Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Will you bow your heads, please?
God of mercy, you promised never to break your covenant with us.
Amid all the changing worlds of our generation, may we hear your eternal word that does not change.
Then may we respond to your gracious promises with faithful and obedient lives through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
This morning's scripture is From Isaiah, chapter 64, verses 1 through 12.
You can find this in your pew bibles on page 606.
Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down so that the mountains would quake at your presence, as when fire kindles brushwood and the fire causes water to boil to make your name known to your adversaries so that the nations might tremble at your presence.
When you did awesome deeds that we did not expect, you came down, the mountains quaked at your presence.
From ages past, no one has heard nor ear has perceived.
No eye has seen any God beside you who works for those who wait for him.
You meet those who gladly do right, those who remember you in your ways.
But you were angry and we sinned.
Because we hid yourself, we transgressed.
We have all become like one who is unclean.
And all our righteous deeds are like a filthy cloth.
We will fade like a leaf and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.
There is no one who calls on your name or attempts to take hold of you.
For you have hidden your face from us and have delivered us into the hand of our iniquities.
Yet, O Lord, you are our Father, we are the clay and you are the potter.
We are all the work of your hand.
Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord, and do not remember iniquity forever.
Now consider. We are all your people.
Your holy cities have become a wilderness.
Zion has become a wilderness, Jerusalem a desolation.
Our holy and beautiful house, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned by fire.
And all our pleasant places have become ruins.
After all of this, will you restrain yourself, O Lord?
Will you keep silent and punish us so severely?
This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
[00:03:26] Speaker B: Thank you, Toby.
Good morning, Church.
It is a gift and a half to be with you this morning.
I am always glad for the opportunity to share worship with you.
Super appreciate husband Tim for making the trek with me up to Pasadena.
I don't know if you would know this because I was really good at cleaning my nails this morning, but I, along with.
It's Ashley, right.
Have taken up pottery.
And it is. It's been two years now and I must say it is an obsession that I dress up as mental health care.
And like, I try and come up with all kinds of excuses, but it is bright, bringing me so much joy. There is something about getting my hands on that clay and getting away from screens and electronics and my to do list that is bringing me so much joy in this season of life.
There's a pottery studio right around the corner from where we live, and I'm over there every chance I get.
I want to just be clear so you've got the right visual. I am not like Demi Moore in Ghost on the Wheel. Like that's, that's not this.
I am a hand builder, which means that the work I do is forming things out of the clay. It's not a spinning wheel. It's like building shapes like cups and bowls and vases, all kinds of stuff. It is not a fast track, is slow going, completely analog for sure.
It is all about this, like preparing the clay and forming the clay and waiting for it to dry out a little bit and then working on it again and we're working on it some more.
There's firing involved, there's glazing involved.
It reminds me of our origin story.
Now, you might have heard it first when you were sitting on the steps as a kid yourself in church.
Genesis tells us that God made humanity out of the earth out of the clay.
It's messy business, you know, hands in the dirt, molding, shaping us inside and out. Genesis chapter one tells us that God created humanity in God's own image.
I want to make sure we get that, that we bear the image of God from the get go.
And then later in chapter two, Genesis, we get a little bit more details that God formed the human out of the dust of the ground and breathed into the nostrils the breath of life, and a human became a living being.
Cole Arthur Riley writes, I like to think of God hunched over in the garden, fingernails hugging the brown soil, mighty hands cradling the mud like it's the last flame in a windstorm.
A God who says, not out of my womb, but out of this here dust, I will make you.
Now, the creation story is something that we often hear when we're kids, but I don't know about you, but I generally don't come back to it very often in my, you know, ongoing spiritual reflections.
We treat it sort of like it was a one and done, like true for Adam and Eve, maybe. We go so far as to say, well, it was true for us when God knit us together in our mother's womb.
It is how it all began. We were formed By God's hand.
And this morning, I want to explore this dynamic truth with you, that God is continuing to shape us into the fullness of God's image.
It's a lifelong process.
We're reformed. And ever reforming, my friends and pottery is all about process as well.
Now Tim will ask me with patience of a saint.
So, are you going to the studio tonight?
It's a fake question. The answer is yes, I am going. Oh, what are you working on?
I'm totally excited, but it's the same answer I give. Well, I'm just moving things along. Gonna get some things out of the kiln, gonna shape, gonna sand, gonna get it started. Some.
Some things with the new bachelor I just got.
Hand building is all about this process of taking the clay and pulling away things and adding things in.
And similarly in our lives, this is how we recognize that God is still shaping us, forming us into this likeness of Christ.
Adding a little more here, taking away a little bit more there.
I want to say there can be deep joy in the moments when we recognize God's hand at work in our life.
It's a part of the spiritual formation process that feels with grace and ease, we are stepping into the invitation that God has for us that we are becoming more profoundly connected with who we were made to be in the first place.
Now, early on in a project, when the clay is first out of the bag, it is so soft, it is so supple. It responds to every. The slightest touch of my hand. It's effortless.
It's the most gentle part.
God is our potter, and we are the clay, and everything is just flowing, and we can find ourselves awash in this moment of God's provision and God's grace and God's enabling.
I mean, have you ever been in that place where one of the fruits of the Spirit just popped out of your mouth without, like, even trying?
Like it was a situation and you just suddenly found yourself with the grace to forgive something that maybe on another day would have been hard to forgive, but you did it, and it felt so genuine and authentic. You weren't acting. It just came up out of you. That's what I'm talking about. This is a way that God forms us and grows us.
It's organic. It's with ease.
And friends, this is true not only for our individual life in Christ, but it's also true for us as the body of Christ.
So I want to ask these days, where are you noticing that kind of flow? Where are you noticing God's hand shaping you now? I noticed there was a lot of Spanish on the Pantaya this morning.
