If you are a stockholder who has gone long on Lucent Technologies, I am sorry. The share price has tumbled from a year ago 87 percent. If your church giving has been tied to investments like that, I am really sorry! What happened? General market turndown, yes. But Lucent shareholders were hurt badly by bad accounting practices. Managers instructed salespeople to record sales in one quarter that wouldn’t close until the next, if ever, thus inflating investor expectations. That was just one thing. But there’s always a reckoning.

Used to be it was only management and outside accounting firms that took the heat for things like that. Nowadays audit committees of the companies’ boards of directors are under fire, too. They have ultimate oversight, but for years those committees have been peopled by trophy directors way over their heads in carrying out their duties. O. J. Simpson once served on the audit committee for Infinity Broadcasting. Gives new meaning to the phrase forensic auditing, don’t you know?!

Well, the situation is not all that different for churches, especially Baptist churches. The Roman Catholic Church audits its theology and practice through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, headed by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger. Baptist churches are more like the Colossian church the Apostle Paul addressed in our text. Messy. Unofficial. They nor we have any official auditor to pass oversight from the congregation to an expert. Baptist churches sometimes expect management—the pastor and staff—to keep a sound accounting of the doctrine of the church. Insofar as we can help look after that because of our training, fine and dandy. It does not, however, relieve the whole church of its duty to look after things.

For several weeks now we have been looking at the first chapters of the New Testament book of Colossians as an aid to understanding what is essential in making a church like ours a truly colossal community—a vital and virtuous fellowship. In some ways these four sermons—number three today—all say the same thing: to grow a church to faith maturity and to thrive as a community of Christ, we have to be rooted and grounded in Christ himself. Today we look at how being so grounded in Christ helps us to stave off bad accounting practices, damaging theology, and overeager oversighters overreaching. It is the job of each of us and all of us to monitor the life of the church. The question is, how?

Paul’s chief theological concern is not laying a foundation for stem cell research. He focuses on salvation and how people grow in the faith. It comes down to cross examination. The correct answer to the exam question on salvation is the cross of Christ. And the way we grow in our salvation and live it out in the world is by our “cross examining” each other in the fellowship. So we start with an examination of the cross.

Examination of the Cross
Paul contrasts two approaches to salvation in these verses: the way of the cross and the way of the straight line. The one is about acceptance, the other achievement. The one goes up by going down, the other up by going up. The one involves grace and the other merit. The one is public, about life in this world as well as the next; the other is private, about escaping this world for the next.

Gnosticism is the name of the philosophy and empty deceit that Paul condemns. It was a soup with a base of Hebrew Scriptures and a dash each of Greek philosophy and Persian mysticism. Salvation is about knowing God and getting free from the flesh. To do so, the soul has to climb the ladder of enlightenment to arrive at its heavenly home. Experts in the spiritual life are trained guides sharing the secrets of the path with those who could pay. They taught how to read the Bible for deeper meanings. The guides taught them how let go of worldly obligations that only held back the progress of the soul.

Now look at how that could play in any pew even now. The Bible is a mysterious book and often difficult to understand. So maybe there are certain keys that will unlock the mystery and allow me to grasp its meaning. Next, who shouldn’t trust the teacher or preacher who has so much more knowledge about these matters and gets to spend his or her whole time focusing on spiritual things? Shouldn’t I listen and learn from one like that? And don’t we easily get so bogged down in our work and hobbies and families that we neglect spiritual things? So maybe I should concentrate on spiritual growth and not be so concerned with worldly things.

Heresy is dangerous precisely because it is not obvious. It contains just enough truth that it can lead you unwittingly from the truth. Ancient Gnosticism isn’t practiced widely today, but it still creeps into the church though the back door and distorts the gospel. As C. S. Lewis has the devil trainer Screwtape say to his trainee Wormwood in The Screwtape Letters: Old error in new dress, is error nonetheless.

