Sunday service for 10 September 2023

Sunday 10 September 2023 — NL2-1, Conversations With God 1
Gourock St. John’s Church of Scotland
Service prepared by Rev. Teri Peterson
Manse: 632143 
Email: TPeterson (at) churchofscotland.org.uk
Email Charlene, Parish Assistant: CMitchell (at) churchofscotland.org.uk

Prelude Music

Welcome & Announcements

Sanctuary Gathering: We Gather As God’s Family (As the Bible is brought in, we stand and sing)
A family gathered in love,
striving for justice and joy,
blessing the broken-hearted,
and sharing the hope of God’s kingdom.

Call to Worship
One: Breathe…
In and out, each breath both ordinary and a miracle.
All: In and out, each breath in sync with the artist whose breath was our first.
One: Close enough to look into each other’s eyes,
seeing this new world for the first time.
All: Breathing together with God,
we come alive.

Sanctuary Hymn: Creation sings! (Words: Martin E. Leckebusch (CCLI/Kevin Mayhew), tune: 188 St Petersburg)

Prayer
In the beginning, Your hand worked the soil,
forming and planting and teaching us how to care for your garden.
In the beginning, Your compassion created community.
In the beginning, You offered all that is good and invited us to trust.
Not in the abstract, but in the particular,
You create, O God.
You see what is needed, and you bring it into being,
weaving together earth and water, garden and steward, companions and partners,
a careful balance of colour and sound and silence and texture,
your living vision.
We confess that we have cared little for your balance,
and under our weight the tapestry has torn.
We do not steward, we exploit.
We do not partner, we dominate.
We do not work together, we stand alone and above.
Not in the abstract, but in the particular,
we have damaged your creation, and we have not wished to inconvenience ourselves for its repair.
Forgive us for forgetting our interdependence with the soil from which we come.
Forgive us for setting ourselves apart from the companions you gave us.
Forgive us for dismissing your handiwork and taking it for granted.
Not in the abstract, but in the particular,
in this place, in this land, with this water, breathing this air,
in these bodies,
forgive us and set us once again in our rightful place in your beautiful world.
Make today a new beginning, Lord God.
Work the soil of our hearts by hand,
form and plant and teach,
create us into your compassionate community,
and give us courage to accept your invitation to goodness.
Amen.

Online Hymn 147: All Creatures Of Our God and King

Sanctuary Hymn 171: Take Up The Song (tune: Highland Cathedral)

Sanctuary Children’s Time

Scripture Reading: Genesis 2.4b – 25 (4-6 and 10-14 Inclusive Bible, remainder Women’s Lectionary Year W)
At the time when the sovereign God made the heavens and the earth, there was still no wild bush on the earth nor had any wild plants sprang up, for the sovereign God had not yet sent rain to the earth, and there was no human being to till the soil. Instead, a flow of water would well up from the ground and irrigate the soil.

The sovereign God crafted the human from the dust of the humus, and breathed into its nostrils the breath of life, and the human became a living soul. And the sovereign God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there placed the human whom God had formed. Out of the ground the sovereign God made grow every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food, and the tree of life in the middle of the garden, along with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river flows through Eden to water the garden, after which it branches into four tributaries. The first stream is named Pishon, or “Spreader.” It circles through Havilah, a land rich in gold, gold of the highest quality. There are gum resins there, and precious onyx stones. The second stream is named Gihon, or “Gusher,” and it flows through the entire land of Cush. The third stream is the Tigris, which borders Assyria on the east. The fourth stream is the Euphrates.

The sovereign God took the human and settled it in the garden of Eden to till and tend it. Then the sovereign God commanded the human, “from every tree of the garden you may eat freely, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day you eat from it, you shall surely die.”
Then the sovereign God said, “it is not good that the human should be alone; I will make it someone to rely on as its partner.” Then the sovereign God crafted from the humus every creature of the field and every bird of the skies and brought them to the human to see what it would call them; and what ever the human called every living soul, that was its name. The human gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal in the field; but for the human there was not found one to rely on as its partner.
The sovereign God caused a deep sleep to fall on the human, and it slept; then took one of its sides and closed up its place with flesh in place of it. And the sovereign God built the side that had been taken from the human into a woman and brought her to the human. Then the human said,
“this time, this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh;
this one shall be called a woman,
for out of a man this one was taken.”
Therefore, a man leaves his mother and his father and clings to his woman, and they become one flesh. And they were, the two of them, naked, the man and his woman, and were not ashamed.

For the word of God in scripture
for the word of God among us
for the word of God within us
thanks be to God.

