Unlike Frank Sinatra, I have regrets, one of which is never learning to throw a pot. Not just picking one up and heaving it. That even I could handle. I’ve watched potters enough to know that it takes three kinds of strength. First there’s creative or imaginative strength—the mental power to be able to envision the end product—what they want to produce. Second is physical strength—strong arms and strong hands at the beginning, then a sensitivity where a little more or less pressure from a single finger can change the character of the whole piece.

Third is emotional strength—the ability to handle defeat. Ask any potter. Things go wrong. When they do, the clay is slammed onto the wheel once again and the transformation of the lump begins afresh.

Jeremiah was feeling slammed. Sure, his name, yir-meh-YAW in Hebrew, means “Ya (God) will rise”—or “God is exalted” or “lifted up,” but being a prophet was never Jeremiah’s idea. God had a big plan for 17-year-old lump-of-clay Jeremiah, but Jeremiah was doing his best to get out of it. “Ah, Lord God! I’m just a kid! You’ve seen me tripping over my big feet. I’m too young to get married—heck, I can’t grow anything close to being called a beard. And even if I did have the power to persuade—which, for the record, I don’t, who’s going to listen to a kid?” Jeremiah might have envisioned himself as useless—a pot that couldn’t hold water, at best; a formless lump of clay at worst. Should his name have been “God is avoided” or “God is ignored” or “God has chosen the wrong person.” Who’s gonna listen to a lump kid? Who’s gonna listen to a kid?

BUT, Prophecy was part of young Jeremiah’s DNA. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you.” Hindsight says that from the very beginning, forces were at work on or in Jeremiah. He was being shaped into God’s idea—God’s vision of what makes a prophet a prophet. The people of Israel were like lumps or like leaky pots—so far from God’s vision for them that they weren’t even recognizable as God’s people.

But when Jeremiah looked at his people, he looked through God’s eyes. When he listened to his people, he listened with God’s ears. When he processed what his eyes and his ears were taking in and tried to understand what he was seeing and hearing, he was doing so with the mind of God. When he finally spoke—as reluctant as he was to do so, he spoke with the voice of God.

“Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.” Let you hear my words? I kind of doubt that Jeremiah saw himself as in a position of privilege who had earned the right to hear God’s voice. God let him hear that voice. The will of God, the desire of God, the words of God weren’t being forced on Jeremiah, they were just uniquely available. Jeremiah wasn’t all “Woo-HOO!” when he was called to pronounce judgment on Israel. Isn’t that the image of a “prophet” that often comes to mind? He or she just can’t wait to deliver the bad news! Jeremiah didn’t think that he was really something else or that he had really arrived because his eyes and ears and mind worked differently. This was a God thing.

“Lump of clay” Jeremiah was taking on the shape of a prophet—what God had envisioned for him and needed him to be. Jeremiah wasn’t all set to cash in on his call as is the case with too many people today who think of themselves as being prophetic. He was just being being himself—what God had created and called him to be. Down to the potter’s house he went.

My buddy Wayne Cleary visited Lima Church with us last year when he came to visit. Wayne and his wife Pat are both retired pastors. Both are wonderfully creative. Wayne was a golf course groundskeeper before going to seminary but he’s also very skilled at bonsai. Pat is a very gifted weaver who has returned to her artistic roots in retirement.

One day, over bottles of green tea, Wayne and I were chewing over the Jeremiah passage, focusing on the potter’s wheel. He made a comment that should have come to me immediately as a musician, but I guess I was busy thinking visually. Wayne mentioned the sound of the wheel, the pulsing rhythms and hypnotic effect as it spins around, and around, and around.

“So I went down to the potter’s house, and there he was working at his wheel.” And it really would have been work in those days. No electric motors to turn the wheel. It would have taken a lot of coordination to keep the wheel turning with your foot as you worked the spinning clay with your hands. Imagine a mesmerized Jeremiah listening to the steady pulse as the potter worked until the rhythm grew lopsided and the pot did likewise. Before long there would be the inevitable expletive, and the potter would begin the process of scraping the spoiled clay off of the wheel, pounding and pressing and molding it back into a lump; smashing it back onto the wheel; then starting the rhythm all over again and working to see the image in his mind begin to take shape.

Now you know, all of this is happening after the fact. What we have is an interpretation of past events, not a prediction of coming events. We have a tendency to forget or overlook that, but it helps to be aware that what the book of Jeremiah was predicting was already history. The Bible is an inspired interpretation of these events.

