Readings for the Day:
Sermon:
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Original Manuscript:
At the end of the movie, Rudolph, upon being asked to lead Santa’s sleigh because his bright nose will get them through the storm, asks Santa to find the misfit toys the one thing they all desire: a home where they will be loved and cherished. Santa agrees and takes these toys in to find them all fitting homes where they will be loved and cared for.
We are all, whether we wish to admit it or not, like those misfit toys. All of us are not quite as perfect as we want to be. All of us are, indeed, a little bit broken.
Our hope in life is that God loves us anyways. God, as we hear in Jeremiah, is going among “blind and the lame”, those broken misfits of the world. God says they will come in weeping, but that God will “with consolations... lead them back.”
God is the one who loves the broken and unloved, the misfits and the out-of-place. God cares for us all.
Even when our sins created a permanent divide between ourselves and God, the Lord has seen fit to create a bridge for us back to Him. Though we rejected God, God has not rejected us. Though we, like the Prodigal Son, have denied God, God has come to bring us back again.
Where before we were divided from God, we can now claim the title of “family”. In Ephesians, we hear that we have even been made children through adoption. Though we were without a home, God has given us one and allowed us to cry out, as Paul says, with the words “Abba”, “Father”.
It will be hard for some of us to accept that we are broken, that we are misfits in the world. It will be harder still for some to see that there is an unbreachable divide between ourselves and God, one that we as the human race have caused. But when we can see that, we can also see the depth of God’s love for us. God wants to redeem us and renew us. God is even willing to adopt us as children of God.
When we see our brokenness, we can help others in their brokenness too. We can be a path leading others back to God. We can say, “Yes, you are broken, and I’m broken too. God loves us anyways.”
To recognize our brokenness is to recognize the power of God’s love, to recognize our need for God in our lives to make us whole, and to realize our opportunity to be a beacon to others back to God. We are all members of the island of misfit toys, and God is there to mend us and give to us the love that we so desperately need and so richly want.