Broken But Blessed

Introduction

Good morning and welcome to our online worship service!

If you are watching this live it is May 3, 2020.

The day after what traditionally has been known as “Derby Day,” which didn’t happen this year, so I guess no sermons on gambling, drinking, and addiction today!

However, this morning we are going to be continuing on with the series we started a few weeks ago about being, Blessed, Broken, and Given.

And I’m going to start out with a something I want us to ponder, because, I am wondering if any us are junk collectors.

And I’m not talking about Fred Sanford junk collectors, but odds are, in your garage or perhaps in a basement storage room, there are piles of tools or furniture or lawn equipment that was once sparkly and new, but is now rusted or scratched, missing parts and knobs and handles.

It’s on your list to fix.

But you’ve got to find the right piece to fix it or talk to someone who knows.

And the reality is, you never get to it.

So it just sits there.

And, eventually, it’s just time to get rid of it.

And, that’s usually what happens to broken things.

We purge them from our lives because they are no longer of any use to us.

What would life be like if God did this to us?

Just because we are broken, God decides to discard us—purge us from existence.

Remember, this whole series has been about seeing our lives as the bread that Jesus takes in His hands, blesses, breaks, and gives for the life of the world.

Last week we talked about how difficult it is to imagine our ordinary, common lives actually being blessed and sacred and holy.

Yet that is exactly what happens to our story when we surrender to Jesus.

To be blessed is to have our identity recovered and restored; it is to become who we were made to be: carriers of the glory of God.

This week, we are going to push forward a bit and turn our attention to the word “broken”.

In our society, we use the word “broken” in several ways.

First, when I think brokenness, it is a way to describe our own frailty.

This is the experience of running up against our own limitations in life.

This is not the kind of brokenness we’re going to talk about today.

Secondly, brokenness can also be a way to refer to our own failure.

When we come up short, when we miss the mark, when we fail what is required of us in a given situation or relationship, we come face to face with our brokenness.

Finally, brokenness is also a way of speaking about the fallen world.

When sickness or death occurs, when tragedies happen, we hear creation groan.

The creaking and cracking of the world, things coming apart from the seams—all these are signs of the brokenness of the world.

It’s these last two kind of brokenness—the brokenness of our failure and of the fallen world—that I want us to look at today.

Jesus and Our Brokenness

So, what can Jesus do with our brokenness?

Like bread that is broken, does it begin to lose its freshness?

Do we become stale and useless?

Or does Jesus receive our brokenness into His hands?

Let’s look at Luke 22:19 . . .

Luke 22:19 NIV - Anglicised

19 And he took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body given for you; do this in remembrance of me.”

And just to give us some perspective here, this is the second “Blessed Broken Given” story in Luke’s gospel—the second time Jesus takes bread into His hands, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it.

The occasion here is Passover, the feast which commemorates God’s rescue of Israel from Egypt and God’s judgment of evil.

In short, Passover is when God dealt with sin and evil.

God delivered His people by providing a covering of blood over their sins.

That makes this passage the perfect place to talk about what Jesus does with our own brokenness.

Let’s talk first about the brokenness of our failure, our sin.

Unlike the gods and priests of other religions in the ancient world, Israel’s God provided a sacrifice specifically for the removal of guilt.[i]

The most dramatic way sin was dealt with in Israel’s worship came on the day of the year known as the Day of Atonement.

On that day, the high priest would first offer sacrifices to cleanse himself.

Then he would select two goats.

After laying hands on one goat and imparting to it all the sins of the nation, the priest would lead that goat out into the wilderness.

The goat took the blame and was led away—literally God removing guilt from the presence of His people.

The second goat was then sacrificed and its blood was sprinkled on the altar inside the holy of holies.

This goat took the punishment—a picture of God allowing the people to be spared judgment.

These elaborate and symbolic acts were found only in the Israelite religion.

Their God was the only god who made a way to deal with sin, guilt, and shame.

And in the brokenness of our own sin, we can find a blessing that removes guilt.

All the stuff about goats, priests, temples, and sacrifices was just a foreshadowing of what was to come.

There is one Priest who was also the sacrifice and, in fact, also the temple.

He was so great that He summed up in Himself all the three main components of old Israelite religion.

And in doing so, He brought it to its fulfillment, to its culmination, and to its closure.

His name of course is Jesus.

Jesus, the great high priest.

Jesus, the perfect sacrifice.

Jesus, the true temple.

The writer of Hebrews was so excited about the way these symbols and elements of Israelite worship came to their fulfillment in Jesus that he could hardly contain himself.

Look what it says in Hebrews 9:13-14 . . .

Hebrews 9:13–14 NIV - Anglicised

13 The blood of goats and bulls and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean. 14 How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!

And the overall point here is that Jesus takes the brokenness of our sin and gives us peace.

And that peace allows us to lovingly and gloriously “serve the LIVING God!”

Not some dead or imaginary God.

But the one true and living God.

And there is no other religion in the world that every could or ever can compare to that.

Jesus and The World’s Brokenness

But what about the brokenness of the world?

How does Jesus deal with that?

What if our lives have been broken because of the brokenness of the world?

Because the reality is, many people are broken, because the world has broken them.

So, let’s look at that.

John 11:17-27 records the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. It says . . .

John 11:17–27 NIV - Anglicised

17 On his arrival, Jesus found that Lazarus had already been in the tomb for four days. 18 Bethany was less than two miles from Jerusalem, 19 and many Jews had come to Martha and Mary to comfort them in the loss of their brother. 20 When Martha heard that Jesus was coming, she went out to meet him, but Mary stayed at home. 21 “Lord,” Martha said to Jesus, “if you had been here, my brother would not have died. 22 But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.” 23 Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” 24 Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” 25 Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; 26 and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” 27 “Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.”