Sermon
This week I read a news story about a patch of snow. Which seems a weird thing to be reading about in September…especially since it wasn’t about snow falling, but rather about snow melting! You may know that there is a place up in the Cairngorms where there has been snow on the ground almost constantly for…ever, basically. Until a hundred years ago, it was assumed this hollow up in the mountains just always had snow. There have been only ten times in over three hundred years that there was no snow in this hollow. It melted completely away this week, for the fifth time the past six years. At this moment, there is no snow on the ground anywhere in Scotland, for only the tenth time in three hundred years, and five of those are in the past six years.

This is the kind of news story that’s almost guaranteed to appear on the pub quiz, but it hit me differently this week when I was also thinking about this creation story from Genesis 2.

The very beginning of this creation story is different from the one we often think of that starts with the earth being all chaos and without form until God says “let there be light” and then things start to happen. In this one, we have an earth with a spring of water, but no plants or anything…just dirt, dust, a blank canvas. And I’d never really noticed this before, but it says there were no plants because it had never rained, and the reason it had never rained was because there was no one to tend and care for the earth.

Why water the earth if there aren’t any plants to grow…and why start plants growing if there’s no one to take care of it all? Basically, there was no point. God didn’t want to waste the effort or resources.

And so God, desiring a garden, decides first to sculpt a human being to enjoy and tend the earth, and only after that human being is available to work does God plant the garden.

And God did all of this by hand.

A handmade sculpture is a beautiful thing, unique and interesting. The clay has to be smooshed and rolled, stretched and pressed, unstuck from the artist’s fingers, looked at from different angles, and tweaked with a little squeeze here or a smoothing down there. And only when God stepped back from the sculpting and decided it was good, did God then come close enough to breathe into the face of this handmade masterpiece, and it came to life, still bearing God’s fingerprints.

Then, with the first living piece of priceless art looking on, God’s hands went into the dirt again and began to plant the garden of God’s dreams. Soon it was beautiful…lovely to look at, full of trees and plants, everything you could need to eat and sit under and enjoy. And the human was there to take care of it all, to be alongside God with hands in the soil, tending and keeping it beautiful.

Usually, when we receive something handmade, we treasure it. We often seek out artisan things — our town here is full of artisans making lovely things from paintings to glass to greeting cards to jewellery to handmade soap. We admire the workmanship, we show it off to our friends, we treat it with love and handle those objects with more care than we might something easily replaced at Ikea or somewhere similar. Even more so when it’s the maker themselves giving us the handmade thing, even if it’s something simple like homemade shortbread, we savour it differently than a box from Sainsbury’s!

One of the reasons for that extra treasuring is, of course, that we know the love that went into making it, and if it was a gift, the thought that went into selecting it from among a world filled with identical mass-produced stuff. We understand the care, the time, the effort, the trial and error, the skill and talent, the tears and laughter that goes into making something beautiful and putting it out into the world, and we value it more highly.

One might ask why we don’t do that with God’s handmade workmanship?

The earth and the plants and the creatures…all hand made, gifted to us by God whose very first identity is artist.

And our own human bodies…and, perhaps more to the point, the human bodies of our neighbours: sculpted by hand by God, still bearing God’s fingerprints and breathing God’s breath, and placed here on purpose.

Why do we not treat these things like the artisan treasures they are?

What would we do differently, if we were treating the earth, the creation, ourselves, and our human siblings like they’re handmade gifts from God?

Well obviously we would treat it all with more care, I hope. We would treasure the earth and each other, and we would grieve when something breaks or is lost or harmed, and we would stand up and say no to people that want to use it in ways that will ruin it. We would refuse to allow our handmade treasure to be destroyed just for a fleeting moment’s pleasure, or to make someone rich. We would tend it, keep it, show it off to friends, share it with joy.

All the usual things like not littering, and picking up litter when we see it, limiting our use of fossil fuels, choosing to repair or repurpose things rather than throwing them away, buying local, and all that stuff we already know is important. Many of us are doing what we can, and the truth is that still isn’t enough. Our fellow handmade treasures are still being damaged. The snow has all melted for the fifth time in six years after hundreds of years of always being there. The last three months on earth were the hottest on record by more than half a degree celsius — and that’s an average that includes the southern hemisphere where it’s winter. People are already having to move because of sea level rise, drought and failed crops, fires, and unbearable temperatures. Children are dying because of famine. Wars are being fought over water and farmland. We are not tending and keeping the handmade treasure of our neighbour and the creation in which we all live. We must do more.

What is that more? We have to go to the institutions that struggle to change when their bad ways are profitable…and either make those ways not profitable, or make so much noise that they become convinced there’s a better way. It will take corporations and governments changing their priorities and actions if we are going to turn this around, not only the individual things we have all learned to do. Our voices and our money are frankly our most powerful tools in tending God’s garden today. And the humans, creatures, plants, water, and soil need us to use them.

