Shaped by Grace in the Potter’s Hands
Shaped by Grace in the Potter’s Hand
Jeremiah 18:1-4
September 13, 2026
Rev. Cynthia Cochran-Carney, First Presbyterian Church of San Rafael, CA
PDF SERMON LINK BELOW
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Holy One: "Come, go down to the potter's house, and there I will let you hear my words." So I went down to the potter's house, and there he was working at his wheel. The vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter's hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him.
The ancient communities from which the scriptures arose never wavered in their sense of wonder over the creative capacities of God. They knew nothing of the Big Bang theory or evolution or black holes in the cosmos, but they never failed to honor the Holy One as the source of all that was or that ever would be. One image comes from the Psalms “. . . For it was you who formed my inward parts, you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you for I am wonderfully and fearfully made.” (Psalm 139:13)
What a striking image: God as weaver, a knitter. One biblical commentator noted that he had often watched his mother-in-law knit Norwegian sweaters. It seemed to him to be a very complicated process, until he began to imagine how much more complicated it must be to knit together an actual Norwegian.
For some awestruck psalmists, God was the master weaver. For the prophet Jeremiah, God works in an entirely different way. For Jeremiah, the crusty, ill-tempered prophet, God was the potter who worked at the wheel. The vessel that the potter was making was spoiled in the potter’s hands, so he reworked it into another vessel. The potter had no need to alter the substance, the clay with which he was working. The problem was that which was inherently good had become misshapen, so the flawed vessel had to be collapsed in order for the potter to begin again.
For Jeremiah, the pot that needed to be collapsed and remolded was none other than the Hebrew people, for whom pride and self-centeredness and rejection of God’s will had become a way of life. Written between 609 BC and 598 BC, during the early reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah. The fact that Jeremiah was so cranky was really no excuse for the people’s stubbornness. They had genuinely convinced themselves that it was enough to go through the motions various religious rituals. That would be more pleasing to God than exercising justice and treating other people with compassion.
I like the thought of God the weaver. And I am thinking about the metaphor of being clay, a lump of mud and the Holy One remaking me, reshaping me.
Maybe you are there today because all of us share the desire to be made new again. Because we are relatively intelligent and honest people, we have faced the fact long ago that neither we nor the world we inhabit will ever become new without divine intervention.
And we want to have hope that we and the world can be different better, bend toward justice a little more.
Jeremiah might have been cranky and irritable, but he was a man of hope. He offered to the people of Israel a vision so that they could hope for a future that would be different from the past. It was out of hope that he shared the story of the potter who would not give up on the pot.
Maybe this is one way to think about grace. Grace - not created by human beings, but gifts from God. I believe the purpose of our lives is to be shaped more and more by the true grace that come from the Holy One, Divine Mystery. I do not know whether you brought any hope into this sanctuary with you today, but I do believe that a core aspect Christian faith than the core conviction that there is a reality known as the transforming, life-giving power of Divine Mystery we come to know in the life and ways of Jesus.
Margaret Farley, prof. at Yale Divinity school once wrote about the meaning of the resurrection of Jesus Christ: “Whatever else the Christian faith has stood for across the centuries, it has always maintained that what has been, does not necessarily determine what will be.”
If God can roll away the stone on that first Easter, then surely God can roll away the stones of hopelessness and cynicism that would keep you from becoming the full, beautiful, faithful, alive person God always intended for you to be, or, as Jeremiah might have put it, God’s mighty foot is pedaling away at the potter’s wheel. God’s creative hands are molding the clay that is you, the clay that is us, the clay that is the church, the clay that is human society.
One has to wonder how the human community looks from the potter’s perspective these days, as fear, religious fundamentalism, terrorism, and war are threatening to carry the day. In our own nation, more and more families are struggling to have enough food and a safe place to live. I understand from friends who work in hunger ministries around the country that food banks and food pantries are being flooded with increased demands.
We seek to be shaped to be people of life lived in hope, in compassion, in community.
Last week I talked about being transformed, ongoing process of more alive, more open. To experience this deeper life means you need to notice, you change your ways, and to open your eyes to the needs of others.” To have indifference destroyed, to raise up a new capacity for compassion—these are the purposes of the potter at work at the wheel.
