PIONEER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Worship
via Blog 1st Sunday of Christmas December
26, 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.
-
No
Deacons meeting today
-
No PPW lunch meeting Tuesday
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
Men and women, old and young, together:
Praise God and exalt the Author of Life.
Praise
God in the highest heavens.
Praise
God, all dwellers on the earth.
God commanded, and we were created.
God sustains us and enables us to grow.
Praise
God, all who seek to live in faithfulness.
Glorify
God’s name and join the loving community.
Know that we are chosen by God, holy and
beloved.
We are called into one body, the church of
Jesus Christ.
Let
us draw close to God and to one another.
Let
us join with all creation to worship God.
PRAYER OF THE DAY
Height and breadth, length and depth, the
whole universe proclaims your glory, faithful God. Your wisdom fills the
universe with possibilities we have not tapped. Your Word comes to us filled
with riches we have not mined. Within ourselves is the potential for greatness
as yet unrealized. Confront us here with your eternal claim on us that we may become
the kind, compassionate, and patient people you intend for us to be. Amen.
OPENING
HYMN: “Lord of All” LU#42
CALL TO CONFESSION
If God were dependent on our communication
to know where we are or who we are, would God know us? We expect of God
evidence and signs of caring. Does not God, who gave us life, have the right to
expect to hear from us daily in prayer? How have we cut ourselves off from God?
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
Heavenly
Parent, we have wandered away to pursue our own agenda. We have laid aside your
expectation that we will forebear one another and forgive. We harbor grudges
against people. There are some we neglect and some we disdain. We have viewed
them neither as your beloved nor as our sisters and brothers. The peace of
Christ does not rule in our hearts. Your truth is not what flows from our lips
or finds expression in our actions. O God, turn us around, that what we do may
be a genuine expression of your love, through Jesus Christ. (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 98
O sing to the Lord a
new song, for he has done marvelous things! His right hand and his holy arm
have gotten him victory. The Lord has made known his victory, he has revealed
his vindication in the sight of the nations. He has remembered his steadfast
love and faithfulness to the house of Israel. All the ends of the earth have
seen the victory of our God. Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth;
break forth into joyous song and sing praises! Sing praises to the Lord with
the lyre, with the lyre and the sound of melody! With trumpets and the sound of
the horn make a joyful noise before the King, the Lord! Let the sea roar, and
all that fills it; the world and those who dwell in it! Let the floods clap
their hands; let the hills sing for joy together before the Lord, for he comes
to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples
with equity.
SCRIPTURE 2: Colossians 3:12-17
Put on then, as God's
chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and
patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another,
forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.
And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect
harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you
were called in the one body. And be thankful. Let the word of Christ dwell in
you richly, teach and admonish one another in all wisdom, and sing psalms and
hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever
you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving
thanks to God the Father through him.
SERMON: “Peace, Love, and Thankfulness” Rev. Jean Hurst
How
would you like a world where people treated you with compassion, kindness,
humility, meekness, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, and love? Sounds like an
idyllic life, doesn’t it? And how would you respond to people who acted
toward you in that way? It would make you see them differently wouldn’t it? It
would likely leave you feeling more positive toward them. And wouldn’t it
incline you to treat them in the same way?
The
Golden Rule that threads through most major religions tells us, “Do to others
the way you would want them to do to you.” Only it’s easier if they do it
first. It’s easier to respond to kindness and compassion and forgiveness than
to be the initiator. That’s especially true if there is any tension between you
and that other person.
And
the reality of life is that there will be tensions. Lots of them. In
lots of shapes. From lots of causes. We can use the term tension, because it’s
fairly neutral. If we want to get down and dirty, we call it what it is:
conflict. I’ve seen conflict defined a couple of different ways.
One
is defined very politely as ‘difference plus tension’. We have a difference of
opinion and that creates a tension between us. We have different values,
different purposes, different ways of understanding and applying our faith,
different cultures, different desired outcomes, different lifestyles, different
morals. Depending on how much, in the
shaping of our lives, we were taught or came to feel that the way we
live and believe is better than or the right way, and therefore the other
person’s is less than or the wrong way, we have tension.
Another
definition of conflict is when something gets between us and what we want. That
one makes us squirm a bit. The first one can be value-based or even
faith-based, if we want to justify our position. This one pretty much nails us
as self-focused. We want our own way and somehow that other person is getting
in the way of our getting what we want.
