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Worship
Service for December 1, 2024
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Christ is coming!
P: We see the signs.
L: Christ is coming!
P: We will be ready!
L: Christ is coming! Raise your heads because your redemption is
near!
P: Praise be to God! We will worship and prepare.
Lighting of the Advent Candles
L: Children of God, we come, tired of
waiting, burdened by the weight of watching.
We surrender to God’s holy “not yet,” embracing the stillness. We come, and God-with-us is present in our
longing. As we gather today, we remember
the promised gifts of the Messiah. In
the lighting of one candle, we set our gaze upon beacons that sustain us
through sleepless nights and restless days.
We bear this light together.
We call this first
candle – Hope.
(Light the candle.)
Let us pray:
Holy Creator, we
tremble under the weight of suffering, its presence heavy in our midst. It is the mess of our own making that pierces
our hearts. Our fears, our need for
control, our dismissal of the other, leave us – and all of creation – groaning
for justice, aching for peace. You, O
God, are our hope, the quiet strength in our deepest longing. AMEN.
With the Holy Spirit as
our guide, we join the prophet Jeremiah in testifying to Your timeless,
unending faithfulness in the shadowiest of days.
“The days are surely coming,” says the Lord,
“when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of
Judah. In those days and at that time I
will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David, and he shall execute
justice and righteousness in the land.
In those days Judah will be saved, and Jerusalem will live in
safety. And this is the name by which it
will be called: The Lord is our Righteousness.”
We stand in awe of a
light that endures, a steady glow through the dimmest days. We draw near to the God who waits with grace,
filling us with hope in every season. Though
our flames may falter, we press on, for God-is-with-us, Emmanuel is near.
Opening Hymn – O Come, O Come, Emmanuel #9/245
Prayer of Confession
Prince of Peace, the wars and
rumors of wars betray our addiction to violence, our destructive and
dehumanizing ways. We deserve Your
judgment and condemnation. Yet, You
remain faithful, a steadfast source of peace in the midst of our warring
madness. Holy God, turn us from
evil. Return us to Christ and His path
of peace. Forgive us our sins against
You and against our neighbor. Forgive
us, merciful God, when we spend so much time looking for the scary things in
life. Focus our attention on ways in which
we can be of service with whatever time we have. Forgive us when we seek the darkness of anger
and fear and turn our backs on the light of possibilities and peace. Open our hearts once again to your redeeming
love and transforming peace, for we ask these things in Jesus’ name. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Anyone who is in Christ is a new
creation. The old life has gone; a new
life has begun. Know that you are
forgiven and be at peace.
P: You call us Your people, O God, and we are
eternally grateful.
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
Almighty and merciful
God we believe, despite all the strange coming and goings of humanity, that our
history belongs to you. We give thanks
that your eternal purpose is weaving its way through the events of time and
space. Sometimes, O Lord, it’s a
challenge to hold on to this belief, but our confidence is in Christ, your Son
and our Savior. We believe his death and
resurrection are our confirmation that even though we can’t understand the big
picture of things, we can know history’s final outcome. Gracious God, we watch with eager expectation
for the return of Christ. Our souls buzz
with anticipation of seeing the One, face to face, who authored and sustains
the universe, the One in whom and through whom all things hold together, the
One who will one day sit in judgment. We
believe that on that last and great day all of history’s scoffers will drop to
their knees in recognition of your Son.
In this season when the darkness is banished and the light
has come, we look to You for comfort and strength. We hand over to You the concerns of our
hearts and pray for….
Not only these do we pray for, but we also pray for the
burdens that are too difficult to share…hear us, Lord, in this time of silence.
With hearts of endless joy we pray to You this morning, the
prayer that your Son taught us to 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 – Lift
Up Your Heads, Ye Might Gates Hymn
#8 Blue
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Exodus
16:1-18
Second Scripture Reading – John
6:22-58
Sermon – The Word Made Flesh
(based on Exodus 16:1-8, John 6:22-58)
Happy Christian New Year!
We’ve come once again to the season of Advent, a sacred time during the
year of anticipation and preparation.
