- There once was a farmer who had two buckets. He used them to bring water home every day.
- One of the buckets had a crack and leaked continuously. The other bucket was perfect and never spilled a drop
- As time passed the cracked bucket became sad about all the leaked water. It decided to speak with the farmer.
- Upon learning that it was sad, the farmer asked the bucket to join him on a walk.
- They walked down the same path as always...but this time the farmer pointed out all the wonderful life that had sprung up around them.
- He explained to the bucket that it was responsible for all this beauty...if it hadn’t leaked water everyday as the farmer went back and forth with the buckets, the beautiful plants would never have grown.
- The bucket realized that despite its flaws it still helped those around it to grow ... even when it wasn’t aware of it.
This is a fable that I’ve heard or read several times over the years. Chances are you’ve heard it too. I’ve seen it in a number of versions. Once it was an old farmer in the Midwest who owned the buckets. Once it was a Tibetan monk. Once an old Chinese lady and once an old Jewish rabbi. Apparently it’s the kind of story anyone can claim for themself. I have no idea where it originated or who first told it.
The version I just shared is a pretty stripped-down, simple one but I’ve also heard longer, much more elaborately detailed versions. But all of them tell basically the same story – of something that thought of itself as inferior learning that it was, in fact, valued.
I ran into this fable two times in just the past week – once in something I was reading, and once when a friend shared it on facebook. When something comes to my attention multiple times in a short period of time, I figure I am supposed to spend some time with it and see what it has to yield for me.
I Googled it and found several different variations all readily available on-line. I read four or five of them, noticing the differences among them. But the one main point is the same in each version. An old, cracked bucket – remember now, this is a fable -- sees itself as virtually useless when, in reality it is vitally necessary for the life and the beauty around it.
How many of us see ourselves as fairly useless, or, at the very least, flawed and not as good as others around us? Maybe sort of boringly adequate? In one of the other versions I read, which turned out to be much too long to use here in this short message, there is a conversation between the two buckets as well as between the bucket and the bucket-carrier.
The cracked bucket said to the perfect one, “Oh, I wish I could be like you. You do your job so well. You are carried straight into the people’s house to serve them, while I sit out here by the washroom because I’m only half-useful.“ The perfect bucket was surprised to hear this and responded that he always envied the cracked one. Not only did he water the beautiful plants along the way every day, but he got to sit outside each night and take joy in the light of the stars and the moon, while the perfect one was shut up each night in the house with the people and never got to see the stars.
Much of how we see ourselves is just a matter of our point of view. We know all of our failings and for us they stand out like lights in a night sky. But others don’t see us that way. And we don’t see all their failings, which they see so clearly.
But more importantly than anything else, God doesn’t see us that way. In keeping with this series from which I’m currently preaching -- what has the Bible to say about how God sees us, as opposed to how we see ourselves?
Well, the first, obvious answer is one we all know from the very first chapter of Genesis:
- God spoke: “Let us make human beings in our image, make them reflecting our nature..... So God created human beings -- he created them godlike, reflecting God’s own nature. And God blessed them.
That should, all by itself, answer any questions we have might have as to our value in God’s eyes.
But in case we still need more – and most of us do -- the next answer I came upon when I asked this question comes from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, verses 8-10:
- We are God’s idea, and all God’s work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish! We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing by ourselves! No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.
But just in case anyone still has doubts about how God views them, here are some verses from Psalm 139 in which the psalmist rejoices in how he was created by God – and yes, these words apply to every one of us:
Oh yes, you shaped me first inside, then out;
you formed me in my mother’s womb.
I thank you, High God—you’re breathtaking!
Body and soul, I am marvelously made!
I worship in adoration—what a creation!
You know me inside and out,
you know every bone in my body;
You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
how I was sculpted from nothing into something.
Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception
to birth; all the stages of my life were spread out before you,
The days of my life all prepared
before I’d even lived one day.
There is much more, just like this, to be found in scripture. God created us in love. We are all valued. However much we may think of ourselves as not worth much, God sees us very differently. Created, as we are, in God’s image, how can we be anything but just as we are meant to be?
We probably always will look at other people around us and think they are so much better than ourselves. Too many of us of us have been trained by life to think like that. And, yes, the world knocks us around some, and we may get a little banged up and bruised now and then, but we are still God beloveds.
Maye we can hear this truth better in the words of Leonard Cohen’s popular song, Anthem:
- Ring the bells that still can ring; forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.
Yes, we may be cracked in some places – but that’s where the light gets in. God doesn’t want our perfection – God wants us, just as we are. Those occasional cracks are also where the love that God fills us with gets out – gets out to light the dark places of the world around us.
Remember, what you think of as your weakness can sometimes be the very part of you that God uses for the healing of the world.
Amen.
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