May 2, 2005
Chapel Address
Broken Faith
Our year together is quickly coming to an end. The last few weeks have been fast paced, stretching, demanding, painful, and inspirational…all at the same time. I have found myself on some occasions asking if I can possibly keep going. And on other occasions thanking God for the privilege to work in this place with these friends, and especially with you students. The feast we've had of stimulating lectures, concerts, honors presentations, departmental presentations, multi-media and musical presentations, chapel speakers, colloquia, and especially the senior workshops on the Common Day of Learning, have left me feeling like I'm drinking out of a fire hydrant! Soon our schedules will change, and for some of you they will never again be quite the same as you move into careers far from the routines of college and perhaps even far from this corner of Illinois. Each year I am grateful for the opportunity to share with you a few parting thoughts. And I am aware they may be the last I am able to speak to many of you. So as I have done before, I want to be sure I leave you with thoughts about Jesus, who is my strength and my hope. Mostly today, I want to tell you how my awareness of His love for me grows strongest when I am feeling broken.
PRAYER
I've done a lot of crying recently. Maybe it's just because I'm Sicilian and that's what we do. To be honest, I'm kind of proud of that latin passion and expressiveness….though often my work forces me to “bottle it up.” But for example, last Friday, I was emotionally exhausted by 10:30 a.m. I had met early with a candidate for a job on campus, and he had told me how he had come to know Jesus. Growing up overseas, his Buddhist father had resisted his turn to faith, ridiculed him, and eventually thrown him out of the house at 15. During this same time he had used the summers to travel to other villages with a guitar asking if he could sing and speak a word for Jesus in whatever church would have him. When his father forced him to choose between his love for family or for Jesus, and then disowned him because of his choice, God provided a guardian who sent this young man off to a Christian college. Tears fell down my cheeks and his as he told of his return home after 4 years of silence, degree now in hand, to see his father run to greet him and announce publicly not only his pride in his son, but his faith in the same Jesus.
Then only a few minutes later, coming here to chapel, I was again moved, as my friend Dr. Balmer, who has felt so much pain in his own life, shared with you so openly and authentically the stories of his “journeying mercies.” I identified with his struggle to learn to love his father's faith, and wept as he confessed that somehow through it all he had lost sight of Jesus.
Earlier in the week, I felt overwhelmed by a number of decisions I was facing in regard to the college. Perhaps like many of you facing exams and presentations, I felt completely inadequate and at times just wished someone else would make these hard choices for me. Finally, many of your know my wife Ellen is not doing very well these days either. In recent days we sometimes just sit together and cry.
Tears of course can be wonderful expressions of joy. I performed the wedding for my daughter and her new husband just four weeks ago in California . It was a wonderful occasion. But she's still my “little girl” so we shed bittersweet tears thinking of how our lives and hers would change unalterably from that day forward. Tears are a part of our lives that remind us that we are not always in control. Whether because of good circumstances like that wedding, or because of tragedy and pain, they mark moments when we are vulnerable, when our defenses are down, when we are authentically open, feeling weak, and often broken in spirit. The tears may not even come from the immediate situation. Instead they may come from an accumulation of circumstances over time and may only triggered by the moment.
My friend Randy's account in chapel Friday prompted tears both because of the pain he recounted in losing track of Jesus and because of what I had been feeling already. My tears with the our job candidate arose because I imagined the pain he had felt in choosing between the expectations of his earthly father and his overwhelming desire to speak out about how his life had been changed by a new relationship with his heavenly Father. But perhaps my memories of the recently changed relationship with my daughter contributed. My tears with Ellen arise from my terrible sense, accumulated over 17 years, of inadequacy to do anything at all to help relieve her pain.
Coming to the end of our own resources, feeling completely inadequate, is part of life. I remember a period over a dozen years ago, when I first became Academic Dean at Houghton College, when I felt so overwhelmed that, with the door closed, I would put my head down on my desk in my office and just cry. You may be feeling some of that inadequacy these last days before the end of the academic year. Such tears are usually a sign we just feel plain broken.
