Worship
Service for May 18, 2025
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Let praise to God resound in the heavens!
P: Let praise to God fill the earth!
L: Let all God’s angels offer praise and
rejoicing!
P: Let all God’s creatures sing praise and joy!
L: Open your hearts and spirits today.
P: Let us praise the Lord today and
always! AMEN!
Opening Hymn – Holy, Holy,
Holy #138/3
Prayer of Confession
Patient God, sometimes we are
just too busy for our own good. We
pledge ourselves to hectic schedules, demands on time, energy, and resources
that erode all too quickly. We seem to
be rushing through life. The cries of
those in need often go unheeded in our blur of activities which sap our energy,
our resources, our spirits. Slow us down
a bit, Lord. Remind us again that we are
responsible for the care of this world, for reaching out and offering Your
healing love. Help us hear the words of
patient love that You have for us.
Remind us again of Jesus’ words to his disciples when he told them that
they should love one another as He loved them.
May we take time to bear witness to that love in all that we do. For we ask this in Jesus’ name. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Wherever you are, Christ is with you. You are beloved of God and God’s care will
always surround you.
P: With
this assurance, we are at peace and we rejoice!
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
Holy God,
when the news is loudly proclaiming anger, hostility, hatred, we are called by
Christ to love one another. How hard
that is, O Lord? Prejudice abounds in
our land, and it is our shame, as we proclaim our faith in you. You call us to
love one another, but we put conditions on that love: some of these conditions
regard race, economic status, gender, age, nationality. O Lord, it is easy to love people with whom we
feel comfortable, but it is more difficult to love those who are different from
us. And that, O Lord, is our dilemma. So, teach us how to love and accept the
diversity in our land. Help us to
treasure each other for the wondrous gifts and talents each person has. Sharpen our ears to hear words of love when
whispered and shouted. Tune our hearts
to Your healing message of acceptance and compassion for all. Gracious God, help us to be the people of the
Resurrection - who have been freed from the bonds of death and turned into new
creatures of love.
Good and
gracious God, we adore you and praise Your holy name. We are especially grateful for Your steadfast
love, revealed to us in the words and deeds of Jesus, Your Son. We give thanks for the disciples and all the
generations that have followed in their footsteps, faithfully carrying out the
mission entrusted to them by Christ. It
is our turn, Lord, to take that mission, to make it our own and spread Your
name, Your love, Your mercy and grace to every corner of the world. To do that, we need to start here at
home. Unite us in our commitment to
Christ. Give us the courage to venture
beyond familiar places, to see in unfamiliar faces potential friends and
neighbors. Transform our hearts and
minds so that we may be instruments of healing, comfort, and peace every day
and everywhere that You may lead us.
This
morning, Lord, we lift up to You the names of those that we hold dear to us….
Hear our hearts, O Lord, in these moments
of silence as we also lift up to you our own selves.
Lord, may your empowering Spirit be
present with all those who are in any need this morning as we unite in prayer
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 – How Firm a Foundation #361/408
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Psalm
148
Second Scripture Reading – John
13:31-35
Third
Scripture Reading - 1 Corinthians
13:1-13
Sermon –
LOVE
(based on John 13:32-35, I Corinthians
13:1-13)
I
remember seeing a bumper sticker once, “Love means nothing in Tennis. What does it mean to you?” Good question,
isn’t it? You know, I’d love (no pun
intended) to know the origin of how they came up with scoring tennis. Hello?!
It’s like the strangest thing in the world.
Anyway,
this passage from the gospel according to John 13:32-35 an also repeated in
another way by Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians 13:1-13 which ends
with the verse, And now faith, hope, and love remains and the greatest of these
is love, are known as the “love passages”.
We
are a culture obsessed with feelings.
Watch the next time you see some disaster reported on the news
channel. The reporter thrusts a
microphone in the face of a woman in obvious agony and what will that reporter
ask her? “Can you tell us how you feel?”
