Broken

Joel 2:12-13, Luke 22:14-20

Church of the Redeemer

January 17, 2010

“Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world: red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight, Jesus loves the little children of the world.”

When I was a child in the early 60’s, I learned that song on one of my family’s infrequent attempts to take my brothers and me to Sunday School. I’m sure I was taught by a very well meaning teacher who hoped, along with a lot of white progressive Christians in the 60’s, that just telling us we were all equal in God’s eyes, and getting us to sing about it, would convince us that we were all equal in each other’s sight as well. As the 1960’s morphed into the 70’s, and despite the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X and the disproportionate numbers of poor black men dying in Vietnam and on the city streets, lots of us white teenagers still believed that if we sang enough about peace, love and understanding; if we all had a hammer and a song and a bell; if we all could overcome, then it would be so. As we married and brought children into our families in the 80’s and 90’s, we continued to hope that the next generation would be the ones who would never know what the word “racism” meant, because no one in their generation would have experienced it. With the election of Barack Obama, many of us still want to believe we were right.

We can continue to believe that as long as we do not listen or look closely enough to the evening news, to the experiences of our own children and those of our neighbors of many races and ethnicities, and even more importantly, as long as we do not listen closely enough to our own hearts. If we do not look and listen closely, we are living in the same kind of unreality as were the people to whom the prophet Joel spoke so long ago, a people who believed that just by taking some ritual actions, they could make right the relationship between them and God, and between different factions in their own society whose division so pained God. I can go to a service of repentance and tear my robe in the traditional sign of mourning, and all will be well. I can go to the voting booth and punch the right card and all will be well. But if I do those things and do not rend my own heart, then something critical is still lacking.

Something in me, and in so many of us, needs to break open. Rend your hearts, says Joel, tear them; break them open. This isn’t like having a broken heart from a love who has left you, but a breaking open to let what is caught in there out, what turns the heart away from God and others. I am afraid of this breaking. I am afraid to look closely at the kind of beliefs that were taught to me as a child beyond that Sunday School song. I’m afraid to hear still echoing in my head the racist comments of my father that were the constant commentary to Walter Cronkite on the news we watched every night at dinner in those hopeful and turbulent 60’s, afraid that something that he said still informs the way I look at people of other races. I’m afraid to admit that this thing called White Privilege exists, and that I, who grew up in a working class household where the last thing I would have called us was “privileged,” still partake in a whole set of privileges in this society by no virtue of anything but my race. I’m afraid to admit that a couple of weeks ago when I was walking down a dark street I crossed over to the other side because a group of young black men happened to be walking behind me and, when I thought about it, I could not with certainty say that I would have done the same thing had the young men been white. Every time I really look my own attitudes and listen to my friends and colleagues and members of this church and children who are of other races and ethnicities, something in me tears a bit and breaks a bit, and I really don’t want to face it. Can’t we all put it behind us and move on?

But then I wonder, as a Christian, why I am so afraid of something being broken in order to be made whole. On a regular basis we gather in this church around this beautiful table, and we proclaim Christ’s words that broken pieces of a loaf of bread are his body, broken for us. There is no doubt for us, as we tell the story of that body being broken, that the breaking was painful and agonizing. Before his death, every time Jesus talked about what would happen, his disciples turned away, not wanting to hear or see, and Peter lived that denial, even after Jesus’ arrest, around a fire in the courtyard of the high priest. When Jesus hung on the cross, they ran away, most of them, not able to face it and fearing the breaking of their own bodies.

So I am in good company, because that’s what I feel like when confronted with things like “white privilege” or the racism faced by the kids in our youth group or by my own children who are Asian American. I want to run away from that brokenness and pretend it is an anomaly and that certainly I do not participate in it. I am not the enemy, I want to believe.

But I can’t run away from it. I shouldn’t. And thank God I am given the gift of taking into my body the brokenness of the beloved body of my Savior, taking it in and becoming one with the brokenness that is all around me as he did. I take in this brokenness, not denying it or pretending I am not part of it, but I take it in and remember that God knows all about brokenness, and that this body which was broken also was made whole. When we celebrate this meal, we sometimes acclaim with hope and joy, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again!” In this meal, we cannot with any integrity leap from a Palm Parade to an empty tomb; we are forced to confront Christ broken. However, we don’t stay in the tomb with a broken corpse. We are witnesses to the power of God to make what was broken by human violence, hate and indifference into a new body, a whole body, a body which seeks out and finds the broken and frightened disciples and says, “Peace be with you.” If I eat this bread and drink this cup and believe also in the Resurrection, I know that God’s power in any matter is far more than I can ask or imagine. I also know that in order for that power to work in me, I must stop running away from what is difficult and broken. I must see the wounds of Christ, the brokenness of this human family of which I am a part, and acknowledge my part as both one who is broken and as a breaker, even as Peter was forced to do when face to face with the risen Jesus. This is hard, and still sometimes, I am afraid, and I’m not always sure what I’m afraid of? Is it fear of losing privilege? Is it that I’m not sure I can take in the pain of my brothers and sisters who live daily with the past, present and future of experiencing racism and know I am in any way part of that pain? Is it that I am afraid that by some word or action to which I do not pay careful attention, I will make things worse between me and my sisters and brothers instead of bringing wholeness? What am I, and what are we all, risking by being vulnerable and open with each other all the time, and what possibility of wholeness do we risk losing by not moving through the fear and being vulnerable and open with each other?

I don’t know about you, but right now I am hungry; hungry to eat this broken bread, Christ’s broken body. I’m hungry because I do believe, trust and dearly hope that, not by our power but by the power of God and through this broken bread, you and I can find courage to journey together into the brokenness. I believe that not by our power, but by the power of God, through this broken bread, we can be made whole. We can be truly the body of Christ. Amen.