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Worship
Service for September 18, 2022
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: O God, we come into Your courts with
praise and thanksgiving!
P: We come in celebration and song.
L: We come in gratitude of Your inheritance.
P: We come as those who have received
blessing upon blessing.
L: We come into Your courts with praise and
thanksgiving!
P: We come in celebration and song.
Opening Hymn – Open My Eyes Hymn
#324/563
Prayer of Confession
We confess that we find Your
medicine hard to swallow. The quick
fixes of this world are so much more pleasant, leaving us free to go back to
our usual routines. But Your medicine is
powerful. And if we take it, it will
remake and renew our lives. It will
reorient us to You and to You alone. Turn us toward Your love for justice and
true worship. Forgive our sins, for
which You weep. Forgive our hesitation. Grant us courage to choose You as our
physician of the soul, and to serve You and You alone. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: The God of salvation, the God who weeps
for us and for our world, is the God whose compassion comes speedily to meet
us, and to forgive us.
P: Thanks be to God for this saving
faith. 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
Jesus Christ, light of the world, we dare to bring our whole selves
before you this morning, asking that you shine your purifying light on us once
again. Illumine the dark corners no one
else sees – the shadows of doubt, the pockets of loneliness, the specters of
fear, the gloom of discouragement. Lift
our face to behold you in the full radiance of your light, that something of
your perfect love, truth, and peace may radiate into our lives and awaken us to
the full truth of who we are, by your grace and in your mercy.
Loving God, remind us
that we are here because you invite us, seek us, come to us, and embrace
us. We are here because as shepherd
seeks a lost sheep, you seek us when we are lost. As a woman searches for a lost coin, you
rejoice when we are found. Teach us ways
to give thanks.
Gracious Lord, shine
your healing light into every place of darkness and despair, we especially pray
for those living in our cities and our children who die at the hands of
violence, we pray for those caught up in alcohol and drug abuse, we pray for
those who are sick and need your healing powers.
Help find a way, Lord, to ease the suffering of the world, to find a
way towards peace and to bolster the good works that others share.
We also lift up to you
our friends and loved ones…
We pray these things
now in his precious name, who taught us to pray boldly together…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 – Come,
Thou Almighty King Hymn #139/8
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Jeremiah
8:19-9:1
Second Scripture Reading – Luke
16:1-13
Sermon – Creative Survival
(based on Luke 16:1-13)
8And his master commended the dishonest manager
because he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd in
dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. 9And
I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that
when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes.
Well, I searched for a more understandable translation. A number of years ago, before his death,
Eugene Peterson wrote a completely new translation of the Bible called the
Message. Many scholars didn’t like it
because it does take some license with the literal translation of words from
their original language, but it's probably the closest we’ve had of
understanding what today’s meaning might be behind the original words, even
though in Eugene Peterson’s translation, they might not be a literal one. So, it’s not a word for word literal
translation from the original languages, but it’s also much better than a
paraphrase. So, here’s how Eugene
Peterson tells the story in Luke 16:1-13.
16 1-2 Jesus said to his disciples, “There was once a rich man who had a
manager. He got reports that the manager
had been taking advantage of his position by running up huge personal expenses.
So he called him in and said, ‘What’s
this I hear about you? You’re fired. And
I want a complete audit of your books.’
3-4 “The manager said to himself, ‘What am I going to do? I’ve lost my job as manager. I’m not strong enough for a laboring job, and
I’m too proud to beg. . . . Ah, I’ve got a plan. Here’s what I’ll do . . . then when I’m turned
out into the street, people will take me into their houses.’
5 “Then
he went at it. One after another, he
called in the people who were in debt to his master. He said to the first, ‘How much do you owe my
master?’
6 “He
replied, ‘A hundred jugs of olive oil.’
“The
manager said, ‘Here, take your bill, sit down here—quick now—write fifty.’
7 “To
the next he said, ‘And you, what do you owe?’
“He
answered, ‘A hundred sacks of wheat.’
“He
said, ‘Take your bill, write in eighty.’
Now here is verse 8 and 9:
8-9 “Now here’s a surprise: The master praised the crooked manager! And why? Because he knew how to look after himself. Streetwise people are smarter in this regard
than law-abiding citizens. They are on
constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way—but for
what is right—using every adversity to stimulate you to creative
survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll live,
really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.”
10-13 Jesus went on to make these comments:
If you’re honest in small things,
you’ll be honest in big things;
If you’re a crook in small things,
you’ll be a crook in big things.
