A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on Aug. 13, 2006, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

“This Broken Bread”

            The World News this week brings word that a broken antique Chinese vase has been put back together.  This was not an archeological feat.  The three-hundred-year-old vase was broken just last January when a visitor to a museum in England tripped on his shoelace, fell down a short flight of stairs, and dislodged three ancient vases from the windowsill on which they had been displayed for forty years. Said Nick Flynn who broke the vase, “I snagged my shoelace, missed the step and crash, bang, wallop—there were a million pieces of high quality Qing ceramics lying around and underneath me.”

            I tell you this because if you are like me you can identify with Nick Flynn.  Our lives are full of broken stuff.  We don’t set out in the morning to mess things up, but by the end of the day, we often have.  The physical broken stuff is probably the easiest to deal with.  The broken relationships and broken dreams of our lives are more painful.      Preacher Lillian Daniel from up in Chicago tells two stories about broken things in her life—and about her relationship with her father.  The first story is from the time she was a toddler.  Her dad came home from war in Southeast Asia carrying a precious gift for her mother.  He’d found a really old, really beautiful Asian vase when he was on leave and moved it with him from barracks to barracks, gently guarding it through bombings and other dangers.  When he walked in the front door on his return he carried the vase—now unwrapped and ready to present.  But little Lillian was so excited he was back that she flung herself at him. He had a choice: he could either keep the vase safe, or he could catch the kid.  He caught his child and let the vase drop to the floor where it shattered.  Later Lillian’s mother crudely glued the pieces back together and displayed the vase, cracks and all…more as a reminder of the preciousness of their family than for any intrinsic value.

            The second story is darker.  Lillian’s dad, now grown old, was visiting her, now grown up and with a home of her own. He invaded her clean kitchen, littering a spotless counter with “an explosion of newspapers, magazines, coffee cups—all teetering on the edge of chaos.” Sure enough, the old man made a sweeping gesture to point to something he was reading and knocked a cup to the floor, splashing coffee everywhere.  “I’ll get it,” her dad offered, mopping at the spill with his newspaper. “No, Dad,” said Lillian, “it’s OK.”  But her tone indicated that it was far from OK and that she’d had enough of him. “I’ll clean up after you’re gone,” she added. And indeed, when he was gone, she got out the trash bags and the disinfectant, and when the counter shone once again, she breathed a sigh of relief.  But as life would have it, that night of the broken cup was the last time Lillian saw her father alive. “My counter sparkles,” she says. “But I want the mess back.”

            The resources of our faith offer us a lot of help with the brokenness of life.  In our Gospel Jesus says, “I am the bread of life.  Whoever comes to me will never be hungry.” Those who heard him say this were skeptical. “This is just a kid from the neighborhood,” they said, “Where does he get off claiming to be the bread of heaven?” But that’s just the point, isn’t it? Jesus WAS just a local kid, and his body was soon broken on a cross because he loved us.  And the resurrection of this local kid, broken for us, speaks a powerful message in our lives:  There is no brokenness God can’t gather up and heal.  There is no tragedy so complete that God cannot bring new life out of it.  Today, we broken people gather around a table to remember that story, and the bread that we identify with Jesus is broken for us again…broken so that we broken people can share it.

            We break a lot of stuff in our lives and we are so often broken ourselves.  One moment we are breathing in the beauty of a small museum and in another moment we’ve tripped over ourselves and “crash, bang, wallop” we’re in a mess of our own making.  But that’s not the end of the story.  The end of the story is God’s ability to put it all back together again: God’s ability to remind us by our frailty what it is that really matters in our lives; God’s ability to forgive us and to bring us inch by inch to forgive ourselves and each other; and God’s ability to bring new reality out of the broken shards of the old.

There’s a three hundred year-old vase in a museum in England that bears witness to that.

It is a gorgeous thing, but if you look closely you’ll see the marks where it was broken—a little bit like what you’ll see if you look closely enough at you and me.

                                                                                                AMEN