Notice in the story that the rivers are named — this is a particular place God is known to walk and work. The animals are all given names by God’s first sculpture — they are seen, known, valued, and meant to be companions in community. And the very first relationship in the creation is between God the artisan craft maker, and the soil. The second relationship is between God and the human being God sculpted from the soil. And the purpose of that sculpting was to create the third relationship of creation: between these first two of God’s loves: the human being and the soil and the garden that grows in it.

It’s all lovingly made and placed together for a purpose. In the midst of everything else we try to force this story into saying, whether or not it says what we want it to say, we have too often ignored the thing it does say: that we are deeply, intimately, at our core, connected and interconnected with the earth and every living thing on the earth, both plants and other animals and humans. And we exist because God needed someone to take care of the earth and so created us explicitly for that task.

Knowing that should convict us, and call us to take up that task for which we were created, to tend and keep the earth and its creatures and its community, to treasure it and care for it as God’s beloved…because together, we are.

May it be so. Amen.

Online Hymn: We Are Tenants of the King (Resound Worship)

Sanctuary Hymn: Monarch and Maker (words: John L Bell & Graham Maule; tune: Woodlands)

Sanctuary Offering

Sanctuary Offering Response: God Our Creator, vv. 1 & 4 (tune: Bunessan; words: John L Bell & Graham Maule)
God our Creator, you in love made us
who once were nothing but now have grown.
We bring the best of all our lives offer;
for you we share whatever we own.

And with the people summoned together
to be the Church in which faith is sown,
we make our promise to live for Jesus,
and let the world know all are God’s own.

Prayer and Lord’s Prayer (ends with the prayers from our prayer book…and in the St John’s part, I’ve borrowed from the 11th)

Creator God, you are so tuned-in to your creation,
its very breath is yours.
We thank you for your hands-on care,
bringing your vision to fruition.
You sculpted and built this world,
and your goodness is visible at every turn.
We lift up today those who have been denied their place in your creation,
treated not as equals or partners but as inferiors and servants.
We remember those who have no one to call “my people,”
who have been cast aside or left out or dismissed.
We ask for your blessing of a community
where we can hold one another up and hold one another to account,
where we can be real and not ashamed.
We lift up today those places where the fabric of creation is so torn,
where abundant life feels impossible,
and the holes left by our destruction harm those trying to survive around the edges.
We remember our neighbours who struggle each day
without ever getting a moment in our news cycle.
We ask for your blessing of inspiration, courage, and strong will
to do what is right for others, not only what is convenient for ourselves,
and for leaders in business and politics
to lay aside their greed and lust for power and seek the common good.
We lift up today (today’s local concerns: — BB 125 charity ball celebration, people grieving/suffering, war, gatherings of world leaders)…
And on the 10th day of the month we join our hearts together as your church family to pray
*For all who live and work in the Midton and Trumpethill areas.
*for the music ministry of St John’s: for the choir, the praise band, the organist, and all who enable our worship and prayer through music.
*For the land, people, and governments of the nations of Libya, Malta, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Western Sahara, and Cape Verde.
We ask for your blessing of peace, grace, and love that endures.

We ask these things, trusting in your creative Spirit and your compassionate presence,
in the name of Jesus the Christ,
who taught us to pray together:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
your will be done on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins,
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours, now and forever. Amen.

Sanctuary Hymn 141: Oh the Life of the World

Benediction
Go forth with the courage to be in relationship — with the earth, with your neighbour, with God. In that relationship may you find joy, challenge, commitment, and creativity.
And as you go, may the Spirit of God go above you to watch over you. May the Spirit of God go beside you to be your companion. May the Spirit of God go before you to show you the way, and behind you to push you into places you might not go alone. And may the Spirit of God go within you, to remind you that you are loved more deeply than you can possibly imagine. May the fire of God’s love burn brightly in you, and through you into the world. Amen.

Sung Benediction Response (John L Bell, tune Gourock St John’s)
Now may the Lord of all be blessed,
Now may Christ’s gospel be confessed,
Now may the Spirit when we meet
Bless sanctuary and street.

Postlude Music

Announcements

* We plan to expand Bowl & Blether to add the 3rd Mondays of the month in the winter months, starting in October. This will require a team of volunteers to make soup in the church kitchen in the morning, to make toasties, and to serve soup/toasties/tea/coffee, offering hospitality and a warm cheery chat to anyone who wants to come in through the winter. Please contact Teri if you would be willing to volunteer on the 3rd Mondays of the month over the winter.