If you’re not honest in small jobs,
who will put you in charge of the store?
No worker can serve two bosses:
He’ll either hate the first and love the second
Or adore the first and despise the second.
You can’t serve both God and the Bank.
Let me reread verses 8
and 9 in this translation.
8-9 “Now here’s a surprise: The master praised the
crooked manager! And why? Because he knew how to look after himself. Streetwise people are smarter in this regard
than law-abiding citizens. They are on
constant alert, looking for angles, surviving by their wits. I want you to be smart in the same way—but for
what is right—using every adversity to stimulate you to creative
survival, to concentrate your attention on the bare essentials, so you’ll live,
really live, and not complacently just get by on good behavior.”
I think it is so much
more understandable now the way Eugene Peterson tells this story and what the
original writer was trying to say. It
makes so much more sense to me now. How
about you?
In fact, it is crucial
to the understanding of the whole story and, I think, crucial to the message we
are supposed to get from it. Here was
the confusion for me. In the normal
translation, it seemed that the master was praising the crooked manager and
that it was ok to do that because you’ll want to be welcomed into the eternal
homes – whatever that’s supposed to mean.
But then, it contradicts that advice by saying whoever is faithful in
little will be faithful in much and whoever is dishonest with very little will
be dishonest with much. But it isn’t
terribly clear that being dishonest is wholeheartedly wrong. Just that you can’t serve two masters. Honestly, for years this has been a
confusing parable to me.
But Eugene Peterson sets
it right for me. The master praised the
crooked manager because he got creative and figured out how to take care of
himself. And Jesus says, I want you to
be like that, but do it for all the right reasons. Do it in all the right ways. People who are streetwise know how to manipulate
the systems, they know how to work all the angles, they know how to get what
they need. Jesus says, be like that, not
for crooked and dishonest reasons, but do it for what is right. I love what Eugene Peterson calls it – he
calls this creative survival.
I’ve mentioned Phyllis
Tickle before. She’s the theologian who wrote
the book called the Emerging Church.
She says that we are in the midst of a sea change within culture and
within church. That every 500 years
there has seemed to be a major change in the world in regard to where culture
and religion intersect. Not just your
normal wave of change that occurs all the time, but rather a serious paradigm
change. The last major paradigm change was
the time of The Reformation in the 1500’s.
Phyllis Tickle believes that we are in the midst of that new paradigm shift. And I think Jesus is calling us to that
paradigm shift in this parable, interpreted by Eugene Peterson in his Message to
the church when Jesus calls us to be like the shrewd manager but in all the
right ways. We need to find ways of being
in the mode of creative survival. We
need to be streetwise and thrifty. We
need to look at all the possible angles.
We need to find new ways of doing things. I know that can be scary for those of us who
have always loved doing things the same way.
But, haven’t I heard some of you say, as you’ve gotten older, “well, I
just can’t do it the way I used to anymore.”
So, things in your own life change and you have to change with it. You might not like it. You might even resist it, but sometimes you
need to get more thrifty, work the angles to figure out how to do what you used
to do in a new way, or in a way that works for you now.
I think we’re in the
very same situation in the Church with a big capital C. It’s not just us, it’s not just
Presbyterians, it’s all of us, in every denomination. We need to start being shrewd, cunning,
working the angles, finding new ways of doing and being church that are
relevant to the world around us. And
here’s where the true understanding of this parable is helpful – not in dishonest
means, not in ways that would go against God and the stewardship God has entrusted
to us, but rather for the benefit and good of the Kingdom.
Now, I have absolutely
no idea what that looks like. I have
thoughts and ideas. I have wonderings
and trepidations, too. But I think we
need to get serious and start looking at this big picture together and figure
it out. God has continued to entrust us with
a message, a hope, a passion, and a heart for God’s love and forgiveness, for God’s
light and joy. How do we continue to get
that message across to our family members, our friends, our neighbors, the
folks down the street and across the way?
How can we learn creative survival in the 21st Century?
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Gracious
and loving God, we thank You for these gifts and ask that they be used to help
the needy in our community and throughout the world. As we offer You these gifts, we offer
ourselves as well, that together we might transform the world with Your grace
and love. AMEN.
Closing Hymn –
How Firm a Foundation Hymn #361/408
Benediction –
By our words and deeds, we show God that we are faithful
with the gifts we have received. Whether
over a little or a lot, we seek to be faithful stewards of God’s gifts. Take the gifts of God into the world, remembering
the poor, the least, and the lost. Go in
Peace!
Postlude
