Broken Windows; Broken World

“Oh my!”  My priest texted me in the middle of my day.  “Wow!”  “Amazing!”  Now, it’s not very unusual for him to text me.  We are 21st century friends; we like immediate answers and convenience.  Also, this year is my turn as a warden of our parish and there are about a dozen things going on at church, a few with which I’m directly involved.  However, when your priest starts sending you random interjections of amazement in the middle of the day, without any context, it’s a little concerning.  My response, “What the hell?”  (We don’t stand on ceremony much.)  His reply doesn't exactly answer my question, “Watch this video, right now.  It’s everything we’ve been talking about.”  He wanted me to watch a video.  What?  I texted, “What are you talking about?  Quit messing with my head.”  He replied, “I’m not messing.  WATCH IT RIGHT NOW.”  Yes, sir!

So, I pulled up Dirt, by Florida Georgia Line on Youtube and sat down to watch.  Holy Ash Wednesday:  there was everything!  The song was a beautiful portrayal of a life well-lived, a life anchored in the dirt from which we come and to which we will return.  It was the perfect sermon for Ash Wednesday, and for our season of Lent. It embodied all the ideas I’ve been struggling to enact, loving people in your life, honoring the everyday world, living in love with the people in your life.  And then there was this line, from the wife to the husband, “I don’t need to go see the world.  The world comes to my kitchen window--even if it’s broken.”  

See for yourself right now: Dirt by Florida Georgia Line

“The world comes to my kitchen window--even if it’s broken.”  What’s broken?  The kitchen window?  The world?  This statement stretches beyond the context of the song into a larger reality.  As Christians, especially during this season of Lent, we see the world through broken windows.  We are flawed, longing for God, desperate for salvation.  We want peace, but instead we get the world.   In our personal lives, the world doesn’t care if we are not feeling well, if we’re sad, if we didn’t sleep last night because our two-year-old was sick.  The world needs us.  People are hurting, people are poor, people are sick, people are broken-hearted.  We view it through broken windows and we decide.  We decide to go out and do something about it, we decide to act in love.  We decide to listen, we decide to help, we decide to show up for someone else.

As a church, we see the world through broken windows, too.  The world doesn’t care that our budget is tight, our parking lot is covered in snow, or our heating bill is due.  The world needs us and it keeps coming to our door, with challenges and with blessings.  We are tired, but we’ve got a job to do.  We meet the world at the resale shop, at fish dinners, at community events, at mass, at the soup kitchen and the food pantry, and we strive to love it through the broken windows of our souls.

However, the windows are not all that’s broken, friends.  The world itself is broken; people are lost and longing for something they don’t even know they are missing.  People we meet within and from outside of our community are searching for something.  I know I can’t give them the answers.  Honestly, I doubt that the incredible combined faith of this entire community is enough to heal someone, on our own.  But we can respect, love, and serve all the people we meet.  In our brokenness and our longing for God, we can love God so much that we see Christ in everyone we meet.   Love is a verb--an action--and God is the loving.  God is in the action that we do for the world and for each other, as we see the broken world through the broken windows of our hearts.  Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.

I wish you a blessed season of Lent, my friends.