The Potter and the Clay

In his Pentecost 15 sermon, the Rev Dr Philip Culbertson, lecturer in Pastoral Theology at Auckland University School of Theology, explored the relationship between the potter and the clay. He offers a view that the clay is less submissive and pliable and uninvolved in the creative process than is suggested by Jeremiah and favorite old time hymns. The clay has a say. "I suspect that the potter metaphor wouldn’t be quite so popular in the Bible if you and I hadn’t started off as Dirt. That’s what the word Adam means: Dirt. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all three tell the traditional story that we human beings started out as dirt, or dust, and God spit into us, making us into clay, and then moulded us as male and female. It’s only a short leap from God’s moulding us out of dirt and spittle, to a potter at the potter’s wheel, shaping a lump of clay. But a potter can’t make just anything out of clay; the potter can only make what the clay allows. As Biblical scholar John Bright points out, “The quality of the clay determines what the potter can do with it, so the quality of a people determines what God will do with them.”[3] Who we are as individuals, and communities, depends both on God’s intention, and the raw material God has to work with. " See complete text at www.stmatthews.org.nz/nav.php?sid=377&id=762.