
Well, I brought a friend with me today to help out with the sermon. He’s a little hard to recognize, especially maybe for you way in the back. So I hope you can all see that this is Jesus, looking maybe not the way you’d expect to find him in church. He’s my plastic Jesus. Maybe some of you have heard that song, “I don’t care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my plastic Jesus riding on the dashboard of my car.”
But this is not that kind of plastic Jesus because he doesn’t have a suction cup. I think of him as roller-skate Jesus, because he’s got wheels under his sandals, and his arms are posable, limited but posable. I think of this as his “come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened” pose.
So there’s a story about how I came to have this Jesus. When I was still at the church I served before I retired, every year in the fall they had a yard sale out in the area in front of the church. And people in the parish—but also outside vendors—could buy a table. And even though it’s out in the country, it’s a fairly well-traveled road. So it was a bit of visibility for the church, too. And it was very popular in the community.
And I would walk around and try to talk to pretty much everybody who was there, just to welcome them and kind of make them aware of our community in that church. So I walked past the table of a guy who sold a lot of junk. And I saw Jesus there sitting on top of some junk behind him. I walked on by, but then I said to myself, you know what? I’ve got to have that. So I went back and I said to him, how much do you want for Jesus?
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