Sunday Service for 2 May 2021, Fifth Sunday of Easter

Sunday Service for 2 May 2021, Fifth Sunday of Easter
Prepared by Rev. Teri Peterson, Gourock St. John’s
Manse phone: 632143 
Email: tpeterson (at) churchofscotland.org.uk

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

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Prelude Music (in person only)

Welcome/Announcements

Call to Worship and Opening Prayer
Come, let us celebrate what God is doing!
Listen to the stories of the Spirit changing lives,
through the work and words of others…and in spite of them.
Listen to the stories of the Risen Christ reinterpreting our ancient words,
inviting us to new ways of being together.
Listen to the stories of God’s people past and present,
showing us where God is leading.
Rejoice, for the Living One is here, calling us on!
Come, let us follow in faith.

Let us pray.
You move where you will, O God.
Bring us on board with what you are doing, here and now.
When we are frightened by your freedom,
give us ears to hear the testimony of others
and guide us to joyful new community.
When we are uncertain of what to do next,
give us minds and hearts to discern your presence
and courage to follow your lead.
Now open your word to us and shed its light on our lives,
on our community,
on this world.
Amen.

Music
In person:
Online: Build Your Kingdom Here

Children’s Time (in person only)

Reading: Acts 15.1-23a, Common English Bible
Last week we heard about Philip’s encounter with the Ethiopian eunuch, when Philip told the story of Jesus and the eunuch was baptised. After that, the book of Acts goes on to tell more stories of the followers of Jesus who had left Jerusalem because of the persecution led by Saul, who is also called Paul. Soon, however, Paul found himself knocked off his horse while he was traveling to Damascus to chase down some Christ-followers, and he had his own personal encounter with the risen Lord that changed everything for him. His heart and mind were changed, and his way of life followed suit. He began to proclaim the good news of Jesus, even to people who were still afraid of him as he had been their persecutor until just a few days ago! Around this same time, Peter was praying on the rooftop when he saw a vision of many animals, and heard the voice of God say “what I have called clean, you must not call unclean.” When his vision ended, a knock on the door brought messengers from a Gentile family asking him to come and speak to them, and while he was telling the story of Jesus to them, the Holy Spirit filled them all just as it had on the first Pentecost morning. Peter then explained to anyone who would listen that God was at work among the Gentiles and he would be following God’s lead in that mission. We pick up the story today in Antioch, where Paul was leading a new church community made up mostly of Gentiles who had come to follow Jesus. This is Acts chapter 15, and I am reading from the Common English Bible.
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Some people came down from Judea teaching the family of believers, “Unless you are circumcised according to the custom we’ve received from Moses, you can’t be saved.” Paul and Barnabas took sides against these Judeans and argued strongly against their position.
The church at Antioch appointed Paul, Barnabas, and several others from Antioch to go up to Jerusalem to set this question before the apostles and the elders. The church sent this delegation on their way. They traveled through Phoenicia and Samaria, telling stories about the conversion of the Gentiles to everyone. Their reports thrilled the brothers and sisters. When they arrived in Jerusalem, the church, the apostles, and the elders all welcomed them. They gave a full report of what God had accomplished through their activity. Some believers from among the Pharisees stood up and claimed, “The Gentiles must be circumcised. They must be required to keep the Law from Moses.”
The apostles and the elders gathered to consider this matter. After much debate, Peter stood and addressed them, “Fellow believers, you know that, early on, God chose me from among you as the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the word of the gospel and come to believe. God, who knows people’s deepest thoughts and desires, confirmed this by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, but purified their deepest thoughts and desires through faith. Why then are you now challenging God by placing a burden on the shoulders of these disciples that neither we nor our ancestors could bear? On the contrary, we believe that we and they are saved in the same way, by the grace of the Lord Jesus.”
The entire assembly fell quiet as they listened to Barnabas and Paul describe all the signs and wonders God did among the Gentiles through their activity. When Barnabas and Paul also fell silent, James responded, “Fellow believers, listen to me. Simon reported how, in his kindness, God came to the Gentiles in the first place, to raise up from them a people of God. The prophets’ words agree with this; as it is written,
After this I will return,
        and I will rebuild David’s fallen tent;
        I will rebuild what has been torn down.
            I will restore it
            so that the rest of humanity will seek the Lord,
                even all the Gentiles who belong to me.
The Lord says this, the one who does these things
    known from earliest times.

