DEVOTION: Brokenness to Healing

One of our Lenten emails from the denomination (see www.ucc.org) this past week shared the following:
“Martin B. Copenhaver wrote: Ernest Hemingway sounds very much like the Apostle Paul when he writes, in A Farewell to Arms, "The world breaks everyone, and afterward some are strong in the broken places." As Christians, however, we understand our brokenness and become strong in a particular way. Paul affirms that, for the Christian, all of life is a reenactment of the death and resurrection of Jesus. His story is not just one we can hear, but a story in which we are invited to share. So the world may break everyone, but that is not the last word. The Christian holds, not that things always turn out for the best, for they seldom do, but that through it all God loves us, upholds us, receives us. That is because our God is the kind of God who insists on having the last word. To be sure, the second to last word, which may be very powerful, can be given to something else--suffering, despair, hopelessness, evil, death itself. But our God insists on having the very last word, and that is always a helpful word, a healing word, a word of peace, of hopefulness, and of life.”

In our Monday night Bible study we traveled through the history of the formation of Israel as a nation as we walked through 1st and 2nd Samuel, Kings and Chronicles. (Notes available on our church blog, fccfaithconversations.blogspot.com) We encountered what Walter Brueggemann describes as the Triad of Death; the obsession and focus on the acquisition and maintenance of Power, Wealth and Information. These three have always been the downfall of the church, because we seek them out of fear that God and the world will not sustain or protect or preserve us. The problem throughout scripture is that when we seek to acquire and keep Power, Wealth and Information we contribute to the brokenness of the world and a more subtle, yet profound, brokenness within ourselves. Because, in the end, they are an illusion; they do not provide what we think they promise. The story of ancient Israel is the story of every human, every group, every nation and every church that must experience death when they realize that this pursuit of Power, Wealth and Information does not sustain, protect or preserve us. Only faith can do that. But this death is the necessary way that leads to a resurrection of God’s Spirit within us and through us. Lent calls us to look at and see the illusion for what it is.