The Bungee Cord. 5-27-25

Hello,

Yesterday, as I was driving into Ligonier (the closest town to where we live) to go to the grocery store, I got behind a robin’s egg blue ford pick-up that I think was pretty new. It was sparkling clean, but as I came close to it, I noticed that it was actually quite dirty. On each of the three window panels on the back of the cab were decals, each decal bearing a visual message declaring that women are meant to be seen and used as disposable sex objects. These decals were brazen in their silhouette depictions and the words that were underneath them. I couldn’t see the driver, so I wondered what sort of person would decide to embellish his brand-new truck with such dirt.

Now, I know that I am more sensitive to foul language and foul jokes than most. My sensitivity does not come from the fact that I am a pastor, but from the fact that I am an environmentalist, of sorts. To me, foul things are not “bad”, but they are foul, as in putrid smelling. The kind of smell that come from a garbage dump. I see them… no I smell them as verbal garbage. In my mind, there’s plenty of things in this world that stink – violence, greed, poverty, hatred – and I choose not to add to the stench with the words that I say and with the decals on my life.

So, I got to thinking, “What if I was to find that pick-up, with its decals, parked in the church parking lot on a Sunday morning?” What would you do? If you knew the driver, would you sit next to the driver and tell that person that those decals needed to come off the truck if he wanted to worship in your church? Would you tell the pastor and ask the pastor to announce that the driver of that truck needed to remove it from our parking lot, lest people driving by would see its dirty windows? Would you make sure the pastor rebuked that pick-up’s message in the sermon? Would you, if you saw who got out of the truck, make sure that you did not sit anywhere close to that person?

As I consider what I might do, it occurs to me that although my Mini Cooper’s rear window does not bear the dirt that was on that truck, it too, is far from clean. There are grudges that adorn my window that I haven’t washed off. There are hurtful things that I have done to people I deeply love, and people that I will never know, that are affixed on my hatch’s window. There are foolish and stupid things from my past that are easily seen by those who have been part of my history. So, it seems to me that if that pick-up driver would be deemed unwelcome in my church, I guess the same would be deemed of me.

But the fact of the matter is that I find myself welcome in my church, because my church knows that it is not a bunch of perfect angels that gather every week, but it is a bunch of sinners whose lives are full of pain, pain that infects their lives and pain that infects the world, and they are there to do something about those sins and the pain that they inflict. So, every Sunday, our worship begins by asking God to open our eyes to the pain that is wrought by our sins, and then God deals his blow to me whose car is parked in the church parking lot has a filthy rear window. God says to me, “You are forgiven.” God doesn’t kick me out until I have gotten things cleaned up. No, God gets out God’s cleanser, the blood of his Son, and goes to work on my life. Some of the dirt has been baked on, and so God uses industrial strength cleanser, his presence in bread and wine.

When the service is over and I go back to my car, my car looks as though it has gone through a car wash with a follow up detailing. No longer dirty, but crystal clean. But no sooner than I put it in gear, it gets dirty again: unkind thoughts about someone who is driving too slowly hit my window like bird droppings, anger pools up as I drive past someone who has hurt me and the grime splashes on my window, I dig up decals of intentional neglect and stick them to my car as I fill my belly to overflowing and forget about the bellies of those in the world that remain empty….on and on it goes…I dirty my car, and my car gets dirtied by the world. By the time a week has past, I can barely see through my rear window.

Thank God…literally….thank God that there’s a place that I can go back to where I am welcomed, and my car is cleaned.

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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