Brokenness and Grace

Rich Mullins, who no doubt influenced my adolescent faith more than was good for it, once said in a concert:

But my theory is that for those of us who are too weak to remain single, God gives us a spouse. For those of us who are too hung up to handle marriage, God gives us celibacy. So, pick your weakness. Pick your poison, I guess. But anyway, for those of you who do choose to be in love and stuff, go for it. And I think it's a good thing - I've heard a lot about it.

I thought about those words yesterday as I attended a wedding of some old college friends, looking at a small cross-section of my college friends represented in the ones who attended (and in some way the ones who didn’t). I found myself surprisingly struck by our brokenness, brokenness that showed its face in different ways among the different people represented.

I thought of the brokenness of those of us with too many grandiose dreams of serving a God we slowly realize we do not believe is gracious, and the brokenness of those of us who give up those dreams because we realize we are too lonely to serve God the way we wanted. I thought of the brokenness of those of us with too much idealistic cultural rebellion to slip easily into what looks like a pre-packaged life, and the brokenness of those of us who take the package and hope the ideals can fit inside. I thought of the brokenness of those who lose the girl and keep the friends, and the brokenness of those who get the girl and lose the friends. It made me want to weep.

And as we took communion, I thought about the Incarnation, about Christ entering the broken places of our lives and making them holy. Christ’s life sanctifies the broken pieces of the single life, and his first miracle sanctifies the broken pieces of marriage. Since we have been given a Messiah who takes on our pain rather than destroying it, perhaps in some ways he pronounces goodness over it. Far from simply healing our brokenness, he sanctifies it.

If that is the case, I suppose all the places that looked like brokenness become openings for Grace. Perhaps just as marriage can be an opening for Grace to those of us who are lonely, singleness is sometimes an opening for Grace to those of us with too many hang-ups. One way or another, there is Grace to the overly-strong, Grace to the weak, Grace to the idealists, and Grace to the idealess.

If that is the case, it is reason to rejoice, here on the eleventh day of Christmas.

Collect for the second Sunday after Christmas Day

O God, who wonderfully created, and yet more wonderfully restored, the dignity of human nature: Grant that we may share the divine life of him who humbled himself to share our humanity, your Son Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.