PIONEER
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Worship
via Blog 4th Sunday after Pentecost
June 28, 2020
~~~~~~~~~~
WELCOME AND ANNOUNCEMENTS
Welcome to Pioneer’s blog worship service.
Though we are accessing this remotely and unable to look each other in the eye,
we are still the Pioneer faith community, gathered as children of God to
worship, to be spiritually fed, and to be equipped to go out to serve in
Christ’s name—though we do it differently during this
Pioneer offers worship in several modes:
a)
The
blog.
b)
The
blog service mailed through US Postal service.
c)
Sermons
only, mailed to those who so request.
d)
Zoom
services at 10:00 Sunday mornings.
e)
Facebook
posting of recorded Zoom services at https://www.facebook.com/Pioneer-Presbyterian-Church-113547145346520.
f)
Live
worship with restrictions began June 14, 2020. Participants are limited to 25
people including worship leaders. A six-foot distancing will be maintained.
Masks are encouraged but not mandated. There will be no congregational singing,
passing the peace, hugs, handshakes, or coffee hour. Registration is on a first
come-first served basis. Call or email
Jon if you want to be on the list.
PPW will hold the annual rummage sale July
10th and 11th. Items can be brought to the downstairs
Fellowship Hall starting on July 8th.
Vicki Keeney has announced her intention
to move to California to be near her grandkids and greats, leaving by July 11th.
Vicki is an elder and is active in many of the church programs and well as
being friend and part of the church family. We will miss her.
Note Jan Ingraham’s new address in the
announcements at the end of the service.
Now allow yourself a brief time of silence
as you open your hearts and feel God’s presence with you, right where you are.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
BAPTISM: Friends, remember your baptism … and be thankful.
CALL
TO WORSHIP
The God of steadfast love calls us
together.
God names us and gathers us as one body.
When we meet God, it is sometimes in
struggle and pain.
God prompts us to wrestle with our fears.
We come to hear God’s promises once more.
We dare to seek newness of life and joy in
the living.
Sometimes that means waiting and trusting in
God’s timing.
We will wait on the Lord. We will be of
good courage.
PRAYER OF THE DAY
In awe and wonder, we meet you here, O
God. We have struggled through the weary times of our souls. We have felt the
loneliness and despair when our world felt dark. We have cried out to you and
your love has drawn us back to you. Renew our spirits now in these times that
seem to just go on and on. With you at our sides, we know we will make it
through. Amen.
OPENING
SONG: “Great and Mighty” LU#29
CALL
TO CONFESSION
When our vision dims; when unfulfilled
dreams disappoint us, we often turn to other ways of regaining control of our
lives. It is time to turn back to the God who holds our tomorrows.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
God of Power, all worlds are in your hands.
We confess our preference to be in control. We admit our resistance to the
Spirit. We acknowledge our misuse of gifts you grant to us. We prefer our
divisions to your unity. Forgive us, God of All, that we may forgive. Draw us
back into a right relationship with you so that we may remember to share your
forgiveness with the world.
(Continue with your personal prayers of
confession …) Amen.
ASSURANCE OF PARDON
Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation.
The old life has gone; the new life has
begun.
Friends, believe the Good News!
In Jesus Christ we are forgiven and
restored to new life!
PASSING THE PEACE
May the peace of Christ be with you.
And also with you.
Let us extend the peace of Christ in heart
and prayer to God’s children everywhere.
GLORY
BE TO THE FATHER
TIME
WITH CHILDREN
Good
morning Zoey and Fiona. Here we are, gathered to worship God. I am at the
church with part of the congregation and others are in their homes. Where are
you? Are you at the coast or at your house?
The
church is sometimes called God’s house. God is here with us, but it doesn’t
mean that God lives here. God is at your house, too, or wherever you are. God
is everywhere. That’s kind of hard to understand. But it’s true. God is a
spirit. God doesn’t have a body like we do.
It’s
kind of like air. Air is all around us and even in us. We breathe air; it helps
keep us alive. We can’t see air though, can we? But we know it is here. We
can’t see the air itself, but we can see what air does. What happens when I
blow up a balloon? I put air inside the balloon. We can’t actually see the air,
but we can see that it has made the balloon bigger. We cannot see God, but we
know that God is here, and everywhere, just like air. We can see the good in
people and in the world, and we know that God is with us.
God
knows us. God knows what we like and what we don’t like, how we feel, who our
friends are, whether we’ve been helpful or naughty. God even knows how many
hairs are on your head! We might not like the idea of God’s being all around us
and knowing so much about us, except for one thing. God loves us better than
anybody. And that makes God a welcome friend to have around. Let’s pray:
Dear
and good God, thank you that you are always with us. Help us not to disappoint
you too often and forgive us when we do. Help us to watch for you in the good
that people do. Amen.
