"A Life of Quiet Brokenness" Romans 8:18-25
We gather in worship, in prayer, in meditation to make personal the life, the suffering, the death, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
We come with our struggle of making Jesus someone who is real and alive for us in this day and age. We come with the struggle of letting Jesus be the Lord and the master of life. We come with the struggle of surrendering our sinful natures, our sinful selves to Him. We come struggling with our pride, and our conceit which says,"Wait a minute, I don’t need a God. I can handle life well enough by myself."We struggle that someone had to die for me, that I am that bad that someone had to die for me. Lord, we struggle and in our struggle we are beginning to see, oh so dimly, what it means to have YOU as Lord and Saviour of life.
We come not only struggling with our thoughts, our feelings, our doubts, our questions about Jesus as Lord of life. These questions we will constantly struggle with, but at the same time, we come with our suffering, with our pain, with our grief, with our sorrow, with our feeling the brokenness of this world and how that penetrates into our lives. We come as people who all to often feel the sinfulness of the creation, people who feel that life is unfair, people who feel that maybe God is not interested in my pain, my hurt and my fracturedness.
Tonight we are going to focus on the pain of the world, on the suffering, the quiet brokenness you and I endure as we walk our daily walk.
Paul says very clearly in our lesson from Romans that you and I live in a fallen and broken world. He says,"We know that the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now." We live in a wounded and fallen world. A world that is no longer perfect, a world that is filled with sin, with temptation, with sickness, with sorrow, with tragedy, with pain, with loneliness, with broken relationships and with people feeling that are not what they would like to be.
Because of the kind of world we live in, my life, at times, is like that of Job’s. What I mean by that phrase, is, there is suffering in this world which is not caused by something that someone did to themselves, or what someone else did to them, but there is suffering, period. Suffering because of the brokenness which is all around us and it affects us in a whole host of ways.
With this as a fact, that we live in a less that perfect world, then, we are forced to be realistic about what is happening to each of us. As we realize that life is not going the way we like, that there are, indeed times when I encounter the suffering of this world, no matter how hard I try to cover it up, we come up against the age old question, why? Why me??
Why me? is a question which a pastor hears very often and which I have asked very often in my personal life. Why, Lord, does this have to happen to me? Our whys can be answered in all sorts of ways: ONE, a poem, "Our problems are like gates in our lives each day.....Some are easy to open but others seem like they are locked and the key thrown away....We come to a gate and we knock and we pound....We ask why?....But no answer can be found....Then if we settle down, and we stop to think and pray....Before we know it, the gate is opened and in answer to our problem we have found a way....There will be many gates in our lives that we think we can’t enter in....Let’s not just sit around and ask, why?....We know that in our daily lives we have sinned....So let us kneel and ask forgiveness from God above....Our gates will be opened through His wondrous love...Our problems will seem small, if our faith is strong...And if we remember, God has the key to our gate....And we can’t go wrong." by Gertie Mork, St. Paul’s, Irwin,.Iowa.
That beautiful poem by Gertie Mork speaks of the hope and the faith a person in God has to answer our whys, to answer our prayers. I believe that God, indeed, does have the key to the questions in all of our lives. On the other hand, sometimes in the short run of things, we cannot see that key. We are blinded by our own brokenness, our honest anger, or the human emotions which God has granted to each which allow us as Paul says to see in a mirror dimly, that is, not understanding all the mysteries of life. I believe that we should allow God those mysteries.
But too many times, well meaning friends, TV evangelists, our own family members want answers, want the prayers answered that have been prayed. Why, God, why not heal me, why not save me from death. Why do I have to live in these broken relationships? We pray for change, we pray for God’s action and sometimes, we cannot see that action in our lives.
In his book"Where is God in my Praying?", Daniel Simundson speaks about these unanswered prayers. He says,"One explanation for God’s refusal to grant my prayer may be that God is angry with me about something." This is one of the most used explanations and one which hurts far too many people. For in this answer, guilt is laid upon a person. Maybe there is something wrong in your life? Maybe there is some hidden sin? Maybe if you had been better in your youth, God would listen to you now? Or another favorite line we have all heard as Daniel Simundson says:"Perhaps the problem is my lack of faith." If only I had faith enough, then God would answer my prayers my way.?? He continues,"Faith healers on TV insist that if we believe strongly enough, anything is possible. They parade before us fantastic examples of miracles that occurred because people believed strongly enough. It is as if the power of God to answer prayer is dependent on our ability to believe what is possible."