We
find it in the family. A teenager wants to make their own decisions. A parent,
trying to maintain discipline or protect their child or set boundaries or
retain control, is seen as trying to run the teen’s life. Conflict. The parent
wants the chores done, the youth wants to play video games. Conflict. One
spouse wants a new car and the other wants to save for retirement. One wants to
spend a quiet weekend at home, the other wants to go out and party. Each is
getting in the way of the other’s wants. Conflict.
We
find it in the workplace. One employee gets the promotion the other thought they
should have. The boss wants an employee to work overtime to get a project done
while the employee wants to spend time with his or her family. Conflict.
We
find it out in the community. One person wants to get their groceries purchased
quickly and go home and fix dinner, the other wants to chit chat with the
checker. One wants to drive leisurely, the other is in a hurry. One wants to
have the roads improved, the other doesn’t want their taxes increased.
Conflict.
When
the conflicts come they are often close to home and more emotionally charged
because of the intimate relationships we have. The closer the relationship, the
more there seems to be at stake. It might help to understand that conflict is
very often fear-driven. A parent may fear that their kid is going to get hurt
or grow up irresponsible or get in trouble. A spouse may fear that if money
isn’t carefully managed, they won’t have enough for retirement or to deal with
unexpected expenses. When one wants to spend time socially rather than intimately
with their partner, the other may fear a pulling away and loss of love.
When
the times of conflict come--and it’s not a matter of what we would do ‘if’ but
what we will do ‘when’, it takes more intentionality to defuse them. Do you
think compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, tolerance,
forgiveness, and love might help? Is it naive to believe in those elements of
goodness in ourselves and in others? Is it just wishful thinking not grounded
in reality? A nice sentiment to put on a greeting card but not practical to put
on ourselves, as Paul suggests, as if they were articles of clothing?
Granted,
it would be easier if the other party initiated it, but how much difference in
our relationships would there be if we were the ones to initiate?
Truthfully, there are times, maybe many times, when we don’t want to
initiate reconciliation. Our wills, our desire to have our own way, our desire
to be right, our egos, get in the way. There is, within each of us, a darker
side.
We
hold both light and dark within us and, being human, those things on the dark
side will sometimes find their way to the surface. But as followers of Christ,
living into our role of being created in the image of Christ, that is not who
we are and we can choose not to let the dark side have the upper hand. It is a
choice we make and it is not always an easy choice. Our egos get in the way. We
like to be right and we get indignant if anyone suggests we aren’t.
Yet
to hold and to be, within ourselves, compassion and kindness and tolerance and
love means there’s not much room left for indifference, cruelty, intolerance,
resentment, or hatefulness.
Is
that a pipe dream? Or is it a vision of what could be? This is an example of
where science and religion are in sync. Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical
physicist. In the 3rd lesson of his audio book, Seven Brief
Lessons on Physics, ‘The Architecture of the Cosmos’, he states that
science is above all about visions, about seeing things differently than
they’ve previously been seen. He goes on to talk about the work of astronomers
like Copernicus who saw a solar system in which the sun was in the center and a
round earth orbited that sun and the sky was all around the earth and not just
a dome over it. That went against the thinking of that time.1
How
many of you believe that the earth is round and orbits around the sun? That was
heresy at one time in our religious history. You could die for promoting such
an outrageous notion. Now we take it for granted. Well, most of us do. Do we have
any closet Flat-Earthers here? The Flat Earth Society is a group who label
themselves as freethinkers who embrace the intellectual exchange of ideas. They
say a round earth, a heliocentric solar system with planets in addition to
earth, and astronauts in space are all hoax and conspiracy. Photoshop. Lies.
They say it doesn’t make sense. It’s not practical.2
There
are people who are just as derisive about a world in which compassion and love
and kindness and peace can become the norm. It’s not practical. It doesn’t make
sense. It’s naive. And yet that is God’s vision, carried forward in the
teachings of Jesus and lived out by people of faith around the globe. Science
and religion: seeing things differently than they’ve previously been seen.
The
Great Kindness Challenge is an example. Children and those who teach them are
leading the way, changing the world by one little act of kindness at a time.3
If you’re a recipient of a kind act, you can’t help but be touched and changed
by it, even in small degrees.
Every
Sunday, following the prayer of confession, we have an assurance of pardon.
“Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation. The old life is gone, the new life
has begun. Believe the good news: in Jesus Christ we are forgiven and restored
to new life.” That new life is a vision of how we can be in the world. It is
hope. It is part of the shared goal of a redeemed humanity that reflects unity
rather than divisiveness.
