PIONEER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Worship
via Blog 23rd Sunday after Pentecost October
31, 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.
-
Women’s
Spirituality is Tuesday at 10:30 a.m.
-
Sign
up to bring cookies and pies for the PPW Harvest Bazaar
-
There
will NOT be a Harvest Festival Dinner this year
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
Listen and hear, all you people of the
book!
There is one God who created all time and
space.
Our
hope is in God who made heaven and earth.
All
creatures of the land and sea come from God.
You shall love God with all your heart and
soul.
You shall honor God with all your mind and
strength.
We
will praise God as long as we live.
We
will sing of God’s glory all through our lives.
A second commandment is like the first:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
God
watches over strangers and widows and orphans.
We
honor God by honoring these, our sisters and brothers.
PRAYER OF THE DAY
Reigning God, we have viewed the work of
your hands. Where there is justice for the oppressed, we sense your presence.
Where the hungry are fed, we know the providers are working with you. You set
prisoners free and open the eyes of the blind. You lift up those who are bowed
down and sustain the righteous with your love. We worship a God who is living
and active. We give thanks that you call us to join the action, to love you and
one another more than the rituals of our religion or the satisfaction of our
successes. Focus us now on all that is worthy of our praise. Amen.
OPENING
HYMN: “Love the Lord Your God” LU #96
CALL TO CONFESSION
God alone deserves our trust and loyalty.
Yet we have not trusted, and our faithfulness is in question. This time of
confession offers the opportunity to unburden our conscience, to experience
forgiveness, and to renew our covenant with the Eternal One.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
We
have not kept faith with you, righteous God. There are so many distractions
that occupy our time! There are so many groups to claim our loyalty. There are
so many activities that bid for our attention. Even the church involves us in
busyness that keeps us from matters of greater importance. In these moments, we
seek to know you and to be known by you, that in an honest exchange our
relationship with you and with the people around us might be strengthened. In
your name, and joining with you, we seek justice for the oppressed, food for
the hungry, and healing for all. (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: Deuteronomy 6:1-9
"Now this is the
commandment, the statutes and the ordinances which the Lord your God commanded
me to teach you, that you may do them in the land to which you are going over,
to possess it; that you may fear the Lord your God, you and your son and your
son's son, by keeping all his statutes and his commandments, which I command
you, all the days of your life; and that your days may be prolonged. Hear
therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them; that it may go well with you,
and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has
promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey. "Hear, O Israel: The
Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your
heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. And these words which I
command you this day shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them
diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house,
and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. And you
shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets
between your eyes. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and
on your gates.
SCRIPTURE 2: Mark 12:28-34
And one of the
scribes came up and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he
answered them well, asked him, "Which commandment is the first of
all?" Jesus answered, "The first is, `Hear, O Israel: The Lord our
God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.'
The second is this, `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' There is no
other commandment greater than these." And the scribe said to him,
"You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that he is one, and there is
no other but he; and to love him with all the heart, and with all the
understanding, and with all the strength, and to love one's neighbor as
oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices." And when
Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, "You are not far from
the kingdom of God." And after that no one dared to ask him any question.
SERMON “Love
Is Not for Sissies” Rev.
Jean Hurst
First things first: Love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength,
and with all your mind. If you’re there, if you can do that, if you can love
God with everything you are—heart, soul, mind, and body—only then can you live
into the second greatest commandment, to love your neighbor as yourself. In 1
John 4:19 we are told that we love because God first loved us. God is the
author of love. God created us out of love. God created us for love. Our love of God is a response to God’s love for us. From
there, it extends out to others. Love your neighbor as yourself.
Loving God, you may think, is easy.
It’s that noisy neighbor that’s the problem. Or it’s that committee member who
leaves you to do all the work. Or it’s that relative that’s always hitting you
up for money or wanting you to bail them out of the mess they created. Or it’s
the immigrant trying to cross our borders. Or it’s that other political party.
Or it’s that country that keeps saber rattling and testing missiles. How do we
love them? And why should we?
It
goes back to that first commandment Jesus quoted. Love the Lord your God with
all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all
your mind. Jesus was quoting the Shema
from Deuteronomy—the heart of all the Jewish laws and commandments. According
to Jesus, this is the most important of all the 613 commandments in rabbinic
tradition. Jesus wasn’t saying to do away with those other commandments. He was
saying this is the starting point that provides a guiding principle for being
able to keep the rest.
Except
that in Deuteronomy 6:5, the list is heart, soul, and might. Jesus added one.
He said heart, soul, strength, and mind.
We are to also love God with how we think, how we reason
and rationalize. How might that impact how we love God? What we think, how we
reason, how we justify what we do and say—or don’t do and don’t say—reflects
how we love God.
