Worship for the Lord’s Day
August
23, 2020
A Note before we begin
this day’s worship:
The Bethesda Church is working on a program called
Community Support for Education for the Elizabeth Forward School District whose
families are caught in the difficult decision for a hybrid model of education
as the school district begins the new school year. Families do not always have the ability to be
flexible in their jobs for at home, on-line learning. We are opening up our church to a very limited
number of children to use our fairly large facility to be dropped off at the
church at 8:45am and picked up at 3:15pm on days that they can’t be left safely
at home. We need volunteers who are
willing to be in the building Monday – Friday.
We are splitting the day into two shifts; a morning shift from 8:30-Noon
and an afternoon shift from Noon-3:30pm, but we need two people for each shift. You can volunteer one day a week for one
shift or multiple days, but we need your help.
Volunteers do not need to offer tutoring or educational
assistance, the kids will be self-taught via their Chromebooks/iPads with the
teachers live or on videos. Volunteers
simply need to be in the building to make sure that the children are safe, take
periodic breaks and have lunch, which they will either bring or the school will
provide (we’re still negotiating this).
Volunteers will also need to wipe down/disinfect frequently touched
surfaces throughout the day. Masks will
be required and temperatures taken when both volunteers and students
arrive. If you are able to volunteer,
please let me know via email at www.revwaltp@gmail.com. We currently only have 3 volunteers, which
isn’t enough to administer the program, but we’ve gotten enough inquiries to
fill our limited capacity. So, yes, I’m
kind of begging for volunteers, if you are able.
We will have a training
session on Friday, August 28 at 1:00pm to go over details and for information
to obtain ACT 33/34 clearances, which is free.
The school start date is scheduled to begin on Monday, Aug 31.
Be patient. We will be together in worship again, soon! Until then, let’s begin:
Opening Prayer
We
thank you, O Lord, that we are not alone. You watch over us, guide us, and lead us in Your
righteous pathways. When we stumble and
fall, you lift us up and gently place us on that pathway again. When we doubt, You surround us with Your mercy
and peace, reassuring us of Your presence through the love of others and of our
savior Jesus Christ. Keep our hearts and
minds open and ready to serve You, for we pray these things in Jesus’ name.
AMEN.
Hymn Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty
Prayer of Confession
There
are far too many times, O Lord, when we have neglected or ignored the needs of
others because it just wasn’t convenient for us to help. We backed away with
excuses on our lips and indifference in our hearts. Forgive us and set us on the right path of
service and compassion in the name of Jesus who modeled faithful living for us.
Remind us that we are residents of a
global community. Help us hear the
plight of those who have been voiceless. With the gifts that we have and the love of
Christ, direct our lives in compassionate service to others. In Jesus’ name, we pray. AMEN.
Words of Assurance
Through the abundance of God’s mercy and forgiving love, you
are empowered to be disciples, to reach out to others, to offer the words and
deeds of hope in a struggling world. God’s
blessings are poured over you for this service.
AMEN.
Affirmation of Faith – The 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:
(Continued prayers for
all those affected by the Coronavirus, for our schools, for our national
leaders. We also need to pray for the
devastation in Iowa that the recent storm left behind. Please continue to keep my friend Dr. Johnny
Awwad in your prayers in Beirut and our Presbyterian Church in Lebanon.)
Lord, we hear the wonderful words from Matthew’s gospel in
which Simon Peter acknowledges Jesus as the Christ, the son of the living God. He is given the name Peter, the rock upon whom
the church will be built. We would like
to be the kind of “rock” that Jesus could count on – to be strong in the face
of adversity; brave when danger is present; compassionate when sorrow and
strife prevail. You have called us to be
Your church and we ask for Your transforming love that we might be better
witnesses for You. Today we name in our
hearts before You people that we love who are dealing with sorrow and
illnesses; people who feel abandoned and alone; people who are entering schools
and colleges, military service, the workforce. We also name those people and situations
filled with joy and hope; a new home, the birth of a child, celebrations of special
occasions, and often just a beautiful day. Hear the cries of our hearts to You, O God. Heal and transform our lives.
For we ask these things
in the name of Jesus Christ our Savior who taught us to pray saying; Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be 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 Praise the Lord! Ye Heavens, Adore Him
Scripture Readings
Old Testament: Psalm 124
1If it had not been the Lord who was
on our side—let Israel now say—
2if it had not been the Lord who was
on our side, when our enemies attacked us,
3then they would have swallowed
us up alive, when their anger was kindled against us;
4then the flood would have swept
us away, the torrent would have gone over us;
5then over us would have gone
the raging waters.
6Blessed be the Lord, who has not
given us as prey to their teeth.
