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Worship
Service for May 15, 2022
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: God has made this day.
P: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
L: The God who raised Jesus Christ from the
dead raises us to new life daily.
P: Thanks be to God!
Opening Hymn – Christ is Made the Sure
Foundation Hymn #417/403
Prayer of Confession
Gracious
God, Dresser of Vines, we confess that we have been more willing to consume the
fruits of others than to bear fruit ourselves.
We have refused to give of ourselves when the harvest is uncertain. We have not been fruitful because we depended
too much on ourselves and not enough on You.
Help us, God, to be channels of Your grace, branches who feed on Your
life-giving Spirit, bearers of Your word of love and joy, in Jesus Christ, . (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: God’s love is steadfast, and God’s
faithfulness endures from age to age.
From generation to generation God has been forgiving. In the name of God, the Father, Jesus Christ,
God’s Son, and by the power of the Holy Spirit it has been declared that our
sins are also forgiven.
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
Sacrament of Baptism - for Addison Amelia Bollinger
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
Good and gracious God, we adore You and praise Your holy name. We are especially grateful for Your steadfast
love, revealed to us in the words and deeds of Jesus, Your Son. We give thanks for the disciples and all the
generations that have followed in their footsteps, faithfully carrying out the
mission entrusted to them by Christ. It
is our turn, Lord, to take that mission, to make it our own and spread Your
name, Your love, Your mercy and grace to every corner of the world. To do that, we need to start here at
home. Unite us in our commitment to
Christ. Give us the courage to venture
beyond familiar places, to see in unfamiliar faces potential friends and
neighbors. Transform our hearts and
minds so that we may be instruments of healing, comfort, and peace every day
and everywhere that You may lead us.
This morning, Lord, we
lift up to You the names of those that we hold dear to us….
Hear our hearts, O Lord, in these moments of silence as we also lift
up to You our own selves.
Lord, may Your empowering Spirit be present with all those who are in
any need this morning as we unite in prayer 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 – O
God, Our Help in Ages Past Hymn #210/686
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Psalm
148
Second Scripture Reading – Acts 11:1-18
Sermon “A
Bigger Circle”
A Bigger Circle
(based on Acts 11:1-18)
A
couple of weeks ago we had a passage from Revelation 5:11-14. The Myriads worshipped God, Christ and the
Holy Spirit. Then all of creation joined
in; all of heaven and earth, and under the earth and even all the leviathans
that dwell in the sea. Revelation 7:9
repeats the same idea.
“After
this I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could
count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the
throne and in front of the Lamb.”
These
words came from John, who had a vision about heaven and what would be
there. And in his vision, John saw that
there was such a large number of people that no one could count them, there was
so many. And surprise, surprise, they
weren’t all the same. There were people
in heaven that didn’t look like one another – there were tall people and short
people, fat people and thin people, there were people who had pale skin and
people with dark skin. Among them, they
spoke many languages, not all of them spoke Greek or Hebrew, but they spoke
Spanish and Italian, Japanese and Russian, English and Germany, Swahili and
Tlingit. They came from every nation on
earth. Currently, there are 197
countries in the world. And there were
people from every one of them in heaven.
And if you want to get really specific, every tribe was represented, as
well. So, not just every nation, but
every group of people that gathers on earth for a cause or a belief or an
interest – every tribe!
Yet,
if you recall your Old Testament history, the world was separated by language,
tribes and nations, nearly from the beginning.
Do you remember the story, from the Tower of Babel in Genesis?
So how
do we go from not understanding one another in Genesis and separating ourselves
among only people of like interests, skin colors, languages, nations, or tribes
to a vision of heaven where everyone is together?
This
passage in Acts is supposed to help show us how.
The
early church was a Jewish Church. Jesus
was a Jew, his disciples were Jews, and Jesus’ ministry had been spent among
the Jewish people. And although Jesus’
commission to his disciples in Matthew 28:19 was to “go and make disciples of
all nations,” up to this point the followers of Jesus were still mostly just Jewish.
But
now the church was beginning to see Gentiles, or non-Jews, coming to faith in
Christ, and this posed some significant theological and practical problems. For example, the Jewish Christians continued
to observe the Old Testament food laws and circumcision, and one question that
arose was should Gentile Christians observe these same laws or not. If not, how were Jewish believers to maintain
their own obedience to food laws when fellowship in Christ involved eating with
unclean Gentiles? And how would close
association with Gentile believers affect the relationship of Jewish believers
with other Jews who did not share their faith in Christ? These issues were serious
theological issues. They were not to be dealt
with lightly. The Holy Scriptures from
God had told the Jewish people that THIS, what was written in the sacred text,
was to be their law. It was to be how
they conducted themselves before their God and in life. And now, the admittance of Gentiles into the
fold of believers was threatening the very core of their beliefs.
What
we see is potential divisions emerging between Jewish and Gentile Christians.
“What
God has made sacred, you must not call profane!” With these words the Apostle Peter set off
shock waves within the early church gathered in Jerusalem. The early church that had been so united in
its common experience of the resurrection of Christ and the Pentecost
experience of the Holy Spirit is now being threatened with a theological
controversy that could bring about upheaval and division.
