November 17, 2024
Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost
10:00am
CHIMING OF THE HOUR
WELCOME
OPENING PRAYER
PRELUDE Partita on “Lyons” Randolph Currie
CALL TO WORSHIP
Reader 1: “This may only be a dream of mine, but I think it can be made real.” — Ella Baker
Reader 2: “Transform yourself to transform the world.” — Grace Lee Boggs
Reader 3: “Wage love.” — Charity Hicks
A new world is being birthed. Let us pray for and participate in God’s coming kingdom.
*HYMN No. 41 – O Worship the King, All Glorious Above!”
1 O worship the King,
all glorious above!
O gratefully sing
God’s power and God’s love:
our shield and defender,
the Ancient of Days,
pavilioned in splendor
and girded with praise.
2 O tell of God’s might;
O sing of God’s grace,
whose robe is the light,
whose canopy space,
whose chariots of wrath
the deep thunderclouds form;
and bright is God’s path
on the wings of the storm.
3 The earth with its store
of wonders untold,
Almighty, your power
has founded of old;
established it fast
by a changeless decree,
and round it has cast,
like a mantle, the sea.
4 Your bountiful care
what tongue can recite?
It breathes in the air;
it shines in the light;
it streams from the hills;
it descends to the plain,
and sweetly distills
in the dew and the rain.
5 Frail children of dust,
and feeble as frail,
in you do we trust,
nor find you to fail;
your mercies, how tender,
how firm to the end,
our Maker, Defender,
Redeemer, and Friend.
*CALL TO CONFESSION
God promises forgiveness through Jesus Christ. In humility and faith, let us approach God in honest confession.
*PRAYER FOR CONFESSION
Eternal God, too often we settle for the way things are. We embrace what is comfortable and disengage from the work of necessary change. We fail to hope for a new day and a new world because our present reality feels good enough. Forgive us. Have mercy upon us. Fill us with the passion to live and work towards a world made just and equitable and new. Amen.
*SILENT PRAYER FOR CONFESSION
*ASSURANCE OF PARDON
“When Jesus saw their faith, he said…“Take heart…your sins are forgiven.”
Amen.
*RESPONSE No. 581 “Glory be to the Father”
Glory be to the Father,
and to the Son,
and to the Holy Ghost;
as it was in the beginning,
is now, and ever shall be,
world without end.
Amen, amen.
*PASSING OF THE PEACE OF CHRIST
Christ is our peace. He has reconciled us to God in one body by the cross.
We meet in his name and share his peace.
The peace of the Lord be always with you.
And also with you.
ANTHEM “Come Today with Jubilant Singing” Robert Leaf
CHILDREN’S MESSAGE
UNISON PRAYER OF ILLUMINATION
Please join me in the unison prayer…
Open us, Holy One, to your Word and your Way. Clear our minds of daily distractions. Fill our hearts with the humility we need to hear and receive the message you intend for us today. Amen.
SCRIPTURE Mark 13:1-8
13 As he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings!” 2 Then Jesus asked him, “Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”
3 When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John, and Andrew asked him privately, 4 “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign that all these things are about to be accomplished?” 5 Then Jesus began to say to them, “Beware that no one leads you astray. 6 Many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’[a] and they will lead many astray. 7 When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come. 8 For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.
Pause…
This is the Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God!!
SERMON “God’s time not our time”
In 2012, documentarian Ken Burns offered a two-part, four-hour PBS documentary on the Dust Bowl. In his introduction, Burns reminds the viewer that the Dust Bowl was a decade-long manmade disaster, brought about by over cultivation of land not really suited for the overproduction farming forced upon it by farmers and speculators looking for easy wealth.
Burns claims the Dust Bowl was “an epic of human pain and suffering—a crucible of dust, drought and Depression, when normally self-reliant fathers found themselves unable to provide for their families; when even the most vigilant mothers were unable to stop the dirt that invaded their houses from killing their children by “dust pneumonia;” when thousands of desperate Americans were torn from their homes and forced on the road in an exodus unlike anything the United States has ever seen.”
The Dust Bowl is a story perhaps forgotten today, save the dwindling number of firsthand witnesses and high school students still required to read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, a story of the Joad family, who lose their crops to the Dust Bowl and then their homestead to the bank. Steinbeck’s novel is a fictional accounting rooted in the pain and loss known to many farm families in that era. The Grapes of Wrath is a book I have found far more profound than under the pressure of sophmore year book reports and the youthful naiveté that I was reading “just” a story.
