June 9, 2024
Third Sunday after Pentecost
10:00am
WELCOME
OPENING PRAYER
God of days,
we praise your name, for your grace sustains us.
We wait for you, Lord, for your word strengthens us.
Our outer nature is wasting away day by day,
but our inner nature is being renewed by your
daily bread.
Grant us the eyes to see what cannot be seen and to
gaze on what is eternal.
May we revel in your work
and be a visible witness of your invisible kingdom.
In Jesus Christ we pray. Amen.
PRELUDE“Marching to Zion”Garrett Parker
CALL TO WORSHIP
Out of the depths, I cry to you, O Lord.
Holy One, hear my voice.
I wait for the Lord, my soul waits.
In God’s word I hope.
My soul waits for the Lord,
more than those who watch for the morning.
For with the Lord there is steadfast love and great power to redeem.
*HYMN No. 396“Brethren, We Have Met to Worship”
1 Brethren, we have met to worship
and adore the Lord our God.
Will you pray with all your power
while we try to preach the word?
All is vain unless the Spirit
of the holy One comes down.
Brethren, pray, and holy manna
will be showered all around.
2 Sisters, will you come and help us?
Moses’ sister aided him.
Will you help the trembling mourners
who are struggling hard with sin?
Tell them all about the Savior.
Tell them that he will be found.
Sisters, pray, and holy manna
will be showered all around.
3 Is there here a trembling jailer,
seeking grace and filled with fears?
Is there here a weeping Mary
pouring forth a flood of tears?
Brethren, join your cries to help them;
sisters, let your prayers abound!
Pray, O pray, that holy manna
will be scattered all around.
4 Let us love our God supremely;
let us love each other, too.
Let us love and pray for sinners
till our God makes all things new.
Christ will call us home to heaven;
at his table we’ll sit down.
Christ will gird himself and serve us
with sweet manna all around.
*CALL TO CONFESSION
Jesus calls us to enter the joy of discipleship, the joy of following in his way. But sin clings closely, and we struggle to respond fully to Christ’s invitation. Let us seek God’s forgiveness so that we may know more deeply the joy God intends.
*PRAYER FOR CONFESSION
God of perfect love,
you continually bring forth life,
transforming sadness to joy,
and despair to hope
We are weak, but you are strong.
Our ways are flawed, but your ways are true.
We are seldom right, but you are never wrong.
Forgive us, redeem us, transform us.
Take away the sin that burdens us,
and restore us to the people you would have us be,
for the sake of Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
*SILENT PRAYER FOR CONFESSION
*ASSURANCE OF PARDON
Relentlessly God seeks us out.
With abundant grace and boundless mercy,
God seeks us out.
This is good news!
In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven!
*RESPONSE No. 15“All Creatures of our God and King” v. 6
6 O sisters, brothers, take your part,
and worship God with humble heart.
Alleluia! Alleluia!
All creatures, bless the Father, Son,
and Holy Spirit, Three in One!
Sing praises! Alleluia!
Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!
*PASSING OF THE PEACE OF CHRIST
Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts.
To this peace we were called as members of a single body.
The peace of Christ be with you.
And also with you.
ANTHEM“American Hymn Sampler”arr. John Purifoy
CHILDREN’S MESSAGE
UNISON PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION
Please join me in the unison prayer…
Gracious God, illumine these words by your Spirit that we might hear what you would have us hear and be who you would us be, for the sake of Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh. Amen.
SCRIPTUREMark 3:20-35
20 Then he went home, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. 21 When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” 22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” 23 And he called them to him and spoke to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. 27 But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.
28 “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin”— 30 for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”
31 Then his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers[c] are outside asking for you.” 33 And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
Pause…
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God!!
SERMON“The True Kindred of Jesus”
“In our family, we don’t hide crazy … we put it on the porch and give it a cocktail.” Anonymous
Jesus has some strange ideas about family.
When you join a fraternity, they give you a pin and a secret handshake. But when you join on with Jesus and join the church, you get stripped naked, thrown into the pool, washed, half drowned, and required to revert and be born again. Now what does that tell you?
To those who took comfort in the old order, boasting of their memberships in God’s chosen people saying, “My family founded this church” or, “I’m not very religious but I’m really, really spiritual,” John the Baptist sneered, “Don’t say to yourselves ‘I’m a dues-paying member! I’ve got Abraham and Sarah as my parents!’ God can raise up a family from the stones in this river if God’s people won’t turn, return, be washed, and get with the revolution!”
