How the Light Gets In: Sermon for Proper 18C, the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

Last year the long-awaited sequel to Mary Poppins hit the theatres, with Mary Poppins taking care of Michael Banks’s children, who have just lost their mother. In one of the scenes, the children break a bowl that had belonged to their late mother, a bowl that she had told them was priceless. So one of their adventures occurs when Mary Poppins takes them and the bowl to her cousin, played by the incredible Meryl Streep, who is known to be able to fix anything. They arrive to find that the cousin’s life itself is a bit topsy-turvy at the moment, and set about to try to help put it right. I don’t want to spoil it—you need to watch the movie. 

But it got me to thinking: What do most of us do with a broken bowl? In our culture today, most often the answer is to throw it away. After all, goods are relatively cheap. But sometimes, we decide we want to try to mend the pot. Maybe it’s got sentimental value, like the bowl the Banks children had. So if we decide to keep the bowl, we look for the crazy glue or the clear gorilla glue, and we try to make the bowl look as if it had never been broken. We like things to look perfect. But really, are we just fooling ourselves? In our hearts we will probably always remember that the bowl has been broken. 

When I was 12 our family visited friends in Japan, and I learned that Japanese have another answer for what to do with a broken pottery bowl: they embrace the breaks and imperfections and mend the bowl if possible. The Japanese practice an art of repairing broken pottery known as kintsugi, that embraces the broken places and spaces within the pot, embraces the cracks—and even embellishes them. As the poet Jane Hirshfield notes in an essay on the healing quality of poetry, and its ability to sit within the broken places, the words “healing and health” come from the word “wholeness.” She explains: 

 “Wholeness does not mean unmarred, or simple, or ignorant of suffering. It does not exclude any part of experience or history. Consider kintsugi, a Japanese repair technique that is both an aesthetic and a philosophical stance. In reassembling a broken tea bowl, a cup, or a plate, the repairing artisan uses, in place of transparent glue, a mix of lacquer and powdered gold. The end result is not an object trying to appear as if it had never been damaged: kintsugi, done well, offers damage made visible as part of the cup’s history, damage made beautiful because the cup was repaired without denial. It may be that any fully rounded truth, seen without denial, will appear to us as beauty. …Kintsugi accepts life’s irreparability and embraces it.”(1) 

Can there be beauty in brokenness? I am reminded of the line from the great singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen’s song, “Anthem:” 

The birds they sand
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
will pass away
Or what is yet to be

Yeah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in  (2)

In our reading from Jeremiah today, the prophet is sent to watch a potter at work at his or her wheel. He observes the potter’s activity so that he may see the metaphor of the clay as synonymous with the people of Israel. Yahweh is the potter. The warning contained in Jeremiah is that if God realizes that the clay is misshapen, God can smash it and destroy so that Yahweh can begin again—we remember that, because it scares us. At any moment, the prophet perceives, the potter could simply destroy the pot rather than repair it, deciding it is too spoiled. This is intended as a warning for the prophet to convey to the people: because of their resistance to God, they too have become misshapen, and risk being destroyed by God as punishment. 

The message communicated there is one that still remains powerful for some people, especially in dominant American Christianity. They see someone's suffering as being placed upon them by God, in punishment for something wrong they have done. It’s a simple proposition: they believe that God punishes wrongdoing with suffering, so if they are suffering, it must be due to their own sinfulness. 

Others of us see flaws in this reasoning. First of all, sometimes people immersed in wrongdoing prosper and innocent people suffer. Sometimes people emerge from trials in their lives scarred and misshapen through no fault of their own. On the other hand, others scoff entirely, and deny any agency of God in times of suffering or trial. 

In the centuries since Jeremiah was written, we have acquired great knowledge about science, medicine, and technology. We explain human behavior through relatively new fields, like psychology. And for some people, that is enough. They think they’ve got it all figured out, and that we human beings are in charge. Yet even with this mindset, most would agree with the idea that we, like clay, are molded and shaped through life. There are many influences that shape us throughout our lives. As much as we like to think that we are responsible in making ourselves and our lives, Jeremiah reminds us that God is there all the time, asking our willingness to be shaped and molded into healing and wholeness. 

But we also have to acknowledge that God is not our only influence. We also have to acknowledge that we are also shaped by others. And indeed, every person who has passed through our lives has a role in shaping the person each of us have become. Sometimes, we are shaped lovingly, kindly, and we become better, stronger, more beautiful. Sometimes, we fall into harsher hands, hands that attempt to squeeze us too tightly, or press upon us too hard, and we have trouble maintaining our balance as we limp away, misshapen, listing to one side. 

Some people have the utter gall to see others’ brokenness as fatal, and to declare them useless, fit only for being thrown away. That, my friends, is spitting upon the image of God that resides within all of us and all of creation. It also ignores the fact that we all have wear and tear within us, we all have brokenness. It must be a way of refusing to acknowledge their own pain and imperfections—I don’t know. It’s not up to us to decide who is worthy and who is not. It is just our job to love each other. 