“Therefore, I conclude that we shouldn’t create problems for Gentiles who turn to God. Instead, we should write a letter, telling them to avoid the pollution associated with idols, sexual immorality, eating meat from strangled animals, and consuming blood. After all, Moses has been proclaimed in every city for a long time, and is read aloud every Sabbath in every synagogue.”
The apostles and the elders, along with the entire church, agreed to send some delegates chosen from among themselves to Antioch, together with Paul and Barnabas. They selected Judas Barsabbas and Silas, who were leaders among the brothers and sisters. They were to carry this letter.

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: Like Us, or Like Christ?

This is one of those passages that always elicits a bit of a blank look from people…and many of you may be wondering whether I just had the session clerk read out the minutes of the first church council meeting and the related correspondence. Yes, yes I did.

It was a meeting convened for the purpose of hearing from missionaries who had been summoned 420 miles back to Jerusalem from Antioch to attend the meeting and report on their activities, especially the part about different kinds of people joining the church. The assembly listened to their report, probably wishing for a powerpoint presentation to keep everything straight. There were two different visions of how inclusive the church should be, and the people on each side both made motions which had to be debated on the floor, probably complete with people who rambled a bit, and those who pretended they were asking a question so they could make a statement, and those who didn’t know how to use the microphone. One of the former moderators stood up and told a personal story. And then Paul and Barnabas, who had made the report, closed the debate with their own closing statement.

After the debate, the assembly took time to pray, hear a scripture from the prophets, and listen to a sermon. And then they voted, and the results of the vote were communicated to the churches via letter. Then they commissioned new missionaries to join those who are returning to Antioch, then adjourned and published the minutes.

I always knew the apostles must have been Presbyterians.

One of the beautiful things about the Presbyterian tradition is that we discern the movement of the spirit in community. Just as God, the three in one, is eternally together in a mysterious equal communal relationship, so we the church are also eternally bound together—and we try very hard to also have equality within our communal relationships, listening to one another, hoping to hear the voice of God through the voices of the church. We truly believe that we can best see where the Spirit is moving when we look and listen together.

That first church council meeting may seem far away now, but the problem they were addressing is surprisingly contemporary. They were trying to decide whether new people who joined the Christian community needed to become like the people who were already members, or whether the point of being in community together was that all of us are seeking to become like Christ.

It was a question of assimilation for some, or transformation for all.

In so many ways, that is still the question we are asking about church. In order to be part of a church community, do people need to become like us, those of us who are already here?

The first church members in Jerusalem were concerned that if non-Jews joined the church, they needed to follow the same rules of life or else there’d be a situation where people in the same community led vastly different everyday lives. The Torah gave structure to their week, and helped them know what to eat and what not to eat, what activities to do when, what to do if they encountered various situations or people, and so much more. It was a spiritual guidebook that organised their lives, giving them a faith lens on every aspect of life. It was a whole worldview that these new people did not have, and the original members insisted they needed to learn. After all, how could they be in community with people whose experience of God in everyday life was different?

It’s sometimes easy to say “change happens” and to forget that with change comes grief. Those original members had a sense of loss — because if new people joined without having to do all the things that they did to come close to God, then they would also be losing that easy shorthand they could do with each other, and the expectations they’d never had to articulate before would now have to be said, and the whole community would no longer have shared story of who they were and how they got here and what they were called to do.

What if people join in online ministry but don’t have any attachment to our church building? What if people participate in youth activities but not in Sunday worship? What if people whose life experience, or accent, or clothes, or family background is really different want to come to church? What if people want to be part of our Christian community but they don’t understand or even care very much about our favourite traditions?

This story of the first church council meeting and the grief that comes with letting go of our desire for assimilation in order that we can receive the gift of all being transformed in Christlikeness together is a story that has played out throughout history. From the beginning, there has been a challenge of continuity — how does our faith evolve, as God continues to do new things in and through the world?

I heard a sermon once by Otis Moss III in which he used the metaphor of a remix—where you take an old song and make it new, maybe with new instrumentation, different voices, or using new technology. He argued that when we see the whole arc of scripture, we see God’s people constantly making remixes—Joshua is a remix of Moses, Paul is a remix of Jesus, and so on. The same is true in the church through the centuries: that we have taken the same essential message and told it in different ways. We can see it already in this first Council meeting, as Peter points out that in all the arguing about whether or not new Christians have to also be physically made into new Jews, points out the core reality: “we will all be saved by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ”…and then James reminds us that God has been telling this story from the beginning.

