Click Here, when highlighted for the YouTube link later today.
Worship
Service for March 13, 2022
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: O come, let us sing unto the Lord.
P: Let us make a joyful noise to the rock of
our salvation!
L: Let us come into God’s presence with thanksgiving.
P: Let us make a joyful noise to the Lord
with songs of praise!
L: O come, let us worship and bow down,
P: Let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!
L: For we are the people of God’s pasture –
the sheep of the Lord.
P: O let us hear the voice of the Lord today!
Opening Hymn – Beneath the Cross of Jesus Hymn
#320/92
Prayer of Confession
Gracious God,
You are the Source and Well of Life; You call us to voice the confessions of
our hearts to You. And so we confess: in
our desperate need, we have settled for wells that often run dry. We thirst and try to quench that thirst with
that which does not satisfy, all the time forgetting that You’ve offered us
living water. Our souls are thirsting;
give us this water, so that we may never be thirsty or keep going to other
wells do draw that which will not satisfy our thirst. Have mercy on us, O God, according to Your
steadfast love. Restore to us the joy of
our salvation. (Silent prayers are
offered) Together, we ask in
Christ’s name. AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Hear the Good News! “God so loved the world that He gave His only
Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish buy may have eternal
life. Indeed, God did not send the Son
into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved
through Him.”
P: Praise be to God for His love and His mercy.
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
Choir: My Lord, My Love is Crucified
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
Loving God, in Jesus Christ you have shown us compassion,
accepted us unconditionally, and given us a new set of values to embrace. Help us to live in accordance with your will
and aspire to be Christ-like in our relationships. Guide us in paths that lead to life and the
peace that only you can give. For
without your grace and guidance, we are lost.
Healer of our every ill,
through the power of your Spirit and the words of your Son, you bring life to
the lifeless and hope to the hopeless.
You know our deep hurts and our needs – those things that drain life
from our bodies and souls. Stir us by
your Spirit, that we may be strengthened in body. Blow through us with your Spirit, that our
souls may be new.
Even as we seek your healing
and life-giving power, we lift up those whose weakness brings them to
despair. We entrust to you those who are
sick and dying; the homeless and those living in poverty; those without work
and without food; those living in constant fear of persecution and oppression,
particularly in other lands; those who live with the constant companion of
violence and conflict.
We pray most especially today for….
There are inner voices too deep for words, Lord, hear us as our spirits speak to your Spirit in this moment of silence…
As you have extended your
life-giving Spirit and wind upon creation from the beginning, continue to blow
a fresh breath of life into your people as 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 – O
Sing a Song of Bethlehem #308/291
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Genesis
15:1-12, 17, 18
Second Scripture Reading – Luke 13:31-35
Sermon
Jesus, the Mother Hen
(based on Luke 13:31-35)
Luke,
our gospel writer for today, knew how to tell a story. But these few verses in chapter 13 are a
little quirky. Before we look at the
foxes and hens in the story, we should probably think about the entire content
of the chapter itself. On the one hand
he issues warnings about the doors of the kingdom shutting down on you at a
moment’s notice and on the other hand he seems to say that the kingdom of God
is wide open, on the move, as huge as a giant mustard tree and as pervasive as
the presence of yeast in a bowl of dough.
Luke offers us fig trees that get a second chance and people coming from
all points of the compass to sit at God’s banquet table. But, then again, we’ve got someone knocking
and pleading at the door only to be refused to be heard from the master of the
house whose door simply will not open for certain people. And finally, we come to today’s passage where
some Pharisees, Pharisees of all people, seemingly trying to protect
Jesus, which elicits from Christ these odd statements about today and tomorrow
and the next day, gathering up chicks against the fox.
Maybe
this back and forth in the 13th chapter with its variety of parables
and odd conundrums is because the kingdom of God is both mysterious and
practical, wonderful and everyday all at the same time. Maybe we get too hung up and obsessed with
trying to figure out the logic and require rules that make sense rather than be
in awe of the fig tree that gets a second chance over and over again or the
miracle of something called yeast that allows the dough to rise, or more than
all the rest of it the beauty of God’s banquet table and all the people who
will sit there one day; the colors, ethnicities, languages, and variety that
have created every person on the planet.
More and more I am convinced that we
miss something vital in our Christian journey and to our faith when we insist
on approaching God only as individuals.
Our individual relationships with God are very important, but they do
not make us the body of Christ. It’s our
life together that makes us Christ’s body, a mysterious organism that is much
more than a collection of individuals.
When we come together to worship, we form a new being with a name and an
address, which has its own life and reputation.
We call it the church – not the building but the people – a phenomenon
that has been around longer than any of us.
When you or I identify ourselves as members of the church, we get credit
for things we did not do.
We
may also get blamed for things we did not do, but the point is, the church is
more than its individual members. We
have a community identity and a community mandate. We stand for something, which it behooves us
to recall from time to time. Do we, as a
body, resemble Christ or have we taken on the characteristics of someone
else?
In
the thirteenth chapter of Luke you can hear the kind of anguish we cause Christ
when we do that. “
At
risk to his own life, Jesus has brought the precious
In a contest between a fox and a
chicken, whom would you bet on?
