Pottery is one of the important finds in archaeology. Give an archaeologist a piece with a distinctive shape or color, or kind of clay or glaze, and they will tell you where it came from and when it was made and what it was for. Sometimes even a fragment is enough for them.  

Of particular interest are pieces that include some identifying mark of the potter. In our day, you will often find the initials or the name or some symbol that identifies the maker on the bottom of a piece. In ancient pottery, it might be some unusual manner of glazing or a special way of painting or, now and then, a distinctive thumbprint on the handle. I found one of those thumb-print pieces at an excavation site in the Holy Land some years ago. Dr. Fleming, our leader, called it “the potter’s mark,” a personal identification that gives the archaeologist a special thrill. I read of an archaeologist who traced the movement of one small group of ancient people across part of the American Southwest by plotting on a map where they found pieces of pottery that bore the mark of a particular potter. 

It is in that vein that I offer you this morning’s sermon: a reminder that human beings are the handiwork of a Potter God, if you will, and that God has put his mark upon us. 

The feeling that this is not the case, that materialism is the last word, is somewhat understandable. It is not even a new idea. You may have thought only a modern cynic could have such thoughts or ask such questions. But then you heard the words of the eighth Psalm a few moments ago, remember? “When I consider the heavens, the work of your hands, the sun and the moon that you have ordained, what are human beings that you are mindful of them?” If the Psalmist could ask such a question three thousand years ago, how much more can we feel the insignificance of human life today! 

You can reconstruct the Psalmist’s understanding of the universe out of references in the Bible. It was a three-layered world in those days. Earth was the middle layer, floating on a vast sea, with a dome stretched over it, a firmament that the scriptures called “heaven” holding back more water above the earth. The account of creation in the first chapter of Genesis sketches the picture for us: 

And God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament... And God called the firmament Heaven.....”   

And on the third day, we read: “And God said, ‘Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together in one place and let the dry land appear. And it was so. And God called the dry land earth.” (Genesis 1:6-10) Essentially a three-layered world. 

So if the Psalmist could say, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them?” in a world understood in that way, how much more can we ask that in our time! Knowledge of the movement of the planets was amazing in the Psalmist’s day, considering the instruments with which they worked, but their understanding of the distances and numbers were primitive indeed compared to the revelations of the telescopes that look out from satellites circling above the atmosphere of earth. Scientists now talk about “seeing” back to the origins of time and space. Humanity, the handiwork of God? What is human life against the backdrop of uncountable galaxies? What is our life span against the eons of time and the complexity of life that Pat and I saw represented in that museum in Drumheller, Alberta that I wrote about in this week’s bulletin? 

The evidence is here, but how do you wrap your mind around it? Have you ever seen ripple marks in the sand or dirt along a sea shore, where the waves have left their undulations in the earth? There is a section of the trail on the hike to Grinnell Glacier in Glacier National Park where you  walk across fossilized wave ripples from some ancient lake or sea shore. But mind you, this is on a mountainside a mile above sea level! Once, on a ranger-led hike, the ranger told about the upheavals of continental plates that had moved these mountains a hundred miles westward and pushed them over a mile into the sky. He spoke of the millions of years over which the glaciers pressed and polished and shaped the landscape over which we walked. 

I heard it and I saw it, but I didn’t really comprehend it. Like that visit to the dinosaur display: What can 90 million years possibly mean to an age that celebrates 40th birthdays with black balloons and sympathy cards? Oh, we can say the numbers and sound informed, but can we really conceive what they mean? Numbers in geological time are a little like the man said about the numbers in the Federal budget—a few billion here, a few billion there, and the first thing you know you’re talking about serious money. When you talk of geological time, you are talking serious numbers! What is our life span in such a scheme as that? In the words of the folk hymn, “We ain’t got long to be here.” 

Likewise, the moral character of humanity often seems to deny God as our maker. Herb Gardner, in Feast of Fools, has a scene in which Arnold, a man who has made his no-questions-asked peace with a comfortable salary, is speaking to his ne’er-do-well brother who has rebelled against the deceits of conventional society. 

Arnold says, “I have a talent for surrender. I’m at peace; but you don’t have the gift; and I see the torture of it. All I can do is worry for you. But I will not worry for myself; you cannot convince me that I am one of the Bad Guys. I get up, I go; I lie a little, I peddle a little, I watch the rules, I talk the talk. We fellas have those offices high up so we can watch the wind and go with it, however it blows. But I will not apologize for it; I take pride. I am the best possible Arnold Burns.” 

There are a lot of Arnold Burnses in the world, and some who far outdo this one in their ignoring and bending of the rules, in the grasping and cruelty that mark their approach to life. Killing children, executing hostages horribly and gruesomely on television. How does God fit into lives like that? 

But vastness of space and numberless planets and unfathomable time and incomprehensible human behavior notwithstanding, the Bible insists that God is our Creator and that he has put his mark upon us. We are dust, but we are dust that bears the mark of divinity. 

