Do-Overs

For some things in human life, it is easy to start again. For other things, there is just no way. Drawing on a scratch pad, or making a list, one can simply crumple the top sheet and start over. In woodworking, we measure twice, and cut once, because fine lumber is too precious to just scrap willy-nilly.

Remember playing with Play-Doh or clay? Start rolling to make a snake, then coil it if you wish to begin fashioning a dish. From there, roll it all to make a ball. Do-overs were easy with malleable, colorful Play-Doh. You had sovereignty. You could squash the little figure and form it anew. We should not seize stance sovereignty over big and precious things of life. There are people to consider; there are circumstances and resources to consider.

The Scripture Lessons for the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost this year have us considering God to be in a position that allows re-shaping things. God fashioned us. The Potter can shift designs on how to move within human history. The Guide of Life can help us mold new dispositions for how to treat each other; help us turn; help us forgive a person; convince us to pick up and carry the cross to follow the Savior as his disciple.

In Luke 14:25-33 Jesus, in shocking terms, challenges the crowds to follow him with completely revamped values. In Philemon 1-21, Paul tells the Christian leader by that name to forgive and receive Onesimus, the runaway slave, who has turned to follow Christ and now is a brother in the household of God. The Psalmist marvels that God has built and shaped us:

You press upon me behind and before and lay your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain to it. For you yourself created my inmost parts; you knit me together in my mother's womb. I will thank you because I am marvelously made; your works are wonderful, and I know it well. My body was not hidden from you, while I was being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb; all of them were written in your book; they were fashioned day by day, when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139:4, 12-15)

Finally, in Jeremiah 18:1-11 the prophet warns that if God is the Potter, and we are the clay, things can be started over to make the vessel that seems good and fitting to the Creator. It is we who need God, not the other way around. God’s work with us is out of love, not a necessity, so we should heighten our love of God. Can we let ourselves be warmed and formed as clay in the hands of God, and conform to God’s designs of love for the transformation of the world? If we are God’s, let us remember that in these hands, it is good to be pliable and to comply.