This morning as I dragged out the trash can to the street I realized that I had walked through the place where my car normally sits in the driveway. My car was gone. Stolen. Sometime between 11 pm when my neighbor, Rita, last checked out her window if everything was right with world, and 630 am when I was dragging out the trash can someone had come to our place and taken it. It felt surreal. Somehow violating. I walked back into the house and said, “Karen, my car is gone. It’s been stolen.”
Those were also strange words to say. “Did you park it someplace else?” But I had checked. Sometimes I have left it on the street when we needed to move things in and out of the garage, but it was gone.
What do you do when you encounter the realities that everything is not right with the world? How do you make sense of what makes no sense?
The officer who came to my door at 7:15 am told us that people are taking cars not to do huge crimes but sometimes simply to get from one place to another. They drive from Beaverton to Portland and drop the car in some parking lot and leave it. He also told me that Hondas are the easiest cars to steal. I guess you can file down any key and if you jiggle it enough in the door lock and the ignition, it will open and start! Well, that’s helpful!
This was Monday morning.
The discovery that my car had been stolen underlined what is already true for all of us: everything is not right with the world. How can it be? We are still in quarantine and there are as many opinions on this as there are people, but mine is, we have been co-opted into the ridiculous. However, what can you do but adapt into the reality you are facing. Some stores disallow patrons without masks, and although I don’t agree with the mask thing, I go along in the store. But please, if you agree with masks, do not wear a mask while driving your own car or while running or walking in the air! Your lungs need real oxygen not your own filtered CO2!
But everything is not right with the world in this time. It is troubled and broken.
So, how do we walk in this. One place I continue to turn is to the fact that Jesus is king. This is what his ascension announced and it is what we can return to in the middle of all the things that are wrong and right, Jesus is Lord and King. He really is the one in charge, not that he planned any of this, necessarily, but certainly has allowed it.
This doesn’t mean that we cannot stand up and say, “But the emperor is not wearing any clothes!” But it does mean, we know that no matter what is wrong, no matter what is a lie, no matter what is true, Jesus is Lord and Jesus is King. Jesus is ruling. Jesus is here with us in the middle of all of it.
We are certainly in a huge cultural and world shift. I’ve recently read that culture shifts every 50 years and we are 20 years into this cultural shift. And we are in a shift of the church world as well, which happens every 500 years. The last people who experienced this kind of shake up lived in the 1500s.
So, my car was stolen, and Jesus is still Lord. We need to wear masks in certain stores, and Jesus is Lord and King. We will need to adopt new policies about worship once together in the sanctuary, but Jesus will still be Jesus and Lord and King even then. We need to stand 6 feet away from others in stores, true, but this does not hinder our ability to speak to others, or reach out, or talk, or be present behind a mask or not.
So, this week in worship we are looking at the ascension -- why did it happen? What does it mean? And how can it impact you and me as we live in this life? So, let’s join in Sunday worship and look for Jesus in this unique season. Join in at 9 am Sunday!