Sunday Service for 28 November 2021, first Sunday of Advent

28 November 2021, 1st Sunday of Advent
Gourock St. John’s Church of Scotland
Service prepared by the Rev. Teri Peterson
Manse phone: 632143 
Email: tpeterson (at) churchofscotland.org.uk

To hear the audio recording of this service, please phone 01475 270037. It’s a local landline number so minutes should be included in your phone plan.

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Prelude Music

Welcome and Announcements

Lighting the First Advent Candle
1: To those who are far from home:
2: A word of hope.

2: To those who have been left behind:
1: A word of hope.

1: To those uncertain of the next steps:
2: A word of hope.

2: To those counting down the days:
1: A word of hope.

All: God is coming, and the world will never be the same!
~candle is lit~

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
and ransom captive Israel,
that mourns in lonely exile here
until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
shall come to thee, O Israel.

Prayer
You are a God who takes the long view yet never loses sight of the now,
and you have set us here, calling us to live life to the full.
We confess that sometimes we get caught up in looking ahead, missing you in this moment.
Bring our attention to your call for us today, and show us how to live in your presence,
wherever we find ourselves.
We confess that sometimes we get so comfortable here in our own ways,
we don’t want to step out to follow your lead.
We forget that your coming will change this world and the next,
and what we know, or think we know, is not your norm.
May we not save up hope for the future, but embody it now,
for ourselves, for this community, and for generations still to come.
Forgive us, and plant in us your hope,
that we may grow into the new beginning you have planned.
We ask in the name of the One who was, and is, and is to come. Amen.

Online Hymn: Lift Up Your Eyes (Resound Worship)

Children’s Time (in person only)

Reading: Jeremiah 29.1, 4-14
Last week we heard from the first prophet Isaiah, who spoke to the northern kingdom of Israel in the time leading up to their destruction by the Assyrian empire. Over the next hundred years, the southern kingdom of Judah alternated between anxiety that something similar would happen to them, and hope for a restored united kingdom. Ultimately the northern kingdom was consigned to history as the “ten lost tribes” of Israel. The rise of the Babylonian empire brought new threats to Judah, and God called the prophet Jeremiah, when he was still a young person, to speak out about how the unfaithfulness of the leaders and people meant they were vulnerable. Jeremiah was unpopular as he criticised the moral, religious, and political compromises that were being made, and he was often imprisoned or threatened. About 25 years into his turbulent career as a prophet, in the year 597 BCE, the Babylonian empire won the first round and took many of the ruling class, merchants, and artisans into exile. One of the royal court prophets claimed it would last only two years, but Jeremiah knew he was just saying what people wanted to hear, not what was true. Today we read the letter Jeremiah sent from his home in a changed Jerusalem to those who had been taken to Babylon in this first round of exile, which can be found in chapter 29. I am reading from the New Revised Standard Version.
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These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles, and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people, whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.
For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfil to you my promise and bring you back to this place. For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.

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: Get On With It

I think I have finally found the biblical basis for what may be the most common Scottish phrase: “you’ve just got to get on with it.” Almost no matter what happens, it’s what people say. It could be a tragedy or a massive achievement to celebrate, or anything in between, and I’ll hear “well, you’ve just got to get on with it, haven’t you?” Sometimes I think we use it as a way to bury feelings in activity, just doing doing doing without ever processing our emotional lives. But sometimes it really is all you can do in the face of an overwhelming situation, is just get on with one thing, and then the next.

Jeremiah was writing to people who were in the early stages of a great trauma. It was ongoing, and it was so awful it didn’t really bear thinking about. It would have been unbelievable if it hadn’t happened to them. The Babylonian army had won, and overrun Jerusalem. The royal family, the leaders, the cultural influencers, and the artisans and merchants had all been marched away to Babylon so they couldn’t gather up support or make weapons to resist. A puppet king had been installed in the royal palace. And there were puppet prophets, too, telling them to just sit back and wait because God was going to get them out of this soon, don’t worry about anything, don’t even bother to unpack in Babylon, this will all be over in a year or two.

Jeremiah’s letter wasn’t so chipper or full of false promises. He knew this was a big disaster, and that the people who were deported were never coming back…maybe their children, hopefully their grandchildren, yes, but these families were going to be away from their homeland for a long time. So rather than sitting on their boxes and wailing and gnashing their teeth, Jeremiah tells them: get on with it.

