NOTE:  I post this article for your efification.  Kevin Annett's discussion of the "remnant" on our planet is all well and good, but the question remains:  Is Annett planning to be the pastor of yet another bloody Christian cult, which believes the Big Lie tht they are "saved by the blood of the Lamb", one who was tortured and supposedy died as a ransom for their sins to "save them" from Hell?  Such foolish people!  ---PHB

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Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2014 22:42:35 -0700

Subject: Prayers and last Easter's sermon to the Covenanted community of Salem, South Dakota, by Kevin Annett

From: hiddenfromhistory1@gmail.com

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From the days of our Fathers we have sinned and thereby have we and our kings and our priests been delivered into the hands of foreign kings, and unto the sword and confusion. But now a small grace has been shown from the Lord God in causing a remnant to escape captivity, and giving us a resting place so that God may light our eyes, and revive us. For though we were slaves, God did not forsake us in our bondage. ... Shall we then return to violate God's commandments, and be in affinity with the people of such abominations?

​-Ezra 9:7-9, 14

 

Upon this rock of faith I will build my congregation, and the gates of hell shall not overcome it.

​- Matthew 16:18

 

In the name of God, Amen.

 

I prayed to God this morning and asked for a message for our small congregation. My Geneva Bible fell open to these two scriptural passages.

These are days of war.

I see the sword upon us everywhere, from our chemtrail-streaked skies to the fear and hopelessness in the eyes of so many of our people. For from the highest to the lowest, we have forgotten who we are and sold ourselves to the power that rules this world, breaking the Covenant our ancestors made with God: the Covenant that created the world's first

​sovereign R​

epublic known as America. And so all of our leaders have fallen, from Presidents to Judges to the clergy. We have all been delivered into a destruction from which there is no human escape.

And yet, as God assures us through the Book of Ezra, at this very moment of despair, something unexpected has happened: a divine pause in the war that forms like a small eddy of light around some of us. God has granted a remnant among us a “small grace”: a way to escape from captivity, so that we may recover, and regain the light of who we really are. For even in our worst moments of slavery, God never abandoned us.

Do you know this to be true? Ask yourself. Because once you do indeed know that somehow God has delivered you and set you apart, there comes a clear voice in that heavenly spark known as our conscience, with this punch line, if you like, straight from heaven: a question to us, which is our challenge today as that remnant people:

Now that you are free, will you return to slavery, and be friends once again with those who serve the abomination?

I come from a country where the biggest sin is to upset somebody. Canadians are expected to be friends with everybody, to go along with everything, to not make waves. That's called being nice. But God, as we know, is definitely not nice, which makes God generally unwelcome in Canada. Especially in its churches.

As a child, it struck me how unwelcome not only God was but I was, too, in the big churches that claim to represent God. I would always get frowned at and lectured by the United Church elders whenever I showed up to Sunday school in unpressed clothing or without my collection envelope, even though that's how I was: unkempt and poor. That's why I always got a kick out of the cartoon that shows a dirty and bedraggled Jesus standing outside a locked cathedral door, and he turns to a hungry, homeless man who is also shut out, and says to him,

“Don't worry buddy. I've been trying to get in there too and nothing seems to work!”

So the eyes of innocence showed me right away how truth always had to play second fiddle to the comforts and routines of the big church goers: and so God, being truth, is never a very nice influence in big churches. For God upsets people, divides them, makes them choose between right and wrong with something more than talk. So for the sake of the crowd, God invariably has to go, and gets comfortably locked away in a hymn or an idea, shut out of the hearts and actions of all the big church goers as efficiently as is the poor man Jesus Christ.

As a boy, and later as a clergyman, I learned that I had to make a rapid choice about who I was to be best friends with: all of those church people or God. I wanted to do both, of course, to get along with both mankind and God, but that is not God's way, if you believe the Bible. God comes first. And that hard fact cuts through every human arrangement there is, every church agenda, and every political agenda, with a finality that most of humanity, and most so-called Christians, just cannot accept.

