Worship
Service for November 14, 2021
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Prelude
Announcements:
·
You can join us for in-person worship at Olivet
Presbyterian Church in West Elizabeth, PA at 9:45 or at Bethesda United
Presbyterian Church in Elizabeth, PA at 11:15.
·
Our West Elizabeth Food Bank at Olivet Church could
use some additional helpers on Tuesday, November 16 from 10:30am-2:30pm
·
Bible Study – Brown Bag and Bible, meets on Wednesdays
at Bethesda at 12:30-1:30pm. Bring your
lunch and join in some learning and great conversation.
·
Bethesda will hold their Christmas Flea Market
on Saturday, November 20 from 8am-2pm.
Soup-to-Go will also be sold by the quart on a first come, first serve
basis with lots of various types available.
·
Communion will be celebrated at both churches
on the First Sunday of Advent, November 28.
Call to Worship
L: Great is the Lord and greatly to be
praised!
P: Each day God brings to us new
opportunities to learn and grow.
L: God is near to all of us.
P: We will not fear to call upon the Lord.
L: Come, let us praise God who walks with us
daily.
P: Let us open our hearts and spirits to God
who loves and lives with us.
Opening Hymn – His Eye is on the Sparrow #screen/624
Prayer of Confession
Faithful
God, we come before You with many concerns on our hearts. We get frustrated and angry at the way things
are going in the world. We want Your
immediate intervention; and when we don’t see things happening the way we think
they should be, we are quick to dismiss You and any thought of Your
presence. Help us stop our selfishness
and our quick anger. Remind us that You
will work with us and through us for peace and hope. Release us from the traps of quick tests of
Your faithfulness and help us see the “big picture” of Your awesome love that
spans all of time. Forgive us for our
pettiness and our stubbornness. Bring us
back to You, O Lord. Help us shout Your
praises and live lives of joyful service.
For we ask these things in Jesus’ name.
(Silent prayers are offered)
AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Even though we get frustrated and angry,
God still love us and seeks to heal us.
Open your hearts to receive God’s blessings and to feel God’s healing
power in your lives..
P: Thanks be to God. 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
Choral Anthem: His Name Is Wonderful
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
As we gather in prayer
this day as a community of your people, O God, we pray for thankful hearts for
the goodness of your creation, for the signs of your loving care of all things
we see around us daily, and for the calling into a community of the followers
of your son, Jesus Christ. We give you
thanks for his teachings, his compassionate words of care, his challenges to
all the ways we focus on self-centeredness and self-sufficiency, for his
healing presence and for his courageous witness against the powers of this
world that focus on destruction, hatred, and death.
Creator God, you draw
all people into one body so that we may learn the precious connectedness of
your universe. You invite us to nurture
each other, to trust each other, to empower each other, to unbind each other,
to encourage one another, so that together we will be a strong and healthy
body.
Holy Lord, empower us to be more faithful and diligent in
spreading your good news of peace, love, hope, and grace in our world. Give us boldness and courage to speak and act
against the principalities and powers of this age that fill the world with
injustice and acts of violence.
We pray for the people of the world. Cover your creation, Lord, with compassion
and care.
We also pray for our own loved ones….
O Lord, hear the words of our mouths and now in silence
hear also the words of our hearts.
We pray all these things together 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 – A
Mighty Fortress Is Our God #260/151
Scripture Reading(s):
OT – Psalm 16
NT – Mark 13:1-8
Sermon –
Rumors
of War
(based
on Mark 13:1-8)
How many of you remember your Grandmother
or Grandfather say something like, “I don’t know what this world is coming to?” How many of you remember your mother or
father saying something like, “I don’t know what this world is coming to?” And how many of you have uttered that very
same phrase? Generation after generation
our ancestors have uttered that question in some form or another for eons.
As we’ve
been working through some of the minor prophets in our Bible Study series, I
can just picture Jonah saying those same words to God when God forced him to go
to Nineveh to preach. I can hear Micah
saying it out loud in the town square as well as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and
all the other prophets of God who looked around them and warned the people
about an invasion both from within and from without, or in regard to the
Hebrews’ plight when they were in exile from their homeland.
