PIONEER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Worship
via Blog 17th Sunday after
Pentecost September 19, 2021
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.
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
Draw near to God, and God will draw near
to you.
Happy are those who find delight in God’s
law.
God
is always nearer than our next breath.
We
gather to become more aware of that presence.
Knowledge of God is a delight to the
righteous.
They seek to grow in wisdom and
understanding.
There
is always more to discover than we know.
God
is our teacher and helper and judge.
Put your trust in God as you prepare to
serve.
Learn to be peaceable, gentle, and
merciful.
We
seek to do good and not harm all our days.
We
would open our hands to the poor and needy.
PRAYER OF THE DAY
You watch over us, O God, and show us the
way to prosper in life, not so much in things as in relationships that
contribute to our wholeness and well-being. Thank you for meeting us here and
helping us to deal with our selfish ambition, disorder, and conflicts. We
submit ourselves to you for instruction. Help us to be honest with ourselves
and with you, voicing our doubts as well as our faith, our hypocrisy along with
all that is deeply genuine. Create in us a space for quiet listening and
thoughtful meditation. Amen.
OPENING
HYMN: “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace” LU#109
CALL TO CONFESSION
We are called to resist evil and to purify
our hearts. Often our need for such cleansing is not apparent to us. We are
hard pressed to find anything bad that we need to confess, and we take real
delight in the good we have done. Yet the peaceful community God seeks, the
serving church that embodies Christ, the Spirit-filled company we are meant to
be, are not yet realized. Our Prayer of Confession is for the whole people of
God, including ourselves.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
Forgive
us, God, for our complacent attitudes and self-serving comforts. We do not
relish the thought of sacrificing for some larger good we cannot see, for
people with whom we find it difficult to identify. We compare ourselves
favorably against many who seem less attuned to your purposes than we,
forgetting that our true standard is Christ Jesus. We ask you to take from us
all the bitterness, envy, and anger that stand in the way of your reign. May
all we ask of you be for the common good of all your children. (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: Mark 9:30-37
They went on from
there and passed through Galilee. And he would not have any one know it; for he
was teaching his disciples, saying to them, "The Son of man will be
delivered into the hands of men, and they will kill him; and when he is killed,
after three days he will rise." But they did not understand the saying,
and they were afraid to ask him. And they came to Capernaum; and when he was in
the house he asked them, "What were you discussing on the way?" But
they were silent; for on the way they had discussed with one another who was
the greatest. And he sat down and called the twelve; and he said to them,
"If anyone would be first, he must be last of all and servant of
all." And he took a child, and put him in the midst of them; and taking
him in his arms, he said to them, "Whoever receives one such child in my
name receives me; and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent
me."
SCRIPTURE 2: James 3:13 – 4:3, 7-8a
Who is wise and understanding among you? By his good life
let him show his works in the meekness of wisdom. But if you have bitter
jealousy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast and be false to the
truth. This wisdom is not such as comes down from above, but is earthly,
unspiritual, devilish. For where jealousy and selfish ambition exist, there
will be disorder and every vile practice. But the wisdom from above is first
pure, then peaceable,
gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits,
without uncertainty or insincerity. And the harvest of righteousness is sown in
peace by those who make peace.
… You ask and do not receive, because you ask
wrongly, to spend it on your passions. … Submit yourselves therefore
to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God and he
will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts,
you men of double mind.
SERMON “The Devil’s on the Run” Rev. Jean Hurst
A Fox one day fell into a deep well
and could find no means of escape. A Goat, overcome with thirst, came to the
same well, and seeing the Fox, inquired if the water was good. Concealing his
sad plight under a merry guise, the Fox indulged in a lavish praise of the
water, saying it was excellent beyond measure, and encouraging him to descend.
