Worship
Service for August 11, 2024
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Out of the depths of our struggles, we cry
to the Lord.
P: Lord, hear our cries!
L: In the inner darkness when we feel so
alone, we cry to the Lord.
P: Lord, hear our cries!
L: We wait for the Lord with patient and
hopeful hearts.
P: Lord, be with us today. AMEN.
Opening Hymn – Seek Ye First #333/713
Blue/Brown
Prayer of Confession
Lord, we want the easy way
out! When things go wrong, we want to
find who to blame for our misfortune. When
we don’t get what we want, we want to punish whoever prevents us from achieving
our goals and desires. We don’t want to
look at the ways in which we have perverted your love for us. We treat you as though you are a puppet who
will dance to our demands. We act like
spoiled children who want everything immediately, and who will become sullen
and spiteful if we don’t get what we ask for. We stopped listening to you. Systems of greed and injustice replaced your
command to "love one another". And now we come to you, asking for forgiveness
and healing. Our hearts and lives are
empty without your love. Our spirits
wither and die in this greedy wasteland. Give to us your life-sustaining bread. Heal our souls. Help us to truly worship you and to willingly
work for healing and hope in this world. We ask these things in Jesus’ Name. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: God has heard your cries and knows your
anguish. In Jesus Christ, you are loved
and forgiven.
P: Praise
be to God who forgives us all. 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
Do we
really dare to believe in Jesus Christ? That
is a question that often goes unspoken but does rest in our hearts from time to
time, Lord. Help us in our unbelief. Help us to be courageous enough to accept the
love that You have for us and the power You have to forgive and heal our souls.
We live in a time of great hostility,
fear and strife. It is easy for us to
succumb to the terrors and forget that You are with us at all times, seeking
peace and hope. You have asked us to be
instruments of peace and justice. To do
this we need to change our attitudes and practices to reflect Your love and
compassion and not be vehicles for our greed or need for approval. Jesus, the Bread of Life, has taught us the
importance of serving others, and in that service we will do honor to You. Create in us hearts that are eager to serve
and witness to Your love. Open our lives
this day and pour Your healing mercies into them, that we may be messengers of
hope to all whom we meet.
We lift up
to You the names and the circumstances of our loved ones who need to feel and
know of Your presence today. We pray
for…
And now in
this time of silence we offer our most heartfelt yet unspoken prayers…
Gracious
are You, O Lord, who offers us life sustaining bread, and drink that quenches
our thirst into eternity 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 – Near to the Heart of God #527/617 Blue/Brown
Scripture Reading:
First Scripture Reading – Psalm 34:1-8
Second Scripture Reading – John
6:35, 41-51
Sermon
– Bread
of Life
In
the lectionary cycle the last few weeks have all concentrated on the idea of
eating, the feast miracles of Jesus, the provision of food in the wilderness
for the Israelites. Particularly bread. I love bread. Who doesn’t like bread?
When I think of bread, my mind wanders
to: Wheat, Italian White, Peasant Bread or Rustic, Sourdough, Focaccia, Baguettes,
Tortillas, even Brioche or Croissants.
Or course there’s also Brown Bread, Rye Bread, Pumpernickel, Cranberry
Bread, Banana Bread, Fry Bread, Donuts, Waffles, Pancakes, Flatbreads, Crackers.
Growing up I wasn’t used to having
bread served at the table on a regular basis.
In my house bread was mostly consumed just for sandwiches. When I was a young student pastor, I moved to
Ohio for a couple of years to serve two small churches in the foothills of the
Appalachians and here bread was served at every meal; breakfast, lunch and
dinner. And it was always fresh out of
the oven bread – Rustic Bread, White or Wheat Bread, Sourdough, Oatbread. Each new loaf that was offered to me was
better than the next. At the time, I
lived in a small townhouse across the alley from a company that made fresh
frozen pasta and breads. My favorite was
their Gorgonzola Bread.
Now I’m hungry for a good piece of bread. What breads do you like?
I like the image of bread that Jesus
used when he spoke with his disciples – I am the Bread of Life? What do you think Jesus meant when he said that?
They say "Bread is the staple of
life!" Jesus is also the staple of
life – a basic, needed commodity. When you
go to a restaurant, what do they serve you first? They bring out a basket of bread, don’t they? Even though bread wasn’t served at home, when
we went out to eat that big basket of bread would come to the table and we’d
all start devouring it. After our second
or sometimes third piece Mom would always say, “Don’t fill up on the bread or
you won’t have room for your meal.”
Bread fills us up. It nourishes
us. That’s what Jesus does, too. Jesus nourishes us with all the things that
he taught us, reminding us of God’s life-sustaining love. He taught us the important things about life –
forgiveness, hope, mercy, love. Not only
do those things nourish us, but they are what can fill us up, too – making our
lives fulfilled and fuller.
When we come to learn about Christ, we
learn more about our own relationship with God. We learn about the many ways in which God
sustains us, giving us life. And when we
think about this in relation to a loaf of bread, we are reminded that when we
consume the loaf, although we might be temporarily filled, we will be hungry
again; but when we rely on Jesus Christ for our nurture and sustenance we won’t
ever hunger or thirst again because Jesus IS our life-giving, soul-sustaining
Bread!
