PIONEER
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
Worship
via Blog 21st Sunday after
Pentecost October
25, 2020
~~~~~~~~~~
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. We can now allow up to 40 people in worship. A six-foot distancing
will be maintained. Masks are mandated. There can be congregational singing
with masks, but no passing the peace, hugs, handshakes, or coffee hour.
-
If
you wish to contribute toward the relief effort for the Oregon wildfires, you can
do that through the Presbyterian Disaster Assistance Fund. You can write a
check to the church, earmarked Oregon wildfire relief or you can contribute
directly to PDA by phone at 800-872-3283.
-
Deacons
will meet following worship Sunday, October 25th
-
PPW
will hold a lunch meeting Tuesday, the 27th at noon.
-
Turn
your clocks back next Saturday, October 21.
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
Blessed are those who stand in awe before
God;
Happy are all who walk in God’s ways.
The
true and living God turns us from our idols.
The
Spirit directs us in the way we should go.
Link your hearts with one another in God’s
presence;
Know that you are a part of God’s family.
The
love of God chooses and unites us;
That
love causes us to value ourselves and others.
Many felt God’s love in knowing Jesus.
They experienced a new relationship with
neighbors.
We
have come seeking community centered in Christ.
We
want to feel God’s presence as we worship.
PRAYER OF THE DAY
God, you have been our dwelling place in
all generations. Before the earth was formed, long before there were people on
this planet, you were fashioning life in its myriad forms. Out of the billions
of years you have been creating, our lives have come to this moment of meeting.
We stand in awe before you, amazed to discover that you care about us, tiny
blips on the screen of eternity. O God, we want our lives to count for
something. Show us how to fit into your plans. Amen.
OPENING
SONG: “Great and Mighty”
CALL TO CONFESSION
How often have we been unwitting opponents
of the gospel, denying good news by the way we work and relate? How much do we
rely on human wisdom, rather than thirsting for the pure waters of eternal
reality? Who do we seek most to please, God or influential persons? Let us
confess our unfaithfulness and the limits of our trust.
PRAYER OF CONFESSION
We
confess, O God, that we have not held the gospel in trust nor been diligent to
share the good news. We have nursed our grievances rather than the people who
need our care. We have been more concerned with honor than with service. Our
greed outruns our generosity. Perhaps we have not loved others because we have
not fully claimed our own worth as your beloved children. Grant us the will and
the courage to change. (continue your prayer in silence ….. ) 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
TIME WITH CHILDREN
Good
morning Zoey and Fiona. Today we’re going to talk about rules … again! Keep
your golden ruler handy because that’s part of it. Back in Jesus’ time, there
were lots and lots of rules. So one day a man asked Jesus what rule was most
important of all those rules. Jesus said the most important rule is to love God
with all your heart, your soul, and your mind. And then the said the second one
was kind of like that one. It’s your golden ruler one. Love your neighbor as
yourself. Jesus said that these were more important than all the others.
So
let’s talk about that first one. Jesus said we are supposed to love God. He
didn’t say love God like we love other things or other people. He said love God
even more. How much more do you think would be enough? Hard question, isn’t it?
Jesus told us how much.
He
said love God with all our heart. As much as we can possibly love or feel. He
said love God with all our soul. Our soul is our spirit within us that shows
that we’re alive. So that would be loving God with all that we are. And then
Jesus said love God with all our minds. That’s kind of a funny one, isn’t it? I
think it means that we love God with how we think. If we think about love, if
we think about good things and doing good for other people, that’s a way we
love God. In another place in the Bible, Jesus says love God with all our
strength. Maybe that would be like using our muscles to help other people. When
we help others, we are loving God. So
there are four ways to love God.
¨ One is with our …
heart, right! Love God with what we feel.
¨ Love God with our
… soul, our very life.
¨ Love God with our
… mind, with what we think.
¨ Love God with our
… strength, with what we do.
Jesus said loving God is the most important
rule of all, to love God with all of us. Heart. Mind. Soul. Strength. Got it?