But 'brokenness' is not a word that most of us use often, and certainly it's not one that popular culture encourages us to cultivate. On the contrary, our heroes and heroines, the idols of our times, are usually the opposite; tough, driven, confident, outspoken, and independent. Of course these images only reinforce our temptation to avoid tears, and certainly not to talk much about them when we have them.
We often dismiss tears and brokenness, even in thinking about our spiritual lives, as overly emotional. I remember clearly a period in the Free Methodist denomination, and perhaps in yours too, when emotion was probably overemphasized. My dad was a preacher and summer evangelist. So I have sat through more than my share of 105 degree 2 hour services, followed by everlasting altar calls. To this day I don't know how many verses there are in that song, “Whiter Than Snow,” but it seemed like dozens and dozens. And I recall the struggle every few months when I'd feel my heart begin to pound at an invitation. I knew I'd either have to respond, and make that trip to the altar or feel I had let myself down for not responding to the Lord's conviction. Having been “saved” many times, I remember the freedom that came when I finally understood that my faith was built not on the emotion of the moment or a lingering feeling of being clean, but rather on the knowledge of God's promise to change me if I would only let myself go, stop controlling, and trust Jesus.
But of course there is danger in overreacting to that emphasis on emotion too. We can make our relationship with Jesus too intellectual, too much a matter of abstract ideas and beliefs. We know ABOUT Jesus but don't really know him. We talk about him daily, but don't often talk to him. It all becomes something we control. And sadly, until we give up that control; until we face our own weakness, face our own failures, and become broken in spirit, He cannot act in our lives.
As contrary as it appears, the Bible teaches this very principle. Matthew 5:3 tells us that those who are broken in spirit are blessed. Commenting on this passage, Matthew Henry says “ The poor in spirit are happy. These bring their minds to their condition, when it is a low condition. They are humble and lowly in their own eyes. They see their want, bewail their guilt, and thirst after a Redeemer. The kingdom of grace is of such; the kingdom of glory is for them.”
A number of Old Testament passages make the same surprising claim . Psalm 51:17 “The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken & contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” Isaiah 66:2 “This is the man to whom I'll look; he that is humble & contrite in spirit.”
And one of the clearest illustrations of this remarkable spiritual fact is in the well-known story of Jesus feeding the 5,000. It is a story of Jesus' response to the “broken faith” of his disciples. You remember I am sure, how in the sixth chapter of Mark the story is told of the multitudes who had listened to the Lord's teaching for an entire day, and now in the evening, his own disciples were tired and hungry. Perhaps you feel that way these days. So Jesus tried to take them away to a solitary place to rest. Sounds like a pretty good idea doesn't it? But when they arrive at this place far from any town, the crowds have followed, and now they too were hungry. The Lord takes pity, and asked his disciples to feed them! Can you imagine how the disciples must have felt? From a human point of view it was overwhelming. Lord, you brought us here to give ourselves a break and to eat. Now you want us to feed them? How? We are exhausted, hungry ourselves, completely without any resources; in short feeling inadequate and broken. There is certainly no record of tears on this occasion; perhaps they felt irritation. But I find that irritation and tears of brokenness are often only moments apart.
So on that day near Galilee , the disciples might well have felt both angry and inadequate. In any case, in the midst of their sense of inadequacy, in the midst of their broken faith, Jesus asked a simple thing. “Bring me what you have.” Often in days like these when I feel broken, I find comfort in knowing Jesus only asks me to bring what I do have.
Do you remember the rest of the story? The disciples turned to someone even less adequate than themselves, a small boy. But he was a boy with a willingness to give what he had. The Lord took the boy's small, already inadequate gift, and did an unusual thing; He broke it! Even in our weakness, the Lord asks us only to give Him what we do have. Then sometimes he breaks us again. But out of this doubly broken, doubly inadequate situation, the Lord showed Himself. The miraculous result, by which so many were fed, was possible only out of the broken faith of his followers. Until we today, like those that day, confess our broken faith, our complete inadequacy, and offer up at least what we do have, we may never see Jesus act. But when we do so confess, we will be amazed; amazed not only by the results in the world around us but by the results within our own hearts.