* We worship in the sanctuary on Sundays at 11am, and all Sunday worship is also online. If you are able, please enter by the front door in Bath street, and only those who need step-free access should use the back door. If you feel unwell, please worship online, to protect both yourself and others in our community.

* Starter Packs are short of Shaving Foam, Shampoo, Soap, Toothpaste, Bathroom/Kitchen Cleaner, Kitchen Roll and Teabags. 
The FoodBank are short of biscuits, UHT milk, soup, tinned fish, and tinned meats. You can bring donations to the church and place them into the boxes in the vestibule. Thank you!

* Did you know that the ministry we do at St John’s costs about £3000 per week? Everything we do is funded by your generous giving — all our support for young people, older people, bereavement care, community outreach, worship, study, spiritual growth, and community work is because of your offering. If you would like to set up a standing order in order to facilitate your spiritual discipline of giving, or if you would like to make an extra gift to support the ministry St. John’s does in our parish, you can give online by clicking here. If you would like to set up a standing order, please contact Teri and she can give you the treasurer’s details. You can also send your envelopes to the church or the manse by post and we will ensure they are received. 
It is also possible to donate to the work of the new parish assistant, speak to Anne Love about how to go about directing new donations to that new item in the budget.

* Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Youtube, and to sign up for our email devotions! Midweek you can watch Wine and the Word on Youtube, pray with video devotions on Facebook, and consider a new angle on something with a devotional email. Feel free to share with your friends, too!

* Wednesday Evening Bible Study is taking the next two weeks off, and will meet again on Wednesday 27 September at 7:30pm.

* Philip is playing a recital at Kelvingrove Museum on Saturday 16 September at 1pm. Music will include items written by Henry Purcell, William Mathias, Malcolm Arnold and Philip himself.

* St John’s Contact Group will start the new session on Tuesday 19th September at 2pm in the church hall. Entertainment will be provided by The Skelpies Ukulele Band, followed by tea, cakes and time to chat. All are welcome to this opening meeting and the fortnightly meetings thereafter. The syllabus of events will be available soon. 

* The next Bowl & Blether will be on Monday 2 October, doors open at 11:30 and soup and toasties are served between 12-1:30. It’s a great opportunity to get out and meet some friends, invite a neighbour, and have a meal and some social time!

* Free period products are available in the church toilets for anyone who might need them, thanks to Hey Girls and Inverclyde Council.

* Youth organisations are in full swing, and we are especially looking for new members of the Anchor Boys and the Smurfs (P1-P3, boys and girls respectively). Young people are invited to come along to the Junior Section (P4-P6) of the BB on Monday evenings at 7, Anchor Boys (P1-P3) on Tuesdays at 5:30, Brownies and Guides on Wednesday evenings at 6pm and 7:30pm respectively, Smurfs on Thursdays at 6pm, and Company Section (P7-S6) of the BB on Fridays at 7. For more information on the Boys’ Brigade, email: 2ndgourock@inverclydebb.org.uk , for more information on the Smurfs (pre-Brownies), email Lyn at lyn41185@hotmail.com, and for more information on the Brownies/Guides, visit https://www.girlguidingscotland.org.uk/for-parents/register-your-daughter .

* The Church of Scotland has a new online learning platform called Church of Scotland Learning (more info here). The first set of modules is now available, and are designed with members of local congregations in mind and will help to grow faith, stretch minds and explore possibilities. They are set at an introductory level and accessible for all. We hope this will ignite people’s interest in learning more. Currently available topics include Vows for Elders; Vows for Ministers; Conversations in Discipleship, Exploring Discipleship, Talking About Your Faith; New Ways of Being Church; Knowing You Knowing Me (Learning to understand more fully where God is and what God is calling us to do); Theological Reflection for Everyone; Equality Diversity and Inclusion; and Unconscious Bias and Me. More modules will be added periodically, so sign up today by clicking here!

* Trinity College Glasgow and New College Edinburgh also both offer “short courses” for lay people — there are a variety of interesting modules available for online or in-person participation, including courses on Listening In Mission, worship, New Testament, Mission and our response to Presbytery planning, Creative Writing as a Spiritual Practice, and more. Please become a lifelong learner and dig into some of these opportunities that God is putting in front of us to grow in our faith and life together! 

* Would you be able to host two university students from the USA from 8-11 June, 2024? They will each need their own bed, though they can share a room, and you would be providing them breakfast and dinner, bringing them to church on Sunday, and being a welcoming and engaging host as they get a cultural exchange experience. There would be some financial help to cover the food expenses. If you might be interested, please be in touch with Teri or Seonaid Knox, so we have a sense of how many students we can host.