Catch us live on Facebook Live at 11:15am
Worship
Service for March 19, 2023
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: I will sing of Your steadfast love
forever, O Lord.
P: I will proclaim Your faithfulness to all
generations.
L: I will declare that Your love stand firm
forever.
P: Righteousness and justice are the
foundation of Your throne;
L: Love and faithfulness go before You.
P: Blessed are they who have learned to
acclaim You and blessed are they who walk in the light of Your presence.
Opening Hymn – The Old Rugged Cross Hymn #327 Brown
Prayer of Confession
Compassionate Lord, forgive us
when we falter on this Lenten pathway; when the road ahead seems too uncertain
and we are afraid. We admit that
following Jesus in not an easy task.
Jesus requires us to be willing to make the ultimate commitment of our
whole lives and we hesitate and hold back.
Draw us back to You, Lord. Give
us confidence and courage to face the future with hope. Let us place our trust in You that the
message of peace and mercy You have given to us through Jesus Christ may be
offered to others through our own witness to Your healing mercy. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Hear the Good News; Jesus, having been
made perfect, became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him. And so, I declare to you: in Jesus Christ, we
are renewed, we are cleansed, we are forgiven.
P: Praise God for 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
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s
Prayer
O unseen yet ever-present God, we come to you in awe and wonder. Though we cannot see you, we are surrounded by signs of your presence; in a perfectly formed daffodil, in the laughter of a friend, in the need of a stranger. Give us spiritual eyesight and insight so that we may see you at work in the world around us.
Today we pray for those in particular who are struggling
with doubt, whose faith journeys seem to be uphill battles. May they find in you a home where doubts are
accepted as acts of faith on the path toward wholeness and peace.
We also remember those who suffer in any way. We pray for the victims of abuse, oppression
and terror, those who feel helpless or deserted, those who are sick and for
their caregivers, and all those who grieve great loss. May they know your presence even when they
feel most alone.
Hear us Lord, in these moments of silence, as our hearts
and spirits pray to you….
Lead each of us, Lord, to someone in need, so that we may
show the love of Christ, who in boldness taught us to pray to you, 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 –
There is a Balm in Gilead Hymn
#394 Blue
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – I
Samuel 16:1-13
Second Scripture Reading – John
9:1-41
Sermon – A
Blind Man’s Faith Journey
As we get closer and closer to the
week of Passion, Jesus is increasingly at center stage. In today’s story, Jesus puts mud on the man’s
eyes made from the dust of the ground and his own saliva. What’s most interesting to me about this
story is that the blind man never asked Jesus to heal him. The whole group of disciples and Jesus were
just walking along and for a point of clarification, the disciples wanted to
know why this man was blind, in a cosmic sense.
Was it the man’s own sins or was it the sins of his parents that caused
it?
In all other healing stories
throughout the gospels, the person sought out Jesus for healing, waited in long
lines to be healed, sat by a pool of healing waters, pleaded with the disciples
to get close enough to Jesus, or had someone else plead their case for them,
and in one story even snuck up on Jesus unawares to touch his garment and steal
the healing power from Christ.
This blind man was simply going
about his daily life. Perhaps he didn’t
know who Jesus was. Perhaps it really
didn’t matter to him that he was blind, after all he had been blind from birth,
he knew no other way of life. No one
truly knows, but not once did anyone approach Jesus on behalf of the man and
the man himself did not seek out healing from Jesus.
But there was a lesson to be learned
in this encounter. And Jesus tells his
disciples when they ask, “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born
blind?” “No one sinned, neither this
man, nor his parents, he was born blind so that God’s work might be revealed in
him.”
For the longest time, I have always
thought that this response was about what Jesus was going to do. That through his healing of the man’s
blindness, God’s work would be revealed.
But, you know, now I see Jesus’ response in a very different way. He was born blind to be a blessing to all
those who knew him, to show God’s love to the world through a different set of
lenses. He was born blind to show that
God’s blessings to the world is not confined to an elite section of the
population who think they are normal, complete, and without disabilities.
This man was a beggar, who sat on
the streets, hoping for some kind soul to throw him a few coins. But as I have read the story over and over, I
don’t really find a beggar here. Instead
of who I think a beggar should be, I find a man of confidence. I find a man possessed of many good qualities
– not because he was suddenly healed, but the man he had always been.
Something powerful has happened to
him to be sure. He was blind and now he
sees. He does not have a clue how it
worked, what he did to get chosen, or who the man who smeared mud on his eyes
really was, but all of a sudden those are the things everyone around him wants
to know. He is suddenly besieged with
questions from every side.
How were your eyes opened? Where is the man who did it? How could he do that? What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes? And now what do you say about him, since he
has opened your eyes?
No one, not a single soul, asked him
what it was like to see for the first time in his life, or whether the light
hurt his eyes. All anybody wanted to
know was “How”, “Who”, “Where” and What”.
His
answers to these intrusive questions are timid one-liners at first. “I am the man,” he says. “I do not know,” he says. “He put mud on my eyes. I washed, now I see.” But as the questions go on and on until even
his own mother and father back quietly into the wings, the man grows both in
eloquence and in courage, finally showing everyone the kind of man that he had
always been. A man of
self-possession. A man of courage and confidence;
finally answering the Pharisees so sharply that they expel him from the
congregation.
“Here is an astonishing thing!” he
says to them. “You do not know where he
comes from, and yet he opened my eyes.
We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one
who worships him and obeys his will.
Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the
eyes of a person born blind. If this man
were not from God, he could do nothing.”
When he says that, everyone in the
room stops breathing. A nobody from
nowhere who was blind until about forty-five minutes ago just told the board of
elders that they could not see God if God bit them on the butt. And, believe me, they will not let that insult
go unreturned either. They rise to their
full height in front of him, look down their unbitten bottoms into his furious
new eyes, and say, “You were born entirely in sin, and are you trying to teach
us?” And they drive him out – out of
their presence and out of the congregation – because he has just proven himself
to be a heretic in their eyes.
He hadn’t been a beggar because he
chose that life. He hadn’t been a beggar
because he had nothing to share with the world.
He hadn’t been a beggar because he had no gifts to use for the benefit
of others. He had been a beggar because
the world around him was cruel. The
world around him refused to see the man he was inside.
But Jesus saw the man. He had
been born blind so that God’s work might be revealed through him. He had not been wallowing in self-pity,
waiting at a pool for healing when the disciples saw him and asked Jesus about
him. He had been off being about his
business, even if that business was begging in the streets. It wasn’t because he wanted to be there, he
was there because no one had ever given him a second notice or a chance to
prove who he was.
This man was born blind to show the
rest of us, how pitiful we are with our whining and complaining when life gets
a little difficult. Everyday, children
are born with disabilities. They grow to
become adults and along the way we label them.
We put them in a box and do not let them out. And we call them by their disability. Not Amy with the bright smile who laughs all
the time, but Amy with Down Syndrome. Not
Bobby who’s always willing to help and lend a hand, but Bobby in the
wheelchair. And it’s there that we
stop. We forget or worse, we refuse to
see the person who they are. Perhaps
we’ve gotten beyond calling someone with a disability a sinner, or a result of
their parent’s sin. But we haven’t
gotten much beyond that.
What is even more astonishing is
that Jesus of Nazareth sought out the man not just once, but a second
time. To the man born blind, Jesus was a
stranger. The face is new to him,
although there is something familiar about the voice. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” this
stranger asks him, which makes the man wince; great, more questions. It sounds like more of what he has just
suffered through, only the voice changes the way the words sound. The question does not sound like an
accusation this time, but like an offering.
“And who is he, sir?” the man asks
the stranger. “Tell me, so that I may
believe in him.”
“You have seen him,” the stranger
says, “and the one speaking with you is he.”
If you are a fan of mystery novels
at all, then you know what happens inside the man. There you are with just ten pages to go and
you do not have a clue – or you have all the clues, but you still don’t know
what they mean. And then comes that
moment of revelation – just the sound of a familiar voice, maybe, asking the
one question that makes sense out of all the other questions, and you know –
you know – who did it.
In revelation the man says, “Lord, I
believe,” and right then and there he worships Jesus. I don’t think this was revealed to him solely
from receiving his sight, but rather from receiving compassion. He knows deep in his soul, that this is the
man who is Lord. No one else has had
compassion for him. No one else has seen
the man inside. No one else has
understood, until Jesus.
And he says, “Lord, I believe.”
What’s so hard to remember for me is
that this confession does not take place in a church before an altar. It does not involve anyone in a clerical
collar. It is in no way sanctioned by
the community of the faithful, who have just spit both of these men out. It happens, instead, outside the bounds of
religious society, in complete defiance of its rules, as one heretic confesses
faith to another branded because he does healing on the Sabbath.
And yet, here we are now reading it
in church, claiming it as a story about us – which means, I suppose, that we
imagine ourselves in the role of the man born blind. The only problem with that reading, as far as
I can tell, is that we still have to decide who the Pharisees are, if they
aren’t us. And we don’t want them to be
us, do we?
The Pharisees are the religious
authorities who are devoted to ritual purity and the preservation of the
law. They are the keepers of the faith,
and – by extension – they are the prosecutors of those who do not keep the
faith according to their standards. So,
if you want to know who today’s Pharisees are; think of Simon Cowell from
American Idol as a religious zealot, a Pharisee, a card-carrying elder in the
church.
They were so sure of everything:
that God did not work on Sundays, that Moses was God’s only spokesperson, that
anyone born blind had to be a sinner or at least his parents must be, and ditto
for anyone who broke the Sabbath, that God did not work through sinners
or on sinners, especially on specific days of the week, and furthermore,
no one could teach them anything.
Meanwhile, the man born blind, who
was not sure about anything when questioned, showed the world the man he had
always been, the gifts of intelligence, courage, and discernment. Who also had an opportunity to experience God
like no one else had.
May this blind man’s faith journey
be a journey for us all. May we find the
courage to see the gifts in others when the rest of the world shuts them
out. May we find the intelligence to ask
the right questions and to praise God for the gifts that all people bring to
the community of faith. And may we
discern what opportunities God gives us on a daily basis to be a blessing to
others. Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
How
grateful we are, O God, for all the gifts of this life. You have blessed us with an abundance of good
things, not only fulfilling our needs, but going far beyond. May our giving today reflect your generosity,
and may it be used to further your work, both in our family of faith and
throughout our community. Through
Christ, we pray. AMEN.
Closing
Hymn – When I Survey the Wondrous Cross Hymn
#101/324
Benediction –
Go
into the world, carrying the light of Christ into the darkness. Go, with hearts full and eyes open. Go, with eyes reflecting God’s light and
hands open to share it. May you walk in
the light of Christ all the days of your life.
AMEN.
Postlude
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