God is determined to have a family. But in order to join a new family, one must detach from the old. Membership in God’s kingdom is a joyful thing, but it also involves some relinquishment.
Look, hey, I love my family. I mean, why shouldn’t I? They all look just like me. But I’m sorry to tell you that “family values” was not really Jesus’ thing. We know all about the prophet Mohammed’s kin; we know next to nothing about the family of Jesus. Mark says that Jesus had a number of brothers and sisters, but what do we know about them? Jesus’ family plays a remarkably negligible role in his story.
And in his ministry, Jesus thought nothing of destroying a family business with a terse, “Follow me,” demanding that these fishermen abandon their aging father in the boat and join Jesus as he wandered about with his buddies. Jesus’ invitation to hit the road broke the hearts of many first-century parents who were counting on the kids for help in their old age.
“I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother,” Jesus threatened. “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, and wife and children, and brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, can’t be my disciple.” That’s a text rarely used by the church on Mother’s Day.
“Your mother and your brothers and sisters are outside asking for you,” someone said. Jesus replied, “Who? Anyone who does my will is my family.” “I’ll follow you,” a man said to him, “only first let me go give my recently deceased father a decent burial.”
“Let the dead bury the dead!” replied Jesus. “Follow me and let somebody else do the funeral!”
Wow! To be fair, Jesus seems no more opposed toward family than he is toward money or success or government officials or religious authorities. In Jesus, everything is subordinated to his mission; nothing is more important than obedience to his heavenly Father. Still, isn’t it interesting that Jesus appears to devalue that which we consider so valuable?
There was a day when Christmas greeting cards routinely displayed pictures of the baby Jesus in the manger and Joseph and Mary standing close by. Now, our Christmas cards feature OUR smiling families on the beach – down the shore. The family has become the center of our adulation, the most important of all human gatherings.
Why, Jesus? Why were you so cool toward family, sexuality, romantic attachments, all which preoccupy us?
The gospels tell the story that the chief focus of Jesus’ mission was to reconstitute the scattered lost sheep of Israel. Jesus left his biological family in order to form a new family based not on genetic kinship–that is, the way we make family–but rather upon the gracious, barrier-breaking summons of God. Jesus got into trouble for practicing a scandalously open-handed table fellowship, calling the lost and orphaned back home. “This man eats and drinks with SINNERS! That’s one of the earliest and most persistent claims against Jesus. Even as he was dying in agony on the cross–a gruesome form of punishment that Romans enjoyed applying to difficult-to-manage Jews–Jesus invited an outcast, a somewhat repentant thief, to join him and his family in paradise. In all these actions and in his stories of seeking the Lost Sheep and seeking the Lost Coin and the Lost Boy, Jesus is forming a new family composed of those who had difficulty fitting in with their human families.
Your human family, for any of its virtues, is just too small, too closely circumscribed. As a pastor, I spend some of my time in pastoral counseling helping people get over the damage done to them in their family.
Thus, when someone steps up and answers Jesus’ call to follow him, the church washes that person in water–baptism–which says, among other things, that the person has been reborn, started over, and has been adopted into a new God-formed family. It is as if the person gets a new name, “Christian,” that takes precedence over that person’s family name. It is as if the person has already died to old attachments and former relationships and has already been raised to new life. And the church is that fresh, new family that is composed of those who have heard Jesus’ “Follow me” and have stepped forward and said “Yes.” The chief act of Christian worship isn’t some mysterious, dark, esoteric rite. It’s a family meal with everyone around the table, the Sunday dinner that we call the Lord’s Supper, family as God intended family to be.
Thus, when parents bring a child forward for baptism, Christian initiation, the pastor takes the child from them and says, in effect, “You are two wonderful people, but you are not knowledgeable enough, not skilled enough on your own, to raise a Christian. Therefore, we’ll adopt your child, we’ll take responsibility for this baby, we will help you raise a Christian.”
In a world of grandparents without grandchildren close by, and single-parent families, and grandchildren growing up without grandparents, and marriages under stress, you need a bigger family than the one you were born into. You must be born again into a new, far-flung family, a family as large as the love of God in Jesus Christ.