This message is the lyrics and basic melody of the song. It’s the unchanging part. All around those lyrics, we might make new chord progressions, use different ways of playing the melody, add in new effects, but the message is the same: all of us are saved by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.

In this remix, the council agrees that it is not necessary for people who want to follow Jesus to first be circumcised and follow Moses. They go for a more inclusive option, letting go of some old rules and practices that are not, in and of themselves, the message. It is necessary to hear the stories and to hold fast to the first commandment, and so they lay out the things that means in their time: no engaging in the rituals of the pagan temples and feasts, which included temple prostitution and acting on behalf of idols in consuming offerings made to them.

We hear the admonition to stay away from the rituals of temple prostitution and strangled offerings and blood and think “hey, that’s pretty easy!” It’s worth remembering that just as the gospel message can be remixed through the years, so can the temptations that draw us away from Christ, especially in the area of the first commandment against idolatry. The big issue of society was whether or not one participated in the rituals that made it possible to live safely and prosperously in the empire, and it still is…but now our idolatry seems to take much more insidious forms than whether we attend a pagan feast. Perhaps today the elders would write to the churches to abstain from white supremacy, or militant nationalism, or products made by low wage workers chained to sewing machines. After all, the temple prostitutes and bloody offerings were a part of the way things were, but they were also practices that drew them away from focusing on Christ, no matter what their intentions may have been. Anything that takes precedence over God in our priority list is an idol, including our own desires or security, and the council is clear that we are to abstain from anything polluted by idols. How much of our economy, our political system, our social structures, even our church traditions, are polluted by idols?

In the end, though, there is still the core message: no matter what mistakes we make along the way, nothing can separate us from God’s love—we are all saved by the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ. His grace and love crosses lines of generation and ethnicity and politics and length of membership and favourite style of music. And we are all meant to be ever more like him, not demanding that others become ever more like us first. What might happen if we followed the Spirit to yet another remix of the old old story?

The Council sent their message back to the church in Antioch, and the story continued to spread. The followers of Christ didn’t sit in their buildings waiting for people to come to them, they looked for where God was already working, even in places they didn’t think God ought to be. They followed the Spirit’s movement and went out to meet people where they were and joined them in the mission to become like Christ and to transform the world toward the kingdom of God.

May it be so. Amen.

Hymn 522: The Church is Wherever God’s People Are

Prayer and the Lord’s Prayer

Living God,
You are at work, and we give you thanks.
We offer our gratitude for the many ways you reach across our boundaries
and break down the boxes we have built for each other and for you.
We pray for all who have been boxed out of community by our human rules.
We pray for all who have been boxed in by our expectations.
May our community be more like your Body each day.

We pray for a world that has been so fractured and fragmented, as we have made distinctions and divisions between us and them.
We pray for a world that speaks of wholeness, healing, and peace, yet does not pursue it.
May we remember your call, and be re-membered by your love and justice.

We pray for those who are anxious, especially in these times of big change.
We pray for those who are tired of advocating for themselves and wish change would come faster.
May they be upheld by your persistence and comforted by your love.

We pray for places where violence is a first resort instead of last.
We pray for victims who suffer and for perpetrators who have lost sight of our shared humanity.
May your peace that passes all understanding fill our hearts, our homes, our world.

We pray for people who have big stories of your goodness to tell.
We pray for people who are still learning to speak of the grace they have seen.
We pray for people who need to hear, and who want to hear, and who are learning to listen.
May your word echo through this space between us, that we might come to trust.

We ask these and all things in the name of the One
who heals all division, re-members us into his Body, and renews all life:
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.

Benediction
Friends, go into your week looking for where God is at work, and make it a point to join in the mission that we all might become more like Christ together. 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.

Postlude Music (in person only)

Announcements
* NEXT SUNDAY, the 9th of May, we will welcome the Rt. Rev. Dr. Martin Fair, Moderator of the General Assembly, to lead us in in-person worship. The online/print/telephone service will be slightly different, as it will be the service he curates each week for use across the nation.

* 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. Teri and David are 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!

* The theme for worship during the season of Easter is “Re-membering” — being put back together as a community, perhaps in new ways! Easter is a season that lasts 50 days, from Easter Day until Pentecost.

* 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!

* 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. Can you, or a group/family, commit to walking 300,000 steps during the month of May? It’s around 10,000 steps per day. Get some sponsors and get walking — together we can become more fit and also help people most in need. You can collect your sponsorships in an envelope and send them to the church for forwarding to christian aid, or you can collect donations online. If you need help with that, contact Teri.