Worship
Service for March 17, 2024
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: O God, You have chosen us to be Your
people.
P: We have come together to give You praise
and thanks.
L: You know our hearts, our inner thoughts,
and our very souls.
P: Accept the worship we offer, and help us
to see You more clearly, Lord, day by day.
Opening Hymn – Jesus Walked This Lonesome Valley #80 Blue
Prayer of Confession
O just and forgiving God, You
have called us to be Your people and to bear witness to Your love in our
world. We confess that we often judge by
appearances rather than looking into the heart.
Forgive us for rejecting those who do not meet our expectations or
please our desires, for assuming that their shortcomings are due to their own
sin and failure, and for persisting in our private judgment when facts and the
testimony of others show the opposite.
We confess that we easily overlook those who are not like us and neglect
those who we assume, have nothing to offer.
Keep us mindful of Your choices and help us resist the temptation to
judge. We ask this confidently in the
name of Christ Jesus. (Silent prayers
are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: The mercy of the Lord is from everlasting
to everlasting. In the name of Jesus
Christ, we are forgiven.
P: We
give our praise and thanksgiving. 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
Loving God, in Jesus
Christ You have shown us compassion, accepted us unconditionally, and given us
a new set of values to embrace. Help us
to live in accordance with Your will and aspire to be Christ-like in our
relationships. Guide us in paths that
lead to life and the peace that only You can give. For without Your grace and guidance, we are
lost.
Healer of our every
ill, through the power of Your Spirit and the words of Your Son, You bring life
to the lifeless and hope to the hopeless.
You know our deep hurts and our needs – those things that drain life
from our bodies and souls. Stir us by Your
Spirit, that we may be strengthened in body.
Blow through us with Your Spirit, that our souls may be new.
Even as we seek Your
healing and life-giving power, we lift up those whose weakness brings them to
despair. We entrust to You those who are
sick and dying; the homeless and those living in poverty; those without work
and without food; those living in constant fear of persecution and oppression,
particularly in other lands; those who live with the constant companion of
violence and conflict. May we not be
silent accomplices, but rather vocal advocates against violence. May we be empowered, O Lord, to live out
each day as examples of Your Way, Your Truth, Your Life. Allow us to teach with every breath and with
every action, that we respect all human life, even as we pray for peace around
the globe.
Plant Your transforming
love into our spirits. Give us courage. As we gather this day to bring before You our
concerns, our joys and sorrows, give us hearts of peace and confidence in Your
all-sustaining presence. Help us set our
feet on this pathway toward the cross and beyond.
We pray especially
for….
…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 – Jesus
Paid It All #305 Brown Hymnal
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Jeremiah
31:31-34
Second Scripture Reading – John
12:20-33
Sermon – A Forward Looking Faith
(based on Jeremiah 31:31-34, John 12:20-33)
Jeremiah’s description is arresting. God would set aside the old covenant. In its place God would give his people a new
covenant. Its foundation would not be written
laws and regulations. Instead, the Lord
would put his spirit directly into the hearts of people. It would be based on his nearness.
How do we think about that new covenant? A baby bird was heard to ask its mother,
“Mother, what is air?” To this she made
no reply, but spread her wings and flew. A baby fish asked its mother, “Mother, what is
water?” She made no reply, but swished
her tail and swam. A baby ant asked its
mother, “Mother, what is dirt?” She made
no reply, but stretched her legs and dug the burrow a little deeper. A child in a nursery asked her mother,
“Mother, what is love?” She made no
reply, but picked up the child and hugged her.
Like water to a fish; like air to a bird; like dirt to an ant;
like love to a child - such is the presence of God to those who love him.
The covenant described by Jeremiah would be natural and
internal. People wouldn’t be forced to
learn of God. Instead, they would simply
know God naturally. It means that God
wants to be known by people everywhere and to that end, God has given knowledge
of who God is to everyone – within their hearts, within their spirits. Unfortunately, there is so much noise today
that drowns that out, and yet people do know.
Helen Keller was blind and deaf from the age of two after a bout
of scarlet fever or (perhaps) meningitis – she had lived a life of isolation,
unable to speak words she could not hear, unable to even know what a word was. A woman by the name of Ann Sullivan, aged 20,
arrived at Helen Keller's house on March 5, 1887, a day Keller would forever
remember as "my soul's birthday". Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen to
communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l"
(do the sign language motions in your own palm) for the doll that
she had brought Keller as a present. Keller
initially struggled with lessons since she could not comprehend that every
object had a word identifying it. She
had no understanding of language. When
Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became
so frustrated she broke the mug. Keller
remembered how she soon began imitating Sullivan's hand gestures and recalls in
her autobiography, The Story of My Life: "I did not know that I was
spelling a word or even that words existed. I was simply making my fingers go in
monkey-like imitation."
The next month Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized
that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running
cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water". Again writing about the moment:
“I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her
fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty
consciousness as of something forgotten—a thrill of returning thought; and
somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that w-a-t-e-r meant the wonderful
cool something that was flowing over my hand. The living word awakened my soul, gave it
light, hope, set it free!
Keller quickly demanded that Sullivan sign the names of all the
other familiar objects in her world.
