"One Man's Trash..."

(This is the column I wrote for the May-June edition of our church newsletter.)

Something interesting happened in Sac City recently. It happens in the spring of each year--our city-wide clean-up days.

For a week or so before the clean-up days actually happen, folks get ready. We clean out our garages, our basements, wherever we're accumulating things we don't want anymore but that we don't think are really even good enough to donate to Goodwill or put in a garage sale. Or we begin home-improvement projects we've been putting off. And we put all of our accumulated junk--broken furniture, scraps of one thing or another, old carpet, you name it--out by the side of the road for the city garbage people to pick up and take away.

Now, what's interesting about this is what happens between the time we put stuff out and when the garbage trucks actually arrive. Last weekend Mike and I cleaned out our shed and the place on the basement stairs where we'd been collecting stuff we didn't want anymore. We had some scraps of plywood, a bunch of leaky plastic buckets, several lighted beer signs that Mike picked up somewhere for reasons I can't fathom, my old stereo that I bought for $80 in 1987 and which finally wore out last summer, and several other things.

That stuff wasn't out for 12 hours before we started noticing it had been arranged and some things were missing. When people have put their unwanted stuff on the curb, that's when the great junk swap begins.

You find that there's someone out there who wants the stuff you don't want anymore--the stuff you think is downright junk. Last year my neighbor put out a pile of bricks from a fireplace he'd torn out. It just happened that I have a sidewalk that goes only partway from the front walk over to my side porch steps, so I went and retrieved those bricks, and they made a nice little brick walk beside a new flowerbed. Someone came yesterday and took my worn-out stereo. Maybe they can fix it, or it might be good enough as it is to be a radio to keep someone company as they work in the garage. I remember when I interviewed here, and we were at the home of one of the search committee members, and she showed me this old window she had painted up and hung on her back porch. It was a really neat decoration, and she had found it in someone's pile of junk during the spring clean-up.

Paul tells us that what the world thinks of as worthless turns out to be the most valuable thing of all: "For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Corinthians 1:18). It's a waste of time to try to figure out how to make the Gospel "reasonable" for those who haven't signed on yet. The Gospel, the message about the cross, is not reasonable. It can't be made rational. It's irrational. But somehow, when someone hears it and through the Holy Spirit's work begins to accept it, they discover that the world's "trash" is the most priceless treasure of all.

And you know, this goes both ways. You used to see a poster now and then that said something like, "God don't make no junk." That poster was talking about people. It seems like in every time and place, in every day and age, in every culture and community, there are some people who are considered to be "junk." They could be people of another race, or they could be people who are desperately poor, maybe even homeless, or they could be people who look or act different for some other reason. For some reason human beings seem to need someone to look down on. For some reason, in order to feel like we're okay, there needs to be someone we consider to be not okay.

But this isn't how God thinks. In Jesus Christ, God showed us that he cares especially about those whom the world considers "junk"--lepers, widows, orphans, poor people, people with disabilities, even sinners. In Jesus Christ, God reached out to the "junk" of the world because, like the folks who went through one another's trash piles in Sac City last month, God sees potential in everyone, even the most seemingly hopeless cases. What is that potential? It's called the image of God. Every human being--every human being, without exception--bears that image, and that means that as far as God is concerned, no human being is "junk" to be thrown away.

As people of God, we also are called to love and care for those people whom the world considers "junk"--because we too were once "junk," but God, through Jesus Christ, found us in our trash heaps, lifted us up, and made us into beloved children.