PIONEER
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Worship
via Blog 11th Sunday after Pentecost August 16, 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 pandemic.
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)
Zoom
services are being downloaded now to Facebook on the Tuesday following the
service. https://www.facebook.com/100050946663006/videos/163070122067876/?t=5
f)
Live
worship. We can now allow up to 40 people in worship. A six-foot distancing
will be maintained. Masks are mandated. There can be congregational singing
with masks, but no passing the peace, hugs, handshakes, or coffee hour.
CONGRATULATIONS GRANDMA MINDY
Liam Alexander Scott arrived July 25th, weighing in at 7 lb. 11 oz. Mindy will be traveling to meet her new grandson toward the end of August.
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
Our faith draws us together this day.
Let us trust enough to open our ears and
hearts.
We
have heard of God’s miracles in other times;
Our
ancestors have kept the story alive for us.
Give ear, all people, to God’s word for
today.
Taste the bounty of God’s blessing here
and now.
We
long for a faith that makes sense today.
We
want to keep the story alive for new generations.
God’s revelation is for all people, near
and far.
God is waiting to communicate with you
and me.
May
God have mercy on us and all people.
Surely
God’s will shall be made known to us.
PRAYER OF THE DAY
Where are you, O God, when our prayers
go unanswered? When our hopes are fulfilled, how will we know it is you who has
acted on our behalf? Why do some prayers seem never to be heard? Speak to us,
God, for we need yet more proof of your caring presence. There is much we do
not understand. Some of what seems clear to us we do not like. Break through
our resistance, to meet us here, we pray. Amen.
OPENING
SONG: “Healing Grace”
CALL TO CONFESSION
What attention have we given this week
to our covenant with God? Have we remembered the ways God has led us and
provided for us? Or are our lives full of other concerns, so that forgetfulness
and rebellion break our relationship with the Eternal?
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
O
God, our thoughts are not full of your love. We forget to listen for your
guidance. When we speak to you it is often to beg or complain, not to give
thanks. Our greed outruns our gratitude. We live fearfully rather than
faithfully. When you assure and bless us, we are not satisfied. O God, we
cannot turn ourselves around. Help us to change. (Let us
continue our prayers in silence …….) 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 one another.
GLORY
BE TO THE FATHER
TIME
WITH CHILDREN
Good morning Fiona. Good morning Zoey.
Today I want to show you my pretty coffee cup.
Look at all the pretty flowers on it. I think it’s fun to drink my coffee from a pretty cup. It makes me feel good. Sometimes I drink tea or milk from it, too. And when I do, others can see what a pretty cup I have. They’ll wish they had a pretty cup like that. Do you like it? Do you think it’s pretty? Wouldn’t you like to have a cup like that?
Uh
oh. What’s that?
That
reminds me of something Jesus said. There were people who thought they were
better than other people because they kept all the religious laws. Back then
they had lots and lots of laws that said what you could eat and that you had to
wash your hands first and lots of other things. Washing your hands is good, but
they were just doing it for show. Jesus said all that doesn’t make any
difference at all if on the inside they’re like my coffee cup. It looks pretty
on the outside but it’s nasty on the inside. Looking good on the outside
doesn’t count if you’re not good on the inside. It’s what we say or do that
shows if we’re good, not how we look. If we’re mean or selfish or mad or won’t
share, those are bad things inside of us. If we’re nice to people and love them
and share and help others then we’re good on the inside as well as the outside.
Let’s ask Jesus to help us with that.
Dear
Jesus. We don’t want to be like that coffee cup that looks pretty on the
outside but has bad stuff inside. Help us to be good both on the outside and
especially on the inside. Help us to say and do things that are nice, not mean.
Thank you. 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: Psalm
133
Behold, how good
and pleasant it is when brothers dwell in unity! It is like the precious oil upon the head,
running down upon the beard, upon the beard of Aaron, running down on the
collar of his robes! It is like the dew
of Hermon, which falls on the mountains of Zion! For there the Lord has
commanded the blessing, life for evermore.
SCRIPTURE 2: Matthew 15:1-20 from the New Living Translation
Some Pharisees and teachers of religious law now arrived
from Jerusalem to see Jesus. "Why do your disciples disobey our age-old
tradition?" they demanded. "They ignore our tradition of ceremonial
hand washing before they eat." Jesus replied, "And why do you, by
your traditions, violate the direct commandments of God? For instance, God says,
'Honor your father and mother,'1 and 'Anyone who speaks
disrespectfully of father or mother must be put to death.' But you
say it is all right for people to say to their parents, 'Sorry, I can't help
you. For I have vowed to give to God what I would have given to you.' In this
way, you say they don't need to honor their parents. And so you
cancel the word of God for the sake of your own tradition. You hypocrites!
Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you, for he wrote, 'These people
honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. Their worship is a
farce, for they teach man-made ideas as commands from God.' "
Then Jesus called to the crowd to come and hear. "Listen," he said,
"and try to understand. It's not what goes into your mouth that defiles
you; you are defiled by the words that come out of your mouth." Then the
disciples came to him and asked, "Do you realize you offended the
Pharisees by what you just said?" Jesus replied, "Every plant not
planted by my heavenly Father will be uprooted, so ignore them. They are blind
guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will
both fall into a ditch." Then Peter said to Jesus, "Explain to us the
parable that says people aren't defiled by what they eat." "Don't you
understand yet?" Jesus asked. "Anything you eat passes through the
stomach and then goes into the sewer. But the words you speak come from the
heart -- that's what defiles you. For from the heart come evil thoughts,
murder, adultery, all sexual immorality, theft, lying, and slander. These are
what defile you. Eating with unwashed hands will never defile you."
SERMON: “Inside
Outside and Topsy Turvy” Rev. Jean Hurst
It goes way,
way back—long before Jesus. The people of Israel are descendants of Abraham.
God promised him a long lineage and that he would be their God and they would
be his people. This covenant was sealed by the act of circumcision. As time
passed, more and more laws were added, mostly after the Exodus when Moses went
up on Mt. Sinai. The laws showed that the Israelites were God’s chosen people,
special and set apart. These laws, including all the food and purity laws came
to represent the identity of the Jewish people. It was who they were.
The scribes
and Pharisees of Jesus’ era were deeply committed religious people. They were
keepers of the law, not just for themselves but also for the people, ensuring
that the people remembered who they were by keeping these long-held traditions.
Jesus was not condemning tradition or traditionalism but the fact that over
time, some of the law keepers lost sight of what it was about and some of them
were reinterpreting laws to serve their own interests. It became, as Jaroslav
Pelikan observed, “that tradition is the living faith of dead people;
traditionalism is the dead faith of living people.”1 Jesus named it,
calling them hypocrites. Hypocrite is a Greek word meaning actor. The scribes
and Pharisees were acting religious but missing God’s intent.
As I’ve noted
before, the first gospel, Mark, was written about forty years after the death
and resurrection of Jesus, and Matthew--a re-writing of Mark--was written after
that. The Gospels were directed at the early Christian church which was going
through issues of conflict and persecution. Part of that occurred as more and
more Jewish people adopted the Christian beliefs. The conflict arose over
whether or not, in doing that, they retained the Jewish laws.
In Mark’s
telling of this same story, the narrative concludes, “thus Jesus proclaimed all
foods clean.” Matthew didn’t carry that statement forward in his gospel. The
issues continued in the biblical story beyond the gospels. Responding to
concerns that Christians were defiling themselves by attending civic dinner
parties held in pagan temples or having dinner with those who buy meat from
temples, Paul wrote several chapters in 1 Corinthians (1 Cor 8:1 – 11:1). He
seems to take a ‘don’t ask/don’t tell’ approach. And in Galatians (2:11-14)
Paul chastises Peter for refusing to eat with Gentiles. In Acts (10:9-16) Peter
had a vision of a sheet filled with unclean animals being lowered in front of
him and God saying, “What God has made clean you must not call profane.” That
statement has been applied to Gentiles who were considered unclean as well as
to food. Paul’s mission outreach brought more and more Gentiles into the faith.
The scribes
and Pharisees, based on their long-held traditions, were very focused on what
would defile a person by virtue of what they ate, how they prepared it, what
they had touched, and whether they’d done proper religious purification by
washing their hands. Jesus was more concerned with what comes out of our bodies
that can defile and hurt. That means actions as well as words. He told his
followers that what comes out of the mouth comes from the heart. Out of the
heart comes evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication theft, false
witness, and slander which defiles the person doing it and hurts others.
We can too
easily become complacent in thinking that we don’t do those things so we’re
safe. But think about what comes out of our mouths—careless words, sarcasm,
gossip, put downs, angry words, deceit, complaints, negativity, divisiveness.