How
can Peter betray and abandon the sacred traditions of his people? Just like John wrote in Revelation years
later, Peter, the rock upon which Christ said he would build his church, has
had a dream. And this dream, if it was
to be taken seriously would turn upside down everything that this gathering of
Jewish Christians held dear; the laws and customs of Judaism. What is at stake here in our text from Acts is
the very future of Christianity. Would
the Jesus movement be for Jews only remaining an obscure Jewish sect never
venturing beyond the boundaries of ancient Israel? Or would the Gospel of Jesus Christ transcend
its Jewish roots and become an explosive force spreading in every direction
across the known world?
It is
remarkable that Luke, the author of Acts, is willing to show us an episode in
which schism threatened the fellowship of the very first Christians. But I think Luke wants us to see the church at
its most vulnerable moment when it was in conflict; why? Perhaps to show us that we’re no longer
talking about a religion that is separate from the conditions of the human heart. That this faith is about being real and
honest, vulnerable and compassionate – because that is who God is.
So,
here the new sect of Jewish Christians have the theological question about
whether or not a follower of Christ (A Christian) had to be Jewish. They were wrestling with the question of how
they were called to uphold all the laws and customs that Jesus and the Apostles
grew up with and practiced as faithful Jews; about what to eat and what not to
eat as laid out in scripture.
It
would be easy for us to dismiss this as irrelevant to us today, except the
first church was dealing with a profound issue that continues to grip the
church today. It is the appropriate
question of how a community of faith defines who is in and who is out; who
belongs and who doesn’t. But what do you
do when some new-fangled idea comes along, something different from the way we
were raised, something challenging to what we believe?
Or, to
put it another way: how do we know something is from the Lord or not? Let’s see what we can learn from this story of
conflict. First thing we might notice is
that the conflict itself is acknowledged. This story from Acts reminds us that sometimes
we have to talk about difficult subjects that have the potential to divide us.
The
critics within the Jerusalem church said, “Wait, hold on Peter! What are you trying to tell us?” And it’s good that they did because you can’t
just go with every new thing that comes along without questioning it. It must be tested. So, the Jewish people had their traditions. Those traditions had been practiced for
centuries. They were written in the
Sacred text as law coming directly from God.
Because of those traditions and laws, in the chaotic world of the
ancient middle east, the people of Israel were able to say this is who we are. We are not Edomites or Egyptians or Assyrians
or Phoenicians. We are the people of
Israel. This is what we have done over
centuries to define ourselves; it is our way of life. It is how we celebrate that we are a people
set apart by God. Because we believe
ourselves to be a chosen people, we seek to follow God’s ways in being careful
about what we eat and who we eat it with.
When
you have been raised this way, to believe a certain thing like this - it is not
just an opinion, or even a belief or practice. It becomes part of your very DNA. For Jews the idea of eating unclean food was simply
revolting. It brought about an
emotional, almost chemical sense of revulsion. This deep-seated feeling doesn’t easily yield
to theological arguments. You can’t
really even debate it no matter what you say or how rational you might be. A change of heart regarding a subject like
this for the Jews can only come from an even deeper place.
And
that deeper place according to our story is when one sees with one’s own eyes
the Spirit of God doing a new thing; when one sees the Holy Spirit working in
people’s lives that you might have considered unclean, outsiders, and even
worse. It is only in this way that one
is shocked into a new awareness. And that
is what happened to Peter. But notice
what happened next. Peter did not
respond to his critics with countless theological arguments. He did not angrily confront those who
disagreed with him. He didn’t engage in
an “us vs them” debate. He simply told
them a story - his story.
He
said these people came to me and invited me to go with them. And to see what their lives were like. And I went. And yes, I knew that I could be defiled by
associating with the unclean, but I went. I felt like God wanted me to go. And I saw that God’s spirit was working in
them in powerful ways. And this changed
my heart. This is my story, but it could
just as easily have happened to you. What
would you have done if this had happened to you?
This
text offers this very important clue about conflict in church. We will more likely be able to resolve our
conflicts and discern the will of God when we share our stories. Not debate. Not arguments. Not name-calling. Just, this is my story. This is what I have experienced for myself. And that’s exactly what Peter did. No one could argue against it because the
story itself wasn’t about right or wrong; it was simply a story about what
happened and what Peter did about it.
Now, there are a lot of years yet to
go between Genesis, when all of the people on earth were separated into various
tribes, and the Revelation as seen by John regarding heaven. This story from Peter, recorded in our Holy
Scriptures, is just one story about how we go from Genesis to Revelation. And that story, that quest, to be more
Heavenly, to usher in the Kingdom of God continues, even today.
Some day there will be a grand
celebration when all the Children of God sing and worship together before the
throne of the Holy One. Until that day
comes, we need to share our stories and make our circle bigger each and every
time we welcome someone to join us in telling their stories, as well.
Thanks
be to God. AMEN
Offertory
Doxology
Prayer of Dedication
We give you thanks, O God, for the blessings
of this life; for family and friends, for work and play, for health and
healing, for the good that we receive and that we also give. We praise your holy name not only with our
lips, but by returning to you a portion of the gifts that you have so
generously bestowed on us, asking you to use them to build up the body of
Christ here and to the ends of the earth. AMEN.
Closing Hymn – Immortal/Invisible, God Only
Wise Hymn #263/33
Benediction –
Today we are
sent out as Christ’s disciples, but we are also called to draw a bigger circle
and invite those in who might be elsewhere rejected. Go in peace.
AMEN.
Postlude
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