Colossians 1-15-23 Sermon
I was walking in Barrie last week when I passed by a broken mirror. It was propped up against a garbage can that was sitting on the curb.
I stopped in front of it. Some pieces were missing. And a dozen cracks caught the light of the sun and reflected a distorted image of myself. There were lines running through my face. Pieces of me were not present. Parts of my body were distorted. It was not a very flattering reflection at all; a little like the image that one sees of themselves in those trick mirrors at carnivals. Being broken of course, I thought the mirror was not a true reflection of me.
It got me thinking that all the troubles in life begin when the image of ourselves as we perceive ourselves does not match the view of how things really are
or how we think they ought to be.
In a Peanut’s cartoon Lucy is speaking to the dog Snoopy: “There are times when you really bug me, but there are also times when I feel like giving you a hug.” Snoopy replied, “That’s the way I am, huggable and buggable.”
We all have our huggable and buggable days when we don’t feel in tune with one another. When we relate to ourselves and one another like we were looking through a broken mirror.
Sometimes the differences become irreconcilable.
I knew a man who thought his marriage was very solid. He came home one day and his wife met him at the door. She wanted a separation. She said he was not the man she married. They ended up getting divorce- Irreconcilable differences, he said.
Some people experience profound dissatisfaction with their work or themselves. They may not be reconciled to the fact that what they do for a living is not who they really are. They see their situation as through a broken mirror. Some pieces don’t fit. Some of the image is ugly and distorted. Life feels fragmented.
Irreconcilable. They search for some answers.
Perhaps you have heard of the book called Walden: or life in the Woods. It was written by Henry David Thoreau in the middle of the 19th century. Thoreau was a philosopher, a naturalist, a man of great social conscious- he worked for the abolition of slavery in the US in the decades prior to the civil war.
He was also a man at deep odds with himself and the social brokenness of his world. In 1845 he went to Golden Pond where he lived alone for a couple of years, trying to reconcile the image of himself with a loving God with the image of the shattered and often too busy world in which he worked.
I don’t know if he ever reconciled himself to his world. He may have wanted the world to fit perfectly into his image but he never could reconcile himself to the broken mirror.
I am not saying we should disappear into the woods for two years, God knows we all think that might be nice. But I don’t think Thoreau’s experience is all that different then our own at least my own.
I am saying that for Christians it is an essential though painful perhaps to find yourself a good mirror and break it and then stand before it and reflect on the image before you. If we want to be reconciled to the irreconcilable in our lives then we must start with the image in the broken mirror.
As people of faith, Christians in the 21st century we struggle to understand and follow the teachings of Jesus who is the product of his own time. We hear his various teachings about life and they seem irreconcilable with real life.
For example can you imagine him showing up at a modern business meeting or high school graduation, or having a discussion with a group of people in a bar and he insists to all whom he encounters that life is to be lived not for the sake of reputation, or financial compensation, or filled with too much worry but for the sheer joy of living simply for others.
Can you imagine him addressing the Van doo battalion that is just going to Afghanistan and saying now whatever else you do love your enemy.
Can you imagine him saying categorically that all anger can be the beginning of murder like he says today. That there is absolutely no hope for any life that does not seek to be reconciled with their neighbour or themselves. So go and reconcile things with your brothers and sisters before you have to go to court. Reconcile the anger in your own heart and you will see the true image of yourself.
It reminds me of the story of Mr. David Thomas. For forty-two years he slipped a letter of apology and love under the door of his neighbour Rachel Jones. Each letter was an attempt to mend their irreconcilable differences that parted them when they were 32. Rachel was having none of it though and she burned every letter and refused to speak to Thomas. Then one day Thomas knocked at her door and proposed to her. She accepted. They were 74 when they got married.
Are you reconciled with the buggable and huggable things in your own life?
Grace in the text
When the apostle Paul felt the pressures of life breaking in on him.
When he felt fragmented and unsure.
When the reality of the conflict or brokenness of what was happening was different then what he knew should be happening.
When there was irreconcilable conflict instead of peace between people in his congregations.
When there was irreconcilable conflict in his own soul.
When he was trying to figure out the truth about it all, he would sit and think like he was standing in front of the broken mirror with all those missing pieces,
and one day it the answer hit him- a bolt of inspiration out of the blue. And he writes “Christ is the image of the invisible God”.
You see Paul finally understands that the broken mirror is the reality of the human condition. It is the norm. There are no perfect mirrors.
Christ is the image of the invisible God. He is
God made himself visible in the shattered and broken body of Jesus on the cross. Paul says go on and take a long look at your shattered mirrors and find hope that Christ is the broken mirror.
We want perfect mirrors so we can look at perfect images but God gives us the mirror of a broken Jesus Christ to reflect on the realities of life.
God says you can live with the buggable and huggable, you can live with the irreconcilable contradictions of life when you remember that the fullness of God in Christ was only reconciled finally through the shattered mirror of this man Jesus.
When we are looking and thinking about our own reflections through our broken mirrors consider that Christ is that mirror. God made peace with all humanity,
with all its fragmentation and distortations through the love of Christ.
Jesus healed God’s own pain and turned it into purpose. Through him God was reconciled to all things and all things are reconciled to God.
In him all suffering shall be reconciled.
In him all hate shall be reconciled.
And God and Chris will work with anyone who takes this brokenness seriously and lives to transform its contracdictions, its pain into cosmic healing.
It was the whistle-like sound high above his head that caused Haji Wali Muhammad to stop talking and look up. His eyes caught the silhouettes of warplanes moving against the canvass of a pale blue sky. They were streaking straight and sure like deadly arrows towards their targets in Afghanistan. After a few seconds, Haji looked down at the reporter who was interviewing him. The old hermit recalled the events that brought him to this remote mountaintop on the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Thirty years before, he was a merchant in the busy Pakistani city bazaars of Quetta. One morning he went into the street outside his home and saw four charred copies of the Koran lying in the gutter. Haji was so appalled by the sight that he gathered up the pages and took them home for safekeeping. That night he dreamed that God was sending him on a holy mission. “I believe it was direction from Allah,” he says to the reporter. The instruction was clear: he would dedicate his life to collecting damaged and discarded pages of the Koran.
So, Haji left the city and came to the mountain. He opened up a library of sorts in a complex of caves which became his home. By 2002, Haji had collected over 65,000 warn and damaged pages of the Koran. They were stacked high against the rock walls in piles of wheat sacks, pillow cases, and plastic bags.
The reporter asks the old man if he reads the Koran for encouragement. “No,” says Haji, with a shy laugh. “I cannot read. My parents died when I was a child and I never went to school. But I look at the pages and I am happy because it is the word of God.”
Then he said to the reporter, “when someone brings me a bible or the Torah, I also look after them. They are holy.”
Could it be my friends that Haji just might be a small piece of the broken mirror trying to reflect the image of the invisible God?