The Goat, mindful only of his thirst, thoughtlessly jumped down, but just as he
drank, the Fox informed him of the difficulty they were both in and suggested a
scheme for their common escape. “If,” said he, “you will place your forefeet
upon the wall and bend your head, I will run up your back and escape, and will
help you out afterwards.” The Goat readily assented and the Fox leaped upon his
back. Steadying himself with the Goat’s horns, he safely reached the mouth of
the well and made off as fast as he could. When the Goat upbraided him for
breaking his promise, he turned around and cried out, “You foolish old fellow!
If you had as many brains in your head as you have hairs in your beard, you
would never have gone down before you had inspected the way up, nor have
exposed yourself to dangers from which you had no means of escape.”
Aesop was a Greek slave who lived
around 550 BC who was credited with writing a collection of fables with animals
as the main characters and a moral to each story. The story I just told you is
The Fox and the Goat. The purported moral is, ‘look before you leap.’ I find in
it a classic example of the world’s wisdom, measured by cleverness and the
ability to gain personally at another’s expense. The ‘clever’ fox then berates
the goat, blaming the goat for getting himself into the situation in the first
place.
As I was reading the fable I saw a
parallel with the trap of materialism. There are many clever foxes at
work—financial institutions that issue high limit credit cards, the companies
that entice buying more than one needs and beyond one’s means on the lure of
looking better, being more loved, more respected, having more power and on and on.
There’s also the social values that say we need to keep up with and surpass
others. Care to guess who is the fox and who is the goat in these scenarios?
People are lured into a well of debt and ‘stuff’, then blamed for getting
themselves into the situation in the first place. There is truth in that.
People are gullible enough to be drawn in with all the temptations of having
more than they can afford, and like the goat, failing to look at the situation
they will put themselves in before they take that leap. But where is the
culpability of the fox? The foxes of the world are considered clever. It’s
smart business. It makes the rich richer. It is an example of the world’s
wisdom, not of God’s wisdom.
We continue the reading and study of
the book of James with all its practical advice about Christian living. James
writes not about head stuff and not really about heart stuff. It’s not doctrine
and theology in an intellectual sense. It’s not about adoration and praise and
emotional highs. He writes about the mundane aspects of day-to-day living, of
how we get along with one another and of how that reflects who we are as
Christians.
Today’s
passage starts off with a question. Who is wise and understanding among you?
Then he starts defining what wisdom is. It is not the cleverness of the fox. It
is not a ‘wisdom’ that comes from selfish desires to best someone else, to gain
personally, to get ahead or get more. These, he says, are false truths. These
things don’t represent the wisdom that comes from God but the false wisdom that
comes from the world. That false wisdom says it’s all about me. It’s how I can
get what I want. And too bad for you. Earthly wisdom is self-absorbed and
destructive.
The writer of James poses another
question. The conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? He
answers the question himself, saying that it is our cravings at war within us,
wanting something and not having it, we go to most any extent to get it. From
that comes war and murder and broken trusts and broken relationships.
And where does the conflict come from?
Consider these: Greed: we want more and more. We want what belongs to
someone else. We want more than our share, more than we need. Fear: we fear losing our way of life
or a change in our way of living. We fear losing control. We also fear being
diminished in some way, whether in our own eyes or in the eyes of those around
us. Separateness: we see the
other as ‘they’. We aren’t able to put a face or personality to ones we would
oppose. We don’t see them as someone we know personally, someone who has a
family, longings, needs, loves, fears. It’s them against us.
Stubbornness can be a source of
conflict. Being inflexible, not willing to give an inch. Having to be right, which means the other
person has to be wrong. Power or
the abuse of power: using your advantages in order to gain at someone else’s
expense. That power comes in many forms--authority, wealth, education, an
ability to be convincing, physical might. Often as a consequence of abused
power comes the desire for revenge. We want revenge when we think
something has been taken from us: dignity, trust, opportunity, reputation,
something material or we want revenge when we have been hurt in some way,
physically, emotionally, financially.
These are all ways in which conflict
arises, when something comes between us and what we want. Hold them up against
the conflicts in your own lives and see if they fit. Hold them up in a national
spotlight and see if they fit. As we do that, whether personal, national or
global, we can recognize that there are two sides to each conflict. Which side
do we fall on?
