The Week of February 6th, 2022

>>>>>> Taken, Blessed, Broken, Given <<<<<<

Sermon Noodles and Devotional Guide

 If you zoom up to 40,000 feet like you are in an airplane traveling across the country, and look out the window. You notice things about the Earth that you would not notice if you were on the ground. You notice the contours of rivers. The farms that dot the landscape, the hills and the valleys. 

The same thing is true when looking at the scriptures.There are themes running through them. There are threads weaving their way through the fabric of the tapestry we call the Old and New Testaments. One of these threads is the movement of the spiritual life in four steps: Taken (chosen), blessed, broken, and given.

Taken

The first step is taken (chosen). It looks like to get a major step ahead in the spiritual life we need to know we are chosen by God. This is the way the Bible starts off in the Book of Genesis-- One of the first things you notice is Abraham and Sarah. This couple, living in the land of Ur, was chosen by God and sent to the Promised Land and became the first couple of the Jewish tradition. 

“We can desire to become the Beloved only when we know that we are already the Beloved. Therefore, the first step in the spiritual life is to acknowledge with our whole being that we already have been taken.”(Henri Nouwen, The Life of the Beloved (TLB) p. 51)

God predestined us  to be adopted as God’s sons and daughters through Jesus Christ, according to God’s pleasure and will.  Ephesians 1:5

Blessed

Apparently just knowing we are chosen it is not enough to sustain us in faith. We need to say “yes” to our belovedness. Step two is we need to know we are blessed. 

“It is not enough to be chosen. We also need an ongoing blessing that allows us to hear in an ever-new way that we belong to a loving God who will never leave us alone, but will remind us always that we are guided by love on every step of our lives.” (Henri Nouwen, TLB 72)

Broken

We are taken, chosen by God. We are blessed by God.  We are also broken, and that is the third step. 

This is really important: Our great task is to allow the choseness and the blessing to touch our brokenness. In spiritual direction we call this sacred wound work.  This seems to me to be a major point of authenticity in the journey. So many times we want to stop at being chosen and blessed so that we won’t be broken. But that is not what the Bible teaches.  We need to allow the choseness and blessedness to touch our failures. To touch our shame and disappointments; to touch our own bias; to put our brokenness under blessing.

Yes, as fearsome as it may sound, as the Beloved ones, we are called to claim our unique brokenness, just as we have to claim our unique choseness and our unique blessedness. (TLB 88) 

Given

The fourth step is that we are given in service to the world. All this is not just for our sakes but for the life of the world. We are given. 

We tend to forget that our real gift is not so much what we can do, but who we are. The real question is not ‘What can we offer each other?’ but ‘Who can we be for each other?’ (TLB 113) 

“As I grow older, I discover more and more that the greatest gift I have to offer is my own joy of living, my own inner peace, my own silence and solitude, my own sense of well-being.”  --Henri Nouwen