One of my dear young friends has a familiar signature at the bottom of her emails: “God uses damaged people.” She sends a LOT of emails. Though I don’t often forward to the 10 people required so that I will be blessed 10fold in the next hour…I do end up reading this tagline at least once daily. God uses damaged people. And as ubiquitous as that phrase is, I now find I love being reminded of it again and again. It’s comforting…

This morning in Acts, we hear the symbol-laden story of Saul’s life altering experience on the road to Damascus. Saul was a young tent maker and Pharisee, a highly educated religious man who believed with many of the Jewish authorities that those who “belonged to the Way,” as the early Christians called themselves, needed to be controlled. But Saul was a zealot and unlike others of the Pharisees, Acts reports he breathed threats and murder and went from house to house to root out the men and women followers so that he could torture them or send them to prison.

But on his way to Damascus to bring back any Jews who had become followers of Jesus, his life changes. He hears the voice of Jesus calling him out on the truth of his life, and calling him to take all that had been given him and use it to build up the people of God. For Saul, his conversion – literally his turning around, his transformation – was sudden, unexpected and altogether life altering. Saul sees with new eyes. He sees his life and the lives of those around him through the lens of a God who loves and heals. In the past, he used power to instill fear, commit violence and create dissention. In his new life as Paul, he struggles and mostly succeeds to use his power and authority to inspire, instruct, lead and nurture the followers of Jesus in the first century of the Common Era, and for generations since.

Paul begins a life that would take this message of a living God to Jews and non-Jews alike, to cities and towns, to wealthy and poor, in ways that he would never have imagined. God it seems certainly used this one very damaged person…for glorious purposes.

Take also the disciples; they are so blessedly imperfect. Still fishing on the wrong side of the boat. Still not sure what they should do or if they should speak, even though knowing in their hearts that they are seeing and eating breakfast with the Jesus who they knew died and yet lives. In so many of the stories, they just don’t seem to get what Jesus is saying half the time. And yet they lived lives of recognizable difference, of noticeable love, of radical inclusion. Indeed this small group of Palestinian Jewish fishermen and working women, struggling to feed their families and make sense out of their lives, gave us a way to envision being disciples in our own day. In no way were they perfect, in no way could they be construed as the obvious choice for God’s revelation, and yet they were each willing to follow and carry on the message of God’s extraordinary love and radical vision for the People of God.

It is fascinating to me that each are called precisely for all their gifts and all their imperfections. It makes sense that Paul’s knowledge of language, of philosophy, of Jewish theology, culture, and tradition prepared him to speak and live as a follower of Jesus in cities across the Greco-Roman world and beyond. Yet the fact that Paul was a zealot, not only as a Pharisee, but also as a follower of Jesus, made him even more suited in many ways to his ministry! Who else would have had the zeal to work and teach for years in the face of persecution, hunger, conflict? This imperfection, this place where he was damaged and damaged others, is oddly the very thing that made him so effective in shaping a conversation that would last for generations about what it means to live a faithful life, to create communities of faith, to follow the Risen Christ.

Some years ago, a woman named Felita came to one of our programs at Capitol Hill Group Ministry. That is her name because she loved us to tell her story because she was proud of her transformation. When I first met her, she said straight out – “I’m damaged goods.” She had fled an abusive relationship and found herself homeless and incapacitated from the trauma. Yet over the course of the year and a half that I knew her – she became one of the most powerful teachers and leaders that I have known.

She hated us at first, cursed us up one side and down the other. Lord that woman could use some language. Then one day she decided that we were for real. We weren’t going anywhere. And almost just like that, she turned around. She started working harder than all of us staff combined. In short order, Felita got her 6 children back, earned a training degree that enabled her to then get a job, found a place to live, and began teaching our younger women to love themselves, and teaching all of us to recognize and use our broken places as places where the light of Christ can break into our lives.

I miss her so much… walking with Felita was walking with the risen Christ. You could feel the power of her love, compassion, and righteous anger for just action. God and Felita, they took broken lives and stretched them, not into perfection – but into something whole and holy.

