People are going to trash [Penn State] university for a while, and it may get a lot uglier as more and more is discovered. Do not be ashamed or turn on your university, we can rest assured, God loves to heal broken things with the cross.

At RUF, we talk a lot about the the corrupting power and presence of sin, and it is easily taken serious in the moment of a sermon, but rarely considered in the normalcy of our regular lives…until something blows up.  This week, our campus exploded.  Though some of us may not call it this, we can clearly see the pain and horror of sin.  I say this with real trepidation, but you and I know we can’t live in a world where it’s “just sex”, because what we saw was little boys who have had not just their bodies, but their soul assaulted – and an entire campus has felt tremors of that nightmare.  Its crystal clear, one man’s sin has sent a tidal wave of sinful actions and effect on everyone here, its almost unexplainable…unless that’s how sin in the world really works.  Because this started with one man, our campus is looking for a hero, one man to bandage it.  When JoePa was fired (not advocating or defending that here), the campus saw the man they had always turned to caught right in the middle of it all, and could no longer handle it.  So where do we turn in this broken situation? The community is shamed/angry/horrified/disturbed by the depth of the brokenness surrounding this situation, and we want to run, hide, and try to move on.  But what if God works not in spite of broken things, but through them? That is almost insane to consider were it not for the cross. God’s hero for these situations is a broken person.  I really believe Jesus’ last words on the cross in John’s gospel offer us truth and reality to be the redeeming community our campus is so thirsty for.

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