Have you ever watched a potter working at her wheel? I don’t know about you, but ever since I was a child I’ve found it mesmerizing. The whirring wheel; the way that shapeless hunk of clay takes life and flows in the potter’s hands; the quiet concentration of the artist over her work. The slightest touch, the slightest pressure of those practiced fingers, and the pot re-forms itself into something unexpected. Often as I have looked on I have felt a twinge of regret: a shape I found lovely and alluring turns out to have been only temporary. The pot is not finished yet; as I watch, it flows into something new. Behind the artist’s intent gaze lies a vision that will not be satisfied until this work in process is perfect. Then and only then will the spinning wheel slow to a halt. Then the potter will take the finished creation in her hands and exclaim with delight, “Isn’t it beautiful!”

Pot throwing—I’m speaking of the creative, not the antagonistic kind—is an ancient art—at least 6,000 years old, archaeologists say. Clay pottery at its most primitive is older still: perhaps as old as 16,000 years. No wonder, when the storytellers of long ago imagined God creating human beings, they pictured a figure stooping down to scoop up a handful of soft, pliable earth.

The Hebrew Bible names the new creature adam, or “Adam,” meaning “earth”; a name akin to our word “human,” from the word “humus,” or soil. This earth-creature will be God’s surprising answer to the question, “What is God like?” “So God created the earthling in his image,” the Bible tells us: “in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” And then, for 66 books of sacred song and story, it proceeds to tell us (sometimes in greater detail than we’re really looking for) the long, long story of human failure. Pride. Disobedience. Fratricide, faithlessness, treachery. The seven deadly sins, and then some. Whatever kind of wickedness you want to mention, it’s in there. Some divine image, we may find ourselves thinking when we come to the story of Cain murdering Abel, four short pages into the Bible narrative. But after all, what does God expect of a creature that’s made out of dirt?

The answer is, “A lot.” God expects a lot of this particular dirt. And why shouldn’t God? We’re actually pretty special, for dirt. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be talking about this. So far as we know, in all of God’s beautiful and beloved creation, we are the only creatures able to gaze back at our creator with anything like recognition; the only creatures with even the dimmest awareness that God loves us and wants our friendship. It doesn’t bother God that we’re as common as dirt—or to be more precise, as common as protein and carbon and water and a few other ingredients readily found in nature. On the contrary, God loves us precisely as matter: living, perceiving, yearning, restless matter with an unmatched capacity to make choices and to learn from our mistakes.

Which is just what God is asking us to do in the wonderful passage from Jeremiah we heard this morning. It pictures God as a potter, like the potter on the corner in Jerusalem, shaping the nation of Judah with loving care. Only the pot isn’t turning out right. It started well, but something happened; it got lopsided, or the shape wasn’t quite right, or it tore where the clay was too thin. Some days clay just seems to have a mind of its own. The potter isn’t perturbed. She smushes the spoiled vessel and begins again, forming and re-forming, coaxing the clay toward the harmonious perfection she has in mind. She’s in no hurry. It takes patience to bring a work of art to completion, and the potter would rather wait and spend the extra time than settle for something flawed. When the work is finally ready, it will have been worth the labor for the moment when she can hold the finished creation in her hands and turn it in the light, delighting in its beauty.

Now, this is the book of Jeremiah, so we know that the flaws in the vessel that is God’s people Judah are not cosmetic. They are deep in the national soul. They have to do with the people’s halfhearted relationship with God: their disregard for God’s claim on their lives; their tendency to seek security from wealth and power and status, instead of God’s faithfulness; their indifference to the welfare of those around them.

All of which hurts God deeply. God loves this people. Remember how it first started? God called Abraham out of Mesopotamia and led him on a journey to a place he’d never seen or heard of. Abraham was not a young man at the time. He was settled, married, with flocks and land and bonds of kinship to keep him rooted where he was; but when God called, Abraham went. Sarah his wife went with him. They gave their lives to God, wholeheartedly and without reservation, and in return, God gave Godself to them and to their descendents forever in perpetual covenant.

It was, in effect, a solemn marriage between God and a people, intended to show forth to all the other nations what the relationship between God and human beings was supposed to be like. All God wanted of Israel was to be allowed to shower it with blessings: children and harvest, peace and well-being; the simple, profound joys of a life lived in harmony with creation. Israel was to infect all the peoples of the earth with a yearning to belong to God. It was to draw them by example toward God’s dream of mutual love and trust between Godself and human creatures, between God and God’s image in the world.

But clay sometimes has a mind of its own, and God’s vision has been slow to be realized.

Perhaps God knew all along that it would be so. Visions are not blueprints, with plans and schedules to be completed by mid-September, if all goes well. They are more like an artist’s dream as he shapes the clay or pencils in a measure of music or changes a word of poetry or dabs a spot of vermillion on a landscape. Even when the materials are inert clay or paint it is often a slow and uncertain process; when it’s human beings you’re talking about—well, expect delays. This is a dream that can only be fulfilled with our wholehearted participation. To compel us would only destroy what God is so patiently laboring to realize: a world where there is no more compulsion, no terror—no more wars, no more hostages, no more children blown up in their own schools—but only love, freely given and freely received, an image of God’s own being planted in the midst of God’s good creation.

