Rebirth

Thousands of cars are damaged or destroyed by floods every year, but don’t assume all those vehicles end up in a junkyard. Some are repaired and resold in other parts of the country without the buyer being aware of the car’s waterlogged history. In fact, Carfax says 378,000 flooded cars were back on the roads in 2021. In addition, 2022s Florida’s Hurricane Ian, and the atmospheric “bomb cyclones” that brought flooding to California, Nevada, Texas, and other states will certainly add many more damaged cars to the used-car market.

The key takeaway is that you need to be vigilant when buying a used car, even if you don’t live near a traditional storm area. That’s because flood-damaged cars are often transported well beyond their original region after major storms to locations where consumers may be less aware of the warning signs to look for.

Water can wreak havoc on automobiles: rusty floorboards, water-logged electronics that controls so much of the car, including safety systems, and airbag controllers. It may take months or years, but corrosion can find its way to the car’s vital electronics and the long-term effects of water damage can haunt buyers for the life of the car.

But as Consumer Reports found years ago in an investigation of rebuilt wrecks, some flood-damaged vehicles reappear with a clean title. Be especially wary of any used car being offered with a “lost” title or with only a bill of sale.

Kenneth Potiker, owner of Riteway Auto Dismantlers, knows what advice he’d give to people considering the purchase of such a vehicle. “I would tell them not to buy a car like that — that would be the best advice. If it floods inside a car, water damage is one of the worst types of damage.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

Redemption; Renewal; Restoration; Second Chance - Storms can suddenly strike and damage our possessions beyond repair. This puts buyers on the alert asking, “Has this been so damaged that it is now worthless?” The same question can be asked in the spiritual realm when a person has been damaged by the sudden storms of sin. “What happens to storm-damaged people? Are they of any value?” But by God’s grace there can be redemption, forgiveness, and restoration.

Ever wonder what happens to all the laptops, cell phones, and other electronics people use after they’re done with them? Some of them end up at a recycling site like CompuCycle Inc.’s operation in Houston. Every month, roughly 2,000,000 pounds of discarded electronics pass through the gates of the facility, where they are either refurbished and sent back out to work or broken down into reusable parts and elements.

A laptop with a busted screen? They’ll fix it up and send it back into the workforce. A five-year-old PC with a failed hard drive? They’ll stick in a used one that works. In the U.S. alone, every year some 150 million phones, or more than 400,000 a day, are buried in landfills or burned in incinerators.

According to the U.S. environmental protection agency, for every 1 million cell phones that are recycled, 34,000 pounds of copper, 772 pounds of silver, 75 pounds of gold, and 33 pounds of palladium can be recovered. The United Nations reported in 2019 that discarded electronics and electrical equipment were worth $62.5 billion annually. The report also said “there is 100 times more gold in a ton of e-waste than in a ton of gold ore.” CompuCycle turns around about 6,500 devices a month that can be used again, including laptops, phones, and hard drives.

Possible Preaching Angles:

God also reclaims, refines, mends, and restores his people using grace, forgiveness, and healing (Hos. 6:1). His methods include using heat, pressure, and trials “so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ.” (1 Pet. 1:7)

Every day, several large trucks full of discarded goods arrive at a warehouse in the eastern suburbs of Hamburg, Germany, before being sorted through and categorized by a team of workers.

But this is not a normal waste processing facility. Stilbruch (German for “stylish inconsistency”) is run by the city’s sanitation department. Instead of destroying or disposing of these throwaways, the municipal team checks and, if necessary, repairs them, before putting them on sale to the public. It touts itself as “for everyone who prefers used to new—used is the new sexy.”

Stilbruch is the “IKEA of used goods.” Some 400,000 objects are processed through two giant cavernous warehouses every year; everything from well-worn teddy bears to refurbished laptops and kitchen counters. Stilbruch contracts technicians and craftsmen who ensure that all used furniture is given a thorough beautification, and all electronics can be sold with a 1-year warranty.

Launched in 2001, Stilbruch has gone from having one full-time employee to 70, and from being a non-profit orientation to bringing in $330,000 to $550,000 per year in profit. Roman Hottgenroth, operations manager said, “These things are useful. They really aren’t rubbish. We are trying to stop throwaway culture and wastefulness. There’s so much value in what we treat like trash.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

In God’s ecosystem, the people the world considers broken and useless are reclaimed and restored by God. The filthy is made clean (Isa. 1:18), and the worn out becomes new (2 Cor. 5:17).