I can
imagine the Kings and Queens of Europe saying the very same thing as they looked
to the future and wondering about the ability of their children to carry on
their legacies. Adults, as they age,
rarely keep up with the pace of life or the changes that surround them coming
from the younger generations. Your
grandparents wondered about it with your parents’ generation and your parents’
generation wondered about it with your generation and you will have those same
thoughts about the generation that comes after you. It is part of the human story. The cycle that has existed for a very long
time.
And
with it come a lot of uncertainties.
Particularly about wars that have been fought since brother took up arms
against brother in the days of Cain and Abel.
They’ve been fought for a variety of reasons, some over resources, some
over greed, some over pride, and some even regarding religion. The only thing that has really changed is our
technology that allows us to kill more people more quickly.
I’d be
a wealthy preacher if I had a dollar for every time someone asked me, “Don’t you
think we’re living in the end times?” And
my initial answer is always a definitive yes, which also always seems to satisfy
them. Most often people that ask that
question want confirmation from a pastor that we are indeed living in the end
times. But they don’t always like what I
say next. “We’ve been living in the end
times since Jesus walked the earth and we have no idea when the final day will arrive.”
Jesus
gathered his disciples and began to teach them about the end of times. This section of Mark and its gospel parallels
are called “the little apocalypse” and the Book of Revelation is known as the
“big apocalypse.” To help understand the
word apocalypse, think of a pan of water with a lid on it, and the pan of water
is sitting on a stove. The word, “apo”
in Greek means lid; and “calypse” means
off. So, the Greek word apocalypse means,
“off with the lid” in order that you can see into the pan and see what is in
the pan. In Mark 13, Jesus was taking
off the “lid” to the future so his disciples could see inside the future and
what the future was going to bring. But what
was Jesus showing them about the future?
Throughout
history, there have always been “false teachers” who thought that they knew the
end of the world was coming in their lifetime and/or shortly thereafter. Every generation in history produces
“fanatics” who think they know that we are living in the “end times” or the “last
days” and they often give evidences for their beliefs, whether that evidence is
the state of affairs of the world or numbers that they’ve crunched to come up
with a specific date. In Martin Luther’s
time, the 1500’s, it was a man by the name of Melchior Hoffman who was a lay
preacher who was noted for teaching that the world would end in his
lifetime. On the eve of the Protestant
Reformation, both Italy and Germany provided fertile ground for apocalyptic
speculation. Pessimism and doom were
dominant themes of prophecy in the decades before Luther. In the year 1526 Hoffman published a detailed
pamphlet on the twelfth chapter of Daniel which proclaimed that the world would
end in seven years, which meant for Hoffman, at Easter in 1533. Then there was a German bookbinder named Hans
Nut (Yes, Nut, was his real last name) said that he was a prophet of God sent
by Christ to herald the Second Coming. And
that this would occur exactly three and a half years after the start of the
Peasant's War, in 1527. And then there
was a Bishop by the name of Frederick Nausea (yes, that also was his real
name), predicted that the world would end in 1532 after hearing a report about
bloody crosses appearing in the sky alongside a comet. Hearing all these things and knowing the
state of affairs of the world, Martin Luther, Protestant reformer, stated:
"I persuade myself verily, that the day of judgment will not be absent
full three hundred years. God will not,
cannot, suffer this world much longer.”
So, even Martin Luther had to weigh in on his own predictions of the end
times and thought that the End of the world would occur within three hundred
years. Apocalyptic doom and apocalyptic
speculation were part of the mood of enormous changes brought about by the
Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the Peasants’ War. The world was in constant upheaval during
this time period.
We
could go to more recent events such as the Great War (or World War 1, as it
became known) and World War II that followed it 20 years later.
