"The Good Life": Part 1 - Blessed Bankruptcy

"Seeing the crowds, he went up on the mountain, and when he sat down, his disciples came to him. And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven."
(Matthew 5:1-3 ESV)

Have you ever felt... powerless?

The annual renewal notice for our AAA membership arrived in the mail just the other day. Between Becca and I over the past 10+ years of being AAA members, I think we’ve managed to need their roadside services just enough to make it worth the $75 a year it costs us to keep it going: a lock-out here, a breakdown there, the occasional handful of free maps… Like all insurance products, you’re paying less for the services and more for the peace of mind. But, occasionally, the services do come in handy. Particularly the older and more derelict your vehicle happens to be.

At the moment, “older” and “derelict” are pretty good descriptors of my daily driver. We just call her the Blue Bomber, and she's a ’98 GMC pickup with a well-worn 200,000+ miles on her. I picked her up for $1000 bucks off of Craigslist a couple years back from a guy of questionable mechanical abilities up in the woods of Wakefield, and she’s more or less what you’d expect. The tires on her are worth more than the whole rest of the package, but she’ll generally get you where you need to go. Generally. A couple of weeks back, though, we ran into an exception to that rule.

It was a Saturday afternoon and I was heading into Dover from my parent’s place in Rollinsford when, at a full 40 mph gallop, the engine just cut out. My guess - and what turned out to be the case - was that the fuel pump had died. The fuel pump in the Bomber was always a little questionable, even though my friend in Wakefield said he had just replaced that fuel pump right before handing me the keys. For whatever reason - cheap parts, poor install, whatever - that pump always sounded like it was working a little too hard. Most of you have probably never heard your fuel pump at work, but on the Bomber, listening to that thing prime up and run was like a sound effect from a Transformers movie. In any case, when the engine cut out on me unexpectedly and refused to be revived, I had a good idea where the problem might lie.

It was a bizarre experience, though, stalling out at 40mph, because for a moment, you’re not even sure what just happened. You’re still rolling along, the radio’s still playing, but there’s suddenly less vibration and noise then you’ve come to expect. It was like my ’98 GMC truck suddenly went into Prius-mode; silent and just gradually losing speed as I rolled up this slight incline. The telltale sign, though, was that the gas pedal went totally unresponsive. Pump it, floor it… nothing. No signs of life or power. So you do the only thing you can do: carefully guide your now coasting vehicle to the edge of the road and call AAA, at which point you’ll have 45 minutes or so to sit and ponder the meaning of life and the liabilities of older vehicles.

But it’s funny: that haunting feeling of pressing down a powerless, ghostly gas pedal has kind of stuck with me. It’s that memorable sense of tension between what ought to have been and what actually was - between the expectation of power and response and the experience of powerlessness and deadness. It’s striking. When I hit the gas in a moving vehicle, I expect to find some power there. But, in that moment, the truck just had nothing to give: rolling along with a burned-out fuel pump, it was broken and powerless.

As we begin our journey into the Sermon on the Mount, our brokenness and powerlessness stand out as themes that we will continue to see pop up. Because Jesus has come for the broken and burned-out. "Blessed are the spiritually bankrupt", Jesus says. Blessed, because those are precisely the people he has come for: He’s come for the lost, the confused, the apathetic and spiritually dulled. He’s come for the people who don’t know what to make of “religion” or “church”. He’s come for the busted and the coasting. He’s come, and at the center of the good news that he’s proclaiming is this: when it comes to reclaiming the life that we have been created and intended for, it’s not about what you and I have in the tank. It’s about what he’s giving us, anyway.

I'm looking forward to this journey!