Worship
Service for December 17, 2023
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Love has come down to us this Advent
Season.
P: Divine love which heals and transforms our
lives.
L: With great joy, we receive that love and
share it with others.
P: We open our hearts to all God’s children,
the last, the least, and the lost, as well as those who feel privileged.
L: The Lord has done and continues to do
great things for us.
P: Praise be to God who loves us so much and
who challenges us to be people of joy in this darkened world. AMEN.
Lighting of the Advent Candles
L: Hope is assertive, and peace is
subversive. But joy? Joy is rebelliously provocative. How dare joy make its way into our dreary,
despairing world? How dare joy show up
in all its flashiness – it even gets a pink candle, different from all the
rest. How dare we, in the midst of war
and hate and despair, deep division and grief and violence, come together and
rejoice? How dare some shepherds start
speaking of good news and the heavenly host declaring peace on earth in the
midst of a violent Roman occupation? But
if they did it, why can’t we? Why can’t
we sing for joy that God is breaking open into our world again? Why can’t we be rebellious against the
politicians and news anchors and doomsday sayers that there is joy for the
world – no – joy TO the world! We light
this candle because God is provoking us to sing for joy, to sing and dance and
laugh so hard we have tears, because there is peace and hope in this world.
Join me in praying:
God of joy, call us to
sing, remind us to dance, tickle us into fits of laughter, because You are in
our world and in our lives and doing something new, right now. Death and despair have nothing on You, and we
rejoice in You, our Savior. AMEN.
Opening Hymn – Lift Up Your Heads Ye Mighty Gates #8 Blue
Prayer of Confession
God of mercy, light and love,
we confess that we have not been people who are quick to pray. When an
emergency befalls us, we turn to pleas and prayers which usually begin with the
heart-wrenching cry, "Why?". Help
us to remember that you are always ready to hear and respond to all our
prayers. Remind us that even though we
have often failed to witness to Your love and live as people of compassion and
faith, you love us unconditionally. Forgive
our stubbornness and willfulness. Cleanse
our souls and spirits and make us truly ready to receive your light. In
Jesus’ name we pray. (Silent prayers
are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Rejoice!
You who once lived in darkness – on you a new light is shining and the
light of God’s glory shall brighten your path.
P: We are healed, loved and forgiven. 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
All praise we lift up
to you, Emmanuel, God-promised, and God with us; all praise to you in the
silence and the singing of this most sacred season. Because of you, stars shine in our lives and
our poor manger places become holy straw.
May the good tidings of peace on earth and good will to the people of
the earth be on our lips, as it was with the shepherds and the angels. We give you thanks that a voice cried out in
the wilderness to shed light on the one who is coming. We give you thanks for becoming human – weak
and poor, cold and lonely. As we become
more human for knowing you – more able to lift our burdens and open our doors
to strangers; more willing to believe that you are near. That we are also the voices of one, crying
out in the wilderness, shedding light onto the one who has come! We give you thanks for the hope of this
season. For the love which you lavished
on us at Christmas. And for the Joy we
have knowing that you are indeed near.
This morning we give you thanks for choosing the low and the rejected
and the broken. Help us find mercy in
our struggles and courage in the rough places and crooked paths.
We also lift up to you
this day our words of both joys and concerns, knowing that you hear the victory
of our souls and the groaning of our hearts in those words. In the silence, hear us O Lord,
…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 – Come,
Thou Long-expected Jesus #2/244
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Isaiah
61:1-4,8-11
Second Scripture Reading – John
1:6-8, 19-28
Sermon – “Discovering Joy”
When Isaiah arrived in
Jerusalem with the people of God after being freed from Babylonian captivity by
a decree from the Persian King, Cyrus, they saw the ruins of their beloved
city. All that remained was a pile of
rocks and the people that Babylon didn’t want: the poor, the sick, the
homeless, the disabled, and the aged.
Who could blame them for wondering if returning to Jerusalem was worth
all the trouble, maybe staying in Babylon would have been better. And yet, in Jerusalem the marginalized had
heard the prophet years before declare God’s decree of comfort – but nothing
had happened.
Isaiah assembled all the people of
Jerusalem and the returning exiles on Mount Zion to hear an important
proclamation. Isaiah announced that he
had been anointed by God; that means that he was given the authority to speak
on behalf of God. And his proclamation
was that God was indeed in their midst.
That God indeed understood their sufferings. That God indeed counted among the blessed
those who were weak, those who had been oppressed, those who were
brokenhearted, those who were captives or prisoners, to comfort those who
mourn, to give them a garland instead of ashes.
Isaiah declared that this was a Jubilee Year – the year of the Lord’s
favor.
We may find the concept of a Jubilee
Year strange, maybe even against our worldview entirely. However, the concept of a Jubilee Year comes
from the idea that people don’t really own the things they think they own. That God really owns all the things. In Biblical times it was understood that
people didn’t own land. Land belonged to
the one who had created it; God. People
were allowed to farm it, toil in it and even pass the land on to their children
to do the same because the use of the land was God’s gift. But no one owned it. So, a Jubilee Year was declared every 50
years for people to return to their ancestral homes/lands/work that they had
been given by God to protect and care for 50 years prior to the last time a
Jubilee Year was declared. A Jubilee
Year canceled debts and allowed people to return home to rebuild.
The reason why God declared a Jubilee
was to demonstrate to all the people of the earth God’s great glory. To this end God entered into a new
everlasting covenant with his people.