The heavy dread, the great uncertainty, the fear of everything about to come crashing down, all of this figures into such a word as apocalypse. We are given a number of moments in the Bible when the text turns ominous and indeed here, we get the oft-quoted phrase “war and rumors of war”.
Such passages resound with images of absolute chaos, deep fear and unthinkable hardship. In Mark 13, we get nations and kingdoms against one another, earthquakes and famines predicted. While the Book of Revelation is most popularly known for such talk, the gospel, aka the “good” news, is also the place where the Bible turns solemn and frightening.
The teachings of Jesus include passages where he predicts and pronounces judgment upon the world. He does not skirt around the idea of his followers knowing hardship and persecution. Indeed, the gospel of Mark is thought to be written with the author’s likely first-hand experience of being a persecuted mid-first century Christian. He gathered together the oral traditions being passed around about Jesus among the early churches with the goal of telling “the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God”.
In the midst of his recounting of the parables and miracles, Mark ensures the reader does not lose sight of faith’s costliness. Love your life, and you lose it. Lose your life and find it. Take up your cross and follow. These words take especial meaning when you realize the challenge of the first decades of Christianity. One could argue the early Christians found the stories of what apocalypse would bring about all too familiar.
Long before gaining favor and standing in the Roman Empire, the Christians would know great persecution and violence, marginalization and martyrdom. One could also argue that they recalled the apocalyptic teachings of Jesus and also found great hope and joy there as well. For in the midst of these frightening images of dread to befall the world and the faithful alike, the apocalyptic serves also as a reminder that while an ending is coming, a beginning is also promised.
We hear remarkable poetic language of God bringing an “end to death, to crying and to pain”, bringing Creation to New Creation. Such language may not be overtly stated in Mark: “When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is still to come”. In Mark 13, we hear of the end bringing not “doom” but this wondrous and poetic imagery of birth pangs, the first sign of new life, rebirth about to take place.
For those who have experienced birth, one might have all manner of terms for birth pangs. For some, the birthing process is graceful. For others, it is a test of endurance. The end result is often the same: an overwhelming sense of joy. Certainly, it is mixed with pain, yet the wee miracle before you is worth it all. In that liminal moment between pain and joy, one might even say that in the delivery room, the baby’s not the only one crying. The apocalyptic has this same mixture of joy and pain, chaos and certainty. We live in a world yet to be birthed into this new Creation where all things will be made well. So it is that every generation will deal with challenges and indeed for some, tests of endurance where we think God somehow absent or aloof. Such teachings of Jesus offer the warning of peril and the promise of God’s good End.
Scholar NT Wright observes, “Jesus’ warnings to his followers are to be taken very seriously by those who are called to work for the kingdom today. Many Christians today face persecution every bit as severe as that which the early church suffered; and those Christians who don’t face persecution often face the opposite temptation, to stagnate, to become cynical, to suppose that nothing much is happening, that the kingdom of God is just a pious dream.”
Some questions I ponder when reading passages like Mark 13: Do we read this passage as a long past word, spoken to a situation not necessarily ever like our own?
Or do we read this text as the good word, spurring us to take heart when we feel the world crashing down around us?
Does the text spur us to care and become involved when we hear of fellow Christians or other religious groups are enduring religious persecution today?
The apocalyptic teachings of Jesus echo down the centuries to us. From generation to generation, we hear these words tinged with sadness and hope, and we ponder the question of how we live out the faith handed down long ago by those who first heard Mark’s gospel. We are here because of Christians who kept the faith in difficult times, not least the Christians who lived in that difficult time of the first century when women and men lived under constant threat for their faith.
Mark 13 reads as a good word for persons who found themselves in unpredictable times with little resources other than their faith and one another. I thought about Mark 13’s predictions of hardship and its affirmation of trust in God when reading Ken Burns’ observations about the Dust Bowl as people struggled through the “ten-year apocalypse” experience.
He writes, ” But the story of the Dust Bowl is also the story of heroic perseverance—of a resilient people who, against all odds, somehow managed to endure one unimaginable hardship after another to hold onto their lives, their land and the ones they loved.”
May we read the New Testament and likewise discover the stories of a similar resilient people who, against all odds, kept the faith and lived into the fullness of their belief in Christ Jesus. Knowing that God’s time is not our time – and our time is not God’s time!
Commentary and Liturgy from the Book of Common Worship (PCUSA), “Call to Worship” Website, PCUSA Book of Confession, The New Interpreter’s Commentary, Alexandra Rodgers, Terri McDowell Ott, NT Wright and Jerod H. Huguenot.