HYMN: “Jesus
Loves Me”
Jesus loves me,
this I know, for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him
belong, they are weak but he is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves
me. Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves
me. The Bible tells me so.
SCRIPTURE
1: Matthew 10:40-42
"He who receives you receives me, and he who
receives me receives him who sent me. He who receives a prophet because he is a
prophet shall receive a prophet's reward, and he who receives a righteous man
because he is a righteous man shall receive a righteous man's reward. And
whoever gives to one of these little ones even a cup of cold water because he
is a disciple, truly, I say to you, he shall not lose his reward."
SCRIPTURE
2: Psalm 13
How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long
will you hide your face from me? How long must I bear pain in my
soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long? How long shall my enemy be exalted
over me? Consider and answer me, O Lord my God! Give light to my eyes, or I
will sleep the sleep of death, and my enemy will say, "I have
prevailed"; my foes will rejoice because I am shaken. But I trusted in
your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.
SERMON: “The Waiting Game” Rev. Jean Hurst
The psalmist cries out in
despair: “How long, O Lord?” How
long? We know the anguish of that cry. How many of you have uttered
it in the last couple of months relative to the corona virus and all the other
goings-on in the world today? “How long, O Lord?” can be a cry of pain or
weariness or despair or frustration or impatience. It might even be a statement of being totally
fed up and that you’ve run out of tolerance. We call out to God in faith and
impatience, expecting that the God of all creation, the God of our lives, will
hear us and will act on our behalf. Sometimes God disappoints us.
If we
embrace the mentality of ancient Israel, we would be told that we were getting
what we deserve. If you’re good, God rewards you. If you’re bad, God punishes
you. That’s what Job’s friends told him. That was the disciples’ comment to Jesus
about the blind man. Of course, that’s been debunked by Jesus and by the
reality of who God is. It doesn’t stop folks like the Gospel Coalition1
and other far right evangelicals from proclaiming that the coronavirus is God’s
punishment on the world for its sins.
Others
might tell you that it is God’s way of refining you like silver or shaping you
like clay on the potter’s wheel. It’s all part of God’s plan. Everything was
attributed to God. That understanding of God carried through to modern times. Check
your old insurance policies for “acts of God.” It was a strong point in
Calvinism—God’s providence. Everything was by God’s decree. It’s just part of
being God. God gets the credit; God gets the blame.
We
believe God is omniscient and omnipotent—all knowing and all powerful. So God
has the potential for doing much. And, admittedly, we have expectations that
God will not only act in our lives and in our world, but will act for our good,
our benefit—as we define it. So what if we feel like God is not living up to
God’s potential or even worse, is failing in God’s duties? What do we do? We
could sue God. Really. Ernie Chambers did. A Nebraska State Senator for 38
years, Chambers was known to take controversial stands on issues. One of those
issues was frivolous lawsuits. So to make a point about our sue-happy society,
Ernie decided to sue God.
Filed
in September 2007, the suit accuses God of “making and continuing to make
terroristic threats of grave harm to innumerable persons, including
constituents of Plaintiff who Plaintiff has the duty to represent.” In
addition, God has caused floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, plagues,
famines, droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects and the like as well as
“calamitous catastrophes resulting in the widespread death, destruction and
terrorization of millions upon millions of the earth’s inhabitants including
innocent babes, infants, children, the aged and infirm without mercy or
distinction.”2
The
case was dismissed with prejudice for lack of an address for God in order to
serve legal papers. But Chambers argued the omniscience of God. Since God knows
all things, God knows about the lawsuit already. The appeals court threw out
the case.
Even
facetiously, Chambers didn’t get to put God on the witness stand. But don’t we
harbor some of that same desire to have God answer for what is going on in the
world--for what is going on in our lives? How long, O Lord? How long do I have
to bear this pain in my soul? How long
do I have to carry this sorrow in my heart?
We want answers and we want action. As people
of faith we believe in the existence of God. This is a good thing. Even when we
question and doubt, it is to the God we know to be there. So, like the
psalmist, we question. Why? Why me? Why is this happening? Why doesn’t God do
something to change things? If we can get past the question of why, other
questions arise. For the psalmist and often for us, it is ‘how long?’
There
are tragedies and traumas and disappointments that hit all of us at some time
or another. It is part of life. We face
illness or accident, a loved one dies, we lose our job, a relationship ends.
Those things hurt for awhile, then generally we move forward in our lives. But
there are some things that don’t seem to go away—like the Coronavirus. It goes
on and on. It changes the direction of our lives. It wears us down, body and
soul. How long, O Lord?
