Your remember the nursery rhyme:
“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.Things get broken in life and they can’t be repaired.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s men and all the king’s horses
couldn’t put Humpty together again.”
My mother loved decorative porcelain pieces, especially flowers. When I studied in Scotland I found a wonderful Royal Crown Staffordshire bouquet of bright flowers in a small bowl. The sales assistant packed it securely and I personally carried the box on the flight home. It got home safely and Mom enjoyed it. After her death, I took it back and we had it for a number of years. One day it was sitting – safely we thought – on top of the filing cabinet. One of our cats got on the cabinet, misstepped, and the flowers hit the floor. Several of the flower stems broke and while some of the petals were irreparable, I thought I could glue the stems back together to make the more or less arrangement whole again. I tried one thing and another, but nothing worked. It couldn’t be mended, not by me anyway. I put it in the closet for years. It was not longer beautiful and the memory was too painful. I finally threw it out.
Lives get broken. We can’t mend ourselves. As counselors tell us, we are never cured but always in recovery, whether from an addiction that eats away at our body or mind or from a trauma which causes what is now diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.
Only a few chapters after the Genesis creation story the wholeness of life was broken by envy, disobedience, lying, blaming, betraying, and murder. Life was broken and it would never be the same. The rest of the Bible is about trying to mend the brokenness of human life.
The Japanese have an art form that not only repairs shattered pottery, it also enhances and illuminates the cracks with a lacquer laced with gold. The artists do this when a precious piece of pottery has been broken. After mixing lacquer resin with powdered gold, they use the resin to put the broken pieces together. What they end up with is a pot with cracks in it, but the cracks are filled with gold.
They call it kintsukuroi (keen-tsoo-koo-roy). Golden repair.
Such restoration creates a gorgeous piece of art and makes a philosophical statement as well. Kintsukuroi asserts that breakage and repair is part of the unique history of an object, rather than something to deny or disguise.
Each of us needs more golden repair in our lives, because we so often hide our brokenness. A friend hurts us deeply, and we retreat inside ourselves. We lose a job or suffer a pay cut, and pretend like everything is really okay. A spouse abuses us, but we never speak up. We sense that we have a drinking problem, but feel too embarrassed to ask for help. A marriage begins with intimacy and anticipation, and ends with alienation and anger. Add your own life breakages to the list.
Life breaks us, in a variety of painful ways. And unfortunately we often deny it. We would rather disguise our cracks than undergo golden repair. We would rather put ourselves in a closet, like I did with the broken porcelain flowers. Only our closet is constructed of denial, fear or shame. We would rather do that than admit our helplessness and our need for golden repair, God’s repair. God practices “kintsukuroi Christianity.”
In Acts, the apostle Paul traveled to Ephesus in Asia Minor – modern-day Turkey. He found twelve disciples there, and asked them if they had received the Holy Spirit when they became believers. They replied, “We’ve not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.”
These disciples might not be broken, but they clearly have some cracks. Not only had they not received the Holy Spirit, they didn't even know that it existed!
Paul was perplexed. He asked, “What baptism did you receive, then?” They answered, “John’s baptism.” Paul then understood that they needed some golden repair, some “kintsukuroi Christianity.”
Paul told them that John’s baptism was for repentance to get ready for the one who was to come after him, that is, Jesus. Paul knew that John baptized with water, while Jesus baptized “with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Luke 3:16).
The disciples were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and when Paul laid hands on them the Holy Spirit entered them. Immediately, they spoke in tongues and prophesied, just like the first Christians on the day of Pentecost.
The gift of the Holy Spirit – that’s pure gold! Suddenly, the gaps in the lives of these disciples were filled, and they were made whole as disciples of Jesus. But notice that there was no attempt to deny or disguise their deficiencies. Instead, God filled their cracks with the gifts of the Holy Spirit, making them stronger and more beautiful in the broken places. That's golden repair. Kintsukuroi Christianity.
In the book Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, Christy Bartlett writes that “not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated.”(1) Not hidden. Not disguised. Illuminated.
Everyone has gaps and breaks in their lives – everyone has been shattered by some destructive experience, whether we brought it on ourselves or it happened to us while we were minding our own business. Mended Japanese ceramics inspire us to show compassionate sensitivity to the broken people around us, and compassionate sensitivity to ourselves as well.
Kintsukuroi Christianity can be defined this way: Whenever I am weak, then I am strong. Whenever I invite Christ to fill my breaks and cracks, then he works powerfully through me. When I am broken, Christ makes me whole.
Paul might express it in different words: When I am weak, I find strength in the presence of Christ. I know that he is making me stronger and more beautiful through his ongoing work of golden repair.
Several decades ago, just ten days after his son was killed in a car accident, the Reverend William Sloane Coffin delivered a sermon to his congregation at Riverside Church in New York City. He said, “As almost all of you know, a week ago last Monday night, driving in a terrible storm ... my 24-year-old son Alexander, who enjoyed beating his old man at every game and in every race, beat his father to the grave.
“Among the healing flood of letters that followed his death was one carrying this wonderful quote from the end of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: ‘The world breaks everyone, then some become strong at the broken places.’ ”(2)
Friends, this font around which we gather every week, into which we pour simple water, over which we say the words, “In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven,” is the place where God affects the golden repair, kintsukuroi Christianity. It is here that the gaps between the pieces of our lives are filled with Holy Spirit, with hope, with illuminating radiance. Our brokenness is mended by God and our enhanced beauty is made visible.
Paul wrote the following to the Corinthian believers:
“God said that light should shine out of the darkness. He is the same one who shone in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in clay pots so that the awesome power belongs to God and doesn’t come from us. We are experiencing all kinds of trouble, but we aren’t crushed. We are confused, but we aren’t depressed. We are harassed, but we aren’t abandoned. We are knocked down, but we aren’t knocked out.” (2 Corinthians 4:6-9)Friends, all who yearn for their brokenness to be mended, all who long for the gaps between the pieces of their lives to be filled with God’s golden repair, all who desire the power of the Holy Spirit to fill their weakness, all who thirst for the life which Christ offers, come to the water.
General Resource: “Kintsukuroi Christianity,” Homiletics, January 2015
(1) Bartlett, Christy, “A tearoom full of mended ceramics.” Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics, 2008, bachmaneckenstein.com.
(2) Coffin, William Sloane, “Eulogy for Alex.” NOW, pbs.org.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright 2015 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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