PIONEER
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Worship
via Blog 4th Sunday after Pentecost June
20, 2021
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
& Music meets following worship
-
Prayer
Shawl Ministry meets at 1:00 p.m.
-
No
PPW lunch meeting on the 22nd; instead PPW outing on June 29th,
leaving church at 9:00 a.m. See Edie to reserve.
-
No
Deacons meeting in June
-
Session
will be on summer break until September
- Start bringing your yard sale items on July 1st put on downstairs' stage. Church is open 8:30-Noon Tue-Fri.
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
Gather in awe before God, who laid the
foundations of the earth.
Open your hearts to the steadfast love God
offers.
The
deeds of God are beyond our knowing.
Yet we
catch glimpses of God’s mercy and care.
God does not forsake us when we are
dismayed and afraid.
Our Creator is with us in all times and
places.
God
is a stronghold for the oppressed and troubled.
The
needy and the poor are not forgotten.
God is ready to listen to us in these
moments together.
See, now is the acceptable time, the day
of salvation.
Surely
God will meet us here in our faith community!
How
good it is when we sense our unity in Christ!
PRAYER OF THE DAY
We sing praises to you, O God, for you
have been gracious to us amid the storms of life. We do battle with many
enemies within and among us, but you give us confidence and courage to face
them. Out of the whirlwind, you answer when we call. We have gathered to listen
for the voice we sometimes cannot hear in the daily clamor of our lives. Help
us to discard the excess baggage and unnecessary armor that keeps us from the
fullness of life you intend for us. Amen.
OPENING
HYMN: “Lord of All” LU#42
CALL TO CONFESSION
All of us have faltered before the lions
and giants that seem ready to destroy us. Life’s storms overwhelm us, and fear
takes a deadly toll. Sometimes we are snared in the work of our own hands. We
forget the greatest source of help and hope. In these moments together, we lay
aside our doubts and fear of judgment to open our lives to God.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
Help
us God, for we do not have the wisdom to help ourselves. When the good we have
known crumbles beneath our feet and we are mired down in hopelessness and
self-pity, we need you. When we cannot hide from the evil that is all around us
because some of it is also in us, we cry out for your saving mercy. We confess
that it is easier to see the problems than the promise. We have been more ready
to complain than to accept your help. O God, we open our hearts to you. We want
to be healed. (continue with
personal prayers………..) 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
SCRIPTURE 1: Psalm
107:1-3, 23-32
O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; for his
steadfast love endures forever! Let the
redeemed of the Lord say so, whom he has redeemed from trouble and gathered in
from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the
south. … Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great
waters; they saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep. For he
commanded, and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea.
They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths; their courage melted
away in their evil plight; they reeled and staggered like drunken men, and were
at their wits' end. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he
delivered them from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves
of the sea were hushed. Then they were glad because they had quiet, and he
brought them to their desired haven. Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast
love, for his wonderful works to the sons of men! Let them extol him in the
congregation of the people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders.
SCRIPTURE 2: Mark 4:35-41
On that day, when
evening had come, he said to them, "Let us go across to the other
side." And leaving the crowd, they took him with them in the boat, just as
he was. And other boats were with him. And a great storm of wind arose, and the
waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already filling. But he was in
the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him and said to him,
"Teacher, do you not care if we perish?" And he awoke and rebuked the
wind, and said to the sea, "Peace! Be still!" And the wind ceased,
and there was a great calm. He said to them, "Why are you afraid? Have you
no faith?" And they were filled with awe, and said to one another,
"Who then is this, that even wind and sea obey him?"
SERMON “Jesus the Storm Chaser” Rev.
Jean Hurst
A combination of moisture, unstable
air, and lift is the recipe for a thunderstorm according to Scijinks, the NOAA
(National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) website. Scijinks is a
science education site for students. They try to take complex concepts and make
them understandable.1 Put another way, storms form when there’s a
collision of pressure zones. Cold air and warm air create air movement—wind.
If the disciples had had access to the
Scijinks site and learned that a storm was brewing, would they have taken Jesus
across the lake that day? Since some of them were fishermen, they would have
known about the vagaries of lake weather and that a squall could come up at any
time. Yet they went … because Jesus told them to.
This passage has always piqued my interest
because of a couple of details you seldom hear mentioned. One is that they took
Jesus “just as he was.” And how was that any different than any other time? Was
it because Jesus was exhausted and could barely stand? That would explain him
falling asleep so deeply.
The other extra detail is that this
crossing wasn’t with just a single boat. It says “and other boats were with
him.” Not just one other boat but multiple. So this little fleet crossing the
Sea of Galilee had to have been at least three boats. In one of them, Jesus is
curled up in the back on a cushion, catching a well-earned snooze. That recipe
of moisture, unstable air, and lift kick in and the storm is upon them. The
wind is blowing ferociously and the waves are lapping over the side, starting
to fill the boat.