The Apostle Paul speaks to this combination of fragility and value when he refers to vessels of clay into which something valuable has been stored. “Common clay pots” is the way one translation expresses that passage from his letter to the Corinthians. Like many of the images of Scripture, such an image carries more weight when we understand the custom of the times. Clay pots were often the safes and vaults and strong boxes of Paul’s day. They were used to store valuable things—jewels, a hoard of coins, precious documents. When the prophet Jeremiah wanted to symbolize his hope for the restoration of Jerusalem, he told his secretary Baruch that God had told him to put the deed to the land that he had purchased “in an earthen vessel that it may be preserved for many years.” (Jeremiah 32:14) 

The plainness or drabness of the pot was never an indication of what it held. The Essenes, a devout people who lived in that incredibly inhospitable region along the Dead Sea, regarded their Scriptures and their writings as their greatest treasures. They placed their scrolls and parchments in clay jars and hid them in caves in the hills around Qumran. They did that in the first century A.D. and there they were preserved for two thousand years, until 1948 when they were discovered by a Bedouin boy looking for a goat. He threw a rock into a cave and heard something  break. In that cave, and others in the surrounding hills, archaeologists found what have come to be known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, manuscripts that pre-dated any then-existing copies of Scripture by hundreds of years. I say again, the fragileness, the plainness of the container is no indicator of the treasure that is inside. 

Neither is the physical limitation of the human body or even the moral failure of human life the final indication of the value of the human spirit. Do you know James Weldon Johnson’s magnificent verse, “Creation”? In graphic imagery, he pictures God taking light in his hands and rolling it up in a ball to make the sun, then taking what was left from making the sun and flinging it against the darkness, “spangling the night with the moon and stars.” After the mountains and the seas, after the flowers and trees and birds and creeping things, he pictures God looking around and saying, “I’m lonely still....” 

Then he writes, 

Then God sat down —
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep wide river He sat down;
With his head in his hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought: I’ll make me a man!

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
      Till He shaped it in His own image;
Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen.

Anthropomorphic language? To be sure. To be understood literally? Hardly. But the message is not in the details; it is in the imagery. That is the testimony of Scripture. For all our weaknesses and imperfections, for all our failure and our sin, we are the handiwork of God and this Potter God has placed within these human vessels something of himself. 

Both the Psalmist and Paul sometimes deplore the fragileness of this clay pot, but ultimately they look beyond the container and see the contents. The totality becomes a two-fold blessing, something to keep us humble and yet to keep us from despair. Those who despair of human life have missed the message of the gift of God’s spirit within us; those who exult in human achievement to the point of pride have missed the message of human frailty. We are both dust and divinity. In Paul’s words, “so that the power which surpasses all things may be seen to be of God and not of us.” 

Every once in a while, someone tells me how difficult it is for them to believe in God because of the suffering in the world. I understand that feeling. And I have no easy answer for it. Much of it seems unexplainable. But you see, I am confronted with another mystery. When I consider so many of the sufferers that I have encountered and think of their goodness, their attitude in the face of pain or hardship, I find that I cannot understand such lives without belief in God. And when I look at the finest lives that I have encountered or read about, I find the handiwork of that same God. Mind you, this is not just my interpretation of the matter; this is what they tell me. Like Paul, they affirm that they do not do what they do in their own strength. Again and again, they tell me that their strength comes from the spirit of God within them. So I am confronted with two mysteries: suffering is the mystery of our dust; goodness is the mystery of our divinity. A treasure in a clay pot. 

Do you see the key here? Just as the comparative insignificance of human life is not permitted to overwhelm the element of the divine, neither does the touch of divinity permit us to ignore the fact that it resides in dust. The treasure is to keep us from despair; the clay pot is to deliver us from pride. 

It is not that such an understanding simplifies our lives. It does not do that at all. We are not always given easier answers; indeed, it often makes the answers more complex. But it is in this complex joining of treasure and clay that we find our hope.  

Listen to Paul’s magnificent contrasts: “We are afflicted but not crushed; we are perplexed but not driven to despair; we are persecuted but not forsaken; we are struck down but not destroyed. ..... So we do not lose heart, for though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal glory beyond all comprehension, because we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen.” (2 Corinthians 4:7-10, 16-18) A treasure in a clay pot. 

Do you know Priscilla Leonard’s lines? 

Flame of the spirit, and dust of the earth —
This is the making of man,
This is his problem of birth;
Born to all holiness, born to all crime
Heir of both worlds, on the long slope of time
Climbing the path of God’s plan.
Dust of the earth in his error and fear,
Weakness and malice and lust;
Yet quivering up from the dust,
Flame of the spirit, upleaping and clear,
Yearning to God, since from God is its birth —
This is man’s portion, to shape as he can,
Flame of the spirit and dust of the earth —
This is the making of man.     
                    (Masterpieces of Religious Verse, #823, p. 265)

Once we scrape away the dust and dirt that blur the potter’s mark upon us, once we recognize who has made us and whose we are, we can never be the same again. We might run from it for a time and hide from it for a time, but the mark of the Potter God is upon us. 

So look for the Potter’s Mark, and claim the treasure that God has put within you. Be what you were intended to be.