But, we also have to put Jesus saying
that he was the Bread of Life into his historical context.
I vividly remember a meal shared with a
group of friends. After someone had said
grace a friend of mine leaned over and said to me, “I don’t understand why we
pray over our food. None of us have ever
been without food. Most of us have eaten
too much of it today, and we, as a nation, are struggling with a weight
problem. We shouldn’t be grateful for
food, but grateful when we can resist it instead.”
He’s right. Most of us do eat too much; on a regular
basis. Most of us have no idea what it
means to go hungry. However, hunger
hurts! When you haven’t had enough to
eat, it is painful. The problem in
relating to this is that most of us have never been without food before, never
been weakened because of the lack of food. However, the average person in the world will
eat one small meal today, and 10,000 people will die due to the lack of food; most
of them will be children. Hunger hurts!
Hunger for food was assumed in biblical
times, and with the context of this universal experience Jesus spoke the
controversial words, “I am the bread of life.” It was a statement that was sure
to get everyone’s attention. What was
Jesus saying about himself?
In our passage today, it says that “the
Jews began to complain about him because he said, ‘I am the bread that came
down from heaven.’ They thought it was
ridiculous that Jesus should make such an audacious claim. “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose
father and mother we know?” They knew who
he was. He didn’t come down from
heaven. He was a boy that worked as apprentice
to his father, Joseph, the carpenter.
And he certainly wasn’t bread.
As I mentioned before, bread has been
known the world over as a universal staple. Every culture from the beginning of time, after
our hunter and gather stage of development, learned first how to make
bread. And it’s fascinating to me how
every culture has a different way, method, resource for making it. Take a little flour, which can be made from anything
practically; corn, wheat, grains of all types, even dried beans. Mix that with a little water and you have a
basic bread. Change that water to milk
and you have a different type of bread.
Change that water to oil and Voi-La, another kind. Add some eggs and guess what, another
type. Add yeast, or use a fermentation
process, and there’s another kind. Keep adding
to those basic ingredients and it becomes something totally different. Now, in preparation you can bake it, fry it, boil
it or do a combination of them (bagels for instance – you boil the dough first
and then you bake them). After you think
of all the possible combinations you can do with a little flour and liquid you
end up with countless types of breads from the most simplest of ingredients –
basic food for life.
In biblical times, bread was also a
staple. According to Webster’s
Dictionary, a staple is a “chief item of trade, regularly stocked and in
constant demand”; “a most important, leading principal.”
Jesus is claiming to the crowd that was
willing to listen to him that life is made up of many pressures, many opinions,
many struggles, many decisions, but there is one thing that is basic to all of
life—himself. In hindsight now, we
understand what Jesus was saying and we get it, but the Jews at the time had
every right to complain about someone who would make such a broad claim. Either Jesus was actually someone they had
never encountered before, or he was in need of the services of the mental
health clinic.
God has created us with a “God-space”
in our lives, and until we fill it with God we will be hungry and thirsty and
we will do absolutely anything to fill that space up. We will search our entire lives to find
something that will try to fill that space. Job expressed this when he cried, “Oh, that I
knew where I might find Yahweh, that I might come even to his dwelling!”
(23:3).
Jesus guarantees that he will fill the
hunger that we all have for spiritual fulfillment. Job’s cry is the cry of everyone. Nothing satisfies our longing for the Deity
but the Divine. Junk food may relieve
our hunger for a time, but a steady diet of junk food will produce all kinds of
health problems. Likewise, if we try to
fill our spiritual hunger with things of the world, we will never be satisfied.
People try to find it in exercise, in
hobbies, in their job, in other relationships, in alcohol or drugs, or in regular
food.
We’ve been trying to find a reason why
people no longer come to church. Perhaps
this is the reason. Most people in
affluent cultures find other things that they think will fill up that God-space. How do we re-proclaim this idea that Jesus is
the Bread of Life for our culture today?
How do we re-proclaim that Jesus is the Living Waters for our culture
today?
Perhaps this is the very reason why
Jesus told one of the rulers of the Jews that it was easier for a camel to go
through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of
Heaven. Being rich, we can pursue any
and every other option to fill up that God-space inside us. How do we proclaim to our culture today that
their pursuits are in vain?
Jesus is the only staple that
permanently satisfies our desire to have fellowship with our Creator. As much as I might love bread and all the
kinds of breads there are, and as much as another person might love something else
and its pursuit, until we allow Christ to fill that God-space in our lives, we
will never be satisfied.
Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
O
Lord, our Lord, how majestic is Your name in all the earth! We bow before You and thank You for the
privilege to participate in Your acts of kindness and love here on earth. May these gifts truly become instruments of
Your purposes here in our church, our community, and around the world. AMEN.
Closing
Hymn – Abide With Me #543/642 Blue/Brown
Benediction –
Having been filled by the Bread of Life, Jesus
Christ, go forth into this world where hunger and thirst persist. Speak and live with integrity as you journey
through this new week, knowing that God will satisfy your every need. Offer the transforming witness of the Holy
Spirit through your life and story to all you meet. Go in peace. AMEN.
Postlude
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