March 20, 2022 Worship

Pioneer Presbyterian Church

Worship  March 20, 2022

Third Sunday of Lent

 

Call to Worship: Psalm 63:1-8

       O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry       

       and weary land where there is no water.

              So I have looked upon you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.

       Because your steadfast love is better than life, my lips will praise you.

             So I will bless you as long as I live; I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

      My soul is satisfied as with a rich feast, and my mouth praises you with joyful lips when I   

      meditate on you in the watches of the night;

            for you have been my help, and in the shadow of your wings I sing for joy. My soul    

            clings to you; your right hand upholds me.

PRAYER OF THE DAY

Hymn of Praise (Opening):                “We Praise you, O God”                              Glory #612

CALL TO CONFESSION

Prayer of Confession

      Holy God, we confess that we are complacent in our response to you. You call us to a  

      banquet table spread with your gifts of peace, justice, and mercy, but we turn away,    

      distracted by lesser things that leave our souls hungry. You call us to serve the poor and

      needy, but we indulge our own desires. Forgive us for falling short of your claim on our 

      lives. Disturb our comfort and ease and deepen our desire for a life that honors you. Give 

      us the courage and grace to put first things first, and to live each day with the single

      purpose of pleasing you. We pray these things in the matchless name of your Son, our   

      Savior, Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Assurance of Pardon

      God’s love is steadfast and sure, always providing a way out, a way through, a way back to  

      God.

              Through the waters of baptism, we have died with Christ and been raised with him.  

              With gratitude, in faith, we will walk in the way of Jesus.

     Friends, believe the good news, and rejoice!

              In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven!

PASSING THE PEACE

GLORY BE TO THE FATHER

TIME WITH CHILDREN

CHOIR ANTHEM

Gospel Lesson: Luke 13:1-9          

MESSAGE:                             “The Two-Minute Warning”                          Pastor Daryl R. Wilson                                                                                      

    Many Presbyterian churches (including the one I served until last Sunday), follow a custom some of you will be familiar with. For others, it will be new. When the Scriptures are read in worship, the reader concludes by saying, “The Word of the Lord.” If the text is from the first four books of the New Testament—Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John—the reader concludes with, “The Gospel of the Lord.” Then the people respond with a unison, “Thanks be to God.” That is, “Thank you, God, for making yourself known to us in your written word, the Bible, and in your Son Jesus who is the living Word. Thank you for revealing your deep love for us. Thank you for your faithfulness in all things.”

    Responding to the Word with, “Thanks be to God,” is a fitting expression of gratitude. But I just tossed you a live grenade of a reading! First, there was an eyewitness report about a government-sponsored massacre of Jewish worshipers in Jerusalem and the profane desecration of a sacred ritual. Then Jesus mentioned another headline story from those days: A tall building near the temple collapsing onto a crowd of people, killing 18. In both cases people were asking him, “Where is God in all this?” Then our passage ended with Jesus telling a grim little story about a barren fruit tree and an ax-wielding landowner bent on turning it into firewood. Are you feeling thankful yet?

    In truth, our feelings are far less important than the underlying reality we affirm every time we say, “Thanks be to God.” We’re affirming that no matter how we may be feeling in the moment, no matter whether a particular Bible passage comes to us as good news, bad news, or something in-between, the deep truth is that God is present in all of it, in every passage and in every experience, every encounter, every event, every moment in our lives, whether we feel like it or not.

    Pastor Jean has a bronze-colored plaque on the wall in the pastor’s study. It’s inscribed with the Latin words, Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit, which means, “Whether or not you ask for him, God is present.” Enjoying the sunshine of good health and good friends? “Thanks be to God!” Storms blowing, darkness all around, and you’re scared to death? “Thanks be to God!” We don’t want to be fair-weather Christians or to think we can avoid bad news by being good.

