Broken and Beautiful
Last Sunday morning we smashed old plates and tiles with a hammer. Then we took the pieces and made this table. I think it’s a pretty vivid illustration of how God can take something broken or imperfect - like us - and make something beautiful. And it reminds me of how all of us, like the individual pieces of pottery and china, are broken and yet, together, form something beautiful and vibrant and resilient and useful: community.
We’re beginning a new series where we look at all the difficult things Jesus asked us to do - like ‘love your enemy’. It’s easy to say and, sometimes, seems simplistic and almost naive, perhaps. But who is the enemy? An ex spouse, fighting for custody of the kids? A competing business whose advertising targets my business? A co-worker with political views at the opposite end of the spectrum from my own? The Taliban? Osama Bin Laden? And what does it mean to love my enemy, exactly? And isn’t this something that we all know we should do but none of actually do?
Michael’s going to help us unpack this - it should be an interesting Sunday morning.
Imagine what could happen if…
“Dance your bones” may be the best advice I get all year. Your best advice of the year is probably in this post from Rae at Blackbird Studio as well.
Waiting
We’re looking at Psalm 130 and, I have to admit, I was really surprised by it. You think you know a thing or two, like what time the bus leaves the station, or how to spell ’sequence’, or how to change the bulb in your car’s headlight and then, Surprise! - the bus schedule is different on the weekends and it’s spelled with the ‘u’ before the ‘e’ and the guy in the Canadian Tire store says, “What you got there, Bud, is a sealed beam headlight.” The Bible is kind of like that. In fact, it’s a lot like that. You think you know what you’re reading, so you just kind of drift over it, like, a thousand times or so, always reading what you think it says and not what it actually says. We do this quite a bit, actually. We all do it all the time. That’s why the Christmas story is comforting and kind of sweet and makes us feel good about things in general instead of, you know, roaring through our world like a Gulf Coast hurricane.
The psalm offers us a progression. David starts with despair and ends with overflowing hope - a hope that calls to the nation. There’s a journey here, and it follows precisely ordered steps - the instructions are all there, verse by verse. But this week I found something I really wasn’t prepared for. In the exact center of the journey - in the very middle of the psalm - is a verse about waiting. And waiting - and waiting again. And as I think about this ‘waiting’ thing it seems to me that all forward motion stops with waiting, that there is nothing more useless in all of life than waiting - can’t go forward, can’t go back, can’t do anything. Just sit and wait. Yet this is an integral part of the journey from despair to overflowing hope. How can that be?
We don’t have a very good handle on waiting. We don’t like it. Waiting on the Lord sounds just awful, like you’re waiting for God to do something, and he’s got billions of other people to tend to, and sparrows, and whales and whole galaxies to keep moving and spinning and spanning time and all that. It seems like God isn’t going to put us very high on the list, or move very fast, or do very much. So we wait. This, however, seems like something altogether different. It’s the watchman waiting for the morning thing that does it for me. More than watchman wait for the morning. You see, the watchmen, up there on the city walls, walking back and forth, scanning the horizon - they know morning is coming. It’s an absolute certainty. They’re actively and eagerly watching for the sun to light up the horizon with streaks of red and gold. They know it.
And that’s where it begins to make sense. Waiting on God is not a time in which all forward motion in our life must stop, a time wasted and useless and empty and vain. Waiting on God is a time spent in the active and eager anticipation of God bringing an answer to our prayers, a solution to our problem, a light at the end of our tunnel. It’s a time of looking forward, fixing our mind not on the difficulty at hand but the God who is surely - as surely as day follows night - coming to change our reality, to change our world.
This time of waiting is where we live. We live between the prayer and the answer to prayer, between the promise and the fulfillment, between the Christ who walked and talked in the gospel stories and the Christ who is coming again. We live in the waiting. And the reason we’re not very good at waiting is because we’re not entirely sure what we’re waiting for, our we’re not certain what we’re waiting for is going to happen, or both. On the journey of Psalm 130 the transformation from hopelessness and despair to overflowing hope comes, I believe, with a conscious decision to eagerly anticipate God answering the psalmist’s prayers.
I once heard a televangelist talking about this very thing. I’m not much in favor of televangelists but what he said has stuck with me for years. He was talking about going through a difficult time in his life and every time the phone rang or there was a knock at the door he’d say, “Is that my miracle, Lord?” I think that’s an absolutely outrageous way to go through our problems. It’s a ridiculous and downright silly and maybe even, on some level, dangerous way to live your life. And I kind of like it. I think it might be exactly how a watchman waits for the morning, scanning the horizon for the first shimmering glint of light. It may still be the dead of night, but morning is coming.