*AFFIRMATION OF FAITH
(from A Declaration of Faith of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and The Shorter Catechism)
God bound his people to himself in covenant.
Freed slaves became the people of God
when they accepted the Lord’s covenant.
God charged them to respond to his rescuing love
by obeying his commandments.
Their life together was to express
the justice and compassion of their holy God.
Since we, too, are the Lord’s covenant people,
we know we must be holy as the Lord is holy.
We must keep God’s commandments,
not in order to earn or compel the Lord’s favor,
but to reflect the character of God
and to be his grateful and loving people.
What is the sum of the Ten Commandments?
The sum of the Ten Commandments is:
to love the Lord our God
with all our heart,
with all our soul,
with all our strength,
and with all our mind;
and our neighbor as ourselves.
*HYMN No. 708 – We Give Thee, but Thine Own”
1 We give thee but thine own,
whate’er the gift may be;
all that we have is thine alone,
a trust, O Lord, from thee.
2 May we thy bounties thus
as stewards true receive,
and gladly, as thou blessest us,
to thee our firstfruits give.
3 The captive to release,
to God the lost to bring,
to teach the way of life and peace:
it is a Christ-like thing.
4 And we believe thy word,
though dim our faith may be;
whate’er we do for thine, O Lord,
we do it unto thee.
THE PASTORAL PRAYER & THE LORD’S PRAYER
Holy One, the stress and strain of these days weigh heavy. As we move into fall and as the days grow shorter, we are more in need of the hope you provide. Set our eyes to the sun, moon and stars. Remind us of the more of this universe plotted and patterned by your hand. Be with us
in the small struggles as well as the great. Transform us so we can be transformational in love and service.
Creator God, you are our refuge, our comfort, and our strength in times of disaster, crisis or chaos. Surround those who are suffering with your grace and peace. May those devastated by fires, storms or floods find the strength they need to rebuild. May neighbors turn to help neighbors in need. May we be each other’s hope and help.
Lover of justice, you call us to support the poor and oppressed. By the power of your Holy Spirit make us advocates for your justice and instruments of your peace. Help us seek reconciliation through beloved community inspired by Christ’s reconciling ministry among us. Empower us to work for what is good and equitable and just.
Compassionate God, look upon us with mercy and grace. Free our minds from prejudice, and our preference for violence over peace. Grant us the wisdom and humility to seek your way above all worldly ways so our path may be righteous and true. Guide us, God, in all things.
As a people of faith, we lift these prayers to you, trusting you hear us and receive us. Finally, hear us now, as we pray the prayer Christ taught us by saying together, “Our Father…”
The Lord’s Prayer
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 have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
ANNOUNCEMENTS
TITHES & OFFERINGS
“You will be enriched in every way for your great generosity, which will produce thanksgiving to God.” Let us present our tithes and offerings to the Lord.
OFFERTORY
*RESPONSE N0. 675 “All Praise to Thee, My God” v.4
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow;
praise God, all creatures here below;
praise God above, ye heavenly host;
praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
*PRAYER OF DEDICATION
O God, maker and provider of all, you have blessed us with many gifts. Use us, and what we have gathered, to feed the world through your love; through the one who gave himself for us, Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord. Amen.
*HYMN No. 689 – When the Morning Stars Together
1 When the morning stars together
their Creator’s glory sang,
and the angel host all shouted
till with joy the heavens rang,
then your wisdom and your greatness
their exultant music told,
all the beauty and the splendor
which your mighty works unfold.
2 When in synagogue and temple
voices raised the psalmists’ songs,
offering up the adoration
which alone to you belongs;
when the singers, trumpets, cymbals
all combined, your praise to share,
awestruck people saw your glory
fill the sacred house of prayer.
3 Voice and instrument in union
through the ages spoke your praise.
Plain-song, tuneful hymns, and anthems
told your faithful, gracious ways.
Choir and orchestra and organ
each a sacred offering brought,
while, inspired by your own Spirit,
poet and composer wrought.
4 Lord, we bring our gift of music;
touch our lips and fire our hearts.
Teach our minds and train our senses;
fit us for these sacred arts.
Then with skill and consecration
we would serve you, Lord, and give
all our powers to glorify you,
and in serving fully live.
*BENEDICTION
May we leave this house of worship reconciled, redeemed, and renewed by our time spent in the presence of God. May we leave this house of worship full of the hope our Savior provides.
May the grace, hope, peace and love of the God the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer be with us now and always. Amen.