In the early 1990s when scientists first peered into a cell, they saw something amazing. They observed the cell destroying its own proteins and organ-like parts (organelles)—structures that it had invested heavily into building.

The process of autophagy (literally “self-eating”) is so vital to our survival that it was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Winner Yoshinori Ohsumi described the discovery of this complex process as a surprise. He watched as cells wrapped entire proteins and organelles in a protective membrane—and then shredded them to pieces with enzymes. It was the equivalent of watching a wrecking ball take down a skyscraper, reducing a majestic work of architecture into a pile of bricks. Why would a cell demolish something it had worked very hard to build?

As Ohsumi’s team investigated further, the metaphor changed: Autophagy isn’t cellular self-cannibalism so much as it is cellular pruning. A cell that was indiscriminately destroying pieces of itself was not going to last long, but one that could select old, broken, misshapen, or malignant proteins and recycle them into something new would flourish.

Since Ohsumi’s work in the early 1990s, researchers around the world have found evidence of autophagy in every tissue of the human body. Old proteins are turned into new ones, bacteria are destroyed, and the nutrients bound up are redirected into more critical processes. Over and over, our body’s cells sing the same song of autophagy in slightly different keys. Sacrifice and destruction let the body build something better.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Discipline; Pruning - This concept seems familiar. We need to be pruned to stay healthy? Yes. We grow through adversity and trimming? Of course. “Every branch that bears fruit [my Father] prunes so that it will be even more fruitful” (John 15:2, Heb. 12:11). 2) Easter; Resurrection – The Lord will “tear down and recreate” these frail bodies and raise them to new life when he returns for us (1 Cor. 15:1-58, 1 Thess. 4:13-18).

Author Sinclair Ferguson provides a helpful illustration to explain how theology works:

There is a program on BBC television I enjoy. It is called The Regular Shop. Ordinary people bring their damaged, decayed, distorted, and well-nigh destroyed heirlooms for repair. They often tell profoundly moving stories--of why the article (which may be of little value in itself) is so important to them because of its connection to a loved one.

We then watch the extraordinary skills of craftsmen and women. Experts in woodwork and metalwork, mechanical work, furniture work, and musical instruments, working what seems to be magic. Whereas people like me patch up and hope for the best, they first deconstruct and only then reconstruct and restore the long-lost glory to the precious objects.

Then the wonderful (unveiling): we witness the various owners overwhelming gratitude, their praise, and often their joy as they are moved to tears as the restored object is revealed in all its furnished glory--usually from underneath a very ordinary blanket (how suggestive of a greater restoration).

Theology is the gospel repair shop. Its various topics (God, creation, fall, providence, redemption, glorification) are, as it were, so many departments of experts that first deconstruct our personal damage and then reconstruct us until the original vision in our creation is realized.

What's it like to walk free again after years behind bars? Lee Horton and his brother Dennis know the feeling. They were convicted of robbery and murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. They always maintained their innocence. Earlier this year, after being locked up for a quarter of a century, they were granted clemency and released.

Here's Lee Horton’s story:

I'm going to tell you honestly. The first thing that I was aware of when I walked out of the doors and sat in the car and realized that I wasn't handcuffed. And for all the time I've been in prison, every time I was transported anywhere, I always had handcuffs on. And that moment right there was … the most emotional moment that I had. Even when they told me that the governor had signed the papers … it didn't set in until I was in that car and I didn't have those handcuffs on.

And I don't think people understand that the punishment is being in prison. When you take away everything, everything becomes beautiful to you. ... When we got out … we went to the DMV to get our licenses back. My brother and I stood in line for two and a half hours. And we heard all the bad things about the DMV. We had the most beautiful time. And all the people were looking at us because we were smiling and we were laughing, and they couldn't understand why we were so happy. And it just was that - just being in that line was a beautiful thing.

I was in awe of everything around me. It's like my mind was just heightened to every small nuance. Just to be able to just look out of a window, just to walk down a street and just inhale the fresh air, just to see people interacting. ... It woke something up in me, something that I don't know if it died or if it went to sleep. I've been having epiphanies every single day since I've been released.

