My Dear Sisters and Brothers in Christ

A parishioner once confided in me that she struggled to relate to me (and my preaching) because I was one of those fortunate people who never had any problems in life and who made following Jesus seem so easy. I remember being deeply shocked because nothing could have been further from the truth. We all have problems, we are all tempted and tested at every turn, we are all broken people, and I am as broken as any. The trouble was, in my desire to walk the talk and to be 'the goodness of God' to the parish, what I was communicating was not true, and because it was not true, it was not helpful.

At the other extreme are those priests who let it all hang out. It is one thing to be aware and honest about our own weakness and frailty, it is entirely another when the pulpit becomes a platform for talking about our own problems, or when our problems so overwhelm us that they inhibit effective ministry. When our behaviour speaks louder than our words, we are no longer able to build the faith of a congregation. As Henri Nouwen once commented, "Open wounds stink and do not heal."

It is in those words of Nouwen that the balance is to be found. We are all tempted, all sinful, all broken. But it is not enough that we recognise, or even acknowledge, our brokenness. What is needed is a brokenness that shows something of the transforming grace of God. Yes, we are broken, but in our brokenness we must come to that place where we are stripped of the pretences behind which we hide, forced to abandon our illusions that we are in control and can manage simply by trying harder, or by doing it differently. Only at the place of abandonment of every security to which we have clung do we come to the place where we can know and receive the radical grace of God and know the 'breadth of Christ's love'. Only there can our brokenness be healed by the kenotic outpouring of God's own life.

That divine encounter at the point of brokenness has profound implications for us. It reveals our terror of being weak and vulnerable in a society that values only strength and competence. It profoundly challenges those fundamental values of glamour, success and power that have become normative in our society. It requires of us that we rethink our twisted images of God, God's grace, and human nature.

In his brilliant book, 'The Solace of Fierce Landscapes,' Belden Lane describes how only a spirituality of brokenness can untangle those twisted images. Firstly, he says, it leads us into a new and truer understanding of grace. Grace is not some easy, saccharine topping that adds flavour to an already contented life, nor an easy invitation to change, but disrupts our life in ways that leave us desperately clinging to the one who alone can save us. Cheap grace is not grace at all; grace costs no less than everything. Only in dying can there be resurrection life. The mystery of grace invites those who are whole to be broken so that those who are broken might be made whole.

By the same token it is only at the point of brokenness that we can discover our true humanity. The world's obsession with youth and beauty and power, its exaltation of intellectual giftedness and productivity distorts and skews our image of humanity and reduces it to the point where people are valued only in terms of worth. Only as we are forced to face our brokenness do we come to know that the prevailing images of humanity mask the truth and the mystery of what it means to be created in the image of God. Only then can the handicapped, the elderly, the marginalised and the weak confront us with the need to measure ourselves by something other than performance. Only a spirituality of brokenness calls us to a life where individuals are valued for themselves in all their uniqueness and where we can learn to accept ourselves and others for who we are, each allowing the other to be no more (nor less) than what God has created us to be.

This, in turn, forces us to rethink our image of God which, like the prevailing image of humanity, is skewed. Our God may indeed be a God of splendour and majesty, glory and might, but is also, at the same time, the one who is revealed in vulnerability and weakness of incarnation. God is most fully revealed on the cross, vulnerable, weak and broken. And yet, the moment of apparent defeat is the place of victory. God was not then, and is not now what we expect. Only in brokenness can we be shaken out of our expectations and brought to that point when we can recognise that the Lion of Judah is the Lamb who was slain.

We would all rather avoid the truth of our brokenness and prefer the false solace of illusion. But, says Lane, "God wills us to be broken for the sake of a strength to be made whole. Divine love is incessantly restless until it turns all woundedness into health, all deformity into beauty, all embarrassment into laughter." And only those of us caught up in that process of transformation can truly speak good news to a world hungry for wholeness. Then the marks of our brokenness, like the wounds in the hands of our Lord, become testimony to the grace of a God who makes all things new.

May Christ shine through your brokenness as a beacon of hope for the world.

+Brian

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