The scribe, in paraphrasing back to Jesus, agreed that
those two commandments were more important that all burnt offerings and
sacrifices. He was also drawing on their scriptures to support his
statement. In Isaiah 1:11-17 God
says, in part, “What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices … learn to do
good, seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the
widow.” In other words, love your neighbor.
Biblically,
love is not an emotion. Love is the way we act toward others. The Bible lifts
up multiple acts of love: Ruth, leaving her home and country to accompany her mother-in-law
Naomi back to Israel, knowing she would be viewed as an outsider and foreigner,
was an act of love. Rahab, an occupant of the land of Canaan, hiding and
protecting the Israelite spies who were their enemy was an act of love. However
Rahab might have felt emotionally about them, she chose to act with mercy in
protecting them. Jesus told the story of the Samaritan, an ethnic and religious
outsider to the Jewish people, who acted from love when he stopped to help the
Jewish man who had been assaulted, robbed and left for dead. There are many
more, but these are enough to make the point.
In
the story of the Good Samaritan, both the priest and the Levite passed by on
the other side of the road, having done nothing to render aid to one of their
own people. It doesn’t matter what ‘love’ they may have thought or claimed they held for the injured man, their lack of
action was a lack of love. In more modern times, when people during the Nazi
regime felt sorry for those persecuted and may even have felt affection or
friendship for some of them, it was not love if they did nothing to help them.
Can you see that it doesn’t matter how each of these may
have felt emotionally, it was about
what they did, how they acted, that demonstrated love. We can
feel all the warm and fuzzies we like, but if we don’t act, if we don’t do what
is right, it means nothing. The same applies to loving God. 1 John 4 tells us
that if we hate our brother or sister, whom we have seen then we cannot love
God whom we have not seen. 1 John 4:8
says whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. Jesus said that
if we love him we will keep his commandments—and that final commandment was to
love one another. 1 John 5:2 tells us, “By this we know that we love the
children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. Scripture makes it
clear that to love God means to obey God. The biggest commandment to obey is to
love—God and neighbor. So the answer to the question, ‘why should we love those we don’t like?’ is because Jesus tells us to.
Of loving those who are close to us, loving those who
already love us, Jesus says big deal, even the worst sinners do that. You don’t
get credit for loving those who are easy to love. It’s the ones who are hard to
love that measures your stature as a follower of Jesus. Love your enemies. Love
those who hate you. Love those who persecute you. Love those who use you
spitefully. Love those who speak and look and worship differently than you.
Love those whose political beliefs and ideologies and values are different.
Love those who gossip about you. Love those who have betrayed or abused you. In
Luke 6:35, Jesus says when you love your enemies and do good for them your reward will be great and you will be
children of the Most High; for God is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.
In other words, if God acts lovingly even toward those
who don’t deserve it, we should do the same. When we do that, we are obeying
God’s commandment to love, which confirms our love for God. It’s worth pointing
out that Jesus recognizes that there are those people who are ungrateful and
wicked. He’s not asking us to label them any differently. He’s saying love them
anyway. If we want to label them, though, I suggest ‘child of God.’ It helps
move us out of judgement and helps reduce the chance of our viewing ourselves
as better than.
But
perhaps we don’t love God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength and we
don’t love our neighbors as ourselves because we want what we want more than we want what God
wants. After all, isn’t that the mantra of our society--it’s all about me? We are focused on self. And isn’t
that exactly what happened in the Garden of Eden that created a wedge between
God and humans? Jesus’ mission is to reconcile the world to God. If God is
love, that reconciliation is a joining with God through love. That plays out
not just as loving God but as loving each other also. Jesus came, taught,
suffered, and died to bring us all back together in love.
Commentator
Carol Wade puts it this way, “When we practice love of neighbor by
participating with God in mending a broken world, Jesus comes near. This mended
world is God’s dream for creation and is nothing less than a world rightly
ordered according to God’s good purposes. It is a world where all are fed and
housed, with access to clean water, health care, adequate education, and
meaningful work; where none is excluded for reasons of race, gender, ethnicity,
or sexual orientation; and where young and old alike are cherished, as God’s
family endeavors to sustain the precious resources of this fragile earth.”1
If you’re there, then you can rest in that love and maybe
help others attain it. If you’re not there with one (loving neighbor), you’re
not there with either (loving God) and you have some work to do. Who are the
neighbors we are called to love? Jesus answered that question posed by a
religious leader by using a parable that lifted up a traditional enemy—the
Samaritan. Who is your neighbor? Who
are you most resistant to loving? Who are you silently saying, “not ……..”?
