We will have a joint service this morning with Communion and Fellowship at Olivet Presbyterian Church in West Elizabeth at 9:45am. There will be no live-streaming service today.
Worship
Service for September 6, 2026
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Look around. What wonders we behold!
P: We see others, gathered here to worship
and praise God.
L: Each person here is a unique, beloved
creation of God.
P: Each person here is given special gifts
and talents by God.
L: Come, let us worship God who has blessed
us so mightily.
P: Let us praise God with our whole hearts,
souls, minds, and spirits. AMEN
Opening Hymn – All People That on Earth Do Dwell #220
4 vs. Blue
Prayer of Confession
Forgiving God, we have messed
up in so many ways. You gave us a
wonderful world, filled with beauty, power, and majesty, and we have ravaged it
- tearing away at its gifts with our own greed and cowardice. We have not treated this world or one another
with compassionate love. We have turned
our backs on situations of need in which we could have been instruments of
help, healing, and peace. We have
neglected service to others and have focused our lives on accumulating things
and status. We have chased after false
gods - greed, power, fame. You are the
potter, O Lord. You fashioned us, but we
focused on developing our flaws rather than working with our strengths. Please forgive us, Lord. Refashion us to be Your people, celebrating Your
love in service to others. For we ask
this in the name of Jesus Christ. (Silent
prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: God’s loving choice for us is peace and
hope. God has fashioned us to be God’s
people.
P: Because
of this we rejoice! For God is with us,
reaching out to heal and care for us. AMEN!
Gloria Patri
Affirmation of Faith/Apostles’
Creed
I believe in God the Father
Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth; And in Jesus Christ His only Son our Lord;
who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under
Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; He descended into hell; the
third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth on
the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge
the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost,
the holy catholic Church; the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins; the
resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting. AMEN
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
We are
broken vessels, O God. You have watched
us. You have called to us. You have blessed us and yet we have chosen
our own flawed ways. Throughout the ages
You have sent Your prophets to help us return to You. Some people heeded Your call and turned again
to lives of love and witness. But others
chose not to listen. Please help us tune
our ears and our hearts to You, O God.
Help us seek peace and justice rather than greed and complacency. As we have gathered here this morning to
listen to Your word, to sing praise, to offer our prayers, help us to remember
that You hold us dearly in Your hands.
You cherish our lives and listen to our cries. You respond to our needs. Enable us to place our trust in You totally,
that we may faithfully serve You all of our days.
We pray
this morning for our loved ones, especially…
In this
time of silence we ask that You also hear the prayers of our hearts.
Trusting
in Your loving and healing presence we pray together saying, …Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed by Thy
name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be
done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give
us this day our daily bread. Forgive us
our debts as we forgive our debtors. And
lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and
the glory, forever. AMEN.
Hymn – I Love Thy Kingdom, Lord #441/405
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Psalm 119:33-40
Second Scripture Reading – Romans
13:8-14
Sermon
Love Knows What Time It Is
(based on Romans 13:8-13)
There
are many ways to tell time. We look at
the clock on the wall, the watch on our wrist, or more likely the phone in our
hand. We organize our days by
appointments, deadlines, school bells, medications, work shifts, and the
familiar rhythms of changing of the seasons and morning into night. But there is another kind of time that cannot
be measured simply in hours and minutes.
There are moments when we realize that something can no longer be
postponed, when a decision has to be made, a truth must be spoken, a wound must
be tended, or a neighbor needs to be shown compassion and love. The New Testament has a word for this kind of
time: kairos. It’s not merely the time
displayed on a clock; it is that decisive moment, the season in which we are
called to understand what faithfulness requires of us now.
Paul
writes to the church in Rome with precisely this sense of urgency. “You know what time it is,” he tells
them. “Now is the moment for you to wake
from sleep.” The night is far gone; the
day is near. Paul believed that God was
drawing history toward a decisive fulfillment, and he expected the risen Christ
to bring God’s new creation to completion relatively soon, perhaps in his
lifetime. Two thousand years later, we should
be cautious about turning Paul’s words into a timetable or using them to
calculate the date of the world’s end, because many have tried that repeatedly,
and every prediction has failed. Yet
Paul’s central claim has not expired.
Life is short. The world is fragile. Our neighbors are hurting. The hour for faithful living is not someday
in the future. It’s now.
What
is especially important is that Paul doesn’t respond to this urgency by telling
the church to panic, to withdraw from society, or to search for secret
signs. He does not invite them to
speculate about the end. Instead, he
tells them how to live before it comes. He brings the entire moral life into focus
with Christ’s one command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Then he tweaks that just a bit and rephrases
it, “Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the
law.” If the time is short, Paul says,
then spend it loving. If the night is
ending, then wake up to the needs of your neighbor. If God’s future is drawing near, begin living
by the values of that future now.
