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The following is authored by Rev. Mary Wilder Cartwright. Responses should be made directly to Rev. Mary Wilder Cartwright at mcartwright@fumc.org.
Weekly Word for August 30
My daughter studied in Costa Rica a few years ago, and she brought back to me a clay jar. She wrapped it carefully for the trip home, but the fragile baked clay couldn’t hold up. So when I look at the pattern of leaves and jungle and Costa Rican monkeys baked into the glaze of the jar, I also see the cracks where I glued the jar together and the gaping hole where the clay shards were too numerous to fit back into a pattern.
However, I don’t just see the cracks and the hole. I see the beauty of the jar’s shape, and I see the monkeys in the jungle, and I can almost imagine the rain forests as my daughter saw them. I can see my daughter carefully wrapping the jar, and I can feel her love for us as she tried to get the clay jar home intact.
The apostle Paul, as he led the early church, was well acquainted with mistakes and failure; he certainly knew the problems of disease, corruption, failed relationships, tensions within communities, sadness and grief. He compared human frailty – both physical and spiritual – to the fragility of a clay jar. We are easily broken, often “cracked,” and with big holes in our attempts to get life right. But Paul writes with hope to the feuding, difficult church at Corinth:
But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies.
--2 Corinthians 4:7-10
Our lives are like clay jars and our life together as a community of faith is like a clay jar – easily damaged – but through the power of God in us and the Spirit working through us, God does amazing things. In the midst of the broken places and struggles that we have, God shows us beauty and goodness and the love that is operative even when things get broken. In those moments we know the hope that heartache and darkness and death will not have the final word.
Where are the cracks and broken places in your life? How do you identify with being afflicted but not crushed? Perplexed but not despairing? Persecuted but not forsaken? Struck down but not destroyed? How do you recognize signs of God’s help and love?
Prayer: Gracious God, make me sensitive to all the evidences of your goodness; and may I, trusting in you, free myself of the terror of death, and feel free to live intensely and happily the life you have given me. Amen.
--Rubem Alves, Brazil, from United Methodist Hymnal, p. 360.
Blessings,
Pastor Mary
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