Worship
for the Lord’s Day
January
10, 2021
Announcements:
I have been silent for
most of this week after events unfolded in Washington D.C. on Wednesday, mostly
because I’ve had difficulty in finding just the right words to express. I desperately try to remain centered, not on
politics, but on our Christian beliefs and try not to let my personal leanings
overshadow anything I might say. It’s
difficult when we, as a nation, are so deeply divided politically. However, I found this article/prayer helpful
for those of us trying to hold the center together. It is a prayer from what’s called a “purple”
church – one that is evenly divided between conservatives and liberals,
politically and theologically. I offer
it to you at the bottom of the page, separate from worship, if you wish to
engage in it at any time (now, as part of the pastoral prayer, before/after the
Sermon, at the end of worship, or none at all).
·
Last
Sunday was known as Epiphany Sunday, but Epiphany is always on January 6th
every year regardless of what day it falls on.
On Epiphany Sunday for the last several years I have handed out Star
Words for you to contemplate on throughout the year. I sent them out to all members of the church
in the mail this week. Hopefully, you have
received them. If not, you should
receive them soon. I do not know what
word you received as I chose them randomly from the pile and put them in the
cards. I did however, try to “guess” how
many people are in your household who might be interested in receiving a Star
Word and put that number or slips in your card.
If
you didn’t get enough, or if one was mistakenly missing, please email me at revwaltp@gmail.com and I’ll pick one for you. If you received too many, just randomly
choose between those you received (but, try not to just choose the one you LIKE
– lol)
· Today
in the liturgical year we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord. In order to do that I’d like you to get some
water, preferably in a clear glass container – bowl or cup, before you begin
this worship service.
·
We
continue to worship on-line only.
·
Our
sessions will meet jointly via Zoom on Tuesday, January 19 at 7pm. We’ll continue to have on-line only services
until the positivity rate falls to 3.5% or below, a marker that we’ve adopted
to use based on best guesses for minimal transmission of the virus for
hour-long inside exposure, with continued precautions in place. As of this writing we are currently at 10% in
Allegheny County, Washington is at 11% and Westmoreland is at 12%. Two weeks after Thanksgiving we were as high
as 13%, so we’re waiting to see if the positivity rate increases or if we
remain stable before falling again. I
believe that it was in late September that we had fallen below the 3.5%, so hopefully
that will be possible within the next few weeks/months. We’re just waiting to see when that happens.
In the meantime, let’s
begin our worship service together:
Call to Worship
The voice of the Lord –
strong and mighty, powerful and full of majesty. It calls to us across the waters. The voice of the Lord breaks forth. It gives us strength and blessing, causing us
to shout, “Glory in the name of the Lord!”
AMEN.
Hymn: I’d Rather Have Jesus
Prayer of Confession
Words of Assurance
The love of God is always offered to us, freely, joyfully,
for all eternity. Rejoice, dear friends,
this is the Good News of our Lord. 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:
God of all creation,
who brought forth light from darkness, continue to light our darkest paths, our
deepest shadows, and our most painful experiences. May the Holy Spirit, who flew over the
chaotic waters of creation and who alighted upon Jesus at His baptism, grace us
with presence in our loneliness and heartache, in our trials and
difficulties. May the comfort of the
Heavenly Dove wrap us in peace and in compassion. May we feel the brush of Your eternal wings,
and know that Your gift of life is upon us.
We grieve the acts of
those who would hurt us, who would destroy the good work that You ordain, who
breach our walls of safety, who might bring about that devilishly alluring
thrill of chaos. We unite, Great God of
Past, Present, and Future, in our request for order and peace. We unite, O Creator of Heaven and Earth, in
our plea for calm and lawfulness. Your
created world is a carefully constructed balance of color and richness,
saturation and ever-changing rotations.
Allow us to be part of the balance and not part of the chaos that seeks
to overthrow Your ordered world.
Today, we continue to
pray for all those who have been diagnosed with this miserable pandemic, for
those who face it every day in their line of vocation and for all those who
have other health concerns…
Today, we also pray for
all those in need from a variety of reasons….
We ask, O Lord, that You
keep our loved ones safe and our country, indeed all nations on earth, on its
knees in reverence to You.