7We have escaped like a bird
from the snare of the fowlers; the snare is broken, and we have escaped.
8Our help is in the name of
the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
New Testament: Matthew 16:13-20
13Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi,
he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” 14And they said, “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah,
and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” 15He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” 16Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the
living God.” 17And Jesus
answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah! For flesh and blood has not
revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven. 18And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build
my church, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. 19I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and
whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on
earth will be loosed in heaven.” 20Then he sternly ordered the disciples not to tell anyone that
he was the Messiah.
Anthem – Upon This Rock by Sandi Patty. I love this woman's voice. I've listened to her for years. This is an older recording, but there is an unmistakable, what I call, the "Sandi Patty Ending". You'll know it, when you hear it. (And I refer to any song that does this as a "Sandi Patty Ending".)
Sermon – Just like the hymns, you can click on the
sermon title to hear/watch a video of today’s sermon via YouTube.
(based on Matthew 16:13-19)
A friend of mine was walking out of
her church on Sunday morning. As she was
walking towards her car, she bumped into a thin, sort of lost-looking man who
was standing on the sidewalk looking up at the big stone church. She excused herself and started to walk away,
but the man called to her and said, “Tell me,” pointing through the big front
doors into the church she had belonged most of her life, “what is it that you
believe in there?” She started to answer
him and then realized that she did not exactly know the answer, or rather
didn’t know how to put it into a short sentence, and as she stood there trying
to compose something to say, the man said to her, “Never mind. I’m sorry if I bothered you,” and walked
away.
She
started to protest and call him back, but decided to let it go. But as the week passed it bothered her more
and more. She told a group of us this
story over dinner one night. And after
she was done she looked pointedly at the two ministers in our group, me being
one of them and said, “so, what would you have said to him?”
What
would I have said? Why do I go to
church? Why have I made it my very
vocation? What is it that we believe in
there? Is it the Apostles’ Creed? Well, that’s not exactly the sort of answer
you want to recite on the sidewalk, even if you do think that someone might
stick around to hear it. It’s kind of
rote and dry, if you haven’t grown up with it.
Would I have told the man that we believe in Jesus as our Lord? Sure, certainly, but what does that mean,
exactly, to a man on the sidewalk these days?
What do the words Jesus and Lord even mean today to those who’ve never
even set foot inside a church? Would I
have said that we come to worship God?
But isn’t that statement alone a little general? Perhaps I could have expounded upon that and
said that we believe that, in spite of all the appearances to the contrary, the
world really is in God’s good hands and that we come to church to learn more
about our role and responsibility in creating a world that’s more just, loving,
kind, and full of hope. Says who,
though? And, so what? With all the churches around, you’d think
this world would be a whole lot better, if that were truly the case.
What
is it exactly that we believe in there and what would you say to a lost-looking
man on the sidewalk?
In
today’s scripture reading Jesus himself is the man on the sidewalk, the one who
asks the questions about what it all means, about what he means to his
disciples. They have all just come into
the district of Caesarea Philippi trailing incredible miracles behind them; the
feeding of the five thousand, the calming of the storm at sea, the curing of
the Canaanite woman’s daughter, among many others. But Jesus has not just been healing; he has
been teaching as well, lessons about obedience to the law and about the
difference between words and deeds.
And
so, every now and then, like a good teacher, he quizzes his students to see how
much they are taking in, to see how well they have understood him, and he
doesn’t hide his displeasure at their consistently low scores. In the verses just before the ones for
today’s reading, he warns them to be on guard against the yeast of the Pharisees
and Sadducees. Eager to please their
teacher, the disciples decide that Jesus is actually talking about bread and
say to him, “We brought no bread.
Therefore there is no harm.”
“O men of little faith,” Jesus says
to them, “why do you discuss among yourselves the fact that you have no
bread? How is it that you fail to
perceive that I was not speaking about bread, but rather about the teaching of
the Pharisees and Sadducees?”
Small
wonder it is then, that they are a little anxious when Jesus gathers them all
around and asks an entirely different kind of question – not one about anything
he has said, but one about who he is.
“Who do people say the Son of Man is?” he asks them, and they are truly
relieved, because it is a question they have some answers to. They don’t have to go over all that he had
been teaching them and come up with an answer.
All they have to do is tell Jesus what they have heard. Easy.
You
can almost see the expectation on the disciples’ faces as they turn over the
little tidbits that they have heard.
“John the Baptist,” one of them says.
“Elijah,” someone else suggests.
“Jeremiah or one of the prophets,” another adds. They pull these names out of their pockets
like interesting stones they have found at the river’s edge and hand them over
to Jesus for appraisal. Because here
there is not a whole lot of risk involved in repeating what you have heard
others say. As the suggested names grow
fewer and farther between, the expectation grows. So, which is it, Lord? What is the right answer, they wonder almost
audibly?
