Worship
Service for August 15, 2021
Special Announcement:
If you
have found this blog and our worship services/meditations helpful, it would be
a great blessing to us if you’d help with our church’s ongoing ministries by
providing a monetary contribution to either church.
Olivet Presbyterian
Church
726 Fourth Street Box 526
West Elizabeth, PA 15088
Or
Bethesda United Presbyterian Church
314 S. 3rd
Avenue
Elizabeth, PA 15037
Click here (when
highlighted) for the YouTube link for the recorded service.
Prelude
Announcements:
Today, we celebrate Communion, if you are worshipping from home, feel free to grab a piece of bread or cracker and some juice or liquid of your choosing to celebrate this sacrament with us.
·
Please feel free to join us for in person
worship at Olivet (West Elizabeth, PA) at 9:45am or at Bethesda (Elizabeth, PA)
at 11:15am.
·
Church Picnic and worship service will be held
on Aug 22 at Round Hill Park and for anyone interested there will be a joint
choir singing for that service. One
practice will be held at First Presbyterian Church on Aug 15 at 12:30.
·
Bright Beginnings Preschool will have an Open
House on Saturday, Aug 28 from 10am-1pm.
All are welcome for tours. Come
and Touch-a-Truck!
Sounding of the Hour (at Bethesda only)
Call to Worship
L: Come, be nourished by the words and witness
of Jesus Christ.
P: He came that we might know of God’s
absolute, steadfast love for us.
L: Receive the gift of the Bread of Life and
hunger no more.
P: We are grateful for Jesus Christ, who has
given to us this magnificent gift.
L: Come, let us worship and rejoice!
P: Let us sing our praise to God.
Opening Hymn – How Firm a Foundation
Prayer of Confession
Gracious
and Merciful Lord, You have offered to us food for the journey. You remind us that Your very life will
sustain us as we witness to Your love.
But sometimes we let those reminders slip from our consciousness. We wallow in our difficulty; make excuses for
not living the kind of life that You would have us live; treat others in ways
which are not healthy or loving. Please
forgive us, Lord. Stop us in our tracks
and help us examine the many ways in which we have not served You well and the
callous things we have done to others.
Cleanse our spirits and our souls from these unrighteous acts, and cause
us to follow You more closely. Remind us
again that You are the Bread of Life, having given Yourself for us. Sustain us and encourage us in our service. These things we ask in Jesus’ Name. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: Even though we turn our backs on God, God
is ready to forgive and heal our spirits.
God’s love never fails, and we can rejoice in the power of that eternal
love.
P: In the name of Jesus Christ, we give
thanks for being healed and forgiven.
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
We
like directions, Lord. We want an
owner’s manual; a guidebook; a how-to guide for our faith. Rules and regulations, time constraints seem
to dominate our lives and we forget the most basic understanding for our faith;
which is our relationship to God through the Son. God has drawn us here this day, to be healed,
to listen, to be encouraged in our service to God’s world. We have lifted up names of dear ones who
struggle with a host of issues and situations over which we feel
powerless. Remind us again that Your
power is sufficient for our needs. We
are all in Your loving car. Help us to
place our trust and confidence in You.
Let us feast on the Bread of Life who has given us the best example of
what it means to truly serve You and witness to Your divine love. Encourage us to serve You more fully.
We
especially pray for….
In
this moment of silence hear our hearts, Lord…
We
pray all this in your Son’s name who taught us to 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 – Just
As I Am
Scripture Reading(s):
OT – Psalm 111
NT – John 6:51-65
Sermon –
Bread of Life
(based John 6:51-65)
The sixth chapter of John is full of
statements that offended those who heard them.
First Jesus suggested that he was God’s own manna come down from heaven
to give life to the world. We’re used to
hearing that sort of thing, but imagine hearing it for the first time – from a
human being who doesn’t look all that different from you and I – Jesus said, “I
am the living bread that came down from heaven.
Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.”
Jesus took this offense to an even
higher level by choosing really gory words to describe what he meant. In all the other gospels, Jesus simply calls
this bread his body – or soma, a generic term for the whole of a person and is
the word used in all other places when Jesus talks about the bread being his
body. It’s used symbolically – just as
when Jesus says he is the door, or the True Vine. But in John’s gospel, he defines it further –
this bread is not just his body, but it is his flesh – or sarx in
Greek. It is a specific term which means
his skin and muscle tissue, the actual flesh that covers the bones. In all the other gospels, he offers it to be
eaten – or phago. The term that
we would often use by saying something like “Let’s sit down and eat.” But in John’s gospel he uses the Greek word trogon
for “chomp” or “gnaw,” a word that is more usually used for what a dog might do
with a bone.
A more literal translation of his
invitation goes like this: “Those who chomp my flesh and guzzle my blood have
eternal life; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” In my mind, that is a rather unsettling image
that sounds more like something for a butcher shop or a hedonistic ritual that
brings up images of candles, an upside-down star of David inside a circle and
animal sacrifice, than it does for a church.
What is really puzzling about this
however, is that on other occasions when Jesus spoke about himself being the
Bread of Life and the disciples are confused because they think he means it
literally, when he meant it figuratively, Jesus gets upset with them and says,
“How is it that you do not understand that I did not speak to you concerning
bread?” And yet here, he seems to mean
it quite literally with the specific word chooses he uses.
This is also where Catholics and
various Protestants have parted ways when it comes to the understanding of what
happens during the Sacrament of Communion.