What do you do when you’re in a small boat
in the middle of a big lake and Mother Nature turns against you? Probably you
do what the disciples did—you panic. I imagine there was some chatter among
them. “How can he sleep through a storm like this?” “This was his idea.”
“Should we wake him?” “He’s so tired, he’ll kill us.” “We’re dead anyway if
something doesn’t save us.”
So they decide to wake him. I don’t
imagine the disciples softly patted his cheek or gently shook his shoulder
while quietly rousing him. Rather, I imagine they grabbed him by the front of
his robe and shook him hard saying, “Wake up!” Along with that came
accusations, “Teacher, don’t you care if we die?!” Hearing the
desperation in their voices and the roar of the storm, Jesus pulls himself from
sleep, rebukes the wind and orders the seas, “Peace, be still.” And suddenly it
is; there’s a dead calm. To his followers he asks, “Why are you afraid? Have
you no faith?”
So then we’re presented with a question of
faith. “Have you no faith?” Was Jesus chastising his followers? Taking that
question literally can be problematic. If Jesus’ response to the disciples is
an admonishment, where does it leave us? We all have that combination of
elements that creates storms in our lives. Science calls it a weather
disturbance and ‘disturb’ is certainly what it does to our lives. And we don’t
always handle those disturbances gracefully.
When we’re struggling with those storms
and we hear miracle stories like these, it can prompt a variety of responses.
One of those is the fear of personal failure. You might think you don’t have
strong enough faith, otherwise Jesus would have stopped the storm in your life.
It raises the question, does not having
enough faith then negate Jesus’ calming the storm? If we look at the scripture
lesson, that’s clearly not the case. Those guys in the boat were in a panic. I
don’t think ‘faith’ was uppermost in their minds. Remember, there was more than
one boat. The other two (or more) were in the same dire straits—only Jesus
wasn’t in their boats—at least physically. Perhaps they also held those same
resentments and sense of abandonment, “Don’t you care?”
If three boatloads of people combined
didn’t have enough faith to stop the storm, do we imagine we could? Is that
really what Jesus meant? If the disciples had enough faith would the storm have
stopped while Jesus slept on?
We might wonder, too, what Jesus was doing
sleeping on the job. After all, this lake crossing was his idea. And he’s the boss.
It was fine while the weather was calm but once the storm fell, shouldn’t he
have been awake to protect them?
But Jesus never seems to do anything
unintentionally. He allows the disciples to experience what they need to
experience and face—even if it’s something in themselves. He doesn’t shield
them from the realities of life. He lets them choose when to call on him and
then he responds. He lets them feel the fear and then challenges them to
examine the cause of it and how they choose to respond.
The first cause, if course, was the storm itself. Consider it from at
least three time periods. The first is the lived reality of the disciples in
that time and place. For them, the wind and the waves were real. The fear of
drowning was real. How do you argue with a boat filling with seawater?
The second time perspective of this story is for the early church. The
Gospel of Mark was believed to be the first gospel written and that was
somewhere between 65 and 75 CE. It was a stormy time for the newly formed Christian
Church. Jesus has been crucified and risen. The Jews are in rebellion and Rome
is violently crushing the Jewish insurrection through Nero’s persecutions.
Those persecutions have extended to the Christians. Paul has been executed.
Peter has been executed. The church desperately needs to believe that Jesus
will calm the storm and see them safely through dangerous waters.
The third time period for looking at this periscope is through our eyes
today—both for the church universal and for each of us individually. We live in
stormy times. Sometimes what’s going on in the world feels like a Category 5
hurricane. We want to batten down the hatches and try to ride it out but we
despair. We cling to the gunnels of the boat, praying that Jesus will calm the
storm.
Included in that are the storms we see
raging between individuals. Some of those come close to home—family and
friends, people we care about, people who one way or another can impact our
lives depending on how the storm settles. It may well be that we have storms
that are more personal—between us and someone else—family, friend, or foe.
While storms are raging outside the boat,
there are also storms raging within us. Those storms, from little disturbances
to cataclysms are real. They range the spectrum of relationships to health to
finances. They encompass how we feel about ourselves and our lives—loneliness,
rejection, failure, meaninglessness, and hopelessness.
The fallout of some of those storms has
the potential to change our lives significantly. How do we react to it? The
accusation the disciples leveled at Jesus when they woke him was, “Don’t you care?” That is often our question, too.
It can feel like Jesus is asleep in the stern and the storm is raging around us
and Jesus just sleeps on.
We don’t want a sleeping God. We want a God who is there for us, who is doing something, who stops the storm in
its tracks. If we don’t see evidence of that, like the disciples, we become
afraid. Fear
leads people to turn in on themselves and focus on their inadequacies. Instead
of doing that, we need to draw on two things—courage and faith.
John Wayne is known for his definition of courage: “Courage is being
scared to death and saddling up anyway.”2 That sort of fits the
lifestyle for Harney County. But there are a couple others that fit what I
think Jesus was trying to get across to the disciples when he invited them to
reflect on their fear and their faith.