One of my morning rituals every morning is I send a message of ‘good morning, good morning, good morning, have a nice day’ to every one of my 42 contacts. And they're like, ‘how long can (he) keep doing this?’ But they don't understand that I was deprived. And now, it's like I have been released, and I've been reborn into a better day, into a new day. Like, the person I was no longer exists. I've stepped through the looking glass onto the other side, and everything is beautiful.

Possible Preaching Angle:

This enthusiastic testimony is an exact parallel to that of a person set free from a lifetime of captivity to Satan (2 Tim. 2:26). The experience of God’s glorious freedom and new life in Christ results in a joyful expression of gratitude and amazement (Acts 3:8).

N.T. Wright said:

“Jesus' resurrection is the beginning of God's new project, not to snatch people away from earth but to colonize earth with the life of heaven."

You remember Scrooge’s story, I’m sure. In one night, the old miser Scrooge is completely transformed by the visit of the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and future. When he realizes he didn’t die, he’s a transformed man. At first he didn’t know how much time has passed.

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head:

“What's to-day?'' cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered to look about him.

“To-day?'' replied the boy. “Why, Christmas Day.''

“It's Christmas Day!'' said Scrooge to himself. “I haven't missed it.”

At the very end, Dickens wrote,

“Ever afterwards; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, ‘God Bless Us, Every One!’”

Possible Preaching Angle: We know another story like The Christmas Carol, only with shepherds and angel visitors instead of ghosts. The transformed Scrooge glorified and praised Christmas. And over a 150 years later, we’re still following his lead. Unbelievers can’t find enough ways to glorify and praise Christmas. But as believers we take our cues, not from Scrooge, but from the shepherds who returned glorifying and praising God for all they had seen and heard .

On Christmas Day the Chicago Tribune ran a frontpage story titled, “At Christmas, a rebirth.” The story said, in part:

Su Zhu Yuan thought Americans celebrated Christmas as part of their patriotic duty. Relatives gave gifts. Neighbors prepared feasts. Storefronts in Chinatown advertised sales. But during her eight years in the United States, no one told her the biblical story behind Christmas--until this year. On Sunday, Yuan celebrated the birth of Jesus for the first time by immersing herself in the baptismal waters at Chinese Christian Union Church. She emerged a newborn Christian. “I have peace in my heart and joy,” the 41-year-old seamstress said through a translator. “I’m giving the heavy burdens to Jesus.”

On Sunday, Yuan donned a white gown and with bare feet ascended a narrow staircase to the church's baptismal pool. Gripping the pastor's arm with both hands, she let him plunge her into the water. As she resurfaced, she wiped the water from her face and smiled. She said, “Today is like a holiday. It's like having two Christmases.”

Sam Leith is an English author and literary editor of the British newsmagazine The Spectator. He spends most of his time reading great pieces of writing. However, he enthusiastically makes the case for playing video games, which are supposedly mindless and a waste of time.

Leith asks if the time spent playing video games is pointless. “Well, possibly—but it’s … pointless in the same way meditation is pointless … and playing or following sport is pointless. It’s a pointless thing that fulfils a foundational human need. Not being able to bear very much reality, and all that.”

Leith’s main point is that these games offer an escape from the often grim, harsh, and mundane experience of real life. Life can be cruel and often doesn’t give you second chances. “Out here … things fall apart. Time runs only one way. But in the game world, the resurrection of the virtual flesh is not a miracle but a routine occurrence. There’s always another life, another try, the possibility of remaking the world of the game afresh.”

Possible Preaching Angles: It is true that some people spend hours in a virtual world of games. However, the church can recognize the heart need this represents and offer true new life and a fresh start in Christ.

A rural area of Northern Kansas just outside of Topeka once housed a nuclear warhead. Now, 65 years later, the former missile base has been adapted into living space and is going up for rent on the short-term rental site AirBnb. Named the Subterra Castle, the property has been classified as an "underground mansion," with multiple apartments including full kitchens, bathrooms, and fireplaces. The manager of the property said his vision for the site is greater than just giving travelers a place to stay. "I see it as becoming a destination," said Matthew Fulkerson, noting that Subterra is the first and only AirBnb that is in a converted missile silo.

