Sunday service for 15 August 2021

Sunday Service for 15 August 2021, 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sunday school Revisited week 12
Rev. Teri Peterson, Gourock St. John’s
Manse phone: 632143 
Email: tpeterson@churchofscotland.org.uk

To hear an audio recording of this service, including music, phone 01475 270037.

Prelude Music

Welcome/Announcements

Call to Worship
One: Some problems are so giant, all we can do is stand and look, talking it over again and again.
All: We feel so small in the face of it all.
One: Some ideas are so out there, all we can do is scoff and laugh, brushing off that naive silliness.
All: We feel so helpless it makes us certain nothing can work.
One: Some encounters are so important, all we can do is take off the armour and be our full selves.
All: We feel so vulnerable, we understand true power.
One: Whatever we see through our eyes, the truth is that God looks on the heart,
All: and nothing is impossible with God.
One: Whether we are quaking in our boots or standing tall in the Spirit’s courage,
All: we trust God’s promise to make small offerings into great things.
One: So let us bring ourselves to worship, and be transformed.

Prayer 
God, we thank you that you equip us with all that we need to follow your call.
You love us and welcome us, showing us how to offer hospitality.
You know us and challenge us, showing us what is possible with your power.
You give us gifts of imagination and purpose, generosity and curiosity, showing us that there is a different way.
We confess that we do not often see what you see.
Where you see possibility, we see obstacles.
Where you see beautiful diversity, we see terrifying difference.
Where you see a path to your kingdom, we see difficulties we don’t know how to overcome.
Where you see a world-changing story, we see the impossibly naive.
Forgive us for our narrow vision.
Forgive us for insisting the only way is the way we have comfortably walked before.
Forgive us for huddling in our safe places
and refusing to even try our hand at the new thing you are doing.
Open our eyes, and our minds, and our hearts,
and give us courage to let go
of those things that weigh us down and hold us back
from following you wherever you lead.
We pray in the name of Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Music
In person:
Online: Voice of Truth (Casting Crowns)

Children’s Time

Reading: 1 Samuel 17.1-51, selected verses (Common English Bible)
The Philistines assembled their troops for war … Saul and the Israelite army assembled and camped in the Elah Valley, where they got organised to fight the Philistines. The Philistines took positions on one hill while Israel took positions on the opposite hill. There was a valley between them.
A champion named Goliath from Gath came out from the Philistine camp. He was more than nine feet tall. He had a bronze helmet on his head and wore bronze scale-armor weighing one hundred twenty-five pounds. He had bronze plates on his shins, and a bronze scimitar hung on his back. His spear shaft was as strong as the bar on a weaver’s loom, and its iron head weighed fifteen pounds. His shield-bearer walked in front of him.
He stopped and shouted to the Israelite troops, “Why have you come and taken up battle formations? I am the Philistine champion, and you are Saul’s servants. Isn’t that right? Select one of your men, and let him come down against me. If he is able to fight me and kill me, then we will become your slaves, but if I overcome him and kill him, then you will become our slaves and you will serve us. I insult Israel’s troops today!” The Philistine continued, “Give me an opponent, and we’ll fight!” When Saul and all Israel heard what the Philistine said, they were distressed and terrified.

Now David was Jesse’s son, an Ephraimite from Bethlehem in Judah who had eight sons. By Saul’s time, Jesse was already quite old and far along in age. Jesse’s three oldest sons had gone with Saul to war. Their names were Eliab the oldest, Abinadab the second oldest, and Shammah the third oldest. (David was the youngest.) These three older sons followed Saul, but David went back and forth from Saul’s side to shepherd his father’s flock in Bethlehem.

