So… Today it seems appropriate to have a
fire drill! You know what those are right?
When Trooper Craig Vedder was here a few
weeks ago he pointed out that if there was ever a crisis in the church every
kid would know what to do, but the parents would be a mess!
So, before we do a fire drill which
encompasses people getting up out of their pews, filing orderly out the back
doors walking down the sidewalks to the manse, and then waiting patiently there
for further instructions! (Many of you already sense what a fail all of this would
be!) I have a few practical questions?
First, when the church is on fire, what
do you do?
I heard a wonderful answer: “Get out of
my way slow poke!”
Here is the answer: Most important of
all, you get everybody out of the church building, out the doors, and down the
street, out into the neighborhood! You do not, and I repeat, you do not - put
out the fire!
That’s it!
If the church is on fire, you get out of
the building, you get into the neighborhood, and you do not put out the fire.
Does anyone else hear a sermon in all of
this?
If the Holy Spirit, which came on
Pentecost to the apostles and the other disciples, decides to stop here in
Otisville, at the Otisville – Mt. Hope Presbyterian Church, and you start to
see signs of the glory cloud of God, the tongues of fire distributed on
everyone here, and it begins to look like the whole church is on fire, you…
you get out of the building, you get
into the neighborhood, you start sharing the Holy Spirit and you do not put out
the fire!
Oh, for God’s sake, do not put out the
fire. Stoke it! And to it. Fuel it. Oxygenate it. Heat it up! Make it burn
baby, burn. Because when the church is on fire, God does amazing things!
Do you know how to put out a fire?
You take away one of the three necessary
elements for a fire: heat, oxygen, or fuel. And in churches we sometimes can be
really good at that.
We fail to apply heat, energy,
excitement, enthusiasm to parts of church life and then we don’t notice that
our spiritual temperature has gotten cold. We don’t have to be the “frozen
chosen” we can be the people on fire!
You know the number one sign of a church
on fire? Adult baptisms. You know why right, because for adult baptism to take
place it means that one of the nones or dones, people outside the tradition
community of the church have decided to enter your church doors to continue
their following of Jesus.
And if they have come in your open doors
it is because 1. Your doors are perceived to be open and 2. someone in the
church has stepped out in faith and invited them to follow Jesus.
If you want your worship experience to
be hot, soul searing, wake you up and make you shout, if you want to be a
little crazy in worship and clap your hands to a praise piece, or sway to the
time of the music, or shout amen when the preacher gets rocking (ahem)…
then you need to come to worship hot and
ready to cook and have the worship experience set to boil! I mean nothing says
“hot worship” more than a preacher in a white shirt and tie looking like a Walmart
manager, just saying!
To be a church on fire, we have to
decide to be a church on fire! We have to decide that the most cutting-edge
things the church is doing have the very best resources: people, money, time,
facilities, and mountains of prayer!
They need fuel and so we have a responsibility
to find fuel and add it to the fire, even if that means some of the fuel needs
to come out of our wallets!
Someone stopped by the church this week
to see me because they wanted to set up a Tithe.ly account. So, I downloaded
the church app for them showed them the newsfeed, the prayer wall, and then
helped them get their credit card linked to the giving section, because, they
wanted to make sure that they were giving regularly even when they were
traveling.
Church fuel.
And churches on fire need the oxygen of
prayer, lots and lots of prayer, praying not only for folks in need and
lifting up words of thanksgiving for all the blessings we have received, but praying that God would use his humble but uniquely gifted people to make a
difference in the lives of the folks in our community!
Not just the food pantry and backpacks,
but space for AA and Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts and Line
Dancing, and maybe someday tutoring and mentoring, but even more than that a
place for folks to come who want and need the healing that only God can do!
He sat by the Temple and waited…
And if Peter and John had just prayed it would have been good, but what they did instead, in addition to praying was amazing!
We need to pray! For the Deacons 5K, for
the EMPOWERkids outreach, for our teens as they spend time today at Pierson’s
Farm giving water to the cyclists coming through town and raise money for Camp
Glow in Namibia, Rachel Pierson’s latest project.
We need to pray as a whole church that God
would send us every young adult looking for meaning and purpose in life so that
we could introduce them to Jesus, and his invitation for them to shake up this
world with love and grace and mercy! And enjoy a beer together, or a nice
smooth cider, and find a mentor for the group that is not 61, but maybe 31.
When was the last time we prayed that God
would fill us with his fire, so much so that on the way to church, if saw a
person in need we would stop and find a way to meet their needs and then take
them to church with us to worship so that they and the whole world could see
what God is doing and so that they could dance in faith with us?
When was the last time you leapt, and
shouted, and danced with joy over what Go has done in your life, and if your
perception is that God hasn’t done much, ask yourself if perhaps that’s because
the heat of God’s Holy Spirit in turned on way too low in your life and in your
church?
“Silver and gold, have I none, but such
as I have I give thee, in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, rise up and
walk. And he went walking and leaping and praising God!”
So, if the church is on fire, what do
you do? You get out of the building, you get into the neighborhood, and you do
not put out the fire. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment