Worship
Service for September 29, 2024
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Those who love God,
P: God will deliver.
L: Those who know God by name,
P: God will protect.
L: Those who call out to God,
P: God will answer.
L: We gather this morning,
P: as those who trust God.
Opening Hymn – O For a
Thousand Tongues to Sing #466/21
Prayer of Confession
Triune God, You call us to
trust You in every circumstance of our lives, yet far too often, we do
not. In times of oppression and strife,
we lose hope in our future. When
enduring natural disasters, suffering illness, or facing death, we often grow
bitter and forget Your love. Stripped of
the idols of our wealth and status, we try in vain to control our lives. Eager to be powerful and successful, we wander
away from You, failing into the pain of addiction, greed, and blind ambition. Absorbed by our wants and desires, we are
blind to those around us who need our care.
Forgive us, O God, Forgive our despair, our bitterness, and our
fear. Turn our hearts to You, that we
may taste fullness of life and trust Your promised salvation. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: God’s loving presence never abandons us,
not even when we abandon God. God
delivers those who seek and love the Lord.
All we have to do is call, and God answers us. God answers us with rescue and honor, forgiveness
and mercy, life and salvation.
P: Thanks be to God for this saving grace. 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
You
have called each of us, gracious God, into relationship with you. As we grow and change, your words continue to
challenge us, to confront us, to judge us, to love us. Thank you for the gift of your Holy Word to
us in our lives.
You
have called each of us in your Word-Made-Flesh self, who was willing to bear
the reproach of those in authority in order to serve the least, the last, and
the lost. He spoke your healing,
redeeming, gracious words into reality.
Thank you for that gift of Your Word in our lives.
You
continue to call to us in the needs of those around us; and so we offer our
prayers for all who are in any way burdened, disillusioned, or suffering. Hear our prayers of concern for the world,
for the establishment of peace, for the ease of suffering and pain from
drought, disease, political strife and conflict. Reach out now to our own country and its
leaders. Allow them to be wise in
decision making and compassionate to those in need.
Lord,
hear our prayers for those near at home and their relationship with you. Allow them to feel your presence and know
your amazing grace. We lift up in prayer
to you this day….
Also
hear these prayers, those quiet prayers of the heart, as we pray to you in
silence….
Most
Holy God, Speak your word of judgment and grace anew in our hearts, that we may
offer worship acceptable to you. In
heart, in voice; in challenge, in healing; in hearing, in responding we stand
now and ever, under your mercy praying the Model Prayer your Son taught to us
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. And 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 – Fairest Lord Jesus #306/87
Scripture Reading:
First Scripture Reading – 1
Kings 19:9-16
Second Scripture Reading – Job
38:1-7
Sermon
Out of the Whirlwind
(based on 1 Kings
19:9-16, Job 38:1-7)
As you are all
aware, I’ve been working on a series now that highlights the scripture passages
that have had a significant impact on my own faith journey, passages that have
transformed my faith. This morning’s
passages are a little different, however.
Rather than a specific passage transforming my understanding of God, of
my beliefs, and my faith, it was a circumstance, or more accurately, a number
of circumstances that began changing how I encountered God and God’s Holy Word.
A lot of times
it’s not necessarily a particular scripture passage that engages us, but a
question, a difficulty, a point in our lives in which God seems to speak to
us. And only after that, we find the
scripture passage or passages that help us put it all into perspective. That’s the case with today’s scripture
reading – two of them from the Old Testament and even more poignant than I’d
anticipated when I put this series together.
Both texts from 1
Kings and from Job talk about the extraordinary whirlwind, or storms that God
created. In 1 Kings, Elijah was
instructed to get up and eat for fear that he wouldn’t have enough fuel in his
body to withstand the journey and the encounter he would have. So, Elijah got up and ate, then went to the
Mount of Horeb. In the cave of the
mountain, the word of the Lord came to him.
Elijah said that he’d come because he was zealous for the word of
God. The Israelites had forsaken their
covenant, thrown down their altars to the Lord, killed the prophets with the
sword, and only Elijah was left, running away, as they also sought to kill
him. Elijah was told to go out and stand
on the mountain and wait for the Lord to pass by. As Elijah waited for the Lord, a mighty wind
(a whirlwind) came, so strong that it was splitting the mountains and breaking
the rocks into pieces before the Lord.
