Brokenhearted?
“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” Let me write that again, “He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.” What an amazing promise! What an incredible statement we hear in Psalm 147 about God! I mean is there really anything else you need to know about God after hearing that? Do you really need to hear anything more?
If I’m honest with myself, this sentence is everything I am desperate for. These are the words that I long to hear on a daily basis. Everything else just seems like noise compared to these words, this promise given by the Psalmist. Because this is where I am most of the time. This is where I am today. I am brokenhearted. I am wounded. And I’m not sure that there is really anything that anyone can do about it. But more often than not, I push these feelings down. I try to ignore them because they’re such a downer. I mean who wants to hang out with the wet blanket at the party, really? It is just too intense and maybe it hits too close to home to tolerate conversation about broken hearts and wounds and the like.
That is our culture after all. It is certainly the case here on the North Fork. It’s summer and people stream in every weekend for beaches and vineyards. Let’s eat, drink, and be merry and drown out our pain! Vulnerability is frankly a dangerous proposition. We don’t often like it. We need to keep up appearances and hold it together.
One of my favorite movies of all time is Cinderella Man. Directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe, Renee Zellweger, and Paul Giamati. Despite its somewhat confusing title, it is a true story about a Great Depression era boxer from New Jersey named James J. Braddock. In it we watch people lose everything in the economic collapse of 1929 and go about trying to live in this new reality. The boxing metaphors are thick and numerous, and one in particular gives a picture of our natural tendency. Jimmy Braddock’s trainer, Joe, excellently played by Paul Giamati tries to get Braddock back into fighting after he had fallen on hard times. And Jimmy’s wife, Mae, angrily leaves their dingy basement apartment in Jersey to go Joe’s fancy Manhattan apartment to confront him for pulling Jimmy back into this violent sport. When she gets there Joe pretends not to be home, but eventually has to let her in after she continues yelling at him through the door. When she enters, we see a huge empty apartment with only a card table and two fold out chairs sitting in the middle.
Joe and his wife had lost everything too, but you could never tell from their outward appearance. Mae says she had no idea, and Joe’s response is, “That’s the idea…always keep your hands up.” That’s our natural tendency, keep your guard up, don’t let people know that you’re hurting, don’t let them know that you’re weak.
Of course a lot of what I’m describing is purely a survival technique. It’s almost instinctual. Like a cat that feels threatened fluffs up all of its fur and turns sideways to appear as big as it possibly can, we too hide our weaknesses. We keep our pain quietly behind closed doors so that no one will know what’s really going on with us. We say, “I’m FINE.” And you know what FINE stands for? It stands for “F’ed up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional.” You hear this definition a lot in 12 Step groups because “I’m fine” is a favorite refrain of addicts in denial. We puff ourselves up to look good. Keep up appearances.
But then you hear the words of the Psalmist, and it sounds almost too good to be true, you almost don’t believe it because you need it so badly. But it cuts right through the façade to our heart. It breaks through the intricately constructed and fearfully preserved exterior to those areas of hurt, to our broken hearts and wounds. This good news that there is Someone that can help, there is Someone who gives a damn and does something about it.
There is a common metaphor in Scripture about how we have been formed by God like a potter forms pots out of lumps of clay. Paul uses the imagery quite a bit actually (2 Corinthians 4, Romans 9). He calls us earthen vessels made by God. It is a beautiful image really when you think of the great care that goes into making pottery. It is not a cold or disconnected process done with machinery, rather it is personal, intimate, completely done with one’s hands. The Artist carefully works the clay into form knowing every crease and bend of the clay by touch. It gives us an idea of how intimately God knows each one of us. And it has been forever colored by the love scene from the movie Ghost to where now I cannot think of someone throwing clay without some sort of erotic undertones. Thanks a lot Patrick Swayze. But I digress…
The other part of the metaphor is the fragility of pottery. It is easily shattered, easily cracked, or broken. And while we know people can be very resilient creatures, able to withstand much adversity and to overcome very great odds, it is never without wounds. It is never without cracks, some of them very deep. Why does God do it this way? Why does he make us with such great potential for weakness? Why not make us indestructible? Instead of making us like clay pots why not make us like the US Steel Tower, mighty and strong?
Years ago while serving in my hometown of Pittsburgh I went to our annual clergy conference where a young Brit named Drew Williams had been invited to be the guest speaker. He was the pastor of Trinity Church Greenwich at the time, where Kate and I actually attended a couple times when we lived in Connecticut during our first year of marriage. Little did I know he would become my Bishop and friend years later here in the Northeast. That day, Drew introduced us to a Japanese art form called “kintsukuroi” or “kintsugi,” which means to repair with gold. I have heard it referenced many times over since then, but that day was the first I had heard of it. It is the process of repairing broken pottery with gold resin. Drew said, “The Japanese have come to cherish the imperfection of a broken pot repaired this way because when something has suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful. The repair process makes no effort to hide the crack or break, but incorporates it as a design element in to something simultaneously broken and strengthened by the break.”
And here we see God’s wisdom in making us like clay pots rather than the U.S. Steel building, making us weak and dependent rather than making us strong and independent. It’s something that Kate often says, “Perfection is good, but redemption is better.” These broken pots with gold striations are pictures of our redemption; God healing our broken hearts and binding up our wounds. We become more beautiful in the process. Instead of just being perfect specimens of the human race, when we know our brokenness and see how God heals us there we become living testimonies. We have history that reveals God’s awesome power in our lives, power to redeem, power to save. The gold lines are Christ shining through, and he is seen in our broken hearts and in our wounds.
That was the case for the Jews. Psalm 147 is one of the five Hallelujah psalms, which many believe were written in celebration after God had brought His people back to the land He had promised them out of exile, after God had restored His people, after He had kept his promise to them. They proclaimed His faithfulness. They testified to His healing work. Their brokenness, what was once a source of shame had now become a source of rejoicing. It was the thing they pointed to as proof of God’s love for them. I was lost and now I am found.
This is true for us too. God does indeed heal the broken hearted and bind up the wounded because he has brought us back from exile. He has come and found us in our sin, in those places in our lives where we have rejected Him and have hurt one another and ourselves. He has come after us by sending His Son Jesus Christ. Jesus came to redeem us and reconcile us back to God. He died for our sin to set us free. His cross, which was once a picture of all things shameful, “for cursed is one who is hung on a tree,” is now our hope (Deut. 21:23). His wounds are now our glory.
Just as Jesus redefined brokenness to be the very glory of God on the cross, the one true way of salvation, so too has He redefined our brokenness. He has fulfilled this promise in Psalm 147. God heals the brokenhearted and binds up the wounded in Jesus Christ. We are his beautiful, fragile, redeemed treasure.
As a result, we can be vulnerable. We can let down the façade and share our histories of brokenness and our wounds with one another because we know that is where He shines through. That is where Jesus meets us. Though I don’t think Paul knew about the Japanese art of kintsukuroi, he certainly knew the concept. When he prayed to have his weakness removed Jesus’ response was, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Cor. 12:1-12). This inspired Paul then to boast all the more gladly of his weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest on him. As he says, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” We can join Paul there. We can boast in our weakness because that is where the power of Christ, His healing grace, is found. This is our hope. This is our strength. This is our freedom. This is our treasure in jars of clay. Amen.
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