The Broken Hallelujah

Sermon preached on the First Sunday of Lent at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rochester, NY: Genesis 2:17-17, 3:1-19; Romans 5:12-19; Matthew 4:1-11

There’s a blaze of light in every word; it doesn’t matter what you heard: the holy or the broken hallelujah. (Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah”)

Our two biblical stories are both stories of brokenness. In the first Adam and Eve manage to screw up paradise and wind up out of the garden and returning to the dust from which they came. “What is this that you have done?” is the plaintive cry of God.

Paul summarizes this story in the stark words, repeated several different ways in this morning’s reading from Romans, “One trespass led to condemnation for all.”

In the second story, we might be “tempted” to see Jesus’ temptation as a great victory, and perhaps it was, although the devil would have his day. When Luke tells the story, he ends by saying

When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.

Even Matthew reports that when the testing was finished, “Behold angels approached and ministered to him.” The testing, I submit, led to a broken Jesus, spiritually and physically spent, full of his humanity which would lead to his eventual death.

I want to call both of these stories by a paradoxical juxtaposition of words from the singer Leonard Cohen. They are stories of a “broken hallelujah.”

As we begin Lent that is the state we are in. Our hallelujah has been broken, quite literally, we are not even to speak the word.

Even our liturgy is broken. We sort of limp through Lent, much quieter than usual. It seems all the exuberance of worship has been kicked out of us. We sing mournful songs that are not among those we tend to sing in our head when we want a bolster of our faith. It is a time in the church year when we are not inclined to invite someone to Church lest they see us at our worst—broken and dull.

We don’t much like brokenness. Most of us avoid Ash Wednesday because its declaration of brokenness is just too much: ashes smeared into the head, the curse of Adam repeated—you are dust—a mournful singing of a penitential psalm and a long litany of confession. It’s just all too in your face.

We don’t much like brokenness. The world doesn’t like it and teaches us not to like it either. We must look and act like winners 24/7, as they say. Church people even get caught up in this distaste. We are supposed to say, “God is good—all the time.” Many of our brothers and sisters are committed to a prosperity gospel—follow God and all will be well with you, including more money than you need. It works—those churches are full, and ours that clings to this period of brokenness we call Lent, are not full. Yet that prosperity gospel can be described by an old fashioned church word—heresy. It has little to do with the actual Christian faith.

That’s because it has precious to do with real life. It does not take into account how far short of paradise even the most well-off of us live. It does not take into account the frequent exhaustion at the end of a time of testing, real faith-shaking testing.

And it does not get you to what I believe is the actual “holy hallelujah,” again to use Leonard Cohen’s words. It cannot see the blaze of light in every word, broken or not.

Why the need to dwell on this unpleasantness? Why drag us into the muck of brokenness? Two reasons.

First of all, it is real. We are all broken, or, as I have put it before, we are all a mess. If you’re not you really don’t need to be here. It is not a good thing that folks out there think of church as the place where people gather who’ve got life together, rather than the place where broken people gather to cling to life.

One of things I discovered in my most recent time of illness was a whole group of people who feel excluded from religion in general and the church in particular—those suffering from mental illness. They/we are probably the most obviously long-term broken people in our midst. We suffer in a way of which we are not encouraged to speak. We ourselves are plagued by our own sense of failure as human beings, and others just don’t want to deal with it—it’s too scary.

I have tried to break that taboo and it has made some uncomfortable, others have called me “courageous” for doing so. But the question haunts me: Why should it be courageous? Is it courageous for others to know that someone broke their leg?

I just cite that as an example of how we avoid our brokenness and why we must not. All of you have your own story of brokenness, and we observe this season precisely because you do. That’s real.

There’s another reason why we must live in this time of the broken hallelujah, however. It is because it is the only way to Easter.

This is obvious in the story of Jesus. No Easter without Good Friday, but that means here lays a universal truth. We don’t get to authentic faith, hope, and love without going through our brokenness. This has always been true. It is why there is such a story as that which we call “the Fall.” And the tradition of our faith has always known that in this fall lies our hope. “O happy fault,” it is called. There is a blaze of light in the broken hallelujah. Easter not only depends on Good Friday, foreshadowed by Jesus’ temptation. It also depends on this mythic story of Adam and Eve and the first separation from God, the shutting off of paradise from our human experience.