But the Lord was not in the wind.
After the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the
earthquake. And after the earthquake, a
fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.
And after the fire, the sheer sound of silence. It was only after the silence that the still,
small voice of God came to Elijah.
In the passage
from Job, there has been a trial. The
so-called friends of Job have all accused Job of various grievances against the
Lord and Job answers each one of them, acknowledges his shortcomings, has his
own complaints, but claims his innocence and integrity. When we get to chapter 38, the trial is
nearly over and it’s God’s turn to speak.
Out of the whirlwind, God answers Job.
For the next four entire chapters God lays out the audacity that any
mortal being could claim knowledge.
“Were you there when the foundations of the earth were laid? Were you there when the measurements of such
things were put into place? Were you
there when the morning stars first sang together and the heavenly beings
shouted for joy? Were you there to
command the morning to begin, the dawn to know its place? Have you walked the recesses of the deep or
seen the gates of death? Have you any
comprehension of the expanse of the universe?
Can you number the months of anything’s existence? And on and on and on. Out of the whirlwind, God continued to pummel
Job for answers to such questions. How
dare you question me, God basically says to Job and all those who even put Job
on trial to begin with.
In humility Job
answers God in Chapter 42, “I know that You can do all things, and that no
purpose of yours can be thwarted. I have
uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not
know. I had heard of you by the hearing
of the ear, but now my eye sees you; therefore, I despise myself and repent in
dust and ashes.”
The past couple of days Hurricane Helene left people in Florida,
Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and so many other
states stranded due to devastating floods and absolute destruction, pummeled by
the wind and rain. Here in Western
Pennsylvania we don’t often experience these kinds of disastrous effects. Most of us don’t know what it’s like to
weather through these kinds of storms, much less comprehend the havoc they
leave behind. Friends of mine in Florida
have told me about closing their ears to the brutality of the sound, how the
entire earth seems to shutter and shake, how the wind can make screaming sounds
of itself, and how the battering of all manner of things beats at your very
soul. When it is all over, there is this
sheer silence that is both unnerving and calming at the same time.
In the Bible
whirlwinds symbolize God’s overwhelming presence, which is too mighty and
mysterious for a human being to comprehend.
This is also true in life when you go through a particularly difficult
time, or wrestle with something that is so big that a simple answer won’t
suffice and God’s complicity in the matter seems wrong and against what you
thought you knew to be the nature of God.
In the immediacy of the moment, it feels like your world is falling
apart, that there is no end in sight, and nothing will ever be good again or
could ever bring you joy, it shakes the very foundation of your faith, your
beliefs, your trust in God. It is all
mighty, mysterious and beyond our human comprehension. When it’s over, when the storm has passed,
when the wrestling is done, there is this sheer silence in your spirit that can
be both unnerving and reassuring at the same time.
So, what brought
me to these passages you might ask?
I was about 7 or 8
years old when my Aunt Betty and Uncle Carmen; again, not a blood relative, but
close friends of my parents that we called Aunt and Uncle, had a second
child. This child was different. The baby had differently set eyes, and to me,
an unusual looking smile. My parents
explain to my sister and I that David had something called Downs Syndrome. I grew up with David. David had a difficult time
communicating. His parents learned sign
language and David did too. Eventually,
David began saying words, not complete sentences, but he got his needs and
wants across to us. Back then society
called people like David retarded. What
a horrible word. I’m glad that we don’t
use it very much anymore. David never learned how to tie his own shoes. David never learned the complete alphabet,
although he knew how to spell his name.
David would never learn the scientific concept of earth’s gravitational
pull on the moon or that the planets revolve around the sun. Or many other normal tasks or other concepts
that most people know or understand. But
that didn’t mean that David wasn’t smart.
If you asked him about any sports figure, he could rattle off every team
they’d ever played on and their statistics.
When people made
fun of David or when he’d do something that you couldn’t communicate and
explain to him that it was wrong, where do you put the blame? It wasn’t until I was in Junior High or High
School that it really began to bother me and set my faith foundation on a
whirlwind trying to understand why God created people like David. Why were people born blind, without limbs,
unable to speak, with various syndromes?
