So for those of you who weren’t here last week, you missed some embarrassing details about my teenage years. You missed some pretty ridiculous measurements: I was too short to ride the “King Cobra” at King’s Island, our closest theme park, I was small enough that whether I had any actual skill as a cheerleader was completely irrelevant. And, if you’d been listening extra closely, you would have heard me slip in a tiny, but important detail, about my ability to drive a car. I barely, I mean, miss-one-more-question-and-fail-barely, passed my driver’s test. I knew I was nowhere near ready to get my drivers license, my drivers ed teacher had his window down and got hit in the head by a branch as I slowed to a stop sign, I panicked and didn’t even look when I was merging on to the highway, and I’d gotten a C- in driver’s ed for gosh sakes. But it just so happened that I accidentally left my learner’s permit in my jeans pocket as they went through the wash around the same time when most kids my age, who are much more proficient drivers, step into the DMV, answer a few written questions and drive some poor DMV evaluator around while they tried to remember right hand turn signals, yielding on left turns, and how to parallel park. So I walk in to the DMV with my mom, I take one of those numbered arrow paper tickets, and settle in for the long wait. When it’s finally my turn, I pull out the remaining wads of torn and washed paper that was once my learner’s permit, I show it to the clerk, and I say, “Hi. I’m here to get a new learner’s permit so I can get my license.” Now, I’ve gone over these words in my mind for years, trying to figure out whether or not it was my fault that this major event of miscommunication had transpired. The clerk simply waved me over to the box that you stick you face in to test your eyesight. She told me to read the third line. Thinking this was a bit odd, but always being one to do what she was told, I stepped over, read the letters, and came back. “Ok,” she said, “go over to that table and put this code in the computer. They’re going to ask you twenty questions. If you miss more than three, you fail the test.” ‘Uhhhh. Ok?” I said. Again, I was just there to get a new copy of my learner’s permit, not to get my actual license. But I walked over there anyway, missed my three questions, came back up and she said something about me “cutting it pretty close there” and then to “go stand in front of the red curtain.” Now, I’m really starting to wonder what in the world is going on here. I don’t need my picture taken for a learner’s permit… But I go over there, give them an awkward smile, squint at the flash, and she tells me to go pay $36 at the teller in the middle, give them a few minutes, and the license will be ready shortly. So, I don’t question it. I just go over there. Pay my $36 - luckily I had $36. Sit and wait. And about twenty minutes later I’m walking out of there with a certified bonafide Indiana Drivers License. I never took the actual driver’s test, just the written one. I never had to parallel park (which, I’m still pretty bad at), I never had to count my following distances under my breath, I never smelled the tobacco on the examiner’s breath, never accidentally sneaked out into the middle of the intersection while waiting to turn left and then have to run the red light because it never got clear enough for me to turn, which, I’ve been told, would have been an instant fail. I walked out of that sticky nondescript linoleum lined office building with a drivers license I had not earned. Go to it kid. Good luck. Be safe out there. Wear your seatbelt.
There are lots of times in my life when I don’t feel ready for something. I haven’t studied enough for this test, or I haven’t exercised enough for bathing suit season, or I get the job that I keep thinking I’m really not qualified for. In those situations, I usually do have what it takes to get the job done, even though I’m doubting myself the whole time. It’s called ‘imposter syndrome’ and it happens to me all the time.
But sometimes, sometimes we get thrown into the deep end before we’ve even learned how to swim. Sometimes, we get pregnant too early, or we fall in love too fast, or we make that big impulsive purchase, or someone hands us a free drivers license, and suddenly, it’s sink or swim, learn on the job, ready or not, here you are. It’s not just our lack of self esteem that makes us feel inept; it’s the facts - I don’t know enough Spanish to pass this class, I have no business turning off the breaker and rewiring that light switch, I am in no kind of emotional space to coach this person through the hardest day of their life.
But. In this passage, Jesus is handing us the keys. I mean, sort of, in this weird passive way, by basically telling God, “Hey! I’m done here. Let’s leave the rest to the kids and let them figure it out. It’ll be fine.” Jesus does this sort of strange new math: he’s like since I have made your name known to them, and you gave them to me, and I told them everything I have comes from you, then, basically, they’re as good as me, which means they’re as good as you, but not really because they’re sinful humans, but they’re still yours, and I am in you and you are in me, so that makes them in us, so yeah. Ok. It’s good. No problem.
