A bumper sticker worth remembering
Moving is a time for reminiscing, always. For the past several days, the staff members of Mission Services Association has been organizing, boxing, and removing belongings from our offices in Knoxville. This move has been a long one for me. For the past ten months, I have been learning the finer administrative details of the Christian Churches Pension Plan and have continued the development of the social media plan of the Pension Plan.
As I boxed up preaching notes today from my days with the former Park Avenue Christian Church in Connecticut, I found myself remembering a bumper sticker I saw one afternoon in New Haven. As I trudged from the train platform to my car, I discovered a car that has been forever in memory. The paint may have been characterized as rust and primer, but that would have neglected three other colors. The muffler had fallen from its twisted clothes hanger connector onto the concrete beneath the car. Several courses of duct tape bound cellophane and cardboard where there was once a driver’s side window. On the rear window, the owner had proudly attached a sticker with these words emblazoned, “THIS IS NOT AN ABANDONED CAR.”
A world that feels abandoned
It may fairly be said that many “FEEL” as if this world is much like that car. Over the eight years of the Obama Presidency, political conservatives across the USA often spoke of a nation adrift toward collapse and worse. From the superabundance of Facebook posts, many political liberals and some conservatives feel the same about the early days of the Trump Presidency.
ISIS appears to be one step ahead of the organized governments of state in creating and executing acts of terror. The tolerance of Salafi jihadists threatens to add greater numbers to the caliphate ascendency. Poverty across Burundi, Burkina Faso, and the Democratic Republic of Congo is increasing faster than the population. Gang and gun violence in Chicago threatens the residents of this great city. Leaders of drug cartels build power and influence upon profits garnered from the weaknesses of frail lives. Bright futures and great dreams are ripped away with dashed hopes and desperation resulting from the blight of human trafficking. As Don Henley penned in the song New York Minute, “Somebody going to emergency, somebody’s going to jail…the wolf is always at the door…Everything can change In a New York Minute.”
Messy? Yes! Abandoned? NO!
The world is messy; it always has been. God’s record of history begins with a husband and wife introducing problems into the relationship and quickly descends into sibling jealousy resulting in murder! If God is anything he is honest. People have had a bent toward selfishness, anger, drunkenness, cheating, and more for all the years of human history.
However, like the car in New Haven, this world is not abandoned. Shortly after Adam and Eve embraced sin, God promised the coming of redemption. He chose a people through whom the redeemer would be born, and took upon himself flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Though the populace embraced him, the powerful rejected and crucified him. When all looked bleak and hopeless in the dim light before dawn, Jesus’ followers instead found he had conquered the worst that evil has to offer.
Since the Sunday of Pentecost, God has been at work among the very people who rejected him. He poured (and still pours) his Spirit into lives and changed them into people of love, hope, peace, patience, and self-control. He has worked through communities of believers in every corner of the world. He has introduced forgiveness and redemption from the darkness of evil as individuals repented and were baptized into Jesus. He has called those communities to love, feed, and bring justice to the hurting and hopeless.
God has not given up on this world…even though it looks a bit rusty and has to be held together by duct tape in places. God created us in his image. His greatest joy comes when we commit ourselves to become like Jesus, and he then re-creates us in his own image. This world is embraced by God’s love, and I am excited about what today will bring! I hope you are as well.