Lutheran Church Missouri Synod

Brokenness

By Dr. Richard P. Bucher

And they have healed the brokenness of My people superficially, Saying, 'Peace, peace,' But there is no peace (Jeremiah 6:14, NASB).

Three scenes of tragic brokenness have presented themselves to me of late. First, the brokenness of little Spencer, South Dakota, a town obliterated in a matter of minutes by the ferocity of a quarter mile-wide tornado. Practically nothing remains. Countless lives have been broken. Second, the brokenness of Inter City Express 885, which, as it traveled 125 MPH, derailed near the town of Eschede, Germany, killing 95 people. Human bodies as well as the once invincible train lay terribly broken. Third, a brokenness that I have seen first hand: that of 10 year old Sandra Clossey, whose broken body lays in a coma, struggling to recover in Pediatric ICU at U. Mass hospital. Sandra, a 5th grade classmate of my daughter, was in a horrible car accident on May 14 and suffered many broken bones and a serious brain injury. The good news is that God is answering the prayers of His people and she is beginning to come out of the coma.

Whose heart does not break when we see and hear about obvious brokenness such as this? But there is another kind of brokenness that is not so obvious, yet even more tragic. It is the brokenness about which God, through the prophet Jeremiah, laments in the text quoted above. The brokenness of God's people had nothing to do with a catastrophe of nature, a failure of technology, or a senseless accident. It was not a brokenness of the body but a brokenness of the soul.

A careful reading of Jeremiah reveals that the brokenness of God's people consisted in their sinfulness, which they were stubbornly refusing to repent of. They had transgressed God's commandments and had become spiritually sick and broken. Jeremiah catalogs their sins numerous times throughout the book and there is not space here to recount every single transgression. But at the heart of it was rebellion, hypocrisy and unfaithfulness. Though God had repeatedly warned them to worship Him only, they had fallen into blatant idolatry, worshiping many gods, all the while insisting that they were being faithful to Yahweh, the God of Israel. They still performed the required sacrifices, but God had become merely one among many. The other major sin repeated throughout the book is violence against the most defenseless of the society: orphans, widows, and aliens.

Because of all this God's people were terribly broken and sick with sin. Since the only way to be healed of such brokenness was to repent of their sin (to admit it and stop it) and turn to God for forgiveness, Yahweh sent Jeremiah to urge them to do just that. Jeremiah warned them that unless they repented disaster was coming upon them. Sadly, though, they scoffed at Jeremiah and stubbornly refused to admit that what Jeremiah said about them was true. And, compounding the problem, other self-proclaimed prophets were telling the people the opposite message, what they wanted to hear: that God loved them, that nothing bad was going to befall them, that there would be "peace, peace."

So it was and so it continues to be. Though the United States is not God's people as Israel was, we are a nation that is just as broken as they were. For we like they have turned from the true God and have pursued endless idols. We like they have perpetrated ghastly violence upon the most defenseless of our society: the unborn. We champion the right of our citizens to engage in all manner of evil, be it abortion, homosexuality, pornography, gambling, or divorce. We have elevated individual rights and wants to the level of deity to the neglect of all else: marriage, family, community, nation. God in His mercy, still sends His prophets to heal the brokenness. But just as His exhortation through Jeremiah to repent was scoffed and rejected, so it is today. And for every one "Jeremiah" that is raised up, it seems that there are 99 prophets of peace, who tell people what they want to hear, that God loves them and accepts what they are doing, that everything is ok. But this will not heal the brokenness. Only repenting of the evil and turning to God for forgiveness through Jesus will.

February 1999