I recently found myself down a Bob Dylan rabbit hole. If you haven't heard his song "Everything is Broken," do yourself a favor and pull it up today. It's from his 1989 album Oh Mercy, and it's basically Dylan cataloguing the wreckage of the world. He sings about broken hands on broken plows, broken treaties and broken vows. Broken pipes, broken tools, people bending broken rules. It goes on like that, verse after verse, and it doesn't really resolve. It just... ends. Broken. It's not a fun song. But it might be one of the most honest ones ever written.
Here's the thing: he's not wrong.
We live in a world that is, in the most fundamental sense, broken. Relationships fracture. Bodies fail. Promises don't hold. We hurt the people closest to us and sometimes we can't explain why. We build things and they fall apart. We try to fix things and make them worse. The news confirms it every morning. Our own hearts confirm it if we're paying attention.
The theological word for this is sin. And I know that word carries baggage. But just admit it, something is deeply, pervasively wrong with the world. Dylan felt it in 1989. You've felt it this week. I've felt it this week. The brokenness is real, and if we're honest, it lives in us too, not just out there.
I want to say something that might sound strange coming from a pastor in the week before Easter: don't rush past this.
The temptation around Easter is to skip straight to the good news. Flowers and full parking lots and "He is risen!" And that's all true and beautiful and worth celebrating. But if you arrive at Easter Sunday without sitting for even a moment in the weight of what's broken, the resurrection becomes just a nice idea rather than the most urgent rescue mission in human history.
Good Friday exists for a reason. The cross means something specific. Jesus didn't come into a world that just needed a little encouragement. He came into a world that Dylan, without knowing it, diagnosed perfectly. Broken. All of it. And the only way through that brokenness was for God Himself to enter it, absorb it, and defeat it.
That's Easter.
Not a holiday that pretends everything is fine. A declaration that everything broken will not have the final word. Jesus conquered sin and death, and that changes everything. It means the brokenness is real, and it is not the end of the story.
We'd love for you to come celebrate that with us.
Join the Hopesters this Easter Sunday. Bring your skeptic friend, your searching neighbor, your family member who hasn't been in a while. Come as you are, brokenness and all. That's exactly who Easter is for.
Easter Sunday, April 5, 9am & 10:45am
Hope Community Church
1831 E. 21st Street
peace,
Nick
Here's the thing: he's not wrong.
We live in a world that is, in the most fundamental sense, broken. Relationships fracture. Bodies fail. Promises don't hold. We hurt the people closest to us and sometimes we can't explain why. We build things and they fall apart. We try to fix things and make them worse. The news confirms it every morning. Our own hearts confirm it if we're paying attention.
The theological word for this is sin. And I know that word carries baggage. But just admit it, something is deeply, pervasively wrong with the world. Dylan felt it in 1989. You've felt it this week. I've felt it this week. The brokenness is real, and if we're honest, it lives in us too, not just out there.
I want to say something that might sound strange coming from a pastor in the week before Easter: don't rush past this.
The temptation around Easter is to skip straight to the good news. Flowers and full parking lots and "He is risen!" And that's all true and beautiful and worth celebrating. But if you arrive at Easter Sunday without sitting for even a moment in the weight of what's broken, the resurrection becomes just a nice idea rather than the most urgent rescue mission in human history.
Good Friday exists for a reason. The cross means something specific. Jesus didn't come into a world that just needed a little encouragement. He came into a world that Dylan, without knowing it, diagnosed perfectly. Broken. All of it. And the only way through that brokenness was for God Himself to enter it, absorb it, and defeat it.
That's Easter.
Not a holiday that pretends everything is fine. A declaration that everything broken will not have the final word. Jesus conquered sin and death, and that changes everything. It means the brokenness is real, and it is not the end of the story.
We'd love for you to come celebrate that with us.
Join the Hopesters this Easter Sunday. Bring your skeptic friend, your searching neighbor, your family member who hasn't been in a while. Come as you are, brokenness and all. That's exactly who Easter is for.
Easter Sunday, April 5, 9am & 10:45am
Hope Community Church
1831 E. 21st Street
peace,
Nick