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: O Master, Let Me Walk With Thee
Scripture Readings –
Old Testament: Genesis
1:1-5
In the beginning when God created the heavens and the
earth, 2the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of
the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
3Then God said, “Let there be
light”; and there was light. 4And God
saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the
darkness. 5God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning,
the first day.
New Testament: Mark
1:4-11
4John the baptizer appeared in
the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of
sins. 5And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people
of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river
Jordan, confessing their sins. 6Now
John was clothed with camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and
he ate locusts and wild honey. 7He
proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not
worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. 8I have
baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
9In those days Jesus came from
Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. 10And
just as he was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and
the Spirit descending like a dove on him. 11And a
voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well
pleased.”
Sermon
–
(based
on Mark 1:4-11)
Ann Patchett’s
first novel was called, The Patron Saint of Liars, written in 1992. The story is mainly about Rose Clinton and
her daughter Cecilia, who live at Saint Elizabeth’s Home for Unwed Mothers in
Habit, Kentucky. Rose is the cook and Cecilia
is the darling of the place, petted and mothered by all the young women who
will give their own babies up for adoption.
One May day when she is fifteen years old, Cecilia meets one of the new
girls who has come to Saint Elizabeth’s.
Her name is Lorraine. She is
skinny, with a head of red curls, and she is about to have a nervous breakdown
while she waits to be interviewed by Mother Corrine, the nun in charge of the
house. Cecilia decided to help her out
by giving her some advice.
“The guy who
got you pregnant,” she tells Lorraine.
“Don’t say he’s dead. Everybody
does that. It makes Mother Corrine
crazy.”
Lorraine
sits on her hands and is quiet for a minute, “I was going to say that,” she
says.
“See?”
Cecilia answers knowingly.
“So what do
I tell her?”
“I don’t
know,” Cecilia says. “Tell her the
truth. Or tell her you don’t remember.”
“What did
you tell her?” Lorraine asks and Cecilia is speechless. “I sat there absolutely frozen,” she wrote
later. “I felt like I had just been
mistaken for some escaped mass murderer.
I felt like I was going to be sick, but that would only have proved her
assumption. No one had ever, ever
mistaken me for one of them, not even as a joke. The lobby felt small and airless. I thought I was going to pass out.”
It was not
that she disliked the women who came to St. Elizabeth’s Home. She had grown up with them. She was friendly and helpful and gave them
good advice. She just never expected to
be mistaken for one of them, because in her own mind she was of another order
of being. She was a virgin, and she
thought it was something anyone could see.
But the
truth is, what is “them”. We are all
“them” in some way or another. We all
fall short of what God intends for us, all of us are sinners; every last one of
us. Every single one of us has committed
sins against God, against neighbor, against ourselves.
However,
just because we haven’t made a particular mistake, or committed a particular
sin, makes us feel (sometimes) that we are better than others. Just because we have asked God for
forgiveness, does not take away the fact that we are still less than perfect
beings.
Today, in
the liturgical calendar, we celebrate the Baptism of our Lord, Jesus
Christ. And an opposite kind of thing
happened on the day that Jesus showed up at the Jordan to be baptized by John. The place was teeming with sinners – faulty,
sorry, guilty human beings – who hoped against hope that John could clean them
up and turn their lives around. Some
were notorious sinners, and some were there for crimes of the heart known only
to themselves, but not a single one of them had illusions of their own innocence. They had come for the specific purpose of
being made clean. They knew they were
not free of sin.
Then Jesus
showed up and got in line with them. No
one knew anything about him yet. In
Mark’s gospel, there are no accounts of Jesus’ birth. His life begins with his baptism, so the
crowds did not part when he appeared. He
simply took his place in line and waited his turn, but later, after the heavens
were torn apart and the voice from heaven made clear who he was, there was a
lot of controversy. And in the
theological debates, centuries later.
What was he doing in that crowd of sinners, looking and acting like one
of them? What did he have to be sorry
about, and why was God’s Beloved submitting himself to his scruffy cousin,
John?
