March 6, 2005 Des Moines

TEXT: John 12:24-26

The Broken Cup

In the summer of 1978, I traveled to Europe with the T.C.U. religion department for a study abroad course called “Religious Architecture and Art.” Over the four weeks of our experience we spent a lot of time in museums and churches, staring at paintings, walking around sculptures, dropping coins into light timers to study frescoed ceilings, and comparing the airy ingenuity of Gothic cathedrals and their “flying buttresses” with Romanesque’s sturdy arches and solid walls. Of course it wasn’t all study. We managed to squeeze in a few minutes of shopping.

One of the treasures with which I returned home was a piece of porcelain sculpture about the size of a shoe box that I found in Florence, Italy. The sculpture depicted a rather eccentric looking musician playing a grand piano. I remember that an entire orchestra was available, but the piano with its player was my favorite, and the most that I could afford. The musician’s fingers curled delicately over the keyboard. Sheets of music lay disheveled on the corner of the instrument. A single candle was situated near the music rack, with a perfect little porcelain flame. It was wonderful!

I carried my prize home in its styrofoam box on my lap, along with the cuckoo clock I found in Germany, and I have treasured them ever since. The piano player graced my apartment in seminary, and every home I have lived in since, miraculously surviving each successive move with only the tiniest damages that only the closest of examinations would observe. Until our most recent move. He successfully moved from Europe to the U.S.; crisscrossed Texas, and from there to Des Moines, but it could not manage to move across town. Here it lives, a boxed set of crumbled memories and broken porcelain. Too ruined to display, but too precious to throw away, I just keep the fragments as they are, not knowing what else to do.

In my head I know how fortunate I’ve been to keep it this long, with its delicate details and fragile substance. In my mind I should have known it was only a matter of time. As with most things.

Sooner or later, all of us manage to accrue some experience with brokenness. A broken bone; a broken heart; a broken family; a broken toilet. We might break the ice, or break off negotiations; we may break into a conversation or break the chains that bind us, but we will learn how fragile the pieces of life finally are.

For some breaks there is a cast to facilitate the healing, or a wrench, a nail, or perhaps some glue; while for others we simply wait on time to work its magic. Some breaks benefit from counseling, while others are the result of it. Some crumble from the hands of violence – twisted, shattered, snapped – while others result from the natural course of creation.

It is that last type – the natural, life-cycle sort – with which I am acutely familiar just now, still picking up pieces of myself following the death of my uncle. Grief is one of those dismantling experiences. Many of you know that far better, far more dearly than I. As we have stood together around gravesides, you and I, we have affirmed our faith in the resurrection of the dead – in mortality “putting on immortality” as the Apostle Paul put it – and shared our conviction that we will stand together again with our loved one in that saintly choir gathered around the very throne of heaven. And we aren’t just saying it. We believe it. Passionately. Fervently.

But believing it doesn’t eradicate the pain. Our faith does not reassemble the fragments of our companionship and affection that litter our souls like broken glass. We may be comforted, but we are nonetheless still broken.

As Joyce Rupp, our spiritual guide throughout this Lenten season through her book, The Cup of Our Life, observes, those times “when hurts, wounds, pains, and adversities of all sorts invade our lives” change us forever. The pain “knocks us over, like a cup on its side. When it happens, she writes, “all we can do is try to survive, slowly recover, and start anew” (p. 88).

Of course brokenness isn’t always catastrophic. It isn’t always the death of a loved one or the loss of a job or the severing of a friendship. Sometimes it consists of the “smaller, daily obstacles and irritations” that chip away at us, or scratch at our soul – a physical ache or pain, an unhealthy habit, a challenging family member or a nagging dissatisfaction. It could be that “thorn in the flesh” from which Paul, the Apostle, prayed to be released. It manifests in any number of faces, large and small, gruesome and merely distasteful, but its character is well-familiar. Whatever it looks like, we know what it feels like: brokenness, and we would rather be whole.

The first thing to affirm in the midst of the rubble is the legitimacy of the pain. It is no sign of weakness to admit that we hurt. If you read the book of Psalms you will see that our spiritual forebears were neither embarrassed nor hesitant to give voice to their pain – in public as well as private – and it ought to be instructive to us that such laments come to us under the name of “scripture”; not just writings, but holy texts. With loud and descriptive voices they bared their soul to God, more than occasionally calling God to account for their misery. It’s OK to acknowledge our brokenness, understanding that just such voicing is the first authentic step toward healing.

The second thing we can affirm by faith is that brokenness isn’t the final word. That’s what the Apostle Paul was getting at, I think, in his familiar word to the Romans:

“…we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Or as Eugene Peterson paraphrases it, “That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.” Every detail – even the pain.

But is it possible that brokenness is more than merely the inevitable bumps in the road that living creatures are obliged to overcome with God’s gracious assistance? Is it possible that brokenness carries some larger, salutary worth? What would happen, Rupp asks us, “if we met our frustrations, pains, and heartaches as we would meet a visitor having something to teach us? What if we lingered a bit with our brokenness and asked it to help us to grow? What might we learn from those pieces of our lives that are still wanting and incomplete?” (p. 88)

What if we came to the same insight as writer Macrina Wiederkehr, who observed, “The most helpful discovery of today has been that right in the midst of my sorrows there is always room for joy. Joy and sorrow are sisters; they live in the same in house.” In fact, could it be that brokenness and wholeness, joy and sorrow, don’t merely co-exist, but that pain is a nourishment to joy? Could it be that brokenness is a teacher – an entrée into fuller life?

While preparing his disciples for his own impending death, Jesus observed, “

“…unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” (John 12:23-25).

There is, in other words, something necessary – something essential – about the brokenness in store. To the extent that we barricade ourselves against breaking we insulate ourselves from growth. “Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,” it remains mere possibility. Saving our lives from the pain of living will only cause them to be lost.

Perhaps we might learn from the wisdom of the forest. Forest fires seem terrifically destructive. We have seen their terrifying power on the news in recent years as waves of flames have overtaken whole communities in the west, and firefighters have coughed and flagged attempting to stop their spread. It’s tempting to define them as unmitigated evil.

But it turns out there is more to the story. The forests, themselves, are in some measure the product of the fires that seem to diminish them. Forest fires clear away the brushy scrub that competes with other seeds, allowing the towers of trees to secure their standing. Some species actually depend upon forest fires to reproduce. The Giant Sequoia tree, for example, opens its cones and releases seeds only in the extreme heat produced by fire.

Author George Wuethner writes, "Fires can be regarded in the same manner as predators. Just as wolves maintain the fitness of a deer herd, fire helps to maintain the fitness of the forest ecosystem."

We don’t enjoy the blackened surfaces, neither the jagged edges nor the broken pieces, but we would grow. We would become all that God has imagined us to be, and so we will see in our pain the seeds of our enlargement – the birth pangs of the fuller, richer, towering wholeness God beckons us to be – opened by the heat, and watered along the way by our tears.