on the walk

We started a great new sermon series this week. I like it because it is radically straightforward in its presentation. It is not subtle or ironic. Rather it picks up on a modern metaphor to make the most important and basic of Christian claims: “God saves people and this salvation is available to all people.”

The series is called “Recycled” and the central image was a simple one. The message was preached between two bigs containers. One was a trash can and the other a recycling bin. Throughout the sermon we were reminded that God is in the business of working through our trash and finding what we knew was beyond hope and declaring that it can be recycled. We were invited to anticipate that over this series we will be surprised at all the things that God can recycle. I have accepted this invitation and I am excited about the rest of the series.

So this week, I have a handful of reflections, and will post at least a couple. And of course I am eager for many of you to share your reflections as well.

I’ll start by sharing an image that I love. Ben painted this picture, “Have you been in a park and seen an old man slowly walking around and looking through the trash cans. Slowly pulling one things after another and rescuing it from destruction because it could be recycled. That old man is God.”

That is a good picture. After Ben told that story, as he continued to rifle through the trash and move things into the recycling I found myself reflecting on how grateful I am for what has been recycled in my life.

This image got me thinking about the recent conversation on this blog about speaking the truth. The connection is this. In my house when something goes in the trash that should be recycled, it is because I don’t want to deal with my trash. To recycle my trash, I have to acknowledge it. I have to name it, and put it in the right place. I cannot ignore it.

The same is true in our lives and in my life. If I won’t let the old man open my garbage can and root around in the trash, then he can’t find what is there to recycle. There is an old Greek philosophical axiom, “the unexamined life in not worth living.” That may be true, but the unexamined life can be comfortable. I can already tell that if I want God to really recycle my life, I am going to have to let God go through my trash, and God will probably want me to go through it as well.
on the walk

-Ethan

Ps. I know that a lot of my readers are in small groups or other discipleship communities. These ideas and this sermon series might be great way for you to talk about group identity. You could invite comment on the series and then at the right moment you could ask, “Do we want to be the kind of group where God recycles us or the kind of group where our trash is hidden, ignored and never examined? Because if we are going to be the kind of group where life gets recycled we are going to have to acknowledge that there is poop in the living room.” (If you want to understand that mixed metaphor check out the post linked above.)

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