Loading...From the Dumpster
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxgWHzMvXOY
This is a sermon about grace so I am preaching it from behind the dumpster.
My friend Linda tells the story of her daughter going out of town for a day.
Sophia, Linda’s 5 year old granddaughter. broke her arm at school. She was fine and her dad took good care of her. But when Linda’s daughter returned home that night Sophia became anxious and kept repeating, “I’m ok Mommy, I’m ok.” “I know you are ok Sophia,” her mom replied. But Sophia could not sleep and kept repeating to her mother with increasing urgency that she was ok. Finally her mother said. “Darling, I know you are ok. Why do you keep telling me?” Sophia meekly confessed to her mother, “I want you to know I am ok because when something in our house is broken you throw it away.”
I’m preaching to you from the dumpster today as a reminder that the dumpster is our destiny, theologically speaking. The salvation story is just that, a story about how Jesus saves — salvages — all of humanity from being thrown away.
Jesus saves all of humanity not by making us whole but by being himself broken, on the cross, on the edge of town, by the city dump. Jesus’ body was claimed and he was fortunate enough to have been buried in a tomb, unlike others who after their execution would have their unclaimed bodies discarded on the trash pile.
When Jesus says to the Pharisees, Give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s Jesus means as on earth as it is in heaven: all the broken bits belong to God. A coin represents the currency we live by in our earthly day to day business.
God designed us with needs which a system of currency can help us meet. God also designed us to be breakable — that is human. We have the capacity to die. And we have the capacity to be raised from the dead.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we lived in a world that didn’t need dumpsters? Where every article of waste or refuse had its own purpose? This earth is not that world. On earth as it is in heaven is where broken things belong to God. God raised the broken bloodied Jesus from the dead as the firstborn of a whole: w-h-o-l-e new creation. Jesus salvages us from the trash pile of sin and shame to be made whole. We are made perfect because Jesus’ broken body is raised from sin and shame by perfect love.
When my brain is struggling to understand the mystery of an all loving God who can forgive even the trashiest of sins I come back to Exodus.
So as your take-away for the week I offer you this image.
When you find yourself in circumstances where you want to chuck it all out of sight and forget about everything that stinks, picture Moses standing on a rock. There is God, tucked out of sight, in the cleft of the rock and covering Moses with his hand. Then God hides Moses in a cleft so God can reveal God’s glory to Moses using this description, I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. God is hell-bent on loving the unlovable.
Your heart can be a rusted lawn chair-three legged table-coffee grinds-egg shell-poopy diaper-raw chicken garbage heart. But you can never be so broken and useless that God won’t love you.