Let’s pray.
Thank
you, Jesus, for teaching us about love and for showing us how to love. Help us
to love God with all our heart, all our soul, all our strength, and all our
mind. And help us love others, too. Amen.
HYMN: “Jesus
Loves Me”
Jesus loves me,
this I know, for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him
belong, they are weak but he is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves
me. Yes, Jesus loves me.
Yes, Jesus loves
me. The Bible tells me so.
SCRIPTURE 1: Psalm 90:1-6, 13-17 (New Living Translation)
Lord, through all the
generations you have been our home! Before the mountains were born, before you
gave birth to the earth and the world, from beginning to end, you are God. You
turn people back to dust, saying, "Return to dust, you mortals!" For
you, a thousand years are as a passing day, as brief as a few night hours. You
sweep people away like dreams that disappear. They are like grass that springs
up in the morning. In the morning it blooms and flourishes, but by evening it
is dry and withered.
O Lord, come back to
us! How long will you delay? Take pity on your servants! Satisfy us each
morning with your unfailing love, so we may sing for joy to the end of our
lives. Give us gladness in proportion to our former misery! Replace the evil
years with good. Let us, your servants, see you work again; let our children
see your glory. And may the Lord our God show us his approval and make our
efforts successful. Yes, make our efforts successful!
SCRIPTURE 2: Matthew 22:34-46
But when the
Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they came together. And one
of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. "Teacher, which is
the great commandment in the law?" And he said to him, "You shall
love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with
all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like
it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend
all the law and the prophets." Now while the Pharisees were gathered
together, Jesus asked them a question, saying, "What do you think of the
Christ? Whose son is he?" They said to him, "The son of David."
He said to them, "How is it then that David, inspired by the Spirit, calls
him Lord, saying, `The Lord said to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, till I put
thy enemies under thy feet'? If David thus calls him Lord, how is he his
son?" And no one was able to answer him a word, nor from that day did any
one dare to ask him any more questions.
SERMON: “Can
You Pass the Test?” Rev.
Jean Hurst
Can you pass the test? Jesus was being tested by the Pharisees. They
were feeling pretty smug since Jesus had just put the Sadducees in their place.
These two groups didn’t share the same theological beliefs especially when it
came to the resurrection. The incident that preceded today’s interaction was
when the Sadducees were trying to put Jesus to the test—or entrap him—around
what happens after you die.
Scoffing at the idea of a life after
death, they propose a scenario of life continuing as it has been. A woman has
been married to successive brothers who each die without producing an heir. In
their law, when a brother dies without offspring, the next brother in line is
required to marry the widow to produce a son in his brother’s name.
In this contrived scenario, all seven
brothers die with no heir; then the widow dies. Since Jesus claims there is a
heaven or an afterlife, then whose wife will she be? Jesus corrects their
thinking. Heaven won’t be a continuation of earthly life with all its religious
laws. Instead we’ll be like angels.
So now it’s the Pharisees’ turn to
take a shot at Jesus. Lest we think that Jesus is being treated unjustly, this
practice of debating the law and scriptures was a common practice in that era.
But the Sadducees and the Pharisees are trying to disprove Jesus’ teachings in
this debate and, as a result, seek to undermine his credibility with the
people.
A lawyer poses the question. Which
commandment is the most important? That might seem simple and obvious to us,
but in the Jewish faith, there are 613 mitzvot
or commandments. Those commandments governed everything in the life of the
people, so they would already be very familiar. Still, Jesus doesn’t even
hesitate in order to mentally sort through them. His answer shows what Jesus is about in his
ministry and teachings. Jesus answers by quoting the shema from Deuteronomy 5:6. “You shall love the Lord your God with
all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the
greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your
neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the
prophets.”
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus is quoting
from the original commandment given through Moses, which follows shortly after
the Ten Commandments. It reads, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord
alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul
and with all your might.” These words are known as the shema, which means “Hear!” and was to be worn on the arm and
forehead, placed on doors frames, taught to children and thought about before
you go to sleep and when you wake up in the morning.
