PIONEER
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Worship
via Blog 20th Sunday after
Pentecost October 18, 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)
Live
worship with masks and social distancing has plenty of room for additional
worshipers.
- Worship and Music meets following worship
- Women’s
Spirituality will meet at 10:30 on Tuesday the 20th.
-
Highway Litter Retrieval Saturday, October 24, 10:00 @ church
-
Deacons
will meet following worship Sunday, October 25th
-
PPW
will hold a lunch meeting Tuesday, the 27th at noon.
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
We are drawn to worship by a Reality
unseen.
The One we call God is beyond human
description.
God
is more than we can ever imagine.
We
sense God’s presence as we meditate.
We gather in awe to bring our songs of
praise.
The Creator of all things has given us
life.
We
are amazed by the wonders around us.
We
feel God’s presence as we sing together.
We are summoned by One who is just and
merciful.
The Ruler of all worlds expects us to
respond.
How
amazing that God chooses us as messengers.
We
know God is with us as we work for justice.
PRAYER OF THE DAY
Appear to us here, God of all worlds, for
we need your assurance and blessing. We seek the strength to do what is right
and just. We long to see you, even though we sense that a god we could see
would be only a tiny part of you whose Spirit fills all time and space. We want
you to have a face like ours, so we find your face in Jesus and occasionally in
one another. We want to be certain that our decisions and actions are right,
but often it is only long afterwards that we realize you were with us. O God,
we want to be open to all you are revealing to us now. Amen.
OPENING
SONG: “Awesome God”
CALL TO CONFESSION
We are invited to reflect on the wrongs we
have done, the good we have neglected and the motives that underlie our
behavior. What are the idols that attract us, the responsibilities we seek to
avoid, the schemes by which we pursue selfish advantages? God knows, but we
need to recognize and confess them.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
Awesome
God, how puny is our cleverness before the magnitude of your reality! How
fleeting are our days measured against the far reaches of eternity! Yet we set
our limited knowledge and restricted purposes against your will for us and
presume to direct our own affairs and those of the whole world. O God, we are
trapped in our pretensions. Turn us inside out so our self-interest becomes
concern for all your neglected children and our actions prove our desire to act
according to your will. 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 and Zoey. Today we’re going to talk about worship. When we go to
church on Sundays or read the service on the Blog, we call it a worship
service. That’s when we take time to thank God for all the things we have
received and we tell God how much we appreciate who God is and what God does in
the world.
When
we worship we also learn more about God and how God wants us to live. And
sometimes we ask God for help with our problems.
We
worship God in many different ways. One way is through our prayers. We can read
prayers together out loud or the pastor can pray, or we can pray silently.
We
worship through music, too. Some of the music we just listen to and some we
sing. One song we sing after the offering starts out, “Praise God from whom all
blessings flow.”
The
best way to worship God is with our hearts and lives. When we love God we are
able to praise God and then we live the way God wants us to live. Let’s pray:
Dear
God, we worship you because we love you. Sometimes we can’t come to church so
we worship you from home. Thank you for being our God. 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 99
The LORD reigns; let the peoples tremble! He sits
enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth quake! The Lord is great in Zion; he is exalted over
all the peoples. Let them praise thy great and terrible name! Holy is he!
Mighty King, lover of justice, thou hast established equity; thou hast executed
justice and righteousness in Jacob. Extol the Lord our God; worship at his
footstool! Holy is he! Moses and Aaron were among his priests, Samuel also was
among those who called on his name. They cried to the Lord, and he answered
them. He spoke to them in the pillar of cloud; they kept his testimonies, and
the statutes that he gave them. O Lord our God, thou didst answer them; thou
wast a forgiving God to them, but an avenger of their wrongdoings. Extol the Lord
our God, and worship at his holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy!
SCRIPTURE 2: Exodus 33:12-23
Moses said to the Lord,
"See, thou sayest to me, `Bring up this people'; but thou hast not let me
know whom thou wilt send with me. Yet thou hast said, `I know you by name, and
you have also found favor in my sight.' Now therefore, I pray thee, if I have
found favor in thy sight, show me now thy ways, that I may know thee and find
favor in thy sight. Consider too that this nation is thy people." And he
said, "My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest." And
he said to him, "If thy presence will not go with me, do not carry us up
from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in thy sight, I
and thy people? Is it not in thy going with us, so that we are distinct, I and
thy people, from all other people that are upon the face of the earth?"
And the Lord said to Moses, "This very thing that you have spoken I will
do; for you have found favor in my sight, and I know you by name." Moses
said, "I pray thee, show me thy glory." And he said, "I will
make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name `The
Lord'; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy
on whom I will show mercy. But," he said, "you cannot see my face;
for man shall not see me and live." And the Lord said, "Behold, there
is a place by me where you shall stand upon the rock; and while my glory passes
by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand
until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my
back; but my face shall not be seen."
SERMON: “Knowing
God” Rev. Jean Hurst
Moses was gutsy, I’ll give him
that. He might have been shaking in his
boots, but he wasn’t about to back down. It wasn’t the first time he’d been
bold in speaking to God. It first began when he had that encounter with the
burning bush and argued with God about being sent to Egypt to bring the
Israelites out. Even then, he was treading on rather personal ground. “Who
shall I say sends me?” “I am who I am,” God replies.
