Miguel was not a Christian but had attended church and youth group activities with his family. One Sunday, he attended a service at the local church near his school. A lot of his friends attended this church and it was very active in supporting the private Christian school which he was attending at the time. Miguel’s family already had a church that they attended but his parents wanted to visit just to check it out.

When he got there, he quickly realized that he had entered a whole new world. Everyone was dressed in freshly pressed suits and ties, elegant dresses flowing in the wind that blew down the hall through the open door. The stain glass windows unveiled beautiful colors upon the pristine pews that lined the sanctuary. It was as if Miguel had walked into a beautiful dream. But that dream quickly turned into a nightmare.

As he walked starry-eyed down the aisles of the sanctuary, a gentleman grabbed him by the shoulder and asked “Excuse me, are you lost?” When Miguel explained to him that he was there for church, the man responded by saying, “I don’t think so, you certainly aren’t dressed for it,” as he looked at Miguel’s tattered jeans and plain black t-shirt. After Miguel’s initial shock subsided he was then asked to leave or find some appropriate dress wear that would look more presentable. Miguel was heartbroken and quickly left the church, completely dejected. In an effort to preserve the beauty of the sanctum of worship, this man was willing to turn away a searching soul, to deny him Jesus.

I am constantly amazed by the lengths that people will go to make their standards of beauty, to preserve their stain glass masquerade. But honestly, I am not surprised. We do the same things to our lives, to the true house of worship. We do everything we can to make our lives look perfect. The perfect hair, perfect skin, perfect body, the perfect house with a clean-cut lawn and white picket fence in which we can house our perfect nuclear family that exists without any strife. We post only the most stunning pictures to social media and present the world with the best possible view of our lives. It is as if our beautiful lives and beautiful churches will make God and others love us more. But no matter what we do to make our lives look perfect and to make our churches look pristine, at the end of the day we are still broken inside and the fact of the matter is the church is for these broken people, it is for messy people. No matter how much we try to make things look beautiful and perfect, we as Christians cannot change the fact that we are all insufferable bastards, you and I. And that’s honestly how it should be!

As we look through scripture we find that all the servants of God are broken and messy people. Noah was a naked drunk, Moses was a stutterer and a doubter, David was a murder who committed adultery, Mary Magdalene was a prostitute as was Rahab, Paul persecuted and killed people, and Peter (the rock of the church) was a violent liar who denied Christ. The first people to worship Christ, were not the rich and powerful, but were instead the lowly shepherds of the field who were beyond the fringes of society. These were the people who worshiped and served God. They were the poor and the broken, the unacceptable and the outcast.

Nothing you do will every make you perfect or more presentable to God, you are not perfect. Your hair, your skin, your body, your house, your family, your social life, your everything is imperfect. And that’s just how God wants you. Christ came to heal the broken and the poor, regardless of anything they did. For it is Christ and Christ alone, in which we can have true perfection. So, Church, can we honestly stop trying to pretend that we are perfect, can we stop excluding people from the Church because they don’t fit our social constructs of perfection. Can we just be the insufferable bastards that we are and let Christ shine through our imperfection. Can we just be beautifully broken?