Finding beauty in the brokenness
Third Sunday of Easter, April 18, 2021
Luke 24:36b-48
We love beauty! And who can blame us? This world that surrounds us can so often fill our senses with its lovely cloudscapes, gracious trees, blossoms, oceans, deserts and mountains, and all the wildlife that inhabit it. We can feel so close to God in the simple act of walking and paying attention to the beauty that surrounds us.
And as Episcopalians we delight in the beauty of our buildings, our vestments, altar coverings, candles, stained glass, the bells, our music, our flowers. We know we can find God in this exquisiteness. We know we can find the holy in beauty.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. God is here to be found: be in no doubt.
But, rather like Mary outside the tomb on that first Easter morning, sometimes we can be so sure of what we’re looking for that we can miss what’s actually there: we can fail to recognize the risen Christ standing beside us in situations less exquisite.
Our gospel reading for today has Jesus standing, complete with wounded hands and feet amid the startled and fearful disciples. They are hiding in Jerusalem behind locked doors. Today’s collect opens with the words:
Wounded God, disabled and divine, give us faith to perceive you, pierced and embodied, standing here among us feeding us forgiveness...
Wounded God, disabled and divine: is this how we usually think of God? This isn’t the lofty, elevated, beautiful language we are accustomed to use, is it?
How easy it is to forget how comfortable God is in the broken places in our world. How God can be found as often in the pain and tragedy of our world as in the seemingly simpler exquisite.
We have only to think of our Christian story after all. We may airbrush out the squalor of that first century Palestinian stable, and fill it with symmetry, light and angel’s voices: but it’s unlikely to have been so pristine.
We have to work harder to clean up the crucifixion scene. We can lean into our memories of beautiful alabaster pietas and that can help. But let us not forget that in the cruelty and agony of that scene at Golgotha, God was absolutely present – even if there had been a moment when Jesus felt he had been abandoned.
The problem is that since it is so relatively easy to find God in the beautiful places in our world, we might be deceived into thinking that we shouldn’t look for God in the other places: the ugly, the violent, the anguished places. How could we find God there?
Where was God on January 6th, in the Capitol? In the eleven mass shootings that have already rocked this country since the beginning of the year? In the continued unjustified violence directly related to our racially biased system. In the injustice and inequity of our economic systems. And what about the atrocities and tragedies occurring in the rest of the world?
If we believe in a God in all things, we need to acknowledge God’s presence in all things in our world: the good, the bad and the ugly. And we need to think about how God is present in all things. Is God keeping God’s hands clean way up in the skies, or is God right in the middle of things, inviting us to touch and see?
And if God is in the middle of things, why isn’t God fixing all the pain? Sorting it all out for once and for all. If God is so powerful and so loving, how can there still be so much injustice, violence, and pain still going on?
All valid questions: if you believe that the main narrative should be “How God single-handedly saved the world: because God could”.
I don’t believe that is what’s going on. God is not going to single-handedly do anything, not that God couldn’t, but simply because that’s not how it works.
Remember the answers to those five questions that are part of our Reaffirmation of our Baptismal Vows, “I will, with God’s help.”
God is with us in all things, yearning for us to make the choices that will free all of us to grow into our God-given, life-filled vocations. Loving us and forgiving us again and again, encouraging and supporting us to be resurrected into new life from the darkness of the tomb.
God meets us in our woundedness, our brokenness. A God as wounded and broken as we are, showing us the gift, the grace, and the beauty of that moment, and yearning for us to embrace the love and healing that is for us and the world. A world that is so wracked and roiled by seemingly unresolvable problems, almost entirely caused by human failings that individually and corporately we need to own and repent. God fixing things once and for all, is never going to help us.
Our Christian story gives us the huge gift of the incarnation. In Jesus we have someone who lived our human life: who can be with us viscerally, knowing our pain, grieving with us, being crucified with us – and being resurrected with us. The risen and beautiful Christ who stands among us in our pain, ‘wounded, disabled and divine’, ‘feeding us forgiveness,’ yearning for us to claim our power as agents of healing. To conclude, I rephrase, in the first person plural, some words from a 4th century sermon of St. Augustine:
We are the body of Christ. In us and through us the work of the incarnation must go forward. We are to be taken; we are to be blessed, broken and distributed:
that we may be the means of grace and the vehicles of eternal love.