Sunday service for 30 May 2021, Trinity Sunday

Sunday Service for 30 May 2021, Trinity Sunday
Prepared by the Rev. Teri Peterson, Gourock St. John’s
Manse phone: 632143 Mobile: 07549 866888
Email: tpeterson@churchofscotland.org.uk

To hear the audio recording of this service, phone 01475 270037.

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Prelude Music (in person only)

Welcome/Announcements (in person only)

Call to Worship
1: God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God.
2: We are able to love because God loved us first.
1: From before the beginning until beyond our imagining,
2: God’s love is from everlasting to everlasting.
1: There is nothing more important, and nothing more true.
2: Therefore, beloved, let us love God and love one another.

Online Music: Love the Lord Your God by Lincoln Brewster

Confession

Creator God, by your power we are fearfully and wonderfully made.
Lord Jesus Christ, by your grace we are loved beyond measure.
Holy Spirit, by your breath we are filled with life, by your whisper we are called—
called to love you, Triune God, with every particle of our being.
We confess that it is easier to hold a bit of ourselves back—
a corner of heart, for nursing grudges and hiding brokenness;
a corner of mind, for the things we’d never say out loud;
a bit of soul to hedge our bets;
a bit of strength so we can rely on ourselves.
But you call us to love as we have been loved, and nothing can come between your love for us. Nothing: not our hesitation or doubt, not our failure or our hiding.
Forgive our holding back and our fractured selves.
Make us whole again, and help us to love and forgive as you do.
We ask in the name of the One who loved us enough to lay down his life for the world, Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Friends, hear the good news: we love because God first loved us. From before the beginning, God’s grace has been the foundation of all things. Even today, the Spirit hovers in and among us, moving us to new life. Let us live as God’s people now: In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven, loved, and free.

In person music: Andantino by Leybach

Children’s Time (in person only)

Reading: Matthew 22.34-40 (Common English Bible), read by Rab Gowans

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had left the Sadducees speechless, they met together. One of them, a legal expert, tested him. “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?”
He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You must love your neighbour as you love yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”

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: The Key

Today we’re beginning a journey of re-visiting some of the classic Sunday school Bible stories that many people learned as children. Even the best Sunday school teachers and children’s Bibles often end up simplifying these stories to be age appropriate for young people, and then we sometimes find that as we grow up, we remember the basics of the simple story but we’ve missed out on some of the deeper meaning that could speak to us as adults with more mature faith, with our different questions and different experiences of the world. So for the next few months we’ll be digging into some Sunday school favourites and looking for what they have to say to us today.

The place to start is, of course, this little teaching by Jesus that tells us how we are to read the whole rest of scripture. Though that isn’t usually what we take away from it as children! About ten or fifteen years ago or so there was a holiday club curriculum that used this as its memory verse and even had a catchy action song to go with it — Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. And then the next verses said I will love the Lord….I will serve the Lord…you get the idea.

When the legal expert asked Jesus what was the greatest commandment in the Torah, it’s likely he expected an answer like this. Because the Shema, in Deuteronomy chapter 6, is the foundation of Jewish faith and life too. It says “hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” This is a verse that Jews have been reciting multiple times every day since the time of Moses— when they wake up, throughout the day as the foundation of many prayers, and when they go to bed. It is the first verse they’ll memorise and the one that will be their constant companion throughout their lives. So it would not have been a surprise to any of the legal experts or Pharisees or disciples or anyone else to hear Jesus claim this is the first and greatest commandment.

Though listen carefully — in Deuteronomy it says to love God with all your heart, soul, and might. In the ancient world, the heart was considered to be the seat of decision making, the source of our will as well as our desires, and might was both our physical strength and our resources, like the might of an army. So the command is to put your whole self, your spirit and your body and your possessions and your desire and your will, toward loving God. In Matthew’s telling, Jesus says to love God with all your heart, being, and mind. Or some translations will say heart, soul, and mind. Already in the first century, greco-roman philosophy had separated heart and mind, and together they superseded the body! Everything that controls your body, basically — everything that drives who you are and what you do — is to be focused on loving God. You may remember we heard Luke’s version a couple of months ago, where he reports Jesus saying to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, like the song…adding mind to the traditional Deuteronomy verse. Just so it’s clear that in a world that is becoming more and more intellectual, we’re supposed to use our minds to love God too! Indeed, God expects us to use the gift of our minds, not to simply turn them off and call that “faith.” The ways we think and the things we learn can be expressions of our love for God, and God can use our intellectual pursuits to answer prayer and build the kingdom.

What does it mean to love God with our whole selves this way? To direct the energies of our minds, bodies, and spirits to love? Jesus heads off the question with the very next sentence: “a second is like it” — meaning that this second commandment is the equal of the first, inseparable. It’s impossible to have one without the other. And the second is from Leviticus, chapter 19: love your neighbour as yourself. And so Jesus shows us what it means to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul: it means to love our neighbour as ourselves. Which, as is often pointed out, means also recognising the gift of God’s love for ourselves, because love for others can only come from being loved. And to love our neighbour, we love God. It’s a big Celtic knot infinity loop…the two are so intertwined as to really be one.