How
long will I have to contend with this disease?
How long do I have to struggle financially, trying to recover from the
devastation it has caused the economy? How long will I have to wash my hands
until they’re raw or be looked at disdainfully if I do or don’t wear a mask?
How long will people step back from me when my heart just needs to connect and
I hunger for human touch and need the embrace of another person?
Our
lives are, of course, more than the virus so the questions go on. How long will
I be struggling to care for a parent with Alzheimer’s who doesn’t even know
me? How long will I live with this
depression where everything in my world is dark? How long do I have to keep
paying for the mistakes I made earlier in my life? How long do I have to wait
for someone to come into my life that I can love, who will truly love me for
who I am? How long do I have to wait to be reconciled to my family? How long, O
Lord?
Sometimes
the question comes from a different angle. How long do we carry a hurt in our
lives and allow it to shape who we are? How many of us have carried the wounds of an injustice, of a betrayal, of an
abandonment, of a rejection for years?
Or perhaps what we’ve carried is something we’ve
done that has hurt someone else. How much have we allowed our lives to be
shaped by those incidents? How often do we pull them out, rethink, retell and
relive the hurt? How long will we keep the wounds raw? How long will we carry
the sorrow in our hearts? How long, O Lord?
Things
happen in our lives that hurt. Some of them, though it feels like an eternity
in the living, are only for awhile. Some go on and on, testing our endurance,
perhaps testing our faith. Some of those things we have no control over. It is
what life hands us. We question why, we lament, ‘how long, O Lord?’, then
hopefully we move beyond that to the next question. ‘What do I do with this hurt?’
Yet,
it’s often not a single hurt. Things seem to pile up. One issue after another can
become more than a person can handle. So the accumulated hurts become an
insidious unhappiness that robs us of joy in life. There was an article in the
news recently that contained the results of a poll by NORC at the University of
Chicago. The poll drew from a half-century of research from the General Social
Research. The conclusion is that Americans are more unhappy now than they’ve
been in the last 50 years.
One of
the examples they gave was Lexi Walker, a 47-year-old professional fiduciary
who lives near Greenville, South Caroline, who said she has felt anxious and
depressed for long stretches of this year. She moved back to South Carolina
late in 2019. Then her cat died. Then her father passed away in February. Just
when she thought she’d get out and socialize in an attempt to heal from her
grief, the pandemic hit. “She said, “It’s been one thing after another. This is
very hard. The worst thing about this for me, after so much, [is] I don’t know
what’s going to happen.”3
And that is a common angst so many of us
carry. We don’t know what is going to happen. That’s true of any single event,
so think of the cumulative issues and not knowing how many more will come or
where it will lead. We carry an illusion that we should have control of our
lives. We don’t.
We may
not have control over a lot of what happens to us in life, but we do have
choices about how we respond to it. We can let the hurt or the fear or the
uncertainty be the reality of our lives, define who we are and who we become.
We can have the hurts or fears determine our choices, how we live our lives,
how we see ourselves, and how we see others. We can become hard, embittered,
distrustful, angry, and depressed. We can fight for control or to be right in
order to exert a false sense of being in charge of our lives even when it hurts
our relationships with others. There is a better way.
In our
pain and confusion, we can turn to the God who waits for us. This is the God
who, in Jesus’ own words, will never leave nor forsake us. This is the God who
knows our pain, having lived it in the humanity of Jesus. God walks with us,
sits with us in our suffering, hurts for us. Psalm 139 tells us of God’s
constant faithfulness, how intimately God knows us, how God will never leave
us, even when we, like a wounded animal, try to hide in our pain, when we try
to run from God. No matter what, God will not abandon us. This is the God who
suffers with us. As the Hopi tribe
attempts to translate the word ‘grace’ in their own language, the closest they
could come to understanding it is, “God cries with us.” Indeed, God feels our
hurts and weeps.
This is
the God who acts--not to bring suffering into our lives in order to punish or
teach. This is the God who acts in the middle of the realities of life’s
suffering to transform, to offer grace. This is the God who comes into our
lives through the work of the Holy Spirit to bring good out of the bad things
that happen.
God’s
transforming grace takes our vulnerability and opens us to heal fragile,
fractured relationships. God opens us to receive the love and prayers and
assistance of other people. God draws into our lives the support systems we
need. God opens our eyes to new possibilities, new choices we might not
otherwise have considered. God even takes our woundedness and uses it as a
source of healing for others who are also wounded.