Think about the actions and inactions that come from our hearts. All of that
from people who profess to follow Jesus and his teachings. It’s not that we’re
bad either collectively or individually. But we all have the capacity for both
good and bad. It comes from the same heart. Any of us can, without desiring it,
engage in actions and attitudes that can hurt others. We go to church, we put
on the image of good Christians but our hearts give us away. If challenged,
we’re good at justifying what we do.
The
experience of a young teen provides an example. In his posthumous
autobiography, Ryan White: My Own Story,
Ryan, who was dying of AIDS at the age of thirteen, went to church on
Easter: “Normally, at our church, the
whole congregation says, “Happy Easter!” to each other this way: our minister
steps forward to the front pew, shakes a few … hands and says, “Peace be with
you.” Then those people turn to their neighbors and shake hands and so on, all
the way to the back of the church, where we were sitting. The family in the pew
in front of me turned around. I held out my hand to empty air. Other people’s
hands were moving every which way, all directions away from me …
It wasn’t
over yet. As Mom, Andrea, and I turned out of the church parking lot, our
transmission died in the middle of the lane … Mom tried to flag down some other
cars leaving church, but no one would stop. A half hour went by, and then
finally a man in a truck pulled away from the auto parts store across the
street, nosed up behind us, and pushed our car over to the side of the road.
Our rescuer climbed out of his truck and asked Mom, “Need a lift home?” Mom
took a deep breath and said, “First I better tell you who we are,” and she did.
The truck driver shrugged, “Well, it doesn’t matter,” he said. He drove us
home. A couple of months later he stopped by and invited me hang gliding.”2
What was in
the heart of that truck driver that came out in his actions? Note that he
wasn’t in church that Easter Sunday morning. What do you think was in the
hearts of those church people? They were the Christians, dutifully attending
church and worshiping God. Their actions or inactions also came from their
hearts. Their justification was probably the fear of catching AIDS. This young
boy became just as much a pariah as the biblical lepers. Jesus said, love and
mercy take precedence over everything else. The truck driver demonstrated that.
For some of
those church people who wouldn’t touch Ryan and wouldn’t help when the car
broke down, there might have been an element of judgement, even if it was
unfounded. Ryan was a hemophiliac who’d received a tainted blood transfusion.
Getting AIDS wasn’t his fault. But should it make any difference how he got it?
Even if Ryan had gotten the disease through a sexual act or using contaminated
drug needles, he was still a beloved child of God. Yet some people would
ostracize him on the basis of long-held traditions around sexual and behavioral
purity. Jesus repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to embrace those who are
rejected by society. Furthermore, he doesn’t give any of us much slack for
excluding others from God’s grace and love or from acts of love and decency.
Acts of love,
coming from the heart, become a collective living-out of what we believe and of
who we are. Sometimes our hearts need a little nudge in the right direction to
remind us who we are. Back in 1983 it took the voice of one brave woman to do
that nudging.
Michael
Lindvall tells the story of his friend Fuad Bahnan, an Arab born in Jerusalem, a
Christian and a Protestant minister in the Evangelical Synod of Syria and
Lebanon. For more than 30 years, Mr. Bahnan had served as the pastor of a small
congregation in West Beirut, Lebanon, the overwhelmingly Muslim sector of the
city. He told about an event in the congregation that unfolded in 1983, the
year that the Israeli army marched north into Lebanon.
No one, he
said, knew how far north the Israelis would come and few thought they would
advance as far north as Beirut. However, members of Mr. Bahnan’s church guessed
that they would, in fact, take Beirut and then attempt to starve out any hidden
Palestinian fighters. In preparation for the inevitable, the church decided to
purchase a large quantity of nonperishable food for the siege they believed
would soon be upon them.
It did come.
West Beirut was totally cut off; no one could enter or leave; no food was
allowed in. The governing board of Pastor Bahnan’s church then met to make
plans for distribution of the food they had stockpiled. The meeting was long
and conflicted. By the end of it, there were two different proposals on the
table.
The first
proposal was that the food be distributed first to members of the congregation,
then, as supplies permitted, to other Christians in West Beirut, and lastly, if
anything was still left, to Muslim neighbors. The second proposal was very
different, the inverse of the first. This motion suggested that the food be
first distributed to Muslim neighbors, then to nonmember Christians, and
lastly, if there was any left over, to members of the church.
