“Arts & Faith:  It’s Just Mud”

First Congregational United Church of Christ

August 15, 2010

The Rev. Sharyl B. Peterson

Scripture Readings:  Jer. 18: 1-6, Matt. 5: 43-48

As part of our August sermon series on faith and the arts, this morning we’re going to turn to yet another form of art – that of pottery.  And we’re going to reflect together on what pottery-making can teach us about faith-making and about life-making.

            I’m especially glad that Gary Andrews was willing to be our guest-artist this morning, in part because he was my very first pottery teacher, and he was Bob’s first long-term pottery teacher (after a quick course at Ghost Ranch years ago), and because he is our dear friend and continuing colleague in the arts.  And I hope you’ll pay at least as much attention to what Gary is doing up here this morning as you pay to what I’m saying up here this morning.  Because the making of pottery is truly a wondrous process – for some people, one bordering on the miraculous. 

            Now, as I mentioned week-before-last when we began this new sermon-series, in ancient Biblical times, pottery was one of the many crafts that we know was created by the people of those long-ago days.  We know that potters living in Palestine and the surrounding areas were making hand-formed vessels at least 8,000 years before Jesus lived.  We also know that of the many craftspeople and artisans of ancient times, potters were among the most important, if not the most well-paid.

            Because “back in (that) day,” if you wanted to invite folks over for dinner and didn’t have enough dishes for them to eat from, or if you needed an unexpected wedding-gift for your neighbor’s daughter’s wedding, you couldn’t just run down to the nearest Wal-Mart or Kohl’s store, and pick up a nice set of disposal, plastic dishes, or a nice set of Haviland China.  Instead, you would have had to walk down to the “potter’s district” in your town or village, and place an order for a potter to throw (or “turn”) and to fire (or “bake”) the items that you wanted.

            You might have to wait several days to get your order, because there was a huge demand for pottery in that time and place.  Most ordinary people couldn’t afford to buy vessels or utensils made of metal, and the things they could afford – your basic earthenware (pottery) vessels – were easily broken, and had to be replaced often.

Potters back then didn’t have the technology that potters today have, and since their work was fired (baked) in pits filled with wood, the temperatures didn’t get very high, which meant that the pottery itself was not very strong.  And so, a child helping place vessels on the family eating-mat (i.e., “setting the table”), who set the glasses down just a little too hard, or the young woman carrying a water-jar on her head to the town-well for filling who slipped on a stone along the path, was likely to smash the clay vessels to bits. And while this fragility of clay vessels was a not-so-good thing for consumers, it was a wonderful source of job security for potters.

            Now, despite our technological advances since then in how we are able to form pottery and in how we are able to fire it (e.g., pottery wheels have improved considerably over the last 10,000 years, and kilns for firing pottery are no longer simple pits filled with wood but are now complex “machines” controlled by computer-chips), the basic processes involved in making pottery have not changed much at all.  Ten thousand years ago, and today, there were and are two keys to producing good pottery.

            One of those keys is preparation.  It was a surprise to Bob and me, as it is to most beginning potters, how much work you have to do before you can even think about throwing – or hand-building – a piece of pottery.  The clay has to be gathered and sieved and mixed just right.  It has to be kneaded carefully by hand to work out any air-bubbles it contains from the mixing process, so that it doesn’t explode when it’s fired.  The lump of mixed and kneaded clay has to be centered carefully on the wheel before you can make anything out of it.  And, you have to have in mind before you start throwing or building some concept of what you’re trying to make – whether you want to turn your lump of clay into a bowl, into a cup, or into a plate – because what you are making determines what you do with the clay to form it into that kind of object.

And I could do a series of sermons just on each of those four important steps (and maybe someday I will).  But today, we’re going to focus on the second key to making pottery, which I believe has the most important application and connection to our faith and to our daily living.  And that second key has to do with something that drives lots of us crazy – and that is imperfection, and how we deal with it.