Jesus didn’t say we were off the hook for loving our neighbor if they didn’t
deserve being loved, if they didn’t meet our standards. Given our history,
behavior, attitudes, and thoughts, who of us really deserves being loved? Yet God still loves us.
Obviously,
love is not for sissies. It is a choice. It’s a hard choice. And sometimes
we’re just not there. There may be too many obstacles to overcome, not the
least of which is our determination to be right. If that’s the case, then when
you have trouble loving someone, give it up … to God. Let God’s love for that
person flow through you. Let God do through you what you can’t do on your own.
You can simply be the instrument. Each time you encounter a person who
challenges your ability to love, say a quick prayer: “Lord, I’m having trouble with this one. Please love this person for me
until I can do it myself. And then show me how.” God is faithful and God
will surely help you with the very thing God asks of you.
If you love God, you’ll want to do what God
wills—which is love. Love is one of the fruits of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22)
and love is also the greatest of the three theological virtues of faith, hope,
and love (1 Corinthians 13:13). Allow yourself to be filled by the Holy Spirit.
Allow the Spirit to transform you. Allow yourself to once again become the
child of God who was created out of love and for love. Be blessed and be a
blessing. Amen.
1Carol Wade
Feasting on the Gospels, Mark, p. 378, Louisville KY 2014
HYMN: “They Will Know We Are Christians by Our Love” Glory #300
PRAYERS OF THE
PEOPLE AND THE LORD’S PRAYER
God of all that exists, God far beyond our
knowing, we seek to love you with our hearts and our understanding and our
strength. Our desire is that our thoughts and motives and energies will be
devoted to serving you through the people and circumstances we encounter day by
day. Loving you is easy. Loving those others you command us to love is a far
different challenge.
It’s so hard when we feel someone doesn’t
deserve to be loved, when they haven’t earned that love, when their values and
lifestyles contradict what love stands for. God, thank you that you don’t
withhold your love for us in the same way. Help us to break through our own
hesitations and prejudices and the barriers we have erected to see others as
you see us. Teach us to love.
We lift up to your tender care those we
are comfortable loving: family of Julia Milleson … RaeJean Newman … … Dave
Clark … Tina Bossuot … Verna’s sister … Mary and Ray Swarthout … Sandy Cargill
… Elaine LaChapelle … Somer Bauer … Tasha Sizemore … Beverly Patterson …
Margaret Dunbar …Virginia … Darlene …
Trisha … Jacob … George and Joyce … Jennifer … Chuck … Courtney … Ethel … and
Pastor Jean. (Additional prayers …………)
In the desire to desire your will, we also
lift up those we are not comfortable loving—those who are different from us,
those we see as a threat, those we would call enemy, those who seem unloving
and unlovable. For all those who are hurting and scared, lonely and rejected,
for all those who are victims of violence, culture, war, oppression, aging, disease,
and hunger. Bless them, we pray and grant us the power and humility to love
them and the courage to act in their behalf.
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
Our energies and our resources are claimed
by whatever is truly most important to us. If God is at the center of our
lives, that will be apparent in what we give. From God we have received love so
amazing that a lifetime of thanks is inadequate response.
DOXOLOGY
PRAYER OF DEDICATION
Receive from us, O God, the best we have to give. All
we have comes from you. We return a portion with joy to accomplish the work we
intend to do together in your name. We bring ourselves as well, to be blessed
by you, so that while we are apart our words and deeds will continue to be a
significant offering. May our lives praise you! Amen.
CLOSING HYMN: “Fill My Cup” Glory #699
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION
Love is God’s command. Love toward
some people is a piece of cake. Love toward other people is hard work. Your
challenge this week is to engage in the hard work of love….starting with
yourself.
As you do, know that 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
24 following worship Deacons
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October
26 noon PPW lunch meeting
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October
27 5:30 p.m. Choir practice
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October
28 8:30 a.m. Men’s Prayer Group
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November
2 10:30 a.m. Women’s Spirituality
-
November
6 turn your clocks back
-
November
11 8:30 a.m. Men’s
Prayer Group
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PRAYER CARE:
Family
of Julia Milleson Rae Jean Newman (Covid
recovery), Tina Bossuot (Alzheimer’s), Verna’s sister (Covid recovery), Mary
and Ray Swarthout, Sandy Cargill (breast cancer), Somer Bauer (breast cancer),
Tasha Sizemore (Crohn’s), Jacob Cunningham, Trisha Cagley (health problems),
Dave Clark (recovery from brain surgery, kidney cancer), Virginia DesIlets (age
99!), Margaret Dunbar (Ashley Manor), 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).
LECTIONARY
FOR 11/7/21
1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-38; Mark
12:38-44
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