Clay
2 Corinthians 4:5-12
Click here for the video: Clay
This Sunday marks the beginning of a season in the historic Christian calendar that is known as ‘Ordinary Time.’ Please stifle that impulse to yawn, though It is understandable. Ordinary doesn’t sound very inspiring. Ordinary doesn’t tend to invoke in us a sense of the transcendent. On the heels of the season we’re coming out of, ordinary can feel like something of a let-down. I mean, we had seven weeks of Easter; the season of resurrection. It doesn’t get much better than that- the life that emerges after death has taken its best shot. Forty days into the season of resurrection there is the celebration of the Ascension, which is about as transcendent as things get; Jesus rising into the air and ascending to sit at the right hand of God. We’re not even sure what that sentence means entirely, or how any of that is supposed to have transpired in the realm of matter and particle physics. But, still… Then Easter comes to its conclusion with the arrival of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost where God quite literally blows the doors off a church full of people who are perfectly comfortable hanging out in their safe space, sending them instead bravely out into the world with a story to tell that is good news. And finally things are capped off with Trinity Sunday in which we stand before the awesome presence of a God who is beyond rational understanding, and invited to participate in the dynamic, generative life found in a love that is in constant motion from Father, to Son, to Holy Spirit and back again, in what Richard Rohr calls the Divine Dance. After all that, it’s hard to get too excited about a season that goes by the name, “Ordinary Time.”
In the movie American Beauty, young Angela Hayes tells her best friend, Jane, “I don’t think there’s anything worse than being ordinary.” In one simple line she gives voice to the great American ambition to be extraordinary, exceptional- to stand above the crowd, stand out. Which brings with it, of course, the great American fear- the fear of being ordinary; that we’ll end our days with that awful word ‘just’ hanging over our heads. Just a bean counter. Just phone support. Just a housewife. Just a student. Just a paycheck. Just some average nobody that no one remembers, who didn’t get their name in the paper, or engraved on a plaque. If, as Brené Brown has defined it, narcissism is the ego’s shame-based fear of being ordinary- then narcissism certainly appears to be the order of the day in this American life. It’s the song, Ordinary, by Paula Cole in which she watches the one she loves love someone else. She is your Holy Mary, she sings, and I am so ordinary. This anxiety, this dread of all that we lack, everything in is us that suffers by comparison to whatever it is that appears to be so perfect, this is the engine that drives our economy. We live in a consumer culture that reminds us at every turn of all the ways in which we are deficient, hoping, of course, to sell us the solution to our problem: a cream, a pill, a device, an app, a car, a home, a lifestyle. It’s enough to make a person lose heart, to despair at the never-ending pursuit of happiness that will surely come with the final acquisition that is always just beyond our reach. It is as though the whole thing is rigged so that we’ll never measure up to the expectations that surround us, let alone the expectations that lie within us, no matter how hard we try.
The apostle Paul knew a thing or two about expectations and the difficulty of measuring up to impossible standards. In fact, his whole relationship with the Corinthian church was an exercise in this. Paul was not that impressive by the standards of the day. From what we can tell from his writings, he wasn’t much to look at and might have been even less to listen to. You might say, he was pretty ordinary. In a cosmopolitan city like Corinth, public speaking and rhetoric were something of an art form. There weren’t all the forms of popular media that we’re so used to- newspapers, radio, TV, the Internet. Ideas were shared and exchanged and entertained in the public square. And then just as now, the medium was the message. Meaning that the better you were as a speaker, the more likely you were to gather a following and get widely heard. But as far as we can tell, that wasn’t really Paul’s strength. And as the church began to grow, there were critics and rivals who tried to use this deficiency to isolate and silence Paul’s voice. It isn’t clear if they called themselves this, but Paul refers to them as “superapostles.” These days, no doubt, they’d be called mega-apostles. They didn’t wear capes, or anything like that. They were just very impressive, and super polished in their presentation. You could say they had the look of someone who had something significant to say about God. Paul did not have that look. And the suggestion was that as such, what he had to say probably wasn’t really worth listening to.
So Paul reminds the church in his second letter to them that this way life they’re being called to isn’t about him. It never was. There are some people who need to make it all about themselves. For them it’s all about self-promotion, making themselves feel important by telling anyone who will listen how great they are, how much smarter and stronger and better they are than everybody else. They believe that if they put on a good enough show, enough razzle dazzle to convince people how great the package looks, then no one will bother looking inside to see how empty it truly is. “We do not proclaim ourselves,” Paul tells them. “We proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord and ourselves as your slaves for Jesus’ sake.” In other words, if we’re in it for entertainment, for the production values being offered, then we are profoundly missing the point. It isn’t about that. It’s about where our allegiance lies, and who it is that we look to in the end for direction and meaning in our lives.
For the average American in pursuit of the elusive goal of a happiness that is always just beyond reach, there may be nothing worse that being ordinary. But for those who have come to see the glory of God in the face of Jesus, ordinary is where some of God’s best work takes place. “We have this treasure in clay jars,” Paul announces. Earthen vessels is how other translations render it. It turns out that the hallmark of knowing God’s glory isn’t some trumped up version of what passes for greatness in the world around us. It isn’t about who can attract the biggest crowd, or put on the best show. In fact, it’s just the opposite. The treasure that we possess, the treasure that each of us possesses isn’t a function of what we do, how others see us, or how impressive we are in talking about God, or Jesus, or any of the rest of it. That is precisely the point. It doesn’t come from us, because it isn’t about us. Notice that Paul doesn’t say that we are just clay jars, like there is some better container, some better way of following Jesus. No. This is how it works. The ordinary- whether it is the ordinary passage of time, or the ordinary stuff of life is exactly where the extraordinary power of God shows up. It is how, and what we are being saved from and saved for by Jesus. We are saved from having to be anything other than who God made us to be, saved from having to measure up to the impossible expectations of a world that would always have us chase after some elusive ideal. Saved by the very assurance that we already have everything that we will ever need to be who God would have us be because we are fearfully and wonderfully made in such a way that no matter how ordinary the clay jar that holds it, we always carry within us the extraordinary image of the potter who shaped us. And we are saved for the truth that fortifies us against all manner of affliction.
I wish I could stand up here and tell you that faith is some kind of magic antidote against heartache and pain. But you all are smart people who know better than that. You know what Paul is talking about when he launches into this litany of all that we come up against: afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, struck down. Just another ordinary day for some of us. Except that it isn’t, because we are not crushed by it, or driven to despair, or forsaken, or destroyed. And that is extraordinary. Anyone can talk a good game. But it’s only the power of God that resides within us that can truly transform what looks for all the world like the end, something like death, into a life like no other.
Or as Leonard Cohen puts it in the chorus of his song, Anthem:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in
It is also how the light gets out.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. amen.