Reworking the Clay

A sermon preached at St Martin-in-the-Fields on September 7, 2025 by Revd Dr Sam Wells

Reading for address: Jeremiah 18: 1-11

Here’s one of the great paradoxes of life. We all want our existence to be plain sailing. We want good health, success in education and work, flourishing in love and family, good weather and happy adventures, and our team to win the league each year. As one politician put it, we want somewhere to live, something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for. But life doesn’t always give us all those things. And sometimes it seems to give us few or none of those things; or some of these things clash with one another in painful or damaging ways. Yet when we look back decades later, we realise something we couldn’t see at the time: which is that some of our most creative experiences, profound friendships, deepest insights and surprising discoveries arose from those periods of adversity – so much so that to erase the most difficult moments of our lives would deprive us of the things that have made us who we are and leave us bland, featureless and unrecognisable. Yet at the same time we fear such setbacks and experience them as distressing and miserable.

We find this paradox crystallised in a vivid image narrated in the first four verses of Jeremiah chapter 18. God tells the prophet Jeremiah to go down to the potter’s house. Jeremiah watches the potter working at the wheel. Then the vessel the potter is making is broken in his hands. The potter doesn’t abandon the broken vessel. He doesn’t throw the clay away and begin afresh with new clay. Instead, the potter reworks the clay into a new vessel.

I want to suggest to you that these four verses contain the whole story of the Bible. There is good clay: the earth is God’s creation. God has a vessel in mind: this is in the call of Abraham and the complex relationship between God and Abraham’s descendants through the Old Testament. Then the clay is broken in the potter’s hands: God’s people go into exile and it seems the promise has died. Next, the potter reworks the clay into another vessel: it’s the same clay, so there’s still a place for those same people, but in Jesus God brings out of the clay a new vessel and that clay is refashioned into a community that embraces Gentiles too. And the way he does that is precisely by being broken on the cross and refashioned in the resurrection. And the definitive way we celebrate that is by allowing bread to be broken and refashioned as the body of Christ, which is what we’re gathered to do today. It’s the whole Bible in four verses. Notice those four verses are in the Old Testament rather than the New. And notice that almost every time we discover something about God or about ourselves in the Bible it’s disclosed in the face of adversity.

With elegant simplicity these four verses in Jeremiah set out what I believe we can understand as the story of England, and of the church. Let me start with England. The recent Operation Raise the Colours campaign encouraging English people to fly the St George’s Cross flag in visible places raises the question of what it means to be English, and specifically whether that definition is one that seeks to include and look forward or exclude and look back. I was struck by the testimony of a 44-year-old man of Bangladeshi heritage who was interviewed in Stevenage a few days ago. He said, ‘I remember being a kid and getting called all sorts of racist names. I don’t get that anymore.’ But he went on, ‘In certain areas, if I see an English flag, there is always a part of me that thinks, ok, I’ve got to be a bit careful here.’[1]

One response to Operation Raise the Colours has pointed out how much Englishness has changed in the last millennium.[2] The Norman Conquest transformed land ownership, language and heritage. The Black Death halved the population. The Wars of the Roses, the Reformation and the Civil War each brought great disruption, and the two world wars, post-Windrush immigration and sixties cultural revolution changed class, race and gender identities for good. Any sense of uniform continuity is dismantled the further back you go. True Englishness isn’t about convictions, conventions or characteristics, but about story, place and belonging.

It’s the same sense of what changes, what remains the same, and how a nation adapts to new circumstances that we find described in Jeremiah chapter 18. The great transition moments like the Norman Conquest and the Civil War were times of adversity and hardship. They were moments when the clay seemed broken in the potter’s hands. Yet a new vessel emerged. The mistake isn’t just to pine for a time before the last such moment, when we knew the rules and the rules favoured people like us; the mistake is even more to fear the next breaking moment as something that will destroy all we hold dear – because the story is one in which the only constant is change. At our worst, when we see the pot broken in the potter’s hands, we resort to blame about who caused the broken pot, nostalgia for the previous pot, and fear that the next pot won’t have a cherished place for us. But at our best, we can face each breaking moment confident that its challenges will shape us in wisdom and its new chapter will contain renewed story, shared place and deeper belonging.

Moving to the church, the same themes of continuity, transformation and identity emerge. In his awesome and visionary 2024 book Nexus, the historian Yuval Noah Hariri suggests that all societies must balance order with truth.[3] Institutions tend to value stability and order. They cultivate stories not least to foster common identity and purpose. But often these myths aren’t true. Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany were shrouded in fake history and false stories. Hariri shows how bureaucracy emerges as a system to facilitate retrieval of information, but like mythmaking it imposes its own kind of order. To be caught in a tangle of procedure is to experience what happens when a system sacrifices truth to conform to its imposed order. You’d think the answer to oppressive regimes would be for disruptive innovators to come forward to proclaim truth. But it’s not so simple. Truth isn’t as straightforwardly liberating as it might appear. Prophets jeopardise order. Jeopardising order often fails to yield the desired result; that’s the story of one violent revolution after another. The secret is to find the right balance between order and truth.