Another example of how our suffering turns inward and makes us feel that God is not on our side is the little phrase that we use which says:"if it be your will."
Daniel Simundson says further:"Some people tell us that even to say such a thing indicates a lack of faith on our part, a hedging of our bets, an underlying distrust, a willingness to settle for too little and therefore, our prayer is doomed to failure. Others say that such a phrase indicates a trust in God that transcends the way this particular request will be handled and leaves the larger picture up to God, affirming that God has our welfare in mind, no matter what happens." He continues,"In the long term we believe God’s will is done. That is a statement of faith....In the short term, in the here and now, we cannot say that every event is willed by God. Terrible things happen in this world, but that is not to say these things are God’s will. The Bible teaches that sin came into the world through human beings. It was not God’s will that the humans turn away from God in defiance, distrust and disobedience."
Dr. William Sloan Coffin of New York’s Riverside Church said this in the April 20,1984 Lutheran Standard after the death of his son, Alex."The night after Alex died, I was sitting in the living room of my sister’s house outside of Boston, when a middle-aged lady came in, shook her head when she saw me and said,"I just don’t understand the will of God." Instantly, I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. "I’ll say you don’t, lady!!" I said. (I knew the anger would do me good, and the instruction to her was long overdue. )
I continued,"Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his, that he was probably driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of ’frosties’ too many? Do you think it is God’s will that there are no street lights along that stretch of road, and no guard rails separating the road and Boston Harbor?"
Dr. Coffin continues in the article:"Nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with His fingers on triggers, His fist around knives, His hands on steering wheels. God is against all unnatural deaths. And Christ spent an inordinate amount of time delivering people from paralysis, insanity, leprosy and muteness. As Alex’s younger brother put it simply, standing at the head of the casket:"You blew it buddy. You blew it."
Dr. Coffin continues:"The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is,"It is the will of God." Never do we know enough to say that. My consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s was the first of all our hearts to break."
The will of God is love and that love was and still is expressed in the cross, in the brokenness of life. The theology of glory which says God can only be found, or most easily found in the good, in the rich,in the blessed,in the healthy, denies the human condition of sin and brokenness which Christ conquered for us on the cross. If God is only found in a "bed of roses","only found in miracle cures, "" only found where people are experiencing the "goodness of life","only found where people are blessed beyond their means with material goods"..."only found in a high emotional experience of faith"... only found in a theology of glory which is presented very dramatically by many of the TV personalities...... then I wonder: why do we have a cross as the focal point of our faith.? Good Friday showed us very clearly our need of a Saviour, that I cannot save or redeem myself, that is God’s work not mine. For if God is found only in all the glorious moments of life, then many of us would be without a God. However, I believe with my whole soul, that God is not only found in the "glory" of life, but He is, at the same time found in the brokenness of life, in and through a theology of the cross. I should not and I will not feel guilty because somehow the preconceived " glory of God" that others feel should be present in my life as expressed in total healing is not. I am and you are whole even in our brokenness. Christ waswhole, God’s Son was whole on the cross.
I am tired of those who play games with my faith by accusing me that because "God’s glory" has not been manifested in some visible way, in total healing, that I am any less a Christian, or have a weak faith, or have a hidden sin, which an anonymous tape sent to me a year ago, accused me of, since I remain in the brokenness of chronic illness. Through Christ, each person, in what ever state they find themselves: are equally children of God. I am no less God’s child in my wheel chair, than you are walking on your own two feet.
Daniel Simundson says:"We do not always know why our prayers remain unanswered. Perhaps it is best not to push so hard for an explanation that we lock ourselves into a cycle of blame, assuming some deficiency in ourselves, or that God lacks concern, knowledge or power. We do better to accept that the reason our prayers are denied is a mystery--. It is all right to leave these questions, these whys of life open, to admit and express our disappointment and fears and doubts. We know that God is present, that God has heard, that we are not alone. We will be given strength to cope. "
"Jesus Present in My Quiet Brokenness" is a real presence for us today as He was a real presence on the cross 2000 years ago. "Jesus Present in My Quiet Brokenness" knows, has experienced human suffering, so He can walk along side of us in whatever state we find ourselves.
amen