Last weekend, I participated in the Damascus Road Anti-racism training. For three days a group of faculty and staff worked to understand the forms this insidious evil has taken in our world, and what we might do to address it. Written on huge sheets of white paper on the walls of our meeting room were hundreds of illustrations of racism in our country's history alone. It seemed impossible to respond. But in a series of exercises where whites talked only to whites, we were called on to explain what we liked about being white. We said we liked things like finding the kind of food we like in the grocery store, questioning a police officer without fear, being able to change our license plates in broad daylight without embarrassment, and so on. Freed in this “whites only” conversation from the defensiveness that usually goes along with discussion of racism, it became apparent that there are deep layers of white power and privilege that we so often take for granted that we simply do not see them as racism at all. When we confess this internalized racial superiority, and experience our broken inadequacy, only then can we begin to see Jesus act. Likewise, our friends of color often cannot see their own internalized feelings of racial oppression. And until they do, they too cannot understand and confess their broken inadequacy allowing Jesus to act in healing their world.
But the miracle of Jesus acting out of our broken faith can occur in our hearts as well as in the world around us. I would like to close by reading to you an extended portion of a wonderful book I have just finished reading; Blue Like Jazz . I have ordered copies for my children and commend it to you. In fact just last night I received the following email from one of you to whom I had recommended the book last week.
“Dr. Mannoia, Yesterday I finished off Blue Like Jazz by Don Miller. I wanted to thank you for suggesting it. It truly had an impact on my life. It was, for me, one of those books that seem to affect the way I literally see the world around me. I learned so much about myself and about others and how to love them. Thanks again, Your brother in Christ,”
The selection I want to read expresses the wonder of Jesus' invitation to follow Him in spite of the ambiguity and doubt of our human inadequacy; in fact to follow Him perhaps only because of it. So I leave this story with you as my invitation to you to join me in confessing our own broken faith, and in following Jesus.
Author Don Miller, describes an event at Reed College in Oregon . Reed is known as one of the most liberal colleges in the country and one annual illustration of this is the celebration of a festival called Ren Fayre. In Miller's words,
“They shut down campus so students can party. Security keeps the authorities away, and everybody gets pretty drunk and high, and some people get naked. Friday night is mostly about getting drunk, and Saturday night is about getting high. The school brings in White Bird, a medical unit that specializes in treating bad drug trips…..Some of the Christian students in our little group decided this was a pretty good place to come out of the closet, letting everybody know there were a few Christians on campus. Tony the Beat Poet and I were sitting around in my room one afternoon talking about what to do, how to explain who we were to a group of students who, in the past, had expressed hostility toward Christians. Like our friends, we felt like Ren Fayre was the time to do this. I said we should build a confession booth in the middle of campus and paint a sign on it that said "Confess your sins." I said this because I knew a lot of people would be sinning, and Christian spirituality begins by confessing our sins and repenting. I also said it as a joke. But Tony thought it was brilliant. He sat there on my couch with his mind in the clouds, and he was scaring the crap out of me because, for a second, then for a minute, I actually believed he wanted to do it .
"Tony," I said very gently.
"What?" he said, with a blank stare at the opposite wall.
"We are not going to do this," I told him. He moved his gaze down the wall and directly into my eyes. A smile came across his face.
"Oh, we are, Don. We certainly are. We are going to build a confession booth!"
We met in Commons—Penny, Nadine, Mitch, Iven, Tony, and I. Tony said I had an idea. They looked at me. I told them that Tony was lying and I didn't have an idea at all. They looked at Tony. Tony gave me a dirty look and told me to tell them the idea. I told them I had a stupid idea that we couldn't do without getting attacked. They leaned in. I told them that we should build a confession booth in the middle of campus and paint a sign on it that said "Confess your sins." Penny put her hands over her mouth. Nadine smiled. Iven laughed. Mitch started drawing the designs for the booth on a napkin. Tony nodded his head. I wet my pants.
"They may very well burn it down," Nadine said.