Yes, God uses damaged people. And it just may be that our broken places are or will be where the sacred seeps into our lives – and seeps out into the world.

Let us pray:
Oh God our great companion, send us anywhere you would have us go, only go there with us. Place upon us any burden you desire, only stand by us to sustain us. Break any tie that binds us, except the tie that binds us to you. Amen.
“I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.” Isaiah 43: 19-21
This morning we hear from the prophet known as Second Isaiah who is reminding the people Israel that God is faithful, will provide a way, will do a new thing. It was written to the people Israel when they were in exile in Babylon, and so this was a message of the promise of freedom, of God’s constancy and continued covenant with God’s people. But getting to this freedom, this new life, necessitated letting go of the comfort of the status quo. Many had become part of the Babylonian infrastructure, and the last thing they wanted to do was leave for what was guaranteed to be a (literal) journey through the wilderness. God calls to the people Israel and God calls to us today to seek the way of freedom, the extraordinary promise of new life.
It makes sense given these circumstances that the Prophet conjures up images of the Exodus here: a path in the mighty waters, part of central memory of God’s magnificent act of freedom for the people Israel in order to entice them to embark on the journey home. But then - in what seems an odd move indeed - he immediately cautions “do not remember the former things or consider the things of old.” Right away, we see the creative tension: remember the powerful work of God who parted the sea for your ancestors, yet don’t remember the former things. In a poetic turn the prophet urges us to remember God’s presence in the past, but cautions us not to look behind us….stay focused on the future that is unfolding now…right before your eyes.

Once again, the ancient ones know what it is to be human. We won’t be able to see what God is up to now, in the present, if we are focused on the past. We have to try to honor the past and stay open to the new thing unfolding. A tricky dance indeed. Change when it springs forth, brings not only possibility and energy, but loss. Even if we are choosing the next step, the loss attends. There is a cost to moving into new life. We finish the 6th grade and leave a beloved teacher behind. We move to the excitement of a new life and grieve the daily life we have created. A Relationships ends and we are alone. A relationship begins and suddenly we have no time alone! In each case, it seems we have to let go of the familiar, to open our hearts and lives for the new thing, for life reemerging in a new form.
So the promise of change is new life, and the cost is giving up the ways of the past, the known, the comfortable. And we know the way of life will have change, loss, and suffering, not because we deserve to suffer, but because death, little deaths and ultimate death, is life’s dance partner.
And yet, and yet, God begs us to trust that there are new unimaginable things happening that will bring new life. I will make a way through the cross to resurrection life. I will make a way in the wilderness of your lives, and rivers in the deserts of your hearts. You will not be alone on this journey. Stay focused on the future unfolding right now before your eyes.
I mentioned changes we choose, but there are the changes we do not choose, we suddenly become ill, violence occurs, someone we love dies and our lives are changed forever. A new reality, a new life, unbidden. Will new life spring forth even there? And God through Jesus the Christ whispers – yes even there my beloved people. Do not be afraid of the journey. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
Next week we begin Holy Week, when we are invited to participate in the journey of Jesus into Jerusalem, to the cross, and resurrection. St. Paul posits that in participating in Jesus’ suffering, our suffering is transformed. Indeed the way to the resurrection is through the cross. But because of the resurrection, we have the courage to walk into and through that wilderness.
Perhaps we can perceive the new thing that God is doing in and through our loss and pain. In the journey through Holy Week we are reminded that God in Jesus knows intimately the landscape of the totality of our lives, the gamut of human experience: Adoration, blessing, fear, bone deep love, betrayal, suffering, death, mourning, anxiety, confusion, wonder… a story told again and again not because of the suffering, but because of the redemption that transforms the suffering.
I leave you with a final image…a gift from John’s Gospel to hold in our hearts as we move into Holy Week: the image of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet. John describes a dinner party at the home of Mary, Martha and Lazarus for Jesus. Others are there, including Judas. But the powerful image is of Mary. She takes the costliest thing she owns, a pound of pistachio nut oil she likely bought for a burial, and pours it on Jesus’ feet. Then in an intensely intimate act, Mary wipes his feet with her hair. It is an act of loving abandon, done without concern for any other’s judgment, an outpouring of love and gratitude that literally fills the house with the fragrance of her love. She says nothing and yet in this act we know that she perceives God doing a new thing through Jesus. Her response is to bless God. It is an image of absolute bone deep love and devotion.
Let us perceive the new things God is doing, and with Mary bless the Lord.

