Another Broken Pot
AM Psalms 31 • PM Psalm 35
1 Kings 11:26-43 • James 4:13-5:6 • Mark 15:22-32
In Psalm 31:12, our guy today says, “I am ignored as if I were dead, as if I were a broken pot.” Boy do I know the feeling! I'm almost 77 years old and a little gimped up. I think a lot of people would be surprised to know how often I’ve become invisible by virtue of what I look like. A weird irony; my appearance makes me invisible. Happens to so many people. There are so many broken pots walking around Fayetteville, Arkansas. I know. I have photographed a whole bunch of them. Such incredibly beautiful broken pots! Leonard Cohen sang: “There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in.”
Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th-century existential philosopher and theologian who we commemorate today, lamented that in his time people went to church to be entertained and the theater to be enlightened. In our time I suspect that many more people have been moved by Leonard Cohen’s songs than have been moved by our church’s beloved scripture. So it goes. I guess God speaks to us in whatever language we are capable of hearing. At least I hope so. God speaks to me in silence and stillness. When I can gaze at one of my fellow broken pots, out of silence & stillness and without any agenda or internal commentary, I see God smiling back at me with love and affection, through the cracks in the faces of all of these incredibly beautiful gimpy old farts.
Most of today’s Scripture is very dark. But perhaps it is in our darkness that we shine the most brightly. God finds a home deep in the heart of each of us. When we see through the breaks in our facades, we see God’s true person shining through. And those who are the most broken up become the most radiant.
Shine on my fellow broken pots! In the end we are left sitting in a room full of people perfectly capable of loving one another.
Written by Andrew Kilgore
Andrew is a photographic artist who has been living and working in Arkansas since 1971. He has a degree in philosophy and a year of seminary. “I began with the intention of a life in ministry,” he says, “and I have ended up serving that ministry with a life full of pictures. Praise the Lord!”