Join us for in person worship at Olivet, West Elizabeth, at 9:45am or at Bethesda, Elizabeth at 11:15am. Or you can find us livestreaming on Facebook Live at 11:15am. Currently, this has been through my personal Facebook page, Walter Pietschmann, but will migrate to its own site in the next few months. Same with this blog, which may move to its own dedicated site for the two churches.
Stay tuned.
Worship
Service for June 18, 2023
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Raise your voices in response to God’s
goodness.
P: We praise You, O Lord, for all the
blessings You have given to us.
L: Lift your hearts in sweet surrender to
God’s mercy.
P: We thank You, O Lord, for hearing the
prayers of our hearts.
L: God is good; Praise be to God!
P: The love and mercy of God never ends.
Opening Hymn – This is My Father’s World #293/143
Prayer of Confession
We confess, Merciful God, that
our lives are burdened by the weight of our sinfulness. We are overwhelmed by the things that we
cannot accept and by the expectations that others have for us. We have hurt others by what we have said and
not said. We have wounded our sisters
and brothers with deeds done and left undone.
At times, we have been careless, thoughtless and unkind. We are bold to ask You to lift burdens of our
worry and guilt from our shoulders. Love
us and forgive us as we stand in your presence.
(Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: My friends, it is the one true son of God
who says, “I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance.” Look
no more to the past, but fix your eyes on the future where your Lord promises
to be with us to the very end of all things.
By grace we are forgiven people!
P: Thanks be to God!
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
Mighty and Holy God, we are thankful
for the life you have given to us and for your renewing Holy Spirit that meets
us with challenge and comfort. Thank you
for gathering us here with others who share faith with us. We pray for the community of faith, that we
may be instruments of peace on earth.
Guide our church and all believers around the world to extend the grace
of Jesus Christ through service and commitment to faith and understanding.
May You, O
Great Father in heaven, serve as a living example for fathers here on
earth. Allow them to be careful in
instruction, wise in making choices and teaching their children, and noble in
thought, word and deed. Make us mindful
of those from whom the goodness and abundance of your creation are hidden; of
those who have been dispossessed from their homes and lands; of those unable to
find food and bread. Strengthen our
hands to reach out to those living in fear and in the shadows of violence. Give us your Holy Spirit to turn our wishes
for justice into expressions of concern.
Make our prayers into efforts on our own part towards justice and grace.
We lift up
to you our requests for healing, comfort, compassion and understanding for our
neighbors and loved ones. We especially
prayer for….
And in
silence we offer up to you our deepest prayers that we cannot find words to
express. Enter, O Lord, into our hearts
and hear us…
We offer these petitions in the name of Jesus Christ, our
Lord and Savior who taught us to pray, 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 For a Thousand
Tongues to Sing #466/21
Scripture Reading(s):
Genesis
18:1-15, 21:1-7
Sermon – A Morsel of Hospitality
As you are all aware last year I took
some time off for a Sabbatical leave and began a project, perhaps even a book,
called Breaking Bread with our Ancestors: our connection to food, faith, and
family. Over the course of figuring out
what I wanted out of my Sabbatical, I knew that it was going to be steeped in
the context of food. Food has always
been my connection to story, to people, place, and culture. Food has also always been my connection to
family and even to my faith with things like our fellowship dinners, potlucks,
and Seder meals. So, I studied the
scripture passages that talk about food.
There are a lot! Did you know
that the Bible refers to food 1,207 times?
In addition, that doesn’t even include specific foods – grain is
mentioned 507 times, bread 466 times, and drink has 452 citations. As I read the stories that surrounded the mention
of food, I found that they mainly settled into a few categories. And so, I broke my Sabbatical into those various
categories. Rev. Cartus helped flesh
those out a little bit in the sermon series she gave while I was gone. And I’ll be speaking a lot more about them
over time with various examples from scripture, the stories from my own life
and in particular stories from my travels that went with them. I wrote an article in the newsletter before I
left on my Sabbatical about the categories, which has expanded a bit, but let
me remind you what they are:
Food in Abundance – when the people are
blessed with having an abundance of food, when the silos are full and the grain
stores are overflowing.
Food in Scarcity – when the people are
starving, when there isn’t an abundance of food and yet how God provides each
day.
Food in Feasting – when the people of
the Bible sat down to eat together in times of feasting and celebration.
