1. When you see yourself and creation as the clay and God as the potter, do you feel trust or feel powerless? Humble or indignant? Hopeful or out of control? Grateful or entitled?

The image of potter and clay can make me feel powerless and apathetic until I remember that the clay has characteristics and qualities that the potter must respect if a vessel of beauty is to emerge from the dull, shapeless lump.  Recognizing this, the whole process becomes a cooperative effort of give and take, with a skilled potter knowing the exact patient pressure and guidance needed to "throw a pot" (interesting term).  

I experience this same thing when working on a drawing or painting. The materials can be experimented with, but still have characteristics that I need to understand if I want the best results. Often something surprising happens that encourages me to change course or add something I hadn't planned.  

We all have experience being on both ends of this kind of potter/clay endeavor. How dull it would be if everything was just pre-programmed to happen, or if each life was developed according to a strict formula. Thankfully the spirit of God is endlessly creative and gracious, working with us to encourage growth in love. May we cooperate in order that we become more genuinely human.

- Penny

If everything is connected and entangled like author Ilia Delio says, it only makes sense that something so hands-on and physically involved as pottery would be somewhat of an intimate experience. I’m sure any potter with years under her belt would say it’s a give and take between creator and created, a relationship of honour and care for what unknown form lies hidden in the unformed. I imagine it takes listening hands to get the feel of each unique lump of clay, discerning how much pressure to apply, how much speed is required to spin beauty and function into being and finally knowing when to slow down the wheel. Overworking and over-spinning the clay can derail the creative process. This much I know.

If I see this metaphor just as a one-way street than I am bound to find myself in a passive state, spinning on the wheel of pre-determination, but trust, humility, hope and gratitude are relational terms, entered into by both potter and clay.  That changes everything. Instead of dominance and mastery, something else is being sculpted in this exchange of hope and trust. God the Potter gets his hands dirty, risking all his love and inventiveness into these clay pots that crack, chip and break so easily.  He is deeply involved from start to finish. 

There’s always danger in the kiln. We can shatter into a million pieces and who knows what the spinning of the wheel can do to our inner structure. We might end up lopsided and less than functional. 

But God the Potter never leaves his wheel and always stays close to the fire. He loves his newly formed clay pieces. These places of uncertainty and risk become a places of worship and mystery. Instead of striving and pushing back on our maker, we are given the gift of trust. Offering up our messy, gray formless lives to the ruddy hands of God’s creational love is to enter into the deepest of unions.

Maybe it’s not so much the question itself but what lies behind the question. When I ask God “What are you making? What were you thinking with those handles” with suspicion and cynicism on my mind, I create tension on the wheel. Getting aligned and centered is hopeless when I choose individualism and indifference. This leads me to pridefully assume I can sculpt and form myself.  But when the wheel is a space of shared communion and mutual fellowship, “What are you making?” becomes an expression of curiosity, enthusiasm and gratitude for what God is about to make. 

- Bev

2. Our passage suggests that God’s purposes seem to be carried by “unacceptable” human agents, such as Cyrus. Name something good that has come to you via an unexpected, unorthodox or even scandalous way. Did you welcome or resist?

Years ago when our son Kelsey was in high school, and not drawn to participate in Watershed studies - I recall feeling very anxious that he wasn’t a part of ‘my world’. I worried and wrestled with it for some time when it kind of came to a head when he decided that he wasn’t going to join us for our annual Watershed retreat. I think you could say I was at the end of my rope, but at one point I felt like I heard a decisive word, as though God was saying, “Enough. He may not be in your world but he is in mine.” It seemed to calm my anxieties, and somehow I could trust that. In retrospect it was a way of expanding my small view of what belonged to God. To this day that word still rings true, and I’m grateful we can speak pretty openly and honestly with both Kelsey and Sean.

- Verda

I kind of bristle when I read passages like this. There is something in the notion of God's extreme sovereignty that I am suspect of, especially when "God" is seen to be using pagan nation states and rulers to do his bidding. American evangelicals use this same kind of heretical logic of "chosen-ness" to endorse their pagan King Donald Trump no matter what he does. 

Prophecy is not history nor is it theology - even though it addresses specific historical events and its primary actor in that history is Yahweh. Brueggemann says that "prophecy is a re-description of the public processes of history through which the purposes of Yahweh are given human utterance." Key words “re-description" and "human utterance". 

Prophecy as a re-description of our history do not tell us what is true, they tell us what we value. Personally I believe Cyrus was autonomously making savvy political maneuvers that accidentally benefitted Israel - he needed a loyal puppet state on the fringes of his empire for political advantage. He could have just as likely slaughtered them all and the prophets would have had to declare final judgement by God's "Chosen One" Cyrus. I don't think I'm being cynical. The prophet’s job is to use poetic license to tell the story of Israel in a way that dignifies their existence and God's integrity in the midst of imperial threat. What I can affirm is that God will always work towards something life affirming even when things seem fixed, autonomous and limited. To me God's sovereignty seems to be linked to human partnership where, because we are loved and hoped for, we work together towards the best, despite hardship or failure. 

When I was about nine, I was viciously attacked by a German Shepherd when our family was on vacation in BC. The muscles in my arm and leg were hanging out, I had a bandage from the top of my neck to my buttocks. I still have scars where the dog's teeth sunk into my arms and legs. Before the incident, I was an extremely confident and rambunctious kid, but after I became withdrawn and fearful, not sure what was around the next corner. (Ironically back in Manitou I befriended a small dog named Nicky. Nicky's owner would wait for his owner outside the pub where I picked up my newspapers for my paper route. Nicky would follow me on my paper route, but then other dogs in town would follow Nicky, so it wouldn't be uncommon for me to be leading a procession of four or five dogs while I delivered papers.)

I concluded as a young Christian that God had sent the dog because I was too happy and rambunctious - God preferred people who were more serious and circumspect. No one had to tell me this; I saw people of faith around me, especially men, who were mostly serious and somber so that made sense to me. As I grew into my teens I saw the dog attack as a kind of hinge, a kind of before and after, where innocence was lost and shame was born. I basically used the dog story as a hook to hang all my new problems: my lack of confidence, my shame and my anxiety. It wasn't until my thirties that I realized that the way I told the dog story wasn't true. Do I really think that I would have escaped shame and anxiety and lack of confidence had I not been attacked by the dog? Wouldn't growing up in a repressive fundamentalist Mennonite religious context been enough to get all that? 

This is all to say is that I don't think we are all that good at telling our own histories. And I don't think the prophets are good at telling the history of Israel either. Nor are they dependable theologians. They are not telling us what is true, they are telling us what is important, and pointing to that which has value. I think the trick to loving their poetry is to read between the bluster and bravado to glimpse the heart of God in history beyond the text.

- Eldon

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