It's a good thing that God doesn't think or act that way about us. God could easily say to any one of us "You're broken. Defective. Sinful. Of no use at all." But God knows that we as individuals and as a people may have broken hearts, but they're still beating. Broken hearts, but they still can love and be of use. Broken understandings, but we can still pray and grow in maturity.
God has never given up when people are broken, or even when they get things wrong. Take God's Chosen People, for instance.
The Hebrew people were not perfectly formed from the beginning: they had to grow. They misunderstood just Who God was for many generations. For example, they were not always a monotheistic people; in other words, they did not always believe in only one God. Or, if they beIieved that their God was the greatest, they still thought other gods existed. In Psalm 95, a Psalm in Morning Prayer, we read "The Lord is God, the mighty God, the great King among all the gods." In other words, "there are many gods, but our God is the greatest." Or look at the first Commandment: "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." This line takes for granted that other gods exist.
It took many generations of struggling for clarity among polytheistic neighbors before the Jewish religious leaders could believe and write "God - there is no other." Did God refuse to have dealings with His people when for many years they were, in a sense, broken, imperfect, believers in many gods? No, God stayed with them and inspired them to grow in their understanding of God.
Here is another sign of the brokenness and incompleteness of God's people, who were influenced by their pagan neighbors, the Canaanites:
"It is now increasingly clear that for a very long part of their history, the people we now call the people of Israel had as a regular part of their basic culture the sacrifice of firstborn children.....There is considerable archaeological evidence to back this up: the custom was popular with the people we sometimes call the Phoenicians.... In the Scriptures, they are called "Canaanites" and a good deal of the cultural baggage of the people of Israel comes from them." (James Alison, in "Jesus: the Forgiving Victim.")
People would sacrifice their sons and daughters to the gods called "Baals," placing them in the arms or abdominal holes of giant metal idols of men with bulls' heads, called "Moloch." A fire was lit in or around the hole and the child either dropped from the idol's arms into the hole or dropped directly into the fire and burned to death. Sacrificing your child, people believed, would ensure financial prosperity for their families and future children. Among the Canaanites, sometimes rich people bought poor children and used them in the rite.
The famous prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel spoke out against this practice in Israel (Jeremiah) and Judea (Ezekiel) in the period between 600 and 580 B.C. Speaking against the widespread presumption that God wants people to sacrifice their children, Jeremiah speaks for God about the worship of Baal:
"Hear the word of the Lord.....I am going to bring such disaster upon this place...because the people ....have filled this place with the blood of the innocent, and gone on building the high places of Baal to burn their children in the fire as burnt offerings to Baal, which I did not command or decree, nor did it enter my mind." (Jeremiah 19: 3-6)
Why had the Jews been so mistaken, believing God ordered them to do this? Some scholars think that they misunderstood the book of Exodus which states "The first-born of your sons you shall give to me. You shall do likewise with your oxen and your sheep." Sheep and cattle were killed as sacrifice; some of the Jewish people thought they should emulate their neighbors and likewise sacrifice their children. Ordinary traditional observant Israelites and Judeans of that period might well have thought that Jeremiah and Ezekiel were not God-fearing people at all to believe otherwise. Both prophets were eventually sent into exile.
But God slowly led His people to discover the truth. We can see the fundamental shift in the people's understanding of what God wanted from them in Genesis 22, and the story of Abraham and Isaac. God seems to test Abraham, by asking him to take his son Isaac to the land of Moriah and to offer him there on a mountain as a burnt offering. Yet at the end of the story, an angel stays Abraham's hand and he is told to sacrifice a ram, not his son. Abraham had moved from Ur, where human sacrifice was not common, to Canaan, where it was widespread. In this story, God distinguishes Himself from the Baals and Molochs as a God Who abhors human sacrifice.
How often have God's Christian people misunderstood God through twisted interpretations of His Word, or disregard for His Word? Think of the terrible wars between Catholics and Protestants throughout Europe and the British Isles. The capturing and selling of African slaves, a practice so widespread that even Catholic and Protestant clergy and orders of religious women owned slaves. When society makes something legal, or a practice becomes widespread and part of the economy, people tend to believe that it is moral, and the prophets - then and now - are rebuked and cast out.
So often our hearts are broken hearts because they have become hardened and we have reduced human beings to something less than human and fundamentally broken and flawed so that we can destroy them - as "Christians" tried to annihilate Jews, homosexuals, and the mentally defective during World War II - or to use them for economic gain as Native Americans were confined to reservations while the US federal government took over their lands.
Today, our society still rejects God's desire that we be loving and merciful. We dehumanize babies in the womb so we can destroy them with clear consciences instead of encouraging and financially aiding their mothers, who often despair because they are without support. Nursing homes are underfunded and understaffed so the elderly, who are no longer needful to society, suffer. Insurance plans do not provide enough aid for people with mental illness. Refugees are rejected. Women still receive sexist treatment in society and in some Churches. People, who are not perfect unless they are "useful," or "like us," are not considered to be really people, or to have worth. Yet God loves those whom society and even the Churches reject. God favors the poor and the rejected and the innocent little ones. Why can't we hear His voice?
Through the years, God's people have grown and matured in their faith, and learned to understand God's Word at deeper and deeper levels. God remains patient year by year - with His people and with us as individuals.
If we sometimes despair because we see the ways in which we are still broken and imperfect: morally conflicted, still afraid, still angry or selfish, still dealing with addictions or illness, still paralyzed by depression or grief, still wearing blinders about what God wants - it's good to remember that God is patient. If we are too afraid or too proud to recognize those parts of ourselves in need of forgiveness and healing - it's good to remember that God is patient. And it's good to be reminded that even canonized saints were people with broken, hardened hearts and broken understandings and didn't always "get it right." For example, we know how Francis touched a leper with deep feeling, seeing Christ within him. But Francis also did this:
"Take for example, the story of Francis and Brother James. James was responsible for the physical care of some lepers and served as a kind of nurse for many people with terrible sores and wounds. One day, Francis returned home after being away to find that James had brought a leper into the chapel from the leper hospice. When Francis saw this, he snapped at James and reprimanded him for bringing the leper around the friars' place of prayer. The text explains that Francis reproved James because he did not want to see lepers with 'severe sores outside the hospital' left alone in the chapel where other people often came because 'people usually abhorred lepers who had severe sores.'
"This is certainly not the open-armed, warm and embracing Francis of Assisi we are used to imagining.
"Why tell these stories? First, it is important that we remember not only the good works and extraordinary acts of the women and men we venerate as saints but also their weaknesses, failings, and imperfections. This helps provide us with a fuller and more honest picture of what makes these figures so venerable in the first place. They were just like you and me, sinful and struggling at times. But they also had the chance, as we do, to respond to God's grace in this world and make a positive difference despite inevitable fumblings and failures.
"Second, we tell these stories to see what the saints did afterward, for it gives us a clue to how we might live. After Francis publicly shamed James and the leper out of his own insecurity and fear, the would-be saint went to both men, and apologized, asked forgiveness and made amends." (Daniel P. Horan, "St. Francis in Full," in "America" magazine, October 3, 2016 issue.)
All of us, in some way and at different times in our lives, are broken crayons. Broken or hardened hearts. Broken and incomplete minds. Yet, God still values us. God knows we have worth and can "still color." God knows that even broken hearts still beat with undiminished life. We only have to have the courage to acknowledge our brokenness, keep praying, keep moving forward in love, keep on saying "I'm sorry," keep on making amends. And, like that famous penitent, that former slave-holder John Newton, keep singing "Amazing Grace."