How
do you feel? That’s the question on talk
shows, in the tabloids, and now in mainstream news reporting – and don’t even
get me started on old shows like the Jerry Springer Show. We are obsessed with our moods. We want, above all else, to lift our spirits;
to make ourselves feel better. You can
even watch the Dow Jones Market rise and fall just on people’s emotions and
feelings about the economy. We are
obsessed with our moods. And we’ll do
anything to feel better. Eat chocolate,
have ice cream, or those wonderfully delicious Krispy Kreme Donuts. We’ll eat the foods that are called “comfort
foods” to feel better when something in our lives just isn’t right. But then we’ll feel awful about the weight we
put on, so we’ll start jogging and running and working out at the gym, going on
a diet so that we can “feel better” about our bodies. We are obsessed with feelings. It honestly controls our lives.
And
now we come to some passages in Scripture that talk about the great of all
feelings and emotions and we’re talking about love. This passage from John calling on Christian
to center their lives around loving one another and the longer passage in I
Corinthians which is read at almost all weddings, used as some blissful
understanding of how two people are to live in harmony and love with one
another. But have we really listened to
these passages.
Jesus
makes a new commandment. Not a
suggestion, not just a way of being in the world or lifestyle, but a
commandment. And Paul wrote about love
not for blissful couples in the honeymoon stage of being in love with one
another, but rather when he was in prison and critical of the people in the
Corinthian church because they had forgotten the real meaning to life. They had taken Christ’s message and turned it
inward and had begun to focus on religion as attaining some kind of emotional
high, an ecstasy that takes them out of themselves, a religious enthusiasm that
carries them far out of the mundane and real world. His comrades in Corinth really majored in the
quest for a “religious” experience. They
spoke in tongues, a sort of utterance that takes them to height of fervor. They reveled in it, they were almost, one
might say, addicted to it. They had
taken Christ’s message of love to a place that it hadn’t meant to go. So now, Paul, although he doesn’t exactly
dismiss their religious fervor, he does become critical of their actions. If they have faith and hope – a euphoric
wonder of God but have not love, the commandment that Christ gave them….they
are nothing, he says.
Paul
says that if we have and can do everything, but have no love, it is as useless
as multiplying by zero or a minus. You
end up with nothing or worse, less than nothing. If we can preach with the eloquence of Billy
Graham, or keep a spotless house, or name the 66 books of the Bible in
sequence, or quote all the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, or teach Sunday
School, or work with Habitat for Humanity, or help out at food pantry, or work
with kids – but have no love – we are worth absolute nothing. Christ’s commandment was to love one
another. And because Christ came to love
the entire world, to sacrifice himself for all, I don’t think he meant only the
people we sit next to in our pews.
Christ meant for us to love everyone.
The
love that Jesus and Paul is speaking about isn’t something that you get swept
up in emotionally, but rather it is something that you decide about and
do. In this case, love is a decision,
not a feeling.
There
are three kinds of love expressed in the scriptures – there is agape love;
which is love for God – the highest, purest form of love. Then there is eros love; which is emotional,
blissful – the love between two people; such as spouses, but it can also be
between parent and child. The third kind
of love is philio love; which is a brotherly love – love between friends and
neighbors.
In
the John passage and in I Corinthians, we are talking about agape love. A love that transcends emotion. The reality is, we must give ourselves over
to this business of Godly love only by setting aside our obsession with our own
feelings, our own longings for eternal happiness, our own desire for ongoing
bliss.
Let
me read an edited piece that Mike Harden, a journalist for the Columbus
Dispatch, wrote some years ago, which I think illustrates as beautifully as
anything that I’ve ever read about the kind of love that Christ and Paul is
talking about in these passages.
Frank’s
wife Judy returned to the hospital room, drawing a chair to his bedside. “Thirsty,” he complained. She lifted the straw to his lips as he pulled
the oxygen mask aside. The medicine made
him sick then. She fetched the basin,
wrapped a firm arm around his spasm-racked shoulders, mopped the sweat from his
forehead. In sickness and in
health. They were supposed to be
preparing for a Florida vacation, not holding on to each other in a cardiac
care unit. “Help me sit up,” he
whispered hoarsely.
