Brokenness

June 15, 2008

First UU Church of Austin

4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX 78756

www.austinuu.org

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

PRAYER:

Let us give thanks for this amazing and miraculous gift of life, and let us work to complete it. Life comes to us in kit form, with some assembly required. But most of the pieces are blessed indeed – far more than are not.

Let us never doubt that we are a gift to this world, and let us pray that our world will be a blessing to us as well.

So much is uncertain in life: how long we will live, how well we will live, the balance of our happy and our sad days, how we will love and be loved. So much is uncertain.

But all the uncertainties take place within the larger miracle of life itself. The miracle and the gift is the fact that we are here at all. Let us not become so confused or jaded that we let ourselves become numb to that most important of facts.

If the only prayer we ever uttered was simply “Thank you,” it would be sufficient. Thank you to Life, the universe, God, the unnameable mystery by whatever names we call it forth. Thank you.

Let us give thanks for this amazing and miraculous gift of life, and let us show our gratitude by becoming a gift to ourselves, and to others. For we are not only gifts, but the bearers of gifts, and the world would not be as complete without us. So let us, above all else, remember to give thanks for the sheer gift of just being alive. Just being alive.

Amen.

SERMON: Brokenness

I’ve never preached on “brokenness” before. When I Googled it, I found it is a very popular word among many Christian writers. I love good and insightful thinking from all religious traditions, but the things I read on this word “brokenness” have an odd, even morbid, undertone. Let me read you the comments of six different authors who were among the first dozen or so to come up on the Google search, and you’ll see what I mean:

One says, “An unbroken person cannot be trusted.” (Gary Rosberg)

Reknowned Catholic priest Henri Nouwen wrote (in his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son) that “it is often difficult to believe that there is much to think, speak or write about other than brokenness”.

Another author (Mark Buchanan) wrote that brokenness “molds our character closer to the character of God than anything else. To experience defeat, disappointment, loss”the raw ingredients of brokenness”moves us closer to being like God than victory and gain and fulfillment ever can.” This sounds like some of the teaching of 12-step programs, and it’s true that sometimes we have to hit the bottom before we’re willing to wake up. But as a model for living our lives? We can do better.

Another (Alan Redpath) says, God will only plant the seed of his life “where the conviction of His Spirit has brought brokenness.”

A fifth author (Charles Brent) says that every call to Christ is a call to suffering, and every call to suffering is a call to Christ.

And a sixth says that “Worship starts with a broken heart.” (Calvin Miller)

I want to say that these voices are coming from another world, but not the one most of us are living in or would want to live in. They are speaking from within only one vehicle of insight and wholeness, the vehicle of one popular version of modern Christianity, and I want to suggest that what’s broken is not us, but that vehicle. I want to bring in a couple evangelical writers who speak to that, and then offer you some wisdom from a very different, perhaps unexpected, source.

A couple weeks ago, I talked about a new book by Christine Wicker called The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church. She was raised in the evangelical Baptist church, came to Jesus at age nine, then grew away from the church, but kept a soft and warm spot in her heart for it. A major publisher asked her to write a book about what great successes the megachurches were as the spearheads of the evangelical movement. But after more than a year of research, the leaders within the churches convinced her that she was writing the wrong book. She went back to her publisher and took another year to write, instead, about the unreported fact that evangelical churches and numbers are declining, have not kept up with population growth for the past hundred years, and that we”ve been duped into thinking they were strong because they learned to manipulate the media very cleverly. They represent perhaps 7% of Americans, not the 25% we”ve been told – and the churches know this. She includes herself among the duped, as she was a religion writer for the Dallas Morning News for seventeen years.

The reason for the decline is the same as the reason for the decline of almost all traditional churches: our world has changed, our minds and hearts have changed, we no longer need the kind of God traditional religion has to offer, and we need other important things that it can’t offer. If you think about it, that’s a revolutionary statement. On Father”s Day, this stands out to me more, because this sounds like the data that say far more women attend church than men, because men want more hard-nosed empirical stuff than all the airy-fairy poetry of religions. I don’t think it’s quite that simple, though there’s something to it. But I think it is more about parents than just fathers.

In the world today, we need to be able to act, to adapt quickly, to think on our own, rather than blindly following authority. We feel a visceral imperative to be more open and flexible than humans have been in the past, which is another reason we may see the blind obedience taught by evangelical parents as dangerous thinking that will not prepare their children to live in the real world after they leave home (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 171).

