Clay Jars

We have been called many things, but... clay jars? That's what Paul calls the members of his congregation in the church at Corinth. It applies to us, too. You'll find out how if you choose to read my sermon!

It was just 13 years ago this summer that I went to live in Israel for 5 weeks. I didn’t go as a tourist. I went as a volunteer on an archaeological dig that was sponsored by Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. My Hebrew professor at United Seminary in Dayton is good friends with the director of that dig; and he encouraged me to join the group even though I didn’t know a soul who would be there. It turned out to be a life-changing experience!

During those 5 weeks, I learned all sorts of things about archaeology. For example, I learned that archaeology in the Middle East is usually done on sites called tels. A tel is an artificial hill containing the remains of ancient cities, each one built on top of the one that came before it. Our tel, Tel Zayit, was a small one; it was only about three stories high.

I learned how Middle East archaeology works. We were working on a trench that had been dug from the very top of the tel all the way down to the bottom. It’s like slicing a pie. When you take out the piece of pie – or the piece of hill, in this case – you get a picture of the city from the most recent remains on the top, all the way down to the earliest remains down at the bottom. At the top of Tel Zayit, we found things from the Iron Age, from about the time of King Solomon. And way down at the bottom, where I was assigned to dig, we found things that we could date as far back as 1500 B.C. That’s long ago in the Bronze Age.

I also learned that what you find on a dig isn’t usually very glamorous. Despite what the Indiana Jones movies say, archaeologists don’t often find gold jewelry, or silver scrolls, or pagan idols with emeralds for eyes. No, most of what we found during our five-week dig was broken pieces of pottery. And that’s what most archaeologists find when they go digging in the Middle East: lots and lots of broken pottery.

There’s a good reason for that. In Bible times, metal cooking pots, cut glass serving dishes, and Corelle dinnerware didn’t exist. Instead, clay pottery was used for almost everything. Water was carried in pottery jugs, food was cooked on pottery bowls, and dinner was eaten on pottery plates. And when grain was set aside at the end of the harvest, it was stored in big pottery containers. Clay pottery was cheap and easy to obtain. Every family had a selection of clay jars for their household use. The only problem with clay pottery is that it was easily broken. Once it was broken, it was pretty much useless. Broken clay jars were tossed outside or thrown into a garbage pit if a family was fortunate enough to have one. A broken jar was just like an old cell phone is today. It’s really not much good except to be thrown away.

So it’s surprising that Paul should call the members of his congregation “clay jars.” (II Corinthians 4:7-12)  Clay jars were destined for the garbage dump after their useful but short life spans. Is that who we are? Are we just clay jars that are going to be broken and then thrown away? Some people might say that we are. After all, we’re a lot like the clay jars of Paul’s time. Human beings are common, just like clay jars. How many of us are there on planet Earth at last count? Something like 7 billion of us! We’re a dime a dozen! We’re very easily broken, too. If any part of us doesn’t work right, our whole body suffers. It’s not just our bodies that break, either. Our minds and our souls break sometimes, too. And we’re never too far from the clay that we came from. Ash Wednesday will remind us of that in just about 10 days. We came from clay and we’ll go back to that clay when our lives are over.

But there’s one big difference between us and those fragile clay jars that the ancient Israelites used for so many things. The Spirit of God fills us up; and that treasure that stays within us no matter how broken we are! Paul says as much: “We are hard-pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” (II Corinthians 4:8-9) The treasure that fills us is not food or water or even stored grain – it’s the power of God to keep on keeping on even when it looks like we’re broken beyond repair.

Our model, in death and in life, is Jesus himself. Paul talks about that when he says, “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” (II Corinthians 4:11) We are human, just like Jesus. And just like Jesus, we will die one day. Even though we don’t like to talk about it, our bodies are all in the process of moving towards the grave. The older we get, the more obvious that is. Our sight gets dim. Our hearing starts to fail. Arthritis makes us creaky, and our muscles just aren’t as strong as they once were. Beyond physical death, we carry all kind of other problems around with us. Even Jesus’ disciples did. Peter was a blowhard and a hothead. He was the one who boasted that he would never, ever deny Jesus! Remember how that turned out? Thomas didn’t believe that Jesus had risen from the dead until he saw the evidence for himself. What did he say? “Unless I see the wounds in his hands and put my hand into his side, I won’t believe it!” Even Paul himself was so mistaken about Jesus that he began his career by persecuting the early church and hauling Christians off to prison! Arrogant, doubtful, quick to anger, sure that they were always right – those were Jesus’ disciples. Does it sound familiar? It should. We’re just like they were. But despite all that, Paul says, we are filled with life – the life that comes from the mighty power of Jesus’ resurrection. We are like little paper cups holding the power of a nuclear reactor! We may appear to the world to be useless, but we are the channels of resurrection power that Jesus promises to the whole world through the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t matter to Jesus that we’re broken! It matters to Jesus that we let him use us, whatever his purposes are.

About 80 years ago, some pieces of broken pottery were unearthed at a dig in Israel. They had writing on them – writing that turned out to be letters from one Judean commander to another during the time of King Zedekiah. They are windows into a time that we didn’t know much about before. Although they’re just broken pieces of clay jars, they are priceless. Rejoice, fellow clay jars! We’re priceless, too! With the power of Jesus filling us, we offer the grace of God to people who never knew about it before. We may not be able to hold water, but with Jesus filling us, we can do amazing things. We can offer a listening ear and a word of encouragement to the lonely and afraid. We can bind up the wounds of the suffering and show them the compassion that God has shown to us. And we can bring love to the unloved and offer hope to the hopeless. Isn’t that amazing! All that from clay jars! Thanks be to God, who can use even broken clay jars for eternal purposes!