On Being Picked

for the "REWORK"

 

"Behold, the potter was working at the wheel.  And the vessel that he was making of

clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter.  So he made it over,

 REWORKING it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make it."

(Jeremiah 18:3,4)

 

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Third Sunday after Pentecost, June 17, 2007

First United Methodist Church, 605 West 6^th, Mountain Home, Arkansas 72653

 

This year is the fifty-fifth anniversary of an I Love Lucy classic, “The Candy Factory,” originally aired on September 15, 1952, during the show’s second season.   Introduced before many of us were born, this hilarious episode is recognized and loved across the generations.  Lucy and Ethel switch places with Ricky and Fred.  The boys stay home and do the housework while the girls go out to earn a living, finding a job at a candy factory.  The supervisor made it clear how important their station at the conveyor belt was.  The girls were to be certain not to let a single piece of candy float by their station untouched.  At first it was a snap, the candy slowly passing in front of them.  Lucy and Ethel surged with pride.  Before long, though, the conveyor belt was picking up speed, the candy rushing by in an uncontrollable cascade of sweetness.  The picture of Lucy frantically working on the speeding candy, grabbing and stuffing it everywhere she could -- her coat pockets, her dress, her hat, her mouth – has become a highlight reel fixture in the history of American entertainment.

 

That hilarious scene brings to mind another significant anniversary in the world of candy.  2007 is the 100^th birthday of the Hershey’s Kiss, the teardrop shaped candy that began as an accidental chocolate dripping during manufacture of other chocolate treats.  The origin of the name is unclear, but best guess is that the sound of the candy dripping was a bit like a smooch.  It was wrapped by hand for over a decade, but in 1921 a machine was created that could wrap 1300 Kisses a minute.  The little plume was added three years later, in 1924.      

 

Today, chocolate is dripped at precisely the right weight and temperature onto a continuously running steel conveyor belt, where it goes through a cooling tunnel for 18 minutes, hardening the chocolate.  Hershey's has the capacity to manufacture up to thirty-three million chocolate Kisses in a single day!  Such vast numbers make me think . . . of  Lucy and Ethel.

 

I read about a real life Lucy and Ethel, an employee for Hershey’s named Steve Bailey, who personally gives the finishing inspection to 20,000 of those Kisses – ONLY 20,000 -- every sixty seconds!  LIFE magazine called him a "choco Valentino," a "maestro of the Kiss."  I saw a picture of Steve leaning sideways, his line of sight just above a virtual sea of unwrapped chocolate Kisses.  Steve was searching for anything less than sheer chocolate perfection. 

 

Actually, Steve's job is not as difficult as those enormous numbers might suggest.  He admits that the vast majority of the one million or so Kisses that pass him every hour are already perfect by the time they reach him.  But, he says, some pieces don't quite pass the specifications required.  The company’s expectations of what a Hershey's Kiss is supposed to look like when you unwrap it at home is so high that only ultimate chocolate perfection will do.  Steve will not allow a defective piece of chocolate to pass by him.  When you unwrap a Hershey's Kiss, Steve sees to it that it is exactly 15/16 of an inch diameter at the base, that it has the proper smooth appearance, the right color and texture, that it is not leaning to the side and, above all the imperfections his trained and steady eye checks, the curl at the top can't be either standing up too straight or drooping too low.  It must be perfect!

 

Now, this is what I found interesting.  What happens to the Kisses that fall short of these lofty chocolate requirements?  Steve tells us that he picks out the imperfect specimens of chocolate, brushing them aside to a catch-off pan where they go into a process Hershey’s calls, the Rework, where the defective pieces are melted down, thus mixed with the rest of the pre-hardened batch. And so the process starts all over again, continuing until the process is consummated in sheer chocolate perfection.

 

Defective Kisses brushed aside into Rework?  The image brings to mind the parable for which Jeremiah is most famous, the Parable of the Potter.  "Behold, the potter was working at the wheel.  And the vessel that he was making of clay was spoiled in the hand of the potter.  So he made it over, reworking it into another vessel, as it seemed good to the potter to make it."

 

To be sure, in Jeremiah's time there were no chocolate factories.  The potter at the wheel was the most up-to-date visual Jeremiah could use to illustrate how carefully God works with his people. The potter's workshop was an everyday sight.  Most of us have seen a potter making a vessel out of clay, but usually on special occasions -- craft booths, museums, amusement parks.  For the people of Jeremiah's day, pottery was in everyday use, his skills in high demand.   There are four basic lessons learned in the parable of the Kiss and of the Potter and Clay: 

 

    (1) A product is expected to attain very high standards.  Both the potter and the candy man take enormous pride in the finished product, accepting nothing short of perfection. They are not making junk.  Their work is their art.
 