Later in life, Ann Sullivan introduced her to Philips Brooks, a
bishop in the Episcopal Church, who had become well known for writing the
lyrics to the famous song, O Little Town of Bethlehem. In one of her letters, Helen told Brooks that
she had always known about God, even before she had any words. Even before she could call God anything, she
knew God was there. She didn't know what
it was. God had no name for her --
nothing had a name for her. She had no
concept of a name. But in her darkness
and isolation, she knew she was not alone. Someone was with her. She felt God's love. And when she received the gift of language and
heard about God, she said she already knew. Now this is what is interesting to me. People say that others impose and push there
believe on people to make them believe. But
Helen didn't have any Christianity or any other religion, for that matter
"imposed" upon her and yet she just innately knew there was a God!
“The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a
new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made
with their ancestors when I took them b the hand to bring them out of the land
of Egypt a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the
Lord. But this is the covenant that I will
make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will put my law within them, and I will
write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to one another, “Know the Lord,” for
they shall all know me.
Helen Keller, blind and deaf from the age of 2, knew God. How can someone explain that? She explains it herself, that even when she
was most alone in her darkness, the Holy Spirit of God was with her, letting
God’s presence be known to her, writing it upon her heart.
This comes about as we give ourselves to God through Christ. Knowing God this way establishes us and
strengthens us. In times of trouble we
will already have a relationship with God that we can count on.
Another important aspect of this passage from Jeremiah is that real
faith looks forward. While the people of
God are told to remember what the Lord has done for them in the past, no real
progress can be made by staring into the rearview mirror. Jeremiah tells his contemporaries “a time is
coming.” He helped them look forward to
a time in the future when their condition would improve. Jeremiah promised a new covenant. The new covenant would face the people forward
and help them live life as it came toward them.
In the book Unfinished Business,
Halford Luccock told a story of the little town of Flagstaff, Maine. In the late 1940’s the Power Company wanted to
flood the area to build a hydro-electric power plant along the river to bring
more electric power to the area. In
order to do that, the town of Flagstaff would have to be flooded. By Spring of 1949, most of the residents and
businesses had settled with the company, but 25 families held out. They were not interested in selling their
homes, however all improvements and repairs in the whole town were stopped. What was the use of painting a house if it was
to be covered with water in six months? Why
repair anything when the whole village was to be wiped out? So, week by week, the whole town became more
and more bedraggled, more gone to seed, more woebegone until the waters finally
came and wiped it out. Then Luccock
added by way of explanation, “Where there is no faith in the future, there is
no power in the present.”
They actually knew what the future held for them. What could they have done in the present that
would have been powerful and brilliant?
Perhaps any number of things – thrown a party! Painted their houses outrages colors, strewn
the town with toilet paper and ribbons. I
don’t know. They could have done any
number of things, but instead they allowed the sorrow of knowing the past would
be forgotten with no faith in a future, that it gave no power to their present. They just simply let the town fall to ruin
and die without even a whimper of acknowledgement.
Jeremiah concludes the passage about a forward-facing faith by
saying in verse 34 that God “will forgive their wickedness and remember their
sins no more”. Gaining God’s forgiveness
is not a matter of following minute rules or loathsome regulations. It is knowing and trusting God. That trust can help us walk through incredible
times.
Christ also calls us to a faith that looks forward.
From our New Testament reading this morning from John chapter
12, Jesus concludes his public ministry and announces that his hour has come. Even Gentiles seek this rabbi, perplexing his
followers. Jesus’ explanation is to
announce his death as part of God’s greater plan. What could be gained by dying? Jesus answer: the conquering of evil and the
salvation of the world! Even now, in
retrospect, the significance of what Christ did, and what Christ does, staggers
our understanding.
This text precedes the betrayal and crucifixion of Christ. The world is poised to nail Jesus to a tree. Both the religious leaders and Jesus’
followers will conclude that his ministry ends at the cross. They will think him finished, but as we know
post-Easter Christianity, and what we will celebrate in a few weeks - God is
not finished.
By Christ’s death, God’s power is revealed. The One who seemed powerless was the one power
on whom the world depended. The world is
often slow to recognize its need for God.
But evil met its match in the power of the Christ. John’s Gospel emphasizes that “the ruler of
this world will be driven out” (v. 31). Christ’s
power comes in what is revealed after death. As is true with one seed that falls to the
ground and brings forth abundant life, Christ’s death yields abundant living
for those who follow Him.
It is most definitely a future forward facing faith. Who would grasp the concept otherwise, that
death is beginning of life?
What a paradox is this power of God! It does not happen when we look backward to
the past as in a rearview mirror, but rather forward into the future. But, it can only happen if you are facing in the
right direction. What way are you
facing?
Thanks be to God. AMEN.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Your
gifts to us are abundant, O God. You
give light and life to your people, strengthening us for your mission in this
world. Receive from us, we humbly pray,
these offerings, that they may be used to both serve you and establish your
will within the body of Christ. We pray
in the name of your Son, Jesus. AMEN.
Closing
Hymn – I Will Sing of My Redeemer #309 Brown Hymnal
Benediction –
Friends,
fix your eyes on the Lord. Place your
hand in God’s Hand, trusting in God’s guidance and comfort. Go into this world that needs to hear the
words of healing love, and bring the good news of God’s absolute love and
presence to all people. Go in peace.
Postlude