The Christian
Church has never been comfortable with the baptism of Jesus. In fact, it is one of the Sundays that I
least like to preach on. Just compare
the accounts of it in each of the four gospels and you cannot miss the un-ease
of even the authors. Matthew elaborates
on Mark’s story by adding that John tried to talk Jesus out of being baptized,
Luke will not even come out and say that it was John who did the baptizing, and
in John’s gospel, he is the most ticklish about it of all of them. In it, the gospel writer, John, bears witness
that he saw the Spirit descend like a dove upon Jesus, but he doesn’t really
mention anything about an actual baptism - at all.
If Jesus had
had a group of public relations people who gave advice about his ministry, he
would have been more like Cecilia wanted to be – a friend to sinners, a kind
and loving helper, but never mistaken for one of them. Jesus’ handlers would never, ever have
allowed him to be baptized. He could
have stood on the shore and offered words of encouragement to those going into
the water, yes. He could have held out
his hand to those who struggled out of the river in their heavy wet clothes,
yes, but he could not under any circumstances have gone into the water himself,
unless it was to tap John on the shoulder and say, “Hey, you go rest and I’ll
take over for a while.”
Public
Relations-wise, to be baptized in the river by John, if he was truly the Son of
God, was ruinous to his reputation. Who,
then, was going to believe that he was without sin? Who, then, was going to believe that he was
there just because he cared about those people and refused to separate himself
from them? Gossip being what it was, who
was not going to believe that he was so pure and perfect; God’s chosen beloved,
if he had to be washed of his sins in baptism.
So, do you
see the problem? We spend a lot of time
in the church talking about God’s love for us sinners, but we sure do go to a
lot of trouble not to be mistaken for one of them. Guilt by association and all that. Only Jesus, again and again in the gospel
accounts, did not seem too overly concerned about being associated with such
lowlifes.
Having just
celebrated the birth of Jesus at Christmas, Emmanuel, God-with-us, a month ago,
we too quickly forget that God-with-us includes being with us in the river, in
the flesh, in the sorrow of repentance and in the joy of new life. So, what if he did not have anything of his
own to be sorry about, to ask forgiveness for?
Jesus just wants to be with us and to give us encouragement and to know
our sorrows and our repentance.
Particularly
on Sunday mornings when we confess our sins, we do not simply confess our
personal sins. We pray and talk to God
about the sins of all humanity – all the things we, as a people, have done and
failed to do, all the ways we have fled from the love of God because we are
afraid to be seen, known, and changed.
And when we
celebrate the gift of new life, we do not do it simply for ourselves; we do it
together. This is one of the reasons why
I’m not particularly fond of live-streaming worship and have adopted this
hybrid method. Worship is an act for all
of us to engage in. It is not something
to simply sit back and watch. Even if we
are doing it separately from our homes, it is an act of engaging in worship,
together.
We say our alleluias on behalf of all those who have
discovered hope in the midst of despair, light in the midst of darkness, life
in the midst of death. Nothing we do is
a private matter between us and God.
Like Jesus in the water, this is something we do in union with one
another, together. When we read the Call
to Worship, when we pray the Prayer of Confession, we aren’t having it done for
us – we know that we are raising our voices with other voices, together.
So, as we
celebrate the Baptism of the Lord this Sunday I’d like for us to also renew our
own baptismal vows. My bet is that most
of you, if not all of you were baptized when you were infants and do not
remember the experience of the minister pouring water on your head. But, in the course of your life, you have
probably participated in the baptism of others by watching and praying with the
families who bring their loved ones to our Baptismal Font.
Each time we
celebrate baptism together we renew the vows we made or those that our parents,
grandparents or guardians made on our behalf and that were confirmed and
completed by us when we joined a church.
(If it’s possible, dip your fingers in the water that
you’ve set aside this morning and touch the water to the back of your hand or
on your forehead – some place where the water touches your skin.)
This is what we reaffirm each time a new child of God comes
to the Baptismal Font in front of the assembly of the faithful.
“Just as the body is one and has many members, and all the
members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized
into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free, male or female. Lead a life worthy of the calling to which
you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing
with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the
Spirit in the bond of peace.
Sisters and brothers in Christ, our baptism is the sign and
seal of our cleansing from sin, and of our being grafted into Christ. Through the birth, life, death and
resurrection of Christ, the power of sin was broken and God’s kingdom entered
our world. Through our baptism we were
made citizens of God’s kingdom, and freed from the bondage of sin. Let us celebrate that freedom and redemption
through the renewal of the promises made at our baptism.