    Today’s Gospel reading opens with a report of some very bad news. The Roman prefect, Pontius Pilate, has ordered a killing of Jesus’ countrymen at the Temple in Jerusalem. His soldiers complied, then scooped up blood from the dead and dying Jews and mixed it with the blood of their sacrifices to God. They were killed in the act of worship, which horrified people back then in the same way the mass killing during Sunday morning worship at a Baptist church in Texas in 2017 or the Thursday night massacre at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston in 2015 horrified us. Where was God? Why didn’t he stop the slaughter of innocent victims? What could it all mean? Jesus’ response suggests the people around him thought God was punishing the victims for their sins (an early, ugly example of victim-blaming and shaming!).

    If you have the stomach to watch what passes for “Christian” TV these days, you’ve heard screeds like this from some angry televangelist or another, telling you that September 11^th was God’s punishment for abortion in America or that God was so ticked off about riverboat casinos in the Big Easy that he unleashed Hurricane Katrina in a fit of righteous rage. This cruel, unbiblical response to tragedy sucks people in because we want to believe there’s a formula for avoiding/evading disaster. If we conclude that there are no accidents and everything happens according to a divine plan, then God is a stone-cold killer (which we don’t want to believe). Alternatively, perhaps God only targets bad people with heart attacks, hurricanes, drunk drivers, Russian missiles, and the like. If that second part were true, we could ensure our safety by being a little less bad than other people. Let God pour out the full cup of his wrath on nasty folks, leaving none for us to absorb. Keep your nose clean and you’ll stay out of the fallout zone. That’s the flip side to the televangelist’s lie.

    Jesus was having none of this rot. He says the spiritual accountants who are busy toting up people’s records so they can assign blame for pain and suffering are full of hot air and understand nothing about God or the world God has made and loves. He tells the crowd that those who died weren’t any better or worse than any of them. The victims didn’t go to worship expecting to be killed any more than we do, except in our worst nightmares. And those poor folks shopping in the markets of the Old City had no reason to believe a tower would collapse on top of them. The people interviewing Jesus thought God drops buildings on people who displease him, like a Kansas twister dropped Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s house on the Wicked Witch of the East in The Merry Old Land of Oz.

    The reality, of course, is God doesn’t have a kill list, as much as we might hope or fear he does. Folks who try to keep even accounts with God are as foolish as those who pay no attention to God. Both sorts of people fail in the same way: They refuse to trust in the One whose whole mission in life is to redeem and save the undeserving. They’ll meet their end without God lifting a finger. They’ll do it to themselves, persisting in willful blindness to their barren, accidental lives.

    Now we come to the Parable of the Fig Tree. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark tell a different version than Luke. They describe an event during the last days before the crucifixion. Jesus was tired and hungry, so he walked over to a fig tree in leaf and reached for a sweet piece of fruit. But he came up empty, so he cursed the fig tree--the only thing on earth he ever cursed—and it withered to its roots right then and there. If Luke knew that version of the story, he left it out of his Gospel. Maybe he felt uneasy about showing such a vulnerable, human side of Jesus, a man with passions and bursts of anger like the rest of us. In any case, Luke’s version isn’t a story about Jesus; it’s a tale told by Jesus on his way to Jerusalem. A corrective for those who believe God punishes people for their sins by dropping buildings on them or killing them in church. The parable starts out like the other fig tree stories: a man looks for fruit and finds none.

    This isn’t a stranger’s fig tree standing by the side of the road, though. This is the landowner’s own tree, planted and cared for in his orchard. Every year he looks for fruit but finds nothing except leaves. What good are they? You can’t eat fig leaves, but the Bible says if you’re caught out in the garden naked you can stitch some together to protect your modesty (see Genesis 3). Anyway, the man decides the tree must go, right now. Not because it’s bad but because it isn’t good. Catch the difference? Its purpose is to bear fruit and it’s giving nothing but shade. The man’s had enough. “Cut it down,” he snaps at the gardener.

