Bring On The Papier Mache

Jeremiah 18:1-11

This is homecoming week at our high school. It's a week filled with daily dress-up contests, lunch-time challenges, and after-school float-making. The week will be filled with fun, each day marking the time as it gets closer and closer to the homecoming game. On that day dozens, if not more, of Kapolei High School alumni will come out to see one another to catch up on each other's lives and talk about old times. It will indeed be a spirit-filled week.

Of course, memories of my own high school days come to mind. I remember all to well dressing up in goofy get-ups, going to pep-rallies, and going to secret places to make the secret float. To be honest, making the float was the best time of all as we gathered to make our floats out of chicken wire and papier mache.

In our senior year we were lucky to have an artist in our midst that could mold the chicken wire into the desired shape. We were also spirited enough to have a lot of young, energetic teenagers come out to help mix the sticky gluey thing (I never knew what that thing was called), tear newspaper into strips, dip the strips into the goo, then lay them one by one onto the shaped chicken wire until it was covered completely. All that was left after we let the sculpture dry was to paint and decorate it as designed.

If it sounds like a lot of work, it was. It took over a week of nightly meetings at one of our classmate's home to shape, cover, paint, and decorate our parade float. But, if it also seems like a lot of fun, it was. In the hours we were together relationships were made, friendships solidified, and a spirit of unity was borne. We became closer as a people as we unified towards one cause.

In today's passage God, through the prophet Jeremiah, is asking the same thing from the Israelites, and to an extent us. God shows Jeremiah the potter's house as the clay-worker is making a jar of some kind. The jar falls apart and the potter tries again, this time making a jar with which he's happy.

God makes the connection between the potter and what God wants by saying the people of Israel are the clay, and God is the potter. God doesn't want a broken jar, and is willing to remake it, but the clay has to be willing to be molded. It's up to us, humankind, to be the kind of clay God can work with.

That senior year we unveiled our float which featured a life-size, white mustang standing on its two rear legs, its front legs reaching to the sky as a lightning bolt shot towards it. It was a great symbol of our school's mascot. We won the prize for best float that year, and from there we never looked back as we won every class contest from that point forward.

We came together as one people, unified for one cause. We relished in new and reinforced relationships. Most of all we allowed ourselves to be shaped by the one thing which made it all work - the grace of unconditional acceptance. As much as we molded that papier mache into an award-winning float, we were molded by the love with which we surrounded ourselves.