Worship
Service for July 23, 2023
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: We have been called to walk the faithful
road and to choose the way of God’s justice.
P: We are here because we believe strongly
that God is good, and that we live in that goodness. We are here to proclaim our faith and to seek
direction.
L: Come, together, then, to be God’s
people. Follow Christ and listen for the
good things that God has done. Rise up
in praise and thanksgiving!
P: We will share with others the goodness
that we have found in God. May our lives
be an expression of that goodness.
Opening Hymn – Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise #263/33
Prayer of Confession
O God of love, God of power,
we have heard Your promises of abundant life and have been afraid to believe
them. We have worshiped You with our
lips but have reserved parts of ourselves for our own purposes and plans. We are bound by our need for absolute certainty
and so we often miss Your living presence in the surprises of life. Renew us by turning our trust to you again. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Even when we have been too busy to notice,
God has been constantly loving us and encouraging us to grow in the light of
God’s love. God reassures us that we are
indeed held in the forgiveness of God’s grace.
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
Gracious
God, we give you thanks for all the blessings that come from your hand,
especially for the invitation to live as your holy people, the body of
Christ. We lift in prayer today your
church, in all its various forms, as it struggles to proclaim your gracious
reign in a world dedicated to wealth and possessions. Strengthen the people of this planet for an
attitude of peace and goodwill and all who lead them. For the nations that struggle with war,
violence, and injustice, grant your full measure of peace and
righteousness.
We
especially lift up to you the people of other countries that have been torn
apart by violence, civil war, invasions, and radical ideologies that hurt and
destroy, but we also must include our own country in the midst of so many acts
of violence against one another.
For the sick and those facing death, we pray
that you send your Spirit and your people to bring comfort and hope. We pray for…
For
this congregation, as we endeavor to let Christ rule our hearts, open those
hearts that we may give and serve gladly; that the witness of those who have
gone before us is a guiding hand.
In
this time of silence, we lift our personal petitions to you…
These
and all other things You know we need, we ask in the name of Jesus as we 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 – It is Well With My Soul #705 Brown Hymnal
Scripture Reading(s):
Psalm
86
Romans
8:12-25
Sermon –
Waiting on the World to Change
(based on Romans 8:12-25)
I
think everyone would agree that American Christianity anyway, as a religious
institution, is in the midst of some type of change, perhaps it’s just the
closure of something before another Great Awakening like the one in the 19th
Century, or perhaps it’s much larger than that, even as great a change as a
total paradigm shift like the Reformation. What it looks like on the other end, no one knows. And for a lot of people, that’s the scary
part.
But
my colleague in ministry, Kerra B English wrote a sermon for today’s lectionary
passage in Romans and I was so struck by her words that I wanted to share them
with you. So, with a good deal of
editing, most of today’s sermon is from her.
To the fledgling Christian community
trying to exist in the heart of the Roman Empire, Paul writes, “I consider that
the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory
about to be revealed to us.” Really Paul? Is that all you’ve got? Just wait; it’ll get better.
Rome, the ancient powerhouse that
set a pretty good benchmark for both the incredible accomplishments and the brutal
downside of what it takes to build an Empire! If you did not have influence, or you belonged
to a fringe religious group, or you were at the bottom of the disposable
economic class, or your morals and values weren’t aligned with their preferred
hierarchical system – well, you were pretty much required to put your head down
and keep quiet. Or else. Or else, even with the citizenship status Paul
had, you might get ridiculed, shunned, arrested, or even executed as an example
to the rest of your kind.
If the revealed glory Paul writes
about is only available to us in heaven after an intolerable life here on
earth, that doesn’t make for a very generous Creator God, now does it?
Lucky for us, this Pauline sentence
has a much larger context within the letter, and it’s also quite fortunate that
Paul has this amazing imagination for seeing beyond just what happens in any
one time and in any one place. He is
locating suffering as temporally fixed – in a “this too shall pass” kind of
way. Kingdoms come and kingdoms go. You’ll personally have good days and bad. Life sucks – and then it doesn’t. Suffering is neither a preferred nor a
despised state of being. It’s just what
is. Suffering happens so that God’s glory
can be revealed. Right? There is a lot of paradoxical tension in that
concept that we need to unpack.
In other words, we can, at the same
time, feel lost in the muck of everything that’s wrong with the world AND we
can remind ourselves that God’s glory is but a blink of geological time away. Paul was both unbearably insistent about and
brilliant in his understanding of Jesus’ message for his own time. And it’s remarkable how it can also apply to
us right now.
So how is it that Paul can see both
suffering and glory entwined in this never-ending dance?
Rather than relying on the defining
spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and
beliefs of that time, Paul invites us to think on a way bigger scale.
Not only are WE waiting on the world
to change,
All of creation waits for change
with eager longing.
Not only do WE long for the
reversals that will upend the injustices of our time,
Creation longs for us to be known,
really known, as the children of God.
Not only do WE groan under the
futility of our efforts to make a difference,
Creation itself groans as if
laboring to birth something new.
Not only do WE hope for salvation,
for adoption, for redemption in both body and soul,
Creation teaches us the patience to
watch for it all to unfold like the disintegrated caterpillar goo in the cocoon
that eventually emerges transformed into the beautiful wings of the butterfly.
We hope for that which we cannot
see, not completely, not yet, maybe not even in our own lifetimes.
When we get depressed with how the
world starts to look to us – our job is to just wait.
