Sixty-Four Souls On Board

"We have sixty-four souls on board...We've been running all the checklists and talking to our maintenance and approach, our maintenance and dispatcher and we have not been able to get the landing gear down.....If it's not completely obvious, we just want to confirm, we are declaring an emergency....Brace for impact! Heads down! Stay down! Heads down! Stay down!"

These are words from the actual voice recordings taken from the cockpit of Delta Flight 4951 as the pilots and crew worked frantically to lower malfunctioning landing gear while they circled JFK airport. Minutes later the flight crew calls for passengers to brace for impact and get their heads down just seconds before the actual landing took place. We now have video from inside the cabin taken by passengers as sparks fly from the plane's fuselage scraping the runway.

It occurs to me that these could very well be the words spoken in a worship service or prayer gathering of the average American congregation..... Less than 100 people .....preoccupied with checklists and maintenance....incapable of landing, yet calling souls to brace for impact.....and once the denial abates there is the naming of the present situation as an emergency.....followed (finally) by a call to bow heads and stay down.........

The actual incident has a happy ending as all "sixty-four souls" landed safely @ JFK. The plane suffered less than cataclysmic damage. Yet, as an allegory, it serves in a parabolic way as a message to the 21st century church in America. By-and-large we have become too preoccupied with what maintains the status quo, and the approaches we should take, while neglecting to gain a healthy focus on our take-offs and landings....

The Captain of Flight 4951 is now a hero, yet everyone on board will one day face death, again; and not to be escaped. The Captain of the Church has saved/is saving us and calling us to become a community that serves to save; setting us free from the power of sin and death. I wonder, will he receive any accolades from his passengers??