It’s in families, raising children, where the real world and the world of religious dogma are most incompatible. Evangelical children, says Christine, are learning to obey authority while other American children are learning to question authority, to voice strong disagreement, to follow their own ideas. While evangelical parents may protect their children from growing up too fast, other American parents – both fathers and mothers – begin preparing their children to make decisions at earlier ages. These deep-seated differences in what parents believe their children must have and in how children are being formed as a result are the greatest reasons Americans will never, and cannot ever, return to the old-time religion. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 173)

The idea that a happy, self-reliant person with adequate self-esteem is more likely to be a moral, good citizen has replaced the Christian image of humans as sinful, broken creatures in need of outside salvation. What was once called sin is now considered sickness. So health rather than holiness is the modern parent’s goal. And I want to say, that’s a good thing. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 185)

It seems that a new way of judging what’s moral and what’s not is coming into being. It means people don’t feel the same need for the kind of God traditional religion supplies. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 187)

This kind of thinking makes our children flexible, thinking, reasoning, searching, very unorthodox people. (Christine Wicker, The Fall of the Evangelical Nation: The Surprising Crisis Inside the Church, p. 187)

It leads to deeper, more aware, honest, nuanced and integrated kids. This state of hopeful wholeness was once called “salvation,” but today we call it health. So one point is that traditional religion has lost its roots in, and lost the ability to prepare us for, the real world outside the walls of the church and many fathers and mothers don’t trust their kids to it.

Let’s hear from one more evangelical who”s writing from inside that faith, rather than having left it as Christine Wicker did. Alan Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College , and wrote this for the Wall Street Journal just over a week ago. (“Too Much Faith in Faith”, 6 June 2008, p. W11). Here’s some of what he wrote:

“If there is one agreed-upon point in the current war of words about religion, it is that religion is a very powerful force. Is it, though? I have my doubts, and they begin with personal experience. I am by most measures a pretty deeply committed Christian. I am quite active in my church; I teach at a Christian college; I have written extensively in support of Christian ideas and belief. Yet when I ask myself how much of what I do and think is driven by my religious beliefs, the honest answer is “not so much.” The books I read, the food I eat, the music I listen to, my hobbies and interests, the thoughts that occupy my mind throughout the greater part of every day – these are, if truth be told, far less indebted to my Christianity than to my status as a middle-aged, middle-class American man.

“When people say that they are acting out of religious conviction, I tend to be skeptical; I tend to wonder whether they’re not acting as I usually do, out of motives and impulses over which I could paint a thin religious veneer but which are really not religious at all.”

Now this man isn’t a Christ-hating savage. He teaches at Wheaton College in Illinois , the alma mater of Billy Graham, which has never been known as a bastion of liberal thought.

So one former evangelical author says the membership in the churches is declining, that they can’t convert enough new people to keep from shrinking because they’re too out of touch with the world we’re really living in. And a current professor at evangelical Wheaton College says that even within the religion, the truth is that the religion has very little to do with what we think, read, feel or do. This is a measure of a religion that has become a broken vehicle for helping us find more meaning and purpose in life. Its wheels have come off.

So I began with the idea of brokenness, which is a concept deeply embedded in a lot of modern religious thinking in our culture. I shared some of the research by a former evangelical who now, as an outsider to that worldview, reports that even the churches know they are losing more members and more appeal every year. She suggests it’s because their message is grounded in biases that have lost their roots in the world we’re really living in, and a growing number of us prefer the real world. Then Alan Jacobs, who is not only still an evangelical, but teaches at one of the flagship conservative colleges, says that even as a believer, he has to admit that his religious beliefs actually play almost no role in how he thinks, feels, or lives. I think there’s good evidence that many of the loudest religious voices telling us we’re broken and need their special salvation are, in fact, themselves broken, and failing as useful vehicles for our most important hopes, fears, dreams and yearnings.

So what if, instead, we were to seek out some wise figures who live in the real world, are at home in it, and are also asking questions about life, meaning and purpose? How different would their advice sound than these messages insisting that God only cares for broken souls?

Well, it just so happens that we have some of these voices among us. So I want to read you a few things from their wisdom, so you can hear and feel the difference. Remember, the question guiding us this morning is the question of brokenness: are we broken, is brokenness really a healthy and useful way of looking at our lives, or is there a way of understanding ourselves that is not broken, and is better for us? Some of you have already heard these voices, because they are four of our own high school students, who presented short homilies during their Youth Service last Sunday. If you missed it, you missed something very special. Listen to a few insights from four teen-agers who live in the modern world, are creatures of that world, and believe what they’ve learned in this church – and I hope could learn in any good liberal church – that their questions and feelings matter, that they can trust their minds, and can find their own healthy and whole path through life if they choose to.

Now as you listen, don’t mentally patronize these young people. Don’t think “Oh, that’s so good for a kid, it’s just swell.” Don’t mentally pat them on the heads. Be tough. Listen to them as you would listen to anyone offering wisdom, and see how it stacks up. See, especially, how it stacks up against advice about how we’re broken or sinful. They didn’t come here to show off; they came here to try and offer something that might be both true and useful for you, so hold them to the high standards they’ve requested.