Food in Conflict – when two people or
groups of people are in conflict with one another and how food brings them
together to resolve their issues and they leave one another in peace.
Food in Remembrance – the best example of
this is when Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper having said, “Whenever you eat
this bread and drink this cup, remember me.”
Food in Gratitude – when God gives us
the blessing of the harvest through our own labors or through the benevolence
of others.
And finally Food in
Hospitality or Generosity – when food is given to the wanderer, the
stranger, the foreigner in your midst out of hospitality and generosity.
For the purpose of
this morning, I want to concentrate on Food in Hospitality or Generosity, which
is the theme in today’s scripture passage in Genesis.
Although I only took
my Sabbatical last year, this project was long in the making, which perhaps had
its roots 15 years ago when I read Take This Bread by Sara Miles. I’ve mentioned her and her book over the
years on occasion. She had been a
journalist by trade, but had also spent time in kitchens as a cook. Let me read to you an excerpt from her book.
“Early one winter morning, I walked
into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. I had no earthly reason to be there. I’d never heard a Gospel reading, never said
the Lord’s Prayer. I was certainly not
interested in becoming a Christian…I’d passed the beautiful wooden building,
with its shingled steeples and plain windows, and this time I went in, on an
impulse, with no more than a reporter’s habitual curiosity. That morning, I didn’t even know what
Episcopal meant…or how they worshipped or what they stood for. I was there as a spectator…We sat down and
stood up, sang and sat down, waited and listened and stood up and sang, and it
was all pretty peaceful and sort of interesting. “Jesus invites everyone to his table,” the
woman announced, and we started moving up in a stately dance to the table in
the rotunda. It had some dishes on it,
and a pottery goblet. And then we
gathered around that table. And there
was more singing and standing, and someone was putting a piece of fresh,
crumbly bread in my hands, saying “the body of Christ,” and handing me the
goblet of sweet wine, saying, “the blood of Christ,” and then something
outrageous and terrifying happened.
Jesus happened to me.
I still can’t explain my first
communion. It made no sense. I was in tears and physically unbalanced: I
felt as if I had just stepped off a curb or been knocked over, painlessly, from
behind. All the way home, shocked, I scrambled
for explanations. Yet that impossible
word, Jesus, lodged in me like a crumb.
I said it over and over to myself, as if repetition would help me
understand. I had no idea what it meant;
I didn’t know what to do with it. But it
was realer than any thought of mine, or even any subjective emotion: it was as
real as the actual taste of the bread and the wine.
Ignorant about the whole historical
sweep of Christianity, I had no particular affection for this figure named
“Jesus,” no echo of a childhood friendly feeling for the guy with the beard and
the robes. If I had ever suspected that
there was such a force as “God” – mysterious, invisible, “silent as light”, in
the words of an old hymn – I hadn’t bothered to name it, much less eat it. I certainly had never considered that this
force could be identical with a particular Palestinian Jew from Nazareth. So why did communion move me?
I couldn’t reconcile the experience
with anything I knew or had been told.
But neither could I go away: for some inexplicable reason, I wanted that
bread again. I wanted it all the next
day after my first communion, and the next week, and the next. It was a sensation as urgent as physical
hunger, pulling me back to the table as St. Gregory’s through my fear and
confusion.
Just a note here: (Upon contemplation,
she’ll write much later in the book, what Sara found wasn’t just Jesus in
communion, but the whole experience; the people, the place, the stories, the
humanity and divinity of it all.) But,
here she goes on.
“I was finding the services beautiful,
with their a cappella chants, long silences, and sung prayers; church didn’t
feel as if I were watching a performance but like a whole group making
something together. The people fervently
hugged and kissed, sang and danced, and shared bread.
At St. Gregory’s there was the
suggestion that God could be located in experience, sensed through bodies,
tasted in food; that my body was connected literally and mysteriously to other
bodies and loved without reason.
(Over time) I would learn that the
early Christians worshipped in houses, shared full feasts, following Jesus’
promise that he would be among them when they ate together in his memory. They ate believing that God had given them Christ’s
life and that they could spread that life through the world by sharing food
with others in his name. That meal
reconciled, if only for a minute, all of God’s creation, revealing that without
exception, we were members of one body, God’s body, in endless diversity. At the Table, sharing food, we were brought
into the ongoing work of making creation whole.”