For forty days straight the Philistine came out and took his stand, both morning and evening. Jesse said to his son David, “Please take your brothers an ephah of this roasted grain and these ten loaves of bread. Deliver them quickly to your brothers in the camp. And here, take these ten wedges of cheese to their unit commander. Find out how your brothers are doing and bring back some sign that they are okay. They are with Saul and all the Israelite troops fighting the Philistines in the Elah Valley.”
So David got up early in the morning, left someone in charge of the flock, and loaded up and left, just as his father Jesse had instructed him. He reached the camp right when the army was taking up their battle formations and shouting the war cry. Israel and the Philistines took up their battle formations opposite each other. David left his things with an attendant and ran to the front line. When he arrived, he asked how his brothers were doing. Right when David was speaking with them, Goliath, the Philistine champion from Gath, came forward from the Philistine ranks and said the same things he had said before. David listened. When the Israelites saw Goliath, every one of them ran away terrified of him. …

David asked the soldiers standing by him, “What will be done for the person who kills that Philistine over there and removes this insult from Israel? Who is that uncircumcised Philistine, anyway, that he can get away with insulting the army of the living God?”
Then the troops repeated to him what they had been saying. “So that’s what will be done for the man who kills him,” they said.
When David’s oldest brother Eliab heard him talking to the soldiers, he got very mad at David. “Why did you come down here?” he said. “Who is watching those few sheep for you in the wilderness? I know how arrogant you are and your devious plan: you came down just to see the battle!”
“What did I do wrong this time?” David replied. “It was just a question!”
So David turned to someone else and asked the same thing, and the people said the same thing in reply. The things David had said were overheard and reported to Saul, who sent for him.

“Don’t let anyone lose courage because of this Philistine!” David told Saul. “I, your servant, will go out and fight him!”
“You can’t go out and fight this Philistine,” Saul answered David. “You are still a boy. But he’s been a warrior since he was a boy!”
“Your servant has kept his father’s sheep,” David replied to Saul, “and if ever a lion or a bear came and carried off one of the flock, I would go after it, strike it, and rescue the animal from its mouth. If it turned on me, I would grab it at its jaw, strike it, and kill it. Your servant has fought both lions and bears. This uncircumcised Philistine will be just like one of them because he has insulted the army of the living God.
“The Lord,” David added, “who rescued me from the power of both lions and bears, will rescue me from the power of this Philistine.”
“Go!” Saul replied to David. “And may the Lord be with you!”

Then Saul dressed David in his own gear, putting a coat of armour on him and a bronze helmet on his head. David strapped his sword on over the armour, but he couldn’t walk around well because he’d never tried it before. “I can’t walk in this,” David told Saul, “because I’ve never tried it before.” So he took them off. He then grabbed his staff and chose five smooth stones from the streambed. He put them in the pocket of his shepherd’s bag and with sling in hand went out to the Philistine.

The Philistine got closer and closer to David, and his shield-bearer was in front of him. When the Philistine looked David over, he sneered at David because he was just a boy; reddish brown and good-looking.
The Philistine asked David, “Am I some sort of dog that you come at me with sticks?” And he cursed David by his gods. “Come here,” he said to David, “and I’ll feed your flesh to the wild birds and the wild animals!”
But David told the Philistine, “You are coming against me with sword, spear, and scimitar, but I come against you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel’s army, the one you’ve insulted. Today the Lord will hand you over to me. I will strike you down and cut off your head! Today I will feed your dead body and the dead bodies of the entire Philistine camp to the wild birds and the wild animals. Then the whole world will know that there is a God on Israel’s side. And all those gathered here will know that the Lord doesn’t save by means of sword and spear. The Lord owns this war, and he will hand all of you over to us.”

The Philistine got up and moved closer to attack David, and David ran quickly to the front line to face him. David put his hand in his bag and took out a stone. He slung it, and it hit the Philistine on his forehead. The stone penetrated his forehead, and he fell facedown on the ground. And that’s how David triumphed over the Philistine with just a sling and a stone, striking the Philistine down and killing him—and David didn’t even have a sword! Then David ran and stood over the Philistine. He grabbed the Philistine’s sword, drew it from its sheath, and finished him off. Then David cut off the Philistine’s head with the sword.
When the Philistines saw that their hero was dead, they fled.