Not long after beginning to formulate this question in my mind, setting
off my faith foundation into a whirlwind of chaos, another dear friend of our
families died from Leukemia. It was the
first time someone I knew had died. So,
then the questions began - why does God allow disease, illness? Why did God want Aunt Grace to die?
I was in youth
group one Wednesday afternoon when someone asked the question, the age-old
question that people have been asking for thousands of years – why does God
allow evil to exist in the world? I
wanted to know the answer to that and to all my other questions.
For an answer, Rev Allen showed us the story in the gospel of
John about the man born blind. In the
story, Jesus and the disciples were walking along and saw a man blind from
birth. The disciples asked Jesus who had
sinned, the man or his parents that had caused his blindness. Jesus’ answer to the disciples was this,
“Neither the man, nor his parents sinned.
He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.” He then spat on the ground and made a paste
of mud, put it over the eyes of the blind man and he was able to see.
For years this
satisfied my early questioning, but there was a nagging problem in the back of
my mind that burned, itched, and twisted and wanted resolution. This story from scripture only satisfied that
burn for so long.
About ten years go
by, I’ve graduated from college and seminary, I’ve been the pastor at three
different churches, and that nagging remained in the back of my mind. Why does God allow it? What’s the cause? Who’s to blame? In 1994 I became a hospice chaplain. As the Spiritual Care and Bereavement
Coordinator I’d been at the bedside or been part of the hospice team of
hundreds of dying patients. Over the
four years that I served in that capacity, I learned the gifts that the dying
give us, so much so that I began to feel a bit more settled regarding that
nagging question, why? The answer Jesus
gave his disciples seemed to fit – so that God’s works might be revealed in
him. The dying often reveal those
amazing gifts to us when we view them impartially and objectively. It’s much harder when the dying person is
your own loved one. But, even then, I learned
the gifts that each person gives us.
In 1998, I went to be the pastor of the church in
Leetsdale. Over the next ten years, the
Leetsdale church welcomed the neighborhood children. And that neighborhood grew from the small
town of Leetsdale to encompass lots more children from the surrounding
communities. In the early 2000’s
Leetsdale was one of the fastest growing churches in our Presbytery. On Sunday morning, there were often more
children in worship than adults. But,
there’s a bit of a twist to this amazing story.
Of the kids in worship or part of our Kid’s Club after school program,
fifty percent or more had a special need of some kind or another.
During the children’s hour, while the main body of the adults
were upstairs finishing worship, we’d hear utter chaos coming from the social
hall below. When Kid’s Club was over on
Wednesday nights, I’d go home in total exhaustion, thankful to sit in silence
for the rest of the evening.
Why did we have so many special needs kids? Why did they keep coming? How do we adequately handle so many of
them? As I wondered about that, the
nagging question came back about my cousin David and all these kids. Why did God allow it? Why had God created them?
I sought answers to these questions with no real resolution
until I read the story of Job. And came
to the end of the book when God answers Job.
How dare you question me? Were
you there? Did you create? Can you even fathom the depths?
It was only then that I realized I had been approaching this
entire conundrum from the wrong perspective.
Out of the whirlwind, out of the chaos, came the sheer silence, and out
of the silence I heard God’s still small voice and the answer.
Job’s answer was sufficient for me, as well, “I know that You
can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. I have uttered what I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear,
but now my eye sees you”
That following Sunday, I looked around the sanctuary, heard the
chaos of the morning grow as the kids came into the worship space, watched each
of the children and actually saw God for the first time. It was not for me to question why, instead it
was simply my job and my church’s job to love, honor, respect, and to care for
each and every one of these children that God had given us. We were doing exactly what God had called us
to do and we simply kept doing it.
Thanks be to God. AMEN
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
We
come before you, all-giving God, rich with the gifts You have given to us, rich
with the love You have lavished on us, rich with the blessings Your Son has
brought to us. The gifts we offer You
here speak not only of our gratitude for Your love, but also of our commitment
to seek anew and continuously to grow in our discipleship. Bless these gifts, and us as givers, to the
work for which You have called us; through Jesus Christ our Lord. AMEN
Closing
Hymn – Farewell,
Good Friends #537 Blue
Benediction –
Go in
peace to serve the Lord. Remember the
healing love that has taken place in your life.
Be open to all the wonders and opportunities that God puts before
you. Go and serve the Lord. AMEN.
Postlude
