Isaiah 64:1-8

            {Prayer}

            In 1950, Dave Ellis’ daughter JoAnn fell victim to hepatitis. She was an honor student at Evanston High School, the valedictorian of her graduating class, the ‘baby’ in the Ellis family, and the apple of her parent’s eye.

            Things didn’t look to good to Dave one morning as he got ready for work. The family doctor, Dr. Cummings, had advised the Ellises that JoAnn was a pretty sick gal. He told them that he was calling in a specialist, a Dr. Keyser.

            That evening, a weary Ellis returned home from work. As he walked in the door, his wife, Helen, rushed to him, threw her arms around her husband and delightfully reported: “Dave, the specialist has examined JoAnn and Dr. Cummings tells me that JoAnn is in good hands with Dr. Keyser.” JoAnn fully recovered from her illness.

            This little story was found in some correspondence 12 years later at a retirement party for Davis Ellis. What his wife told him when he came home from work that night when his daughter met with the specialist stuck with him. In a late night meeting on developing a new ad, he proposed a slogan which has been around for the last 70 plus years. The company which Davis Ellis worked for was … Allstate. The slogan … “You’re in good hands with Allstate.”

            We confess in the Creeds of the Church that God is the Creator of heaven and earth. In Luther’s explanation of the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed, he shows us how we are all created by God, our Heavenly Father, how all that we have comes from God, how He defends us against all danger, and how He does this out father, divine goodness and mercy. We could summarize all that and say that we are in the good hands of our Heavenly Father.

            But is this a good place to be? Initially we say yes and we’d like to think so. After all fathers are to love and care for their children and who would do a better job of that than our Heavenly Father. Isaiah in our text describes God as “Father,” but Isaiah also calls him the potter. If God is the potter, then we are clay. What does it mean for us to be clay in the hands of our heavenly Potter?

            Isaiah is thought to have written these words of our Old Testament reading around 700 BC. By this time the Assyrians had overrun most of the land. They had even laid siege to Jerusalem. Isaiah here is lamenting, he is crying out to God. He wants to know why God seems so distant from His chosen people. Isaiah says, “Oh, that You would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before You! As when a fire sets twigs ablaze and causes the water to boil, come down to make Your name known to Your enemies and cause the nations to quake before You” (64:1-3).

            Isaiah knows that God is not a wimp. He knows that the Heavenly Potter, that God has the power to squash anyone or anything as easily as we can smash a clay jar. Isaiah knew this because God had demonstrated this power in the past. Remember the story of Jericho or the song about the walls of Jericho? After the Israelites had marched around the city for seven days, God literally cause Jericho’s walls to tremble before Him and come crumbling down, allowing the Israelites to take the city. God had that kind of power, and since He used it in the past, why not now? Why not cause the Assyrians to shake in their boots? Why did God feel so distant from His people?

            We can relate. In the midst of some things happening in our lives, it can feel like God is distant. When we look at the things we have to put up within our life, things like the loss of a job, like sickness, like the death of a loved one, we often assume that God is distant, that God just doesn’t really care about what we’re going through. Or when we see the violence in our world, whether it is here at home or halfway around the world, we wonder why God doesn’t just come down and squash these people?

            The thing is, Isaiah barely gets his prayer out of his mouth and he realized that he had just asked for something absolutely awful. In begging God to come down and deal with all that was wrong with the world … Isaiah realized that he had just asked God to come down and deal with him.

            Isaiah confessed, “You come to the help of those who gladly do right, who remember your ways. But when we continued to sin against them, You were angry. How then can we be saved? All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags; we all shrivel up like a leaf, and like the wind our sins sweep us away. No one calls on Your name or strives to lay hold of You; for You have hidden Your face from us and made us waste away because of our sins” (64:5-7).

            Like the drug dealer who calls the cops to report a break-in at his house forgetting that when the cops show up, they’ll find the marijuana growing operation he has in his basement and arrest him for it … when we call on God to come down deal with the ungodly, we forget that we’re inviting God to come and scrutinize our lives. And you know what He finds? He finds that we are what’s wrong with this world.

            Isaiah said, “all our”, not those over there, but our … “all our righteous acts”, so not the bad moments that we have but the righteous things, the good things we do, they “are like filthy rags.” And not like rags that you use to dust the house with, but rags which are severely stained in which nothing can get the stain out. That’s us! That’s you and me!

            The best things that we do, like give money to missions or charities, spend time on church committees, send encouragement or sympathy cards individuals, cook meals for others, give hugs to those hurting, whatever we do … Isaiah says that they are filthy rages, worthless, not able to be used again. That’s the way God sees it. He sees it this way because everything we do … it is soaked with the sin of pride and self-righteousness. It’s all about me. We do so call “good” things so that we, not others, but so that we feel better.

            To which we ask the age old Lutheran question, what does this mean? Isaiah says our sins shrivel up like a leaf. Dead leaves either end up on a compost pile or in a burn pit. You can take your pick as to where you want to go because the Bible talks about how we deserve both for our sins. It’s not good to be clay in the heavenly Potter’s hands for He not only has the power to squash us, He has the right to squish us.

            Thankfully though, Isaiah remembered something else about the heavenly Potter. Isaiah says, “Yet, O LORD, You are our Father. We are the clay, You are the potter; we are all the work of Your hand. Do not be angry beyond measure, O LORD; do not remember out sins forever. Oh, look upon us, we pray, for we are all Your people” (64:8-9). Although God is the heavenly Potter who has every right to squish us, He still remains our heavenly Father who cherishes us.

            God demonstrated that love for us when He squelched the punishment we deserve for our sin. God squelched it through His only Son, Jesus. When Jesus came into this world, He did not do so to bear God’s arm to squash and to squish the sinner. He came to bear His back to those who whipped and crucified Him. He came to squelch the punishment that you and I deserve for our sins.

            Make no mistake, we are still clay in the heavenly Potter’s hands. But now we can see this as a good thing.

            Because of our sinfulness, because of the fact that we are born sinful, the clump of clay of ourselves is dry. There is not a whole lot you can do with dry clay. If you try to shape it, it just crumbles and falls apart. The thing that makes clay workable is water. And so through the water of Baptism, God makes you pliable. God breathed new life into you so that He could mold and fashion you into His likeness. In the transformation process, there are times where the Potter will have to trim off bits and pieces of clay. This allows Him to make us into something useful. Then He puts us through fiery trials so that as happens with dull clay baked in a kiln, we come out as something beautiful.

            Notice who is doing the work. You and I are not the one who is trying to impress the Potter with how good of clay we are. We are not trying to please Him and make Him want us to be His clay. God, by His grace alone saves us. By God’s grace alone, He doesn’t squash us, squish us, or squelch us. This is the message of the Reformation.

            It’s actually a great thing to be in the hands of the heavenly Potter. Our heavenly Potter is our heavenly Father who loves us. Through Christ alone, God has squelched the punishment we deserve for our sin. And in time, our heavenly Potter will squash all who try to pull us from His love. With God as the heavenly Potter, He is making you into something useful and beautiful for all eternity. You are in good hands with God. Amen.

            The peace of God, which surpasses all human understanding, guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus our Lord, now and forever. Amen.