Compare all that to what Paul says about the gospel. Rather than being about self-improvement and turning salvation into an upward bound program, it’s about dying with Christ in order to live with him. That’s the picture baptism draws for us. Christ took all the standards of the world— whether the way you get measured in looks or intelligence or ability, or in spiritual terms by your insight or purity—and he nailed them to the cross. THE CROSS OF CHRIST DOES NOT CONDEMN YOU; IT CONDEMNS ALL THOSE THINGS THAT CONDEMN YOU. Christ erased the record that stood against us, he says, and set it aside, nailing it to the cross.

This cuts two ways. One way to those who feel they’ve spent a lifetime trying to measure up and coming up short. I was in a meeting the other day when a guy was giving a devotional. He reported that he looked in the mirror that morning and said, I like what I see! It got a laugh, of course, but then the punch line: It’s taken me a long time to be able to say that. He has spent most of his life the way many of us do, looking for all the imperfections that remind us we aren’t really worth much. When we do that we are captive … to the elemental spirits of the universe, as Paul puts it. We are enslaved by those false gods that promise us much and always let us down. To get free of that, you have to turn to the cross of Christ and realize that all your sins and imperfections have been nailed to it. You are not saved by being a winner in the court of public or private opinion; you are saved by refusing to defend yourself in those courts and walking over instead to the court in which you are not alone in the dock, where Christ stands beside you before God. When you look at yourself through the grace of Christ, then you are free and clear.

A second cut is at those known winners in the courts of public or private opinion. You’ve got the right degrees and pedigrees to prove yourself worthy. You account yourself well at banks and banquets. You have proper relationships with family and community. And when you come to church, you can’t imagine what more God could want than what you have already achieved with what God has given you. You expect to be given positions of leadership befitting your lofty station.

If the church is spiritually healthy, it will not allow either one of those bad theologies to flourish. It will look for spiritual convictions that fit with the cross of Christ. It will search for grace-ful humility and a servant spirit. It will look for marks of spiritual circumcision instead of marks of the flesh. It will insist upon the cross of Christ as the litmus test of spirituality.

Cross Examination
Jake Chapman, age 3, recently went into the hospital to have tubes put in his ears. Routine, unless he’s your kid undergoing a general anesthetic. Parents Amy and Matt, and grandparents Doug and Mary Ann Hill, report that all went well. When Jake woke up in recovery after his long sleep, he looked around mystified at all the people in white clothes. They asked him how he was, and he replied: I think I was dead!

Well, part of the job of the church is to remind each other that we have been dead. There is no straight line of enlightenment that bypasses the cross or lets us avoid God’s life-giving grace. This is a kind of cross examination, so to speak. But rather than it coming from some official person in the church, it comes person to person in the church.

Now I know what you are thinking: Good Lord, isn’t that just what we’ve been trying to get away from in Baptist churches? Isn’t that the way so many people get turned off to the church? We run around judging one another. Well, you can do a thing badly and hurt the body, but you can hurt the body badly by doing nothing, too. If you want a healthy community, you have to watch out for each other in the fellowship. And that includes our ideas as much as morals.

In Victor Hugo’s story about the famous Parisian hunchback, the archdeacon of Notre Dame cathedral refers to the Bible on his desk and then to the arches of the great building and predicts to the King of France, Alas, this will kill that. He was afraid that putting the Bible in the hands of ordinary people would be the end of the church. He was only part right. The printing press and the Reformation that became possible because of it were the beginning of the end of the authority of clergy over people, but it was not the end of the church. The church was and still is the people of God. Look around you and see the church. Yet we have to finish the Reformation by moving from just the privilege of the people of God over against the clergy to the responsibility of the people of God to each other. We are to be priests to each other.

At the least that means that we must engage one other in creative cross examination. Do our views square with the gospel? Are they in keeping with the way of salvation we know in the cross of Christ? Nobody— preachers, teachers, and individual members—gets a free pass. That would open the door of the church to the kind of deception the apostle so warned about. The right to hold and express and opinion may make you a Baptist, but it doesn’t make you right.
Getting it right is a common task, not an individual one. We have to be constantly growing and maturing as a community of faith. Mature people are more discerning about things.

To be a vital community of faith requires examining the cross and “cross examining” each other— gracefully. Are you up for it?