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I remember the first week back to school in—I think it was grade 5. My teacher that year, Mrs Katz, had asked a few of us to stay after class and help her finish decorating for the start of the year. Mrs Katz was your stereotypical elementary school teacher: curly bright red hair. Oversized glasses. Eccentric clothing. She was a real Miss Frizzle.

As a reward for helping her after class, Mrs Katz let us play Pac-Man on the laptop computers the school had added to grade 5 classrooms that year. This was the era of typing with a metal shield over the keyboard, so you would learn to type without looking at your fingers. The laptops were brought in for that purpose but of course it was Pac-Man that was the real draw. 

It was me, my friend Allison, and a boy named Claude who got asked to stay. After we'd helped Mrs Katz tidy up, we each had a turn playing Pac-Man and then made our way home. I remember the three of us: me, Allison, and Claude walking home. Allison and I were a few paces ahead while Claude was traipsing behind singing, “This is the song that never ends . . .”. 

It was, of course, having its intended effect. We were still a few blocks from home when my friend and I decided that we'd had it. We stopped, turned around, and said something along the lines of “Cut it out already! You're being so annoying!” 

Then, we gave Claude a big hard shove into the bushes. As Claude was stumbling backwards he missed the hedge and landed instead on the sidewalk. We heard a big *crunch*. Claude's backpack had broken his fall. Phew! But, as Claude took off his backpack his eyes began to fill with tears. He opened his bag and pulled out one by one the pieces of the pottery bowl he'd made that morning in school.  

What happened next, you ask? Suddenly, there was the screech of car tires. There was Mrs Katz who had apparently been watching this whole scene unfold as she drove home. The passenger door flew open. Mrs Katz leaned over from the steering wheel.

“Girls!” she said.

“What in heaven's name is going on? Get in here right now!”

Mrs Katz drove us home, Claude in the front seat clutching his bag, Allison and I slumped down in the back. I can't remember what our punishment was, or if Mrs Katz ever told our parents. I do remember Allison and I clapping a lot of chalkboard erasers during recess that year while everyone else went out to play. (Do you remember those chalkboard erasers? You'd think I was telling a story from the 1800s; this was the 90s!).

This story is one of my earliest childhood memories of becoming aware of my power, this physical strength that we weren't necessarily taught that we had as girls. It was also one of my earliest memories of learning that boys cry, too, that regardless of gender, there was this thing called human fragility: that people have the ability to experience hurt and to cause it.

Because this was such a formative childhood experience, that image of Claude's pottery smashing in his backpack often comes to mind when we have this passage from Jeremiah as one of our readings. It's not an easy passage; if we read it anthropocentrically God is a potter who yes lovingly molds and shapes human beings but also breaks and destroys them. It's also one of a few passages in Scripture where God is portrayed as an entity which human beings can influence, a God who will change their behaviour if human beings change theirs. It's a passage that portrays at once the fragility and the power of human beings in relationship with the Creator. 

The prophet Jeremiah shows us that power and fragility do not exist independently. They very much go—to use pottery imagery—hand in hand. If you've ever thrown clay on a potter's wheel you'll know that the slightest shift in your hands, the smallest application of pressure from your fingers can change the shape of the clay instantly. You must be gentle, careful, deliberate with the power you bring to the wheel. At the same time, if you don't put your hands to the clay at all and allow it just to spin round and round, you risk the clay sliding off the wheel in a splattering mess. 

Indeed, power and fragility are interdependent. As humans created in the image of this potter God, I wonder where you exercise power and where you experience fragility? I wonder, as you're heading back to school or heading back to work or resuming whatever routines mark this time of year for you, where it is you feel your heart soft and malleable and where you find it tough and unmoldable? Remember, the two are not mutually exclusive. 

In the Christian faith, it is being in relationship with a potter God that helps us to attend to this interdependence of power and fragility in our lives. Some call it discipleship, others spiritual practice. Whatever your name for the routines that help you connect with God, Source of All Being, Eternal Word, and Holy Spirit, I hope you will find here at St Clement’s a place for that relationship to be nurtured. Bible study; prayer; youth group; singing with the choir; reading in church; simply carving out an hour on Sundays to come and worship; all of these are faithful acts of discipleship, all of these help us to recognize the hands—ours and God's—at the potter's wheel. Amen.