What do you have to do to be credibly called a Christian, a contemporary follower of Jesus? Well, you must be willing to be baptized, that is, to be adopted by a new, far-flung, barrier-breaking family, the church. You must be disposed to let go of your innate American rugged individualism and be incorporatedin a family bigger and more demanding than the one into which you were born. You must join us at the table, addressing some of the most sinful, often difficult-to-bear rascals as “brother” or “sister,” just because Jesus loves them to death.
So, you can see why, when the Jesus movement got going as the church, baptism became the radical rite of Christian initiation. Baptism not only signified everything that water means-cleansing and birth, and death and refreshment, renewal, life–but baptism also meant adoption. As John the Baptizer said, “God is going to have a family, even if God has to raise a people out of the rocks in this river. To become a Christian, to have your life taken over by Jesus, is to be joined into a family, a people convened by “water and the Spirit,” a family bigger and better than your biological family, a worldwide, barrier-breaking family that goes by the name, “body of Christ.”
I am pleased that our church responds weekly to the needs of families in the Greater Woodbury community through the Food Pantry. We provide nonperishable food items, financial support, leadership and volunteers for this local ministry. But, of course, the folks in need of food and household supplies are Americans, people who looked and talked fairly much like us.
But I’ll tell you, I am even more delighted we are connected to the people of Cuba through the Presbyterian Church in Placetas. We send missionaries, financial support, and medical supplies to a struggling community. Why? Because Jesus has made them part of God’s family and has by his love transformed us from being strangers into being sisters or brothers.
On Good Friday, as Jesus hung on the cross, he performed an amazing last act of invitation and adoption. Having been deserted by most of his family, the crucified Jesus, in a last, wild, desperate act of inclusion, invited a thief to join him in paradise–a stunningly defiant rebuke to the ways the world gathers people. Only a Savior like Jesus would parade into Paradise arm-in-arm with a criminal, some great trophy for his painful rescue operation for humanity. Well, today, every time the family of God gathers for Holy Communion, the Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper or a covered-dish fellowship supper or serves up soup to the homeless on the street corner, the world looks at this odd family and says, “Jesus is hanging out with the same reprobates that got him crucified.”
And we say, “Thank God.”
Let us pray.
Lord Jesus, by your grace bring us into your big family. Help us to feel part of the family. Help us to see all people as brothers and sisters in your family. In the name of one who was crucified for hanging out with people like us, we pray. Amen.
Commentary and Liturgy from the Book of Common Worship (PCUSA), “Call to Worship” Website, PCUSA Book of Confession, The New Interpreter’s Commentary, John Wurster, David Lose, Porter Taylor and William H. Willimon, Karoline Lewis.
*AFFIRMATION OF FAITHColossians 1:15–20
Jesus Christ is the image of the invisible God,
the firstborn of all creation;
in him all things in heaven and on earth were created,
things visible and invisible.
All things have been created through him and for him.
He himself is before all things,
and in him all things hold together.
He is head of the body, the church;
he is the beginning,
the firstborn of the dead,
so that he might come to have first place in everything.
For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,
and through him God was pleased to reconcile all things,
whether on earth or in heaven,
by making peace through the blood of his cross. Amen.
*HYMN No. 401“Here in this Place”
1 Here in this place the new light is streaming;
now is the darkness vanished away;
see in this space our fears and our dreamings
brought here to you in the light of this day.
Gather us in, the lost and forsaken;
gather us in, the blind and the lame;
call to us now, and we shall awaken;
we shall arise at the sound of our name.
2 We are the young; our lives are a mystery.
We are the old who yearn for your face.
We have been sung throughout all of history,
called to be light to the whole human race.
Gather us in, the rich and the haughty;
gather us in, the proud and the strong;
give us a heart, so meek and so lowly;
give us the courage to enter the song.
3 Here we will take the wine and the water;
here we will take the bread of new birth.
Here you shall call your sons and your daughters,
call us anew to be salt for the earth.
Give us to drink the wine of compassion;
give us to eat the bread that is you;
nourish us well, and teach us to fashion
lives that are holy and hearts that are true.
4 Not in the dark of buildings confining,
not in some heaven, light years away:
here in this place the new light is shining;
now is the kingdom, and now is the day.
Gather us in and hold us forever;
gather us in and make us your own;
gather us in, all peoples together,
fire of love in our flesh and our bone.
