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Dinosaurs.  Or  . . .  why the pastor is acting kind of crazy.

Some of you folks are looking at me quizically lately.  We thought Pastor was a rational guy.  But he's gone sort of crazy.  He's acting kind of nutty.

Let me attempt to explain why that is.  I'm a dinosaur.  A relic from a long extinct tribe.  

You say, OK, so far, not that helpful.

Let me explain further.  In church history, when the church veered off the rails into papal extravagances, we saw in our study of Revelation 3, remember Sardis.  The church was dead.  God left the room.

And what invariably happens when God leaves the room is that man takes over.  God is missing but the buildings and the magisterium was off the charts.  The great cathedrals.  Magnificent.  The pinnacle of man's ability to build someting glorious.  Absoulte pinnacle.  Notre Dame.  Bizarrely beautiful.  The vatican with Michael Angelo's sistine ceilings.  Magnificent beyond anything else perhaps in the world.

Think high church.  Low church.  High church reached the absolute pinnacle of glory that man is capable of.  But all of that glorifies men, not God.  God left the room a few centuries earlier.  Those churches are stone quarries.  Beautiful magnificent spiritually dead places.  God is long gone.

Then came a course correction.  The reformation.  Calvin.  Luther.  And a century later, the era of the Puritans.  If you read their books, it is a different kind of pinnacle.  Those guys set a bar for true worship and godliness that we look at and quickly get discouraged about how far the bar has dropped in 4 centuries.  

When they did that course correction the pendulum swung wildly opposite of the pinnacle of man made magnificence that glorifies man.  Their meeting houses were austere.  They did that on purpose because they wanted to move as far as possible from "high church" as they could.  Austere, but full of spiritual power.  

Everything they did was geared towards teaching God's word.  Prayer and fellowship and missions are all natural by products.  It was the most spiritually powerful era the world ever witnessed.  It's also the civilizational backbone of the nation we dwell in.  Austere meeting houses full of the Spirit's power built our country.

That's my tribe.  That's why I used to love to go to that conference.  3000 other dinosaurs all together in the same room!

Now I'm painfully aware that just because you folks unwittingly hired a dinosaur, that doesn't mean I can expect you all to become dinosaurs like me.

But hopefully this little treatise will help you understand why man made religious articles that are exquisite . . . kind of trigger me.  Something in me is fighting against the whole dead high church beautiful magisterium, that is godless.  

I have a confession.  Nobody knows this about me.  Don't tell anybody.  
I watch music You Tubes made by a church in Lincoln Nebraska.  They've got this magnificent pipe organ, and their music director dude is maybe the most gifted music person in the western United States.  They make beautiful beautiful music.  Glorious.

But that music director is married to a man.  He flaunts his gayness.  And the pastors are a mix of at least one man but several women.  It's woker than woke.  And those folks parade up and down the isles in their vestments and hats and smoking pots.  It's the most religiously religiosity I've ever seen.  Beauty out the kazoo.  But God isn't there.

Folks, we may be low church.  We ARE low church.  We're so low church that if Hollywood ever discovered us they'd probably have film crews here every month or so, because we look like what Hollywood stereotypes what a 1950 church would look like.  Like that song, They're gonna put me in the moovies.  An all I gotta do is act naturly.

But, that being said, it's funny how often I've heard visitors marvel, God IS in the room here.  We're old fashioned and "low" and homely but God visits our services.  

So that's kind of the basis for my irrational behaviour.  I'm after the magic, the spiritual power that the best of the Puritan reformed churches experienced.  The places that sent missionary's all over the world.  If God's in attendance, you don't need all the man made religious paraphanalia.  Vestments and robes and hats and smoking pots and marching up and down the isles being religious.  

Give me 5 minutes in a room full of spiritual power from the Word of God and I'll rather have that than a lifetime of parading around in man made glory.