Well, once again, Moses wants to know
who God is. “You tell me to lead these people, but you don’t tell me who you
will send with me.” You see, after that incident with the golden calf, when the
people had so quickly sought a god they could see and had Aaron fashion one
from their jewelry, God had been so angry with them, he had refused to go with
them anymore, sure that their behavior would exceed the limits of his own
self-control. Fearing that his anger would prompt him to annihilate the people,
God told Moses he would instead send an angel to go with them.
But Moses refused to settle for
anything less than God’s own presence with them. Moses had a special
relationship with God and he didn’t want to lose that. In verse 11, immediately
preceding today’s reading, it says that the Lord had been speaking to Moses
face to face, as a man speaks with his friend. So perhaps it was in the way of
one friend asking another to prove their friendship.
Moses says, “You say you know
my name, that I’ve found favor with you. If so, teach me your ways so that I
may know you. God relents, “My presence will go with you and I will give you
rest.”
But Moses pushes the point. He and the
Israelites are about to enter the wilderness. Even Moses doesn’t realize
they’ll be wandering there for forty years. Entering that wilderness and making
that long journey is perilous without God’s presence with them. They needed
God’s guidance and protection. “If your presence doesn’t go with us, don’t even
bother sending us up from here.” Moses rants on a bit and God has to say,
“Okay, okay, I’ll do what you ask.” That only seems to embolden Moses. “Now
show me your glory.”
I wonder if God rolled his eyes. His
response to Moses is a litany of what he will do:
☐
I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you.
☐
I will proclaim my name in your presence.
☐
I will have mercy and compassion.
■ But
I’m not going to show you my
face.
Apparently
God’s glory and God’s face were synonymous. And to look on God’s face would be
sure death. God didn’t want that for his friend.
So God softens a bit. “Tell you what
I’ll do,” God says. There’s this rock over here. You can stand on the rock.
There’s a big crack in it. I’ll put you in the crack. I’ll walk past and as I
do, I’ll put my hand over that crack and you. When I get past, I’ll move my
hand and you can see my back. But you don’t get to see my face.” That gets to
be Moses exposure to the glory of God. I wonder if he was satisfied with that
or still left with a hunger to draw closer, more dangerously, more intimately
to the very core of God’s own self.
Would we dare to be as bold
with God as Moses was? I think there is in us that same longing to know who
this God is that we worship--not just to know about God, but to really know
God. We want a face-to-face sort of relationship. We want to understand the
nature of God. We want to please God, to find favor in God’s sight, to be
sustained by God’s grace, to know God’s presence with us.
We can learn from Moses. He was
emboldened by virtue of his relationship with God--this long standing
friendship that began when he was called from the place he had run to when he
tried to escape his past. And even then, he tried to escape his path,
the purpose to which God called him. But God was relentless and the
relationship was begun.
It was in trusting, in going, in
doing--however reluctantly--that Moses built this relationship with God. He
found that despite all his doubts, God had gone with him then. God had opened
the way, worked through his weaknesses and limitations, had given him
the abilities and resources he needed, had guided and protected him. Moses had
trusted and God had been faithful. His relationship with God had become so
important to him that he wasn’t willing to go a step further on the journey
unless God was with him.
Moses’ conversation with God--his
prayer--was not about the things he wanted for himself, nor even what he wanted
for his people--not food for the journey, not protection, not an easy path, not
assurance of success. Moses asked to know God’s way and expressed a desire to
stay within God’s grace. If he had that, the rest would fall into place.
With a history of trust and obedience,
of continuing relationship with God, Moses had sufficient confidence in God’s
love for him that he was able to make his request to see God more fully, to
know God more deeply. His boldness in asking led God to partially grant his
request. He couldn’t see the face of God, but he would be allowed to
see God’s back.
Seeing the glory of God would come
many centuries later when God chose to reveal his glory in the person of Jesus
the Christ. Through Jesus, we see the human face of God. The Gospel of John
tells us, “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word
was God... and ... the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We
have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only.”
It is in that revealed presence of God
that we, like Moses, are confident that God knows us, calls us by name. Jesus
said, “I am the Good Shepherd. I know my sheep and my sheep know me.” As Moses
and God were friends in this relationship, we, too, are called ‘friend’ as, in
John’s account of the gospel, Jesus proclaimed to his followers the night he
was arrested that he no longer called the servants, he called them friends.
God assured Moses that God would go
with him on this journey and we are assured as well. Hebrews reminds us that he
will never leave us nor forsake us. At the conclusion of Matthew, the risen
Jesus told his followers, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
Moses had a unique experience that
becomes symbolic of our own relationship with God. God told Moses, “There is a
place for you, here by me. There is a rock--a sure foundation that you can
stand on, that will support you, hold you up, sustain you. There is within that
rock a place of safety, a refuge. I will cover you with my hand, I will be the
security that shields you and protects you.”