            In the world of pottery, while lots of potters think about this in different ways, one way to think about this second key is as acceptance.  Accepting that sometimes, no matter how careful the potter is, things are going to go awry, and the intended bowl or cup or plate is going to “go south.”  Even highly-experienced and –skilled potters like Gary occasionally have projects go down the drain, perhaps because we accidentally bumped an edge just a little bit, or perhaps because we incised the piece a little too deeply with an engraving tool, or perhaps because, just for a second, we stopped paying attention to what we were doing. 

            It’s important to know that while this may look like a catastrophe, if you’re going to be a potter – at least, if you’re going to be a happy potter – you have to learn to accept that, no matter how careful you may be, things may not work out quite the way you had planned or hoped.

            But that fact has a deeply important up-side.  And that is the fact that even if your piece does go to heck in a hand-basket, you can almost always have what we used to call a “do-over” when we were kids playing games.  Just like the writer of the book of Jeremiah points out in that text we heard this morning, “Whenever the pot/  the potter was working on turned out badly, as sometimes happens when you are working with clay,/  the potter would simply start over and use the same clay to make another pot.”

            Potters back then, just like potters now, know that when things go wrong, you can almost always simply start over (usually trying not to make the same mistake again).  And that’s not a disaster or a catastrophe.  In fact, as Gary used to remind all of us beginning students over and over, “it’s just mud.”  It’s just mud – which is a substance – in some ways, a lot like us – that can be shaped and re-shaped.  That can be worked on again and again, until you get it like you want it to be.

            And these “do-overs” – these start-overs – are sometimes a very good thing, because very often, something new – and even more wonderful – emerges from our mistake.  Which is, in part, precisely what Jesus is talking about in the passage we heard today from Matthew’s Gospel.  (And he told them all) “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of (our God) in heaven… (Love, and pray for, and greet, and welcome everyone.)  … (And) Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

            I admit, at first, this passage sounds as if Jesus is completely contradicting what I just told you about accepting mistakes and mess-ups – especially in that very last line.  As you just heard, in the NRSV and in the King James Bible and in the American Standard Bible and in numerous others, Jesus’ concluding statement is:  “Be perfect therefore, as your heavenly Father (as God) is perfect.”  And that certainly does not sound like making mistakes is okay.

            So, an incredibly important thing for us to know about this passage is:  the usual English translation, which you just heard, and which occurs in almost all English-language Bibles, is incorrect.  That statement – “be perfect as (God) in Heaven is perfect” simply could not have been spoken by Jesus.  And we know it could not have been spoken by Jesus because Jesus’ primary language was Aramaic, and in Aramaic, there is no word for “perfect.”  So Jesus could not have said, ‘Be perfect[1].”

            Instead, what Jesus was talking about is a concept that is much larger – and much more helpful – and much more congruent with our understandings of our loving God – than “be perfect.”.  While there is no exact parallel between Jesus’ Aramaic language and our English language, that word that gets translated as “perfect”        really means something more like “wholeness” – or “balance” – or “harmony.”  So instead of calling us to live lives in which we never, ever make a mistake; in which we never need to stop and start over, Jesus invites us to a life of wholeness; a life of balance; a life of harmony with and within ourselves, and with other living beings.

            And that means we are invited – even called – to take risks, to try new things, to enter into new relationships, and see what may happen.  It means we are invited – even called – to explore possibilities, to do things the way we have never done them before, to be willing to make mistakes, to be willing to be imperfect – and trust that God can use whatever happens.  And the fact is, we can never know (in advance) how our mistakes and imperfections may turn out to actually be gifts, to be treasures, to us and to others.

            As an example of how this might look in real life, in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom, Dr. Naomi Remen, a physician and psychotherapist who counsels people with cancer, shares a story about a young man with whom she once worked.  This young man was in his early twenties when she met him.  He had been good-looking and popular, a successful student and athlete, he loved fast cars, and was adored by all the girls.  And then, he developed cancer.  And he had to have his leg amputated.

