I was once in a wonderful play called Summerfolk by the Russian writer Gorky. He was a fan of Chekov and a great naturalist so every line was finely balanced, each scene written meticulously, but there was one line that always jarred for me. A woman has fallen out badly with her oldest friend and when her friend comes to make amends she is refused with the words: 

‘No, I don’t like anything which has been broken and mended.’

Now it may just be me but I found that line always caught my attention and stood out -it seemed entirely false and unnatural. 

I’m exactly the opposite, something mended always appeals to me hugely.

This is maybe because my mother, who was never rich, used to love to buy broken crockery at antiques fairs.

Beautiful little china cups with no handles – or no saucers. 

Anyway going back to the play; I realised, when I ‘d heard the line a few dozen times, that it had the same effect as its subject, speaking of a broken friendship it broke the listeners concentration and in a surprising way made you think freshly about the situation.

This is a recurring technique in many plays, and indeed in all the arts:

a regular verse can be beautiful, but when the poet ‘throws’ the verse out with an ‘odd’ syllable or irregular emphasis the effect is amazing.

The verse structure of Pied Beauty is a good example of this; Hopkins was a verse master and could easily have written in the regular meter which would have been expected when he wrote it in 1877. Instead the thing hops and skips about like a free-jazz impro until the penultimate line when he switches meter altogether which makes the last line:

“He fathers forth whose beauty is past change – Praise him”

chime like a bell.

Another thing my mother taught me to love was what she called ‘oriental rugs’, again she bought ripped ones that had been repaired. ‘If they hadn’t been good quality they wouldn’t have bothered repairing them’ she maintained. Not unreasonably. Often she would point out the deliberate flaw that a devout weaver would always weave into a pattern in order to demonstrate that ‘Only Allah is perfect’. When I went looking for the source of that quote I didn’t find it but by happy accident came a line again from the Spanish poet Antonio Porchia; “Nothing that breathes is perfect”. Isn’t that wonderful. I think its from his book of aphorisms ‘Voices’ which also has:

“to wound the heart is to create it”.

One of my favourite poets isnt a poet at all, he’s a singer; Leonard Cohen, I heard Cohen say that Bob Dylan had scolded him once; ‘Leonard your songs are getting more and more like hymns‘ and its true; listen to this from his song ‘Anthem’

‘Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in…’

I dont usually have a chance to do this but I’m just going to play you another song I love that I began to think about the other day as I was standing on the roadside. This is by Dylan from an album called ‘Oh Mercy!’

Dance if you want to; Everything is Broken…

(Music plays)

Great good old rock and roll. Out of the great fusion of French folk, African chant, Christian spirituals and who knows what other secret ingredients, its great strength was the breaking of tabboo and one of the first was the tabboo of discord. Somewhat like the dissonant interval that was banned in medieval church music, the bleu note in Jazz and blues, and Rock and Roll, is a note which is tangental to the predictable melodic progression. And it is almost impossible to harmonise.

When we harmonise we tend to come together in stillness in orrder to listen closely to one another but dissonance makes us unsettled, we become active and move from place to place. So it is essential to a music of dissent, of agitation and action. Which is why the Church banned it and why the authorities always banned it from the early years of the century to the public order acts of the 1990s. But to our lives it has been essential the basis of our contemporary soundtrack but also the backbone of so much of our resistance; from the foregrounding of the civil rights movement in the public (white) consciousness by Dylan and Bob Seeger and others, and the opposition to Vietnam and nuclear war, and punk and rave rebelliousness.

I began to think of the theme of today’s service on Easter Sunday. The Easter break from my ministerial studies had been an incredibly busy time; I know that we all live pressurised lives and I don’t want to waste your time by complaining about mine but suffice to say I was looking forward to the bank holiday weekend off; or at least to doing some work on my dissertation and spending some time with my family, as we have two little children. But on Good Friday I learned that my mum, who is unwell, had another collapse and was in Hospital, so I spent all Saturday making care arrangements on the telephone and on Sunday I set off to drive up to visit her. On the way, driving through rural Oxfordshire, I started noticing the engine was over revving and the car lost power – it completely broke down and I was stranded, miles from anywhere. Luckily I was able to call for help and I knew I ‘d only have a couple of hours wait but as the car was on a fairly fast bend it wasn’t safe to sit inside it, so I stood on the verge some way off. I was pretty grumpy about the situation. I was missing an opportunity to visit a friend taking a service; I could have stayed at home and spent the day with my children and my wife; I was wasting precious time.

And then I heard the larks singing.

I saw the country I would otherwise have driven past. I was next to meadow fields, some way off was a little copse. There were borage flowers, and bluebells all around the trees, and, thinking of my mum in hospital I suppose, I remembered the lines from Robert Bly’s poem that I read earlier; ‘We did not come to remain whole, we came to lose our leaves like the trees, the trees that are broken and start again, drawing up on great roots.’ And I thought of the business and hassle I ‘d been going through and my total unawareness of the loveliness of this bend in the road, this unconsidered piece of arable land beside the carriageway. As the psalmist says: ‘Out of my distress I called on the Lord; the Lord answered me and set me in a broad place.’

The Zen story I shared with the children refers to the Japanese concept of Wabi-sabi, Wabi-sabi is one of those terms that is said to be untranslatable (and one is reminded of the great line attributed to Louis Armstrong when he was asked the meaning of the blues and he’s supposed to have said – ‘Well if you’ve got to ask, you’ll never know!’), but Wabi-sabi is, maybe, the element of the unpredictable, the irregular or flawed, exactly the element that brings a real artwork to completion.

I began this service with a quote from the Psalm 118, a great Psalm which carries meaning from the fifth century bce right to our hearts today. Line 22 says: “The stone which the builders had discarded has become the cornerstone”.

In all of our miseries and failures can lie the seeds of our successes, our oppression can provoke our liberation.

That 22^nd line from the psalm inspired the gospel writers to see in the figure of their beaten and defeated Rabbi an image of God as the ultimately vulnerable and victimised. Just as Isaiah had described a wrecked person, a person of sorrows, so they could see that such a person was identified with God and ‘God-likeness’, far more than any perfect person could ever have been.

Its an inspiring, provocative and disturbing image of God so its a horrible pity that it has also been discarded from mainstream Christianity. But perhaps its an image we can cherish nevertheless for as St. Paul says: “Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.” (2 Cor. 12:10)