Rumor of Angels for a Dead Church?
Good Morning Friends,
Ok what do the following phrases have in common: Mobil Station, Act Naturally, Advanced BASIC, Accidentally on Purpose, Daily Special, Dead Right, Freezer Burn, Good Grief, Nothing Much, Pretty Ugly, Press Release. Right, they are all oxymoron… two words that seem to be contradictory, but are joined together. They are terms that shouldn’t fit together, but they do. They have at least two meanings and one has to get to the source of context to understand what is happening. Now how about this one…. A Dead Church?
Now with all of our writing the last few days out of Romans about living and dying we need to get to the Alpha…the very beginning before we get our head around the Omega of what is happening in the church and the word to help us do that is Prolegomena. Alright forgive me, but the world has rules for engagement on this topic of the study of what is ultimately there and what it is like and my intent is not to send you back to sleep. But here is the deal we need to crawl out of the box. The world has changed and some of it may indeed be in a way we cannot empirically measure…yes even for Google. Still at a key stroke…a mouse click.. I can get information about every mom and pop church in the world and the dogma that formed it. I can, and billions of others can confront their religious traditions from the perspective of our own culture and biographical background and even compare it to those things that are foreign to it… and in this reality the role of our experience in theology has become more necessary than ever before. So this morning I am wondering if it is a spiritual messenger or a human one taking a spiritual message to the church? Is it an Angel or just the Rumor of Angels for a Dead Church?
Scripture: “To the angel of the church in Sardis write: These are the words of him who holds the seven spirits of God and the seven stars. I know your deeds; you have a reputation of being alive, but you are dead.
Revelation 3:1 (NIV)
And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.
Colossians 2:13-15 (NRSV)
Message: God is not afraid of questions. So are you wondering if you and your church are spiritually alive or spiritually dead? Maybe if you have asked God to forgive your sin …maybe if you are you happy Christian…maybe if your spiritual life is full of joy and celebration because you know the value of your sins being cancelled…maybe if you have let Jesus nail your sins to the cross…maybe then it is Christ alive in you guiding you to let the living Holy Spirit disarm you from being controlled by negative passions. Friends, have you decided to claim the victory of the cross in your life and be alive with Jesus? If you affirm Christ in the victory of the cross then the answer then might be that you are spiritually alive….that you too are a messenger bringing a warning to others. Friends the church is in danger of death and especially so I think when we begin to worship our own past…our own history…our reputation and the form of our worship more than the function and life of people. Maybe Christianity is the only belief system that can start at the very beginning reasoning together to confirm our prejudices and change. Maybe we can be more than a morgue with a steeple…a congregation of corpses. Know that whether the origin of our Christian theology starts from the top down or the bottom up…like the oxymoron… there may be more than one way to view this reality of the church and of the formation and reformation of theology in the age of information preparing us for the age of transcendence.
Pray we wake up from being spiritually asleep. Pray we strengthen those things that still have purpose. Pray we remember those things that God has called us to do and we have not finished. Pray we retain and apply the truth of scripture. Pray we repent and change our way of thinking. Pray we reclaim the mind for Christ so that we can walk with others not only through the what of our belief but more importantly also the why. Pray the Lord of Lords Himself will protect, uphold, and guides the leaders of the church with His strength and wisdom. Pray we have a collective Christian Consciousness of Grace. Pray we move from seeing our culture as the sole structure for experiencing God to a reality of Christ working in culture creating a unity yet to be realized. Pray we rejoice that Christianity works even though we cannot understand it.
Blessings,
John Lawson
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