This season is often a time of comings and goings, of traveling to visit
loved ones, to return to places and people to whom we feel a belonging, a
kinship. Songs of the season speak of
these travels in joyous language with words like: “Over the river and through the woods, to
Grandmother’s house we go!” and “O’er the fields we go, laughing all the
way!” They paint a picture of holiday
travel by horse and sleigh that probably strikes us as quaint and fun, maybe
nostalgic for a time long which has since passed. How many of you have ever really ridden in a
horse and sleigh to get to Grandmother’s house?
Me either, but the thought of it brings back collective memories of
generations long ago who probably did.
Most of you as young parents probably experienced that not
all children travel joyously on holiday trips.
Small children almost universally ask, “Are we there yet?” just a few
minutes into a long drive. And many
often ask to have a snack or to stop for food long before their parents would
like to stop, sometimes not because they are hungry but because they are simply
bored. In a certain way, we can see a
similarity here with Moses’s people, the Israelites, whom we read about in the
Book of Exodus:
“They set out from Elim, and all the congregation of the
people of Israel came to the wilderness of Sin, which is between Elim and
Sinai, on the fifteenth day of the second month after they had departed from
the land of Egypt. And the whole
congregation of the people of Israel grumbled against Moses and Aaron in the
wilderness, and the people of Israel said to them, ‘Would that we had died by
the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate
bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill
this whole assembly with hunger’” (Exodus 16:1-3).
Moses is taking the Israelites out of Egypt and toward the
land of Promise, and the people are grumpy.
They are tired, and they are hungry.
I think we can relate somehow to this story. Maybe we relate to Moses and Aaron, who know
that the people will be happy when the journey is over and they’ve arrived at
their destination but still have to deal with the grumblings of their people in
the meantime. Or maybe we relate to the
Israelites, who, after over 40 days of wandering in the desert, are getting
“hangry.” (You know, that somewhat new
expression of being angry because you are hungry) So, they are hangry. In their discomfort, they are wondering
perhaps if, in fleeing Egypt, they’ve made a huge mistake. Yet, God, like a caring parent, provides for
them, providing plentiful quail every evening and miraculous bread every
morning, bread that they don’t even have to make themselves.
It is this story that is recalled in our reading from
John’s Gospel. Here, in the sixth
chapter, we come upon Jesus having just the day before fed a crowd of five
thousand people. Because of this
miracle, the crowd began to call him a prophet.
Sensing that the people meant to crown him their earthly king, Jesus had
fled across the water, and the crowd only finds him the following day. And so Jesus says to them,
“You are seeking me not because you saw signs but because
you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not
work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give to you” (John 6:26-27).
Both Moses and Jesus tell their respective crowds not to be
confused about where their true satisfaction comes from. Moses reminds the Israelites that the bread
is from the Lord; Jesus reminds the Galileans that they are thinking with their
stomachs and not their spirits— earthly bread is perishable. But Jesus says to them,
“Truly, truly, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from
heaven, but my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is he who comes down
from heaven and gives life to the world.”
They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always,” and Jesus said to
them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and
whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:32-35).
Jesus and Moses warn us not to put stock in the bread that
is perishable, which only goes stale or molds in a fairly short period of
time. Bread from heaven, though, is
right in front of us. So why do so many
people not see it? We shouldn’t chase
after fleeting satisfaction when something much more sustaining, fulfilling,
even captivating, and honest is right in front of us, offering that which lasts
forever. It sounds easy, doesn’t
it?
We know that the things of this world are temporary, and
yet so many of us often find ourselves starving after the next thing—passing
fancies that are usually already passing away, moving on to find that next
passing fancy. If we sometimes have a
hard time keeping our hearts set on the eternal bread of life, we are not
alone. The apostles and later Christian
writers often learned the truth of Jesus’ words the hard way. For instance, Augustine of Hippo, in his
famous Confessions, writes on the very first page, “...because you have made us
and drawn us to yourself, [Lord], our hearts are restless until they rest in
you.” For hundreds of pages after he
pens this line, Augustine tells us the story of his own misspent youth, years
wasted chasing after the admiration of his peers, the comforts and thrills of
romantic liaisons, and prestige in his career.