Potential Preaching Angles: In the midst of our sin, we stand broken, empty, and condemned. But through the blood of Jesus Christ, our souls are redeemed from their broken state and fashioned into something far better and more beautiful than existed to begin with.

They call it "the born again beach." Here's how a British newspaper described the "rebirth" of a lost beach:

An Irish beach that disappeared more than 30 years ago has returned to an island off the County Mayo coast. The sand at Dooagh, Achill Island, was washed away by storms in 1984, leaving only rocks and rock pools. But after a freak tide around Easter, hundreds of tons of sand were deposited around the area where the beach once stood, recreating the old 300-metre stretch of golden sand.

Local people are using the word "miraculous" to describe the beach's renewal. An official for the areas tourism board explained why pilgrims are flocking to the site:

We live in a dark world these days so I think that is why there has been so much interest in Dooagh beach since the story broke. For something like our beach to come back gives people hope. It's a good news story and one where nature has done something benign for a change.

The poet-singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen died in November 2016. For many people Cohen became famous with his moving and biblically-infused song "Broken Hallelujah," especially with one of its last lines—"I'll stand before the lord of song with nothing on my tongue but hallelujah." Though he would often protest that he (in his own words) "wasn't really a religious man," Cohen seemed unable to sing or speak for very long without bringing up God. Shortly before his death, in an interview with the New Yorker, Cohen said, "I know there's a spiritual aspect to everybody's life, whether they want to cop to it or not. It's there, you can feel it …"

Although Cohen primarily identified as a Jew, he was drawn to the person and work of Jesus. Commenting on his song "The Captain," Cohen said, "What I mean to say [in this song] is that there are many things about Christianity that attract me. The figure of Jesus is extremely attractive. It's difficult not to fall in love with that person." After praising Christ's emphasis on resurrection and rebirth, he concluded, "When we have this notion that there is no mechanism for resurrection, there is no redemption from sin, then we are forced to embrace evil and we get the kind of activity like genocide."

John Entwistle, former bass guitarist with the rock band The Who, once made a guitar composed from the parts of five broken guitars. He called it "Frankenstein." One day the rest of the band came into his hotel room to find him jumping up and down saying "It's alive." Entwistle described his creations this way:

I put this together in San Francisco on a day off part way through a Who tour. It's the remains of five smashed basses hence the name "Frankenstein." In the mid 70's it was retired from stage work so I had it refinished from sunburst into its present pink color. I used this baby from 1967 onwards through [our most famous tours] … The neck, pickups and circuitry are from a "dead" slab bass, the tailpiece from a Jazz bass, the pickguard from a black P bass and the machine heads from 2 white P basses … [It took] two hours with a Phillips screwdriver and a soldering iron and I was ranting around my hotel room screaming "It's alive, it's alive!"

After Entwistle's death, it was auctioned at Sotheby's in London. It was expected to fetch about $10,000; instead, it fetched a staggering $100,000. Anyone looking at those broken guitars would have thought that they were good for nothing—fit to be thrown out. It took the eye of a master craftsman-musician to see their potential for "resurrection."

Possible Preaching Angles: God does the same with his children and his local churches. (Although calls us sons and daughters not Frankensteins.) What the world sees as broken and useless, in the hands of Jesus become an instrument of infinite value, making music to change the world.

London witnessed a spectacular scene when a giant wooden replica of the city ignited and burned brilliantly to the ground. The conflagration was planned, however, in honor of the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London. The original fire began on September 2, 1666, in the early morning at a bakery on Pudding Lane. The surrounding structures were soon engulfed, and the fire spread to the rest of the city, lasting four entire days. The modern-day festival to remember the disaster is known as "London's Burning" and contains four days of free art events, concluding this year with the grand burning of the replica of medieval London.

At first glance, it seems a bit odd to celebrate such a catastrophe-especially with another fire. However, as gruesome as the Great Fire may have been, it now has its place firmly etched into the city's history as a turning point: the beginning of a time of regrowth and resurgence for London.

Christians arguably perform the same "odd" type of ritual when we take communion and decorate our homes and sacred buildings with crosses. We not only commemorate the brutal murder of Jesus, but we adorn our worship with the murder weapon: the cross, one of the most widely known torture devices of that time period. And yet it doesn't seem strange to us—because we know that what Satan intended to be the ultimate act of evil, God turned around to be the ultimate act of love.