Josh is one of our students, and says, “As our lives change, we lose and discover things about ourselves. We change from what we were, to what we are, to what we could be. Sometimes we also find friendships we thought we could never have, without even trying. In my short 16 years I have moved a total of 10 times and every time I seem to find these wonderful and amazing people without even looking. They seem to pop out of nowhere and change my life. That I think is the greatest thing anyone could find: the love and joy of friends.” He doesn’t sound broken.

Listen to the trust here. He has found a way to back off and see life as a moving picture. He isn’t trying to cling to a dogmatic truth, he knows already that life is about change. He isn’t looking for water wings, but for swimming lessons, and he’s swimming pretty well.

One youth reflected on a Rolling Stones song from her parents” generation, about how “You can’t always get what you want”but if you try sometimes, you can get what you need.” She says, “No matter how much we want something or how much we think we must have something, or how hard we try to get it, sometimes the universe just won’t let it happen. But, if you try sometimes, if you try new things and expand your world, you can get what you need,” even if you hadn’t known you needed it.

She told a story to illustrate this, about a time she was digging through the family couch, looking for loose change to buy candy at the movie. I imagine nearly everyone here remembers doing that. She didn’t find enough change to get the candy, but she did find something without which many teenagers might not be able to survive for even one day – her cell phone. She didn’t even know she’d lost it. And so the world, she said, is like a big couch, “littered with all sorts of random objects, and waiting for us to dig around in it. Maybe we will find what we want. Maybe we will find what we haven’t been looking for, but need more than we thought. Nevertheless, the choice is ours whether or not to look in the first place.” And she thinks we should be out there digging around in the couch of life. She doesn’t sound broken.

Our third student, Shane, thought about the whole idea of gaining experiences. He said that unless you live under a rock, you’re experiencing things every day. And that even if you do live under a rock, you’re probably experiencing things too, like pain and boredom. But it’s not like you can go to the movie store and pick out which experiences you want, and skip the bad ones. If you want to have really valuable experiences, you have to be patient, because not all experiences are either valuable or pleasant. And when the really valuable experiences do happen, it may not be when or where you expect. Does this sound like a modern teenager, or an ancient sage?

Then Sierra talked about happiness. She’s already learned that you can’t buy it – even with money from the couch. “You have to know where to find it. And this is the tricky part. How can we get it? You can try as hard as you possibly can to reach this happiness, and still not get it. You can’t control it. You can alter your mood and surround yourselves with things that supposedly “make you happy”, and some days the happiness just won’t come.”

She decides that maybe happiness is more complex than we think. Maybe it has to include the sadness, the fear, the satisfaction, the contentment, the surprise, and the regrets. Like Natalie, she invents an analogy for us. She says maybe happiness is like white light. White light is made up of all the colors, and if one color were missing, it wouldn’t be pure white, just like if one of our experiences was missing or an emotion was suppressed for a lifetime, it wouldn’t be as full, as complete a life. It isn’t about pretending we can only have happy, fun experiences. I”d say that’s not the real world; that’s Disneyworld . She says, at age 15, that in our real-world pursuit of happiness, we are gathering experiences that at the end of our lifetime might just combine and finally give us our greatest happiness – the most full and satisfying life – the way all the different colors combine to make pure white light.

These young people are not finished growing, but they’re not broken. They see the good and bad as inherent parts of life, and see happiness as living in a way that can let them integrate all of our experiences, and weave them into a character with depth and nuance.

We are completely at home in the real world. Whatever is sacred, is there – which means that whatever is sacred is already within us, too. We are linked with all other life on earth. We are part of this world, all the way down. We are at home here, all the way down. And our salvation, our wholeness, must be rooted deeply in the real world around us to its most profound and life-giving parts, all the way down.

That’s the voice you hear coming from our own high school students. Not because they were taught a doctrine or dogma, but because they were taught that they must think, they must interact with the world and that it can mostly be trusted, and so can their own powers of reasoning and meaning-making. We are saved, today, not by dogmas or orthodoxies, but by an empowered imagination, and our ability to imagine our own most fulfilling paths through life.

we’re not broken. we’re unfinished. We don’t need to be made holy; we need to be made whole. And that has changed everything. We can trust life. We can trust ourselves, we can trust in the best of human relationships, and it’s ok when we occasionally fail, because failing is part of living, just as succeeding is part of living.

Let me sum this up in the words of some local sages. As we go digging through the big couch of life, we can find things we want, and things we need, as we change from what we were, to what we are, to what we could be. If we want to have really valuable experiences, we have to be patient, because not all experiences are either valuable or pleasant. And when the really valuable experiences do happen, it may not be when or where we expect. But don’t be afraid of the wide range of life’s experiences, because in the end they can all go together like rays of different colored lights to create a kind of white light so complete we can call it by its ancient religious name: Enlightenment.

That isn’t broken. It’s whole. It’s blessed. And it’s very, very good.