Acts 2:14a, 36-41; Psalms 116:1-4, 12-19; 1 Peter 1:17-23.

I have told you before, but here it is again, during the months between May 2003 and January 2009 I belonged to Hillsong Church London. One of my great privileges as a participant in Church was the time I spent associated with the “New Christians Team”: we were the sneaky ones who were sat strategically around the various theatres where we met to “do church”, and when everyone else had their eyes closed for the altar call we kept our eyes open. When someone in my “section” raised his or her hand for salvation I would see that hand, and then I would discreetly identify him/her to one of my team members who would then approach him/her during the final songs and speak with him/her about salvation as the service ended. Over the course of 2004 there were something like 637 “hands” raised some for first time salvation, or re-connection with God after a time “in the wilderness”. In 2005 we saw the thousandth person that year raise his/her hand in late September. We stopped counting after that: we had the delicious difficulty that converts were being made faster than we could count them. So, we stopped counting them and instead focused on loving them.

Two things from that experience stand out for me, and I hope you’re already seeing the link to our reading from Acts this morning.

1. Whilst we never had 3000 people baptised in one day, God really was adding daily to our number those who were being saved. One of our regular guest speakers was a church planter in India and his intention at the time of one of his visits to us was to plant 365 churches each year; statistically that would be one new church per day. Let alone God daily adding people, this pastor wanted God daily adding new missional congregations to the holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.
2. I remember that one service where no one raised a hand. I’m a bit used to this story now, but when I first began telling it in sermons in Australia I used to choke up at the memory. Now to be clear, I’m not talking about no one in my section raising a hand, that often happened; what I’m saying is that after the hour and a half of song, praise, prayer, message, and all, there was not one hand raised across our theatre. I remember the visible distress in our team room after the service: not one person had been saved anew! We had been church and we had done church, and no one had found Christ anew. No-one, not one! We had failed God: to say we were devastated is an understatement, we were gutted and hurting.

So, can you imagine why Hillsong Church was so successful at what it did? I’m not here to praise them up, after all I am here and not there. What they do with media, music, and film, is another story, not a bad story, just not my focus this morning. Can you imagine what it feels like to be in a congregation where the leaders go home wracked with sobs because there was a service without a salvation? I don’t need to imagine it, I was there, and it haunts me occasionally. Here is why; at that stage Hillsong Church London met in a small theatre, it had about 650 seats, and because of that there were three services on a Sunday. There were salvations in the other two services that day so it’s not like God went home empty-handed. People were added to the Church that day. But imagine it: even though God was saving Londoners in the morning and in the evening, not one person had asked for grace in the afternoon. That set off grief like I had never before seen in a bunch of Christian leaders anywhere.

In today’s set text from 1 Peter 1:18-19 the writer tells his readers, which includes us, that we were ransomed with the blood of Jesus; a ransom far more valuable than coin and bullion. And in Acts 2:41 we are told that 3000 were added to the congregation after they had been cut to the quick by the word of the gospel. Can we doubt that salvation is a precious thing? More precious than anything the world can provide, more devastating when it is missed than any other human catastrophe. Just think of it in these terms, to miss salvation is to have an “Act of God” which didn’t happen. As nasty as storms and bushfires are we understand that they are awe-inspiring in their power: imagine how powerful a positive “Act of God” might be, and how awful to miss out. Money cannot buy that, and if you miss that window in the skies how can you be sure that it will come again? We as Christians have faith that there is always a way to God, but if you are not a Christian and you miss your chance, how do you know there will be another chance? Or, and this one does cut me to the heart, if we Christians miss our chance to open the skies to those who are not Christian, how will we know that they’ll get another chance? We trust that God is gracious in seeking the lost to save them; but if this congregation did not extend a hand to welcome the lost, how can we rely on the next congregation to do so?

And if we continue to miss our opportunities, if we continue to shirk our responsibilities, perhaps God will not send the lost to us. Maybe when God is shepherding a lost woman or man into the Kingdom of God, God will send that one to Life Links Church of Christ, or Ararat Anglican. I’m not saying we are in competition with the other churches, not at all. I am delighted that God is adding daily to the Church those who are being saved, especially if they are being saved in the Salvation Army, and the Roman Catholics. But if God is sending lost souls there because God feels God cannot send lost souls here…I don’t even want to think about that being true.

So, what do we do? Do we have an “altar call” each week for the next six weeks in the hope of having a mega baptism service on Pentecost Day? Do you need to start bringing your unsaved friends to church more often so that I can preach salvation to them? Do you actually trust me to do that, or is this congregation and its worship life embarrassing to you? I’m not suggesting it is, and I’m not having a go at you at all: in fact, I have belonged to congregations where I would not have invited my unsaved friends along, so I know that such sentiments exist. On the other hand, as your preacher and chaplain can I trust you to disciple and encourage those friends and neighbours of yours that I lead in salvific prayer? I know that Hillsong lost converts when having “prayed the prayer” they were then not followed up or encouraged in their new faith by their Christian friends.

The gift we were given in Jesus Christ is beyond compare. I have said that it is beyond value, and we know that it is beyond comprehension. Salvation from sin and from its effects in our life through the process of healing and discipline, security and salving from aloneness and hopelessness, and from feelings of worthlessness and uselessness, are concepts that we could spend a lifetime of sermons and Bible studies unpacking and still not get to the end of.