In
verse nine, Paul names several of the commandments: You shall not commit
adultery. You shall not murder. You shall not steal. You shall not covet. Instead of continuing the list he says that
all the commandments are summed up in one word: “Love your neighbor as
yourself.” Paul is not dismissing the commandments or claiming that love is a
pleasant substitute for moral responsibility.
He is saying that love reveals what the commandments were reaching
toward all along. The moral code and the
real religious law written in Scripture is about protecting life, honoring
relationships, restraining greed, preserving trust, and creating a community in
which neighbors, everyone, can flourish.
The
word love is easily reduced to emotion.
We say that we love a song, a restaurant, a television show, or a
particular kind of dessert. We may
imagine that loving our neighbor means feeling warmly toward people, being
polite when possible, and avoiding open conflict. But Paul gives love a much more demanding
shape. Love does no wrong to a
neighbor. In other words, love is
measured not only by what I intend or feel, but also by what my choices do to
another person. Love asks whose life is
protected, whose dignity is honored, whose burden is being carried, and who may
be harmed by the systems from which I benefit.
Paul
moves from particular commandments to the deeper command of love. “You shall not murder” establishes a
necessary boundary, but love asks more than whether we have personally taken a
life. Love asks whether we ignore
conditions that shorten lives: hunger, untreated illness, gun violence,
poisoned water, racism, war, loneliness, or despair. “You shall not steal” forbids taking what
belongs to another, but love also asks whether workers receive a living wage,
whether families can afford a home, and whether our prosperity is built upon
someone else’s exploitation. “You shall
not covet” confronts not only private envy but an entire culture that trains us
to believe that enough is never enough.
Love presses beyond the minimum.
It moves us from avoiding obvious wrongdoing to seeking our neighbor’s
good.
A
future forecast warns of heavy snow or flooding, and within hours grocery
shelves begin to empty. People rush to
buy bread, milk, batteries, bottled water, and more toilet paper than any
household could possibly need. Fear
says, “I must secure everything I can before someone else gets it.” Love says, “What do I need, and what should I
leave for my neighbor?” Fear fills the
storehouses or the garage. Love checks
on the older person down the street, brings medication to someone who cannot
drive, charges an extra flashlight for the family next door, and makes room at
the table. The crisis reveals what has
been present within us all along. It
shows whether we imagine survival as a private achievement or as a shared
responsibility.
Paul’s
language becomes even more urgent in verses eleven and twelve: “You know what time it is… the night is far
gone, the day is near.” In our own age,
one of the most sobering symbols of time running short is the Doomsday Clock,
created in 1947 by The Manhattan Project and set each year by the Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists. It is not a
literal clock and it does not predict the date of the world’s ending. It is a warning symbol, a way of expressing
how close humanity may be moving toward catastrophe through our own
decisions. In January 2026, the clock
was set at eighty-five seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been. Scientists pointed to dangers including
nuclear weapons, climate change, biological threats, disruptive technologies,
and the erosion of international cooperation.
Eighty-five
seconds to midnight. That image is meant
to disturb us, and it should. However, the
Doomsday Clock is not God’s clock.
Scientists are not announcing the second coming, and Paul is not giving
us permission to surrender to despair.
The Christian response to a dangerous hour is neither denial nor
paralysis. It is supposed to be about
awakened love. The hands of that
symbolic clock move because of human choices, but human choices can also move
the world away from destruction.
Treaties can be negotiated.
Weapons can be reduced. Carbon
emissions can be lowered. Truth can be
defended. Technologies can be
governed. Enemies can speak to one
another. Neighbors can organize. Citizens can insist that leaders choose
cooperation over domination.
The
Doomsday Clock and Paul’s spiritual alarm sound different notes, but they ask a
similar question: Do we understand the seriousness of the hour? Paul says it is time to wake from sleep. Sleep, in this passage, is not ordinary rest;
it is moral drowsiness. It is the
condition in which we move through the world without truly seeing it. We become accustomed to reports of war and
scroll past the suffering of strangers.
We learn to accept cruelty as political strategy, poverty as inevitable,
and lies as merely another point of view.
We hear about the warming planet, the displacement of families, and the
epidemic of loneliness, yet the scale of it all can make us numb. Eventually, the unimaginable becomes ordinary. We are awake physically but asleep
spiritually.
Many
of us know the experience of silencing an alarm in the morning. The sound interrupts our comfort, so we reach
out almost instinctively and press the snooze button. Just nine more minutes. Then nine more. The danger is not that sleep is evil; the
danger is that eventually we will miss what requires us to rise. Churches can press the spiritual snooze
button too. We say that we will address
injustice when the congregation is less divided, care for creation when it is
more convenient, welcome the stranger after our own needs are settled, repair a
broken relationship when the other person makes the first move, or speak the
truth when it carries no cost. But Paul
reaches across the centuries and says, “No, now is the moment.”
