Like Clay in the Hand of the Potter

Psalm 139: 1, 7-14, Jeremiah 18:1-6

Have you ever had one of those serendipitous moments when you knew you were in the right place at the right time because you experienced something that felt like it was meant only for you?  It feels like being in a crowded theater, but everyone and everything else fades away and it seems like what the person on stage, or at the pulpit is saying was intended just for you. I had one such experience in September of 2001. I walked into a church for Sunday morning worship that I had never been in before. A man was seated on the chancel at his pottery wheel working with a large lump of clay. And the scripture text was read out of the Prophets – “Go down to the potter’s house and see what it is I have to say to you, Jeremiah… Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand.”

Why this dramatic moment? Was I a potter? No.  Was my name Jeremiah? No. So, what was the significance? I sat there watching the potter – in church!-- that Sunday morning in early September having just spent the summer as a camp pastor. I had used that same scripture passage for eight weeks on the first night of camp. Jeremiah heard God’s invitation to go to the potter’s house and I had used this passage as my invitation to these students to do the same: “Come see what God wants to show you this week. There might be a message for you, too.” God is always issuing invitations. We just have to pay attention to see them.

That summer turned out to be a very formative time for me.  For the first time in my young adult life, I had come to feel at home as a preacher and as a pastor – to the students and my peers on staff. Now… Here I was listening to a lovely and strong woman in the pulpit preach using this scripture text that had made its home in me over the past several weeks.   This would not be an anomaly. More and more female voices would be added to the long list of male preaching voices that had and would shaped my faith.  
Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand, says the Lord.

Jeremiah was a young man when he started as a prophetic preacher, probably between 17 and 20 years old. He serves as a mouthpiece for God for 40 years or more when Judah and the city of Jerusalem  experience their most deeply wounding events under Babylonian rule.  In one fell swoop in the year 587 BCE, both the Temple and the succession of Kings in the lineage of David are taken down.  Solomon’s Temple and the Davidic dynasty are no more. These institutions were the most symbolic assurances of God’s appointment of Israel as chosen people.  Their destruction “demanded a total reappraisal and rethinking of Israel’s self-understanding as the People of God.”[1]

Who were they now without their Temple, without their King? This is the backdrop of Jeremiah’s prophetic ministry. The people of Judah suffered a political collapse, so severe,  they wouldn’t recover from it for centuries.  This is what led to the scattering (diaspora) of the Jewish people throughout foreign lands. Jeremiah was called to remind these refugees who feel abandoned by their God and who thus abandon their allegiances that God still wanted to be in relationship to them. Jacobsen calls Jeremiah, “the most creative prophet.” Because he had to find a dramatic way to say what needed to be said.[2]  So, the people would listen and trust God again.  Jeremiah models for all of us what Walter Brueggemann called the prophetic imagination. That is, Jeremiah approached his work with imaginative disruption.[3] He reframed reality in such a way so that his hearers could see themselves in a relationship with God that still had hope and possibility.

Jeremiah tells the people what he has seen… What if God is like this potter and you, Israel, are like this clay? Not that you are an inanimate lump, Jeremiah might have added. Not that you have no agency in this relationship with God, he might said. God’s mind is not made up, you understand. What the potter determines to do with you, the clay in the future, will be decided based on your, Israel’s, malleability. In fact, God’s unrelenting hope is that Israel will put its future in God’s hands just like this clay.

One could read the verses that immediately follow these and write Jeremiah off as another demanding prophet of an angry God. You could approach the metaphor and think this potter wants to manhandle this clay and whip it into shape. The way an exhausted parent grabs a child’s hand and pulls them along against their will in the direction they should go. God’s threat to pluck up, break down, destroy, inflict, and devise against sound like a punitive, violent Sovereign overlord... It’s not hard to imagine that the Divine Parent gets “done” with us and our whining and wandering sometimes.

But here’s what we know… God’s unrelenting hope is that Israel will put its future in God’s hands. Here’s what we know: that after Jeremiah, God sent Ezekiel… and then Daniel… and then Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi… Does that sound like a God who is “done”? And then God sent Jesus his one and only son into the world not to condemn the world but to save the world through him. Does that sound like a God who is “done” with his people? Here’s what we know: The Divine Potter can be trusted.

But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him. (18:4, NIV)

It’s not a perfect metaphor, but if the Divine Potter wants to shape our lives, our futures, as seems best to him, I’m okay with that, because this is the God who loved the world so much that he sent Jesus to walk among us, to teach, preach, heal, and set free; and then to die so that we might live.

The Potter can be trusted. A master-potter knows that you can’t overwork the clay or it won’t be structurally stable; he knows  just the right amount of water to add to soften the clay. He knows the right amount of time on the wheel, the speed of the rotations, when to let the clay rest, how long it needs to dry, the time it needs in the kiln. The Potter can be trusted to shape our lives with care and artistry, so that our futures have purpose and meaning.   God’s unrelenting hope is that we will allow ourselves to be molded into vessels of God’s love and care for the world. Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in God’s hands.

In a few minutes, we will recognize a group of people who have said Yes to being vessels of God’s love and care in our congregation. They will contain our sorrows, they will pour out love. My prayer for them and for all of you is that they will look and listen for God’s word for our community, like Jeremiah did, and that they will allow themselves to be shaped by the One who can be trusted.

[1] Clements, R. E., Interpretation Commentary Series Jeremiah

[2] Jacobsen, Rolf, Sermon Brainwave Podcast 2025

[3] Edwards, Jason, Christian Century August 2025, Walter Brueggemann’s gift of disruption