We cannot as a nation, as a church, as families, or as individuals close our doors and our hearts. I remember how it was 25 years ago in September 2001 as Americans lined up for hours to give blood in the wake of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks. Jeffrey and I had just moved Pocono Mountains to start a new church. Hundreds of children in the Poconos had parents who worked in NYC. The school district and community had to figure out how to care for children while we waited for those parents to come home on busses. And to be with children whose parents would not be coming home. Thankfully almost all the parents came home. On the Sunday after Sept. 11, we worshipped in Stroudsburg and the sanctuary was packed. Churches and communities of faith were packed. People were helping each other.
For those who lost loved ones, twenty-five years does not make the loss part of history.
But remembering is not just about the past. Our memories shape us. What we remember, how we remember, & the stories we tell about what happened become part of who we are.
Compassion spread across the country but so did grief and fear. Some of that fear led to war, torture, and surveillance. Muslim Americans and people thought to be Muslim faced suspicion, harassment, and violence. The deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent people became linked to the deaths of many more innocent people far away.
We cannot choose the history we inherit, but we can choose what we carry forward from it. Twenty-five years later, fear still tempts us to see strangers as enemies. Political and religious leaders still find it easier to control people who are afraid. Violence still offers the tempting idea that if we defeat the right people, we will finally be safe.
This has been another week of deciding what will shape us – divine love and grace and mystery, clay shaped at holy potter’s wheel or fear and hate? Do we go back to old ways and old perceptions and old habits? Maybe there is a different way to frame our stories.
Think about stories of transformation in the Bible. Clay made into a new shape. Peter, a disciple of Jesus, had a moment of utter clarity when he saw for real what authentic life looks like. “You are Christ; you are the Son of the living God!” At that moment, he surrendered the centrality of himself and entered into the new reality of living and being. Jesus invited his followers to a radical kind of reorientation, and for most of us it takes a lifetime. Always time to look again at how the Spirit is nudging us, inviting us.
Rev. Joanna Adams tells a story - I think of a lawyer I knew in my first church. He was with a successful law firm and had been one of the stars on America’s team at Wimbledon. He was a dad, with two little boys and a wife. One Sunday, we invited a guest to speak at a luncheon after church. The guest was a man named Ron Sider, who had just written a book entitled Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. The lawyer attended the luncheon on Sunday. The next week he called me and said, “Joanna, I am in trouble.”
“Oh?” I said.
“Yes,” he replied. “I just can’t hear the kind of thing I heard at church on Sunday and keep living the way I have been living.”
Within three months, he had set up a law practice in a little building near a housing project, where he represented clients who were poor in criminal court and in family court. That little project started by that Presbyterian lawyer over 40 years ago is called the Georgia Justice Project, one of the finest legal clinics for the poor in the nation.
I love the thought of the church as the potter’s house. Here is First Presbyterian Church in all its Gothic stained glass and modern architecture. Think of it also as the place where God is at the workbench laboring over the new creation that is you.
Marjorie Bankson, Christian author and retreat leader, has been a potter for nearly thirty years. From her craft, she draws an analogy to the making of a life:
"After centering the clay on the wheel, a potter opens the solid mound by making a hole in the middle. Then one hand can work from the inside and the other from the outside, squeezing the clay between them at a single point of tension where all the change is concentrated....
“Using her body to steady and brace her hands, the potter throws the clay by pressing firmly and evenly in an upward spiral to thin the wall and stretch the clay to its full height, then can change the shape by pressing harder with one hand or the other to swell or constrict the form. As my inner hand begins to define the space inside, I am aware of God's Holy Spirit longing for shape and form in the world. As my outer hand supports the thinning clay wall, I am aware of the need for structure, commitment, routine. Attending to the inner and outer pressures makes adjustments possible and choices necessary, both in working clay and living life. . ."
And so it is for us, with the gift of a new season of days and months: inner hand and outer hand, body and spirit, God working within us and around us. Take the raw material, however brittle or broken or flawed -- it's all a rich mixture waiting to be shaped. bend to God's mending and shaping. Make the choices and changes and commitments you need in patterns and priorities. All kinds of possibilities are before you now to be shaped by God into something beautiful and useful- yourself, our church - as an "earthen vessel" to be filled and poured out in hope and agape love for ourselves and our neighbors. Amen
Resources
Rev. Joanna Adams, “The Potter’s House,” 8.25.2002 Fourth Presbyterian Church https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2002/082502.html
Marjory Zoet Bankson, Soulwork of Clay: A Hands-On Approach to Spirituality (2008 Skylight Books)