At
the time of Paul’s writing, a common teaching method of the Greco-Roman culture
was to list moral vices and virtues. But as Christians, it’s more than just
naming what is bad and avoiding it and seeing what is good and modeling it. It
is less about the self-discipline we can exert and more about who we are. It is
the Holy Spirit that renders that transformation within us and empowers us to
live it out as an emulation of Jesus.
This
passage tells us not just to emulate these virtues because it’s a good thing to
do, but that we do it because we are, in God’s sight, holy and beloved. And it
is love that holds it all together. We do it because we let the peace of Christ
rule in our hearts. Paul says that’s what we’re called to. It’s a new
reality--the reality of the call of God, the reality of Christian love, and the
reality of Christ’s peace.
We
are to allow that peace of Christ to rule in our hearts and lives. That peace
on earth promise of the angels to the shepherds becomes rooted here, in our
hearts--and from there through these actions of kindness and compassion and
love, out into the world. Christ’s peace ruling in our hearts is what allows
new life to flow from us, allows us to see things differently than they’ve
previously been seen.
Our
new life, our new nature becomes more and more one of peace and love and
thankfulness. When we embrace that as who we are it changes how we behave
toward one another. We move toward that world where people are treated with
compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, and
love. And that is something to be thankful for. Amen.
HYMN: “The
Servant Song” Glory #727
PRAYERS OF THE
PEOPLE AND THE LORD’S PRAYER
God of the prophets, God of our dreams
and our waking moments, God of our times of weeping and our days of gladness,
lead us, we pray, from all that would destroy the best you have placed within
us. Lead us toward those times and places where we can grow in the likeness of
Jesus. Help us to discern the warnings and the invitations that come from you
so our lives may be a beacon to lead others to fulfillment and joy.
As we stand on the threshold of a new
year, looking back on our lives and looking forward to the future, may we truly
know that you are always present in our lives. Open our hearts Lord to your will
and your direction. Put joy within our hearts and praise upon our lips.
As
we see your presence in our own lives, God, we pray for an awareness of your
presence in the lives of our church family and community who struggle with
health and aging issues. We pray for Linda Kaesemeyer … .Dave Clark … Tina Bossuot
… Verna’s sisters … Mary and Ray Swarthout … Sandy Cargill … Elaine LaChapelle
… Somer Bauer … Tasha Sizemore … Beverly Patterson … Margaret Dunbar … Virginia
… Darlene … Trisha … Jacob … George and
Joyce … Chuck … Courtney … Ethel … and Pastor Jean. (Additional prayers …………)
We pray for safe travels for those who
are returning from holiday gatherings. We ask that those times together be good
memories and where there has been friction or broken relationships, that you
would bring wholeness and healing.
As the frenzy of Christmas passes,
God, we pray for peace for your world, for those who live in areas torn by war
or disaster, for those who wait and worry for their loved ones, for those whose
lives and future are uncertain, and for those whose decisions will make the
difference between war and peace.
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
In the name of Jesus Christ, we respond to
God’s forgiveness and empowerment with thanksgiving and praise. As we have been
blessed, so we share. May our offerings express compassion and kindness within
our faith community and in our outreach to our immediate surroundings and to
the world.
DOXOLOGY
PRAYER OF DEDICATION
We are thankful for the love that gave us life, for
the mission that gives purpose to our days, and for the peace that Christ
grants to us. Keep us from needless anxiety, that we may give without counting
the cost. We give ourselves as well as our money, that your Word may spread
where it is not known and take root where it has not been heeded. Amen.
CLOSING HYMN: “Let
All Things Now Living” Glory
#37
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION
A new year is before you. The slate is
clean. The opportunities are many. Live your life as though hope has come into
the world and that love can make a difference.
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
-
Deacons
will not meet on December 26
-
No PPW lunch meeting Tuesday
PRAYER
CARE:
Linda Kaesemeyer
(multiple health issues), Ron Schirm and family (Jennifer’s passing), Tina
Bossuot (Alzheimer’s), Verna’s sisters (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), Chuck VanHise (leg/walking rehab), Darlene Wingfield (pulmonary
fibrosis, breast cancer), Courtney Ziegler (Huntington’s), and Pastor Jean
Hurst (kidney cancer).
LECTIONARY
FOR 1/2/22
Jeremiah 31:7-14;
Psalm 147:12-20; Ephesians 1:3-14;
John 1:(1-9) 10-18
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