Worship
Service for December 12, 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.
·
Bible Study – Brown Bag and Bible, will meet
this Wednesday at 12:30pm for our new study of Hosea.
Christ Be Our Light - Choir
Call to Worship
L: Advent is a time to awaken our spiritual
senses.
P: We stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord,
repeat them in our day.
L: Grant us vision to behold your glory.
P: We stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord,
repeat them in our day!
L: Quiet us so we may hear your still, soft
voice.
P: We stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord,
repeat them in our day!
L: Make us vessels of your mercy, compassion,
and grace.
P: We stand in awe of your deeds, O Lord,
repeat them in our day!
L: For all of us eagerly watching for your
glory in our midst.
P: Grant that we might have the peace of Christ
as we wait, the love of Christ as we act, and the grace of Christ as we speak.
Lighting of the Advent
Candle
Opening Hymn – Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty
Gates #8 in Blue Hymnal
Prayer of Confession
Patient
Lord, forgive our lack of faith in Your loving power. We look around us and all that we see is what
we don’t have. We fail to notice the
daily blessings You lavish upon us.
Clear our blindness to the needs of others. Strengthen us and move us from lame excuses
for not serving You. Help us to truly
listen to one another, not with our pat answers ready, but with peaceful,
loving and generous hearts. Heal us and
make us ready to fully be Your disciples.
In Jesus’ name we pray. (Silent
prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Behold and believe in the wondrous power
and peace of God! It is poured out for
you and for God’s beloved world. Rejoice
in this good news for it is given especially for you.
P: Let us rejoice and be glad, for God comes
to us in peace!
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: An Advent Alleluia
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer
All praise we lift up to you, Emmanuel,
God-promised, and God with us; all praise to you in the silence and the singing
of this most sacred season. Because of
you, stars shine in our lives and our poor manger places become holy
straw. May the good tidings of peace on
earth and good will to the people of the earth be on our lips, as it was with
the shepherds and the angels. We give
you thanks that a voice cried out in the wilderness to shed light on the one
who is coming. We give you thanks for
becoming human – weak and poor, cold and lonely. As we become more human for knowing you –
more able to lift our burdens and open our doors to strangers; more willing to
believe that you are near. That we are
also the voices of one, crying out in the wilderness, shedding light onto the
one who has come! We give you thanks for
the hope of this season. For the love
which you lavished on us at Christmas.
And for the Joy we have knowing that you are indeed near. This morning we give you thanks for choosing
the low and the rejected and the broken.
Help us find mercy in our struggles and courage in the rough places and
crooked paths.
We also lift up to you this day our words of
both joys and concerns, knowing that you hear the victory of our souls and the
groaning of our hearts in those words. We pray for…
And now, O Lord, in the silence, we also pray…
Hear our prayers, O
Lord as we pray together…
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 – It
Came Upon A Midnight Clear #38/251
Scripture Reading(s):
OT – Isaiah 12:2-6
NT – Philippians 4:4-7
Sermon – The Lord is Near (based on Philippians 4:4-7)
I have to be honest; this Advent Season has been difficult for me. In my neighborhood, lights went up outside on the day after Thanksgiving. And it’s been my tradition to start to bring down all the “stuff” from our third floor – essentially our attic – to begin decorating that weekend, as well. When I first moved into our neighborhood, 14 years ago, our house was the only house on the block that had Christmas lights up outside. As the years have gone by, more and more neighbors have joined us and now most all of them have decorations and lights on outside. And this year, especially, it seemed that each yard was trying to outdo the next. There are more lights and decorations than I’ve ever seen.
But this year, I just wasn’t interested. A couple of years ago we strung lights on the
two evergreens out front and never took them down following Christmas. The trees have grown and the lights are
firmly embedded deep within the branches.
We turned them on and they now glow faintly from within and that was
about all I could muster by Thanksgiving weekend, the first week of
Advent. The second week in Advent began
and I half-heartedly roped Tyler and Walter into bringing down just a few
things. But my heart really wasn’t in
it. The first couple of boxes I opened
were my sister’s tree and her ornaments and the tears started to flow.
Christmas was always a magical time in our household, as
I’m sure it was for many of you, as well.
We generally put up our tree and decorated the house on the same weekend
as our Advent Workshop at church. The
workshop was generally held on the first Sunday of Advent for everyone – both
adults and children. Each member of the
family would sign up for a different Advent Craft class. We’d gather in the social hall for a light dinner,
sing a few Christmas Carols and off we’d go to create some new age- appropriate
Christmas ornament or decoration for our homes.
Our Christmas Tree always went up the Saturday before the
Workshop. We’d leave early in the
morning and go to Featheroff’s Tree Farm, cut down the fattest, roundest tree
we could find. Dad would hack away at it
in the garage to get it to fit into the stand.
Mom and my sister and I would check the Christmas lights to make sure
they’d all work, sometimes spending a ridiculous amount of time changing
bulbs. We’d bring the tree in from the
garage and set it up in the large picture window in our Living Room so that the
lights from the tree would shine brightly from the front of our house. And we would decorate the tree with handblown
glass ornaments only from West Germany at the time which my Mom had started to
collect when my parents were first married.
Mom did most of the decorating allowing my sister and I to carefully
hang a few.
One year, coming home from the Advent Workshop as we were
driving up the road, the picture window was dark. No lights shone brightly in the window and
someone asked, “Did somebody turn off the Christmas Tree lights before we
left?” (Yes, I know you probably
shouldn’t leave the house with your Christmas tree lights on. But we did, all the time. And I still do.)
