39The Sermon on the Parking Lot

On the side of a pub, facing a parking lot, in letters you can read from across the block: LOVE YOUR CITY & YOUR NEIGHBOR. That's the entire mural. No portrait, no landscape, no signature hogging the corner — just the instruction, painted in patterned black capitals on whitewashed brick, with the ampersand set apart in its own gold box.

The ampersand is the whole sermon. It means you don't get to pick one. Loving the city is easy — the river, the murals, the pizza. The neighbor is the advanced course. So the wall bolts them together with one golden symbol and stands there, over a row of parking spaces, delivering the shortest homily in Waco to a congregation that rotates hourly and never meant to attend church today.