My two days with Rob Bell ended with a run around London and a train journey on Thursday morning – Maundy Thursday.
My two days were a mixture of the everyday profane – tiredness, impatience, frustration yet with a glimpse of the divine – wonder, awe, inspiration. There was something profound and mundane, something transcendent and something ordinary.
Maundy Thursday is the day we remember ordinary bread broken with extraordinary friends, the washing of feet in the most astonishing of circumstances, of bleak tears poured out in the depth of human sadness and abusive kisses.
Rob Bell spoke for more than 12 hours with stories of science and faith and cosmology and love and purpose and meaning and said so much of worth but there is a message that, at least for me, is writ large. I am invited to be a Eucharistic person - to be broken and poured out in service and in love. Now that sounds a bit bleak doesn’t it?
At the end of the two days he said ‘which of my stories did you enjoy and remember the most?’ I immediately remembered the ones where he had told us of his mistakes, when things went wrong and for Rob it seemed that in the midst of the pain of being broken and being poured out that he found meaning and purpose and a reason and an energy to get up and try again.
It was on Maundy Thursday that Judas betrayed Jesus, it was on Maundy Thursday that Jesus crumpled in the garden despairing, that he broke bread and poured out wine as a forward recognition of what was to be. And soon all would be broken and all would be poured out: life, hope, friendship, everything of import, everything of matter.
Yet this would not be the end but instead a start.
Maybe being broken is an opportunity; the first step to being remade, maybe being poured out leaves room to be filled.
May we know that in our 'brokenness and poured-outness' that there is meaning.
Broken
Poured out
Intentionally,
with purpose
In service
In love
Knowing
and waiting
to be filled and renewed.