Although
I’ve never been there, I’ve read that in the Holy Land of Israel, there is a
small chapel on a hill opposite Jerusalem, built on the spot where tradition
holds that Jesus wept for the city. The
wall behind the altar is made out of glass, giving visitors a splendid view of
the skyline of
A
rooster? That’s the question I thought
when I saw a picture of it. But, Jesus
didn’t say rooster. Jesus said hen, but
I think I know why the artist took liberties with the text. A rooster can defend himself and the entire
flock. He has sharp spikes on the back
of his feet that work like little stilettos on anyone who bothers him. A rooster can also peck pretty hard, and he
doesn’t wait for you to peck first. If
you’ve ever tried to get eggs from a hen house with a rooster on the loose,
then you know what I mean. They can be
pretty nasty.
And
yet, Jesus didn’t liken himself to a rooster in this text. He likened himself to a brooding hen, whose
chief purpose in life is to protect her young, with nothing more than a beak
and nothing at all in the way of talons.
About all she can do is fluff herself up as big as she can and sit on
her chicks, hiding them away from predators.
She can also put herself between them and the fox, as ill-equipped as
she is. At the very least, she can hope
that she satisfies the fox’s appetite so that he leaves her babies alone.
How
do you like that image of God? If you’re
like me, it’s fine in terms of comfort, but in terms of protection it leaves a
little something to be desired. When the
foxes of this world start prowling really close to home, when you can hear them
snuffling right outside the door, then it would be nice to have a little bigger
defense budget for the hen house.
Unfortunately, we’re seeing this very scenario play out in real life
right now between Ukraine and Russia.
When I read today’s passage, it was all I could think about and really
couldn’t get passed it very much.
A
number of years ago, I used this illustration from a Clint Eastwood movie, Pale
Rider, about a group of clergy in the Atlanta area who were sent invitations to
a special preview of the movie. The
person telling the story went, wondering what in the world this movie had to do
with the church. As it turned out, Clint
played a frontier preacher with a past.
What kind of past was never clear, but he walked around in a clerical
collar looking deeply pained, and once when he took his shirt off you could see
the scars of three old bullet holes in his back.
One
day he rode into a mining town where the corrupt sheriff was in cahoots with a
bunch of armed bullies who were always taking things that didn’t belong to them
and then killing anyone who got in their way.
At first Clint just took it all in, getting clear who the foxes were and
where their lair was.
Then
one day he calmly walked into the bank and produced the key to a safe deposit
box (perhaps a clue to his past, in that very town!) Alone in the vault, he pulled the box from
the wall and opened the lid. Inside was
a pair of six shooters and a belt full of bullets. Clint carefully took it out and strapped it
around his waist. Then he took off his
clerical collar and put it in the box while all the clergy in the audience went
wild. Yes!!! Go get ‘em, Clint! Gun down those foxes and nail their tails to
the wall!! Which is exactly what he did,
to the great satisfaction of everyone in the theater.
Well,
that was Clint Eastwood, but Jesus was Jesus.
He too bore old scars on his body.
He too meant to protect the chicks from the foxes, but he would not
become a fox himself in order to do it.
He refused to fight fire with fire.
When Herod and his bullies came after Jesus and his brood, he didn’t
produce any six shooters to stop them in their tracks. He just put himself between them and the
chicks, all fluffed up and hunkered down like a mother hen.
It
may have looked like a minor skirmish to those who were there, but that contest
between the chicken and the fox turned out to be the cosmic battle of all time,
in which the power of tooth and fang was put up against the power of a mother’s
love for her chicks. And God bet the
farm on the hen.
Depending
on whom you believe, she won. It didn’t
look that way at first, with feathers all over the place and chicks running for
cover. But as time went on, it became
clear what she had done. She had refused
to run from the foxes, and she had refused to become one of them. Having loved her own who were in the world,
she loved them to the end. She died a
mother hen, and afterwards she came back to them with teeth marks on her body
to make sure they got the point: that the power of foxes could not kill her
love for them, nor could it steal them away from her. They might have to go through what she went
through in order to get past the foxes, but she would be waiting for them on
the other side, with love stronger than death.
With
so many stories that have been in the news the past few years; we know that
there are a lot of foxes out there just waiting, prowling, stalking. Even good clergy people want them to pay for
their sins, as they did when Clint Eastwood went after the bad guys. But…that’s not what this story in Luke tells
us. God has a different way of dealing
with foxes in the end.
I’ll
use the words of Ukraine’s own president, Volodymyr Zelensky to sum up today’s
lesson from Luke:
“God
sees everything and answers in such a way that you cannot hide. There is no such a bunker, where you can hide
from God’s answer. Even if you destroy
all our Ukrainian cathedrals and churches, you will not destroy our faith! Our sincere faith in Ukraine and in God!”
When
the enemy is at the door, may we, as the body of Christ, also have such
faith. The eyes of the world are
watching.
AMEN.
Offertory
Doxology
Prayer of Dedication
Your gifts to us are abundant,
O God. You give light and life to your
people, strengthening us for your mission in this world. Receive from us, we humbly pray, these
offerings, that they may be used to both serve you and establish your will
within the body of Christ. We pray in
the name of your Son, Jesus. AMEN.
Closing Hymn – In the Cross of Christ I
Glory Hymn #85/328
Benediction –
And just
like Chapter 13 of Luke offers paradoxes in parable and story, I offer you
today’s Charge and Benediction: May God continue to shelter us beneath His
wings like a mother hen, protecting the Body of Christ from the foxes of this
world. Also, go from this place of
protection, out into the world, to share God’s peace and love.
Postlude
No comments:
Post a Comment