The invitation to Lent is the invitation to embrace our brokenness, not as a place to live, although live with it we must in this life, but also, as Paul says, as the means by which we can embrace our “justification and life.” Our lives will be “unbroken;” the separation will end; we will make a new home in the paradise of righteousness, that is, our justice and our vindication. And we get a glimpse of this, paradoxically, when we embrace our brokenness. We can only see the holy hallelujah when we embrace the broken one. But in the broken hallelujah is the same blaze of light as in the holy.

There’s a blaze of light in every word; it doesn’t matter what you heard: the holy or the broken hallelujah.

Let us be people of Lent—people of real life. Only then can we people of Easter—of real resurrection.

Witnesses of These Things

Sermon preached at the Church of St. Luke & St. Simon Cyrene, Rocester, NY, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany: 2 Peter 1:16-21, Matthew 17:1-9


We did not follow cleverly devised myths…we had been eyewitnesses of his majesty.

Reading the piece from the Second Letter of Peter, I am cognizant of the fact that many people (many, many people) do in fact think that we are following “cleverly devised myths.” Sometimes we ourselves wonder about this as well.

If we do not follow cleverly devised myths, than how, like Peter, are we witnesses of transfiguration? That is my question for this morning.

The Transfiguration could have been the end of the story, and, in some ways that would have made sense. Jesus’ glory is revealed on the mountain, including the confirmation of his status as “Son of God.” Peter thought it was the end of the story, so much that he wanted to set up camp on the mountain.

Back down the mountain, however, they go, and, notice, not to tell people what had happened in an “end of the story” kind of way. Jesus actually tells them not to say anything about what they have seen “until after the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.” Peter, James, and John must have thought this request to be completely illogical. You can almost hear their “but.” But we just saw Moses and Elijah! We just heard the voice of God! You are God’s Son and the message is now that you are to be listened to! Why then don’t you want anyone to listen?

The truth is—and Jesus clearly knew this—that as nice a moment as the Transfiguration was, it was not the end of the story. It is such a moment in itself that could easily be discounted as one of those “cleverly devised myths.” In truth it has no meaning without what is about to take place in Jerusalem. The voice from heaven means nothing without the cross and the resurrection.

And it makes sense, if you’re going to tell the story of Jesus to a non-believer, you don’t want to start with this story of the Transfiguration. This story only means something after the whole story is told. It can only be understood in retrospect.

Yet we are witnesses of Transfiguration and we are called to make that witness known, not to keep it a secret. But how?

First of all, we are witnesses because each one of us has already had our moment of transfiguration. “What?” you say, “I must have missed it.” No, you didn’t.

The moment of transfiguration for each one of us is our baptism. It is the moment when it is said of us, you are my son, my daughter, the beloved, with you I am well pleased. “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever.” And week by week we renew our transfiguration in the Eucharist. Why would God feed you his own life, his own self, if he were not pleased with you, if he did not think of you as a daughter or a son, his heir along with Jesus?

And yet I can hear some of you say, “How can I be sure God is actually pleased with me? I’m not even sure most weeks I am pleased with me!” The answer is you can’t, you can’t be “sure” that God is pleased with you. You can only have faith, faith in the reality of grace, God’s unconditional love and acceptance.

All of this truth about ourselves means that we, too, are witnesses of these things, our own belovedness in our lives united with the Beloved One. And we are witnesses of the belovedness of others, no matter what the world thinks of them or, sometimes, even what they think of themselves.

Yet even our own belovedness makes no sense—is itself a “cleverly devised myth” without the cross and the resurrection, the dying and rising of Christ, and our own dying and rising in union with him.

Our witness to grace—the belovedness of all—must be grounded in our own experience of Jerusalem—the reality of our real lives, which are not all transfigured hunky-dory. Our own suffering and our witness to the suffering of the world is absolutely essential to dispel the notion that we follow “cleverly devised myths.” And our experience that in spite of these things we believe God is present, loving and graceful, and that we are called to be as well.

Our witness to these things is our faith that we are God’s beloved in spite of all signs to the contrary. That’s real. It was real for Jesus. It is real for us.

Brothers and sisters, we need to be witnesses of these things, even eyewitnesses, able to say, “I have seen the love of God. I have experienced the grace of God. It’s as real as the suffering of this world, and it calls me to care and to act to relieve as much suffering as I can.”

That’s our witness. That is what will draw at least some to faith. We must be people, like Jesus, who keep it real, but who also can say with conviction, that reality is not the last word. Faith is.