Worship
Service for November 8, 2026
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: Great is the Lord and greatly to be
praised!
P: Each day God brings to us new
opportunities to learn and grow.
L: God is near to all of us.
P: We will not fear to call upon the Lord.
L: Come, let us praise God who walks with us
daily.
P: Let us open our hearts and spirits to God
who loves and lives with us.
Opening Hymn – His Eye is on the Sparrow Hymn #624 Brown Hymnal
Prayer of Confession
Faithful God, we come before
You with many concerns on our hearts. We
get frustrated and angry at the way things are going in the world. We want Your immediate intervention; and when
we don’t see things happening the way we think they should be, we are quick to
dismiss You and any thought of Your presence.
Help us stop our selfishness and our quick anger. Remind us that You will work with us and
through us for peace and hope. Release
us from the traps of quick tests of Your faithfulness and help us see the “big
picture” of Your awesome love that spans all of time. Forgive us for our pettiness and our
stubbornness. Bring us back to You, O
Lord. Help us shout Your praises and
live lives of joyful service. For we ask
these things in Jesus’ name. (Silent
prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Even though we get frustrated and angry,
God still loves us and seeks to heal us.
Open your hearts to receive God’s blessings and to feel God’s healing
power in your lives.
P: Thanks be to God. 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
As we gather in prayer
this day as a community of your people, O God, we pray for thankful hearts for
the goodness of your creation, for the signs of your loving care of all things
we see around us daily, and for the calling into a community of the followers
of your son, Jesus Christ. We give you
thanks for his teachings, his compassionate words of care, his challenges to
all the ways we focus on self-centeredness and self-sufficiency, for his
healing presence and for his courageous witness against the powers of this
world that focus on destruction, hatred, and death.
Creator God, you draw
all people into one body so that we may learn the precious connectedness of
your universe. You invite us to nurture
each other, to trust each other, to empower each other, to unbind each other,
to encourage one another, so that together we will be a strong and healthy
body.
Holy Lord, empower us to be more faithful and diligent in
spreading your good news of peace, love, hope, and grace in our world. Give us boldness and courage to speak and act
against the principalities and powers of this age that fill the world with
injustice and acts of violence.
You also taught us, Lord, to pray for those who persecute
us. Though it is difficult to voice kind
words about those who perpetuate evil, we pray for those who find anger in
their hearts, for those who want to do violence against another human
being. We pray also for those who lost
their lives in events around the globe.
Cover your creation, Lord, with compassion and care. We especially pray this day for those living
in the Middle East, for Israel and Palestine, for those living in Gaza. We pray for those in the Ukraine and for Russia. We pray for a change of heart, for people to
find better ways to communicate their frustration, for increased understanding,
for Your holy sense of mercy to pervade minds and spirits.
We also pray for our own loved ones….
O Lord, hear the words of our mouths and now in silence hear
also the words of our hearts.
We pray all these things 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 – A
Mighty Fortress Hymn #260/151
Blue/Brown
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Amos
5:18-24
Second Scripture Reading – 1
Thessalonians 4:13-18
Sermon
– Hope
Flows
(based on Amos 5:18-24 and 1
Thessalonians 4:13-18)
There are some things we say because
we honestly don’t know what else to say, especially when someone we care about
is hurting. We stand in the receiving
line at the funeral home, or we sit across the kitchen table from someone whose
whole life has changed, and we feel this responsibility to find a sentence that
will somehow make things better. So, we
reach for something familiar. “Everything
happens for a reason.” “God needed
another angel.” “You just have to have
faith.”
Usually, we mean well. We want to offer comfort, and we would give
almost anything to take away even a little of the pain. But sometimes the words we reach for ask
people to move past their grief before they have even begun to understand what
they have lost. And sometimes, we offer
those words because another person’s sadness makes us feel helpless, and we
would like to get everyone back to a place where things feel manageable again.
But faith does not always make
things manageable. Sometimes faith gives
us the courage to remain present when nothing can be managed or explained, when
the only loving thing we can do is pull up a chair and stay.
That is part of what Paul is
offering the church in Thessalonica, and it is part of what we need to hear
this morning. The people in that
congregation are worried about those who have died. They have placed their hope in Jesus Christ,
and they are waiting for Christ’s return, but in the meantime, people they love
are dying. There are empty places in
their community, familiar voices they no longer hear, people they expected to
share the future with who are no longer there.