    The owner belongs to John the Baptizer’s church, where every tree that doesn’t bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. But his gardener belongs to a different church, because he pleads for mercy for the tree. “Let it alone,” he says. “Give me one more year with it, then I’ll stand aside while you chop it into kindling.” Did you notice how the gardener subtly moves from negotiation to subordination? “You can cut it down,” he vows, “but I won’t do it now or later. Wanna kill the tree? Find an axe and do it yourself!”

    Some preachers can’t stand the unresolved tension and paradox in this story, so they assign a meaning they like, such as, “This is an allegory where God is the angry owner coming at us with a roaring chainsaw. Jesus is the brave gardener who steps in just in time to save the day.” Or they’ll generalize more broadly and claim this story is Luke’s (or Jesus’) way of contrasting the (so-called) vengeful God of the Old Testament with the (so-called) loving God of the New Testament. This misinterpretation turns God into a homicidal anti-Semite with a frightfully split personality, but hey, what’s a little mayhem, murder, and madness among friends? Especially if it ties up loose ends so we don’t have to live with mystery?

    Thankfully, Jesus is a wiser teacher (and better storyteller) than those guys. He doesn’t finish the story. He leaves it as a cliffhanger. He trusts his listeners—then and now—to find the good news in the story. So, let’s take a stab at it. As frightful as it sounds, we need a clear view of the axe lying near all our roots—not because God wants to chop us down and burn us up, but because the grass withers, the flower fades, and we have a finite space of time, the merest blink of an eye, really, to find the life God intends for us, and then our times run out.

    Sometimes we sleepwalk through life. We need something jarring to wake us up and get us asking good questions about why we’re here. Is it to chase empty dreams of power, wealth, or fame? Is it to seek security above all else, as if with our religion, our 401Ks, our guns, or our well-laid plans we can shield ourselves from pain, loss, and finally, death? The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy once put it this way: “What meaning has my life that the inevitability of death does not destroy?” That’s a question to keep you up at night, if you’re wise enough to consider it. Is it too late to do the things that matter, to love the people who’ve been waiting to be loved, to seek the God who wants to be found?

    The deepest human longing is for significance; to leave an imprint that remains past our death. This passage is like a two-minute warning for our souls. It’s saying, “Pay attention. There’s not much clock left. Use your timeouts wisely and call the best plays you can. Don’t waste time on trivial things. Go for the win!” Listen, God won’t drop a building on you. But our clocks will expire. Jesus invites us to pay attention to our hearts and lives while we still can. How will we spend our brief and fleeting days before the last trumpet sounds? By his grace, let’s cultivate the good fruit that brings his healing love into the world. 

Thanks be to God!

Amen.

Hymn of Response:                         “Jesus, Lover of My Soul”                                  Glory #440

 

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE AND THE LORD'S PRAYER

CALL TO OFFERING

DOXOLOGY

PRAYER OF DEDICATION

Closing Hymn:                                “Be Thou My Vision”                                           Glory #450

 

CHARGE AND BENEDICTION

CHORAL RESPONSE

LOOKING AHEAD

                         Worship and Music meets  following the morning service

                          Prayer Shawl meets today at 1:00

                         PNC meets Monday the 21^st at 8:00 a.m.

                        PPW Luncheon Meeting, guest speaker Jennifer Williams, Crossroads Ranch,   Equine Healing Therapy the 22^nd at Noon

                        Great Figures of the New Testament meets the 22^nd at 7:00 p.m

                         Lenten Services & Soup Supper Thursday the 24th at 5:30

Jean’s Memorial Service April 9^th at 1:00 p.m. Westminster Presbyterian Church, 777 Coburg Road, Eugene, OR (541) 343-3140

PRAYER CARE:

For the people of Ukraine, Ralph Sawyer in St. Charles with serious health issues, Blaze Carol Sawyers nephew with a head injury, Summer Bauer undergoing cancer treatments, Darlene Wingfield, Mary and Ray Swarthout, George and Joyce Sahlberg, Margaret Dunbar dealing with declining health issues. Our thoughts and prayers are with our friends and family near and far.

 LECTIONARY FOR 3/27/22

Joshua 5:9-12, Psalms 32, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32