November 5: "Beauty in our Brokenness" (All Saints Sunday)

THE WORD IN THE GOSPEL  Matthew 5:1-12

Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up a mountain. He sat down and his disciples came to him. He taught them, saying:

“Blessed are people who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

“Blessed are people who grieve, because they will be made glad.

“Blessed are people who are humble, because they will inherit the earth.

“Blessed are people who are hungry and thirsty for righteousness, because they will be fed until they are full.

“Blessed are people who show mercy, because they will receive mercy.

“Blessed are people who have pure hearts, because they will see God.

“Blessed are people who make peace, because they will be called God’s children.

“Blessed are people whose lives are harassed because they are righteous, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.

“Blessed are you when people insult you and harass you and speak all kinds of bad and false things about you, all because of me. Be full of joy and be glad, because you have a great reward in heaven. In the same way, people harassed the prophets who came before you.

MESSAGE

What does a saint look like? What does a saint do? What makes someone a saint?

I believe that most people tend to think that a saint is someone who has lived an exemplary life. Someone who was very Christ-like. Someone who was consistently humble and caring and loving. Someone who was as close to perfect as a human being can get.

If that were true, then I’m not sure there’s a lot of hope for many people to be saints.

But it may surprise you to know that some 2,000 years ago in the early Christian Church, a “saint” was anyone who lived a Christian life. Notice that I didn’t say an exemplary Christian life or a perfect Christian life.

The truth is, not one single saint throughout the history of the Church has been perfect. Every person who we might consider to be a saint struggled with the same kinds of problems, challenges, temptations, and failings as the rest of us.

The truth is, the path to sainthood is filled not with perfection and praiseworthy behavior. The path to sainthood is a journey through the messiness of life. Every saint has known what it’s like to struggle and to be broken.

Every person whose memory we honor today has known some kind of brokenness in their lives. Every one of these people have experienced the sharp edges of grief, disappointment, and failure.

And yet, today, we recognize all of them as saints. How can that be?

The father of Methodism, John Wesley, believed that anyone who claimed the Christian faith was on a life-long journey toward holiness and toward sainthood. But Wesley emphasized that it was not just people’s actions that made them holy. The process of being made holy was a gracious act of God.

In other words, God takes our brokenness and turns it into something beautiful . . . something exquisite . . . something holy. 

Let me show you:

There is a Japanese art of fixing broken pottery or ceramic pieces called kintsugi. Kintsugi literally means “to patch with gold.” With this technique, the artisan uses lacquer or resin mixed with powdered gold, and this mixture is used to bond the broken pieces. The gold mixture  creates a wonderful veined effect in the repaired piece, and makes it even more beautiful than it was before it was broken.

In other words, the cracks – the physical signs of brokenness – are transformed into signs of a new, more beautiful kind of wholeness.

The craft of kintsugi gives new life or rebirth to damaged or aging ceramic objects by celebrating their fragility. According to Japanese philosophy, this same principle can be applied to life, as we seek to find value in the cracks, missing pieces, and brokenness in our lives while also seeing the beauty of 'imperfection' and loving ourselves, family, and friends despite our flaws.

In the Christian faith, we could say that God is the great kintsugi artisan who is always working on us, filling the cracks of our lives with the golden bonds of love, making our broken lives more beautiful than we could ever imagine.

Let me read again the words from today’s reading from the book of 1 John:

“See what kind of love God has given to us in that we should be called God’s children, and that is what we are! Dear friends, now we are God’s children, and it hasn’t yet appeared what we will be.”

Sometimes, the world doesn’t see us as saints, as followers of Jesus, because of our brokenness. Oftentimes, the world can’t see beyond our cracks and our scars. The world demands perfect saints, one-of-a-kind saints. But if the world is looking for saints who are perfect, then the world’s going to be disappointed.

Because true sainthood, true blessedness, true holiness, always begins with scars and cracks and broken pieces.

In the passage from the gospel of Matthew, Jesus makes that clear. He doesn’t say, “Blessed are those who are perfect.” He says, “Blessed are those who are humble and who are grieving and who hunger for righteousness and justice and who are harassed and persecuted.” In other words, blessed are those who have experienced those sharp edges of life, those difficult times that make us broken in the eyes of the world.

The world wants perfect saints, so in the eyes of the world, we don’t qualify. But God has a different idea. God is at work in our lives, slowly and carefully mending our brokenness, gathering up those sharp pieces and turning them into a work of art, a work of holiness, a work of saintliness.

Those golden bonds of love not only transform us, they also keep us connected forever to the saints that have gone before us. Because one of the ways we know God’s love is through the ways that these saints have shown love to us. Through the grace of God, their imperfect love and their brokenness have been turned into something of great and lasting value and beauty.

And that’s what we celebrate today.

Thanks be to God for seeing beyond the cracks in our lives and in the lives of our loved ones.

Thanks be to God for turning imperfection into something magnificent.

Thanks be to God for leading each of us through our brokenness and toward that glorious communion of saints. Amen.