I have always been a Christian. If you want to argue the merits of that statement in view of original sin and the time between my birth and my accepting Christ’s lordship over my heart as a sentient adult, well I don’t care for your tone. I was born into a family of disciples, raised in discipleship, and I’ve never departed from it. I am not sinless, I am far from perfect, but I have always had God in the centre of my life. And because of this, for the life of me, I cannot understand how anyone could possibly live without that. I mean, how do unbelievers even continue in the world? They exist because God created them human: but how do they actually live without the knowledge of God and this deep, core, fundamental, central, foundational, defining understanding that they were made in the image and likeness of God with the sole purpose of being loved by the God who made them? This is why it is so important that we be ready when people from “outside the awareness of the love of God” come to us ready to respond. Psalm 116 speaks of a man who was ensnared and in deep distress, but God leaned down so as to hear his cry for deliverance all the clearer, and God saved him: he says now I will thank God with an offering and with public declaration of God’s magnificence and my gratitude. I know that I am precious to God and that God is interested in me and takes care of me, God deals carefully with me. I am nothing, yet I am precious to God, so I will praise and magnify God’s name.

We must take care when people come to church: we must be aware when something extraordinary is happening in someone’s life and any given Sunday is a special day for him or her because of what God has done. It’s an over-used tool in some churches to say, “what if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, where would you spend eternity”. I don’t like that question, it’s cheap and it’s bullying, so here’s a better question and it’s for you, not them. What if yesterday something extraordinary happened and someone wanted to come and give exultant praise to God? What if for us it’s ho-hum another Sunday, time to get the urn on and to ask who’s heading for Barney’s later, while a visitor (or more so, one of us locals whose attendance we might take for granted) wants to be flat on her face before The LORD in exaltation or despair?

Here’s two stories to illustrate what I mean:

1. I didn’t see this happen, but I’ve been to the place where it did. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the traditional place of the cross and the empty tomb, many different Christian denominations have their own zone. As at many churches there are bowls for candles and intercessions: I have been there, I have seen the bowls, and I have lit a candle. I have been a Christian on his first visit to Jerusalem: I have knelt at the slab where tradition says Jesus was laid out between cross and grave, and I have knelt in the sepulchre itself, the empty tomb. Well this story goes that another pilgrim such as I was, this one a woman of the Roman Catholic faith, joyfully placed her candles in one of the bowls of sand in celebration of her being in Jerusalem. Can you imagine this woman’s joy? Can you imagine this woman’s heartbroken terror when a bearded man screamed “No!” from across the space, and in a mass of cassocks and flame sent her candles flying? She had placed Catholic candles in some very specifically other Orthodox bowl. I mean, you’d think she’d shitted on the actual cross, with all the offence that the use of that word implies here, as well as the act. Horrifying! Not my use of the word “shit”, but the way in which this dear daughter of God was treated in her Father’s house.
2. I was almost there for this next story, I know the woman involved and I passed her in the foyer on the day in question. A young woman who had been inconsistent in her attendance at church for a few months was present one particular Sunday. She was not backsliding at all, she was just struggling in life and her very new husband, who was not a Christian at the time, really only got to see her on Sundays so she’d stay in bed with him rather than go off to church by herself. Anyway the woman came to church this week, and feeling a little bit frail for a reason I’ll tell you in a minute, she sat in the very back row. She sat there quietly, her head bowed, while the bustle of church went on around her. The 8:30 traditional service (which I had preached at) was emptying out of the hall after coffee and the 10:00 crowd was arriving. But there she sat, this young woman, quiet in the back row. After church got underway and the young woman had sung the first song and so forth she was sitting, again silently and with her head bowed, when one of the regulars came in late. Being late she sat at the back. She sat next to the young woman. And since the young woman had been infrequent in her attendance the older woman whispered to her: how are you? How is your new husband? How do you like married life in place of just living together life? and your new house? and being called Mrs? and so on, and on, and on she whispered, being friendly and interested. On she whispered through the formal prayers.  On she whispered through the time for silent prayer. On she whispered through the sermon. The young woman, unbeknownst to anyone that day, unbeknownst to the older woman, unbeknownst to the minister or any of the elders, unbeknownst to me who passed her in the foyer as I left and she arrived at 9:45, that young woman had miscarried her first pregnancy earlier in the week. She had come “to church”, practically “back to church”, to spend some daughter-time with her Father in Heaven and some crying time with her Comforter. What she got was an hour of whispered interrogation and interruption.

Church let’s not do that. Let’s never be that priest or that older woman. Let’s all be aware of where we are and what this house represents to everyone who comes. Let’s take care of God’s house: because if we genuinely believe this building to be the house of God then we must always be aware that God is at present and at work here, and God is welcome to be at work here, in God’s own house. We can be fun, and we can be social. You know I have a very evident sense of humour and most weeks I have elicited a chuckle or two from you; that must not stop; but we are primarily here in this place, the house of God, to worship God and to respond to our glorious Father and magnificent saviour whom we adore so much.

So please all of you and me, never get in the way of anyone else seeking God in adoration, desperation, or both.  If we are so care-giving, so careful in this better way, then maybe, just maybe, God will add to our number those who are being saved. Amen.