So the word that came to Jeremiah was Plan B. God the potter had begun to reshape Israel. Israel was a mess. What next? The word Jeremiah hears sounds like God is flexing the old divine muscles, letting Israel know who is in control. But listen to it again. God is reacting to the behavior of Israel.

If that nation…turns from its evil, I will change my mind about the disaster that I intended to bring on it…if it does evil in my sight, not listening to my voice, then I will change my mind about the good that I had intended to do to it.

God’s not being wishy-washy here. God’s not grabbing for power. God is saying, It’s up to you. You, Israel, are responsible for the shape of your own pot, for your own fate. Will you be built up or torn down? Israel is in charge. They have control. God is simply responding. If they choose to be faithful as God’s people, to be for the world what God has envisioned for them, they open the door to God’s blessings. But they block those blessings when they fail to recognize and respond to the One who is the reason for their existence as a people—the Potter who has shaped them into Israel—“El (ale), strength, almighty, God,” and sarah (saw-RAW)—“to have power.” It’s like a double whammy. Sarah-el. Israel. Creative, physical, and emotional power.

What happens when the potter loses focus? When the image of what this formless lump of clay is becoming fades? When God’s people lose sight of their calling, when they forget or abandon the stories of what brought them into being, of the liberation from slavery that shaped them as a community—what happens? When they begin to try on, to worship, to serve, and to be shaped by other stories, other gods—what happens? It wasn’t about them falling apart individually, but falling apart as a faith community. The faith they had was not faith in the God who had placed incredible faith in them—as a people, as a community.

People are often reluctant to hear the “we” story. I love the songs and the hymns that pick up on the potter image, but we need to think “we” even when a composer writes “me,” and “us” when the composer writes “I.” None of this eliminates the call for you or for me to personally get our act together or ignores God’s concern for the shaping of individual lives. But Jeremiah’s focus was corporate evil not individual evil; it was on the continued existence of the people of Israel; it was on the continued existence of those who were responsible for the survival of the story. God was on the brink of being forgotten. God’s vision was fading, so Jeremiah addresses the community of faith, reintroduces them to the God they have abandoned and to the story they have forgotten. The potter is shaping that community to ensure their survival as a community.

Since “pulling the pastoral plug” in 2015, I confess that I have said many times, “I am so glad to be retired.” I determined that I wasn’t up to another presidential election or another United Methodist General Conference—trying to guide a very traditional congregation toward embracing God’s vision of acceptance, of a welcome being extended to all. Since then we’ve factored in: 1. A global pandemic that has left very little unchanged in its wake; 2. The escalation of evidence that the earth isn’t going to take our abuse any longer; and 3. An explosion violence, an assault on human rights, and a polarization that reminds me of the world I entered 71 years ago—a world that would be strangely familiar to a Jeremiah. He said, “I’m too young.” I say, “I’m too old.” All the more reason why the emphasis needs to be on who we are, on the stories we tell, on the vision we sustain, on the calling that we share—young and old and everyone in-between.

Picture bits of wet clay flying in every direction, propelled by the wheel as it turns and hums. The mass that remains on the wheel feels the pokes and the prods of the potter’s touch as the lump of clay is transformed into an image lodged in the potter’s mind—of something more than a lump of clay. Sometimes the community responds, sometimes the community begins to conform to the image being conveyed through the potter’s touch, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes we are what we were intended to be as the church, as the body of Christ. Sometimes we aren’t. But whether we are or aren’t, whether we are allowing ourselves to be shaped to reveal what God has imagined us to be, God the Potter—God the Love, the Truth, the Compassion, the Justice—that God remains deeply invested in our life together. When my faith is weak, your faith compensates for my weakness. My faith does the same for yours. We can all be at different places, we can all be feeling different emotions, and by the grace of God that we spend a lifetime coming to know in Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, we can still be the community of faith. God wants us to survive together.

Jeremiah’s message from God was about who we are together, and it is together that we have the hope of being shaped into what God needs us and calls us to be—no matter what age we might be. When you read in that message the word “nation” or “kingdom,” think “community of faith,” because that is the target of Jeremiah’s prophesy. It speaks to who we are as a church, not who we are as a country. And until we move beyond the “What’s in it for me?” question, the clay on the potter’s wheel is going to keep bulging, resisting, and continually be in need of the “Smash!” that starts the process all over again. Shaping the church anew takes creative strength, physical strength, and emotional strength. “The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: ‘Come, go down to the potter’s house, and there I will let you hear my words.’ So I went down.” Are we ready to go along?