From Broken Pieces

Matthew 14:13-21

and Genesis 32:22-31

A lot has happened since the last time I stood in this pulpit. I know it was only a few months ago, but I feel much older.

It’s still very difficult to speak about my father’s illness and his death in early June. I can’t say much about the experience of losing him in and of itself, except to say thank you, all of you, for your cards and notes and food and visits and presence, which comforted me and my family more than you can possibly imagine.  

But I would like to speak a little bit about grief. At first, I didn’t really want to – I had hoped to find a less personal, more distracting sermon topic for today. But as I sat down to work on this sermon, I found it hard to think about anything else. I don’t want to preach a whole sermon about myself, and yet I realize that the experience into which I have now entered is a common human experience. I don’t mean “common” in the sense that many people experience it, but common in the sense of being common to us all. Grief is something all of us will experience if we love other people and live long enough.

Grief was very much on my mind as I turned to today’s Gospel lesson, and I found something there that speaks to me. It’s a familiar story: Jesus takes a small amount of bread and fish, and with them feeds the multitude. What speaks to me in particular, when I read the story this time, is the way the breaking of the bread, the wounding and separating and opening up of the bread and the fish, if you will, is a necessary movement in a larger context of blessing and generosity. Jesus breaks the bread, and he gives it, and vast crowds of hungry people have something to eat. And even the broken pieces left over fill up twelve baskets. In the end, somehow, there’s more than was there to begin with.

Jesus’ actions prefigure the actions of generations of Christian pastors celebrating Communion. Or maybe “prefigure” is the wrong word. It’s hard to know which came first: do our actions in the Communion liturgy intentionally echo the real actions of the real, historical Jesus? Or was a Gospel writer’s imagination of the scene shaped by his own experience of Christian worship, a generation or so after Jesus’ life and death? We don’t really know for sure. Maybe we don’t need to know. We do know that each time we celebrate Holy Communion, we have the opportunity to live out, in our words and actions, the deep spiritual meaning of this story and other stories and memories of Jesus that have been handed down to us.

The great spiritual teacher Henri Nouwen wrote that the pattern we see in Communion – the pattern of taking the bread, blessing it, breaking it, and giving it -- is more than what Jesus did with bread and fish, more than what Jesus did with bread and wine, and even more than what we do with bread and wine or grape juice in Holy Communion. This pattern, according to Nouwen, is what God does with each of us and with our whole lives. God takes or chooses us, blesses us, breaks us, and gives us to the world.
When I think about God doing this with us and our lives, especially now, I stumble a little bit on the “breaking” part. Being chosen, being blessed, and being given all sound meaningful and pleasant; not so much being broken, being broken open, having your heart broken. I don’t question whether we are broken, now least of all. But when you’re in the middle of it, it doesn’t feel like a good and necessary part of God’s redemptive plan. In fact it feels miserable, and unnecessary, and wrong.

There are times when I think God’s plans for human life contain some serious design flaws. For example, why do babies learn enough to be terrified about the absence of a parent before they can understand that the parent is only in the next room? If you were God, couldn’t you engineer it the other way around? The parents would be able to get a lot more sleep, and it might work out better for everyone.

And right now I have a similar feeling about death and grief. It just seems like a failure in the overall design. You can spend your whole life loving another person, not even necessarily in any very dramatic way, but just day by day enjoying all the things that make them so special, tolerating all the things that make them so irritating, and building up a lifetime of memories and experiences. You may not even be fully aware of what someone means to you, even if you think you are. And then all at once, they’re gone, and in a day or a month or a year you have to bear the grief of losing a relationship that built up over years and decades. Like a balloon payment on an adjustable-rate mortgage, it can feel like everything you have been lent has now come due.

And because the pain really is too much to bear all at once, you don’t. You can’t. You just stumble through it the best you can, all the while forgetting appointments, not feeling well, sleeping too much or not enough, getting depressed or irritable, and having to dig really deep just to find the energy and motivation for simple daily tasks like grocery shopping or laundry. I always imagined that grief would feel noble and dignified, and I suppose in very small doses it can – but in big doses, it’s just a mess.

And I do question if God really planned it this way, or if so, why? Why is love so gradual, and loss so sudden? Why is the cost of love so high? If you were God, and you wanted human beings to love one another, couldn’t you come up with some easier scheme?
You can know all the right things to say, all the wise and correct things, and yet not feel or believe them, or find any comfort in them.

When I read today’s Old Testament story, the story of Jacob wrestling with God, I notice that Jacob doesn’t come away from his encounter with God unchanged. However it is that God’s love is made real to him in that night of struggle, Jacob comes away broken, wounded, limping. And yet somehow in his brokenness, he becomes more able to love, to forgive, and to reconcile a broken relationship.

Nouwen says that we can experience our brokenness as one piece of the larger movement or pattern of being chosen, being blessed, and being given. According to Nouwen, each person’s unique brokenness is part of what’s good and chosen and special about us, our brokenness itself is blessed, and brokenness and even death can be a way of being given, a way of becoming pure gift.

It’s too soon for me to say I take comfort in that. And maybe, if you have experienced serious losses, it’s too soon for you, too. But it does make sense to me intellectually, and perhaps as all of us who grieve work through our grief, we will come to a place of believing it in our hearts.

My Dad enjoyed designing photo books of vacations and family events and flowers in neighborhood gardens. The last book he finished was an ABC book for Nevaeh, with every letter of the alphabet illustrated by something she loved. A is for Ayden, B is for Boo (that’s our dog), and so on. He included pictures of all her relatives, both birth family and foster family, and many circus and zoo animals. He gave it to her on Mother’s Day and she was absolutely rapt. She took it to Show and Tell at day care, and told every page.

A few weeks after his funeral, Nevaeh’s case was reviewed in Family Court, as all such cases are two or three times a year. The children are usually not present unless they are old enough to speak for themselves, and Nevaeh was at day care. But Nevaeh’s social worker had her ABC book, and at the end of the hearing asked if she could show it to some of the other people in the courtroom like the DHS social worker and the city solicitor. She did, and there was such a ruckus as they exclaimed over the book that the judge wanted to know what was going on. The judge took the book and took time between hearings to page through the pictures of Nevaeh with us, Nevaeh with her birth family, Nevaeh with ice cream and a plastic princess tiara and in general delighting in the world around her and surrounded by a wide array of people who love her. In those few moments, I think, for everyone in the courtroom, all of the human beings became much more human, not just names and birth dates on court documents but real people with faces and relationships and broken hearts filled with love.

Driving home that afternoon, I thought about how much I would have loved to tell Dad that story, and how often he would have enjoyed repeating it to the neighbors and to everyone he knew until I myself became tired of hearing it. And then, somehow, this might sound silly, but I was aware of him. I was aware that he had seen it all, that he didn’t need me to tell him because he had been there, present in a way that was different from his presence before he died, but no less real. I cried all the way home but there was, in my tears, something of joy. In death, perhaps – perhaps – we all become a more profound gift to the world than when we were alive.

As we come to the Communion table today, let us remember that in some mysterious way we cannot now fully understand, all our brokenness is caught up in a larger pattern. We are all broken, even as Christ is broken with us and for us. But in our brokenness, we are also chosen, and blessed, and given to one another and the world. Amen.

 © 2008 Irene Elizabeth Stroud