Exodus 20:1-21

It is December 11th, 1998. The sleek spacecraft sits on the pad at Cape Canaveral, high atop a Delta 7925 rocket. As the countdown spins toward zero, a redundant series of supercomputers provide management for the rocket's thruster systems. The zero stage solid fuel engine ignites on cue, burning for precisely 64 seconds, giving way to a 265-second burn of the RS-27C motor burning a blend of lox/kerosene fuel. The spacecraft is propelled to an initial 185 kilometer by 198 kilometer by 28.4 degree parking orbit around the earth. Then a second burn raises the apogee to around 900 kilometers, setting the stage for the Thiokol Star 48 engine's 88-second burn. This accelerates the craft into a trans-Martian trajectory. Nine and a half-months and 416 million miles later, a small Leros bi-propellant engine will provide the on-board propulsion for the orbit insertion maneuver at Mars. The Climate Orbiter will then use aero-braking to reach a sun-synchronous mapping orbit by November 23rd, 1999. The mission is to map the Martian surface at high resolution, and study the distribution of water vapor and ozone, along with other climate-related tasks.

It is a brilliant plan. But it has one flaw. Engineers at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Colorado have apparently calculated acceleration data in English units of pounds of force. This data has been fed into a computer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California that assumes metric units of acceleration. Units called newtons.

And on September 23rd, 1999, the little Leros bi-propellant engine ignites as planned and small thrusters fire to perform the orbit-insertion maneuver. But nine and a half months and 416 million miles worth of tiny, undetected errors, caused by using units of English measurement rather than metric, extrapolate into a catastrophic accident that ends the life of the 125 million dollar spacecraft.

You see, you can't get to where you need to go in space by using outdated standards, obsolete measurements, and no-longer applicable guidelines. And you can't get to where you need to go in life unless you learn to convert the old standard into the new.

Now in today's reading from Exodus, the Hebrew people are on a long flight of their own. They are flying toward freedom. Freedom from Pharaoh - freedom from Egypt - freedom from the sad emptiness and exploitation of life as slaves. They have miraculously moved through the Red Sea, found heaven-sent manna to stave off starvation, assuaged their thirst by drinking water that flows from a rock. And now, they are on the brink of a new frontier. They are ready to become God's people. They are ready to launch toward the Promised Land.

But just then, God lures Moses up a mountain. And there on the mountaintop, Moses receives a gift. We picture it as two stone tablets. Upon the tablets are etched ten guidelines for living. They are the most famous guidelines of all. We call them the Ten Commandments, and they form the moral basis for much of what we call civilization. But these teachings are really much more than that. These revolutionary principles are - in a very real sense - God's own conversion of life - from English to metric, so to speak.

You see, you can't get to Mars by using outdated standards, obsolete measurements, and no-longer applicable guidelines. And you can't get to the freedom of the Promised Land so long as you measure life through the perspective of what it was like in Egypt.

To be made free from the past and available to God's future, old ideas, attitudes and values have to be converted. Devotion to the many gods of Egypt must give way to a singular commitment to the one true God. Secular attitudes and the resulting behaviors that hurt and exploit others must be replaced by new attitudes of respect and altruism - attitudes and behaviors that will build a community. Everything the people learned as slaves in Egypt must be re-learned, and replaced by a larger and higher vision of life as a free people.

This is a powerful thought for us to consider this morning as we celebrate World Communion Sunday. During the course of this day, Christians all over the world will gather at the table - eat the bread and drink the cup - and be particularly mindful of the whole family of God. It is one of those important moments when God helps us to update our spiritual data. We are invited to convert our faith-perspective from the exclusive to the inclusive - from the smaller to the larger - from the personal to the family. This morning, we have a chance to discover ourselves not as just a local church serving Tellico Village, but as a part of Christ's universal church created to serve the world.

And we do this on the occasion of the dedication of our new Christian Life Center.

God is placing in our hands today a tremendous responsibility. We are opening the doors to a resource that has tremendous potential for serving others in Jesus' name. There are untold miracles that can take place through this center, in the lives of people young and old - from this generation and 100 generations from now - natives of East Tennessee, transplanted northerners, and even people we will never meet who dwell in the furthest corners of the earth.

But to be faithful stewards of this gift - to make it come alive with the glory of God - we are going to have to ask God to help us convert our spiritual English into metric.

Our small minds - shaped by experiences in life that come no where even close to giving us an adequate understanding of either ourselves or others - must become larger minds that measure life differently than ever before. Our small hearts - able to scratch only the surface of God's compassion for people - must become great, big hearts that learn new ways to love the people of our planet. Our small faith - that sometimes thinks it has a corner on God and life but in fact barely knows either - must become a deeper, more probing faith that sets us off on a life-long journey of living in friendship with Jesus.

There are three basic conversions that lay at our feet today.