“A priest seated himself at a coffee shop counter next to a man who immediately noticed his clerical apparel. ‘Where is your Church?’ the man asked. The priest pointed in the direction of the Church on the corner and the man said, ‘Why that’s the church I go to.’ ‘I’ve been there five years and I don’t believe I have ever seen you,’ said the priest. The man replied: ‘I never said I was a fanatic!’”
(Copied)

I would suggest this morning that the parable told by Jesus of the Prodigal is a call to fanatic and radical reconciliation. Let us look at the setting. Jesus was under heavy criticism from the Pharisees for eating with tax collectors and sinners, the most outcast at that time. He responded with three parables…the lost coin, the lost sheep and then the lost son. He was challenging the establishment to look beyond their rigidity and to recognize that God was and is a God of radical love and forgiveness.
Let us look briefly at the main characters in the story. First, the youngest son dared to ask for his share of his inheritance prior to the death of his father. Normally there would have been a division – 2/3 to the eldest who would care for his mother and unmarried sisters, and 1/3 to the youngest. Not only did the father give the youngest his share, but he also turned over the remainder of his wealth to the eldest. It could be surmised that the younger son didn’t trust his brother to divide things fairly.
The younger then went off to a distant land and squandered his fortune. By his behavior he sullied his father’s name and showed himself to be an immature wastrel. When he found himself feeding pigs to survive, still thinking only of himself, he came crawling home.
The father, seeing his son walking while still far away, ran to him and embraced him. This would have been highly unusual for an elderly, austere Jewish man to do in those days. Further, when he reached his son he embraced him and kissed him, a sign of forgiveness. Before the younger could even ask for forgiveness, the father called for a robe, a ring and sandals to replace his tatters. He then told the servants to kill the fatted calf for a feast.
The elder brother, on the other hand was not so generous. He had stayed at home, been very obedient, as only we eldest children can be, and was angry that his wastrel brother was being honored in a way that he, who had obeyed all the rules, had not been. It is pretty clear that he thought he had earned it! In many ways, he was like the Pharisees to whom Jesus was speaking. He, too, disappointed his father by not being willing to welcome his brother home.
The elder brother was much like the Pharisees, the establishment, who followed the rules and made judgments as to who followed them. He put greed and entitlement above relationship. We, too, often behave in this way. The younger brother was like us also…putting greed above relationship, wanting only his own way and selfishly seeking it.
The father, however, illustrated the radical reconciliation and forgiveness of God. We, in God’s eyes, have been forgiven before we even ask. All our trespasses have been forgiven as we are welcomed home to our God of pure and unadulterated love. The sacrifice of Jesus for all of us was the ultimate expression of that fanatic and radical forgiveness.
Lent calls us home to God, to renew our relationship and intimacy with the one who created us. In addition to prayer and worship, Barbara Brown Taylor has said that the only way to work out our relationship with God is to work out our relationship with one another. (Copied) The two sons thought that they could be in relationship with their father and not with one another. True healing in the parable would only come through the reconciliation of the two sons.
Desmond Tutu wrote an incredible op ed piece in the Washington Post on Friday calling for radical reconciliation on the continent of Africa regarding treatment of gay and lesbian persons. He chastised politicians and clerics of all faiths for daring to exclude anyone in God’s name.
Let us in this latter half of Lent come home to God through a radical reconciliation with the members of our families, our parish, our church, our denomination, our city, our nation and the international community. Help us to dare to be fanatics for God as we demonstrate outlandish love for one another. AMEN