Conflicts will happen. It’s the nature
of relationships. The things that create or keep conflicts going are most often
things of the world’s values. They are based on the world’s ways. They come
from the world’s ‘wisdom’ which is a false wisdom.
James says there is another wisdom, a
wisdom from above. That wisdom is pure, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy
and good fruits, without partiality, without hypocrisy. Those who live by that
wisdom are peace makers. They don’t buy into the culture of the world. They
aren’t just out for themselves. They don’t view other people as a means for
getting what they want. They honestly care about and act in the best interests
of the other person. And no, that does not mean becoming a doormat or giving up
who you are and everything you have. It means respecting yourself and
respecting the other person. It doesn’t put life into an either/or framework.
A story that puts that into context
occurred in 1976 in Spokane, Washington at a trackmeet. Nine Special Olympics
contestants, all physically or mentally disabled, assembled at the starting
line for the 100-yard dash. At the gun, they all started out, not exactly in a
dash, but with relish to run the race to the finish and win. In the heat of the
competition, one contestant stumbled on the asphalt and fell. A couple of the
other contestants turned back to help their fallen friend. They crossed the
finish line together.
Contrary to the glurge on the
Internet, it wasn’t the whole team who turned back to assist the fallen. They
didn’t all link arms and cross the finish line together. It isn’t the sort of
story that is solely characteristic of a certain category of people. Most of
the team stayed focused on their desire to compete and win. That is, of course,
the way of the world. And it is not to say that competition is bad. Yet this
story has stayed with people for over forty-five years. It touches hearts, I
think, because it speaks to something deep within us that remembers that this
is how we should be for each other.
Sometimes we do remember. We
remember who we are. We remember whose we are. We remember and live that
heavenly wisdom because that is who we are. It doesn’t mean we are perfect or
have to be. Using heavenly wisdom does not mean disconnecting ourselves from
ordinary, day-to-day life. Christian wisdom is expressed in the routine and
mundane matters of living in but not of the world. It is like integrity. Wisdom
is the integration of thought, will, action and context. It is not a matter of
setting up faith against works—it is faith and works together.
Let’s return to James opening
question, “Who among you is wise?” At Pioneer we have those people who are wise
with God’s wisdom. They consistently, not perfectly, but consistently, live out
the characteristics the passage describes--pure, gentle, willing to yield, full
of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, without hypocrisy, peace makers,
caring for the best interests of others, not willing to advance themselves at
the expense of someone else. Can you think who some of these in our midst might
be? What sets them apart? Are you one of those people? If you are, you have
much to teach the rest of us.
If you feel you are not, what is it
that keeps you from being counted among the wise? Do you want to be? You can
be, if that is what you want. James tells us how. He says draw near to God and
God will draw near to you. So how do you draw near to God?
Some of the answer to that seems
obvious and so simple. Why don’t we do them more? Pray. Read scripture. Come to
church. Going beyond the obvious, find other things that work for you. Find
connection with God through music, art or nature.
Be
still and wait for God. Risk being in that place of uncertainty, that
wilderness of struggle, following an unknown path, and occasionally getting
lost. Acknowledge your own helplessness, that you can’t do it on your own, that
you have no other viable choice but God. Let go. Be willing to trust God with
all that is most precious to you. Be willing to let go of control and outcome.
Find
thankfulness in all areas of your life, opening your eyes and hearts to the
blessings all around you. You may have others and as you do, share them. We all
need to learn. Through it all, stay open to the belief and feeling that God is
near. For indeed, God is. And as the author of James assures us, when
we resist what is evil and instead choose to draw near to God, we’ll put the
devil on the run. Thanks be to God.
HYMN: “The
Servant Song” Glory
#727
PRAYERS OF THE
PEOPLE AND THE LORD’S PRAYER
God of living waters, we come to you
in prayer knowing that there is nothing about us that you do not already know.
