What’s the most beautiful sculpture you’ve seen? If you’ve been to Florence, Italy, you may have inspected Michelangelo’s David, considered by many to be the world’s best sculpture. I, for one, am partial to the pottery work of Japan. Not far from my parent’s home three hours north of Tokyo is a pottery town called Mashiko. The town is crammed with potters’ studios filled with practical yet aesthetically pleasing bowls, plates, and cups. Yet none of these pieces of artwork can compare with God’s masterpiece. Am I referring to the Grand Canyon, or the Canadian Rockies? No. I’m talking about the human race. Today we’re going to learn that we are divine masterpieces: formed in love; deformed by sin; but reformed by grace.
Last time we visited my parents we went to the pottery town of Mashiko. We were hoping to pick up some unique dinner plates to bring home with us. We ended up not buying very much because we couldn’t afford the prices they were asking. The starting price for most serving platters, for example, was $120! It didn’t seem like pottery should cost so much because, after all, it’s nothing more than clay, not gold or silver. What you are paying for of course is the love, care, and the creativity that went into making that pottery.
We’re a lot like the pottery of Mashiko. If we were to sell off our various organs and tissues, we could stand to make $45 million! But if we were to break our body down to its basic elements and minerals like oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon, we’d only get $5 for it on the open market (http://soundmedicine.iu.edu/archive/2003/quiz/humanWorth.html).
So what makes our bodies so valuable if we’re only made from the dust of the earth? The fact that an almighty creator formed us in love makes us valuable. Just think of the care God exercised in making Adam from the dust of the ground. Did God wear a work apron as he bent over Adam in an open field in the Garden of Eden carefully sculpting his nose, his ears, and his eyes? And how long did it take God to do all this? How long, for example, did it take him just to do the detail of Adam’s eyelashes?
Adam must have been some masterpiece when God was finished with him, but so are we! Do you remember our psalm from last week? In Psalm 139:13 King David wrote: “you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” We too have been formed in love and are a divine masterpiece. Sadly, we don’t always see ourselves that way though do we? Instead of thanking God for the body he has given us we wish we had a smaller nose, bigger hands, more hair, less hair, etc. But God made each of us the way he wanted us to be and he did so in love. And so we will want to sing with David: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psalm 139:14a).
But it’s hard to praise God when our bodies don’t work the way they are supposed to. I mean I don’t think you would sing a carmaker’s praise if the new car you bought stopped working properly after a few years. But who is to blame for our bulging waistlines and our clogged arteries? We are. For although God formed us in love, we have been deformed by sin. We wrestle with our health because we don’t use God’s gift of food correctly. We eat too much and we don’t exercise enough. Even if we did eat right and worked out often, our bodies would still quit on us. Why? Again the answer is sin. Sin has so poisoned our bodies that they start to die from the moment they are conceived.
But what’s even worse than our physical deformations caused by sin is the spiritual deformation. In our text God illustrated for the prophet Jeremiah what sin had done to the Israelites. While Jeremiah was watching a potter at work he witnessed how the clay in the potter’s hands started to fall apart (Jeremiah 18:4a). It was just like the Israelites. God had taken them in his hands to be a special vessel to carry his Word and the promise of a Messiah. But the Israelites didn’t want any part of it. They had their own ideas for worship. It was more convenient for them to worship the gods of their heathen neighbors than to faithfully trek to Jerusalem to worship the one true God.
We’re a lot like those Israelites. We value what society values: money, and time for ourselves, rather than valuing what God wants us to value: his Word, his worship, our fellow Christians, and the lost who don’t know Jesus. For example instead of loving our neighbors and looking out for their welfare, we curse them for letting their trash blow across our yard. We walk around the schoolmate who has dropped all her papers and books snickering instead of stooping to help.
So what should God do with us who are like defective pieces of clay? He should toss us aside and reach for a new piece of clay. But that’s not what the potter Jeremiah was watching did. That potter worked his defective piece of clay into something else (Jeremiah 18:4b). This is also God’s response to our sin. He reforms us by grace.
Grace. That’s a word often the focus for Reformation Sunday isn’t it? Grace is God’s underserved love. Just as that defective piece of clay couldn’t beg the potter to be given a second chance, so we, who are by nature sinful, cannot ask God for any second chances. And although we should be tossed aside as defects by our Creator, in his grace, in his undeserved love for us, God patiently reforms us into his own likeness.
God seeks to reform us every time he calls us to turn away from sin. The awesome thing is that God isn’t asking us to do that which he doesn’t give us the power to do. The potter did not command the defective piece of clay to fix itself. No! The potter himself did the fixing. And so when God calls us to repent, that word of warning and love sends the Holy Spirit into our lives to reform us.
Sadly, we can block the Holy Spirit’s efforts. That’s what the Israelites did. This was their response to God’s call to repentance: “It’s no use. We will continue with our own plans; each of us will follow the stubbornness of his evil heart” (Jeremiah 18:12). What an insult! The Israelites said they could not change their sinful ways because they did not want to change. That’s also what we are admitting every time we excuse our sin or put off changing our sinful habits.
Don’t be like the Israelites. Rejoice in the reformation God seeks to bring about in your life through his grace. That’s right. The Reformation is not just an event that happened 500 years ago in Germany; it’s an event that is to happen every day we live in these bodies wracked by sin! If we don’t think we need reformation, then we become like a piece of clay that has fallen off the potter’s wheel. That piece of clay cannot turn into anything beautiful as long as it stays out of the master potter’s hand. And if it’s cast aside long enough it will dry up so that even if the master potter should take it into his hands again it will crumble. That’s what happened to Pharaoh when he hardened his heart against Moses’ repeated calls to heed God’s Word. Don’t let it happen to you. Rejoice in God’s reforming grace.
In the many trips I took to the pottery town of Mashiko, I can’t say I’ve ever inspected a potter’s hands up close. I don’t imagine them to be rough like a farmer’s, though. After all, wet clay doesn’t have any coarse edges. It’s too bad the same can’t be said of us. As sinners we have many rough and jagged edges that makes life here miserable. Isn’t it wonderful to know then that God didn’t shy away from taking us in his hands? God could have left us be, broken vessels bound from the scrap heap, but he didn’t. The God who once formed us in love now reforms by his grace. Evidence of this can be found in the hands of Jesus for those hands bear the scars of salvation. The nail marks testify to the depth of God’s love for us. It’s those loving and forgiving hands that hold us now reforming us through calls of repentance so that we continue to stand as a testimony of his grace and as divine masterpieces. Amen.
