The Broken Cookie Jar

One of the dangers of learning to be a Presbyterian minister is the education required to become a Presbyterian minister. First of all, a candidate for ministry is required to get an undergraduate degree – often it’s one in philosophy or sociology, or literature, or, like mine, in psychology. Then when that’s complete, one must embark upon the task of obtaining a Master of Divinity degree. This is a three-year programme with courses like systematic theology, church history, studies in the New and Old Testaments, and the learning of one or more Biblical languages.

Finally, in the sixth year of my studies – the last year of my Master of Divinity degree at Knox College, I had to do a student placement – in a real congregation and with real people. The problem with that was, by this point in my education, I had become much more at ease in discussing God academically, rather than personally.

So it was that I took on my student placement at York Memorial Presbyterian Church in the west end of Toronto. I remember my first week there when I attended the adult Bible Study. My supervising minister, Winston Newman, said to me, “Wes would you like to open us with a word of prayer.”

“No,” I replied.

He gave me an amazed, and then profoundly irritated look,

I went on, “But, no, I really would not like to do that.”

Later in his office, I tried to defend myself, “But you asked me if I would like to. I really wouldn’t like to. I don’t really like to do that sort of thing in general. I’m not like a big “prayer” … but I do believe in honesty!”

He went on to counter, “Whether you like doing it or not, part of what you’re going to learn to do in this church is to do public prayer – whether you find it embarrassing, uncomfortable, awkward or not!”

And, of course, I did learn it.

Just as I also learned to do other mildly awkward things, like talk about my experience of Christ, the presence of God and the power of the Holy Spirit. Not just abstractly, like we learned to do in university and at Knox College, but personally, as in, “God is working on me in my boring and ordinary life, right now … all the time.”

And since those days, I’ve found it important in ministry, and in my preaching, to tell something of my own faith experience, as I’ve tried to live out the Christian life day by day. But one of the things I’ve learned in talking about how I have encountered God directly, in the world, and through my encounters with other people – one of the things I’ve learned, is that I can never be the hero of my stories, because that role, of the chief actor in the story, belongs to somebody who is a lot more interesting than Wes Denyer. The hero of my faith and of my sermons, has got to be God … and me, the preacher, I get to be the foil for God’s miraculous work – highlighting the perfect nature of God in comparison to my weaknesses, failings and flaws.

So that’s why some sermon stories don’t work – the kind where the speaker, him or her, becomes the hero of the story. And we’ve all heard that sermon before.

It’s why the pastor who speaks endlessly about how he grew his famous megachurch with Jesus’ help … doesn’t work either, because even with a slick, thick veneer of false humility, along with the ubiquitous heartfelt proclamations, “without this or that little bit of folk wisdom from my lovely wife …”

It doesn’t work, because the pastor up there, surrounded by all those people, still looks like the hero.

It’s also why the sort of “canned” stories about the pantheon of saints – the great people in history, like Mother Teresa, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King Jr. – those don’t always work either, unless we know those people personally, because sometimes those people come off as too big heroes, and we’re left to think, “Well, those are the kind of people God works through and talks to, but certainly not me …”

To my mind, it’s the stories of brokenness that work – in my sermon or in your life. The ones that leave us feeling uncomfortable – stories that are hauntingly unresolved, at least in human hands.

The story of broken people, and a God who steps in to make things whole.

In brokenness, you see, God has room to work through the cracks in ways that are harder than when we’re all pretending to have it perfect.

The perfectly formed church. The perfect family. The perfect career. The perfect home.

They scare me … because I follow a Saviour who works so much better through broken things. It’s in the honesty and admission of the story of our imperfect and broken lives, that we make space for God to work.

Let me tell you a story …

My grandmother used to love to collect plates and bowls and cups that depicted the Royal Family. And since these pieces were arranged around her house, just out of the reach of running children and frisky dogs, it was not until I was a teenager that I noticed a King George VI Coronation Cookie Jar from 1937 that did not fit with the rest of the collection. This cookie jar had once been a beautiful memento of the coronation of George the Sixth, but now it was damaged, and it stood against the finer polished and dusted mint condition pieces that surrounded it. You see this cookie jar was cracked and broken and chipped – crudely glued back together with old yellow glue bubbling out from between the cracks.

“Why don’t you get rid of that cookie jar?” I asked my grandmother.

“Never,” she replied. “It is the most valuable piece of property we have in the house.”

And then she told me the story behind this cracked cookie jar.

Apparently in the 1930’s my grandfather, who worked for CN rail, would be gone for long periods of time with trips from one coast of Canada to the other. Sometimes he would be gone for weeks at a time. On one occasion, on his travels he had found this beautiful piece in a store – a King George VI Coronation Cookie Jar - and knew that my grandmother – his wife – would love it. It was wrapped in string and brown paper, and he carefully guarded this treasure all the way back home, until finally walking up his sidewalk with this special present in his hands.

But, at that very moment, my mother, at the age of nine, spotted him through the living room window and came flying out the front door to greet her Dad. She ran down the porch steps up the sidewalk, and through herself into my grandfather’s arms. Surprised, elated, exhausted, my grandfather forgot about his delicate treasure and simply opened his arms. And as my mother fell into his arms, the cookie jar slipped from his hands, shattering into a hundred pieces on the sidewalk.

That night, my grandmother pulled out her glue and very clumsily repaired the cookie jar and called it “precious … precious …

It was a symbol of my grandfather’s love for her, and my mother’s love for her father.

The church presents a similar understanding of brokenness. When we gather around the communion table, the vessels – whether they are pewter plates or delicate chalices, are not the issue. It is in the breaking of the bread – tearing it out of the perfection of the formed loaf, and leaving the edges jagged, that we remember the witness of Scripture … what Jesus said, “This is my body, which is for you” … broken on the cross …

Those words render absurd our human pre-occupation with perfection. True beauty comes not from the flawless piece, nor from the piece that pretends to have no crack. And on Communion Sunday we acknowledge that our salvation lies in God’s broken body. But then in the frenetic pace of perfect children’s classes and choir rehearsals and efforts to create bigger and better programmes to attract more people, the congregation can sometimes forget the beauty of being broken … and appear to be a congregation without flaw or fault. So that a family, happily married, attends church, but then once they get divorced, wonder if they belong. The grieving find some peace in the sanctuary after the funeral, but then on Sunday morning, the church just seems to be a place with too much cheerful, happy veneer to make room for their scars.

But when the church resists the culture of perfection and acknowledges instead the beauty of the broken cookie jar, remarkable things may happen … the hungry are fed, the homeless are sheltered and personal relationships turn from bragging and one-up-man-ship to “truth telling.”

We move from the safety of being appropriate, to the risk of being truthful and imperfect. From those who get church right, to those who will risk talking about God and perhaps getting it wrong.

If we can remember the broken body of Christ is good enough to save us, then perhaps we can pull out our broken cookie jars, as well as our broken personal lives – we can pull them out into the spotlight. We don’t accept them as inferior pieces in the collection but rejoice in the beauty their lack of beauty brings to the collective mix.

Perfect people and perfect lives are no match for the broken cookie jar my grandmother put in a place of honour. Its beauty lies in the scars themselves. The stories behind the scars, reminders that for generations, God has picked us up, put us back together, placed us back on the best shelf, and called us precious.

May God do that with all our lives …