Every couple months the mood will strike and I will visit the website “Bring a Trailer.”  There are other websites like it, but this is probably the most popular.  “Bring a Trailer” is an auction site for old, collectable cars.  Because it is an auction site, the available selection of cars to ogle and/or bid on is constantly changing.  If you visit you will find an amazing range of choices.  You can find customized muscle cars from the 60’s and 70’s.  You can find immaculately restored examples from the earliest days of the automobile.  It’s not surprising to find exotic cars whose values are well into 6 figures, but you can also find a reasonably preserved 25-year-old car listed that would be more at home on Craigslist than in a high-end showroom.

One of the things that marks the most highly sought-after cars (the ones whose selling prices rise impossibly high) is that they have very little mileage.  Some are virtually unused.  It’s not unheard of to see a decades-old car with just a couple hundred miles on the odometer.

Although I sometimes enjoy browsing through the pictures of the rare and collectable cars, I am not really in their target audience.  Even if I did have the means to spend a quarter of a million dollars on a 20-year-old Ferrari, I still am not the kind of person who should buy a collectable car.

The point of owning a collectable car for most collectors is having it.  Having it, looking at it, exhibiting it from time to time and perhaps selling it again as an appreciated asset is the basic point of owning high-end collectable cars.

I’m not likely to have a high-end or even a low-end collectable car, but if did, I would not park it in a garage and look at it, and occasionally dust it.  I would drive it.  All the time.  That’s what cars are for.

In the Gospel lesson for today, the Tuesday in Holy Week, Jesus says: “Very truly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.”  (John 12:24)

As disciples of Jesus, we have to resist the temptation to treat our lives as though we are collector’s pieces, and the goal of life is to get safely through without damage or signs of use. 

Jesus goes on to say, “whoever serves me, must follow me.”  Being a disciple of Jesus means following his example of spending yourself fully, offered in love without fear.  The unburied seed bears no fruit.

Prayer:  Holy One, you’ve got the wheel of my life.  Drive it like you stole it.  Amen.