Her story resonated deep within me,
not because I shared her transformative story of becoming a Christian. For me, that part was exactly opposite having
grown up in the church. But I shared her
experience of finding a place of fulfillment and belonging in the church
through the sacrament of communion and the feeding of people where I truly
believe we are brought into the ongoing work of making creation whole, as she
stated.
About 4 years ago a little café opened
in the town I live in called Mediterra. The
staff wear shirts with this Bible passage on it (which is up on the screen.) Twenty years ago, Nick the owner, began a bakery
called Medittera Bakehouse and they chose this scripture passage because of the
obvious reference to bread, but also because he believes strongly in the
hospitality of Abraham referenced in this text; that we need that kind of
mentality in the world today more than ever.
Lisa, his wife said, “Being kind is easy. It costs nothing. And the lives you touch, you have no idea.”
Last summer I spent
most of July in France. After spending
time with friends in Toulouse, I headed to Avignon. It was late in the afternoon and my AirBnB
was off the beaten path rather far from Avignon, where I’d hope to spend a good
portion of my time. Avignon had been a
town mentioned in fairy tales, movies, and in a lot of my church history books
when the Papacy had moved out of Rome for about 100 years and settled in Avignon,
France. Unbeknownst to me the following
day was a national holiday when all stores, restaurants and businesses would be
closed and my hosts were leaving on their own vacation. Having settled in, I sent a message to my host
to inquire about where I could go for dinner or go shopping for some food. She sent a response back that everything was closed
for the holiday. Already feeling the
pang of hunger, I wrestled through my bag to see if there was a pack of peanuts
or something to stave off the hunger and wondered about what I’d do for food
the following day. Minutes later, my
host knocked on the door with a huge basket full of food from her garden and her
own kitchen that would provide enough food for me for at least an entire day,
if not more – a loaf of bread, various cheeses, oatmeal, rice, sweet rolls, half
of a chicken, some other sliced meats, coffee, tea, butter, tomatoes, peppers,
and various fruits. And, of course, the
basket included a bottle of wine. I
nearly wept for the abundance of it all and the generosity of my host.
While I was in Spain
last January and February, I learned about the Camino de Santiago. “The Way of St James”, as it is called, is a
pilgrimage walk that many have taken since the 9th Century from
various locations to the town of Santiago in the northern part of Spain and the
Compostela there where the bones of St. James, the brother of Christ, are said
to be buried. One of the Camino’s called
Camino del Norte, leads through the Pyrenees mountains, along the seashore,
through pastureland and sweeping scenery, through ancient towns, busy streets
as well as dusty paths. I hope to walk a
portion of it for my 60th birthday.
Two days ago, I came across this Facebook post from Rob Saldana who is
currently walking it.
“I’m currently on day
4 of (my Camino walk) and right now stopped at Larrabetzu just to eat a Clif
bar so I can make it to Bilbao. I’m
sitting in the town square. Halfway
through my bar, a woman comes to me with a huge slice of a lemon cake, and with
my broken Spanish, we engage in a short conversation and (she) asks me if I’d
like some coffee. Unfortunately, my
limited Spanish can only handle so much before she says, “bueno” (which means
good) and heads back inside her house. I
start eating the delicious cake, and she comes back out with another bigger
piece, “para luego” (which means for later).
Before I can even crank out a proper “muchas gracias,” my voice starts
breaking and I start tearing up. It’s
been such a great experience so far, and I look forward to 28ish more days of
this, but it also isn’t easy. This type
of kindness (and dare I say generosity/hospitality) and gesture just now broke
me down, in the best ways.”
In the words of Abraham,
“I will bring a morsel of bread that you may refresh your hearts.” And in Sara Miles’ words, “At the Table,
sharing food, we are brought into the ongoing work of making creation whole.”
Thanks be to God. AMEN
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Our lives are stories, Holy God, which others read. May the offerings we bring and the service we
offer enable our stories to lift the Holy Spirit into the midst of our church
and our community, so that your good news may be proclaimed and realized. May your grace pervade our work, for the sake
of Jesus Christ. AMEN.
Closing Hymn – The God of Abraham Praise
#488/23
Benediction –
You were called to be disciples; difficult, yes;
impossible, no - to bring a morsel of hospitality to the stranger and welcome
the foreigner in your midst. May God’s
Spirit fill you with knowledge and wisdom, compassion of healing ministries,
and boldness to share the good news wherever you go. Go in peace!
Postlude
No comments:
Post a Comment