Verse
ten is one of the clearest tests of Christian discipleship: “Love does no wrong
to a neighbor.” Before we share an
article online, love asks whether it is true and whether spreading it may harm
someone. Before we tell a joke, love
asks whose humanity is being diminished for our amusement. Before we support a policy, love asks how it
will affect the poor, the immigrant, the child, the elderly, the disabled, and
those whose voices are easiest to ignore.
Before we speak in anger, love asks whether our words are meant to heal,
clarify, and hold accountable, or merely to wound. Love is not passive niceness. Sometimes love confronts, protests,
interrupts, and refuses to cooperate with what would harm another. But even then, love does not surrender the
neighbor’s humanity.
Sometimes
we have a tendency to reduce human beings to a label in just a few seconds, and
once the label has been applied, we feel free to dismiss whatever that person
says. We may believe we are defending
truth while slowly becoming less truthful about the humanity of those with whom
we disagree. Paul offers another
way. Love does no wrong to a neighbor,
including the neighbor on the other side of any argument. That does not mean pretending all ideas are
equally good or remaining silent before injustice. It means that Christians must resist the
machinery that turns disagreement into contempt. We can oppose a harmful position without
delighting in the humiliation of the person who holds it.
Healthy
love does not require us to erase our own needs, tolerate abuse, or remain in
situations that destroy us. The self is
included within the circle of God’s care.
Boundaries can be loving. Rest
can be faithful. Seeking help can be an
act of courage. Yet Paul assumes that
most of us already know how to attend to our own hunger, comfort, reputation,
and safety. His command asks us to
extend that same seriousness to the hunger, comfort, dignity, and safety of
another. The neighbor’s life must become
real to us—not an abstraction, not a statistic, not a problem to be managed,
but a life as precious to God as our own.
A
congregation practices this kind of love through ordinary actions that may
never make the news. Someone drives a
neighbor to a medical appointment.
Someone listens without trying to fix the grief. Someone prepares a meal, advocates at a
school-board meeting, writes to an elected official, reduces waste, mentors a
child, welcomes a refugee, visits a prisoner, or stands beside a person who has
been made to feel alone. None of these
actions by itself will turn back the Doomsday Clock. Yet together they form a
different way of inhabiting time. They
train us to believe that the future belongs not to fear but to God, and that
our task is to make God’s coming day visible through acts of love in the
present.
In
the past, we may heard these commandments only as instructions for private
behavior while leaving economics, politics, technology, and war to operate by
supposedly different rules. But Paul
allows no such separation because the word “neighbor” follows us
everywhere. The neighbor is in our home
towns, our workplace, our congregation, and our voting district. The neighbor lives downstream from the
factory and downwind from the power plant.
The neighbor is across the border and on the other side of the
ocean. If a decision affects human
lives, God’s kind of love for us to show to others should have something to say
about it.
This
does not give Christians an easy answer to every difficult policy
question. Faithful people can disagree
about which program will help, which strategy will work, or which compromise is
necessary. But Paul gives us the
standard by which every answer must be tested: Does it do wrong to the neighbor,
or does it seek the neighbor’s good? Who
is protected? Who is placed at
risk? Who receives the benefits? Who bears the cost? Who has been invited to speak, and whose
experience has been ignored? Love does
not eliminate hard thinking, in fact, love requires it. Good intentions are not
enough when our choices have consequences for others.
The
Christian story insists that dawn is coming.
Paul’s image is not finally a countdown to annihilation but an
announcement of approaching daylight: “The night is far gone; the day is near.” That distinction matters. Doom says there is
no future. The gospel says God’s future
is approaching and calls us to live toward it.
Doom produces panic, scapegoating, and the desperate protection of our
own. Hope produces courage, solidarity,
and the willingness to work for a good we may not live long enough to see
completed. Christian hope does not close
its eyes to the eighty-five seconds. It
opens them wider. It looks honestly at
danger and still chooses love because resurrection has taught us that death
does not have the last word.
So
what time is it? It is time to wake up
from the sleep of indifference. It is
time to stop treating cruelty as strength and compassion as weakness. It is time to refuse the lie that our
neighbor must lose in order for us to win.
It is time to make peace before another generation inherits our wars, to
care for the earth before damage becomes still more difficult to repair, and to
govern our technologies before they govern us.
It is time to listen to those whose pain has too often been
doubted. It is time to repair what we
have broken and to protect what we still can.
It is time to love—not vaguely, not eventually, but concretely and now.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Generous God, with joy we receive abundant
blessings. Now, also with joy, we
give. By this act of giving, we ask you
to work in us by your Spirit that this might be only the beginning of our
giving. In the days ahead, show us how
we might offer ourselves more fully to you and your ways. AMEN
Communion
Invitation to the Table
Words of Institution
Distribution of the Elements
Communion Prayer
Closing Hymn – Lord, Make Us More Holy #536 Blue
Benediction –
Friends, God’s
love for us is our example for how we are to love, as well. And Love knows what time it is. It’s time for us to love God in return, love
ourselves, love one another, and to show the rest of the world how to do so, as
well. So, go from this place showing love
to all. AMEN
Postlude