I ask you, therefore, once again to reject sin, to profess
your faith in Christ Jesus, and to confess the faith of the church, the faith
in which we were baptized.
Trusting in the gracious mercy of God, do you turn from the
ways of sin and renounce evil and its power in the world?
Do you turn to Jesus Christ and accept him as your Lord and
Savior, trusting in his grace and love?
Will you be Christ’s faithful disciple, obeying his Word
and showing his love?”
Let us pray. Eternal
and gracious God, we give You thanks. In
countless ways You have revealed Yourself in ages past, and have blessed us
with signs of Your grace. We praise You
that through the waters of the sea and marsh You led Your people Israel out of
bondage into freedom in the land of Your promise. We praise You for sending Jesus Your son, who
for us was baptized in the waters of the Jordan, and was anointed as the Christ
by Your Holy Spirit. Through the baptism
of his death and resurrection You set us free from the bondage of sin and
death, and give us cleansing and rebirth.
We praise You for Your Holy Spirit, who teaches us and leads us into all
truth, filling us with a variety of gifts, that we might proclaim the gospel to
all nations and serve You as a royal priesthood. We rejoice that You claimed us in our
baptism, and that by Your grace we are born anew. By Your Holy Spirit renew us, that we may be
empowered to do Your will and continue forever in the risen life of Christ, to
whom, with You and the Holy Spirit, be all glory and honor, now and
forever. AMEN.
Friends, as
we contemplate our oneness in Christ, we recognize that we all fall short of
the glory of God, but in that fall, we land in the gentle arms of Christ who
claims us as His own, who knows all of our shortcomings and understands, who
went down into the waters with us and brought us back up renewed and
remade. God also empowers us through the
Holy Spirit to try one more time to overcome those mistakes, to learn from them
and to be holy.
Being
renewed and cleansed in the waters of Baptism we claim all that Christ did for
us, we claim it for ourselves and we claim it as a community for one
another. Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Hymn: Take My Life
Benediction
God is Lord over the waters and rules forever. May the God who reigns over all creation give
us strength and bless us with peace. AMEN.
Here is the article
from Presbyterian Outlook I mentioned at the beginning of this worship page.
On Epiphany, January 6, a
day rightly dedicated to the discovery of the Christ-child, our national
identity, trust and conscience were simultaneously exposed and violated by the
tragic violence at our Capitol.
In response, I have been
asked to write a prayer from a purple church. That is a prayer from a congregation where
liberal people, conservative people and people somewhere in between worship,
pray and serve their neighbors together.
My wife (a teacher
teaching from home), our teenage children (learning from home) and I (working
from home) watched the events necessitating this prayer in real time like many
of you. There is no gray area when
violence begins, no gray area when hatred is on display. We found ourselves lamenting in real time. On occasions of lament, it is right to pray. And while prayer alone is not all the work to
do, it is a faithful place to start.
O Lord, hear our prayer:
Dismay. Shock. Lament.
How did it come to this?
Almighty God, we confess
the sins of the worst parts of our history.
We ask that your
Holy Spirit guide us toward a deep repentance.
We confess that too often
we have relied upon temporal promises which come and go with every news
cycle.
Instead, help us to rely
upon Jesus. Jesus who calls us to love. Jesus who offers grace. Jesus who offers mercy.
We remember your promises
of restoration and covenant, and we call upon them now.
We pray that the Holy
Spirit will bring a newfound peace to our land. A surprising peace, yes. But a deeply needed one. Peace to heal wounds. Peace to end a time more defined by outrageous
rhetoric than by acts of kindness.
We remember the warnings
of Jesus about violence begetting violence:
Save
us from further acts of political and racial violence.
Save
us from mistrust, chaos, and injustice.
May the coming days be
ruled by truth, goodness and integrity.
From sea to shining sea,
from small town streets to the halls of power, help each and every one of us to
walk in the manner of Jesus Christ.
We offer this prayer in
Jesus’ name. Amen.
by Christopher Edmonston,
pastor at White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, North Carolina
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