Good morning, Happy Easter, and welcome to Entry Point. It is wonderful to see all of you here this morning. Here in this faith community, we provide the opportunity, or the ENTRY POINT for you to explore or discover what you believe.
Today, we celebrate Easter.
If you are like me, you might at times be amazed at the beauty and precision of a song lyric. The words are pure poetry. They are marvelously strung together. The words express that emotion, that occasion, that step on the journey, so perfectly.
“If you could only see, what love has made of me,” — sings Sheryl Crow in the song The Difficult Kind. If you could only see, what love has made of me. A beautiful lyric. Perfect for Easter Sunday.
We have all heard the expression that we are changed by two things in our lives — pain and love. And love is the much more pleasant experience.
Close your eyes a second, please, and think about the people who have loved you the most. Picture the faces of those people who have loved you so well. Think about the person you were before, and the person you are now, because of their love. Reflect on the mess that you were. And their love healed you. See what love can do? It’s amazing.
Now, open your eyes, and look around the room. All these people used to be messes too. And love is healing us. Love from people, and love from God. If you could only see, what love has made of me.
Today, I am looking at the Easter story as a love story. God’s love gives us another chance. A new beginning. A resurrection. A repair, if you will. The video clips this morning are from the Short Documentary titled The Last Repair Shop, which won the Oscar this year. The repair shop is in LA, and they repair musical instruments for the children in the LA public schools. The story of this repair shop is a metaphor for Easter. It is a story of repairing things that are broken. Like what God does. The broken instruments are repaired by technicians that have experienced their own moments of brokenness…..Like we all have. The broken instruments are played by students who are also sometimes very broken, who attend schools that are sometimes very broken. I think we can all relate to any of the broken things in these video clips this morning.
If you could only see, what love has made of me.
We all know the Easter story:
“At the crack of dawn on Sunday, the women came to the tomb carrying the burial spices they had prepared. They found the entrance stone rolled back from the tomb, so they walked in. But once inside, they couldn’t find the body of Jesus.
They were puzzled, wondering what to make of this. Then, out of nowhere it seemed, two men, light cascading over them, stood there. The women were awestruck and bowed down in worship. The men said, “Why are you looking for the Living One in a cemetery? He is not here, but raised up.” ~Luke 24:1-8 The Message
He is not here…..his broken body has been healed. Proof of God’s love. His body has been repaired. He has risen. There has been a return to life for Jesus.
While it might seem to be a distant experience, from long ago, the death and resurrection of Jesus can be directly applied to our lives today. I think the Easter story is about rebirth. It’s about an old way being crucified so something new can be born. This is not a once-in-a-lifetime event. When someone experiences a divorce, the death of a partner, loses a job, or experiences a shift in external circumstances, an old identity dies so a new one can be born. We experience brokenness multiple times in our lives. We need to be repaired more than once.
In other words, we all have crucifixion experiences. We all experience loss. Multiple times along our journey. I can think of several times when I was broken. Barely hanging on. I wasn’t sure I would get it together.
You’ve been there too. Then God or someone comes along and puts us back together. Cleans us up, loves us, and cares for us. Helps us get back on our feet. We all know what it means to be broken.
A little girl was visiting her grandparents, and she had broken one of her toys. Afraid that she would get into trouble when her mother came by to pick her up, she crawled into her grandmother’s lap for some comfort and some conversation.
Girl: “Grandma, will my mom be mad at me?”
GMA: “I don’t think so.”
Girl: “Will God be mad at me?”
GMA: “No. God loves you so much. That broken toy won’t change how much God loves you.
“God made you.”
Girl: “God made me?”
GMA: “Yes, God created you a little while ago.”
Girl: “Did God create you?”
GMA: “Oh, yes, God created me a long time ago!”
The little girl hesitated for a few seconds, then said, “God’s been doing better work recently, I’d say.”
Sometimes we are broken by our own choices as well as by the actions of others. We often have no control over the actions of others that breaks us. We carry those wounds with us a long time.
Our bodies can break, our relationships, our heart, our hope, can break. Our ability to function well — with compassion, kindness and generosity can break. Sometimes our thinking is broken. We don’t see things in a healthy manner. We just get to a place where we aren’t our best — we are broken.
And then it is the love of someone else that sees us, sees what we can be, rescues us, repairs what is broken in us…. Or maybe it’s that their love heals us enough so we can make better choices to repair ourselves. I believe that God’s love works like that. If we can let God’s love in — it will soften our edges, and then we can choose to start again, to live a new life. See what love can do? Amen.
Swiss explorer and author, Isabelle Eberhardt wrote these powerful words: “From every ruin, life springs up again, and everything that dies is born again.” — Isabelle Eberhardt
My prayer for each of us today, is that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that God loves us, and that love heals us and rescues us.
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