But
Jesus does not give them the answer; instead, he puts them back on the spot,
“Ok. But who do you say that I am?”
Silence.
Like the awkward silence of my
friend on the sidewalk. “What do you believe in there?” After a moment the man said, “Never mind,
sorry to have bothered you.”
But, in this case, Jesus doesn’t let
his disciples off that easily. He
waits. Who knows how long that silence
lasts before Peter breaks it with his answer.
“You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”
Thank goodness for Peter! Right or wrong, he is always the first one
out of the gate, one of the first to leave his fish net and follow Jesus, the
first one out of the boat to walk on the water, the first to volunteer his
opinion on any given subject. Sometimes
it’s hard to say whether he is courageous or just plain reckless, but in any
case his answer is apparently the one Jesus is looking for, because in one fell
swoop Jesus pronounces Peter blessed, the rock upon which the church will be
built, and the inheritor of the keys to the kingdom of heaven.
But…there
is a catch, although Peter’s answer was the right one, it isn’t really
his. “Blessed are you,” Jesus tells him,
“for flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in
heaven,” which is a little like saying, “Blessed are you for coming up with the
right answer, even though you cheated because it really isn’t your own.”
If
it wasn’t Peter’s own answer, if he didn’t even think it up, then why does he
get rewarded for it?
His sudden blessed status and
promotion may have seemed a bit odd to those other disciples, as well. After all, Peter sank in the middle of the
sea on his walk out to Jesus because he doubted. And while he may have been the first person
with his hand up in the air when a question was asked, he didn’t always follow
through on his bold pronouncements.
Jesus says, nonetheless, “You are
Peter”, giving Simon Bar-Jonah (Simon, son of Jonah) a new name, “and on this
rock I will build my church.” With that,
Peter is exalted in front of the others.
But six verses later, Jesus will
have to put Peter back in his place, for no sooner does Peter receive his new
authority than he begins to argue with Jesus about what is really going to
happen in
In some ways, it’s almost impossible
to squeeze a moral lesson out of this story, to find some model for our own
behavior, because the fact is Peter doesn’t do anything particularly right on
his own. He is impulsive and
opinionated, and when push comes to shove he even denies that he knows Jesus at
all. About all that can be said in his
favor is that he is willing to go first, to speak his mind, and that every time
he falls down he gets back up again, brushes himself off, and charges
ahead. While the other disciples hang
back for fear of giving the wrong answer.
So, what is the lesson here? If we go back to the original language we
might find something. Jesus says, “You
are Petros”, the masculine form of
Peter, Rock. It means a stone or a
pebble, a small piece of a larger rock.
Then Jesus says, and on this
It is this relationship between the
two that the church will be built; Peter’s small pebble built upon the motherlode
of stone in Christ that the church will be built. It is not by Peter’s virtue of being
rock-solid. Instead, he has been chosen
by God because of the relationship that Peter and Jesus share. Because Jesus in his unsearchable wisdom, his
inscrutable way, decided to pick a bullheaded, bighearted, fallible, stubborn,
never-say-die pebble upon which to build his church.
Because if Jesus understands someone
like him, then maybe Jesus understands someone like me. Someone who goes ahead and says things and
then regrets them, or makes brave promises and then loses heart.
If Peter is the rock upon which the
church is built, then there is hope for all of us, because he really is one of
us, just another pebble upon which the mountain is created. In spite of his flaws, or perhaps because of
them he remained God’s chosen rock whether he is acting like a cornerstone or a
stumbling block, and because he shows us that blessedness is less about
perfectness than about willingness and being unique – that what counts is to
risk our own answers, to go ahead and try, to get up one more time after
falling.
So the next time you bump into
someone who asks you what you believe, and all of a sudden you understand that
your answer matters a great deal, that even though you do not know who is
asking you the question you know for sure whom you are answering – well, go
ahead and give it a try. You may say
something stupid, but then again you may surprise yourself and an answer will
be given to you and you’ll say something inspired instead. The important thing is to try – not only to
say what we believe but also to live what we believe – knowing that we are just
like Peter, just a small stone added to our other small stones to create a mountain
of truth and belief against which even the powers of death cannot prevail
against it. Regardless of what we might
think right now, it is a promise that we’ve been given. The church is not going anywhere. It is upon this rock that we hold the
future. It is upon this rock that
together we will stand.
AMEN
Hymn Soon and Very Soon
Benediction
The world awaits the love and gifts you have to offer. Go forth in joy and peace to be God’s
witnesses this day and all your days. AMEN.
No comments:
Post a Comment