Fragility and Power
Text: 2 Corinthians 4:7-12
How many times have we heard the verse from scripture that tells us to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, and all our strength? A lot, right? And how often do you find yourself loving God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind and all your strength? It’s really taxing but it is our existence that depends on these.
Our mind, soul and heart are typically exercised in church and fellowship all the time. But what about our strength? What about our bodies?
Paul says that death is at work in us… death is at work in us, around us, all the time, and everywhere.
We have bodies carrying extra weight.
We have bodies carrying infected cells.
We have bodies that are broken from injuries.
We have bodies that are broken from arthritis and bone loss.
We have bodies that are struggling to hear well and see clearly.
Sometimes our limitations are fleeting or short-lived. Other times, an injury limits our mobility for the rest of our lives… or perhaps an illness brings us to monthly doctors visits. Sometimes, no matter how hard we try to be healthy and keep in shape, a party comes along and the dessert tempts us, throwing us off the diet bandwagon for what seems like the umpteenth time. Sometimes no matter how hard we try to fight it and no matter how many vitamins we take, or orange juice we drink, we still get sick.
Some days it seems that no matter how hard we try, the world is working against us. We are afflicted in every way, perplexed, persecuted and struck down.
We are, as Paul says, clay jars... fragile and weak… more vulnerable than we would ever like to admit. As we will discover in our prayers in motion, we all have our own stories of fragility and vulnerability, life and death. But let me first share my own experience.
Last summer, I went with a group of youth and young adults to Guatemala. On the third day of the trip, following lunch, my group went up a mountain just a little way to install stoves at the house of a few families. After installing the outdoor stove I went to lean on the concrete wall to get a breath of fresh air and as I was leaning looking over the cornfields and at the mountains in the distance, my vision got blurry, my hearing started to fail me and I collapsed, hitting my head on concrete… twice. I was out cold for 45 seconds. After I came to, they got me back to our hostel and with the help of the doctor on our trip, I was rehydrated, given medicine to stop the nausea and make the pain in my head and neck go away… all the while wondering if I had a closed head injury or if I was going to wake up the next morning. All afternoon I had demanded doing things on my own, wanting to be independent, but I realized that I couldn’t do anything on my own……… That night, I was so upset about missing devotions that everyone gathered by my bedside to do them. You could feel Emmanuel, God with us, in the overwhelming sense of community that the group provided as we sat in the dark recalling the days events. Fortunately, that day, I was struck down, but I was not destroyed. Praise be to God.
It is when our clay jar is shattered… when we are in our most fragile moments, we experience God. And it is in those moments we realize that our brokenness matters not, because it is God’s power that works through us—no matter how fragile… how weak… how delicate we may be. It is in those moments that we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed. That power belongs to God and does not come from us.
One of my favorite songs comes from a small community called Church of the Beloved and in their song entitled, “Broken,” they sing the following words:
You are broken, I am broken, everyone is broken
Stay, there is peace beyond anguish
life beyond death, love beyond fear
Bless, bless and do not curse.
Pull brokenness far from the shadow of curse
put it under the light of the blessing.
Praise, praise to you Lord for I never realized
broken glass could shine so brightly.
We are broken. Broken in every way. Christ’s death is visible in us in our ailments and our disabilities and our illnesses and our everyday struggles. And that is real. There is no denying it and no getting around it. It is discouraging and infuriating. But it is a part of who we are, whether it is short-lived or ongoing. Everyone is broken.
Through those experiences, we come to various conclusions about our bodies, both positive and negative… but the conclusion to which we should arrive is the one in which we realize our ability to understand more about ourselves and about each other through those conditions. We share in our joys and sorrows as we move through the various stages of life. And as we share with each other, we reveal truths about who we are as humans and as people of flesh. We reveal strength and hope, courage and love.
Leonard Cohen once said, “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Let the light shine in through your fragility. Love God with not just your heart, soul and mind, but Love God and love people with whatever strength you can muster because even when our brokenness makes us feel incapable, it is evident that the power enabling our lives comes only from God. We must accept the fact that our bodies are a place of truth and revelation for others and when we do, we will begin to see the life of Jesus in each others lives.
Let it be so.
