Confronting Tragedy: Finding Hope in Brokenness

"Tragedy is an Ancient Ancient category um since about 1500 we talk about it as a bad circumstance but initially actually was a theatrical term and the ancient Greeks uh used to have plays Aristotle writes about this that were called tragedies um troos it was from two different words OA is the word for song like an ode but then the other word tragas was the Greek word for goat and no one is quite certain why it's thought to be related to the sacrifice of goats and of course in the ancient world drama and religion and theater were much more closely connected than they were in our day so it made well be that uh when a Greek chorus would recite the story of a Greek tragedy a kind of a song uh a goat would be sacrificed offered up in the hopes of plating the Gods in the hopes of making things better at any rate um that was the story and beer talks about how the gospel has the dimensions of all three of those." [00:01:48]

"The first uh step of the 12 step is uh admitted that we were powerless over now alcohol but the tragic condition is you fill in that blank for you and our lives had become completely unmanageable I'm no longer writing my own story that's tragedy step two came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to moral sanity that's good news that's comedy step three made the decision to turn our lives and our Wills over to the care of God uh that is to enter into the reality now of another dimension of a Transcendent power that is beyond myself and to be transformed as a person that's part of what we will see beers talking about when he speaks of the Gospel as fairy tale but we can't go there yet we cannot go there today we don't go to the good news today we must live with the reality of the tragic in our lives you have to come back to step one we're never done with the steps I'm powerless my life became unmanageable." [00:03:09]

"bner uh writes about the importance for those of us who preach to keep in mind the people who are in the congregation there is one who can't stop thinking about suicide there is one who experiences his own sexuality as a guilt of which he can never be absolved the there is one whose fear of death is only a screen behind which lies his deeper fear of Life there is one who is in a way crippled by her own Beauty because this meant she has never had to be loving or human to be loved but only to be beautiful and the angry one and the lonely one for the preacher to be relevant to the Staggering problems of history is to risk being irrelevant to the Staggering problems of the ones who sit there listening out of their own histories to deal with the problems to which there is a possible solution which is tempting to do for those of us who preach can be a way of avoiding the problems to which humanly speaking there is no solution and those are the great ones guilt Brokenness sin death hell." [00:04:13]

"when Fred bner was a boy 10 years old he remembers the door to his bedroom opening and seeing the face of his father and that's the last time he would see him his father went down to the garage and started the car and they found him dead of carbon monoxide poisoning sometime later his wife found in a newly published book back then it was the book Gone with the Wind poignantly enough Gone With the Wind a suicide note from Fred's dad that read simply I adore you and I love you and I am no good I adore you and I love you and I am no good and he took his life and a few years after that his brother Fred's uncle took his life and that was the day when SU side was thought to be uh shameful and deeply humiliating to a family and so they never spoke of it again they never spoke of him again Fred writes that for many many years afterwards when somebody would ask him how did your father die he would say a hard problem a hard problem." [00:05:29]

"all us live in a world the writers of scripture say the prophets in particular say that is deeply haunted and deeply broken and deeply twisted and that is inside me and I cannot make it better and part of me wants to avoid thinking about it he goes on to write there would be a strong argument for saying the much of the most powerful preaching of our time is the preaching of The Poets and the playwrights and the novelists because it is often they better than the rest of us who speak with awful honesty about the absence of God in the world and about the storm of his absence both within and without which because it is unendurable unlivable drives us to look to the eye of the storm and no one has ever addressed that the way that Jesus himself did who said when he was on the cross the ultimate tragedy I have a friend who is a Greek New Testament Professor wrote a book about the gospel of Mark as a form of tragedy but with a different kind of an ending and in his own life he has known tragedy as well Jesus cries out kind of like a Greek chorus my God my God why have you forsaken me." [00:07:01]

"Jesus shares with us the darkness of what it is to be without God as well as the glory to be with him he speaks about it perhaps uh perhaps that is why although we have not followed him very well these past 2,000 years or so we have never quite been able to stop listening to him the gospel is a story and it is first of all a tragic story one of the most famous chapters in the Bible you may know this if you're a Bible person it's Isaiah chapter 53 and we often don't think think about this but as is often the case with the prophets this is a story it is a story about someone who was never named about those who are faithful to God perhaps in the Old Testament the New Testament writers came to understand it to apply primarily supremely to Jesus he grew up before God like a tender shoot like a root out of dry ground not just a shoot a tender shoot a tender shoot of course is vulnerable has the capacity to be bent or broken he had no beauty or Majesty to attract us to him." [00:08:25]

"beon writes about how we're often tempted to sentimentalize suffering and problems in our world because that makes it prettier but Jesus was not that way when he is portrayed in movies very often It Is by somebody uh who has a lot of beauty and a lot of majesty but not this one nothing in his appearance that we should desire him I wonder what Jesus looked like he was despised and rejected by humankind The Man of Sorrows and familiar with grief surely he took up our pain and bore our suffering yet we considered him punished by God stricken by him and afflicted did but he was pierced for our transgressions he was crushed for our iniquities and the punishment that brought us peace was on him by his wound somehow we were healed he became he became the scapegoat on which somehow were placed the Brokenness and the guilt and the tragic fallenness of every human being." [00:10:32]

"I can't I cannot make my life right periodically I will read something I'll find for myself I have a natural tendency towards optimism and I'm a Feeler and so I will want to feel all as well with the world and then I will read something or something will happen and I'll remember oh no uh there is a shadow and it's not just outside of me it is inside of me it is not just things that folks might have said or done to me or about me it is what I have said and what I have left unsaid is what I have done and I have left undone I can't now we will not ultimately end there so watch the next video in this little series but we stop there today because if we do not live fully and deeply in the reality that we cannot do it then we cannot experience the power and the goodness of what it is that God wants to do so we we will move to that but not today today my invitation is name what it is in your life the Brokenness the thing that you cannot fix the great need for God the dependence on God the darkness the storm the sorrow we meet God there I don't fully understand why I just know that it is true we meet God in the place of pain and Brokenness and repentance and sorrow in ways that we don't meet him any place else this is my story." [00:11:22]