The passage we face this
week is a hard one. That is the first thing my lectionary commentary told me
when I opened the book – this is a hard passage for preachers. Thank you,
lectionary commentary, you are correct. And the Sermon Roundtable agrees with
you too.
So, we leaned heavily on
the commentary and the biblical footnotes to understand what Paul was doing in
these verses. If you look at the text you will notice that there are a lot of
quotation marks in it. Paul is quoting liberally from other texts. The
commentary and footnotes tell me that these quotes are coming from the Old
Testament law and prophets, which he may, in some cases, be paraphrasing. He is
quoting from the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the prophets Isaiah and
Joel. But what is really interesting is that he is sprinkling in some Christian
interpretation along the way, inserting them right into the quotes. Paul is
interacting with the scriptures.
He is engaging with the
texts in a very creative way, keeping it lively, keeping us on our toes along
with him. It is a dance of interpretation. And the meaning, the purpose, of the
dance is to make his theological argument: that while it is not, perhaps,
necessary for the Gentile believers to follow the law of Israel, for the people
of Israel, the law is grace – the law is blessing, along with the glory, the
covenant, and the promises. In other words, to the Gentiles we might hear Paul
saying, “It may not be for you. But don’t dismiss it. And don’t dismiss the
Jews either, for you all, we all, belong to God.
“For there is no
distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous
to all who call on him,” Paul writes.
It is true, then. We are
all broken, every one of us. We are all in need of the mercy and grace of God.
The matter of our
brokenness is a weighty matter. I want to tell you a story about Bryan Stevenson – he tells the story
himself in his book, Just Mercy.
Bryan grew up in Delaware,
attended law school at Harvard, and found his way down to Alabama to work with
death row inmates, many of whom had been wrongly convicted. For years he worked
tirelessly, against the odds, to get men and women a new trial, to get their
sentences modified or vacated. He still does. Often with success. But there was
one point when he almost quit.
He was working on behalf of
Jimmy Dill, a prisoner on death row in Alabama. Jimmy, as so many others like
him, came from nothing – no family, no money, no competent counsel to represent
him, no one who cared about him. He sat on death row for years. Every
opportunity for appeal came and went without a single soul lifting a finger to
help him. When Bryan got involved, it was just a month before Jimmy’s execution
date. He tried everything he could think of to get Jimmy another chance – a
hearing that might bring him some relief. But repeatedly he was told no, it was
too late.
The night Jimmy was to be
executed, Bryan was on the phone with him, to give him the terrible news that
their last appeal had been denied. Before hanging up Jimmy said to Bryan, “I
want to thank you for caring about me. I love you for trying to save me.”
Bryan almost quit that
night. And he asked an important question. He asked, “Why do we want to kill
all the broken people?”
Why do we want to kill all
the broken people?
Because it is easier than
fixing them, or fixing the broken systems that failed them.
Because we see them as
utterly different from us, deserving of condemnation.
Because if we kill them we
can continue to deny our own brokenness.
We are all, every one of
us, broken. We are all in need of God’s grace and mercy. And we are God’s hands
and feet in the work of fixing the brokenness of this world. But the challenges
we face are real. Mending the broken things can be very hard, presenting new
challenges that might seem even harder than the old ones.
Mending the broken things
demands that we work together, cooperating with people we might not like
working with; sometimes admitting that they are better equipped to mend things
than we ourselves are.
Mending the broken things
can take a long time.
Mending the broken things
might not even seem possible to us.
But seeing our own frailty,
our own brokenness, can make it possible. Trusting in God to make it possible,
even when we don’t see the results.
There is beauty in
brokenness because it allows us to let God in and see God’s hand at work. There
is a song that says,
“There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” In our own
brokenness, we see God’s light, God’s love and tender mercy.
No comments:
Post a Comment