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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