The Cracked Pot
Mark LaValley
Fayetteville, AR
7/16/97
The Cracked Pot
You had enjoyed your visit to Jerusalem until today. With the tour guide herding your pack through the ancient city, you are obligated to continue on. Still, the sun is an oppressive older brother this day, always looking over your rather red shoulder. Tired, you long for shade and for one less opportunity to purchase
ancient clay lamps straight from Bible times. How, you think to yourself, can a person tell the genuine from the counterfeit? The cynic in you answers,
If they’re selling it, it’s fake. The tourist in you, by contrast, hopes for a miracle.
There are many in our community I suppose, who feel like tourists when it comes to the religious realm. Their naive questions and innocent approaches to faith mark them as surely as a tourist’s neck-suspended camera. They are looking for true spiritual life, but have enough street sense to know that all too many churches merely use the techniques of the Jerusalem marketeer: exaggeration, a loud voice, and collaboration with a tour guide. If they knew II Corinthians 4, they might phrase their question this way:
Where can a person find the treasure of the gospel?
Paul addressed this very question when he wrote,
But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God, and not from us.
II Corinthians 4.7. At least a few Corinthians had suggested that Paul was a counterfeit.
How, they asked,
are we to know that you promote true spiritual life? Paul’s answer is as ingenious as it is faithful. Find a person who is as common and fragile as a clay jar but who gives gifts that are as precious as treasure. A former Christian killer turned church planter is a good bet. So is a teacher turned encourager, a business person turned philanthropist, and a homemaker turned spiritual guide. When we find uncommon grace in a common, flawed person, we are very close to the kingdom — Jesus came in a common form yet bearing a truly unique gift.
Finally! you say to a fellow tourist. The tour guide has promised that this is the last trinket stand on your way back to the hotel. You turn to leave when a luminous spark catches your eye among the clay artifacts. Spotting the special jar, you examine its contents to find an ancient gold coin lodged deep down in its throat. The tourist in you is rewarded in finding the genuine article among the unreal.
May our lives also bear witness to genuine treasure — the tourist’s only reward.
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Mark LaValley
Fayetteville, AR