So, how does this address the world’s brokenness and how Jesus deals with it?

Well, after their brother Lazarus’s death, the question that both Martha and Mary asked of Jesus is the very question that haunts us in our suffering: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died”.

It’s the question that arises every time pain is disconnected from justice, when suffering is the result not of guilt but of the brokenness of the world.

Couldn’t you have prevented this, God?

Why didn’t you do anything, God?

These are the questions that come up.

The questions that we don’t have answers for and that we don’t understand.

When a person suffers needlessly, when pain seems random, or worse, unjust, the appeal to the God of mercy and justice rings throughout Scripture.

How long, O Lord? Why do the righteous suffer?

Or in the case of Lazarus, “See how much [Jesus] loved him!” This is set right next to “He healed the eyes of the man born blind.

Couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?”

Jesus loved his dear friend, so why did he die?

It’s not as though Lazarus was an enemy of God or a wicked person.

This must have caused Mary and Martha to wonder: Is there no justice in the world? Is there no compassion from God?

What we often hope for from God is prevention.

In the face of the brokenness of the world, we want to be spared.

We do not want to be bent or bruised by the brokenness of a groaning world.

Jesus even taught us to pray that we might be spared the great day of trouble, trial, and testing.

Yet for reasons beyond our grasp, bad things still happen to good people.

However, God does offer something that is much stronger than any sort of prevention.

And that thing is called redemption.

We see it in Lazarus’ story.

While we often call what Lazarus experienced “resurrection,” this is not quite right.

Lazarus was raised only to die again, so this is more accurately described as “resuscitation.”

He was not raised in the same way that Jesus would be raised—with a perfected and glorified body that is incorruptible.

True resurrection is what awaits all who are in Christ.

The resuscitation that Lazarus experienced was a sign of the resurrection to come.

It is a clue suggesting what God will do about the brokenness of the world.

Resurrection doesn’t tiptoe around death.

It breaks death’s power completely.

Resurrection is the reversal and undoing of death.

That’s the power of redemption.

Just as resurrection is stronger than death, redemption is more powerful than any prevention.

A couple of illustrations to demonstrate my point . . .

Imagine an artist who works a public piece, like a mural on a wall or a building. Imagine her choosing to leave her work out in the open, no ropes or cones restricting access. It is one kind of strength for an artist to prevent her work from being vandalized; it is another to say, “Whatever you scribble on this piece, I will find a way to make it even more beautiful than it was before.”

Now imagine a chess player, unafraid of his opponent’s strategy. It is a certain kind of genius for a chess player to block the moves his opponent wishes to make; it’s a different order of brilliance altogether to say, “Whatever your move, I will still put you in checkmate.”

The point is, it is one kind of power to say, “You shall not harm me!”

It is a wholly other kind of power to say, “Do your worst; I will prevail.”

And on the cross, Jesus absorbed the full weight of evil and the judgment of God against it.

Jesus became the sin that leads to death, and He became the curse that infects God’s world.

He drained the venom from the serpent and drank the poison to the last.

He died the death that is at once sin’s wage and God’s verdict.

And on the third day, the Father raised Him up from the dead.

And now because of His resurrection, one day death will be swallowed up in victory for all those who are in Christ.

Only God can do this.

Only God can take brokenness and bring blessedness from it.

Only God can make blessedness come through brokenness.

Altar Call/Challenge

So, as we close, remember that Jesus takes the brokenness of the world and gives us hope.

Whether the brokenness is from our frailty, our failure, or the fallenness of the world, we are still God’s image-bearers and this is still God’s world—the world that He created, the world that He blessed.

All of the sin and suffering that we see all around us every single day are not beyond His capability to redeem.

What God blessed, He will redeem.

He has the power to make His blessing come to pass, over and against the infection of evil.

God the creator blesses;

And God the redeemer carries the blessing to its completion, even through the brokenness that comes.

God’s redemption makes even the broken become blessed.

God did this by becoming the broken.

In Jesus, the blessed God became the broken human so that broken humans might become God blessed.

And that sometimes scares us because to be broken is to be opened up to the grace of God.

When you place your brokenness in Jesus’s hands, it becomes openness.

It is brokenness that opens us up to grace, and it is grace that puts us together.

And the goal is to let the grace of God redeem and restore and repair.

There is an old Japanese art of mending broken pottery. It is called Kintsugi and means “golden joinery.”[i] It’s the art of joining broken pieces of pottery with a liquid resin that resembles gold. The result is a bowl or vase that is more beautiful, more aesthetically complex, and more valuable than the original piece. The new piece with golden seams became so popular among Japanese art collectors in the fifteenth century that some were even accused of purposely breaking pottery in order to repair it with gold.

What does that have to do with what we have been talking about?

Well, that sounds an awful lot like God’s grace.

Grace that takes what is broken and puts it back together in such a way that it is more beautiful and more valuable than it was before.

So, this morning, where is the brokenness in your life?

Is it from failure or from the fallenness of this world?

This morning, I invite you to let your brokenness open you up to the grace of God.

Let God taken hold of that brokenness and repair it with the gold of His grace.

Because, when grace comes rushing in, it does not leave us broken in our sin.

It heals and restores and cleanses and forgives.

It makes us new in a way that is more beautiful than we could have imagined.

Grace is the gold that holds the broken pieces together.

Will you let Him take your broken life today?

Whether you’re broken by your own failure or by the fallenness of this world, place your broken life in Jesus’s hands.

Can you do that today?