This is the moment in Luke’s gospel when the questioner follows up with “who is my neighbour?” thus prompting Jesus to tell the story of the Samaritan who stopped to help a person in need. But in Matthew’s version we usually just think the story ends here, even though perhaps the most important sentence is the one that we always leave out of our Sunday school lessons and holiday club memory verses! This conversation with the legal expert ends with Jesus saying “All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.” Or in some translations it might say “on these two commands hang all the law and the prophets.”

In other words, these two commandments are what hold the whole rest of scripture together. They are the key for understanding and applying everything else.

Jesus isn’t just telling us how to feel about God and our neighbour, and he isn’t only telling us to demonstrate our love for God by loving our neighbour as ourselves — he is explaining how we are to read the whole of our sacred text. Every story, every law, every letter, every prophet, every confusing bit and every part that seems so clear, all of it are to be read through the lens of these two commandments. They are like the tree trunk and the rest is branches and leaves, and the way we live it out is the fruit. So if there are things we read in the Bible that don’t seem to help us fulfil these two commands in our living here and now, then we are misunderstanding and need to read it again, asking the Spirit to help us.

That will be an important thing to remember as we revisit these stories we learned in Sunday school — and indeed an important thing to remember anytime we are in a conversation, or reading the comments on social media, or following a news story coming out of General Assembly, where someone says “well the Bible says…” Aside from the fact those weaponised bits are often taken out of context, there’s this larger issue: Jesus says that the whole of the Bible depends on these two commands: love God with all our heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love our neighbours as ourselves. If the teaching we are hearing does not lead us to more love, it is not leading us to Christlikeness, no matter who is saying it or how many verses they quote.

If this is the key to all of God’s word, then surely it is also the key to living in God’s kingdom, even now in this life: to put our whole self in, holding nothing back, in loving God and loving others. That means it isn’t just a feeling, because our feelings are only one part, but also our actions, our work, our play, our conversation, our resources…all of it focused on loving God and loving others. Whoever we are, whatever our personality or history or questions, the key is the same, and all of scripture and all of life depend on it. You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You must love your neighbour as you love yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”

May it be so. Amen.

Music: Hymn 622, We Sing A Love

Online: announcements
Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer
Loving God, we come today thankful for many things—
for the beauty of your creation,
for the laughter of children,
for the work of your church in General Assembly,
for glimpses of hope that catch our attention.
We are especially thankful for all the ways in which you fill our lives with your love.
We are grateful for those who make your love real in both word and action,
and we pray that you would move among us again,
that we too might love and be loved
through acts of compassion,
through words of comfort,
through prayer and song, through tears and laughter.

The world is troubled, Lord,
and many of us are troubled as well.
We pray for those who are sick, for those who struggle,
for those who are anxious.
May they feel themselves enfolded in your healing presence.
We lift up our voices on behalf of those desperate for the justice that leads to peace,
those whose voices are drowned out by bombs and cries and the pursuit of profit.
May your peace that passes all understanding seep into every place.
Open our eyes and ears, our minds and hearts, our hands
to be a support to those in need,
a friend to the lonely, makers of peace.
And open us up to one another too, God,
that we might be who we truly are,
share our lives with each other,
allow others in to our vulnerable places,
and so deepen our bonds to one another and to you,
allowing ourselves to know your love
that we might more fully share it with others.

In this difficult time in the world,
in this coming time of transition for your Church,
in the change to a new and more sustainable normal for our nation and world,
we pray that your love would be visible—
in the way we treat ourselves,
the way we treat our neighbour,
the way we treat our enemy.
Fill us with your Spirit of love and compassion and grace,
and send us out to share that love with all.

We pray in the name of 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.

Benediction
Go into your week to live out the love you have received, to direct your energy and your resources and your life to loving God and loving your neighbour as yourself. 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.

Benediction Response (tune: Gourock St. John’s, words by John L Bell)
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.

Announcements

* 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, and no singing yet. We can welcome approximately 33 people for worship, so if you would like to come in person, please phone Cameron (630879) on a MONDAY afternoon between 1-3pm or Anne Love (07904 617283) on a Saturday morning between 10-12 to book a place.

* Young Adult Bible Study is on Zoom at 1pm, we are reading through the Gospel According to Mark. Contact Teri for login details.

* Tonight we will gather with Christians across the nation for evening prayer on the Connect Facebook Page. David is leading tonight’s service, 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!

* The theme for worship during the season of Pentecost (30 May – 5 September, also known as Ordinary Time) will be “Sunday School Revisited” — look out for some well-known stories, and maybe even some crafts as we explore in depth the things we learned the basics about long ago.

* May includes Christian Aid week! While door to door collections, book sales, and coffee mornings are not possible, Christian Aid is encouraging us to undertake a month-long sponsored walk. If you would like to sponsor one of the other church members who have committed to this walk — Alison Bolster, Ann Stephenson, Ben MacSwan, Mhairi Gilchrist, or Teri, you can find all their fundraisers linked here. Or you can request a Christian Aid envelope (or go to the Christian Aid website) if you’d prefer to just make a more traditional donation. Don’t forget to GiftAid it!