And in
all of this, if we allow it, if we trust, we are drawn into deeper relationship
with the One who is our hope and our future, the One who loves us no matter
what, the One who gives us the strength and courage to keep going, to take the
next step, to face the next day, the One who holds our tomorrows. The God of
love waits for us. Thanks be to God.
1 https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/erik-raymond/is-the-pandemic-punishment/
2 Homiletics,
May-June, 2011
HYMN: “Make
Me a Channel of Your Peace” #753
PRAYERS OF THE
PEOPLE AND THE LORD’S PRAYER
Holy and totally amazing God, the
world is in chaos around us and in the midst of that, you bring out the good
and noble in some people. Thank you, God. We need to see those acts of love and
compassion because it spurs us on to also respond in loving and compassionate
ways when it seems easier and more natural to respond in anger or resentment or
judgement or condemnation. Help us, loving God, to live into Jesus’ teachings.
And in this world that has gone amuck,
send your Holy Spirit to inspire and guide us in finding solutions and
respecting one another without regard to ideologies or skin color. Bring your
Shalom into our world—or remind us that you already did through Jesus, the
Prince of Peace. Help us to be healers of the hurt, repairers of the breach,
defenders of the vulnerable, extenders of grace, and proclaimers of your love.
Stir us to passion, Loving God, so
that we are willing to act to help those who are lonely or afraid, those who
are hungry or without a decent place to live, those who are bound by addictions
or abusive relationships, those whose despair and live without hope. We pray
for an end to this virus. We pray for a just end to the racial unrest and abuse
of power. We pray for restoration of a healthy economy, here and globally. We
pray for wisdom for our leaders.
God of healing and compassion, we lift
up to you those of our church and families and community… Virginia DesIlets … Peggy
Jamison … Judy’s daughter Rosa Lester … Darlene Wingfield
… Joel Scrivner … John Matthews … Margaret Dunbar … Sandi …Trisha … Dave …
Jacob … Joyce … Jennifer … Chuck … Courtney … Ethel … Helen.
(Additional
prayers …………)
We
entrust these prayers and those that remain yet in our hearts as we pray in the
name of Jesus who taught us to 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, but
deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory
forever. Amen.
CALL TO OFFERING
What do you hold most dear? What of
yourself do you offer just a tiny, safe portion to God, holding the rest back.
Are you afraid God will take too much? This is a time to consider what we bring
to God as a love offering ... and why.
(Pledges and financial offerings can be
mailed or dropped off at the church.)
DOXOLOGY
PRAYER OF DEDICATION
Generous God, we offer you our time, our energy, our
hopes and dreams. We trust that the good you want for us will be reflected in
how you work in us through these offerings. We trust that you find in us
something worthy of building your kingdom and sharing your love and grace.
Bless these gifts we pray. Amen.
CLOSING HYMN: “My
Hope Is Built on Nothing Less” #353
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION
Your
charge and challenge for the week is to open your eyes and hearts, to look for
and truly see where God is in the midst of what is happening—both within your
own life and in the world.
As
you ponder that, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and
the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.
CHORAL RESPONSE
May the Lord, Mighty God, bless and keep you forever.
Grant you peace, perfect peace, courage in every endeavor. Lift up your eyes
and see his face and his grace forever. May the Lord, Mighty God, bless and
keep you forever.
~~~~~~~~~~
LOOKING
AHEAD
Worship has
resumed under restricted conditions which include a 25-person limit. Reservations
are on a first-come, first-served basis. Contact Jon Zieber at the church
office to get on the list. Being on the list once does not automatically sign
you up for subsequent services. You need to register each time. See the
newsletter article for full details.
PPW Annual Sale will be held July 10th and 11th.
You can bring your items for the sale to the downstairs Fellowship Hall
starting July 8th.
Jan Ingraham’s new address: 1188 NE 27th
St. #96, Bend OR 97701
PRAYER
CARE:
Virginia DesIlets
(fall/injured ribs on 6/16), Peggy Jamison (knee replacement 6/25), Margaret
Dunbar (fall/broken tailbone), Judy’s daughter Rosa Lester (retinal bleed), Darlene
Wingfield (pulmonary fibrosis), Joel Scrivner (heart attack), John Matthews
(cancer), Sandi Posz (lymphoma), Trisha Cagley (health problems), Dave Clark
(kidney cancer), Jacob Cunningham, Joyce Sahlberg (health issues), Jennifer
Schirm (Parkinson’s), Chuck VanHise (leg/walking rehab), and Courtney Ziegler
(Huntington’s).
LECTIONARY
FOR 7/5/20
Genesis 24:34-38,
42-49, 58-67; Psalm 45:10-17 or
Song of Solomon
2:8-13; Romans 7:15-25a; Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30