    (2) Sometimes, the product fails to measure up.  For Steve Bailey, the top may be a bit too curled or the outside texture too rough.  For the potter, the work is said to be "spoiled," probably for the same reasons, the shape wrong, the texture abrasive, or the color not right.
 

    (3) The defective piece is selected for REWORK.  The chocolate is melted down and remixed with the unhardened chocolate.  In the case of the potter, the same occurs.  The clay is remixed with the rest of the wet, soft, pliable clay where the entire process begins again.
 

    (4) And, perhaps the most important thing in gaining a proper understanding of God's message to us is that the selection of who is picked for REWORK is entirely at the discretion of the potter.  If Steve gives it the go-ahead, the chocolate is wrapped in bright foil and shipped to the store where you buy it.  If Steve doesn’t like something about it, it is brushed into the REWORK and the process is started over.  So it is with the potter.   Jeremiah says that the pieces were selected for REWORK, "as it seemed good to the potter."

 

Ready for another 100^th anniversary?  After the sermon we will sing Adelaide Pollard’s famous words, which were put to music 100 years ago in 1907:

 

"Have Thine Own Way, Lord!

Have Thine Own Way! 

Thou art the Potter, I am the Clay.

Mold me and make me, after thy will, 

    While I am waiting, yielded and still."   

 

And yet, how many of us are "waiting, yielded and still?"  That may be so of Steve's little candy pieces, motionless as they are carried along the conveyor belt, passively awaiting inspection.  Chocolate and clay are inanimate objects, by nature “waiting, yielded and still.”  Oh, it may SEEM that things have a mind of their own.  I think so every time I find myself looking for a hammer or a screwdriver.  They seem to move themselves.  I call it the “recalcitrance of inanimate objects.”   Hammer insubordination is what it is, a rebellion of my toolbox against my higher purposes.  Yet, truth be known – the fault is mine (or Sherry’s!), and the simple solution to the mystery is that we forgot to put it back where it belongs after last using it.  The hammer is innocent, “waiting, yielded and still.”

 

Something which cannot be said of you and me.  Our human capacity of free will adds a complicating factor to the parable, something that parables about mushy clay and sweet chocolate simply cannot address.  We are not conveyor belt Christians, but rather have minds and hearts of our own.  That capacity is our glory.  And, at times, our ruin.  We are each of us, through sin, spoiled in the hand of the potter.  My friend Dr. Donald Strobe, retired pastor of First United Methodist in Ann Arbor, titled a sermon on this text, "God and Us Cracked-Pots!" 

 

We all have times in our lives when we feel mis-shapen, time when our lives have developed a texture of which we are not happy or proud.  We feel unformed – sometimes in shame due to poor choices and actions, other times through inevitable processes of living and loss, losing the emotional and spiritual shape we once had.  In such times, we sense that what we were Becoming has been melted down, that we are made to begin again.  While it’s a painful process, we can rejoice in the knowledge that God is not finished with us, that we, to use Paul’s words in Romans 8, are being conformed into the image of his Son Jesus Christ.

 

Here is the Good News for those feeling formless and undone.  That we experience this is evidence that God is yet working with us, that we are clay in the potter’s hand.  God is not finished with us, sending us to the REWORK and, in his time, scooping us up again and placing us back on the upper wheel to craft his workmanship.  He will not then allow us to harden into another mold until we achieve his sovereign purpose. 

 

God re- shapes us.  God re-molds us. Have you ever noticed that the church’s theological vocabulary is full of words that have the prefix, Re-?  Think of some of them.  Re-vival, re-birth, re-new, re-fresh, re-generation, re-store, re-turn, re-pent, re-concile, re-surrection, re-dedicate, re-enlist, re-solve.  This morning we could produce a virtual thesaurus of RE words with a sermon in each one.  Why?  Because our faith is a faith of hope and RE is the prefix of hope. 

 

I love the story of the mountain man standing and talking with a stranger when the mountain man’s old dog suddenly howled in a long, painful tone.  The conversation paused as he glanced lazily down at his dog, who stopped howling and seemed okay.  They continued talking.  But the wailing happened again and again and at last the stranger said, “What’s wrong with your dog?” 

 

The mountain man spit tobacco and said, “I think he’s settin’ on a nail.”

 

“Well, why doesn’t he move?” asked the stranger. 

 

The mountain man slowly replied, “Don’t hurt ‘im ‘nuf to move.  Just hurts ‘im ‘nuf to complain.”

 

Can we not be the same, not quite happy with ourselves, with the progress we are making in our Christian walk, yet no so uncomfortable that we feel we must make changes in our life habits and commitments?  Let us not fear change, but let us trust that with each change God is reworking us, reshaping us into what God wants us to become. 

 

Sources and notes:

“On The Job” section of LIFE, 1993, exact issue unknown.

 

www.hersheyskisses.com