There is no forcing such a dream. There is only the invitation to leave everything and follow it. If our gospel reading this morning about discipleship seems uncompromising, it is because the dream asks not for part of us, but for our whole selves. The crowds who have begun to trail after Jesus need to understand what they will be leaving behind and what it is that God is asking of them—and to consider soberly whether they are prepared to go on. If they try to make this journey with Jesus halfheartedly, still clinging to the things around which they have built their former identity, they will never finish it. Sooner or later, they will have to choose: whether to obey the demands of family, security, and social position, or whether to follow where Jesus is leading. Because right now, Jesus is leading the way to Jerusalem, and Calvary.

We cannot understand such a journey in advance. Even Jesus’ closest disciples did not understand it, and would not understand it until they had seen him risen from the dead. To go where Jesus is going, we must first let go of the need to have our own lives in hand, to protect ourselves from difficulty and danger, to guard ourselves and our families from loss—whatever prudent considerations are keeping us from putting ourselves wholly in the hands of God. This is a new world that God is creating: one we have never seen or even imagined. Like Abraham and Sarah, like the Exodus people following God through the wilderness, we must be willing to move forward on nothing but faith in the trustworthiness of God.

We know something about what that kind of wholehearted commitment might have meant to Luke’s audience. We know that family was indeed central in that time and place, and a major source of personal identity. We know that the social climate was growing more hostile to Christianity and that the choice to convert could come at a high personal cost. To test the depth of their commitment and prepare them for entry into a radically new mode of life, the church began requiring converts to undergo a lengthy period of instruction before they could be admitted for baptism. It was a way of trying to ensure that they would be able to complete what they had started.

Today, people are more likely to see Christian formation as a gradual, lifelong process. Old South offers all kinds of ministries to support our growth in faith. Education programs, Bible Study, Healing Prayer, Theological Book Group, opportunities for Christian service and witness, special programs in Advent and Lent, fellowship groups where we can learn to bear kindly with one another’s foibles and to be there for one another in our joys and struggles—these ministries recognize the need we all have to nurture a living faith that keeps up with us as we grow and change, and nudges us forward when we hold back.

It’s all good. Still, I can’t help thinking… Is something missing?

I don’t mean missing from this church, exactly. I mean, is something missing from our lives?

I suppose it’s a funny question to be asking a crowd of people whose schedules just seem to get busier and busier and more and more filled up with things to do. But I do have to wonder whether there isn’t an emptiness at the heart of all this activity. Where is God in the midst of it all?

Or IS God in the midst of it all? That’s what the Rev. James Forbes challenged us to ask ourselves when he spoke from this pulpit a few weeks ago. He said that even people of faith have a habit of pushing God to the sidelines. Instead of claiming the very center of our identities, our faith in God has become something to practice or neglect as convenient; a piece of our lives we think of occasionally, but more often don’t think about at all.

It’s an old story, the story of our estrangement from God. It’s remembered in the book of Genesis as the story of what happens after God forms the earth-creatures out of clay. Endowed with the freedom to choose between good and evil, they start listening to competing voices, and they stop trusting God. Over time, the image of God in them gets harder and harder to see.

For us, that is. Not for God. Our true self, the self created by God as a portrait of God’s own nature, has never gone away. It remains hidden in God, though we catch glimpses of it every day: in acts of kindness for their own sake; in the way someone makes space for another person to be seen and heard; in attitudes of heart that turn away from retribution and look for healing; in the willingness to sacrifice and sometimes to suffer for the sake of the new age. The signs are all around us.

Can we find that self within ourselves? Is it even possible to find our way back?

The answer is, no, it is not possible. WE will not find our way back; but God will lead us there, if we’re willing to follow. If we’re willing to place ourselves in God’s hands.

I think about Jeremiah’s image of the potter—clay up to her elbows, clay on her clothes, clay in her hair, leaning toward the vessel she is working on with quiet attention. Patiently she shapes and reshapes, never forcing, never giving up; waiting to see what emerges.

She’s used to doing things the hard way. She could throw the vessel away and start over, but she won’t do that. She loves our human clay too much. So much that she was even willing to become clay herself, taking on our nature and uniting it with her own, sharing our joys and pains as one of us, transforming our human lives from the inside out. Person by person, heart by heart, she will build her new creation with the materials she has. She’s in no hurry. It takes patience to bring a work of art to completion, and she has all the patience in the world. When the work is finally ready, it will have been worth the labor for the moment when she can hold the finished creation in her hands and turn it in the light, delighting with us in the beauty that we have helped to bring about.

The freedom is ours, to give our hearts or not to give. The freedom is ours to open our hands and receive the gift of ourselves from our creator, or to turn away and construct our own selves as best we can.

Either way, of course, we are being formed by our choices and by the way we choose to live. The question is: into what?

“So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them.” I for one would really like to know how this story turns out. It’s hard not to know! But God has promised us that the ending will be well worth waiting for.

Gracious God, help us to place ourselves in your loving hands. Liberate us from the things that would hold us back from you and the new life you have promised us. Free us to serve your purposes with confidence and joy, so that others may glimpse your vision through us. Help us, now and always, to walk with Jesus, who shows us what is means to be truly human. We pray in his name. Amen.