The Potter and the Clay

Jeremiah 18

The other night a good friend of mine gave a sermon on the church as pottery. Looking deep into the idea of pottery throughout history and how it relates to how the church is supposed to "be" in this world. The whole idea really jumped out to me and I thought I would give it some more thought and here is that working itself out as I run with a few thoughts that came up while working through this notion of the church being like pottery.

The Church is: the people of GOD, on the mission of GOD.

The first idea we're looking at here is pretty simple. Let's have a look at pottery. This is the point where I might hold up a picture of a clay pot or urn or something have that sort, or maybe we can just imagine it. What is the first thing that comes to mind when looking at pottery? I think initially we (as Americans) would be inclined to note pottery fairly singularly in the aesthetic sense. A beautiful piece of art. And really that is where we have relegated pottery these days. However, historically speaking pottery is one of the things that has really driven civilization and made population expansion possible in the early world. Pottery has driven economies to push past the bounds of pure agrarianism. Bringing to the world a way to store resources, whether they be food, water, etc. With storage comes movement, trade, and commerce. Arguably pottery is one of the more important things to civilization on the whole. And so the argument that pottery has both a use and very much a beauty or aesthetic as well. This is really the basis of the whole sermon. Pottery is both useful and beautiful. The church is like pottery (or should be). The church is both useful and beautiful.

This idea strikes me at the very basic level of what it is to be a Christian. And much of the teachings of Jesus resonate soundly with this idea of use and aesthetic. Here are a few of the direct teachings that come to mind. In Matthew 5, Jesus says, "You are the salt of the earth [...] You are the light of the world." I've heard these verses taught on multiple occasions with most of the thought being given to the straight-forward idea. Light shines and enables sight, and salt flavors and preserves. But what came to mind after listening to this sermon the other night was taking a deeper look at both of these things.

Let's start with salt. I think most of us would admit and rightly so that salt is useful. It makes things taste better. I fact, when we describefood the default label is for it to be perfectly salted. Food can be "too salty" and it can be "bland." Salt also can be used to preserve food, historically this use is nearly impossible to calculate its importance. Salt has the ability to change the boiling point and freezing point of water. I appreciate that as I drive a rear wheel drive quarter-ton truck that drives kinda like a sledge hammer tapping in a tack in Colorado winters. Anyway, salt has a great deal of uses. However, I think we rarely think of salt as being beautiful. But one the more memorable times I can recall and maybe just about the only thing that I can recall from my high school chemistry class is the day we took a look at salt. I remember the teacher bringing out a cube of table salt, probably about the size of your fist, and a hammer. He set the salt cube on the table in front of the class, took the hammer, raised it and smashed the cube into smaller pieces until it was in enough pieces that each person in the class had there own piece of salt.

The teacher then remarked at the structure of each piece of salt that we held. Each one was a cube. This was followed by showing a series of photos that displayed salt's cubic structure if you were to continue to smash it into smaller and smaller pieces, even to the point that we would recognize it as a fine powder. These pictures are similar to those shown back then. And I think we can all appreciate the structure of salt and view it with an aesthetic eye and just remark at the beautiful perfect crystalline structure that salt holds.

Secondly, have a look at light. And I won't go into as much depth here because I think it is easier to understand both the useful

properties of light as well as it's aesthetic qualities.

Maybe Jesus is telling us a little more than to simply light the world or season the earth. The way I see it, Jesus is telling us to do what I have for you to do, or be useful in fulfilling God's mission. And also be what God has created us to be, beautiful and

reflecting the very image of our creator.

A Holistic Faith

Salt, light and pottery... With both use and beauty, Jesus instructs us to be like these things. This thought guides me into another area of my faith that I often negate the importance of. And that is the area of the aesthetic faith. That I can reason my faith to some use. But I also appreciate that God is very much about the aesthetic, the inherent beauty. God is about inspiration. God created more in man than the ability to reason, but the ability to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of the world. For me, the aesthetic is what really speaks to my soul, whereas the logic is what speaks to my brain. Sometimes I want faith to be merely the usefulness part. What does it do in reality? How can it help the people around me? But faith also incorporates the aesthetic, the appreciation for things of beauty to inspire a feeling and to announce our creator's desires and strike up that feeling in my heart that thing is beautiful just because it is.

I had a conversation with the same friend that gave the sermon, a couple of weeks ago about the role of the aesthetic and tradition in the church today. We walked around a building noting the quite amazing structure of the building that seemed to be negated by its focus on being merely useful. It is a building that could be profoundly inspirational and fairly breath-taking if some more focus were given to that area of our faith. And I say 'our faith' because I think it is some what of a trend that I am proud to see waning in the Christian church today. I think we're nearly at the end of the era of the santi-gymna-torium. A space that is profoundly useful, and yet it is also profoundly un-inspiring; maybe to the point of being anti-inspirational. I love to view my faith as being complete with both the usefulness and the aesthetic quality of it.

God is both useful and beautiful, and we as His people are both useful and beautiful. Everything we do show display both our use to this broken world and the beauty in which our creator has instilled within us. We should be both in the world doing what we can to help the world in every area that we can and also be reflecting the glory, the beauty of the Lord that created us.

Inherent Worth

This brings me to my final thought, that as the artist is that which gives art value. Our worth as the people of God has nothing to do with what we do. In other words, our use means nothing to our worth to God. And this is where viewing our faith in the realm of the aesthetic is so helpful. A work of art is granted value on two planes. One is its creation, the artist gives value to the creation because it is his creation, his inspiration made concrete, his made passion made visual. The second value is art's ability to inspire, to reflect the nature of the artist. If we view ourselves as God's work of art, then we are inherently valuable because He created us, he formed us, made us beautiful in His sight. We are valuable because we are a work of art, and as such we have the quality of reflecting God's divine inspiration throughout the world. Nothing you do has any effect on your value. You are valuable because you are. To me, this is freedom. Its hard to believe this sometimes because we want to believe the lies that say you are what you do, and if we believe that then we are bound to our actions.

To me this is grace. Not that God takes what we have done and throws it away. But that what we have done was never taken into consideration when God values us.

The movie Across the Universe puts it perfectly, "Why is it always what will I do? "What will he do", "What will he do," "Oh, my god what will he do", Do, do, do, do, do. Why isn't the issue here who I am? "

The end of this scene is incredible and true. The world lies to us and says "what you do defines who you are" leaving you in chains bound to your actions. God says "that who you are defines what you do." And you are His creation, and because of who you are, you are free to do what you were created to do, reflect the Glory of the Lord.

Special thanks to Jared Mackey, whose sermon inspired much of this thinking.