Potential Preaching Angles: Redemption; Cross; Crucifixion; Easter; Communion

Bible scholar N.T. Wright uses the analogy of waking up in the morning for how some people come to Christ through a dramatic, instant conversion and others come to Christ through a gradual conversion:

Waking up offers one of the most basic pictures of what can happen when God takes a hand in someone's life. There are classic alarm-clock stories, Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, blinded by a sudden light, stunned and speechless, discovered that the God he had worshipped had revealed himself in the crucified and risen Jesus of Nazareth. John Wesley found his heart becoming strangely warm and he never looked back. They and a few others are the famous ones, but there are millions more.

And there are many stories, thought they don't hit the headlines in the same way, of the half-awake and half-asleep variety. Some people take months, years, maybe even decades, during which they aren't sure whether they're on the outside of Christian faith looking in, or on the inside looking around to see if it's real.

As with ordinary waking up, there are many people who are somewhere in between. But the point is that there's such a thing as being asleep, and there's such a thing as being awake. And it's important to tell the difference, and to be sure you're awake by the time you have to be up and ready for action, whatever that action may be.

There is a Japanese word, kintsukuroi, that means "golden repair." It is the art of restoring broken pottery with gold so the fractures are literally illuminated—a kind of physical expression of its spirit. As a philosophy, kintsukuroi celebrates imperfection as an integral part of the story, not something to be disguised. The artists believe that when something has suffered damage and has a history, it becomes more beautiful.

In kintsukuroi, the true life of an object (or a person) begins the moment it breaks and reveals that it is vulnerable. The gap between once pristine appearance and its visible imperfection deepens its appeal.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Christ, power and grace of—Jesus is the ultimate Kintsukuroi artist. He takes our broken lives and makes them new. (2) Suffering—We probably shouldn't take this idea of beautiful brokenness as a symbol of how suffering makes us better. In the face of serious life damage, some tragedies are not "for the better" but are just that: tragedies, for the worse, which we would have been better off without. But kintsukuroi nevertheless remains a wonderful illustration for the Christian life, which holds symbols of both life and death in one ruddy old jug.

NPR (National Public Radio) reported on a new deli in rural Maine with a hotshot chef behind the counter. "Foodies" may recognize the chef's name—Matthew Secich, the chef for famous restaurants across the country, including The Oval Room in Washington, D.C. Secich shocked the foodie world when he became a Christian and moved his family and his kitchen off the grid. (Editor's Note: He also joined the local Amish community.)

As NPR reports,

His new spot, Charcuterie, is a converted cabin tucked away in a pine forest in Unity, Maine, population 2,000. You have to drive down a long, snowy track to get there, and you can smell the smokehouse before you can see it. … There are no Slim Jims here, but rather handmade meat sticks, fat as cigars, sitting in a jar by a hand-cranked register.

Even as a hotshot chef something was missing in Secich's life. According to the Portland (ME) Press-Herald:

[Secich's] perfectionist streak ruled his actions. "I burned people," he said. As in, held a line cook's hand to a hot fire for making a mistake at Charlie Trotter's restaurant in Chicago, where Secich was a chef from 2006 to 2008. "Four stars, that's all that matters." Then he grew disgusted.

"I went home one night and got on my knees and asked for forgiveness," he said. For his lack of compassion for others, his nights with restaurant friends and a fifth of Jim Beam with a side of Pabst Blue Ribbon, for that overactive ego. "I gave my life to the Lord, which I never would have imagined in the heyday of my chaos."

Speaking about the power of Christ to redeem sinners and build his church, Russell Moore wrote:

The next Billy Graham might be drunk right now. The next Jonathan Edwards might be the man driving in front of you with the Darwin Fish bumper decal. The next Charles Wesley might currently be a misogynistic, profanity-spewing hip-hop artist. The next Charles Spurgeon might be managing an abortion clinic today. The next Augustine of Hippo might be a sexually promiscuous cult member right now, just like, come to think of it, the first Augustine of Hippo was.

But the Spirit of God can turn all that around. And seems to delight to do so. The new birth doesn't just transform lives, creating repentance and faith; it also provides new leadership to the church, and fulfills Jesus' promise to gift his church with everything needed for her onward march through space and time (Eph. 4:8-16).