Rev. Bahnan
said the meeting lasted six hours. It finally ended when a normally quiet
woman, a much-respected elder, stood up and with uncharacteristic volume and
impatience shouted to her fellow board members, “You hypocrites! If we do not
demonstrate the love of Christ in this place, who will?”
The second
proposal passed. The food the church had stockpiled was distributed first to
Muslims, then to nonmember Christians, and finally to members of the
congregation. Fuad Bahnan ended his story with two points. First, he said that
there was actually enough food for everybody. Then he added this note: “The
Muslims of West Beirut are still talking about it.”
Who are we?
Do the words and actions that come out of our hearts hurt or heal, condemn or
extend grace, feed fear and hate or demonstrate inclusivity and love? Who are
we? Jesus’ perspective is that who we are is really defined by the way we live
in relationship to others. Do we demonstrate the love of Christ with what comes
out of our hearts? As that elder in West Beirut asked, “If we do not demonstrate the love of Christ in this place, who will?”
1Jaroslav Pelikan, The
Vindication of Tradition: The 1983 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, New
Have: Yale University Press, 1986, p. 66
2Feasting on the Gospels, Matthew, Volume 2, Chapters 14-28,
Cynthia A. Jarvis and Elizabeth Johnson, eds., Westminster John Knox Press,
Louisville, 2013, p.30
3Michael Lindvall, Feasting on the Gospels, Matthew, Volume
2, Chapters 22 and 24, Cynthia A. Jarvis and Elizabeth Johnson, eds.,
Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, 2013, p. 22, 24
HYMN: “Lord,
I Want to Be a Christian”
PRAYERS OF THE
PEOPLE AND THE LORD’S PRAYER
Creator God, you have called us to be
one, to live in unity and harmony, and yet we are divided: race from race,
faith from faith, rich from poor, old from young, neighbor from neighbor.
O God, by whose cross enmity is
brought to an end, break down the walls that separate us, tear down the fences
of hatred and indifference; forgive the sins that divide us, free us from pride
and self-seeking, overcome our prejudices and fears and give us courage to open
ourselves to others. By the power of the Holy Spirit unite us in Christ.
And it is as your united people, Lord,
that we lift up those from our church and community to your tender care. We
pray for your presence, your peace, and your healing touch: Joyce and George Sahlberg in the death of Joyce’s
son Lance, Lois White with stomach cancer, Joel Scrivner as he undergoes more heart procedures … for Laura
VanCleave … Cherry … Virginia … Judy’s daughter Rosa … Darlene … John Matthews
… Margaret Dunbar … Sandi …Trisha … Dave … Jacob … Joyce … Jennifer … Chuck …
Courtney … Ethel … Helen. (Additional prayers …………)
God,
we pray for peace in the world, an end to violence on our streets, an end to
threats between nations, an end to oppression and exploitation of people. Be
present in a felt way for all who live in fear or isolation or loneliness.
Bring an end to this pandemic and all the rancor and differences it generates.
Comfort those who have faced so many losses because of it. Be with teachers and
staff and students as schools resume. Keep them safe we pray.
We
entrust to you these prayers and those that remain yet in our hearts as we pray
the prayer Jesus taught: 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
King David said, “I will not worship the
Lord with that which cost me nothing.” We give back to the Lord as the Lord has
generously given to us. In faith, in gratitude, in love, let us bring our gifts
before the Lord.
DOXOLOGY
PRAYER OF DEDICATION
For
all your gifts, Holy God—those we remember and all we have not recognized—we
give thanks. We are grateful for the privilege of giving from the abundance you
provide. Help us, together, to use what we have shared to fulfill your
purposes. Amen.
CLOSING HYMN: “They’ll
Know We Are Christians by Our Love”
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION
I
challenge you this week to awareness. What comes out of your mouth? Jesus said
it’s a reflection of what is in your heart. Do you know what’s in your heart?
Listen to what you say.
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 40-person limit, 6’
distancing, masks, and no physical contact.
PRAYER CARE:
Joyce and George
Sahlberg (death of Joyce’s son Lance), Laura VanCleave (medical issues), Lois White (stomach cancer), Joel
Scrivner (heart procedure) John Meinzenger, Virginia DesIlets (fall/injured
ribs on 6/16), Margaret Dunbar
(fall/broken tailbone), Judy’s daughter Rosa Lester (retinal bleed), Darlene Wingfield
(pulmonary fibrosis), 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).
Exodus
1:8—2:10; Psalm 124; Romans 12:1-8; Matthew 16:13-20
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