Words fail me.
Ok, words don't completely fail me. But my jaw did drop just a little when I first saw the spectacle.
As I stopped to snap these pictures on a warm spring evening, a passerby struck up a conversation with me about the limo. "Don't you feel saved?" she smirked. I chuckled with her, not giving any hints about what I do for a living.
This limo, however well intentioned, does not actually say anything about who Jesus is or what a follower of Jesus should do. The only hints I get is that Jesus loves yellow and lived in 1992.
Of course she laughed at this scene. She had absolutely nothing to engage with - just a name thrown in her direction.
The name "Jesus" has often been divorced from any understanding of his life on earth or what God revealed through him. People talk about the importance of accepting Jesus without first knowing Jesus.
But, it cuts both ways. Many mainline, intellectual Christians are much more comfortable talking about God as some abstract, metaphysical reality beyond space and time than talking about Jesus. If you talk about Jesus too much you start to sound like those other Christians, the ones that put his name on top of their cars.
I wish I could have told her, this passerby. I wish I could explain to her that Jesus really does free us for new life, that Christ is alive and that's great news. Not in a spooky, brain-washing kind of way, but in a belly-laugh kind of way and a smell-of-rain kind of way.
I wonder if she would have understood, or if the Christian cacophony would have drowned out Jesus' own loving voice.