Proper 18 C

Clay in the hands of a potter, a letter asking for a slave to go free and Jesus saying that we cannot be his disciple unless we give up all our possessions. How do these all fit together?

Proper 18C

Transcribed from a sermon given on

September 5, 2010

By Rev. Valerie Ann Hart

At St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Jeremiah 18:1-11

Philemon 1-21

Luke 14:25-33

I love the image in Jeremiah of the potter and the clay - that we are clay in the hands of God. It is a wonderful, wonderful image. Think about how a lump of clay is turned into a beautiful pot or bowl or other useful item. First the potter thinks about what is to be made and then picks the particular kind of clay based on what the item will be used for. Some clay is heavy and good for things that need to be very strong. Some clay is very fine and is good for things that need to be more fragile. Some clay is light colored, some is dark.  There are lots of different clays from all over the world. Once the potter has chosen the particular piece of clay that he believes is just the right clay for what he wants to accomplish, he takes a hunk of it. When you cut off a piece of clay from a larger piece it is kind of ugly. It is just this wad of clay. 

The first thing that has to be done is that the clay has to be prepared. That means you have to get all of the air bubbles out, because if there are air bubbles in the clay and you put it in the kiln the thing will explode - break apart. It is a process sometimes called wedging or kneading. Wedging is when you take something and you put it into the clay over and over again. Kneading is not like bread. When you knead bread and fold it you are trying to get more air in. When you are kneading clay you don’t fold it, and you don’t want any extra air in it. You push, and you shove, and as you do that the clay warms up and gets more pliable. Finally, you have a nice round ball. Often the potter will throw the ball back and forth between his or her hands to get the air out, and if you really want to get all the air out you take the ball and you throw it down on something hard, and then you pick it up again and you just throw it down again. Each time the clay gets a little better and a little purer. 

Then the clay is taken, and if you are making a statue you might just pinch it and work it into shape, but if  you are making a bowl, you put it on the potter’s wheel and it spins around. You still have just a lump of clay. A little smoother than what you had when you started, but it is still a lump of clay. But in the hands of a master potter, with just some subtle pushing here and there that is gentle but strong all of a sudden up comes a bowl. It is almost miraculous when you are watching it because it just kind of appears there. 

Once the bowl is finished to the place where the potter likes it and it looks beautiful it is still not useful because it has to be fired in the kiln. You put it in the kiln and you get the temperature up to 850 degrees for 24 hours. Then you remove it from the kiln. Now you could use. It’s solid, but its not done yet. 

It has to cool, and if it is a particularly nice piece and the potter is pleased with how it came out, then the potter might want to decorate it, to paint it and glaze it. Once he’s done that then it goes back into the kiln and gets heated up again until finally it is removed and you have a useful and beautiful item. 

I think that describes very well the spiritual journey. We start out as a lump of clay and we get kind of thrown around and hit and beat up until we are softened enough that the potter can do something with us. And then just when we feel like nothing is happening, all of a sudden we blossom into something beautiful and useful to God. We just start to feel good about what we have become and suddenly we find ourselves, we call it hot water, I’ll say we find ourselves in the kiln, and it is hot, and it hurts, and it is intense, but it makes us stronger. And we come out of that particular crisis strong and ready to serve God. But if God finds us particularly beautiful we will get decorated and stuck back into the kiln again for more fire and more perfecting. Until we become something that is useful to God and beautiful. 

The letter that we read today of Paul to Philemon is the one time we read an entire letter in one day at church. In it he talks about someone being useful. It is interesting letter because the best we can understand of what this letter is about is that there was a man named Onesimus who evident ran away from his owner Philemon and then came to Rome where Paul was in prison. H was helping Paul and obviously had become a Christian and at some point. He and Paul decided that as part of the spiritual journey he had to go back to his owner and ask to be released from slavery so that he could come back and serve Paul. Of course when he went back to his owner he had no idea how the owner would respond. So Paul wrote this wonderful letter. It is a great letter because if you want to do fund raising or get someone to do something, read this letter and write something like it. It starts out basically saying, “Oh Philemon you are so wonderful, and you are so generous, and I’ve heard wonderful things about you. Now I’m going to send this person back to you. He was useless to you.” It is interesting that the name Onesimus is very close to the Greek word for useful or useless. So it is a wonderful word play that you can’t get in the translation. Paul says that once he ran away he was useless to you. But if you set him free than he will be useful, and he will be your brother. If you do what I am asking you are going to be better off than you were in the first place. Then Paul writes, “I could demand it. I could insist upon it, but I won’t do that. I’m going to trust your good heart to give this. And if it costs you anything, put it against my debt. I’ll take care of it. But of course you do know you owe me your soul. Wonderful letter when you really look at it. 

It made it into the canon, not as a fund raising letter and not because it was about slavery, it made it into the canon because it has a spiritual side to it. Because as long as we are enslaved we aren’t useful to God. And until we are truly free we can’t serve God. Now for us slavery doesn’t look like slavery then, where there is a person who owns us, but we all know what it feels like to be enslaved. The most obvious is those who get enslaved to alcohol or drugs. Some people are enslaved to power, or relationships, and most of us are enslaved to wanting to be financially secure. 

The Gospel reading today is one of those Gospel reading that make us uncomfortable. It is one of those Gospels reading that people who say they take all of scripture literally and follow it complete tend to ignore. Here is Jesus surrounded by thousands of people who are impressed by this wonderful charismatic teacher who has been healing people, and they are just fascinated by it. They have been feed by his miracles and they are all excited and want to follow him. Then he says be careful what you ask for. Think about it before you make the decision to follow me. You don’t want to be like someone who decides to build a new house and puts in the foundation but never gets to finish it and all the neighbors laugh about the waste of money. You want to be sure that you are going to be able to follow through. 

To follow through and to follow Jesus means to offer ourselves to Christ - to become clay in Christ’s hands. Now clay that tries to resist all that happens to it ends up not working very well. The only way for clay to become useful is to surrender. And we can’t surrender to Christ as long as we are enslaved to something else. Jesus ends this talk about being careful think before you become my follower by saying therefore you must sell all your possession - to be able to let go of everything you have. Now very few of us are capable of doing that. That’s why they call St. Francis a saint. But it is an important point. It is an important point because we are enslaved with a fear and concern about money. In our culture that is what enslaves almost everybody. If you don’t have money your focused on the fear of not getting it, and you have some to get more. If you have a little bit of money you want to have more so you can some put away and be secure. If you have a lot of money your focus is on protecting it so that you don’t lose it. So you get security systems and worry about where it is invested. 

It is not so much the having of the money that is the problem it’s the attachment to the money that is the problem. What we need to do to really follow Christ is to be able to give up our financial security any time we feel that is what God is calling us to. We need to feel free enough about our finances that if we feel that God is calling us to be generous we can be generous. To be comfortable enough and trusting enough of Jesus that if we feel like we have to leave our job because in order to stay we have to be untrue to what we believe, then we quit our job and trust that God will take care of us. We have to have a comfortable enough attitude toward money that if we feel called by God to go over seas and serve the poor that we can do that. To not be slaves to anything. To not be slaves to anything so we can be useful to God. Jesus warns us that if you want to be my follower, if you want to have that relationship with me that will feed your soul, if you want that, think about it first because you will be like a lump of clay in my hands which means you may get tossed around, you may find yourself in a kiln, in heat. It won’t be easy. And you will have to let go of all of your attachments, even your attachment to money. Think before you make the commitment.