Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Sermon from Acts 2:37-41 for May 27


Have you ever gone to a Dr.’s office? What do they do when they finally get you into an examine room? They take your height and weight, pulse and blood pressure, sometimes they take your temperature, look in your ears, eyes, nose and throat.  They check your eyes to see if they are reacting to light correctly.

Why?

Whether you are a child or an adult they are trying to see if you are healthy, growing, or if there is a problem, an allergy, illness, or perhaps a disease.

I have the unique privilege to being to see able to lots of Dr.s, remembering that in some places in the world seeing even one Dr. is a rarity.

This past year alone I have seen a General Practitioner, a Cardiologist, an Endocrinologist, a Urologist, a Dermatologist, and a dentist. So far, I have avoided seeing the General Surgeon, Orthopedist, Proctologist and Chiropractor, but there is time before December.
Doctors are wonderful. Being healthy is even more wonderful, and the quest usually begins, at least at the Doctor’s office with insurance, mounds of paper work, and then the check to see what your body has to say. Total cholesterol, good, HDH, LDL, Triglycerides, Glucose, A1c, and a host of numbers later, an “attaboy”, and an appointment to come again in 3 or 6 or 12 months.

Determining whether we are healthy is important. Dealing with illness and disease is essential. We get that, sometimes, about our bodies. But what about our own spiritual health?

Why, pray tell, is your spiritual temperature? Are you growing, maintaining, or actually showing signs of illness? Do you know? And what are you doing about it, in order to continue to grow, or if not growing to deal with your particular spiritual illness?

And going even further, what about that other body, the body of Christ, the church, this community of faith? Is it healthy, growing, becoming more effective, making a bigger difference, touching not only the lives of the people inside the church, but more importantly, folks outside of the church.

On Pentecost, Peter got up and preached to the people who had gathered to see what the disciples were all saying in different kinds of languages. What he said was powerful and convicting, so much so, that 3000 people decided to join in with the followers of Jesus that day.

The disciples were on fire, their faith was strong, their commitment was clear. They wanted to grow, they wanted to make a difference, and they were prepared to do what was necessary to follow Jesus and make more disciples.

They were not content to leave things as they were, to stay in the safe upper room. They wanted to make some noise for Jesus, and that meant breaking out of the walls of First Church Jerusalem and expanding the community of faith.

A friend recently did a demographic study and discovered that the most likely time and day to put an additional service in the church’s schedule was Monday night. Why? Because the folks that weren’t in worship on Sunday were most likely to watch the video of the worship service on Monday night.

They wanted to know what they missed!

They wanted to see what this church was like before they came to visit.

They knew Sunday wasn’t going to work for them, but Monday night could.

So he did a cost analysis to see what it would cost to do a Monday night worship service and presented it to the church as a new mission outreach, musicians, preaching, heat, lights, janitorial, and lots of advertising.

He said it terrified the session. So he asked what they thought the disciples on Pentecost would have done?

Jokingly some of our Christen friends call Presbyterians the “Frozen Chosen”. Why, because traditionally we Presbyterians have believed in a theological idea called “predestination” from where they get the “chosen part as in “chosen by God”.

The “frozen” part comes from traditional Presbyterian’s lack of emotion, not emotion inside us, there is plenty of that, external displays of emotion. We don’t clap our hands, raise our hands in praise, shout “amen” and “preach it”, when the pastor gets on fire, because our pastors don’t get on fire!

There is the story of the man who came to worship and shouted “amen” and then “Hallelujah” and when he then shouted “preach it” the minister took him to task, saying “we don’t do that here”. The man said, “but I’ve got the Spirit” and the pastor said, “well you didn’t get it here”.

Or the story of the Old School Presbyterian Church in Kansas that fired a minister who was discovered whistling on the way to worship, because they didn’t want “those kinds of displays of frivolity” damaging the youth of the church!

Are you on fire for Jesus? Is the church? How do you know? What is the evidence?

And if so, what can we do to throw another log ofn the fire, turn up the temperature, get even better in spiritual shape, and if not, what do we need to do to return to our first love, and be a group of disciples like those who reached out beyond the walls of the upper room and found 3000 more souls as part of their growing congregation.

Come Holy Spirit, we need you!
  
Amen.

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