The first is a new commitment to learning. In these closing days of the twentieth century, I believe God is calling Christians to be smarter, deeper and more intellectually aware than ever before. Where once there was a time when the art of Christian thinking was left to the scholars and the priests, we now live in a day when people think for themselves. How will we appeal to the people of the new millenium if we cannot meet them where they live, and speak intelligently to their spiritual needs? And just as importantly, how will we live effective and powerful Christian lives ourselves unless we are constantly updating and deepening our understandings of God, ourselves, and others? Oh, it used to be that Sunday School ended in adolescence. But today, all over the world, Christian adults are recognizing the need to love God not only with the heart and soul, but also with the mind. We live in changing times. How excited I am that, on this very day, as we open the Christian Life Center, more than 10% of our adult membership has already signed up to learn more about Jesus Christ!

Oh, you can't get to either Mars or the Promised Land by using outdated standards, obsolete measurements, and no longer applicable guidelines. You've got to gain a new perspective by converting the way you've measured things in the past to the way God needs you to measure things now. Jesus puts it this way: "You can't put new wine into old wineskins."

Now a second conversion we face today is to recognize the potential of the church to be a center of healing. It should not surprise us that the bookstores are full of self-help books on countless subjects related to personal wholeness. After all, this is a broken and hurting world. How can we utilize our new Christian Life Center to provide avenues of healing and support for people going through difficult times? I believe it is no accident that the Lord has led us into our Stephen Ministry, and through that to developing a grief-support group as well as a support group for those who are giving care to Alzheimer's patients. And there are so many more needs out there! People who battle chronic depression. Folks whose health has become frail and confines their activities. Can you imagine our Christian Life Center as a place humming with programs designed to be a helping and loving hand to people in whatever stage of life they're in? What about a literacy center for children, or a wellness center where principles of faith are applied to health issues?

Oh, you can't get to either Mars or the Promised Land by using outdated standards, obsolete measurements, and no longer applicable guidelines. You've got to gain a new perspective by converting the way you've measured things in the past to the way God needs you to measure things now. Paul puts it this way: "If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creature. The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come!"

And a third conversion. Gaining a larger view of who we're here for.

I have some relatives who belong to a church whose primary activity seems to be trying to develop new and creative ways to keep outsiders out. They have a marvelous physical plant, but nothing worth talking about going on inside. Oh, sure, there are good reasons for this - questions of insurance liability, worries about damage to furniture, concerns that the costs will far outweigh the income. Now they don't know this about themselves, but underneath this obsession with keeping people out is a deep and dark sin. They don't really believe Jesus came to save the world. Jesus said, "You'll know them by their fruits." And the fruits are obvious when a church spends more time trying to figure out how to save itself from the world than it does trying to reach out to the world Jesus gave his life for.

One day, long ago, at the old First Congregational Church, some of the folks became upset because a scruffy young boy - and his even scruffier dog - took up a habit of sitting on the front steps of the church as everyone arrived for worship. He was - to be honest - something of an eyesore. And people were afraid of the dog. Even though the dog had never bit anyone, several people were sure it was bound to happen sometime soon.

Amidst all the mumbling of the people, however, one of the deacons came up with a plan. He befriended Paul, and invited him to come inside to help him open the shutters on the big Palladian windows. Having Paul as a second set of hands made the project a little bit easier, and in the meantime, gave the deacon a chance to get to know the boy. He lived just a few doors down the street. His family didn't go to church. His father didn't believe in God. In fact, Paul had never even been inside a church until the first day the deacon invited him in.

Now he was there every Sunday - sitting with his dog on the front steps - just waiting for the deacon to arrive so they could go inside and open the blinds. I called Paul "the blind man", and the nickname seemed to stick. And so did Paul. At first, he didn't stay inside after the shutters were open, but the day finally arrived when Paul remained. He sat quietly in a little corner of the balcony as the great pipe organ began to play. I saw him thumbing through a hymnal, trying to follow the service. After the service, he was full of questions, and there was no doubt at all that God was at work in the life of this little boy.

You know, Jesus had a special way of caring for blind men. And I am so thankful to God that one of the deacons at the old First Congregational Church let the Lord give him a different standard of measuring scruffy little boys. For unlike most people, but very much like Jesus, that deacon discovered that blind men come in all shapes and sizes and circumstances.

And God loves them all!

Our Christian Life Center opens today to serve the world in Jesus' name. And its a much larger world than we can ever even imagine. To accomplish our purpose, you and I will have to develop bigger minds, bigger hearts, and a bigger faith than we've ever had before.

Because today - ready or not - we're leaving Egypt behind! We're blasting off to "seek out new life, explore strange new worlds, and to go where no one has ever gone before."

We're heading to places only God knows where.

So give him your mind, and let God expand it! Give him your heart, and let God enlarge it! Give him your faith, and let God convert it - from pounds into newtons, from English to metric, from what happened yesterday to what God can make happen today.

Come to the table. Eat the bread that's more than bread. Drink the cup that's more than wine. Join hands with your family all over the planet.

Come to the Lord. And then let's all together go and convert what was to what is in the amazing plan of God who is always building...to serve and save the world!