The
first is from Shannon Adler, “Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the
answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been
avoiding your whole life.” And Victor Hugo’s reflection, “Have courage for the great sorrows of life and
patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your
daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”3
And that is the faith piece of it. It is to believe that God is awake
and God will see you through. I wonder if the disciples’ reaction would have
been different if Jesus had been sitting in the boat, grinning as he enjoyed
the power of the storm. Wouldn’t they have been confident that, awake, he
wouldn’t let them come to harm even though the storm was scary? Faith is
believing that he won’t let us come to harm even though it seems he’s asleep or
even though we can’t feel his presence or see evidence of it.
There is no promise that God will eliminate the storms of our lives.
The promise we do have is that God will be there with us in the middle of those
storms and will see us through it, whatever the outcome might be. God draws out
the courage and wisdom and resources we need in order to survive and thrive.
After the storm calmed, the disciples
asked each other, “Who then is this that even the wind and sea obey him?” Who
is this? This is our Lord and Savior, the God of our lives, who promised, “I
will never leave you nor forsake you.” Thanks be to God! Amen.
1https://scijinks.gov/thunderstorms-video/
2(https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/77-motivational-quotes-that-will-give-you-courage.html);
3(https://www.keepinspiring.me/courage-quotes/)
HYMN: “How Firm a Foundation” Glory #463
PRAYERS OF THE
PEOPLE AND THE LORD’S PRAYER
O God, who created all things from the
void, teach us to know the power of silence and of prayer. Fill our emptiness
with your peace and your love, and fill our darkness with your light. Fulfill
in us the potentials for which we were born and were called into your church.
Eternal God, give us discerning hearts
to recognize the fear in our anger, the muffled hope in our cynicism, and the
wounds we carry as weapons. Help us see ourselves as you see us, and love
ourselves and others with your gracious love.
We pray for our nation that is so
divided. Bring healing to this country, Lord. Lead us to a vision that will
transcend political boundaries. Grant wisdom to our leaders and to those of all
nations who hold the welfare of the world’s people in their hands.
God, bring your healing comfort and
presence to our church family and community. We pray for Ralph Hook … Kris
Mangold’s father … Joe Henry … Elaine LaChapelle … Sandy Cargill … Larry
Koskela … Linda and Bill Kaesemeyer … Somer Bauer … Tasha Sizemore … Beverly
Patterson … Lois White … Virginia …
Margaret Dunbar … Darlene … Trisha … Dave … Jacob … George and Joyce … Jennifer
… Chuck … Courtney … Ethel. (Additional prayers …………)
God, we place these prayers and the
unspoken prayers of our hearts in your care and trust them to you. Thank you.
And now we boldly pray as Jesus taught us:
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
Let us praise God with all we have to
give. As we consider what we will offer to God of our lives and our resources,
may it be worthy of our calling. Let us bring our offerings before God in
humbleness and joy.
DOXOLOGY
PRAYER OF DEDICATION
Thank you, God, for meeting us in our need. We give
that others in even greater need might not be forgotten. We are grateful for
the trust you place in us. Through our offerings may others find peace for
their lives and know the joy of your grace. Amen.
CLOSING HYMN: “Eternal
Father, Strong to Save” Glory#8
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION
Life is full of storms and we never
know when one will strike. When it does happen, remember that we worship the
God who clams the storm, however large or small. Trust him.
As you do the grace of the Lord Jesus
Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit will be 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
June 20 following worship Worship & Music
June 20 1:00 p.m. Prayer Shawl Ministry
June 22 NO
PPW meeting
June 24 8:30 a.m. Men’s Prayer Group
June 27 NO
Deacons Meeting
June 29 TBA PPW Outing
July 6 10:30 a.m. Women’s Spirituality
July 8 8:30 a.m. Men’s Prayer Group
July 9-10 TBA PPW Yard Sale
July 11 following worship M&M
PRAYER
CARE:
Ralph Hook (knee
replacement), Kris Mangold’s father (Covid), Joe Hendry (pending hip surgery), Elaine
LaChapelle (broken arm, anemia), Sandy Cargill (pre-cancer surgical
procedures), Larry Koskela (stomach and joint issues), Linda and Bill
Kaesemeyer (Bill’s heart/breathing issues), Somer Bauer (breast cancer), Tasha
Sizemore (Crohn’s), Lois White (lymphoma, aortic tear), Jacob Cunningham,
Trisha Cagley (health problems), Dave Clark (kidney cancer), Virginia DesIlets
(age 99!), Margaret Dunbar (aging issues), George and Joyce Sahlberg (health
issues), Jennifer Schirm (Parkinson’s), Chuck VanHise (leg/walking rehab), Darlene
Wingfield (pulmonary fibrosis, breast cancer), and Courtney Ziegler
(Huntington’s).
LECTIONARY
FOR 06/27/21
Lamentations 3:22-33; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15;
Mark 5:21-43
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