Wait patiently and hopefully for the
world to change.
Now for the caveat – it is not some
sort of inert waiting, it is active waiting. Like that worm in the cocoon. As the larvae broke down into goo, it was
actively remaking itself into something new.
It was actively rearranging its parts and its very DNA makeup to become
something beautiful.
For the Roman Christians to be both
in Rome AND Christian required courage, commitment, and a deep love for their
fellow friends and pilgrims who were following Jesus’ way. They had to have a
full and complete picture of the whole of creation, beginning to end, to trust
at all that they could live this way. They
had to know that God’s Kingdom would not be like these passing kingdoms of
various degrees of good or bad depending on who was seated as Emperor, many of
whom demanded to be called the ONLY true and right Son of God by the way. These tenacious Roman Christians were not
putting their heads down and being quiet, though at times they thought it best
to keep their meetings secret. Imagine
this early church actively being different, in a time when different could get
you killed. That alone was a cause for
excitement, but it was also cause for fear.
Paul turns out to be spot on with
that pivotal sentence that we can both love and hate. Roman Christians were suffering, but they also
invested their hope in the future – in the glory about to be revealed. And we have to believe that it wasn’t just a
hope that they would be whisked off to a personal heavenly reward after being
fed to the lions. I believe that they fully and completely thought they were
changing the world -- because they were. When Paul begins this letter to them, he
starts it off with a prayer of thanks to God for them, as he often does, but he
goes on to say, I thank God in Jesus Christ for you because your faith, YOUR
FAITH, is proclaimed THROUGHOUT THE WORLD.
This is what Paul writes, that the
Christians who practiced their faith in the capital of the Empire – were the
ones whose voices could be heard around the world.
Our faith, even now, has to be
grounded in the belief that the world can change, that it is possible, that it
is happening, right now and everywhere, even when we cannot fully see it, even
when there are forces that are working actively to blind our eyes to it. That is the cause worth risking your worldly
citizenship for as Paul did. Paul and
these early Christians chose to place their primary allegiance toward a very different
kind of Kingdom, the one that Jesus was proclaiming.
This is where our faith and life
connect.
We actively choose to live fully and
joyfully in the present, even as we long, with the Spirit’s hope, for a future
we can only imagine into being together.
This is the future brought to us
through the minds of poets, mystics, and prophets. People like Maya Angelou reminds us that all
storms eventually run out of rain. The
mystic Julian of Norwich heard Jesus whisper in her ear that “All shall be
well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Even the prophet Jeremiah has many tremendous
insights from listening both to the laments of the people AND to the voice of
the Lord transforming those who had been exiled from their homes into a people
of hope. In the opening of chapter 31,
which is all about joyfully returning from Exile, Thus says the Lord,
“The people who survived the sword
found grace in the wilderness.
As Israel searched for a place of
rest,
the Lord appeared to them from a
distance:
I have loved you with a love that
lasts forever.
And so with unfailing love,
I have drawn you to myself.” (CEB
translation)
Even the voice of the Psalmist from today’s
reading asked God for answers to their prayers due to their present situation, and
held out hope and assurance that God was a merciful and gracious God, slow to
anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Why? Because
God had provided comfort and care before and therefore there was hope and
assurance that this same comfort and compassion would come again.
This persistent hope comes from the
one true God who continually reminds us that we belong, body and soul, mind and
spirit, to a power far greater than any worldly power. This is how we experience
the love of the Creator of all that is, of all that will ever be, who is
intimately involved in the well-being of creation, who, with us longs for,
waits for, dreams of a world that is constantly changing and transforming into
the goodness of its potential – whether we can see that all through our human
eyes or not.
So, what do Christians like us do to
listen and engage this hope in our own time?
First and foremost, we are called to
follow Jesus. And as we follow the
ministry of the earthly Jesus who was human like us, we link arm in arm with
those who are hurting now.
We feed the hungry. We clothe the naked. We free the captive. We comfort the afflicted. We love our neighbors, our friends, and yes,
even our enemies. We give our children
the good gifts they will need to power their own sense of hope in a time when
the future seems uncertain, and danger lurks around every corner.
But we also know the resurrected
Christ, the living Christ, and because of that we plan for a future in which
the vision will be fulfilled, planting seeds for what could happen 10 years
from now, 20 years from now, a hundred years from now, knowing that the world
will be a different place because of what we choose to do today.
Know that creation itself, the whole
of it, is God’s magnificent work and you are a contributing part of it –
joyfully, wonderfully, on your good days and on your bad days. God sees you personally and has plans for
engaging your life in the here and now, for a future that is yet to come.
You see, God’s providence is the
invisible hand on our lives letting us know that there is nowhere we can escape
the Spirit’s influence. There is no
context that occurs outside of God’s love. God knows us, so intimately, so completely
that the waiting, as awful as it can seem, doesn’t have to be so frightening. When we start to believe that we really can
believe in hope, we will engage our present time with curiosity, and we will
learn that we can trust in the future because the Spirit is already there
beckoning us to join all of Creation in the wonder and awe of it.
Amen.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Gracious God, as Your Holy Spirit moves among
us, may it inspire us towards generosity and fire us with an ember to serve You
as well. AMEN
Closing Hymn – Lord, Dismiss Us With Thy Blessing #538/237 3 vs.
Benediction –
Get ready to
go into God’s world. Bring messages of hope to all. As we have been blessed,
may we bring blessings to all in the name of Jesus Christ. AMEN.
Postlude