The gospels of Mark and Luke say it a
little differently, listing four ways to love God instead of three. Love God
with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. I suppose it’s just a way of
placing emphasis and interpreting from the shema,
which would be the core teaching for every Jewish person.
The Hebrew lexicon or dictionary for
Deuteronomy 5:6 offers multiple interpretations for use of those words. ‘Heart’
can mean inner man, mind, or will. ‘Soul’ can be defined as living being, self,
person, passion, appetite, or emotion. ‘Might’ can mean power, muchness, force,
or abundance. In this era, we tend to scramble some of those meanings, like
putting emotion in with heart. It seems that the Gospels of Mark and Luke have
done similarly, creating an extra category. Matthew did that, attributing Jesus
as saying 'mind' as opposed to ‘might’.
If we get caught up on which words are
used and which are right, we miss the point, which is that we are to love God
with all we are, every bit of us, every part of our being and feeling and
thinking and doing.
If we were to do that, what would our
lives look like? How would we live? How would we relate not just to God but to
each other and to those with whom we differ. I suspect that for most of us, it
would look very different from the present reality in which we live. Hence the
question, “Can you pass the test?”
We have a habit of picking and
choosing what, of ourselves, we are willing to give to God and how much or to
what extent. Some of you may have just moved into resistance mode when I made
the leap from ‘loving’ God to ‘giving’ to God.
We tend to prefer keeping God on an
emotional leash, like a pet, and lavishing affection on God as the mood strikes
us. It’s fine to feel something about
God or toward God, quite another to do
something with that feeling. God
doesn’t need our warm and fuzzies. God wants our actions, the living of our
lives. In this commandment, love is not a noun. Love is a verb. Love is
something that becomes love in the doing.
Those different ways of loving God
lead to the doing. The heart was considered the center of a person’s willing,
choosing, and doing. If we love God with all our hearts, we will be willing
what God wills, choosing what God wills, and doing what God wills.
If we love God with our entire
selves—our souls, our life being, then everything in our lives will be governed
by our love for God and lived out in every aspect of our lives.
If we love God with all our minds,
then what we think, which leads to what we say and do, will be focused on God.
If we love God with all our strength, then we will be using our physical
abilities, our power, our influence in ways that serve God and God’s purpose
for the world.
Where does that leave us today? I
suspect in a place we don’t want to examine too closely. Can we honestly say
that the thoughts in our minds are reflective of our love for God and governed
by God’s will? More than occasionally?
Can we say that the things we do, the use of
our power and influence is a reflection of our love for God and of our desire
to be in line with God’s will and purpose for the world? Can we say that how we
use our bodies, our physical abilities, our strength, our might shows our love
for God and is in line with what God wants for us and for the world?
Let’s consider some examples. Foremost
in most minds right now is the election. We’ve received our ballots. How will
we vote? Will we love God with heart, soul, strength, and mind? Will what we
think about the issues and candidates align with God’s will and vision for the
world? Will the action we take through our voting be a reflection of God’s will
as opposed to our own? Or are we tending to decide what God’s will should be and then voting according to
our own will or how others have told us we should vote? Where is our love for
God on the ballot?
Another example is materialism. Jesus
had a lot to say about wealth. How we manage our wealth, what we spend it on,
is a reflection of whether we are loving God with heart, soul, mind and
strength. Is our accumulation of more and more material things showing a love
for God or a love for self? Do we give more than a pittance of what has been
entrusted to us to help God’s children who are in need? Our money becomes one
of those aspects of power with which we either love God or love self. Jesus
said we can’t serve both God and money.
Are we loving God with our whole
selves or does that give way to loving self instead? Think about our frequent
need to be right. That is about ego and control which is about self. We are too
often ready to sacrifice relationships with others in order to be right. Is
that what God wants for us and for the other? Judging is yet another as we see
ourselves as better than, more deserving than those we are ready to condemn.