And beneath their questions about what happens next is a deeply human
question: What about the people we love?
Will they be left out? Have they
missed what God promised? Has death
somehow carried them beyond the reach of Christ?
Those are questions we can
understand. We may ask them with
different language, and we may carry different pictures of what lies beyond
this life, but sooner or later most of us find ourselves wondering whether the love
we have shared with someone can really survive their death. Paul responds by telling them that he does
not want them to grieve as those who have no hope. He does not say that faithful Christians
should recover quickly, that tears reveal a spiritual weakness, or that
believing in resurrection means you should be able to get through the holidays
without feeling the absence of someone you love. He makes room for grief, because grief
belongs to the experience of loving people whose lives are precious to us. You can believe in resurrection and still cry
in the grocery store because you walked past your mother’s favorite
cookies. You can trust in God’s promises
and still reach for the phone before remembering that the person you want to
call will not answer. You can have a
deep and enduring faith and still find yourself dreading the first Thanksgiving
with an empty chair. Hope does not
remove those experiences. Hope gives us somewhere to bring them.
Paul’s promise is that those who
have died have not slipped out of God’s care. The living will not get ahead of
them, and the dead will not be forgotten. However we understand the
extraordinary images in this passage—the trumpet, the clouds, the gathering in
the air—the heart of his message is that God will bring Christ’s people
together, and they will be with the Lord.
The passage ends with an instruction that helps us understand its
purpose: encourage one another. These
words are given to a grieving church so that its people can hold one another
up. We misuse them whenever we turn them
into a source of fear, or treat them as a puzzle that must be solved before we
can rest in the love of God. Paul wants
this congregation to know that death cannot make their beloved people less
beloved to Christ.
And that would be enough to sit with
for a while this morning, especially for those among us who are carrying fresh
grief, or grief that has become familiar without becoming easy. But alongside Paul’s words of comfort, we
hear the voice of Amos, and Amos will not let us settle too comfortably into
our seats. Through the prophet, God
speaks to people who look forward to the day of the Lord, apparently expecting
that God’s arrival will confirm what they already believe: that they are on the
right side, that their enemies will be dealt with, and that the future will
belong to them.
Amos asks them to reconsider. Why are you so eager for God to come, he
asks, when you have paid so little attention to what God desires? Then the language becomes almost unbearable. God rejects their festivals, their offerings,
and the sound of their songs. All the
things that make their religious life feel substantial and reassuring have
become offensive to the very God they claim to worship.
Imagine spending weeks preparing a
beautiful worship service. The choir has
rehearsed, the flowers are in place, the bulletin has been checked, and
everyone has worked hard to make the morning meaningful. Then, right in the
middle of it, God says, “I need you to listen to what is happening outside
these doors.” Because outside, someone
cannot afford enough food. Someone is
being denied a fair hearing. Someone is
working hard and still falling further behind.
Someone has learned from experience that the community’s promises of
welcome come with exceptions.
And the worship inside has taught
people how to feel faithful without helping them become more faithful in their
treatment of their neighbors. That is
the wound Amos presses. The problem is
not that people sing or pray or gather for worship. The problem is that they have allowed their
worship and their daily lives to become disconnected. They can honor God with their voices while
ignoring people God loves, and somewhere along the way they have stopped
noticing the contradiction.
Then comes that great call: “Let
justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing
stream.” Water moves. It reaches
places. It makes a difference to the ground
it touches. We understand this when a
water line breaks. There can be an
enormous supply in the system, but if it never reaches your kitchen faucet, you
still cannot fill a glass. You can talk
all day about how much water is available, but someone needs to find out where
the flow has stopped.
Amos asks us to consider where the
flow has stopped in our life with God.
We hear about grace here. Where
does that grace reach someone who has made a mistake? We celebrate welcome here. What does that welcome feel like to the
person who arrives without knowing anyone?
We speak of every person being made in God’s image. How does that conviction shape what we
tolerate when a neighbor is demeaned because of race, poverty, disability, or
whom they love?
