Announcements: We are looking for a part-time site coordinator for our Free Kids Meals this summer on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. We are also looking for a part-time site coordinator for our Senior Lunches on Tuesday at Bethesda and Thursday at Olivet. Contact Pastor Walt if interested.
Worship
Service for May 19, 2024
Prelude
Announcements:
Call to Worship
L: We are summoned today to be touched by
holy fire.
P: Even now the flames may dance above our
heads.
L: Igniting our call to discipleship so that
it blazes into commitment.
P: Even now the flames may be burning into
our hearts,
L: Prophets, visionaries, dreamers – all were
touched by holy fire.
P: May the Holy Spirit’s fire touch our own
spirits today.
Opening Hymn – Spirit of God,
Descend Upon My Heart #326/390
Prayer of Confession
Almighty and ever gracious
God, we confess that we have failed to open our hearts to the power of Your
Spirit. We continue the divisions of
Babel, speaking in tongues that confound rather than clarify, hurt rather than
heal, separate rather than unite. Though
we are not deserving, we pray for the gift of fellowship that confirms Your
presence among us. Restore our fractured
lives that we, with one voice, may give You thanks and praise. (Silent prayers are offered) AMEN.
Assurance of Pardon
L: For all who have come believing in Christ
as the Way, there is rest from your fruitless labors, forgiveness for your
sins, and the guarantee of eternal life.
Let us then be touched this day by holy fire which can set the world
ablaze with God’s love and compassion.
Friends, this is the good news of the gospel.
P: In
Jesus Christ, we are forgiven. 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
On this
day of Pentecost, knock us off our seats, Lord, with the wind of your Holy
Spirit. Don’t let us just sit back and
rest as though nothing important has happened. Remind us that You have come to bless and
prepare us for Your service. Now is the
time of proclamation and celebration! Now
is the birth of your church, not as an exercise in futility, but as a dynamic
group of people who know You and love You as You know and love each of us.
Most Holy
God, make us so joyful that we find it difficult to sit back and watch. We want to take part of Your healing love and
mercy. We want to be people who bear the
word to others that Your love for us is eternal; that Jesus Christ, our Savior,
proclaimed and taught that love in all that he did and said, modeling for us a
new way to live. Pick us up and propel
us forward into Your world. Help us
remember that You have given to us what we need to be Your disciples. We just need to say a resounding "Yes!"
to You.
We thank
you, O God, for all the wondrous patience and blessings You pour into our lives
each and every day, as we offer our lives back to You in joy and hope. Be with our loved ones and friends that we
have named this morning, who need to feel and know of Your presence in their
lives as they deal with health issues or other situations that You are solely
aware of. We especially lift up to You….
And now,
Gracious God, hear our own prayers of mercy, petition, and thanksgiving in this
moment of silence.
Hear our
Prayers, O Lord, as we unite with one voice 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 – Spirit #319 Blue Hymnal
Scripture Reading(s):
First Scripture Reading – Ezekiel
37:1-14
Second Scripture Reading – Acts
2:1-21
Sermon – Pentecost
Sunday 2024
Pentecost Sunday 2024
(Acts
2:1-21)
Today
in the Christian calendar is known as Pentecost Sunday, which is the fiftieth
day after Easter. Today, we celebrate
the giving of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the church. It is also the day upon which we try to wear
red as a symbol for us to remember this day.
The
traditional reading for today is always the dramatic story from Acts 2. How many of you have served as liturgists
here at this church or at another church?
Nobody
wants to be the liturgist for today.
After the first paragraph there is the long string of nationalities that
were present at the festival:
Parthians,
Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and
Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene,
and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs.
Diana
Butler Bass said that this week, she googled some of these groups and laughed
at the pop-up results. The first search
for each began with how to pronounce the words and she said, “Rarely does a
reader get through the list without stumbling; I think I’ve heard every
possible mispronunciation of the names. Frankly,
I can’t get through it without a struggle. Congregants often giggle with sympathetic
pity. Lectors skip the week as not to be
embarrassed. Only the bravest church
member actually wants to read Acts 2 in public.”
In preaching about Pentecost, we often
skip over the list of these groups of people and go immediately to the dramatic
events, but this year I’d like for us to take a moment and learn something
about these groups. They are listed for
a reason. Who were they? And why were
they there?
Answering
the Why question is easy. All of these
people were, as the text says, devout Jews gathered in Jerusalem for a major
pilgrimage festival: Shavuot, or what is known as the Festival of Weeks. Shavuot is one of three Jewish pilgrimage
festivals that are prescribed in the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. It occurs fifty days after Passover, and it
celebrates both the wheat harvest and the giving of the Torah to Moses. In Jesus’ day, Jews from all over the known
world would make pilgrimage to come to the Jerusalem Temple and offer the first
fruits of the new crop and a sacrifice of bread made from the newly harvested
wheat.
Who were they is the more interesting
question? As already mentioned, they
were devout Jews. And they came to the
festival from all over the Middle Eastern world. Parthians, Medes, and Elamites were from
kingdoms and empires located in present day Iran. Mesopotamia is roughly modern Iraq. Judea now includes parts of Israel and the
West Bank. Cappadocia, Pontus, Phrygia,
and Pamphylia now make up Turkey. Cyrene
was a Greek colony in northern Africa. The
rest of the names are more familiar to us: Egypt, Libya, Crete, and Arabia.
