Oh, come on. You know you've got something like that somewhere in your house. Maybe it's not a sweater from your great-aunt, but maybe it's a knick-knack or present from some relative that you knew as soon as you saw it that you'd never use it and you've been looking for a way to get rid of it ever since. Truth be told, I've got several of those lying around somewhere - we all do.

And that's what makes the Rummage Sale so fascinating. I spent most of my day Friday and again Saturday morning at the Rummage Sale. Now, I've seen some church Rummage Sales before, but never one that took over the entire building and took a week to set up. But, as vast as this one at LUMC was, it didn't fail the test; a lot of the things I saw fit perfectly into the description above. I can't tell you how many t-shirts and sweaters and games and puzzles I saw that I thought, "Wow, were they colorblind? Did they not know as they knitted that sweater that their grandchild would get beat up for wearing it? Didn't they know that game hasn't been cool since 1987?"

I leafed through shirts and old shoes, books and shellacked records (do you know what a record is? Or how a shellacked record is different than a vinyl?), and saw so much, well, junk. And don't you know, there were people lined up at 7:30 am just to buy cart-loads of that junk. Smelly ol' shoes? Broken suitcases? Just junk. People lined up to buy boxes and boxes of junk.

...but that's kind of like what Jesus Christ did for us. Paul writes in his letter to Christians in Rome: "But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." I think the key part of this phrase are the words "still sinners". Why these? Well, because "sinners" talks about the very nature of who we were- the driving force behind what we used to be. Without Christ's death and resurrection, we would've remained these hopeless creatures who constantly sinned. We'd be like that crusty sweater from your great-aunt: intended for good, but all dirty and nasty from what we've done and where we've been. But even when we were junk, Christ paid for us. The fact that we were broken and messed up didn't put God off- we didn't have to do anything to earn His affection. He didn't care if we screwed up, He wanted to have a relationship with us. He didn't care if we were a crusty ol' sweater, He wanted to buy us anyway. That's pretty amazing. That's powerful! That's love. Unconditional, undeserved, but phenomenal love.

There's this great song that I first heard when I was a junior in high school. It's called "Dandelions", and it's by a now-defunct Christian band called Five Iron Frenzy. I think it says a lot about how God views us. It doesn't say we're perfect, 'cause we're not. We are sinners in need of saving. But, it shows how God sees us compared to how others might judge us, or how we sometimes see ourselves.