Always, there is that place for us by
the side of God. We are invited to draw near. We are invited to come closer to
God’s very presence, to be in deeper relationship, to know God more intimately.
There, in God’s presence, we experience the One who is our sure foundation, the
rock that supports us. There, in the closeness of that relationship, we have
the assurance that God will cover us with his hand, will shield us. . . . Have
you ever been in the cleft of the rock with God’s hand gently, protectively
covering you? Have you had those times when, if only in hindsight, you
understood that God had a better knowledge than you of what was best for you?
Moses had that experience. He wasn’t
ready, he wasn’t able to see the full glory of God. God allowed
him what he could bear, shielded him to permit even that. Then, when God
fulfills his promise, passing before Moses who is held protectively in the
cleft of the rock, God proclaims who he is, “The Lord, the Lord, a
compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and
faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion
and sin.”
God is a God of justice as well,
remembering the faithlessness of the Israelites and their golden calf. God’s
declaration of visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and
grandchildren foretold the wandering of the Israelites for forty years in the
wilderness. During that time three to four generations would die out before the
Israelites entered the promised land. None of them except Joshua and Caleb were
to enter Canaan. God holds us accountable for our sins, yet even in that, God
first proclaims his nature as a God of mercy and compassion.
We are recipients of God’s grace. Like
Moses, we want to truly know God, to understand the nature of God. God has
shown us. Through these words and actions, we know that the nature of God is
relationship, that God is a God of grace and compassion. We know God’s
protective nature. We know God’s desire to give us rest--peace. We know God’s
faithfulness. We know God’s love. We know that despite all the ways we’ve
sinned, done things we’re ashamed of, behaved and thought in ways that would
contradict our desire to have God in our lives, God’s mercy and grace save
us.
We know the truth of all of
that--through God revealed, through the human face of God in Jesus Christ,
through the teachings and miracles of Jesus, through Jesus’ self-sacrificing
love. And we know God through the resurrection of Jesus, where God conquers sin
and death, redeems us and restores us to that full relationship in which we
will one day truly be ready and able to look upon the face of God, to
experience and live within the full glory of God. Between times, God gives us
his sustaining grace to guide us, to prepare us, to get us through until that
great day when we meet face to face. And in that between time, we know that God
goes with us. Thanks be to God.
HYMN: “God
of the Ages, Whose Almighty Hand”
PRAYERS OF THE
PEOPLE AND THE LORD’S PRAYER
God of our lives, you hold us in the
palm of your hand. Thank you for all the ways you have provided for us and
protected us. Thank you that you are with us in all of life’s events. Help us
to trust that you will bring good from the painful things that happen in our
lives. Open our eyes and hearts to receive the people you send to assist and
comfort us. Help us to be that to those who need us during the nighttime of
their fears.
God, you hold the world in your care
and you, too, yearn for the peace that you have promised in your new kingdom.
Help us do our part to make it happen. Show us what we should do. We want to
live according to your will for us. As we near time for voting, grant us wisdom
as we consider candidates and issues, that the world we create through our
voting will be the world you desire for us.
We pray for your children here and
around the world—those who live in the shadow of fear and violence and hunger
and loneliness, those impacted by Covid, by wildfires, by economics. We pray
for those close to us, for Phyllis Bauer and her family as her earthly life draws to a close ... Darlene
Wingfield … Lois White … Virginia …
Cherry … Judy’s daughter Rosa … John Matthews … Margaret Dunbar … Trisha … Dave
… Jacob … Joyce … Jennifer … Chuck … Courtney … Ethel … Helen. (Additional
prayers …………)
God
who guides our lives, 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
We are stewards of all that God places in
our hands—our time, our talents, our accumulated treasures—life itself. Our
offering is not just about tithes and gifts for the church’s mission; it is
about rededication of all of life in Christ’s service. In your heart consider
your offerings.
DOXOLOGY
PRAYER OF DEDICATION
God, we cannot deceive you with the appearance of
generosity. You know how we manage the wealth entrusted to our care. Help us to
know the joy of sharing from the abundance you provide. May what we offer here
be useful in your kingdom work. Amen.
CLOSING HYMN: “Immortal,
Invisible, God Only Wise”
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION
Remember God’s faithfulness. God
guided the people of Israel through their wilderness times. Trust God to guide
you now. As you do the grace of the
Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit is
with you now and always. 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
October 20 10:30
a.m. Women’s Spirituality
October 24 10:00 @ church Highway litter cleanup
October 25 following worship Deacons
October 27 noon PPW
If you wish to
contribute toward the relief effort for the Oregon wildfires, you can do that
through the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Fund. You can write a check to the
church, earmarked Oregon wildfire relief or you can contribute directly to PDA
by phone at 800-872-3283.
PRAYER
CARE:
Lois White
(lymphoma), Virginia DesIlets (broken hip), Darlene Wingfield (heart valve,
pulmonary fibrosis, breast cancer), Margaret Dunbar (fall/broken tailbone),
John Matthews (cancer), 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 10/25/20
Deuteronomy
34:1-12; Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17; 1 Thessalonians 2:1-8; Matthew 22:34-46
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