Maybe Jesus is just tired of driving us to school and then to soccer practice and then to pizzeria Uno’s where we welcome guests and seat them at tables and flirt with the bus boys and get yelled at by the servers and then have to call him too late at night to come pick us up and take us home and stay up with us while we cry over our Calculus homework until three in the morning. Maybe Jesus is like, “I am. Tired. Y’all are totally capable of doing all of this for yourselves.” And, then also like a parent, he is filled with trepidation and burdened by exponentially rising insurance costs when he hands over the car keys to the rusting 1986 baby blue Ford Escort, and says, “sure. Go to it. Wear your seatbelt. Don’t play the radio too loud.”
And so as we adjust the mirrors and move up the seat and turn the radio dial and slowly back out of the driveway, with our hands tightly gripping the steering wheel and amazed by this new power that we have been given, Jesus prays, Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one..I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.
Set them loose. Trust them. Give them freedom. But protect them. Don’t let the world separate us. After prom and parties and heartbreak and football games and band practice, bring them back home to me, to Us.
It’s a terrifying responsibility when we’ve been given the keys to the good news, when it’s our job to be the hands and feet of Christ, when we have to navigate this scary and confusing and often gridlocked world while bringing good news to the poor and release to the captives and telling the story of a God who turns everything upside down in order to right it back up again.
I can’t help but think, God, I am going to wreck this car.
I don’t have enough training. I don’t have enough Greek or Hebrew. I don’t even know where my Book of Confessions is, let alone all the rules of Roberts Rules of Order. I need better listening skills. I need more focus. More discipline, more humility and more sacrifice. I should learn more about community organizing and biblical exegesis and the difference between sanctification and justification. I need to know how to avoid falling in to the heresies of Docetism and modalism and gnosticism and Patripassianism. What if I say trespasses instead of debts and get caught going over the speed limit and I get confused which way to flip the turn signal when I’m turning right and turning left? When am I allowed to turn on red and what if I go down a one way street the wrong way and what if there is only one parking space left and there’s a line of cars behind me and it takes me forever to finally fit it into the space? Why are you trusting someone like me to transport this precious good news to the rest of the world?
Yup, dear ones. We are going to wreck the car. We have no business getting behind the wheel. It is a dangerous world and we are under equipped and some of us have barely passed the prerequisites in this thing we call life.
And. That is where we are called.
And. Like a parent who prays for the safety of her child as he pulls out of the driveway, she really isn’t thinking all that much about the car.
She’s thinking about her child. She’s praying that he will stay safe. And that others will be safe. She’s praying that there be a shield of protection around that car so that when people do come racing into his lane or cutting him off in traffic or tailgating him too closely, her child will be ok. She is praying and hoping that he will get to where he needs to go, and then come back home again.
The amazing, mind-blowing, almost incomprehensible thing about this prayer that Jesus prays is that he doesn’t seem so much to care about the car. He could have said, “Oh God, help them to deliver these words perfectly, so that everyone can hear and understand.” He could have said, “God, let’s build some schools to help these folks carry out my message in the ‘right’ way.” He could have said, “let’s make more rules for them to follow so that we can measure whether or not they’re doing this right." He could have prayed, “Lord, let’s just suck up all the good ones that are yours right now and leave the rest of this world to rot.” Nope. He knows we are going to get this wrong. The message is going to be skewed and blurred and confused and conflated. And still, he says, “They have enough. They have your name. They have an understanding that I came from you. They have your words and your protection and my joy. And they’ve been set apart. That’s enough. That’s all they need. Let’s set them loose. Let’s see what happens. Let’s give them the keys to this thing, and see if they can open ‘er up. They are going to wreck it. But let’s give it to them anyway. They will only come to realize how much they need us after they’ve wrecked the car. Just keep them safe so that once they do slide into the guardrail or spin out on the ice, they’ll know who to come back to, they’ll know they aren’t alone, they’ll know that I am in you and you are in me and that means that they are in us, and who cares about the increase in insurance premiums.”
Thanks be to God.
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