Our fall preaching series is "Crosses We Wear." The entry into each sermon is the story behind the different crosses that we pastors wear each week in worship.  This is the third sermon, and it is based on the broken crosses I have (had) in my collection of crosses.

 “Crosses We Wear: Broken Crosses” Sept 17, 2020, SAPC, Denton; Dr. Richard B. Culp; Ephesians 2: 1-10; Psalm 107: 1-3; 17-22

Ephesians 2: 1-10  You were dead through the trespasses and sins 2 in which you once lived, following the course of this world, following the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work among those who are disobedient. 3 All of us once lived among them in the passions of our flesh, following the desires of flesh and senses, and we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else. 4 But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us 5 even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ[a]—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, 7 so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. 8 For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— 9 not the result of works, so that no one may boast. 10 For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.

Introduction:  I am sure most of you would find it hard to believe since I keep my desk in y office so neat and tidy, that I used to have a problem with where I kept my crosses.

Before I had too many crosses to wear, I kept them in a coffee mug on my desk.  Easy to find on Sunday mornings, of course, but sometimes the crosses did not quite make it back into the coffee mug. 

As I acquired more crosses, I added a second coffee mug.  But then, the problem.  the more delicate crosses would break.

The first one I broke was a beautiful green, glassy looking stone cross a member had brought back from South America for me.  it broke into a couple of pieces, I glued it back together, then the glue didn’t hold, then it broke into lots of pieces.  It was beyond repair.

If you look at the cross I am now, you would probably notice two things.  One, it clearly has a break across the bottom part of the cross.  When it broke into two pieces, I had learned my lesson about gluing and reusing, so I just left the two pieces alone so as not to damage it more.

The couple who had given the cross to me noticed that I never wore it, so they asked.  I sheepishly told them what happened; the husband, a handyman, took the two pieces, glued them back together, and soldered metal around the edges so I would not break it again.

When I wear this cross, I always notice the crack and am reminded of our brokenness, but I also see and feel the metal ending and remember that our brokenness can be overcome, indeed in Christ God had chosen to overwhelm our brokenness with steadfast love and faithfulness.

Move 1: As we heard the words of Psalm 107, we heard a recitation of this pattern of brokenness and God’s redemption.

a.  After the introductory section in which the Psalmist calls those who have been redeemed by God (that’s us folks) to give thanks to God, the psalm breaks into sections that share the same pattern.

1.   A description of human brokenness:  people who are hungry, thirsty, and faint in the wilderness;  prisoners in darkness and gloom who had turned away from God; the sick and distressed; those caught in a storm on the sea; those brought low through oppression, trouble and sorrow - we could perhaps fill in some more sections with the brokenness we see and feel.

2. Following the description of brokenness is a recitation of how God has redeemed those people from their brokenness by God’s steadfast faithfulness.  

3. As the Psalmist uses the Hebrew word for ‘steadfast faithfulness,” we remember that this same word is how the covenant between God and Israel is described (http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=2490; Scott Shauf Associate Professor of Religion, Gardner-Webb University Boiling Springs, North Carolina)

4. God’s steadfast faithfulness not only redeems us from our brokenness, but is the fundamental basis for our relationship with God.

b.  The Letter to Ephesians that we read this morning points us to the God who lived out this steadfast faithfulness by sending Christ to redeem us.

1.  We who are dead because of our sinfulness are saved by God’s grace.

2.  In other words, we who are broken beyond repair, so it seems, are redeemed, that is repaired, by God.

3.  If you are a Greek grammarian, you might find it interesting to note the “you have been saved by grace,” is a passive, perfect, periphrastic, participle (quadruples P).

4.  If you do not care about Greek grammar, you will still want to know that means we are totally passive and God is the one who acts all on God’s own to save us.

5. And, it tells us that God has been doing this, is doing this, and will be doing this (http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=262; Richard Carlson,

Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg

Gettysburg, Pa.)

5. Our brokenness is not healed by anything we do, but by the God who loves us, whose love will not go away.

Move 2:  Imagine what it might be like to have our brokenness healed.

a.  In her book Unbroken, author Laura Hillenbrand tells the story of Lt. Louis Zamperini, whose plane went down in the Pacific during WWII.  He survived the crash, along with two others, and floated in the Pacific for almost two months before landing on a Japanese occupied island.  Then, he was held captive and tortured in a Japanese prison camp.  

Before his crash, he had been an Olympic caliber runner.  As he was tortured, his body was literally broken, as was his spirit.