Yet we come anyway, recognizing our need to give voice to what we feel, what we
desire, to seek guidance and direction that we might live into the image of
Christ, that we might become the people you call us to be. We come to you, Holy
God, seeking comfort and peace. Our soul thirsts for you, O Lord, and will not
be satisfied until we drink from the living waters. Hear now the prayers of our souls …..
Sometimes, too, Tender God, it is hard
to focus on the needs of our souls when it takes all our energy just to make it
through our physical lives. When so many demands press upon us, when those we
love so often want more than we can give, when we are burdened by regrets of
the past and anxiousness about the future, we need your peace. We need the
strength only you can give, we need courage to live our lives day to day. Hear our prayers for this coming week……….
We
are concerned about loved ones and friends, God, and so we lift them to your
care as well. We pray for Dave Clark who is having surgery this morning for a brain tumor ... for Tina Bossuot who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer's ... for Verna’s sister and family with Covid … Mary and Ray
Swarthout … Sandy Cargill … Elaine LaChapelle … Larry Koskela … Linda and Bill
Kaesemeyer … Somer Bauer … Tasha Sizemore … Beverly Patterson … Virginia …
Margaret Dunbar … Darlene … Trisha … Dave … Jacob … George and Joyce … Jennifer
… Chuck … Courtney … Ethel … and Pastor Jean. (Additional prayers …………)
Hear
our prayers for family and friends.
Even as we remember those who are
close to us, we lift up those who may not have someone to pray for them or love
them. Lord watch over those who are lonely and alone, those who grieve without
the care of a church family, those who are alienated from family and friends,
those without adequate homes or food, those who suffer from disease, age, and
disability, those who suffer from effects of natural disaster and those who
suffer from the effects of human imposed oppression, those who are serving and
fighting in wars and those who wait for them, and especially we pray for those
who have no sense of hope. Hear our
prayers for your people.
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
With free-will offerings, we will
sacrifice to God, giving thanks for mercies too abundant to count. We want to
share all that has been entrusted to our keeping, that God may be praised, and
peace may come to all God’s people.
DOXOLOGY
PRAYER OF DEDICATION
Thank you, God, for this opportunity to support the
ministry and mission of our congregation. May these offerings be a reflection
of our mutual love and support and be a courageous outreach to people near and
far who need the help we can give. Bless each gift and each giver. Amen.
CLOSING HYMN: “Praise
Ye the Lord, the Almighty” Glory
#35
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION
This is a week we have the opportunity
to live as Jesus calls us to live—to be servants to one another. This week,
look for and then carry through on some act of service for another person,
preferably for someone unable to return the favor.
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
-
September
19 following worship Worship & Music
-
September
19 1:00 p.m. Prayer Shawl Ministry
-
Sep
20-24 pastor in Bend for
radiation
-
September
21 10:30 a.m. Women’s Spirituality
-
September
23 8:30 a.m. Men’s Prayer Group
-
September
26 following worship Deacons
-
Sept
27-Oct 1 pastor in Bend for radiation
-
September
28 noon PPW lunch meeting
PRAYER CARE:
Dave Clark (surgery for brain tumor, cancer), Tina Bossuot (Alzheimer's), Verna’s sister and
family (Covid), Mary and Ray Swarthout, Sandy Cargill (breast cancer), Larry
Koskela (stomach and joint issues), Linda and Bill Kaesemeyer (Bill’s
heart/breathing issues), Somer Bauer (breast cancer), Tasha Sizemore
(Crohn’s), Jacob Cunningham, Trisha Cagley (health problems), Dave Clark
(kidney cancer), Virginia DesIlets (age 99!), Margaret Dunbar (home now),
George and Joyce Sahlberg (health issues), Jennifer Schirm (Parkinson’s), Chuck
VanHise (leg/walking rehab), Darlene Wingfield (pulmonary fibrosis, breast
cancer), Courtney Ziegler (Huntington’s), and Pastor Jean Hurst (kidney cancer
returned).
LECTIONARY
FOR 9/26/21
Numbers 11:4-6,
10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14;
James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50
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