Sermon: Size Doesn’t Matter
It’s a favourite story for many, and popular in children’s bibles and storybooks — the underdog facing the giant and winning. We usually leave off the gruesome ending, of course! And we normally only hear about the big moment, when David slings the stone with perfect aim…but as you can hear, there’s much more to the story!

The Philistine and Israelite armies were encamped across from each other, each on top of hills. Obviously from that position, no one wants to make the first move because it would mean going to low ground and being vulnerable while making their way up the opposite hill. So they just stood there every day and shouted at each other. Finally the Philistines sent out one man, hoping that if they could settle this one-on-one, they could all avoid a bloodbath. But the man they sent out was…huge. He was the tallest person anyone had ever seen, and he was absolutely covered in shining armour.

Notice, though, that he’s got so much armour he can barely see to navigate the path, so he follows his shield bearer up and down the hill, twice each day. He’s so weighed down by all this external stuff, he can’t even carry his own shield! Goliath may be the biggest man ever, and he was no doubt a fearsome sight, but the truth is that he was totally reliant on all that armour and weaponry to give him the courage to fight, whether with words or swords.

On the Israelite side, no one was willing to step forward. They looked between that hulk of armour, lumbering down into the valley twice every day, and their king — Saul, who also stood head and shoulders taller than anyone else in the country, who was handsome and charismatic, and who was trembling in his boots. He had been chosen to be king because he was the biggest and the best-looking…and it turns out that his leadership was nothing of the sort. If the only person who could even sort of match Goliath for height and skill was afraid, what was the Israelite army supposed to think? Of course they followed Saul’s lead…in being terrified and frozen in place.

It was clearly a dire situation, since Jesse was sending provisions for his sons and for the commander too. There wasn’t enough food for them to stand on that hillside for 40 days doing nothing but quaking in fear. When David arrived with food, though, he got to hear firsthand the taunts from the other side and to see with his own eyes the despair of his countrymen. Which is something his brothers didn’t want him to see…and after more than a month of listening to the verbal abuse from Goliath and wallowing in the fear of their own leader, his brothers were desperate for an outlet for their own frustration. So they took it all out on their baby brother — he was an easy target, after all!

But people overheard their sibling dispute, and took David straight to Saul. Once David was finished boasting about his shepherding skills — you can practically hear his brothers’ eyes rolling from outside the tent — Saul dressed David up in his own armour and sent him on his way.

Remember, Saul was a grown man who was head and shoulders taller than anyone else in Israel. And David was probably a young teenager. He was very diplomatic saying “I’ve never worn this before so I can’t do it”…because the truth is it would have been giant on him, he’d be swimming in armour meant for someone twice his size! All that would do is highlight the fact that Saul ought to have been the one serving as champion, but he was too weak a leader, even with armour and weapons.

So David, taking only himself and his sling, went out to face the Philistine champion who was weighed down with the things he thought he needed to protect himself.

A shepherd or a warrior experienced with a sling could throw a stone very nearly at the same speed as a bullet comes out of a gun. So it was no children’s toy. But the contrast must have been immense: the massive Goliath, made even more massive by hundreds of pounds of armour strapped on, a hulk that could not even lift his own shield as he shouted insults at the opposition, and the slight David, in a tunic and sandals and with a bit of fabric he swung round his head as he proclaimed that God could do more than any weapon or armour.

Malcolm Gladwell talks about how we think of this story as about the underdog defeating the giant against all odds, but that isn’t actually the case. The reality is that Goliath and David were equipped for two different fights — Goliath was ready for hand-to-hand combat, he says “come here so I can fight you,” but David could fight from a distance. While the armies on the hillside could only see one way forward, David had the gifts and skills and, perhaps most importantly, the imagination to do something different. He wasn’t weighed down by the old ways, or the expectations of being the biggest and best, or the structures of the institution. He looked at the problem and saw that God had given him exactly what he needed to meet the challenge, and he had faith that despite what everyone else thought was necessary, he was equipped enough. Size doesn’t matter, vision does. And the courage to follow that vision through.

