Worship
Service for December 4, 2022
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: We hear the promise of the coming of Jesus
into a manger and into our hears and homes.
P: Bless our Advent waiting;
L: Fill our worship with anticipation of Your
love.
P: Help us prepare Your way by lifting up the
valleys in our lives
L: and making smooth the rough places of
others.
P: Come to us, Emmanuel!
Lighting of the Advent
Wreath
Today we light the
second Advent candle, we’ll call it the Bethlehem candle. This candle is offered in honor of the
birthplace of Jesus as well as the many places where Christ is born in the
hearts of believers. While Bethlehem was
so busy with commerce that it had only a stable to offer Jesus, let our
Bethlehem be places of warmth and welcome.
Prayer:
Dear God, who comes to
us through Jesus at Bethlehem, enable us to open our hearts so that we might
have Christ in us. We give You thanks
for the places where we meet Him. AMEN.
Opening Hymn – O Come, O Come Emmanuel Hymn #9/245
Prayer of Confession
Silent Word, Creative Act,
Hidden Truth, Revealed Love: we wait for You.
To be precise, we are impatient for You to come and set things
right. We are insecure with our world, fearful
of crime in the streets, and anxious about ourselves. We refuse Your guidance, but we often wish
You would act according to our plans. We
seldom pause to consider that You are waiting for us: waiting for some genuine
act of contrition; waiting for us to repent and change; waiting for us to
listen and respond with a burning passion to Your truth, Your justice, and Your
mercy Furnish us with humble hearts and
willing spirits to receive You as You come to us through all the experiences of
our lives. (Silent prayers are
offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: This is the good news in Jesus
Christ. We stand before God, not through
our own goodness, but through God’s great kindness to us. Rejoice and be glad, for God comes to you!
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
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
Almighty and merciful God we believe, despite all the strange coming
and goings of humanity, that our history belongs to you. We give thanks that your eternal purpose is
weaving its way through the events of time and space. Sometimes, O Lord, it’s a challenge to hold
on to this belief, but our confidence is in Christ, your Son and our
Savior. We believe his death and
resurrection are our confirmation that even though we can’t understand the big
picture of things, we can know history’s final outcome. Gracious God, we watch with eager expectation
for the return of Christ. Our souls buzz
with anticipation of seeing the One, face to face, who authored and sustains
the universe, the One in whom and through whom all things hold together, the
One who will one day sit in judgment. We
believe that on that last and great day all of history’s scoffers will drop to
their knees in recognition of your Son.
In this season when the
darkness is banished and the light has come, we look to you for comfort and
strength. We hand over to you the
concerns of our hearts and pray for….
Not only these do we
pray for, but we also pray for the burdens that are too difficult to share…hear
us, Lord, in this time of silence.
We pray these things because
Jesus taught us to pray 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 – Gentle
Mary Laid Her Child Hymn #27 Blue Hymnal
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Isaiah
11:1-10
Second Scripture Reading – Romans
15:4-13
Sermon –
Waiting
(based
on Isaiah 11:1-10, Romans 15:4-13)
How many of you would consider
yourself to be a patient person? Has
your patience ever been tested? How long
can you last before you can’t take it anymore and have to say something or do
something?
We don’t tend to be patient people, do
we? And yet, the Bible is replete with
stories of people having to wait and be patient. Sometimes that waiting period is short… such
as when David waited three days for a sign that all was well for him to
return. Or when Noah sent out a dove
after 7 days to see if it had found dry land.
Or when the people of Israel waited for Moses to come down from the
mountain. But sometimes that waiting period
can be long like when Abraham and Sarah waited for God to fulfill his promise
that they would have children. Or when
Anna, the prophetess, had waited 84 years to see the gift of the Messiah when
Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple for his circumcision. Or when the Hebrew people were in bondage for
500 years waiting for someone to free them from Egypt. Or in today’s account when the people of Israel
heard from Isaiah that one day a shoot would come from the stump of Jesse and become
the Messiah, the long awaited one. But
they would have to wait another 800 years for that to occur.
Are you prepared to wait that long for
something to be fulfilled?
As Christ the King Sunday rolled
around two weeks ago, a colleague in ministry wrote a sermon about the cycle we
talk about in our Creeds; birth, suffering, death, burial, and
resurrection. Think for a moment about
the words we said during the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed this morning. We believe in Jesus Christ, the only Son of
God, who was born, suffered, was crucified, died and buried; on the third day,
he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.
