Clay Pots

New Testament Scholar N.T. Wright, in writing about confession and our relationship with God, tells a parable about a young woman and her parents.

Heather had been excited her parents were coming to visit. They had been overjoyed about her new job and her first home. Determined to do something special for her, they had purchased a wonderful period armchair, in the style she admired, and had it recovered in exactly the right material to go in her new living room. They were glad to have done it; she was delighted to have it.

But then, the day before they were to come, disaster struck. Heather had some friends over to help her unpack and decorate before her parents got there. They were working hard to put everything right in the living room. They were sorting books and shelving them when suddenly…nobody really knew how it happened, but a mug of hot, black coffee tipped and found itself spilled right across the new chair.
They sprang to action, they scrubbed and wiped, they treated and waited, they did everything they could, but the stain was there. It was obvious. Heather was devastated, what should she do?
If she could only turn back the clock 2 minutes…why had she ever made coffee and let it be brought into the living room, anyway? If only they would postpone their visit, what could she say that would make them put it off. Buy some time. She could work on it. She could even have it recovered…they would never need to know.

But they were coming, and she knew it. Maybe if she left the lights low, closed the drapes. One glance and they would know, they would see it. It was no good.

They would come, and as excited as she was to see them, she dreaded the pain of the encounter. The pain they would feel to see the ruined gift. The pain of embarrassment and regret she would felt washing over her again. The pain of knowing that she had disappointed them; they had taught her not to bring drinks into the living room. And as much as she wanted to delay and hide in the darkness, she knew that she wanted it out, in the light, known. She dreaded it, but at the same time, she longed for the other side of the confession. She knew that, as disappointed as they would be, they would still love her.
When we come into worship, we gather in the presence of God. And we are made painfully aware of the gap between God’s holiness and our sinfulness. We realize that we have fallen short. We are stained. So, sometimes we delay encountering God, and sometimes we try to hide in darkness. But God is light, says I John, and if we say we have no sin, we aren’t fooling God. He sees.

Heather’s parents came. Her mom brought a little housewarming gift for her now grown-up daughter. A spray bottle of a cleaner that would lift any stain. By some reaction, it was able to make any stain as if it had never happened.

As we gather in worship, each Sunday we confess our sin and we claim the cleansing waters of our baptism. Washed in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we receive God’s assurance that we are forgiven, that we are able to come into the light and be in the presence of our Lord.

In her book The Way of Forgiveness, Marjorie Thompson writes, “Of course, in order to receive God’s forgiveness we must first be aware that we need it. We need to see sin for what it is – a breach of our relationship with God, a breaking of the trust God placed in us by making covenant love the center of our life together. Scripture makes it clear that sin against God is the root of all division, all alienation. Sin is the pervasively toxic condition of human life that we are born into, absorb, and pass on to others. It is our worldliness, our wounded pride and reactive anger, our compulsive desire to control and dominate, our greed for more than we need, our hardness of heart toward fellow human beings, our need to hide from truth, our willingness to distort reality for our own purposes. Sin takes a thousand forms, subtle and overt….When I fail to worship and praise God or to allow my efforts to depend on grace, I not only sin against the gracious praise-worthy love of God” but I fall short of being Christ-like in my interactions with others.

Each Sunday the liturgist reminds us of our need to confess and invites us to come boldly into God’s presence with our sins, seeking reconciliation. But the passage I read from Isaiah warns us that when we confess our sins, we are to be clay in the hands of the potter. “These people come to worship, they honor me with their words, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is scripted and they just go through the motions. Woe to those who go to great lengths to hide their stains from me, who try to hide in the shadows, who think “Who will know?” You act like you are the potter and I am clay. You say “God doesn’t understand.” You go through life as though you were not made by me and arrogantly make decisions you know are wrong with the excuse that I just doesn’t understand.”

Have you ever watched a potter turn clay? A lump of clay is firmly placed on the wheel, and then the first thing the potter does is what is termed “open the clay.” The potter starts the wheel turning and finds the center and gently applies pressure to form the bottom of the pot. The first step in being formed is to be opened. The surface of the clay must remain wet as the potter works. It is messy, but in the potter’s hands, the clay takes shape and is formed in a way that makes it both useful and beautiful.

Each Sunday, this water cleanses us, this water refreshes us, this water washes over us and allows us to be molded and shaped so that the image of God shows in us once more. The proof of God’s love is this: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. We are forgiven, not because we could get the stain out. We are forgiven, not because we could shape ourselves. It is in the name of Jesus Christ that we are forgiven. Thanks be to God! Amen.