Grace and Peace to you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.
Our image, our mental picture of God, is always changing, growing and evolving. When I was a little guy, one of my pastors preached a sermon on God as a potter. He brought in clay and actually molded it as he was preaching. It is an entirely Biblical image or symbol for God. God takes clay, which is simply earth and adds water and voila-fashions it into us. Strictly speaking the image comes from Jeremiah. Let me read you the passage.
The 1st stories of Genesis have God in this potter role too. His first human project after he had made the heavens and the earth, water, the elements, the sun, our source of energy, fish, seas and animals in us. People. The word that Genesis uses is dust-but it can also be translated as clay-like you would find or a riverbank. Dust that is saturated with water, another life giving element.
On Ash Wednesday, I always say “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” There is an up and a down side to those words of sober caution. The downside is that you are given a relatively short life span. Seventy years normatively, eighty or ninety if you get lucky. Then you return to dust-your being goes back to the elements. Such a thought is extremely humbling. We are not self made. We have no independent existence apart form God. This is bad but also freeing news. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Enjoy your life. Don’t spend the precious time you have frustrated, storing up vast accumulations of anything-wealth, power, prestige, fame. In the end, it crumbles into dust along with you.
The up side of the dust statement is that you are of immense value to the celestial dustman. The sun is a vast cloud of cosmic dust that is gathered together by the hand of God, swirls around following internal currents and generates heat and light. God loves dust and recycles dust endlessly to generate life upon life upon life. The consummate details being, God even controls the universe’s dust and it all dances to his will to create life and beauty. This immense potter, God, has a heart for dust, and dust beings-rather dust “be ins” (get it) - dusty beings. You and me, clay jars, animated by his Spirit.
So rejoice in your dusty status. As St. Paul says: We have these clay jars – “our bodies, our selves”, but the true power belongs to God. Paul is saying something very comforting – God has taken control of you and your life and will always keep control. When we aren’t in the mood to rebel, that’s wonderful news. It means we are “kept” women and men, loved and cherished and safe in the hands of God, the keeper. Amen.
Who We Are