In
the end, love comes down to this; not Clark Gable’s devilish first appraisal of
Vivien Leigh, not Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling in the surf, but,
“Help me sit up.” A sharp-toothed rain
spattered against the windowpane. In the
room, a procession of medical courtiers came and went, trading pills for blood
and tinkering, ever tinkering, with the buttons and dials controlling the tubes
and wires to which their patient was trussed, like some latter-day Gulliver.
One
evening Frank was sitting asleep in the chair next to the bed. Judy paused in the waiting room to remove her
street shoes and put on her slippers.
She did not want to wake him now that sleep was such a rationed
luxury. Soundlessly, she slipped into
the chair next to his. In the end, love
is not the smoldering glance across the dance floor, the clink of crystal, a
leisurely picnic spread upon summer’s clover.
It is the squeeze of a hand. I’m
here. I’ll be here, no matter how long
the fight, even when you want most to close your eyes and be done with it all. Water?
You need water? Here. Drink.
Let me straighten your pillow.
“Help
me into bed,” he said, he who had once been warrior triumphant in the business
world. He was tough, demanding, but
never as much on others as himself. If
you gave him your best, no one could hurt you.
If you gave him less, no one could hide you. She had been with him and beside him when the
future was golden, beside him when health sent his career into eclipse. “I’m thirsty,” he said. “Here,” she said, “let me get you
something.” Pause
Along
the road they once traveled so often to visit family, the hearse wound its way
past stubbled fields, shuttered roadside markets. The minister, clutching his Bible against his
chest as though it was sufficient cloak against the winds whipping across the
rural countryside, passed final benediction:
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
He stooped to pick up his hat as the funeral director placed the folded
flag in Judy’s lap.
So,
when all is said and done, love is not rapture and fire. It’s a hand steadier than one’s own,
squeezing harder than a heartbeat. Wine
changes back to water. Endearment is
exhibited by what once might have been considered insignificant kindnesses, but
which, in the end, become the tenderest of ministrations. On the day after the funeral, trying to busy
herself with chores that could easily wait, she plopped the laundry basket down
in front of her granddaughter. The child
tugged out the end of the sheet her Frank had always held when they did the
wash. When the child brought the folded
end to meet the corners her grandmother held, she kissed her playfully, just as
he had once done. “I’m thirsty,
Grandma.”
“Here,
let me get you something.” As a tear
streamed down her cheek, she got a glass of water for her grandchild. Pause.
A
beautiful picture of what life is all about, isn’t it? But not just the love of a married
couple. It reminds us that love is as
near to each one of us as someone who needs us.
And there is always someone who needs us. This is why we are here, for the love that
does not insist on its own way in life, that not only hopes and believes, but
that bears and endures the sufferings and the needs of those with whom we share
life’s way.
Love is expressed in how we relate to
one another, how we treat one another.
It has less to do with an emotion than with devotion. Sometimes doing the loving thing means being a
bit more patient with a friend or family member who irritates us. Sometimes it means doing a random act of
kindness with a stranger. Sometimes it
means we can rejoice in someone else’s good fortune. Sometimes it means we need to quit drawing
attention to ourselves and focus on others.
Sometimes it means being humble.
The impact of these kinds of loving actions would be enormous.
Love is a decision, not an
emotion. Let us fill our world with
agape love.
Thanks
be to God. AMEN.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
We
give you thanks, O God, for the blessings of this life; for family and friends,
for work and play, for health and healing, for the good that we receive and
that we also give. We praise Your holy
name not only with our lips, but by returning to You a portion of the gifts
that you have so generously bestowed on us, asking You to use them to build up
the body of Christ here and to the ends of the earth. AMEN.
Closing
Hymn – Seek Ye First #333/713
Benediction –
May the love
of God which was lavished upon you by Jesus Christ be in your hearts, your
minds, and your spirits as you leave this place and go into God’s world. Be bearers of peace and hope, and most
especially love to all you meet. AMEN.
Postlude
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