeremiah lays it on the line with respect to the people's selfishness and greed, oppression of the weak and poor, sexual immorality, abusive business practices, self-indulgence, and self-serving ways even in their serving of God.
You're serving God in none of this, says Jeremiah. The potter is not pleased with the pot on his wheel. "Thus says the Lord, look (pay attention!), I am a potter shaping evil against you and devising a plan against you. Turn now, all of you from your evil way, and amend your ways and your doings" (Jeremiah 18:11).
You can take that two ways: as a threat if you perceive that the potter's plan goes against what you had in mind. And that if you keep living the way you've been living you'll eventually be "up against it"; or worse, up against God. Or you can take it as reassurance that in this world where there is so much wrong God has every intention of setting it right. As the hymn puts it: "That though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet."4
Jeremiah doesn't mean that every evil that befalls us is caused by God to control us. That is simply not so and never said. He does mean that the evil that befalls us because of the evil that we do is used by God to correct us. That the wheel is turning, life is taking form, and we are called to turn toward life and away from death. "Turn now, all of you from your evil way and amend your ways and your doing" (Jeremiah 18:11).
That's what it means to "repent." Literally, to turn a different way. To be "returned" into the form that the potter intends. And to live life praying as Jesus himself prayed to God as he faced the cross: "... not my will but yours be done" (Luke 22:42).
To pray as Jesus taught us to pray: "... Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" (Matthew 6:10). And then to live life as in the words of the old hymn: "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."5
So, in the still of this moment, what shall we say?
For some reason the committee that chose the lesson from Jeremiah chose not to tell us what the people said. They left out the last verse in this section. But that which is too often left unsaid in our lives needs to be said, on occasion, so we can hear ourselves say it.
Jeremiah writes: "But they say, 'It is no use! We will follow our own plans, and each of us will act according to the stubbornness of our evil will' " (Jeremiah 18:12).
The potter is at his wheel. The wheel is life. It's turning. What do you say?
1. Lew Smedes. How Can It Be Alright When Everything's All Wrong? (Harper and Row, 1992) p. 71.
2. The Hymnbook, 500 (Presbyterian Church in the United States, 1955).
3. Martin Marty. Righteous Remarks, (quoting Abraham Lincoln), p. 65.
4. The Presbyterian Hymnal, 293 (Westminster/John Knox Press 1990).
5. The Hymnbook, 302 (Presbyterian Church in the United Staets, 1955)