Catholics have held on to the belief that the body and blood of bread
and wine are somehow transformed into Jesus real flesh and blood at Communion –
this has been called Transubstantiation.
Some Protestant denominations, such as Lutherans, are of the belief that
somehow the body and blood of Christ become part of the physical elements of
bread and wine – this has been called Consubstantiation. Presbyterians have held onto the more
symbolic understanding of Communion and that Christ’s body and blood are only
symbolically held in the bread and wine.
And for the first century hearers,
the Hebrew scriptures or the Old Testament as we know it, the Law clearly
forbids the drinking of blood. And here
Jesus is saying “drink my blood” for it is eternal life. Perhaps now you can understand why Jesus’
followers began to pull away from him at that point. “This teaching is difficult,” they said, “Who
can accept it?” No kidding. Jesus is telling them to go against
everything they’ve been taught.
Instead of making it easier for them
to understand, Jesus made it even harder.
“Does this offend you?” he said to his disciples. “Then what if you were to see the Son of Man
ascending to where he was before?” He
simply would not let up on them. If they
were going to follow him all the way, then they were going to have to give up
their need to understand, to agree, or to approve of everything he said or
did. They were going to have to believe
him, even when what he said offended them.
They were going to have to trust him, even when what he did went against
everything they had been taught.
At this point in following Jesus,
you can almost hear their minds slam shut.
They had hoped he was going to explain things to them so they could make
reasonable decisions about how best to follow him. Instead, he let them know that nothing, not
even their belonging to him, was theirs to decide. Because then he raises the bar even higher in
terms of offense. “For this reason I
have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father,”
he said. If you don’t get it, don’t
blame me. God must not have chosen you.
There must have been a terrible look
on his face when he said that, a terrible sound to his voice, because plenty of
his disciples turned around and left the room right then. For all we know, one or two of them spat on
the floor as they did, while others simply shook their heads and walked out the
door. At least twelve stayed, because
according to John he asked them, “Do you also wish to go away?” He was ready to watch all of them walk out
the door and for all of them to go away.
But Peter answered for them all.
“Lord, to whom can we go? You
have the words of eternal life.”
Maybe it’s just me, but I hear such
pathos, a mixture of pity and compassion, in those words. Peter is as offended as anyone else by what
Jesus is saying. Of all the disciples,
he is the one who stands up for traditional faith. He keeps the dietary laws. He never eats forbidden things, including any
kind of meat with the blood still in it.
The idea of gnawing flesh and drinking blood turns his stomach as badly
as it does anyone else’s, but where is he to go? As confusing as Jesus is, Peter has glimpsed
something in him that he cannot turn away from.
He has glimpsed God, and if trusting that means struggling with a whole
lot of distasteful things that go with it, then Peter will consent to
struggle. He will not give up the truth
he’s found, even if it comes tucked in a box full of spiders. He will not go away from the life he has been
led to, even if it is miles from the life he thought he wanted.
Denominations have fought long and
hard about some of these doctrines or ideas in scripture over centuries. And usually when there is a fight in the
broader church it is about scripture passages that seem to have opposing points
of view, so that all sides have a legitimate point to make. But we’ve chosen to argue about things for so
long that we are truly becoming irrelevant to the culture and society we are
supposed to lead to Christ.
There is no perfect church. If you become a Christian, you should
struggle with what the Bible says. It is
a life-long learning process, but one that is filled, I think, with rewards and
in the end, a rich heritage of faith, of action, of guidance for living, and
hope and assurance of eternal life in the future.
If you become a Presbyterian, you
get a national church heavy with all the bureaucracy. You get committees that take forever to
decide anything and people that still want to fight over rather silly
things. But then you also get inspired
worship, deep theologically sound documents and a commitment to world-wide
peacemaking and mission that surpasses the outreach of any other denomination
and puts all our divisions to shame.
Wherever people are people, there
will always be things that offend. Some
of them are things we should pursue until we get some agreement on them, and
others we should probably just leave alone – so that they can go on reminding
us that there are other people in this world, just as sincere as we are, who do
not see things our way. We need each
other, to save us from self-righteousness.
We also need each other to help keep us in shape for God. Because wherever God is God, there will
always be things that offend. Like
Jesus. Like fleshy bread and bloody
wine. Like this church we call Christ’s
body, in which we are grafted to each other as surely as we are grafted to him.
Further on in this passage in John
6, the disciples tell Jesus that this teaching was difficult, who can accept
it? Because of this many disciples
turned back and no longer went about with him.
So, Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” Peter spoke for all twelve of them and said,
“Lord, to whom can we go? You have the
words of eternal life. We have come to
believe and know that You are the Holy One of God.”
This is where we have heard the
words of eternal life. This is where we
have come to believe and know the Holy One of God. With God’s guidance may we continue to be
relevant for our culture and society today.
AMEN.
Offertory
Doxology
Prayer of Dedication
Gracious God, who provides in
abundance and in many ways, thank you for your blessings and the gifts we bring
to form community. Give us the will and
the ability to make the most of the riches you have showered upon us. In the name of our Savior, Jesus Christ. AMEN.
Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper
Closing Hymn – God Be With You Till We Meet
Again
Benediction
Filled to the brim with the
goodness of God; the nourishment of Jesus Christ, the Bread of life, and the
power of the Holy Spirit, go now in peace to serve God in all that you think,
do, and say. May God’s peace be with
you. AMEN.
Postlude