We are called to acknowledge that a good portion of the rest of us may spend a huge chunk of our lives trying to make up for the injuries inflicted upon us by some of those influences in our lives. Some of us have lived through episodes in our childhoods that haunt us and have threatened to crush us—the shouts of our mothers and fathers that arose in the night and awakened us from childhood sleep night after night, or alcoholic rages that break the dishes. Hands that have touched us in anger, seeking to break us rather than shape us. Hands that have attempted to shape us for their own ends, who have used us and then discarded us. 

Those of us on a journey of faith often arrive here because we are crying out for God’s healing hands in our lives, to help us come to peace with injuries or breaks like the ones just described. To talk about a God who is waiting to crush us is to show that we do not understand God’s message at all. It just doesn’t fit with the God we have experienced in dark moments in our lives—a God of incredible power, yes, but the power to support us with limitless love, a God whose faith in US forgives us for our sins and foolishness and lack of faith over and over again. 

Of all the books in the Bible, according to Old Testament expert Walter Brueggemann, it is Jeremiah that depicts God suffering real distress when faced with our casting God away.(3) The most important message to take from the full sweep of Jeremiah is this: it is a broken-hearted God who is taking the initiative in trying to renew and reconcile the relationship between humanity and God, both as individuals and as groups. The book of Jeremiah is notable for its portrayal of God as suffering real pain and hurt from the betrayal by the people. That’s what should stand out to us—not the threatened destruction that too many people like to imagine God holding over human heads. 

The problem with using verses like these to attempt to frighten us into some sort of rigid behavior is that it ignores the overriding thrust of the truth that God has revealed to us over and over again: that God reaches out to us repeatedly, and loves us unconditionally, even when we go our own blind way. 

God also uses us human agents—friends and relations who care about us—to try to help us toward healing from the places we have been broken in our relationships with others. If we really observe our pain, and open ourselves to healing, we become aware that, like we have heard in our reading from the letter to the Hebrews last week, we have encountered angels within our lives, usually unaware that they were such until later. God is also there both as a presence and in sending us healing friends and companions, offering healing to those of us who have been harmed and marred by the actions of ourselves or others within our lives—if only we will accept the hope and promise of God’s grace and healing hand to help us. To make us whole. And the Hebrew word for wholeness is “shalom.” 

And we can do the same for others. Our own brokenness is how the light gets in, as Leonard Cohen sang, and brings us to empathy and compassion and the practice of forgiveness and grace with others. That’s a gift from God—that our mended places can give us insight into helping others along their journey to healing and wholeness of God. Rather than marinating in old hurts and resentments, and allowing them to continue to mar our lives, we have another choice—we can let that light in, shining on all the darkest places within us, and accept God’s healing love, and become forces for healing ourselves. 

As the parable of the Prodigal Son reminds us, God is not a vengeful father waiting to crush us into dust. Rather, God runs to us the second we turn back from our errant ways, and just when we think we are as far as we can be from God, in our repenting we turn and find God right alongside us all along. God sends God’s own son to be one of us—and thereby experiences all the pain and loss that is part of our human existence. 

That is why this image from Jeremiah of a potter at a wheel is the centerpiece of a medieval poem prayed during the Jewish observance of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On a day that is dedicated to repentance and seeking forgiveness, the liturgy still reminds us that, like an artist, God has made us, and continually is working within our lives, even when we go astray. God understands our weaknesses, and through the gift of unlimited grace calls us again and again to reconcile with God and with each other, to allow ourselves to be shaped, to acknowledge that God can transform and sustain us even in our darkest moments because God made each of us, whether saint or sinner, cares for us, and loves us for all eternity.

That’s actually right there in the same readings that others twist for their own ends. But there is also good news about healing for those of us who have been bruised and battered by some of the hands that have shaped us throughout our lives. We are not called to be perfect. We are not called to be unafraid all the time. We are not called to never have doubts or questions. We ARE called to embody God’s healing, reconciling presence into a broken, divided, hurting, fearful world, as best we can. To be bearers of God’s grace because we have been recipients of God’s grace. 

As our readings from Jeremiah and our psalm reminds us, God presses upon us behind and before, God’s hand is upon us, shaping us, never giving up on us, reconciling who we are with who God intends for us to be – a people forgiven, healed, renewed, shaped! A people empowered to go forth into the world, reconciled and at peace with ourselves, and with our God, and with one another. A people called to help embody God’s healing hands in the lies of others. That’s how it works. 

The hands of God’s love never stop trying to ease us, to soothe us, to work with us and within us to help shape us into our best selves. Like a potter at her wheel, God’s hands are creating within us, right now, offering us a profound sense of release, a profound reconciliation, a profound sense of peace and wholeness—the kind of peace that comes from being in the presence of a love that is so amazing that we are reshaped, and are never the same again. 

 A peace that comes to us through a God that reaches out to us, again and again, constantly trying to embrace our brokenness as avenues toward beauty. Because that is how the light gets in.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on September 7 and at 8:00am and 10:30am on September 8, 2019 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:
Jeremiah 18:1-11Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17Philemon 1-21Luke 14:25-33

Citations:
1) Jane Hirshfield, “Poetry, Permeability, and Healing,” at The American Academy of Poetry, July 1, 2018, at https://poets.org/text/poetry-permeability-and-healing
2) Leonard Cohen, "Anthem," from the album The Future, 1992.
3) Walter Brueggemann, A Commentary on Jeremiah: Exile and Homecoming