Basins, Pitchers & Crosses – Michele Rizoli – Sept. 9/07

Pottery has been around one way or another for about 10,000 years, it’s one of the most ancient artifacts (as any archaeologist could probably tell you). I guess it was an easy concept to figure out that one minute the clay could be squishing through your toes when you walked by the lake and a few days later the same stuff could be dry and hard from exposure to the sun.  [From my own personal experience with play-dough, I’m guessing that the first thing someone tried to make was one of those snakes you can get by rubbing the clay between your hands.] Soon, useful vessels were being made out of the clay, to store things in, or carry water from one place to another. Over time pottery-making became more and more sophisticated and humans figured out that if you spin the clay on a wheel, and apply different kinds of pressure, you could create wonderfully different shapes.

I have never worked a potter’s wheel myself [it’s still on my list of things to do before I die], but it is a wonderful thing to watch a skilled potter. A slippery glob of clay spins round and round on a flat wheel, the potter strategically places her hands on it, gently presses a little harder here or there and before our eyes the clay takes on wonderful and ever-changing shapes.  Every once in a while, something might go wrong, the shape isn’t quite what the potter had in mind, so all she needs to do is squish it all down and start again. The potter is committed to making the clay become something more, she will start over again as often as needed. 

  Pottery is quite fascinating. So much so that one fine day back in Bible times, God suggested to the prophet Jeremiah that watching the potter would help him hear God’s voice. On this occasion, as God so often seems to do, God’s message came in the form of a metaphor – an image that would capture what God was trying to say.  Back then, the message was that God’s people had been shaped to be vessels of good, but, as the potter, God could also smoosh the pot down and start again with a different shape. God’s message through Jeremiah was meant – to borrow a phrase[1]—to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. In that sense, so was Jesus’ message.

The image of the God as Potter has been inspiring Christians for many years. An example is a 2^nd century poem by Irenaeus[2]:

  It is not you who shape God;

   it is God that shapes you.

If then you are the work of God,

   await the hand of the Artist who does all things in due season.

Offer the Potter your heart,      soft and tractable,

   and keep the form in which the Artist has fashioned you.

Let your clay be moist,

   lest you grow hard and lose

   the imprint of the Potter’s fingers.

  While Jeremiah was speaking to the context of the ancient tribes of Israel and Judah, I think the metaphor of God as Potter can still work for us today in how we think about our faith commitment.  God’s love still shapes the Church. Likewise our Christian commitment still shapes our lives and the lives of those around us.

 It is interesting that our parting gift from Gary and Lydia Harder was a lovely set of pottery pieces, a basin and a pitcher. They are powerful a symbol of how we understand our faith commitment: it is modeled in Jesus’ attitude of doing things differently or even opposite to what would be expected. Jesus washed feet instead of seeking a position of honour. Jesus flipped the usual values upside down and inside out and spoke of shifts so profound it was like being born again. The changes Jesus called for were radical, all-encompassing and difficult. We might say that Jesus himself was engaged in creating a different shape to the world and to relationships. Like with the potter the end result was /is /shall be amazing and perhaps unexpected.

  Later on we will reflect on what it means for us to be followers of Jesus when we look at the somewhat disconcerting text we read in Luke 14. But first I would like to tell you why I think it is important to think about our Christian commitment on this, the first day of Sunday School.  It’s because, knowingly or unknowingly, we who have made a decision to follow Christ are being an example of Christian faith for the children in our church.

  I know someone who was raised in the 40’s whose father used to say: “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.” That advice was misguided even then, but today we know with certainty that children learn much more by what we model to them than by what we tell them.  We know this, yet somehow in a church context it becomes tempting to rely only on words. We think that words will to do the job of exposing children to the joy and the cost of living by the values of the Kingdom of God.  Not so.

  On top of that, many of us here have issues with the concepts and the language we heard growing up in church, so we might be tentative in how we present our Christian commitment, even as we imagine ourselves to be doing this through what we say.  The reality is that we are actually communicating our faith to this church’s children – and to everyone for that matter — by how we are living, not as much by what we are telling them. [No, this is not an excuse for the Sunday School teachers not to prepare their lessons properly! J]

  For those of you out there who think this is not pertinent because you do not have children, or that you’re off the hook because you’ve raised your kids already, let me remind you that only a couple of weeks ago (and often throughout the years) we as a church have committed ourselves to the Christian nurture of several children in our midst. In church we all have children and we are all responsible for them.