"I will build a trapdoor," Mitch said with his finger in the air.
"I like it , Don." Iven patted me on the back.
"I don't want anything to do with it," Penny said .
"Neither do I," I told her.
"Okay, you guys." Tony gathered everybody's attention. "Here's the catch." He leaned in a little and collected his thoughts,"We are not actually going to accept confessions." We all looked at him in confusion. He continued, "We are going to confess to them. We are going to confess that, as followers of Jesus, we have not been very loving; we have been bitter, and for that we are sorry. We will apologize for the Crusades, we will apologize for televangelists, we will apologize for neglecting the poor and the lonely, we will ask them to forgive us, and we will tell them that in our selfishness, we have misrepresented Jesus on this campus. We will tell people who come into the booth that Jesus loves them. All of us sat there in silence because it was obvious that some thing beautiful and true had hit the table with a thud
I stood there outside the booth as a large blue mob started running across campus, all of them, more than a hundred people, naked and painted with blue paint. They ran by the booth screaming and waving. I waved back. Naked people look funny when they are for-real naked, outside-a-magazine naked.
The party goes till nearly dawn, so though it was late we started working the booth. We lit tiki torches and mounted them in the ground just outside the booth. Tony and Iven were saying that I should go first, which I didn't want to do, but I played bold and got in the booth. I sat on a bucket and watched the ceiling and the smoke from my pipe gather in the dark corners like ghosts. I could hear the rave happening in the student center across campus. I was picturing all the cool dancers, the girls in white shirts moving through the black light, the guys with the turntables in the loft, the big screen with the swirling images and all that energy coming out of the speakers, pounding through everybody's bodies, getting everybody up and down, up and down. Nobody is going to confess anything, I thought. Who wants to stop dancing to confess their sins? And I realized that this was a bad idea, that none of this was God's idea. Nobody was going to get angry, but nobody was going to care very much either.
There is nothing relevant about Christian spirituality, I kept thinking. God, if He is even there, has no voice in this place. Everybody wants to have a conversation about truth, but there isn't any truth anymore. The only truth is what is cool, what is on television, what protest is going on on what block, and it doesn't matter the issue; it only matters who is going to be there and will there be a party later and can any of us feel like we are relevant while we are at the party. And in the middle of it we are like Mormons on bikes. I sat there wondering whether any of this was true, whether Christian spirituality was even true at all. You never question the truth of something until you have to explain it to a skeptic. I didn't feel like explaining it very much. I didn't feel like being in the booth or wearing that stupid monk outfit. I wanted to go to the rave. Everybody in there was cool, and we were just religious.
I was going to tell Tony that I didn't want to do it when he opened the curtain and said we had our first customer.
"What's up, man?" Duder sat himself on the chair with a smile on his face. He told me my pipe smelled good.
"Thanks," I said. I asked him his name, and he said his name was Jake. I shook his hand because I didn't know what to do, really.
"So, what is this? I'm supposed to tell you all of the juicy gossip I did at Ren Fayre, right?" Jake said.
"No."
"Okay, then what? What's the game?" He asked.
"Not really a game. More of a confession thing."
"You want me to confess my sins, right?"
"No, that's not what we're doing, really."
"What's the deal, man? What's with the monk outfit?"
"Well, we are, well, a group of Christians here on campus, you know."
"I see. Strange place for Christians, but I am listening."
"Thanks," I told him. He was being very patient and gracious. "Anyway, there is this group of us, just a few of us who were thinking about the way Christians have sort of wronged people over time. You know, the Crusades, all that stuff. . ."
"Well, I doubt you personally were involved in any of that, man."
"No, I wasn't," I told him. "But the thing is, we are followers of Jesus. We believe that He is God and all, and He represented certain ideas that we have sort of not done a good job at representing. He has asked us to represent Him well, but it can be very hard."
"I see," Jake said.
"So there is this group of us on campus who wanted to confess to you."
"You are confessing to me!" Jake said with a laugh.
"Yeah. We are confessing to you. I mean, I am confessing to you."