He survives both brutal experiences and returns home after WWII.  He marries and is working, but his life is slowly falling apart.  The nightmares will not stop, and they are dominated by images of the most brutal of the Japanese prison guards.  Zamperini turns to drinking.  He has no tolerance for his brokenness, no belief it will change, the best he can do is find distractions from it, like drinking to forget.

When things had gotten so bad there seemed to be no hope, a Billy Graham crusade came to CA.  Zamperini's wife and friends begged him to go to hear Billy Graham.  He finally relents and sits on the back row of the tent and listen to Graham's sermon.  Then, when Graham moves to prayer and a chance to give your life to Christ, Zamperini gets up and flees from the tent.  He is full of anger and rehearsing his life and all the awful experiences he has had.   

His wife wants him to go back to hear Billy Graham again.  She pesters him until he agrees to go.  But he only agrees to stay for the sermon.  He tells her he will leave when they get to the prayer part with the silence and the invitation to give their lives to Christ.

Again, the sermon evokes all sorts of thoughts and lots of anger in Zamperini.  The sermon ends and Graham invites them into a time of pray and commitment.  

Zamperini gets up to leave.  Graham notices the movement and announces that no one should leave at this point.  They need quiet and stillness while they pray.  

This causes Zamperini to hurriedly push his way down the row to flee.  He gets to the aisle and before he can leave, something overtakes him.  He has a flashback to his time on the raft when he promised God that if God would help him survive, he will live his life for God forever.

In that moment, he changes.  He lays claim to the love Christ has for him that Graham had just preached to them.  He sees himself not as a broken person who had had been beaten down by fighting for survival on a raft or by the Japanese prison guards.  He suddenly sees himself as someone Christ loves.

He goes home and empties all the alcohol from his liquor cabinet.  He never has another nightmare again.  

His changes life reveals what he can be when he is not bound by his brokenness (This part of the story is found on pages 370-376 of Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand, NY:Random House, 2010).

 

b.    We know brokenness in our lives.

1.  We see it and experience it on a corporate level as we look to our world and see all the divisiveness, the anger, the hatred, the acting out both in our own country and across the world.

2.  We know brokenness in our personal lives as well.  

3. You can fill in the blank with your own challenges, both physically and spiritually.  

4.  Part of the human condition is brokenness.

c.  But, into our lives of brokenness comes the God of love and mercy, again and again.

1.  God does not leave us alone in our brokenness.  

2.  God continually moves toward us in faithfulness, offering healing and redemption.

Move 3: From our brokenness, we find healing and new life.

a.   If you come into my office and look behind one of the doors, you will see a strip of wood mounted on the wall with pegs on which my crosses now hang.

1. the guy who soldered my cross made it for me (I moved it with me to St. Andrew) so that I would have a new way of storing my crosses so I would not break them again.

2.  It has worked well.  No broken crosses in quite a few years.

b.  the God who redeems calls us to a new way of life, a way of life marked by the goodness in which we were made.

1.  created for good works.

2. Called to live into that goodness despite the brokenness we have experienced.

3.  As I mentioned about the cross I am wearing, you can see the crack and the brokenness.

4. Like the resurrected Christ who still shows his wounds, we do not erase our brokenness as if it never happened.  

5.  But we move beyond our brokenness through God’s redeeming power.

c.  I attended University Presbyterian Church just off the campus of Trinity University while I was in school there.

they had sort of ugly looking cross that hung on their chancel.  In fact, they have a tradition that when a member moves to another place, they give them a hand-carved cross modeled on the cross that hangs in the chancel to go with them.

The cross hanging in the chancel, goes back to the early days of the church.  In fact, it goes back to the first day some worshipers met to start University Presbyterian Church.

they obviously did not have a building, so they had permission to meet at Northrup Hall, one of the first buildings of the brand new campus for Trinity University.

the worshippers arrived on Sunday morning and were met by the construction supervisor who informed them that the building was not yet ready for people to come inside.  They could not worship there.

 Those gathered decided to worship anyway.  So they set up chairs, and someone noticed in a scrap heap some lumber being thrown away.  They found a hammer and nails and put together a cross with these jagged-edged pieces of wood and placed it at the front of the worship space.

the cross stayed with them.  They told the story of how out fo the scrap pile two pieces of wood were taken; one of the pieces represented the brokenness of the world;  one of the pieces represented the cross on which Christ was crucified to redeem the world’s brokenness.

Each week the cross hangs in worship as a call to remember that God has healed their brokenness and sends them into the world (Lib Mc Gregor, Pastor, UPC, San Antonio told this story on 3/9/08 in her sermon).

Conclusion:

Christ calls us to carry his cross and follow him.

it is a broken cross that has been redeemed.