Well, nobody admitted to having unplugged the tree. The most logical conclusion was that the
lights were off because multiple bulbs had burned out and we were all thinking
of the hours ahead of us to try and figure out which ones were bad. As we walked by the front window of the
porch, not only were there no lights on from the tree, but there was also no
tree in the window.
What we found when we entered the house and turned on the Living
Room lights was that the tree had fallen over and lay on the floor with
scattered Christmas ornaments everywhere.
Miraculously, not a single handblown glass ball had broken.
Over the years, all of us – Mom, Joy, and myself had
continued the tradition of buying only handblown glass ornaments, now mostly
made in Germany or Eastern Europe like Poland and Slovenia. Years ago, when Mom stopped putting up a
large tree, she gifted her entire collection to my sister and me. And now I have them all; Mom’s, Joy’s and my
own. It’s enough to completely fill
three trees and so, that’s what I did.
Although my heart wasn’t in it last weekend, I
decorated. There’s a tree in the Parlor,
a tree in the Living Room, and a tree in the Dining Room. And yesterday, I put up the last tree, a
fourth and final one, out on the front porch full of nutcrackers I’ve
collected.
As I hung each ornament the tears flowed as I remembered
Christmas’s of the past. One year we
eschewed our normal traditions altogether and rented our favorite cabin at
Mountain Springs Lake in the Poconos and had Christmas with a much smaller tree
decorated with strung popcorn and cranberries and decorated milkweed pods and
pinecones. We attended a small local
church on Christmas Eve and opened the gifts that somehow Santa had found a way
to deliver to us on Christmas morning while we sat around the fire sipping hot
chocolate. It was one of the more
magical Christmases I remember.
And two years ago, the last Christmas we would spend
together, we all went to my sister’s.
She was so excited to have us all there for the first time – to be the
host, to cook the Christmas dinner, to show off all her own decorations. Joy was an enormous gadget/widget type of
person and every light, every piece of electronics, was on some kind of timer
or worked by remote. She was like a
little kid as candles, the Christmas tree, her porch and other display lights,
and various pieces of electronics popped on and off at her whim.
Tears flowed as I hung a favorite ornament from childhood,
or placed my sister’s wreath on my front door, or redecorated a lighted bush
that had been hers, but was decked out in pink and purple – not really my
colors; asking for her forgiveness as I covered it in red and gold.
And there were some things that I just couldn’t bear to do
like hanging up her stocking. I simply
put it back in the box after my 100th bout of tears that day.
Advent is a time of preparation, a time of watching and
waiting. And every year we anticipate
the Hope, Love, Joy and Peace to be experienced at Christmas. But, for various reasons, Christmas for some
can be a time of deep weariness. It can
magnify loss. It can turn twinkling
lights into a glaring reminder of what used to be, but no longer is. It can be a sad reminder of those who used to
sit at the table with us and whose stockings will be forever empty.
Today’s scripture reading for Advent from Philippians says
for us to rejoice. Many of us will have
a hard time rejoicing, whether it’s because we have recently lost someone or
we’re remembering those whom we lost years ago.
When I first read this passage, I was quite frustrated with what I could
possibly say this morning that would, at least, sound uplifting, even if my own
heart was not rejoicing.
So, I kept reading this passage over and over wondering
when that rejoicing would start – thinking of others who have also lost loved
ones; mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, and children. But Paul doesn’t just tell us to rejoice, he
says something more. He says, “Let your
gentleness be known to everyone. The
Lord is near.”
“Gentle Mary laid her child, lowly in a manger”. The gravity of it all hit me remembering
these words from that hymn. Mary sang
about her own son’s birth and she knew that he had come to save the earth. She knew from the beginning what cost she
would bear and yet in her gentleness she welcomed shepherds and angels and
foreign wisemen from the east. In her
gentleness she found peace in laying the child in a manger, this same child who
would one day be crucified. In her
gentleness she would find comfort in knowing only one thing; that the Lord is
near. He was near when she was a child. The Lord was near when the angel came to her
to say that she had found favor with God. The Lord was near when she, an unwed young
woman, became pregnant. The Lord was
near when Joseph agreed to be her husband and father to her child. The Lord was near in the stable where she
gave birth. The Lord was near as she
placed him in the manger. The Lord was
near as he grew to adulthood. The Lord
was near as she watched him grow and teach, heal, and bring others back to the
ways of God. The Lord was near when he
died a cruel death. The Lord was near in
her heartache and pain. The Lord was near
when she took her own last breath and joined him in heaven.
The Lord is near in all our joys and in all our sorrows.
Whether this Christmas season comes to you with ringing
bells and happy Alleluias or if it comes to you with a weary heart and soul, may
the gentleness of Mary be with your spirit and allow you to fully experience
the joy in knowing that the Lord is indeed near, wrapping you in everlasting
arms of comfort and strength.
Thanks be to God.
AMEN.
Offertory
Doxology
Prayer of Dedication
O Gracious God, bless our
offerings this day that it may reach and touch those who hunger, who hurt, who
seek new hope. We dedicate our lives and
all that we have to the work of life, of love, of peace. Receive these, our gifts in joy, and lead us
in wisdom and courage. AMEN.
Closing Hymn – Joyful, Joyful We Adore You #271 Brown Hymnal
– 2 verses
Benediction
Postlude
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