How. How is that? Is that a place of flow for you? Is that a place of unfolding grace?
Or maybe there's another ministry that you're like, oh, yes, it's blossoming, it's going gangbusters.
We can really see God's leading and God's provision, and we are leaning into it and it is bearing fruit.
This is what it looks like when God's hand is upon us. The body of Christ.
It would be so sweet if I could just tie it up with a bow and we could leave it there.
But you might have noticed in the scripture for this morning that there is a little bit more to the process.
It is not always the easy, supple, flowing moment as we are working with God.
So in this pottery studio, what's interesting is when I'm forming a piece, there is that moment when the clay is soft and so responsive. But if I work it too hard, if I ask too much of can't pull it off, it would collapse under the weight of what I was pushing it to do and return to being the original lump a little worse for the wear.
What the clay requires is that I give it time to dry. They call it leather hard. The clay stiffens up and it then can withstand the further shaping and sanding and formation that is required to get the vessel to be complete.
Now, as a potter, I'm like, well, that's just what we do to the clay. But when we're the clay I want to name, it is not always a great feeling.
And Isaiah speaks to that a little bit. I mean, you heard that centerpiece verse. We are the clay father, you are the potter, we are the work of your hand.
And that is the foundational truth of the matter.
But did you catch the context of that verse?
There is a lot going on.
Like in particular, our holy, glorious temple, where our ancestors praised you, has been burned with fire, and all that we treasured lies in ruins.
Isaiah offers this lament at the time of the Babylonian exile.
Now, just quick context. Historically, Babylon was a big empire next to Israel, which was relatively small.
And eventually Babylon invaded Israel, destroyed the temple, tore up the crops, mass deported the leadership, and anybody who knew how to get anything done in Israel.
And it was not a great moment for the people of Israel.
And Isaiah is giving voice not only to their pain, to their contrition, to their yielding. The people are longing for God to intervene, come shape the situation. God reshape us.
But it seems like it's falling on deaf ears that God has a different timeline, and God is waiting it out.
Maybe God the potter, has put them on a shelf to dry out a little further, to become a little sturdier, so that they could withstand the shaping that would be needed in the future.
Now, I trust that God knows how to shape me.
And from the point of view of the clay and the person being shaped, my experience is that this is not always the most pleasant part of my spiritual journey. It is not the easiest part of my walk with Christ.
It can be painful.
And there's a reason that Isaiah is using this format of a lament, of giving voice to the pain. Because it is bewildering to move from this soft, flowing, easy, gentle season with God into a time of rough edges.
Now, it is not lost on me, church, that your community was on fire and that the burn scars are still running deep in and among us today.
I wonder where the parts are in your life together where you are feeling the rough edges and you are waiting.
And I wonder where are the places that you are noticing God's hand sanding away something that needs to be smoothed over, cutting, perhaps shifting, inviting a different posture.
Sometimes it's hard to let go of those things that have always been a part of our life together as a church.
And sometimes it becomes clear that that is how God is shaping us.
Now remember, it is never a one and done with God.
God is a God of transformation, a transformation of us into the image and likeness of Christ, us as individuals, from our first breath until our last.
Us collectively as the body of Christ, from the day of Pentecost until Christ comes again.
Isaiah's counsel comes to us across the years. You, Lord, are our Father.
We are the clay, you are the potter, we are the work of your hand. It puts us in a place of acceptance. Not like doormat acceptance, but acceptance of our God, of the potter's hand.
On those days when it feels easy and in those seasons when it can feel rough, we are clay of the earth.
And what we do is we yield.
In closing, I want to share with you. Many years ago, I was part of this archaeological dig in Israel. We were working on the site of sepphoris, which is 4 km outside of Nazareth.
And we were digging at the level of the first century, the early part of the first century, like the time when Jesus was probably a forward on the soccer team at Nazareth High School.
Now, I gotta tell you, not much survives in the ground for 2,000 years. There's pillars, there's coins, and there's pottery, to be more precise. There's broken pottery.
What's interesting is the part that survives is the handle, the handle of the pot.
And what's interesting, the technique of attaching a handle to the pot is the same technique we use today.
You sort of squish it on a little bit and you fold it down. And then you use your thumbs to press the continuation of the handle back into the body of the vessel.
And what happens is you end up leaving a thumbprint, the bottom of the handle.
And what was interesting is these handles that we found in Sephiroth still had the thumbprint of the potter.
The thumbprint had endured 2,000 years, my friends. This is true for us at Genesis, at our birth, yesterday and today.
God has made, is making, and will continue to make us into the image of Christ.
That is to say, we bear God's thumbprint now often in church circles, and there is a time and a place for this.
We focus on where we fall short of this image. Like, where is the gap? Where am I lacking, bringing and inhabiting the image of God in the world around me?
But I want you to know as well, we've got that thumbprint. It's in there.
I want to see where. Are you noticing that you are today already bearing this image of God in your life, in your world, in your witness?
Are you that person who's got faith that moves mountains?
Or maybe you're the person who always has the depth of spirit to be able to forgive.
Or maybe you are a person who bears patience, peace, understanding, love.
What is the signature way that you uniquely bear the image of God today and church?
Know that the sun print is upon you as well.
There is a unique way that you are bearing this image of God to this community, on this corner, in this place, in this time.
Is it your hospitality?
Is it your willingness to get your mouth to catch up with your heart with. With what might be a second language of songs for worship in the service?
What are the ways that you are offering? Welcome to the stranger.
What are the ways that you are shining Christ light in this place?
Now, I'm just throwing out these questions, and I know the answers would keep us until next Sunday, but I hope that it begins a conversation for you not only within your heart, but also within this body, because this is the ongoing way that God is at work among us.
And I pray that the image of God will continue to be revealed in all of us. Amen.