"You're serious." His laugh turned to something of a straight face.
I told him I was. He looked at me and told me I didn't have to. I told him I did, and I felt very strongly in that moment that I was supposed to tell Jake that I was sorry about everything. "What are you confessing?" he asked.
I shook my head and looked at the ground. "Everything," I told him.
"Explain," he said.
"There's a lot. I will keep it short," I started. "Jesus said to feed the poor and to heal the sick. I have never done very much about that. Jesus said to love those who persecute me. I tend to lash out, especially if I feel threatened, you know, if my ego gets threatened. Jesus did not mix His spirituality with politics. I grew up doing that. It got in the way of the central message of Christ. I know that was wrong, and I know that a lot of people will not listen to the words of Christ because people like me, who know Him, carry our own agendas into the conversation rather than just relaying the message Christ wanted to get across. There's a lot more, you know."
"It's all right, man," Jake said, very tenderly. His eyes were starring to water.
"Well," I said, clearing my throat, "I am sorry for all of that." "I forgive you," Jake said. And he meant it.
"Thanks," I told him.
He sat there and looked at the floor, then into the fire of a candle. "It's really cool what you guys are doing," he said. "A lot of people need to hear this."
"Have we hurt a lot of people?" I asked him.
"You haven't hurt me. I just think it isn't very popular to be a Christian, you know. Especially at a place like this. I don't think too many people have been hurt. Most people just have a strong reaction to what they see on television. All these well-dressed preachers supporting the Republicans."
"That's not the whole picture," I said. "That's just television. I have friends who are giving their lives to feed the poor and defend the defenseless. They are doing it for Christ."
"You really believe in Jesus, don't you?" he asked me.
"Yes, I think I do. Most often I do. I have doubts at times, but mostly I believe in Him. It's like there is something in me that causes me to believe, and I can't explain it."
"You said earlier that there was a central message of Christ. I don't really want to become a Christian, you know, but what is that message?"
"The message is that man sinned against God and God gave the world over to man, and that if somebody wanted to be rescued out of that, if somebody for instance finds it all very empty, that Christ will rescue them if they want; that if they ask forgiveness for being a part of that rebellion then God will forgive them."
"What is the deal with the cross?" Jake asked.
"God says the wages of sin is death," I told him. "And Jesus died so that none of us would have to. If we have faith in that then we are Christians."
"That is why people wear crosses?" he asked. "I guess. I think it is sort of fashionable. Some people believe that if they have a cross around their neck or tatooed on them or something, it has some sort of mystical power." "Do you believe that?" Jake asked.
"No," I answered. I told him that I thought mystical power came through faith in Jesus.
"What do you believe about God?" I asked him.
"I don't know. I guess I didn't believe for a long time, you know. The science of it is so sketchy. I guess I believe in God though. I believe somebody is responsible for all of this, this world we live in. It is all very confusing."
"Jake, if you want to know God, you can. I am just saying if you ever want to call on Jesus, He will be there."
"Thanks, man. I believe that you mean that." His eyes were watering again. "This is cool what you guys are doing," he repeated. "I am going to tell my friends about this."
"I don't know whether to thank you for that or not," I laughed. "I have to sit here and confess all my crap."
He looked at me very seriously. "It's worth it," he said. He shook my hand, and when he left the booth there was somebody else ready to get in. It went like that for a couple of hours. I talked to about thirty people, and Tony took confessions on a picnic table outside the booth. Many people wanted to hug when we were done. All of the people who visited the booth were grateful and gracious. I was being changed through the process. I went in with doubts and came out believing so strongly in Jesus I was ready to die and be with Him. I think that night was the beginning of change for a lot of us.”
I want to close today by inviting you to join me in allowing our defenses to be broken down, to become people who confess our inadequacy, and in that moment to see and to meet Jesus. He is a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.
Let us pray.
Jesus, I ask you to break my heart and teach me to follow you. AMEN
BE THOU MY VISION
MARK 6:30-44
Isaiah 57:15 “ I dwell in the High & Holy place with him who is of contrite & humble spirit. ”
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