I have never done work with clay but it looks like fun—you get to get dirty while creating something pretty. My friend who is a potter works wonders with colors and uses a very hot kiln to bake the clay and make it brittle and hard. Working with clay seems to be meditative, and potters have said as much. In seminary our professor of spirituality gave us all some colored clay to work with while she lectured one day. It was a soothing activity, as we got the clay warm in our hands and pliable enough to move around into shapes. I don’t remember what I made, but I do remember the calming effect of the clay in my hands.
I am told by potters that they can spend a great deal of time working on a piece only to have it produce a hairline crack after firing in the oven, rendering it useless as a mug or vase. Many potters say that it took them many tries to get it right. Making things with clay takes knowledge and skill.
A very old hymn I remember from my childhood went: “Have your own way Lord, have your own way. You are the potter I am the clay,” echoing our words from Isaiah. The Isaiah passage is full of the message that God can turn God’s face from us because we are full of sin and unclean—that God has every reason to rebuke us because we do not measure up. So if we are clay in the hands of this potter, God can choose to be near or far from us, depending on God’s judgment of our hearts.
This message of Advent is about the people of God making themselves clay in God’s hands, opening their hearts to be the people God’s wants them to be. This preparation for judgment prepares us for the coming of Christ in our hearts, makes us molded to God’s will for us, so that the love of God has space. God can mold us so that our hearts are pure, but we are not able to do this without God’s assistance.
And Jesus commands to prepare with his warning to keep alert, keep awake, for we do not know the hour of the coming of God’s judgment.
To make ourselves open to God’s will, and God’s judgment, makes us open to all that God has prepared for us—both the cries of despair in our regret and the abundance of love that God will pour upon us with the birth of the babe of Bethlehem. The message is to keep alert for God’s movement around us and in us.
I believe this alertness is difficult. It requires an ear to the ground of the movement of the spirit—a sense that God is active around us and through us. And a deep awareness that God’s activity should be the most important thing in our lives and to the world God has created.
Be alert and awake, and yet be like clay waiting for God’s hands to mold us. One message is about intense awareness of who we are and the other message is about giving up our egos and needs for the greater good of God’s will. Can we be both alert and passive in the wake of God’s presence? Can we be both on tenterhooks with awareness and as inert as dirt at the same time?
These two messages seem to be contradictory. They seem not to be asking us to do the same thing, yet they come to us for the same reason—to furthering God’s sovereignty in our lives.
In both ways, in our alertness and our inertness, we are in God’s hands. We open our ears and eyes to where God is breaking into human activity, we see perhaps the areas we would judge as good or evil. But the message is that, while we can be aware of God’s activity, judgment is never ours to make. Judgment comes from God. And realize that the word judgment means making us aware of both good and evil. We tend to see judgment only toward the evil, but the opposite is making love grow in the world. God does both—condemns the evil of the world and helps us grow the love.
That God is in charge is the message of both these passages today. God has control over the earth, over evil. God takes control of the judging of all that is and it is therefore not our job. We can rely on God’s judgment to make all things come out for God’s realm of love and light, but this will happen when God the potter decides.
These messages seem to make us passive in our faith, but really they are the opposite. The sovereignty of God requires us to have the most faith possible that our human activity can only participate with or for God, but that God controls the ultimate outcome. God can use even the most evil acts for furthering love in the world and God can redeem the most degraded things into things of love and beauty. It takes great faith in God to let God have the reins of control over the world.
As we do the preparation required of us in the season of Advent, we come to grips with these ultimate events of heaven and hell, of God’s judgment on us and the entire world. We ask that God would mold us and use us, to keep us alert for the breaking in of love and light. That Advent would be for us a season of reflection, of meditating on God’s calling, and of trusting in faith that God’s will makes all things right at the end.
No comments:
Post a Comment