Sermon: Blessed in Our Brokenness

Phyllis C. Roe
Preached at Church of the Crossroads,
Honolulu, HI
Jan. 31, 1993

Scripture: Matthew 5:1-12

In the past two years we have experienced, here in Hawaii, two powerful community events - last year the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and, just recently, the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. Both times something radically new happened. The truth of people's experiences broke through the official myths of history.

Last year, many Japanese-Americans told their stories of what the war years were really like for them - many of them for the first time spoke of lost land and homes, of families divided and separated by the war, of the humiliation of the internment camps. Ordinary people whose losses had never been counted or recognized were invited to speak. I will never forget one woman whom I heard speak. She is a local Japanese woman who, on the morning of the bombinb, had left her children with a relative just for an hour or so while she went to run an errand. She was caught in the raid. When she returned she found her family dead - killed by a bomb dropped from an American plane in hot pursuit of the Japanese bombers. She was told by well-meaning relatives not to cry - and she didn't. She hadn't cried once in 50 years, she said. She had bravely and stoically gone about rebuilding her life. But there in the interview, her tears began to flow. Someone had asked what happened that day and how did you feel? She had permission to tell her story, to feel for the first time the impact of her losses and the reality that the bombs meant to protect her had killed her children.

The past months leading up to January 17th and the intensity of the emotions evoked by the observances marking the overthrow of the Hawaiian government have moved all of us. The grief, rage, bitterness, pride, and saving humor of the Native Hawaiian people, held in for a century, finally had a public forum. A 94 year old Hawaiian woman stood watching the drama re-enacted at the Palace and listening to a young Native Hawaiian man speak with force and conviction about theeds and rights of his people. With tears running down her face she said, "Maybe now my grandchildren can be proud to be Hawaiian." Even among the discord created by the controversy over how we should respond to the events and to the move for Hawaiian sovereignty, we all feel that a new spirit is at work.

Both events bear witness to the truth of the Beatitudes - if we want to see where God is breaking into the world we need to look where those who know the brokenness of life are speaking out. There is a human need in all of us to tell our experiences as we really feel them. When the desire to tell how it really is comes together with permission to tell it like it is, healing power breaks loose. That is what has happened in these public events - as those who have been silenced bergin to speak, the tension underneath the surface in our community breaks out into the open; a boil is lanced, a wound is drained. Apologies can be made, grief can find release, forgiveness can be offered, solutions can be discussed.

The Beatitudes are promises of the Kingdom, the blessedness of those who are wide open to God's grace because they know their need. To be in the Kingdom is to have that need met: to be comforted, to inherit the earth, to be satisfied, to be treated with mercy, to see God.

The Beatitudes are not virtues to be cultivated so that we are blessed as a reward. Blessedness is a reality we discover when we speak of our lives as they really are in the healing presence of Christ. The Beatitudes is one place where we are told that our desire to tell about our woundedness is fully embraced. Here, Jesus says, you have a safe place. You have God's full permission to say how life really is. The Beatitudes are a list of safe harbors in the sea of God: all of you who know what it is to be poor, empty, needy - here is where you will be filled. All of you who hurt with loss, here you will find comfort. All of you who are wracked with guilt, who need forgiveness, here you will find mercy. All of you who long for singleness of purpose, who want to give yourselves for truth, here you will see God. All of you whose love has been tried through suffering, here is a harbor where you can rest. Here all of you have permission to say how it is for you because God knows.

Now, please don't misunderstand me. There is nothing blessed about brokenness per se. Injustice, death, poverty, loss, war, greed - many people are crushed and embittered by these experiences and would find it a cruel joke to be told they are blessed. Though I am healing, I have found few blessings in many of the hours of raw grief I experienced after Michael's death. There are few blessings in the personal fragmentation experienced by victims of incest. There is constant anxiety and insecurity when one is poor. The Beatitudes do not offer a spiritual rationalization for people continuing to stay poor, oppressed, wretched.

The Beatitudes recognize that there is nothing more agonizing than living in a world, a system, a family and not being able to say who you are or how life really is. I was reading a newspaper article yesterday about a gay man who had retired after 22 years of military life. He spoke of how deadening it had been for him to have to be secret about being gay. "Many mornings I didn't even want to get out of bed. I felt invisible. The real me couldn't be known and many days I felt I had lost touch with myself."

Last night some of us from Crossroads saw a marvelous play, Shadowlands, at the Manoa Valley Theatre. It is the story of C.S. Lewis, the British writer and philosopher, and his love affair with the woman he marries - which parallels her dying from cancer. When she dies, C.S. Lewis is shaken to the core. His theology of suffering, which he had written an earlier book on, was called into question. A rather inept clergyman, trying to be of some comfort, was alarmed by Lewis' questioning of God. "you've got to hold on to your faith," he said, "that's all that will get you through." But Lewis insisted on an honesty about his own grief. In agony he cried out, "If God loves someone, how could God let them die?" It was his willingness to speak to the truth of his grief that allowed healing to begin.

Over and over again we see it happen - for individuals and families in therapy, when we open our souls on spiritual retreats, in the women's movement, in the civil rights movement, in Gay Pride, and now in indigenous people around the world - when the desire to tell our real experience is supported with permission to tell our experience - then healing has a chance to begin - people are empowered - change happens.

The Beatitudes point to the reality that when we have come to the end of our resources, when we name injustice for what it is, when we allow ourselves the full agony of loss, when we have permission to say how it is with us, there is the possibility of new life. When we give up the pretense, when we lose our composure, when we are pushed to our limits, when we are emptied of our pride and self-sufficiency, it is there that we have a chance to discover who we really are - we are blessed: that is, we loved, favored, remembered, accepted. It is in the moments when we are broken open that we can be filled with God's presence, to know ourselves as blessed.

Thomas Merton once wrote: "the value of our weakness and our poverty is that they are the earth in which God sows the seed of desire." Our desire for fullness of life - for justice, mercy, comfort, satisfaction - drives us again and again to open up our wounds and to be embraced by One who knows.

Beatitude people are people who know - who know what it is like to need mercy and so are willing to be merciful. Who know the hurts of the heart and so can be open to stand with the hurts of the world. Beatitude people are intolerant of injustice and work for justice. Beatitude people live with open hands, with hearts willing to feel, to hurt, to love. Beatitude people live with a hunger for everything gentle and true. Beatitude people live with a purity of heart, in touch with their deepest selves and so able to see things as they really are, to call them by the right name. Beatitude people are willing to be who they are created to be, to become what they already are, because they know themselves to be blessed.

Thanks be to God!

A term used by Macrina Wiederkehr, O.S.B. in Seasons of Your Heart: Prayers and Reflections.