            Not long after his surgery, although his body was healing, his spirit was not, and so he was assigned to Dr. Remen for counseling.  In their first session together, the young man was clearly angry and bitter.  He told her that his life was over, and that it had no meaning any more.  As he raged on, she handed him some drawing-paper and markers and crayons, and asked him to draw a picture of what he was feeling.

            As it happens, he began by drawing a large rounded pot, robust and beautiful, with clean, lovely lines.  And then he took a black crayon, and made large, dark, angry slashed lines through the pot, so violently that he nearly tore the paper apart.

            When he had finished, she asked him to tell her about the drawing.  He said the pot was himself, and the black lines were all the horrible, broken places in his body and in his life – all the things he’d lost, and everything that was terrible for him.

            Session after session, he continued to express his fury at his doctors and nurses, at all people who were well, and at all those people who (in his view) “so feebly tried to be supportive” of him.  One day, after a particularly intense session, Dr. Remen suggested that although he wasn’t finding other people’s support for himself very helpful, maybe he could offer some support to other patients who were in situations like his own.

            Grudgingly at first, he began to make hospital visits to people who had suffered the loss of a limb, or whose bodies were broken in other ways.  He soon discovered that during his visits, he felt empathy and compassion for the people he visited, and that he could offer them a special kind of support, because he understood – in a way that most other people could not – what they were going through.  He discovered that those to whom he offered care accepted him, missing leg and all, and loved him.  He found real joy in the work he was doing – to the point that he decided to go back to school and finish his college degree (which before, he had felt was impossible), and become an art therapist.

            In his final session with Dr. Remen, they were reflecting together on the transformation that had taken place in him.  His file was lying open on her desk, and he saw the drawing he had first made of the broken, slashed pot, and asked her to hand it to him.

            After looking at it for a few minutes, he said quietly, “It’s not finished.”  And he picked up a crayon, and drew yellow lines that radiated out from each of the black cracks in the pot.  When he was finished, he held up the picture to show her, and said, “Those dark lines are all the broken places I still have – and the golden lines are where the light shines through them.”

            His point – my point – Jesus’ point – was that our imperfections – our mistakes – our shortcomings – don’t prevent us from living lives of wholeness – and balance – and harmony – the kind of healthy and beautiful lives that our Christ calls us to.  Any more than the imperfections in a pot like this one that Gary made and graciously gave me, prevent it from having its own kind of beauty.

Although Gary threw this beautiful shape, and glazed it carefully before it was fired, a mistake happened during the firing – a really big mistake.  In loading all of our pots into the kiln to fire them, this pot got shoved back into a corner of the kiln where other pots blocked it from the heat and fire that move through the kiln and make the glazes develop properly.  And when it came out, one side looked like this (FLAT GRAY SIDE), instead of the whole pot looking like it was supposed to (DEVELOPED GLAZE SIDE).

            Now, while this is not one of the most “perfect” pieces of pottery I own – nor, on this one side, one of the most “beautiful” pieces – it is one of my very favorite pieces.  In part, that’s because it was a gracious gift from a cherished friend.  And in part, it’s because it reminds me that my imperfections are just as okay with God, as the imperfections of this pot are okay with me.

            It reminds me that there is still beauty to be seen, despite the cracks and flaws.  It reminds me to cherish the broken places, as well as the whole places, because the broken places are often where “the light shines through.”  And it reminds me that with God, there is always the chance for a “do-over.”

            And so my prayer for each of us this week is this:  that we may not hang ourselves up on trying to be – or look – or live – in a “perfect” way.  But that instead we cherish the lives we have been given, and that we are profoundly grateful for both the things that go well, and the things that don’t, and that we do all that we can to live the lives of wholeness – and balance – and harmony – that our Christ calls us to do.  Amen.