It actually sounds a little like crazy advice, at first. They’ve been removed from their homes, from everything comfortable and familiar. They’re surrounded by people who speak a different language. The weather patterns are different, the food is different, the culture is different, the religion is different. They’re grieving the loss of everything they’ve ever known. And Jeremiah tells them to build houses and plant gardens and get married and have families.

In other words, Jeremiah tells them to use this ending as a new beginning. Jeremiah’s first words are “live where you are.” LIVE. This is a time for a new creation story, just like the first: plant gardens. Be fruitful and multiply. Live your life to the full, right where you are. However much this feels like a disaster, like the end times, like everything has changed around you and there’s no way forward because there’s no way back…live. Don’t wait for rescue, or for something to change. Don’t defer everything and live in a holding pattern. Just get on with it. Live where you are, in these bodies, in this community, with all these new customs, in this new reality.

Given how easily we say “just get on with it,” this might feel like easy advice from the prophet. But I’m not sure it is. While most of us have not been displaced from our homes, sometimes for the church it feels like our home has been displaced from us. Some among our community remember times when the culture and customs were different, when church was more central to our lives, when nothing else happened on a Sunday, when school children began each day with the Lord’s Prayer and sang hymns at assemblies. Sometimes we might even feel like we are the church in exile, like we long for the things we remember and teach our children that we’re just waiting to go back. As the world around us has changed, sometimes we have followed the puppet prophets in believing things could get back to the way they used to be, or that people would come back to us when they had kids, or that if we just kept doing the same things we did in the old world, it would eventually work in the new world. But that isn’t the case, and our holding pattern is not the same as living life to the full in the here and now, where God has sent us.

Jeremiah’s second words are even harder. He says to seek the welfare of the community where you are, and pray for it, because the only way to prosper is together. If the community where you’re living flounders, then so do you…if it does well, then so do you.

Jeremiah tells his people to work for the good of the city where they are living in exile — to pray for the very people who had defeated them in battle and brought them out to this unfamiliar place. They were to seek the welfare of their enemies, and to work together to create a thriving community — nearly 600 years before Jesus would teach “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” It was a hard message in the 590s BCE, a hard message in the first century, and a hard message today. But it is as true now as it was then — that we rise or fall together. Perhaps when we are tempted to moan about all those Sunday activities or other changes to the culture while we hold fast to what was meaningful to us about the way things used to be, Jeremiah is speaking to us, too…pray for the community in which you live, the people who surround you, the very people who have done this terrible thing to you. Pray for them, and also seek their good. Work for the welfare of the whole town, not just yourselves. Don’t just live in this place, but live fully here with these people, because God’s blessing comes to us together.

Then Jeremiah says that when they’ve done this, when they’ve learned to live faithfully in the place where they are, to be grounded both in the earth, planting gardens, and in the community, putting down roots, then God will reveal himself to them and they will know the new life that God has planned for them. They have to learn in exile what they didn’t manage to learn in their old comfortable land where they took God’s blessing for granted. If they follow Jeremiah’s call, they will learn connection to God’s creation by participating in a new creation. They will learn faithfulness in prayer. They will learn how to serve others, not only to be served. They will learn to be flexible and resilient, to follow God’s call in unfamiliar territory, adapting to the reality around them as they didn’t have the Temple or any of their traditional worship options available. They will learn to trust God’s promise rather than simply relying on their own ways. And a future of hope will open before them, and God will restore them, gather them, listen to them, and fulfil God’s plans for them.

But first they have to learn to live where they are. They have to learn to care about the community that they’re pretty sure doesn’t care about them. They have to get on with it, rather than simply waiting for something around them to change so they can continue on as they always have. And when they do — when we do — we’ll be a sign, a foretaste of what God’s kingdom can be like on earth.

This Advent, while we await the coming of Christ once again, of God with us, in the flesh, living where we are, seeking the welfare of the community who cares little for his message and is sometimes actively hostile, may we too wait like this. Not sitting around passively waiting for God to fix everything, but following Jeremiah’s call to live where we are, to be embedded in our community, to pray for those around us, and to seek the welfare of the place where God has sent us — even if they aren’t interested. God knows the plans for a future with hope, so we too look forward with expectation even as we live life to the full here and now. Let’s get on with it.

May it be so. Amen.