That’s true of the giants we face today too. The big stuff staring at us from the other hillside — climate change, homelessness, poverty, hunger, injustice, violence, political corruption, or even the difficulties facing the church in the modern world — all of it is huge, and we are small, and it all feels impossible to deal with. So we huddle together in fear. We take up positions but never move forward, we just stand there for awhile looking at the problem and then go back into our tents and hope it’ll be different tomorrow. We look to leaders who were, frankly, chosen for the wrong reasons. And we keep doing the same things we’ve always done, even though we know it doesn’t work and nothing ever changes.

But size doesn’t matter, vision does. It doesn’t matter that we feel small in the face of such huge challenges like this week’s climate report, or the situation in Afghanistan, or the refugee crisis, or the number of people addicted to drugs and alcohol. What does matter is that our leaders do not have the imagination to see a different way, and so following their leadership freezes us in place. What does matter is that we keep trying to fit into armour we cannot carry, weighed down by what they think we need rather than trusting the gifts God already gave us.

It is often said that we cannot solve problems with the same kind of thinking that created the problem. Saul and the Israelite army knew perfectly well they could not defeat Goliath and the Philistines on their own terms. David knew that too. But he saw a way to adapt and use the gifts God had given him, simple as they were, to change the game. He thought differently, and that different thinking opened a new solution to an old problem.

Never underestimate God’s gift of imagination — and never forget that that gift is often housed in the youngest among us. Size doesn’t matter, and age doesn’t matter, vision does. Allowing David to pursue God’s vision changed everything on that hillside. What if we trusted God to equip us, and our young people, to face the giant problems of the world in new and surprising ways too?

May it be so. Amen.

Music
In person: Hymn 535, Who Would True Valour See
Online: Hymn 251: I, the Lord of Sea and Sky

Prayer and Lord’s Prayer (adapted from Spill the Beans)

You are the God of the ages, your hand has guided us throughout history.
In every time and place your word creates and re-creates,
calling us to your kingdom way.
You are not trapped in the past,
nor are you far away in some future we cannot imagine.
You do not live high up in the sky or in between the covers of an old book.
You, God, speak in this place, even now.
You, God, live and breathe in us, even now.
You, God are everywhere present, involved in our every moment,
challenging us and equipping us to live as your people, today.
By your power, we pray for the courage to slay giants —
of poverty and hunger,
of prejudice and hatred,
of conflict and bigotry.
By your power, we pray for the will to slay giants —
of environmental destruction,
of apathy and wilful ignorance,
of greed and unwillingness to change.
By your power, we pray for the imagination to slay giants —
to look at things a different way,
to listen to those with new ideas,
to shed the things that constrain us and step forward in faith.
It took David only one stone…and the resourcefulness to use it well.
We trust you have given us all we need to take our stand for your goodness in this world.
We commit ourselves to your work,
to slay the giants we have named,
for with you all things are possible and we need not fear.
We ask in the name of Jesus, who chose a different path and changed the world, and 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.

Music:
In Person: Hymn 251: I, the Lord of Sea and Sky
Online: Goodness is Stronger than Evil

Benediction
Friends, go into your week ready to use your God-given imagination in the service of God’s kingdom. However big the problem, remember size doesn’t matter, vision does. 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. Go in peace. 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 (in person only)

Announcements

* All worship is online (or on the phone at 01475 270037, or in print) and we also meet in person, subject to some continued protocols for distancing, hand hygiene, test-and-protect details, and mask wearing. We are now singing! Beginning next Sunday the 22nd of August, we can welcome approximately 85 people for worship with 1m distancing still in place. No booking will be required, but please arrive early enough to sign in with your test-and-protect details, and please use the front door unless you require step-free access. 

* Tonight we will gather with Christians across the nation for evening prayer on the Connect Facebook Page, led tonight by Teri. Log on at 6:58pm to join in.

* The Kirk now has online giving! If you have not already 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 Peter Bennett, our treasurer, or Teri and she can give you his details. You can also send your envelopes to the church or the manse by post and we will ensure they are received. Remember: no one is coming to your door to collect your envelopes, so please stay safe!

* 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!