Hariri has a second key theme, which is that the key to a healthy society is its capacity for self-correction. The model for self-correction is the progress of science. When a theory is found to be inadequate, it’s superseded by a more accurate theory. Thus the Newtonian physics that was accepted in the nineteenth century was modified in the twentieth by insights from relativity and quantum mechanics. Meanwhile whereas homosexuality was understood by psychiatrists in 1952 as a mental disorder, by 1974 that perception had been dismissed. That’s how self-correction should work. By contrast, Hariri laments that religions tend to assume the infallibility of a holy book. He maintains the Catholic church has demonstrated no capacity for self-correction. It struggles to identify institutional failure or doctrinal flaws. Instead it can only pin shortcomings onto individual misdemeanours. He makes the same point about centralised totalitarian regimes. A system that so prioritises order over truth thereby lacks the facility for self-correction. It inevitably relies on oppression in the medium term and is doomed in the long term.

Hariri’s thesis is compelling, but his assessment of Christianity is depressing. It’s depressing because Hariri has little notion of faith other than the employment of myths to overcome existential fears and thus create order, and it’s depressing because he sees the church as the imposition of order rather than the cultivation and practice of truth. While I think it behoves the church to lament and confess the reasons why someone as perceptive and insightful as Hariri might have come to such conclusions, this description goes against everything this community stands for and I have spent the last 35 years seeking to bring about. I don’t want to take time challenging the accuracy of Hariri’s description. I think it’s more valuable to ponder how as a church and community we hear his profound analysis as an occasion for renewal. After all, Hariri himself says the most important takeaway of his book is ‘to commit ourselves to the hard and rather mundane work of building institutions with strong self-correcting mechanisms.’ (404) How can we foster an order that upholds truth?

To empower this quest, I want to return to the image presented in Jeremiah chapter 18 of the potter and the clay. Notice how the story is fundamentally not about our search for truth and order, but God’s desire for relationship. God is at work: the Holy Spirit is shaping the clay. As we read in Isaiah 45, ‘Does the clay say to the one who fashions it, ‘What are you making?” or “Your work has no handles”?’ Faith begins with a fundamental humility that the story is not about us and we’re beyond blessed to be invited to be part of it. Notice also that the Jeremiah image describes a constant work in progress. This is where Hariri’s critique is so helpful. The church should not be in the business of preserving relics against change, but dwells in a world that’s always evolving, and is itself, as Martin Luther put it, always being reformed. The Bible is not a timeless bulwark against novelty, but a constant stimulus to self-correction. Life isn’t about unshakeable achievements, but about constant failed experiments through which we learn humility, compassion, solidarity and wisdom. If we say, ‘But you can’t be saying there’s no constants – surely we must preserve our identity?’ the answer is, ‘There is one constant – the potter. In whom we find our identity.’

Then notice the Jeremiah story is one in which the pot is broken. Brokenness is not a catastrophe or the end of the story or a cause to discard the whole enterprise; it’s part of the process of making a pot, and if God’s not phased by it, neither should we be. Hariri portrays the church as an institution so obsessed with keeping order, which is a synonym for control and power, that it sidelines or suppresses truth. But the reality is, failure and brokenness are part of being made of clay, the dust of the earth, as we all are. After all, the story the Bible tells is one in which Gentiles get to be included in the story precisely because God’s people are broken. And the final thing to notice is that the Jeremiah story is one in which we are constantly being refashioned. We don’t get to be the finished article, and we make fools of ourselves if we ever pretend we are. We’re either being broken or about to be. Our lives are not ones to be offered at God’s altar pure, holy, unblemished, beyond reproach; they’re clay to be refashioned as the Holy Spirit chooses. After all, if faith is fundamentally about relationship, then it’s a constant process of re-establishing trust after setback and hope after failure.

Here’s a suggestion. Every time you put your head in your hands and wonder what this country is turning into; every time your heart is broken by the latest crazy and smallminded thing the church has done; every time every time you look in the mirror and realise what a mess your life is or how many people you’ve let down – each time, you pick up the first four verses of Jeremiah chapter 18 and rediscover that we’re all lumps of clay being fashioned and refashioned. Life isn’t about avoiding failure or disappointment. Instead it’s about allowing the Holy Spirit patiently, gently and skilfully to pick up the broken pieces and rework us into a new vessel, from which others may drink the wine of God’s never-ending love.

[1] www.nbcnews.com/world/united-kingdom/english-flag-campaign-patriotism-far-right-rcna227947

[2] Robert Tombs in Daily Telegraph August 25, 2025

[3] Yuval Noah Hariri, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI (London: Fern Press 2024)