The Potter’s House, by Carrie Schofield-Broadbent.
Oftentimes, our spiritual practices, and our prayers, are about control. When I pray for friends as their planes take off — and for myself, when I’m on the plane — I want to control the safety of that aircraft. I pray this: “Help and bless them, holy God, and keep them in your care.” That’s my little airplane prayer. (I change “them” to “us” when it’s my own life on the line.) I am asking God to be in control so that a good thing happens, but really, if I’m honest, I want to be in control. Help and bless these people, holy God. Keep us in your care, holy God. Listen to me! Please do as I say!
But we often have doubts about our spiritual practices, and our prayers – and about God, and the basic idea of a loving creator. Those doubts often arise when we realize, inevitably, that we are not in control. Countless prayers were said by hundreds of people, but my mother still died of cancer. The plane could still go down. Innocent people are killed. Children are killed. Who is in control of all this? If it’s God, then we have many questions for God. But it is most certainly not you or me.
When I was in seminary I met Thomas Jay Oord (“Oord” is spelled o-o-r-d), a theologian who has written faithfully about God as good and loving, but not in control of the universe. He came to our campus to promote his book, God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, and Other Evils.
Oord addressed directly the problem of evil, saying that God can’t be good if God allows the suffering – and the trauma! – of innocent people. For Oord, it isn’t that God didn’t cure my mother’s cancer, it’s that God couldn’t cure it, because God, who is love, is in an uncontrolling relationship with the universe God created. The universe as God created it cannot be controlled directly, top-down, even by God.
But God is love, and God moves powerfully in and with all creation. Here are Thomas Jay Oord’s chapter titles in his book, God Can’t – they’ll give you a quick thumbnail of his argument:
God can’t prevent evil
God feels our pain
God works to heal
God squeezes good from bad; and perhaps the most important chapter –
God needs our cooperation
Essentially, God did not create a closed aquarium where everything exists and interacts just as God wants, no matter what happens from our limited, local perspectives. No. Given all the terrible things that happen in the world, that makes God monstrous. And so God has created the universe in an uncontrolling way. But God does feel our pain, and Christians see this first and foremost in the human yet divine Jesus, who “was like us in every way except without sin,” as one of our Eucharistic prayers says it. Among other things, that means Jesus suffered through no fault of his own. God loves all created matter, and empathizes with all who suffer. And God works to heal: just remember that healing and curing are not always the same thing. With God’s help and surrounded by God’s love, we find healing even in the face of the most wretched experiences.
God also, in Oord’s phrasing, “squeezes good from bad.” For this bit, we need to proceed carefully: again, it is not God’s will that bad things happen to good people! But when bad things happen to good people, God the creator recreates. God recreates something better than what would have existed if the suffering alone had occurred. And sometimes God’s recreation is even better than how things were before the terrible thing happened! A repaired relationship is sometimes stronger than it was before the betrayal.
But again, the most important point is this: “God needs our cooperation.” God is interactive; God alone is one, but God does not work alone. When I had an aquarium of tropical fish, I faintly resembled a controlling god from the perspective of the fish (though I couldn’t prevent all bad things from happening to them). But I was working alone: I did not work with the fish to improve their situation. But then, I am not God. I did not create the fish; their lives and their deaths do not culminate in me; I am not clever enough to be an uncontrolling creator.
But here’s an even better way to understand all this. God speaks through the prophet Jeremiah in this way:
“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 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.”
God is the potter. Our households and our communities; our states and nations – these are the wheel. And we are the clay. Notice how the vessel in the potter’s hand is “spoiled.” If you’ve ever tried to throw a clay vessel on a potter’s wheel, you know what this means. The sides are wonky; the clay is too dry or too wet; there are cracks or inconsistencies that wreck the shape. And so the potter needs to rework it all. God then takes this metaphor further: we are the clay, and we can make decisions that spoil our vessel; or we can make decisions that go with the potter’s movements, allowing the potter to “throw” us into a good, strong, and beautiful vessel.
“God needs our cooperation.”
And all this brings us to Jesus, who is uncompromising today as he looks over the crowd that’s following him on his long trip to Jerusalem. He looks over the crowd and realizes that many of them don’t really understand why they’re in his movement, or where he’s going, or what might – what will – happen to them if they truly follow him. So he throws an elbow. He tells them forcefully that they will have to submit fully to the movement – or as Jeremiah might put it, they will have to work with the potter, and not against the potter. But “working with the potter” isn’t easy. Cooperating with God isn’t all happy and sweet. It means we will get pushed and spun around and molded. We will have the potter’s hands on us, shaping us, directing us, forming us into something we ourselves didn’t plan to become.
We will not be in control.
So who is in control? We’ve already established that God isn’t in control, at least not without our cooperation, and not within a free universe. And we’ve now concluded that we are not in control, either. It actually took Jesus’s followers several centuries to make sense of this, so traumatized were they by his brutal and humiliating execution. Working with the universe but not in a top-down, controlling way, God resurrected Jesus, who lives now in this gathered community and all communities who proclaim his name, and his Good News. But that trauma at the cross still haunted – still haunts – the followers of Jesus. The first followers had hoped he would be a triumphant political figure – a king in control. They didn’t get it. They didn’t get him.
But they kept this story around. They wrote it down. They preserved the memory of Jesus admonishing his enthusiastic followers, telling them that they would have to relinquish all control, even if it meant death on a cross. Jesus himself became, with us, the clay in the potter’s hand. God the creator has thrown a splendid vessel with that clay! Alleluia! But we mustn’t forget that before Jesus gleamed in the resurrection like a dazzling, colorful glazed vase, the pride of the potter’s house, he was thrown down into destruction and death.
And so it is with us. I’m not the boss of you, or you of me. Now, we all have power: one writer defines power as “the capacity to make things happen,” which means even a day-old infant has power simply by screaming their head off!. But none of us has the power to force anyone to do whatever we want. But we can work with each other in an uncontrolling way. And God teaches us to do all this with love, even when it hurts. Even when it leads to death. We cooperate with uncontrolling love. We cooperate with uncontrolling love. We cooperate with uncontrolling love.
That’s the teaching. That’s the Good News. That’s the power and presence of God that raises up life from death, and gives meaning to awful suffering, and fills our hearts with hope.
This good church has such a bright future. We worry about our finances and we grieve our losses and we long so deeply for our loved ones to come back to church, for our children and youth to flourish, for everyone and everything to be back. That will all happen. It is happening, even now! God is throwing a new pot here, at the potter’s wheel, working with us, surrounding us with love, teaching us that even now, with no one in control, something new and strong and beautiful is being formed.
Help and bless Grace Church, holy God, and keep us in your care.
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Preached on the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18C), September 4, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Jeremiah 18:1-11
Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
Philemon 1-21
Luke 14:25-33