Hymn: O God, who gives us life and breath (words: Carl P Daw Jr; tune: NOEL)

Invitation to a Generous Advent

During the season of Advent, many people traditionally open a door of an Advent calendar to find a treat of some kind. This year we are invited to a different kind of advent calendar, in which each day we do something. Connect is gathering together for a Reverse Advent Calendar in which we put something into a box each day, and then those things are donated to the food bank and starter packs — these will be collected at our family film night on Saturday the 18th at 4pm at the Lyle Kirk, or you can bring them to church or the manse that weekend so we can get them to the right people — a tangible way to put Jeremiah’s instruction into practice. St John’s also has an advent calendar to help us explore the them of an EmBodied Advent, and each activity will help us go deeper into living out what we hear in scripture on Sundays. These advent calendars are available in print and online.

As this is also a season of gift giving and generosity, I also encourage us all to consider our spiritual practice of generosity and perhaps to make a special gift to the ministry of the church in this place and time, as we seek to serve our community in new ways that put Jeremiah’s words into practice. You can give a one time gift, change your regular offering, or create a new standing order either by talking to Peter, giving online, or arranging things with your bank. Or if you use envelopes or prefer cash/cheque donations but are not able to join in-person worship at this time, please let us know and we can arrange a collection. Thank you for your generosity, at this time and every time of year, as we try to be faithful to God’s mission for us.

Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Loving God, we come with thanks for your care.
You have placed us in community,
and we share our gratitude around table and hearth,
across miles and through the miracle of technology.
Hear our praise for your gift of togetherness,
in all its many forms.

Where community is complicated, O God,
we ask for the grace to embody your way.
We offer our prayers for those among
our families, friends, neighbours, and community who have hurt us,
and ask for your healing for their hearts, and ours.
Transform us all ever more into your likeness.

Where people are suffering in body, mind, or spirit,
we ask for the grace of your wholeness.
We offer our prayers for those whose fullness of life is restricted by illness or treatment,
and for those who care for them.
We lift up our neighbours near and far who long for healing, freedom, and peace.
Reveal your loving kindness among us and through us.
We especially pray for those who have left their homes,
seeking refuge, seeking hope, seeking peace.
We ask your protection on their journeys,
that they may encounter welcome and help, solidarity and support.
We ask your comfort for those who grieve —
lost homes, lost familiarity, lost families, lost loved ones, lost livelihoods.
And we ask for your compassion to infuse us, that we may be a haven,
a community that makes space for all to live life to the fullest
where you have planted us together.

We trust your promise, Living God,
that when we seek you, you will be found.
We offer our prayers for all who are desperate for your new thing to be revealed,
for this world is not yet in alignment with your will.
Give us the courage to live expectantly,
and to act hopefully,
carrying on the good work you have begun in us.
We ask these and all things in the name of the One
who lived your hope in the flesh, 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.

(in-person hymn 479: View the Present Through the Promise)

Benediction
Friends, go into this Advent season with expectation, to live as the Body of Christ in this place, seeking God’s future of hope for the whole community. 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

Announcements
* This Advent our theme is “EmBodied” — encountering the Word Made Flesh, in our own bodies and in our own places where God has planted us.

* Follow your St John’s Embodied Advent and your Connect Reverse Advent Calendars! There’ll be a Facebook Live for most of the St John’s Advent Calendar too.

* Connect is hosting a family film night on 18 December at 4pm at the Lyle Kirk (Union Street). Bring your Reverse Advent Calendar with you so we can take the donations to the Foodbank and Starter Packs!

* Mark your calendars for Christmas worship: 
Longest Night (a quieter Christmas service recognising the darkness in which the Light shines) on 21 December at 7:30pm
Joint services for Christmas Eve at 7:30pm at St. John’s and 11:30pm at Old Gourock and Ashton
Christmas Day, 11am, on ZOOM with all of Connect
Sunday 26 December, 10:30am, joint service with St Ninian’s Larkfield and OGA, at Old Gourock

* All worship is online (or on the phone at 01475 270037, or in print) and we also meet in person, subject to the usual protocols for distancing, hand hygiene, mask wearing. We can now welcome up to 85-100 people for worship with 1m distancing between households. No booking is required. Masks are required at all times inside the building, including while singing. 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.

* Tonight we will gather with Christians across the nation for evening prayer on the Connect Facebook Page, led tonight by David. 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!