  Parenting guru, Barbara Colorosso suggests that the goal of raising a child is to teach this person to make decisions.  When they are little, it might be a choice about which cookie to eat first, or which colour pajamas to wear tonight. But young children learn that life is about making choices and hopefully are becoming equipped to make increasingly important decisions into adulthood.  Children are watching our choices and monitoring our integrity
on many levels. They can spot a fake a mile off. No use saying “be kind to one another” in church then berating your husband or your wife as soon as you get to the van. No use singing a hymn about forgiveness, but never extending any of it to the kids. You get the picture.

  Back to Luke 14. Now I’ll admit it is a bit strange to read a “hate your parents” verse in the context of Christian education, so let’s unravel it a bit and see what it has to do with modeling integrity.

  Here we are being reminded that living in Jesus’ way, being a follower of Christ is also about decision-making; not just the decision we often associate with baptism, but daily decisions on how we will face the world, given our identification with Christ. How will we live within creation? How will we respond to the driver who cut us off on the 401or the friend who betrays us? How will we treat the homeless person at the next stop light, the annoying co-worker, the kid who once-again broke the rules, the person who is different than we are? How do we pray? Do we pray? What consumes our time and money? And so on. 

At this point in Luke’s account of the Gospel, Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem and was being followed by crowds of overly-enthusiastic people who may not have been attentive to what he was all about. He felt it was important to stop and do a reality check with these folks.  One way to do that is to shake ‘em up a bit, and so he exaggerated to make a point. [Although at times it may be tempting to take it literally, especially for teenagers!] Saying “hate your family” is hyperbole, it’s over-statement. It is sort of like saying there were a gazillion people when what you really mean is that there were a lot of people. Jesus is saying: “You think it is easy to live by the Kingdom of God standards? Think again. Following me means changing your loyalties and affiliations. You won’t be able to live by the usual society guidelines that place ‘you and yours’ above all else.” Jesus says,  “My priorities are radically different; following me means seeking justice, loving kindness, walking humbly, being free from possessions, valuing people above rules, seeking wholeness and healing, being shaped by the Potter, living with a basin and towel in hand, ready to serve.  That and much more: Following me means carrying a cross.”

  At this point in the story, Jesus had not yet suffered the cross, so how did these people hear this expression? Who knows? What we do know is how we hear it today and it’s fair to say we’ve got a lot of baggage, there are “issues” with this idea of carrying a cross.

  First, carrying a cross is not to be trivialized and understood as finding purpose in the burdens that are part of everyday living.  Having to face the world with a bad back or a rebellious child is certainly difficult and will certainly shape our spiritual path, but it is not a cross, nor a burden necessarily unique to the Christian experience.

  In the context of Luke, where Jesus is talking about a shift in loyalties, carrying the cross might also be about being identified with Christ, carrying the Christ-mark, if you will. In those days people could be conscripted to carry crosses for the condemned. You will recall that this in fact happened at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion when someone was made to carry the cross for him. Here Jesus was warning his listeners that to follow him, to be on his side, would involve some tough decisions and that difficult things might be required. Truly committing to the values of the Kingdom of God still carries risk.

  Finally, no matter how we understand Jesus’ death on the cross, what seems clear is that he ended there because his pursuit of justice and his challenge to the social and religious status quo were radical and had ultimate consequences.  So carrying the cross means assuming the risk of living with different priorities.

  How very Mennonite of me to stress the “cost of discipleship”  (Dietrich Bonhoffer) — and I do believe this. And I believe we are short-changing everyone if we spare our children the struggles we face in trying to let God shape us as faithful followers of Christ.

  Gary once read us a wonderful story by Walter Wangerin [and I will borrow from that shamelessly here!] where a father was trying to teach his son not to steal comic books. The father tried every kind of punishment he could think of and the boy just kept on stealing. Finally, in desperation the father went into a room, closed the door and cried praying to God for help. Eventually the son did stop stealing. Years later they were reminiscing about that comic-stealing phase and the father wondered, of all the punishments, which one had ultimately made the son change his ways. The son told him it had not been the punishments at all, but the fact that he had overheard his father crying.  To use the pottery image: we never know what small pressures will reshape a vessel into something totally different.

  A final and crucial point: elsewhere in Jesus’ teaching, when he was asked to sum things up he said it was about loving God above all else and loving others as ourselves. What motivates us in risking and pursuing God’s kingdom and opening up to God’s shaping influence is our love for God and God’s love for us. Love may at times entail suffering and self-renunciation, but it also entails wholeness, life-affirming interactions, and acceptance. It is not suffering for suffering’s sake but God’s love that shapes the Church.

  There is a Taizé chant that says: The kingdom of God is justice and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, come Lord and open in us the gates of your kingdom.My prayer for us on this first day of Sunday school is that we may we be shaped by this kingdom and with integrity shape those around us. Amen.