The Cup of our Life – sometimes empty, sometimes overflowing; eventually chipped by the knocks and jostles of life, and sometimes broken altogether

March 13, 2005 Des Moines

TEXT: Matthew 25:31-46

Preached following a report of the Mission Team just returned from El Salvador

The Cup of Compassion

You could say that these trips to El Salvador that we have undertaken now for four years have occurred in the context of brokenness. It is a country that still quite plainly bears the marks of civil war that only ended in the last decade; a war that left in its wake broken families, broken communities and a broken economy. It is a country broken not nearly in half, but certainly in two by a deep and wide economic divide separating a few wealthy “haves” from the vast majority who have very little. And it is a country broken by earthquakes that have destroyed whole communities. But as the members of our mission team just returned will tell you – or any of those who have gone before – brokenness is not nearly the final word in this humble but magnificent country, nor with the people who are native to it. In fact, it need never be the final word.

We have been talking, throughout this Lenten season, about “The Cup of our Life” – sometimes empty, sometimes overflowing; eventually chipped by the knocks and jostles of life, and sometimes broken altogether. It has been our metaphor for life in the Spirit of God. Last week we spent some time in our tears – rubbing our fingers over the jagged edges where our contented wholeness has been shattered; honoring the grief and pain that inevitably wounds our days in ways that allow the fullness of joy to seep out into puddles of loss. But the point of our thinking wasn’t simply to echo again the truism that “life is hard and spent scabbing over one wound after another.” What we affirmed was that brokenness can very well be the birth process of new life. Our pain can help us grow larger, deeper, stronger; in a word, better.

We need to recognize that it doesn’t happen automatically. Some people are simply broken by their experiences, and spend their subsequent years as craggy, jagged people – pained, and also painful. The reality is that brokenness results in neither spontaneous edification, nor glorification. It is, if I might turn the metaphor a bit, simply and wonderfully the raw material of growth.

Some of us have read a little of the writings by Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who was born in 1926. An activist and spiritual innovator within Buddhist tradition, and an inquisitive mind unencumbered by the belief that he already knows it all, Nhat Hanh has spent a lifetime listening for the wisdom of God as revealed in his own tradition, but in other traditions as well – including our own. Sensing the interconnectedness of all life, he reflects on this very interconnectedness between the kind of brokenness we named last week, and the kind of compassion we are nudged toward living today.

“When we look deeply at a flower,” he writes, “we can see that it is made entirely of non-flower elements, like sunshine, rain, soil, compost, air and time. If we continue to look deeply, we will also notice that the flower is on her way to becoming compost. If we don’t notice this, we will be shocked when the flower begins to decompose. When we look deeply at the compost, we see that it is also on its way to becoming flowers, and we realize that flowers and compost ‘inter-are.’ They need each other. A good organic gardener does not discriminate against compost, because he knows how to transform it into marigolds, roses and many other kinds of flowers.

When we look deeply into ourselves, we see both flowers and garbage. Each of us has anger, hatred, depression, racial discrimination and many other kinds of garbage in us, but there is no need for us to be afraid. In the way that a gardener knows how to transform compost into flowers, we can learn the art of transforming anger, depression and racial discrimination into love and understanding.”[1]

Our brokenness made into the compost of new and colorful life. It is something of what we have seen accomplished by the Salvadorans we have met and worked alongside: people who have taken the garbage of their existence – the brokenness of miserable circumstances – and converted it into gracious generosity and hospitality.

There are other blossoms potential as well: like the gift of compassion. Compassion, which literally means “to suffer with,” involves a deep awareness of the suffering of another coupled with the desire to relieve it. I suppose there are those who are simply constitutionally bent in the shape of compassion, but I am convinced that most of us learn how to give it by our own experience of ache and need. Those most readily offer a cup of cool water whose throats have stuck from thirst, themselves.

Jesus calls us to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to shelter the homeless and visit the imprisoned, and some might manage to find in those broken the pieces of the face of Christ by simple obedience. But most of us will know how to pour from our cup of compassion – will know how to recognize Jesus in those faces because in our own seasons of brokenness someone recognized Jesus’ face in our’s.

By the grace of God, the garbage – the brokenness of our lives – becomes the compost that gives rise to new blossoms of compassion, wisdom, and generous grace. Thanks be to God.

[1] Excerpted by Janet Parachin in Engaged Spirituality: Ten Lives of Contemplation and Action (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1999) pp. 73-74.