Clay Jars: A Belated Lenten Reflection...

Genesis 2:4-7 (NLT)

⁴ This is the account of the creation of the heavens and the earth. When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, ⁵ neither wild plants nor grains were growing on the earth. For the Lord God had not yet sent rain to water the earth, and there were no people to cultivate the soil. ⁶ Instead, springs came up from the ground and watered all the land. ⁷ Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person.

Crafted not by divine words but by divine hands. Fingerprints of God over every inch of human flesh. Unique in creation and set on top. The zenith. The pinnacle. The cherry on the sundae. The icing on the cake. Special. Set apart. Made by God with his own self in mind.

Yet made of mud. Fashioned from dust. Not from precious stones or from angel hairs or from clouds or from gold. Man from dirt, woman from man. A clay jar. Mud hardened into a shell of a body, the humble container of a soul.

Dust raised up to a height above all creation—not due to its own worth but by what was breathed into it. No other creation boasted the animation of the breath of God. Plants grew. Animals flew, swam, hopped, ran, crawled, slithered, and loped about with a lesser degree of life. Man breathed in his delicate lungs the transferred breath of God, breathed out, breathed back in. Face to face with his source of life and light and living water and all things good. A dance of sorts. A breath by breath dependency. The shell of the human body constantly being filled and refilled with the strengthening, existence-maintaining, worth-giving contents of the very existence of God. Breath. Spirit. Water. Life. Light. Love. In and out in a divine romance.

Serpent lied sleazily, Eve misled easily, Adam followed breezily, poem rhymed cheesily.

Breath forcefully exhaled from spiritual lungs. Face turned away in shame. CPR not forced. Free choice given. From garden driven.

Now, this shell was only that: a shell. Empty of true life, physically sustained by bios. A spiritual vacuum. Eternal death not simply a punishment but a natural consequence of ceasing to share the breath of God. Days over were days over. Dust gave birth to dust and the number of descendents numbered that dust. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, decision made: “In myself I trust.”

Isaiah 29:16 (NLT)

¹⁶ How foolish can you be?
    He is the Potter, and he is certainly greater than you, the clay!
Should the created thing say of the one who made it,
    “He didn’t make me”?
Does a jar ever say,
    “The potter who made me is stupid”?

Not only an empty shell but fractured and with broken off shards. We prided ourselves on how our cracks gave us “character.” Constant attempts to fill ourselves with something—anything—thwarted by leaking, chipping, seeping, tipping. Sexing, drugging, rock-n-rolling, distracting, ignoring, explaining away truth. Being good, thinking positive, being a member here or there. Nothing repaired the cracks and holes that left the unholy unable to hold a spark of the holy.

Thomas Browne

If thou could'st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, 'This is not dead',
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes, He says, 'This is enow
Unto itself - 'twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.'

John 9:1-7 (NLT)

As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. ² “Rabbi,” his disciples asked him, “why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents’ sins?”

³ “It was not because of his sins or his parents’ sins,” Jesus answered. “This happened so the power of God could be seen in him. ⁴ We must quickly carry out the tasks assigned us by the one who sent us. The night is coming, and then no one can work. ⁵ But while I am here in the world, I am the light of the world.”

⁶ Then he spit on the ground, made mud with the saliva, and spread the mud over the blind man’s eyes. ⁷ He told him, “Go wash yourself in the pool of Siloam” (Siloam means “sent”). So the man went and washed and came back seeing!

Seamless repairs are only made from the same kind of material as the cracked object is made from. The being of God came, wrapped in dust. Mixed with the water of the divine life, he smeared his perfect humanity over humanity’s cracks. Beyond hope of our own fixing, but not beyond the Creator’s. Stronger in the broken places not due to our resiliency but the grace of a healing, restoring Savior.

Pink: Just Give Me Reason

Right from the start
You were a thief
You stole my heart
And I your willing victim
I let you see the parts of me
That weren't all that pretty
And with every touch you fixed them...

Just give me a reason
Just a little bit's enough
Just a second we're not broken just bent
And we can learn to love again
It's in the stars
It's been written in the scars on our hearts
We're not broken just bent
And we can learn to love again

Christ patched the chipped edges with his own substance. He made the container able to contain once again. He filled it with the breath of his Spirit once again. The structure held. The Spirit didn’t leak out through cracks and breaks in the brittle clay. Instead, it overflowed from the abundance of its presence, spilling in a glorious mess out of anyone willing to sit under the flow of the streams of grace. Glowing out the top of the vessel. Splashing abundant life on anything nearby.

2 Corinthians 4:5-7, 14-15 (NLT)

You see, we don’t go around preaching about ourselves. We preach that Jesus Christ is Lord, and we ourselves are your servants for Jesus’ sake. ⁶ For God, who said, “Let there be light in the darkness,” has made this light shine in our hearts so we could know the glory of God that is seen in the face of Jesus Christ.

⁷ We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves...¹⁴ We know that God, who raised the Lord Jesus, will also raise us with Jesus and present us to himself together with you. ¹⁵ All of this is for your benefit. And as God’s grace reaches more and more people, there will be great thanksgiving, and God will receive more and more glory.

The shell of dust was full again—overfull of the strengthening, existence-maintaining, worth-giving contents of the very existence of God. Breath. Spirit. Water. Life. Light. Love. A humble vessel surrounding an infinitely valuable treasure. Delicate lungs full of real, eternal, immortal life. Breathed in and out in a divine romance. The reverse of the curse. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. A new decision: “In God we rightly trust.”

But still a jar of clay. A structure of dried mud. Fragile and brittle. Not meant to carry such a precious cargo forever. Groaning for the permanence of tougher stuff. Aching to be less feeble. The weight of the glory within almost too much to bear.

A challenge today, brothers and sisters:

A challenge to look behind us and remember that we were made from dust and will return to dust. Our glory is not in ourselves. It’s not it what we know. How educated we are. How gifted we are. What big words and languages we know. How well we preach or teach. How much money we make. What car we drive. It’s in nothing that we try to use to fill ourselves. It’s in what God breathed into our souls and we forcefully breathed out. We were born cracked and warped, twisted and chipped. Our futile attempts to fill ourselves—to have a purpose—ended in disappointment and emptiness. BUT GOD. He came and wrapped himself in that dust, healed our blindness and brokenness, and filled us with himself again.

A challenge to look into this moment. We are just earthen vessels, created and chosen by God to reveal that the light and life that should be evident in our lives isn’t our own. Instead, it comes from the power of Him who dwells within us. Our words and actions are nothing if they come from our own efforts seeping through the cracks of our brokenness. They are of great value if they come from the overflow of the grace that God offers to pour out on us. Shine onto us. Breathe into us.

John 3:30 (NLT)

³⁰ He must become greater and greater, and I must become less and less.

A challenge to look ahead.

2 Cor 4:16-18

¹⁶ That is why we never give up. Though our bodies are dying, our spirits are being renewed every day. ¹⁷ For our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever! ¹⁸ So we don’t look at the troubles we can see now; rather, we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen. For the things we see now will soon be gone, but the things we cannot see will last forever.

A new, unbreakable body and soul await us. Through the pressure and trials and fires and natural processes of this life, we are worn back into dust, buried in the dirt, reduced to ashes. Our glorious Potter, however, is not dismayed by such happenings. He will sweep up the pile of our fragility and lovingly recreate us. His hands will fashion a new vessel, crystal clear and cut to let his glory shine through. Hard as a diamond and never to be cracked and marred again. Never will the lungs exhale their last breath. Never will the life run out. The light will never stop shining in our hearts. The well will never run dry.

Only our God could take a pile of dirt and tell such a story.