Those questions are part of worship,
too. They help us follow the love we
proclaim all the way into the lives we live. And this is where today’s passages
speak to one another. Paul tells a
grieving church that its beloved dead belong to God. Amos tells a worshiping community to take
seriously the lives of the people who belong to God right now. Together, they give us a hope large enough to
embrace those we have lost and those whose suffering we have learned to
overlook. It’s possible to talk about
heaven in ways that make us less attentive to earth. We can assure people that everything will be
better someday while leaving them alone with what is unbearable today. We can promise a future feast without
wondering whether our neighbors have supper tonight.
The hope of resurrection should
deepen our care for the lives around us.
If God’s love holds us even through death, then surely the life of each
person we meet deserves our attention.
Their hunger matters. Their
safety matters. Their dignity
matters. Their grief matters.
Think about what often happens when
someone dies. Someone makes soup. Someone takes care of the dog. Someone remembers that the surviving spouse
has never handled the bills and offers to sit down at the kitchen table and
help. Someone keeps calling after the
funeral, when the house has grown quiet and most everyone else has returned to
their routines. None of those people can
undo the death. None of them can explain
away the loss. But through their
patient, practical care, they help a grieving person experience something of
the promise that they have not been abandoned.
That is encouragement with hands and feet.
And Amos asks us to let that care
keep widening. When we discover that a
neighbor is hungry, we feed them, and we also begin asking why so many
neighbors are hungry. When we help
someone through a crisis, we listen for the barriers that made the crisis
worse. When we hear the same painful
story from person after person, we consider whether something in our common
life needs to change.
For a congregation that has a food
bank or takes care of Christmas for a family, this becomes very real. Food offers immediate nourishment, taking
care of a family at Christmas offers immediate help but the table and lack of
resources also creates the possibility of relationship. We begin to know names. We hear about the rent increase, the
unreliable car, the long wait for an appointment, the job whose hours never
quite add up to enough.
And once we know people, it becomes
harder to reduce their lives to an opinion we heard somewhere. Justice grows more personal, and our
understanding of love grows more demanding.
Of course, some days we are tired.
Some days the needs seem endless, and we wonder how much difference our
small congregation, our small offering, or our one act of kindness can make. This is where we need Paul’s encouragement
again.
We are not being asked to
manufacture the resurrection or carry the future by ourselves. Our hope rests in the God who raised Jesus,
the God whose faithfulness reaches further than our strength. We can do the work that is ours to do without
pretending that everything depends on us.
And we can rest when we need to rest, trusting that God continues to
love the world even while we sleep.
That kind of hope gives us room to
be honest. We can admit that death
hurts. We can acknowledge that injustice
is real. We can confess that the church
has sometimes offered beautiful words where courageous action was needed. And because we trust in God’s grace, honesty
can become the beginning of change.
Perhaps that is what these passages invite us to carry into the week
ahead: a willingness to stay close.
Stay close to those who are
grieving, even when you have run out of things to say. Stay close to the neighbor whose experience
challenges what you thought you understood.
Stay close to the promises of God when you cannot see how those promises
will be fulfilled. And let what we
receive in worship begin to move through us.
Let the assurance that we belong to
God help us make room for someone who feels they belong nowhere. Let the bread we share awaken our concern for
those who are hungry. Let our prayers
for peace shape the way we speak, the decisions we make, and the suffering we
are willing to confront. We do not know
all the details of the future Paul describes.
We know the promise at its center: we will be with the Lord. The people we entrust to God are held in a
love stronger than our ability to hold them ourselves. And we know what Amos asks of us while we
wait: let justice flow.
So, we will grieve when grief comes,
and we will help one another carry it.
We will worship, and we will listen for where God is sending us. We will
keep setting the table, making the call, showing up, and asking what love
requires in this particular place, among these particular people.
For the God who holds our future is
present with us here, giving us grace for the next faithful thing. Amen.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Heavenly
Lord, we are indeed thankful for the blessings you have bestowed upon us. Grant that these offerings serve you in the
building up of your church and your witness to the world; that your heavenly
kingdom is near at hand within us now and always. AMEN.
Closing
Hymn – O Master Let Me Walk With Thee #357/665 Bl/Br
Benediction –
God has called and chosen you to be witnesses to hope and
peace in God’s world. Go in peace and
this same healing, reconciling love and peace will be with you. Go and serve the Lord your God in all that you
do. AMEN.
Postlude
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