How about how we spend our time? Does that show a love for God? Does it reflect
loving God with all of who we are?
The issue of self comes into play in
myriad other ways. Consider all those teachings of Jesus—forgiveness,
peacemaking, generosity, grace, acceptance, tolerance, healing. All of it and
all the Bible teaches is, according to Jesus, tied in with those two
commandments. He said all the law and prophets hang on those two.
The greatest commandment is to love
God. Love God with all your heart. Love God with all your soul. Love God with
your entire mind. Love God with all the power and wealth and influence and
resources you have available to you. If we do that, we will, without
hesitation, love our neighbors as ourselves. Amen.
HYMN: “Take
My Life”
PRAYERS OF THE
PEOPLE AND THE LORD’S PRAYER
God who has given us life and then
redeemed our lives, thank you for your great love. Because you love, we know
how to love as well. God, for all that you have provided, for all the ways you
have blessed us, we thank you. We especially thank you, Lord, for the many ways
you have been present in our lives, even though we may not have understood it
at the time or may even have resented it. Thank you for watching over us,
guiding us, and protecting us. Thank you for not giving up on us.
Through the power of your Holy Spirit,
create in us a restlessness, a hunger to be close to you. Help us, O God, to
want you enough to risk failing and to trust you enough to know that your hand
will support us.
As election day nears and as people
are already making decisions about who will lead this country, grant us all
wisdom to discern your will for us and help us have the integrity to vote
accordingly.
We continue to pray for those who have
suffered because of the Covid virus and
the wildfires. For those who have lost loved ones and homes and businesses,
Lord help them so they don’t lose hope.
We pray for those close to us,
for Phyllis Bauer … Beverly Patterson … Darlene
Wingfield with heart valve replacement on Thursday… Lois White … Virginia …
Cherry … John Matthews … Margaret Dunbar … Trisha … Dave … Jacob … Joyce …
Jennifer … Chuck … Courtney … Ethel … Helen. (Additional prayers …………)
God
who guides our lives, we entrust to you these prayers and those that remain yet
in our hearts as we pray the prayer Jesus taught: 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
We have been issued the invitation and the
means to be generous, whether in material things or in the capacity to care.
All of us have received, and all of us have something to give. Our offerings
are a symbol of our intent to please God and to realize in and through the
church the community God intends.
DOXOLOGY
PRAYER OF DEDICATION
Giver of all gifts, we seek to share as you have
shared with us. We want to serve in the spirit of Christ. Therefore, we
rededicate ourselves with this offering. May we love you and one another as we
learn to love ourselves as we should. Amen.
CLOSING HYMN: “Fill
My Cup”
CHARGE AND BENEDICTION
Your charge is to love. It’s not my charge to you, it’s Jesus’ charge to you. And not just for
this week but for every week. When you’re voting … do it with love. When you’re
talking about political issues or Covid or anything … do it with love. When
you’re praying or worshiping … do it with love. First love God. With all your
heart. With all your soul. With all your mind. With all your strength. And then
love everyone else.
And remember … 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 27 noon PPW
November 3 10:30 a.m. Women’s Spirituality
PRAYER
CARE:
Phyllis Bauer, Beverly
Patterson (Sheila Cunningham’s mother) (aging issues), Lois White (lymphoma),
Virginia DesIlets (broken hip), Darlene Wingfield (heart valve replacement 10/29), pulmonary
fibrosis, breast cancer), Margaret Dunbar (fall/broken tailbone), John Matthews
(cancer), Trisha Cagley (health problems), Dave Clark (kidney cancer), Jacob
Cunningham, Joyce Sahlberg (health issues), Jennifer Schirm (Parkinson’s),
Chuck VanHise (leg/walking rehab), and Courtney Ziegler (Huntington’s).
LECTIONARY
FOR 11/1/20
Joshua
3:7-17; Psalm 34:1-10, 22; 1 John 3:1-3; Mathew 5:1-12