He tells us the story of his restless heart. Nothing, in all that he fashioned himself
after, all that he chased after, all that he thought would hold a lasting
purpose; nothing, he says, could satisfy the aching hunger within him—nothing
except finally, God.
In thinking about the long and winding spiritual journey of
Augustine, and the desert wanderings of the Israelites, let us all take a
moment and think about our own winding journeys. Have we ever been so certain we wanted a
certain thing, only to be disappointed?
How did you react in that moment?
Thinking back to our earlier example of hungry children, perhaps we
remember an instance when a hungry child—maybe one of yours, or maybe it was
you—was given a plate of food, only to immediately claim that they were no
longer hungry. Especially, if I was
given a plate of liver and onions or Brussel Sprouts.
This fickle child is much like the crowds in our Gospel
reading—perhaps you already know how this story ends? Jesus’ words and deeds, while initially a
cause for excitement, are rejected. The
people cannot accept that this Bread of Life is coming to them through this
man. Jesus, who is promising them the
Bread of Life, is just too familiar. The
crowd knows his parents – his mom, Mary; his dad, Joseph. All this talk about eating his body and
drinking his blood is too strange. So,
despite the crowd of five thousand having been miraculously fed, they leave
him. He doesn’t fit the Judeans’
expectations. They were expecting a
king. That’s what King David, long ago
promised them. A stump would rise out of
Jesse and lead them to victory, to power, to glory. Jesus…he’s not it.
But he is, as the Advent hymn says, “long-expected.” This
Advent, as we ponder a Savior who comes to us as bread, we pray the words of
this song:
Come, thou long-expected Jesus,
Born to set thy people free;
From our fears and sins release us,
Let us find our rest in thee.
Israel’s strength and consolation,
Hope of all the earth thou art;
Dear desire of ev’ry nation,
Joy of ev’ry longing heart.
Jesus, who offers us the joy of our longing hearts, came in
an unexpected way. We’ll find him in a
manger, lying in a feeding trough in Bethlehem, the House of Bread, like the
true nourishment he is. And he will come
again. So let us prepare our hearts to
receive Christ, our Bread from Heaven, which does not perish but satisfies
every mortal longing and brings us to eternal life.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Eternal
God, how majestic is Your name in all the earth. The whole earth is full of Your glory. Please accept our humble offerings of
ourselves and our resources. Please use
them to herald Your hope to all persons everywhere who are living in physical,
moral, and spiritual poverty. Bless our
gifts this day, O Lord. AMEN.
Communion
Invitation
In coming to the Lord’s Table,
we intentionally take our place in the story. We come not on our own, or only
as this congregation, but with the Body of Christ throughout the world and the
saints in heaven. We come as real
people, loved for all our real or perceived faults. We come as those who are an essential part of
the story, because there is room for everyone in this story. We also come to the Lord’s Table as those
invited. Our welcome does not depend on
how good we are. It does not depend on
whether we feel like we are worthy or not. It is an open invitation to all, as a gift of
great joy for all people.
The Lord Jesus on the night of
his arrest, took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and
said, “This is my body that is for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.”
Christ’s body was broken that
we might be made whole. Take and eat.
In the same way he took the
cup also, after supper, saying, “This is the cup of the new covenant in my
blood. Do this, as often as you drink
it, in remembrance of me.” For as often
as you eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until he
comes again.
Christ’s blood was shed that
we might be healed. Take and drink.
Prayer After Communion
Holy God, from generation to
generation, we are nurtured at Your banquet feast. As we once again tell Your story of
forgiveness and love, we proclaim our adoption into Your family tree of kings,
carpenters, foreigners, disregarded women, and second sons. May our lives testify that there is a place
for everyone in Your story of salvation. Amen.
Closing
Hymn – Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus Hymn #2/244
Benediction –
Dance,
celebrate, sing, and shout for joy while we wait for Christ’s return. He already goes before us into this world of
fear and pain. He has called us to bring
the Good News of healing and hope, and of redemption. Go in peace, and feel the
presence of the Risen Lord with you, now and forever. AMEN.
Postlude
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