A LUV is all we need

I was 16 years old and wanted a vehicle of my own in the most desperate way. And the best evidence of that desperation's intensity was the thrill that attended my uncle's call from his lumber yard one day. A customer's 1975 Chevy LUV pickup truck had broken down. And so had the customer. He'd had it with the truck and was ready to sell.

Being in retail, my uncle Stewart knew when the time was ripe make a deal. So he called me. "You need to come down and make an offer. He's talking like you might get the thing for $50." That's right. Fifty dollars. American currency.

Well, by the time I'd made it to the Lumbermart Building Supply parking lot, the price had reached $200. But not even that great and climbing sum could keep me from my first set of wheels. We closed the deal then and there.

The truck was the saddest shade of pea green and its eight years of life had been hard ones. The texture of the steel across the driver's side bore a striking resemblance to the cheeks of Keith Richards. Pitted, lumpy surfaces that also suggest travel along some pretty rough roads and more than a few trips right off into the ditch.

Lester, the lumber yard foreman, would become the lead mechanic on my project. And we set ourselves to the task of replacing the broken timing chain that had wreaked a good deal of havoc under the hood in its breaking. Eventually we found ourselves pulling the whole engine with the help of the Lumbermart forklift. And my crude training in the automechanical mysteries was underway.

This dismantling experience came to mind as I spent an evening with the EfM (Education for Ministry) group here at Christ Church last night. The EfM curriculum includes a little dismantling of the Bible and the Christian tradition. For instance, we read from the book of Deuteronomy at the eucharist service, and the EfMers would have studied the theory that the five books of Moses were not written by Moses (one clue is that he seems to narrate his own death at the end of Deuteronomy).

The process can be unsettling. What seemed like a glistening, perfect whole can suddenly rest in disarray at one's feet. It's exposed as a jumbled collection from varied sources with varied agendas and experiences that all inform how the stories were told. We might say that the book we thought of as a dignified old Bentley suddenly looks more like a 1975 Chevy LUV whose engine is dangling from a logging chain that's been looped around the tines of a forklift.

But somehow, as the illusion of the Bible as a staid, tame book fades, it becomes only more enticing and compelling to some of us. Far from seeming undone and lifeless, it looks a lot more like the unpredictable, shabby, glorious reality we all actually inhabit in this world.

The Chevy LUV sits hidden behind its own privacy fence in my parents back yard as it goes the way of the things of the earth. But my own 13 year old son is now the LUV infected one. And, yes, it seems like something almost hormonal is going on.

He's thrilled at the possibility of getting the old beast running again. He and his grandpa spent a few days this spring pulling off the valve cover, spraying WD-40 into the cylindars, loosening and lubricating the seized and rusted parts in the hope that they might move once again. And I'm convinced that these two dreamers are closer to the deep magic of the automobile than any Ferrari driver or polisher of Bugattis.

The stories of the Bible are sometimes beautiful and beautifully told. But they endure because they weren't told in order to be beautiful. The endure and continue to charge and change our lives because they come from the deepest realms of human experience, the parts of ourselves where meaning is made out of and amid the glorious mess that is life. It's a place of vibrant, enticing potential and possibility. It's the place where we're still thrilled, not in spite of, but because of the dents and dings and rust and corrosion that are signs of stories untold, barely hinted at, calling us towards their discovery.