As I am getting older, I find myself setting a reminder for so many things—for bedtime, art, meditation, exercise, appointments, the list goes on. Either I’m writing it down or typing a reminder in my phone. Perhaps, I may delegate a reminder to my wife so I can have someone else to blame in case we both forget. Not kidding. I am kidding, really. I promise. Last year I wanted to make a big change by devoting the year to cultivating a life that constantly gives attention to God throughout the day. Sadly, the God I love so much was the God I so often forgot. And I was fed up with it. So, I embarked on a journey of building new habits. Habits are hard to build and hard to break. I started by setting a daily reminder for the whole year with an alert to pray at 6am, 9am, 3pm, and 6pm. Often I would pray the SHEMA, the Lord’s Prayer, or Psalm 23 in a remix based on what was happening in the “now” kind of way. Slowly my life changed. It was a wonderful experience.

Sometimes, all we need is a reminder to help us see differently and do differently. Sundays are like that. Sundays are reminders telling us the world is different. Jesus is alive and the resurrection is a living hope. Sunday, the first day of the week, the day Jesus rose again, is a reminder that Jesus is Lord over the world, over the next 6 days. Sundays are our commission into the week as a community of communities.

Sunday is not a day disconnected from and irrelevant to every other day in the week. It is the gathering of Abraham’s children from east, west, north and south of our city and the dispersion of those children into the city to gather smaller, find the lost sheep, and start new gatherings.

Sundays are how we corporately meet with the living Jesus and care for the Communities that are gathered on the Lord’s Day as one Community. Sunday gatherings are where our identity in Christ and as Renewal Church is affirmed and reaffirmed (Vision, Mission, & Values).

Sundays are not events in the sense of a one-time thing disconnected from everything else we do, although we plan. Sunday is a reminder nudging us to live in the reality that New Creation has arrive. In the first century it was a common Jewish belief that the resurrection of the dead would occur at the end of history. No one expected it to happen before then, but it did. Smack dab in the middle of history, on the first day of the week, Jesus rose again from the dead making life and immortality obvious (2 Timothy 1:10). We leave Sundays knowing the world is different because the anticipated resurrection of the future has skipped the line, from the very end to the merry middle. Jesus is that future. We enter Monday through Saturday as people of hope who not only know the world is different but who make a difference in the world. That difference will be made through us as it was made through Jesus via the cross (Acts 14:22). It will be difficult. The cross always is, but God will be present. We need to revive the theological underpinnings of Sunday. We need a reminder.