And so that brings us to what the Bible calls the

​R​

emnant: those of us who are incapable of doing anything but serve God first, last and always, regardless of who or what it costs us.

We are the ones that the Bible keeps going on and on about, in both the Old and the New Testament. We are the ones who throughout scripture God keeps preserving in the midst of war and genocide and murder. And Jesus called us his disciples,

​which comes from a Greek word meaning "a close approximation": ​

and it was to the

​select disciples​

, and not to the multitude that showed up for the free loaves and fishes that day, to whom Christ turned and spoke his perfect words known as the Sermon on the Mount. And in his words, Christ told us who we, his brothers and sisters, really are, and what we are to do in this world

​: a world​

whose power has been given over to a dark force called Satan, who is the adversary of truth and of God.

According to today's scripture, we, the

​R​

emnant, are to be revived.

The Hebrew word Ezra uses for “revived” is michaya, which means “to be brought to life”: not simply revived, or woken up, but actually given birth. Either we become alive or we go back to being dead, again: to return to being friends with the abomination, or in Hebrew, tobaw, an idol, or an inhuman monstrosity.

All of us know what it's like to try operating in the dead zone known as “being polite” with family or acquaintances who have nothing in common with our life in Christ, or even with who we are as men and women. We can't. It simply isn't possible for us to be dead to the truth in ourselves without beginning to die from the inside out. And that's one of the ways we can tell we have indeed been set apart, since most folks around us have no problem becoming dead inside whenever it's required, or convenient.

And so we, a Christ-conscience driven people, are the ones who are constantly being revived by that truth of God within us

​, provided we take it more seriously than the illusions around us​

. We are those who are being led out of th

​e​

confusion and warfare all around us. And it is only upon such a rock as we – a rock of faith – that Christ is building not a church, but a congregation: an assembly of gathered, remnant people of God.

Our second scriptural passage today, from Matthew, is really a cornerstone of who we are as Covenanted Congregationalists: as the true spiritual descendents of the Puritan founders of America and its Constitutional Republic. For in Matthew 16:18 when Jesus speaks about Peter being the rock upon which he will build, the Greek word “ecclesia” does NOT mean “church”. It means a special assembly. And the different understanding of that key word marks a boundary between the worldly, fallen church and the congregation of true witnesses to Christ.

Christ never founded a church that would save all of mankind. He said nothing about popes or institutions or sacraments, or

​man-made ​

rituals by which his saving grace is bestowed on humanity. All of that is man made. What he said was that he was establishing a special gathering of friends, a fellowship of equals, through which he would live

​on: a congregation.

 

Much blood has been spilled over that word. In 1525, a poor English scholar named William Tyndale was the first to translate the Greek word correctly, as congregation, not church, and his single act overturned the false church of Rome and cemented the Reformation – at the cost of his

​own ​

life. And yet even today, almost every Bible, even the Protestant ones, has had that word “congregation” edited back to read “church”, falsifying Christ's word and purpose to justify man made religious bodies.

This congregational understanding of Christ witness formed the basis of the American Republic and it alone guarantees all of our efforts to revive that Republic and courts that serve the people. For from God emerges the law, and the government extends no further than the consent of those gathered in assembly: whether in worship, in court, or in governance.

But whether in the law, or in politics, or in our community life together, we who embody Christ's called out people know by our lives that his congregation and any true Republic is formed by faith alone - faith in God's direct saving grace in our lives – and by how that grace continually births a new world within us and around us. That is the escape we have been given from a collapsing world at war: a world we will not save or redeem, but from which we will escape, into a new promised society of which we are but one seed.

By everything good and true in creation, and by the love that gave us birth and sustains us, I long for the day when I can be among you all again and help pastor that world into being in your company, as your minister and servant of Christ. Hold fast to the promise we have been given, and carry one another's burdens, so that you may revive the one law of life, the law of Christ, the first born of our new humanity.

Amen.