God would bless God’s people and the people of God would proclaim to the
world that they had been blessed by God.
That covenant is still at work today.
God continues to richly bless us with forgiveness of sins and an
abundant life. Therefore, we are called
to proclaim this blessing of God to all people.
This is ultimately the mission of the church: to acknowledge that we
have been blessed by God and to demonstrate God’s glory to the rest of the
world by proclaiming it to everyone we meet, everyone in (West) Elizabeth,
everyone in the world.
Although this morning we read from the
gospel according to John, like we did last week in the gospel according to Mark,
about John the Baptist being the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, I
want to acknowledge that this passage from Isaiah was cited and read by Jesus in
the gospel of Luke, when he went into the synagogue in Nazareth, opening the
scroll of the scriptures and read this passage.
When he was through, he rolled it back up and told the gathered
congregation, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
By saying and doing this, Jesus was
claiming to be the anointed one, given the authority to speak on behalf of God –
and in Jesus case, he also claimed to be the Messiah, the Christ. Jesus was claiming that the Spirit of God had
come upon him giving him this authority.
And with that authority Jesus had come to proclaim good news to the
poor. This good news was to be a year of
Jubilee. All debts were to be forgiven
and the people restored to their ancestral homes.
Of course, Jesus’ words were
treasonous. If anyone found out what
Jesus had said the Romans might crucify all the men in the village. So they argued with Jesus and a mob tried to
throw Jesus over a cliff. But Jesus and
the good news he was spreading could not be silenced. A jubilee had been called by God’s Messiah.
How are we to handle
this call for jubilee today?
As Christians, I think
it is time for us to stand up for biblical principles even if they are
unpopular. If we are truly the follower
of the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ, and if we are called to proclaim
good news to the poor, then we should advocate a radical shift of our economic
system away from personal property and the pursuit of profit to a system based
on the requirements of justice that we find in scripture. We need to do this because the God we worship
is the God of justice and righteousness. And as God’s people our mission is to care for
those in need. Obviously, we can’t
suddenly start a Jubilee Year concept where one never existed. But we can learn from its principles and do
better, justice-wise, to the poor, to the outcast, to the widow, to the orphan,
to the prisoner, to the brokenhearted. I
can just hear people asking the question, “But what if they don’t deserve that
money, that help, those opportunities?” which is only a question ever asked of
poor people. It’s never a question we
ask of those who have everything, who have every opportunity, who have wealth,
who have support and care. We only ask
that question of those who are less fortunate.
Today’s Advent candle is
supposed to represent Joy. What is more
joyful – to announce pay raises for 500 employees to receive more income so
that they can afford housing, medical coverage, sports attire or music lessons
for their children, or that one CEO is able to buy another vacation home? What is more joyful – to build tiny homes for
the homeless to live in, or to see them huddled under bridges in tents or half
covered by cardboard? What is more
joyful - to provide a family for orphans or to see hundreds of thousands of children
only wish for a forever family? What is
more joyful than to donate 3-5 canned or dry goods for the food bank a week or
to buy another Starbucks Caramel Latte?
How we see the future shapes the way we live
in the present. Ask any investor; the
financial forecasts determine where he or she puts money. Ask the average consumer; sales have been down
this holiday season because many people feel that more difficult times are
coming. Ask the military; armies beef up
their strengths because they see war on the horizon.
And quite often we get
the future for which we have prepared; in fact, our very preparation helps to
usher in that future. Too many overly
cautious consumers will cause an economic slowdown. The feverish preparations for war heighten
tension, evoke hostility, and make conflict more likely to occur.
What kind of future do
we see? Do we have in our eyes the
future that God has promised? Or do we
see no better than the politicians and the economists? Do we accommodate our lives to a grim tomorrow
or do we live for the light of a glorious day after? It is a tragedy of the church that we have
been too ready to embrace the gloom and doom of the world and not proclaim the
joy of the God we believe in. We should
not conform to the injustice and violence of the world as it is; but rather, we
are to embody the world as we want it will be.
There is an incident
that took place shortly after World War II involving Francis Pickens Miller. Miller was a great churchman and a statesman. At that time he was in charge of an American
military unit in Germany. A lieutenant
in his command had a meeting with his Soviet counterpart, who asked the
American lieutenant if he had ever read Karl Marx. The lieutenant said he had. In response, the Soviet officer said, “Then
you know how history will come out.” Miller
heard about this encounter and wished he could have asked the Russian, “Have
you ever read the New Testament? If you
have, then you know how the future will come out.”
The story, our story,
is not over - yet. I am convinced of
this: that the real truth about life and history is not found in the forces of
oppression or in the dynamics of war; that the final truth cannot be seen in
the practice of inequality or the presence of poverty; and that the real truth
is in the future that Isaiah and all the prophets saw and that Jesus lived. And when we open our eyes to see it and move
our limbs to live it, we will discover a world full of joy.
Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
O Gracious
God, bless our offerings this day that it may reach and touch those who hunger,
who hurt, who seek new hope. We dedicate
our lives and all that we have to the work of life, of love, of peace. Receive these, our gifts in joy, and lead us
in wisdom and courage. AMEN.
Closing
Hymn – The First Noel Hymn #56/265 4 verses
Benediction –
We have
heard God’s word of healing justice and God’s everlasting joy and are
challenged to go forth into God’s world and spread the message of good news and
joy. Go in peace. AMEN.
Postlude
No comments:
Post a Comment