Or we
could go to false prophets such as Hal Lindsey wrote, THE LATE GREAT PLANET
EARTH in 1971. It was THE rage of that
era, 50 years ago. That book sold over
28 million copies and was made into a movie narrated by Orson Welles. THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH interpreted the
Book of Revelation and that the Book of Revelation and the Bible specifically
prophesied about Lindsey’s time in history. And for Lindsey, the beginning of the End had begun
on May 14, 1948, when the land of Israel was officially established. By reading closely and carefully the Book of
Revelation and other similar prophecies in the Bible such as in Mark 13,
Lindsey and similar “fanatics” thought that the End was coming very soon, that
there would be a final battle of Armegeddon fought in the Middle East between
Russia and Western Europe, that Russia was “Gog and Magog,” that the ten horns
in the Book of Revelation represented the ten nations of the common market of
Western Europe, etc, etc….making parallels with the current culture of Lindsey’s
day. In their fanaticism of end of times
thought, people actually believed the contents of that book were true, that it
was an accurate interpretation of the Book of Revelation and other similar
prophecies. The popularity of the book, THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH, was so
great that you could not say a word against it, without offending the enormous
horde of true believers who believed Lindsey’s interpretation of the End
Times.
Then
in even more contemporary times, we have Tim LeHaye and his LEFT BEHIND
SERIES. LeHaye’s novels are “good reads”
of fiction and have sold nearly 25 million copies since their inception in
1995. And when you read LeHaye’s
theology on his websites on the Internet, you begin to realize that Timothy
LeHaye has simply replaced Hal Lindsey. There
is a huge market out there in America for people who believe Lindsay’s and
LeHaye’s interpretation of the End Times in the New Testament. There is a whole bunch of people out there in
America who think like Lindsay and LeHaye that the End of the World started in
1948 with the creation of the state of Israel and “things are falling into
place” in our lifetime.
Then
there was the year 2000 scare with the idea that our incredible dependence on
the computer world would cause the end of times to occur because most computers
weren’t created to be able to function after 1999 rolled around. That somehow their hard drives would go
berserk and we’d be left in a state of world panic, black-out and
confusion. Well, the year 2000 came and
went without as much as a flicker of interruption.
Then
in 2012 there was the Mayan scare. Based
on the theory that the Mayans, who were advanced astronomers and scientists in
the New World, long before their civilization was discovered by Spanish
explorers, had ended their long-count calendar on Dec. 23, 2012. No one really knows for sure why their
calendar ends on this date, but there were many theories about it. And the one enduring theory, the one that has
gotten the most attention, the one that elicits fears in people and creates
great box-office money, is the theory that the end of the world should have
occurred on that day. It didn’t
If you
look at the words Jesus uses in his talk with the disciples across all of the
synoptic gospel accounts, Jesus himself did not know when the End of the world
was coming. If Jesus didn’t know when the end of the world was coming; if
Matthew, Mark, and Luke didn’t know when the end of the world was coming, why
would Hal Lindsay know? Why would Tim
LeHaye know? How would the Mayans
know? In every generation, there are
“scare books,” that want to scare people into believing or they will be left
behind or they will burn in the fires of hell.
I honestly don’t believe that scaring someone into believing in Jesus
Christ and salvation is the message that the gospels ever wanted to portray. I don’t believe that Jesus ever tried to
scare someone into believing in him and in God.
I think that is the wrong approach to faith. In my opinion faith is built on love,
forgiveness and acceptance. It is built
on a steadfast strength, facing obstacles and the difficulties that life throws
at us with courage and triumph over tragedy.
These are the basis of faith; not scare-tactics.
We
need to look to the past and learn from history. How did the world recover from previous tragedies,
from war, from anger against neighbor?
In most cases the world recovered by realizing that we are on this
journey together and that we MUST find ways to love another, to care for each
other, to see God in the eyes of strangers and even our enemies and ask for
forgiveness and find mercy in offering it.
That is
the only way forward; yesterday and today.
May we be Christ’s ambassadors to our own world at odds with one
another.
Thanks
be to God. AMEN.
Offertory
Doxology
Prayer of Dedication
Heavenly Lord, we are indeed thankful for the
blessings You have bestowed upon us.
Grant that these offerings serve You in the building up of Your church
and Your witness to the world; that Your heavenly kingdom is near at hand
within us now and always. AMEN
Closing Hymn – O Master, Let Me Walk With Thee
#357/665
Benediction
May God bless you and keep you
today and tomorrow. May God’s mercy be
the light that surrounds any darkness, difficulty, or struggle you may
encounter this week. Go in peace, in
God’s service. AMEN.
Postlude
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