That is the life cycle of all living things…with hopefully, one
exception; most of us will never suffer to the extent that we are crucified,
but we do, all of us; die. Just like the
rest of it, we all go through – birth, suffering, death by some means, burial
and resurrection.
It is
part of reality. It is part of our daily
existence. All things are born, suffer,
die, and are buried, then rise again whether to life eternal or to a new form
of life on this earth.
But there’s
one part of this pattern that we fear.
And why so many of us are afraid of letting go. It’s certainly not the birth part. We celebrate new beginnings all the
time. It’s not even the suffering
part. We all know that life isn’t always
easy and that there will be moments and periods of time that are difficult. It’s not the death part either, even though
loss can be devastating and difficult. It’s
certainly not the resurrection part. As resurrection
people, we look forward to that with anticipation.
It’s
the burial part. It’s the time between
death and resurrection that we fear the most.
The deep, dark, painful time of waiting for what comes next. It is the unknown. It is the part of our worst nightmares. What if something new doesn’t happen? What if I’m stuck in this lonely pit of
isolation? What if what comes next isn’t
better than what I let go of? What if
it’s actually worse? Burial; that’s what
we’re afraid of. The grieving, anxiety
producing, waiting period of time.
That’s why we are often afraid of letting go. Because it’s the scariest part of the
pattern.
And
yet, I contend that waiting is the most necessary. To wait with faith is to acknowledge that the
waiting is not pointless. It is to
believe that the waiting will be worth it.
It’s in this period of time that new life finds root. It’s in this period of time that we become
stronger, braver, more courageous, and more whole.
Waiting
is a time to look around and recognize that all is not as it should be or could
be. Waiting is the time to lean into
these feelings of longing. It is a time
to lean into those feelings that not all is right, and that there is something
better to come. It is a time to dream;
it is a time to imagine. When we wait,
though it seems that death and suffering run rampant and unrestrained through
our world, we dream of being comforted. We
dream of being reunited with loved ones. We dream of a time when God is going to make
everything alright. To echo the words of
Isaiah, we dream of a time when God’s promise is fulfilled, when the wolf will
lie with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, that calf and the
lion together, when the cow and the bear will eat grass and their offspring
will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. When nothing will be hurt or get destroyed on
God’s holy mountain. When all will live
in safety and flourish. We dream of a
day when God will execute justice and righteousness throughout the land.
But,
how long, O Lord, how long? How long
must we wait for that?
Advent
is a time to stop and to hesitate. It is
a time to dig into the discomfort and seeming incongruities Scripture presents
to us. It is a time to linger with
questions rather than rush to answers. These
moments of delay or disruption create space to feel. In these coming weeks leading up to Christmas,
may we all pause and look around. May we
notice those things which are and those things we wish would be. Certainly, we believe in Christmas and the
theologies of Incarnation and of God’s presence with us. But we also believe in the not-yet. We hold onto those feelings of discomfort and
of doubt. We believe in Christmas, but
let us also believe in Advent. This time
of waiting and burial for the not-yet.
It is a time to let go of our fears, to let go of whatever is holding us
back from becoming. It is the time to
release what we’ve been holding onto, in order for the something not-yet to
come. Certainly, we believe in Christmas,
a time of miracles and the miraculous, the stump of Jesse to become the branch
of love, joy, peace, hope for the whole world.
It is the time of the anticipated birth of Baby Jesus. But let us also believe in Advent.
What
does it mean to believe in Advent? To
believe in Advent is to believe in waiting, to allow ourselves to be buried in
the not-yet. And may our waiting be full
of dreams for a better world, full of God’s justice and love made present to
all. It’s time to let go and WAIT for
what comes next. Amen
Offertory –
Doxology –
Holy Communion
Prayer of Dedication –
Eternal God, how majestic is
your name in all the earth. The whole
earth is full of your glory. Please
accept our humble offerings of ourselves and our resources. Please use them to herald your hope to all
persons everywhere who are living in physical, moral, and spiritual
poverty. Bless our gifts this day, O
Lord. AMEN.
Closing
Hymn – O Little Town of Bethlehem Hymn
#44/250
Benediction –
Postlude
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