THE SACRAMENT OF COMMUNION
Invitation
Beloved in the Lord,
as we draw near to the Lord’s Table,
we are to consider the great benefits of this Sacrament
for those who come in faith and repentance,
and those who hunger and thirst after Christ.
Those who, putting their trust in Christ,
desire to lead a new life,
and to mature with the gifts of grace,
are invited and encouraged to come to
the Supper of the Lord
for their spiritual refreshment and renewal of strength.
The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
Lift up your hearts.
We lift them to the Lord.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give God thanks and praise.
Prayer of Thanksgiving
Holy God, Creator of heaven and earth,
with joy we give you thanks and praise.
You commanded light to shine out of darkness,
divided the sea and dry land,
created the vast universe and called it good.
You made us in your image
to live with one another in love.
You gave us the breath of life
and freedom to choose your way.
You set forth your purpose
in commandments through Moses,
and called for justice in the cry of prophets.
Through long generations
you have been patient and kind to all your children.
How wonderful are your ways, almighty God.
How marvelous is your name, O Holy One.
You alone are God.
Therefore, with apostles and prophets,
and that great cloud of witnesses
who live for you beyond all time and space,
we lift our hearts in joyful praise:
Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.
Hosanna in the highest.
We praise you, most holy God,
for sending your only Son Jesus to live among us,
full of grace and truth.
Sharing our joy and sorrow,
he healed the sick and was a friend of sinners.
Obeying you,
he took up his cross and died that we might live.
We praise you that he overcame death
and is risen to rule the world.
He is still the friend of sinners.
We trust him to overcome every power that can hurt or divide us,
and believe that when he comes in glory
we will celebrate victory with him.
Therefore, in remembrance of your mighty acts in Jesus Christ,
we take this bread and this cup
and give you praise and thanksgiving
as we proclaim the mystery of faith:
Christ has died,
Christ is risen,
Christ will come again.
Gracious God,
pour out your Holy Spirit upon us,
and upon this bread and wine,
that we, and all who share this feast,
may be one with Christ and he with us.
Here we offer ourselves to be a living sacrifice,
holy and acceptable to you.
In your mercy,
accept our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
Fill us with the joy of eternal life,
that we may be your faithful people
until we feast with you in glory.
Through Christ, with Christ, in Christ,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
all glory and honour are yours, almighty God,
for ever and ever.
As our Lord taught us we now pray:
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. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, butdeliver us from evil: For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.
Words of Institution
On the night before he died,
Jesus took bread, gave thanks to you,
broke the bread and said
“Take, eat.
This is my body, given for you.
Do this for the remembrance of me.”
In the same way he took the cup, saying,
“This cup is the new covenant sealed in my blood.
Do this for the remembrance of me.”]
Communion
Closing Prayer
Eternal God, we give you thanks for this holy mystery
in which you have given yourself to us.
Grant that we may go into the world
in the strength of your Spirit,
to give ourselves for others
in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
OFFERING OF TITHES & OFFERINGS
With gratitude for God’s faithfulness and with thanksgiving for all that we have received, let us bring our gifts to God.
OFFERTORY
*RESPONSE N0. 609“Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow”
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow.
Praise God, all creatures high and low.
Alleluia, alleluia!
Praise God, in Jesus fully known:
Creator, Word, and Spirit one.
Alleluia, alleluia!
Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!
*PRAYER OF DEDICATION
O God, with faith and hope, we offer these gifts. Use them, even as you use us, to accomplish your purposes in Jesus Christ, the Head of the church and the Lord of our lives. Amen.
*HYMN No. 393“O Day of Rest and Gladness”
1 O day of rest and gladness,
O day of joy and light,
O balm for care and sadness,
most beautiful, most bright;
on you, the high and lowly,
through ages joined in tune,
sing “Holy, holy, holy”
to the great God triune.
2 On you, at earth’s creation
the light first had its birth;
on you, for our salvation
Christ rose from depths of earth;
on you, our Lord victorious
sent Spirit forth from heaven.
And thus on you, most glorious,
a triple light was given.
3 On you, God’s people, meeting,
the Holy Scripture hear,
Christ’s living presence greeting,
through bread and wine made near.
New graces ever gaining
from this our day of rest,
we reach the rest remaining
to spirits of the blest.
*BENEDICTION
Let us go from this place trusting that God is with us and for us in every place.
May the grace of our Lord Jesus, the love of God, and the companionship of the Holy Spirit be with you and abide with you this day and forever- more. Amen.
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