When I was in kindergarten, I was taught to memorize nursery rhymes. One of those says: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.
As an adult later, I had read that Humpty Dumpty refers to King Richard III, the hunchbacked monarch who rode a horse named Wall. In one of the battles, King Richard fell from his horse, and his body was hacked to pieces by the enemy.
If this is so, it is so violent that I don’t think it is good for children. I wonder why this was categorized as a nursery rhyme.
Maybe the resilience of this old nursery rhyme lies in the fact that it talks about life. And in this rhyme, there is something in Humpty Dumpty that is part of us.
First of all, we could be like Humpty Dumpty as broken people. Some of us are exhausted from the past days, dealing with problems at work or at home. A parent might be coping with a child who is on drugs, or a child with failing grades. Some of us have bodies that need healing. A few are still grieving from the death of a loved one. Some of the students might be struggling with term papers that are due this week, or are busy preparing for the final exams. Or a faculty member might be having some difficulties helping a student who doesn’t seem to care about his/her studies. Some of us have broken relationships. Or if you have been watching the news, it is frustrating to see that in several places in the world, people are being killed in the name of religion. Today, we come around the Lord’s Table as broken people.
In our scripture lesson, Paul’s big problem with the church at Corinth had to do with divisions. Even at the Lord’s Supper, some were excluded, while others got drunk. Paul was not about to condone such behavior so he wrote, “I have no praise for you, for your meetings do more harm than good.”
And even today, on this World Communion Sunday when we talk about being united in Christ, we see a lot of churches or groups of Christians worshiping separately.
Driving from my house to Church, I would count about five churches or fellowships. And unfortunately, we know there are people who are not welcome at the table of Communion in many of these churches.
Sometimes our broken relationships are much more personal. I have talked with some people who tell me they cannot worship in church on Sundays because they do not like to see the face of someone in church.
Henry Nouwen once said, “The men and women who love me and are very close to me are also the ones who wound me.”
Many of us come with broken souls. Paul wrote, “A man ought to examine himself before he eats of the bread and drinks of the cup.”
So we come to the Table of our Lord today with confession on our lips, “We have erred and strayed from God’s ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have not loved our neighbors and we have not heard the cry of the needy. Forgive us, we pray.”
And for us who are broken in spirit and in body, we are invited to come to the Table of our Lord in our brokenness.
This then takes us to the second point I would like to share. At the Table of our Lord, we encounter the broken Christ. The one we meet at Holy Communion is the one who was also broken for us.
Thus, we hear the words, “The body of Christ, broken for you!”
The Christ who appears to us at Holy Communion is not the Triumphant Lord but the Suffering Servant. Here, God is neither a picture of success nor a portrait of prosperity, but someone despised and rejected by others, a man of constant sorrow, one well-acquainted with grief. As we take of the bread and of the cup, we will find the Jesus whom we know by the nail prints in his hand.
Many of us have read about, or may have been to, the Vietnam Memorial at Washington D.C. It is a memorial of those who died during the Vietnam War. There is this painting of the Vietnam Memorial depicting a young widow and her daughter standing at the wall, reaching up and touching the name of a husband and father who died in combat. The reflection in the polished granite, however, is not the mother and daughter, but that of the husband and father, reaching out his hand to touch theirs.
That is what happens when we come to the Lord’s Table. We bring our brokenness, our sins, our sorrows, to the Lord with the hope that we can touch him.
However, we find him reaching out to us even before we reach out to him. He is the one who always cares and understands. He is the one whose love is steadfast, no matter what.
The prophet Jeremiah is often called the weeping prophet. He never preached a sermon that got approval from the people. Nobody ever slapped Jeremiah on the back and said, “We are lucky to have you as our prophet, continue on the good work.” There was never an appreciation dinner held in his honor, and no one came to him saying, “I hope you will be our prophet for a very long time.”
Instead, they threw him in a cistern where Jeremiah cursed the day he was born. On another occasion, he prayed, “O that my head were a spring of water and my eyes a fountain of tears, I would weep day and night for my people.”
However, it was the same Jeremiah who wrote in his Lamentations: “Your compassion, O Lord, never fails. Morning by morning, new mercies I see; great is your faithfulness, oh Lord, unto me.” “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness.” (Lam. 3:22-23)
Today let us bring our brokenness and place it under the Lord’s blessing. The Lord uses broken things. He uses broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give us rain, broken grain to give us bread, broken bread to give us strength.
And then, the Lord takes our broken lives using our brokenness to be a blessing to others. We may help a few people out of our strengths. But we will help a host of people by putting our brokenness under the blessing of the Lord.
When the Lord blesses our brokenness: the intolerable becomes a challenge; the reason for depression becomes a source of purification; and what seems like rejection becomes a way to deeper communion.
The body of Christ was broken for us that your brokenness and mine maybe redeemed for the glory of God and the good of others. Come to the Table of our Lord.