These
places included most of the Roman Empire at its peak, two or three decades
after the Book of Acts was most likely written.
Now known as the nations of Iran, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Turkey,
Egypt, Libya, Crete, and Saudi Arabia — for the most part, these are nations
that make up the world’s most conflicted geographical tinderbox.
And
it has been that way for a couple thousand years.
When
the Acts 2 Pentecost occurred, most of those kingdoms had been conquered by
Rome and under direct Roman authority. Parthia
was in a tenuous peace with Rome (after a brutal history of wars between the
two), only the far northwestern part of Arabia was a Roman province and the
rest beyond its control, and the Mesopotamians had mostly been incorporated
into Rome, retaining only a rump empire much-diminished from its peak.
Before Rome had conquered them, they
had been conquered by Alexander the Great and absorbed into the Hellenistic
world. Long before Alexander, most of
them had been significant powers in their own right, empires to themselves and
often at war with each other.
Parthia, Medea, Elam, Pontus,
Phrygia…all of them. Bass says, that the
list of these kingdoms is like a Who’s Who of imperial losers from the ancient
world. It’s a list of double — or triple
— colonized states that had formerly been colonizers. And within their boundaries, there were
numerous foreigners, mostly people they’d conquered in the former imperial
days, but that also included many Jews who left Jerusalem centuries ago during
the many times that Israel had been conquered and exiled, as well. These Jews were most likely the bottom of the
outcasts in their countries, wherever they lived.
And that’s who gathered in Jerusalem
for the Festival of Weeks. The story of
Pentecost isn’t just a dramatic story about tongues of fire, rushing wind as
loud as a freight train and as strong as a whirlwind, and it isn’t about people
speaking in foreign languages. The story
of Pentecost is a story about this gathering of subjugated people. It’s a political dagger aimed at the Roman
Empire. A threat of growing turmoil, an
uprising empowered by the risen Jesus,
fueled with spiritual fire. Peter’s
sermon to the crowd ends with Peter’s recalling King David’s psalm, “The Lord
said to my Lord, sit at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool.”
The
day of Pentecost is a loud and clear call for empires to repent, the colonized
to rise up, and for both to forge a new community in the fire and wind of the
Spirit.
The
empire might have killed Jesus and his message of love, peace, and justice for
all, but on this day, three thousand people rose up in his place. Where Rome had one rebellious Jew, it now had
thousands, spread over the entire empire.
Together,
these provincial pilgrims formed a community that stood in direct opposition to
Roman identity (the apostles teaching), Roman social practices (the breaking of
bread), and Roman economics (they shared all things in common). Rome had built a world of war and woe for the
vast majority of people under its thrall. Pentecost birthed a community of God’s peace,
constituted on an ancient day of gratitude for both wheat and the word. There couldn’t be a greater contrast.
The people who gathered in Jerusalem
that morning were not free. They were not there with protections of religious
liberty. They made this journey in the
shadow of crucifixion, where one of their own people, a popular yet
controversial rabbi, had been executed by the overlords. And the rumors swirled — of a missing body, of
strange appearances. They’d made a
difficult journey from long distances in dangerous times to be at this
festival.
If we understand who was there and why
they were there, the real miracle of Pentecost comes into focus. All these victims, those demeaned, enslaved,
and brutalized by Rome, stopped being afraid. Those diverse peoples, who had been at war for
centuries, whose ancestors had tried to destroy one another, suddenly realized
they weren’t enemies at all.
They finally heard each other in their
own language, they weren’t enemies of one another — the spirit broke through —
and they rediscovered their own story of a world destined to be shaken by the
justice of God.
However,
there was an enemy: Caesar, the imperial force that had, for generations,
inflicted trauma upon them and their historic homelands through their military
might, political manipulation, ethnic superiority, and economic control.
But
there was an Advocate for them: the Holy Spirit. The spirit was unleashed — “poured out on all
flesh.” Men and women alike, and despite
enslavement: these were God’s dreamers and prophets of “the great and glorious
day.”
This
is the new body of Jesus, the embodiment of solidarity, freedom, and equality
in this world. May the complete story of
Pentecost inspire us today to stand with the outcasts, to break down the barriers
of what would separate us, one from another, to herald the cause of the poor,
the disenfranchised, the weak and lonely against empires of military might,
political manipulation, ethnic superiority, and economic control.
May
the celebration of Pentecost lead us to finally, and truly, be the body of
Christ on Earth.
Thanks
be to God. AMEN.
Offertory –
Doxology –
Prayer of Dedication –
Precious
Lord, we hunger for the light and strength that only the Spirit can bring. Feed us and strengthen us, as we learn to
feed others. Fill us with the breath of
Your Spirit as you search our hearts.
Take our lives as proof of our faithfulness. Take these gifts as proof of our love. Use them to Your purpose here on earth. AMEN.
Closing
Hymn – Breathe on Me, Breath of God #316/393
Benediction –
Out of Great
Love, God has created you. Out of Great
Love, Jesus Christ has redeemed you. Out
of Great Love, the Holy Spirit has lifted and inspired you to go proclaiming
the good news of peace, love, hope, and joy to all. Friends, go in peace. AMEN.
Postlude
