Sunday Service 4 October 2020

4 October 2020
Service prepared by the Rev. Teri C Peterson
Gourock St John’s Church of Scotland
Contact: tpeterson at churchofscotland dot org dot uk

Though we cannot yet be together in person, we can be together in spirit! Please note the following announcements:

* In September, Starter Packs were provided to 33 homes. Within these homes were 21 single people, and 12 families including 20 children. At the moment as donations are reduced some items are in short supply, they are looking urgently for Washing Up Liquid, Cleaning Cloths, Ladies Shampoo, Soap and Face Cloths. Thank you for your support!

* Coffee Fellowship Time will happen today on Zoom! The room will be open from 11:45 – 1 today, for you to drop in for however long you wish, so grab a cup of tea or coffee (or juice or whatever you prefer!) and maybe a biscuit, and come have a chat! We look forward to seeing you!

* 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 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 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!

* We also now have an audio recording of the service available on the phone! Simply dial 01475 270 037 to listen to the most recent service. Please share this number with your neighbours, friends, family, and fellow church goers who don’t have the internet, so they can listen in!

* The theme for worship this autumn is “Becoming God’s People.” We’ll be exploring  who God is and how God’s character informs God’s actions, and how our actions also ought to be informed by that character…by way of stories of God and humanity working out their relationship with one another through the Old Testament.

* Children’s Time happens each Sunday morning at 11am on Zoom. If you would like the login details, please contact Teri. 

* The Young Adult Bible Study (BYOPizza) meets via Zoom at 1pm, reading chapter 4 of the Book of Revelation! If you’re aged 15-25 and would like the login details, please contact Teri.

* Churches across Scotland are calling people to join together in prayer on Sunday evenings at 7pm, placing a lit candle in the window and spending time in prayer for others. Our Sunday evening prayer services will be shared across CONNECT. Tonight’s service will be led by all three Connect clergy, beginning at 6:57pm on the Connect Facebook page, and be sure to like / follow it while you’re there!

* Feel free to share this with others, with the attribution information at the top. If you know someone who does not have access to the internet and who also does not receive the tape ministry, you can either print this service out and share it with them, or let Teri know via email or phone call and we will be sure they receive a printed copy.

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Hymn 253: Inspired by Love and Anger

Prayers, Reading, Sermon

Hymn: If Not Now

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Call to Worship and Opening Prayer

Wherever we are in the world, God calls us:
to prepare
to remember
to share
to worship
to be formed and transformed as God’s people.
With our neighbours near and far, we gather:
at tables,
in homes,
outdoors,
virtually and in person,
recognising the time is now, God’s kingdom is near.
Come, for all is ready.
Let us pray.

Liberating God, you are making all things new.
We confess that we don’t always see the need for “new.”
The way things are works for us,
and we admit we have become complacent.
We are good at using words of freedom and justice,
but too often we resist the tangible implications
of your liberating grace.
We see the needs of the world
and the oppression of our neighbours,
but insist on taking more time, going slow,
ensuring everyone is in agreement before taking any action.
Forgive us for telling our neighbours to wait for justice.
Forgive us for holding back when you are calling us forward, urgently, now.
Forgive us for believing
that we can control the spread of freedom so that no one —
or no one like us — needs to be uncomfortable.
Change our hearts and our lives, now.
Make today the new beginning
that marks the coming of your kingdom among us.
We pray 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,
and 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.

Sung Prayer #139 vv. 1 & 4
(words: Iain D Cunningham, tune: cwm rhondda)

God the Father of Creation,
source of life and energy,
your creative love so shapes us
that we share your liberty.
Teach us how to use this freedom
loving children all to be,
loving children all to be.

Members of our Saviour’s body,
here on earth his life to be,
though we stand as different people,
may we share the unity
of the Father, Son, and Spirit,
perfect love in Trinity,
perfect love in Trinity.

Reading: Exodus 12.1-13, 13.1-8
Last week we heard the story of Joseph and his brothers and how the family of the Israelites ended up in Egypt. They grew and were prosperous and safe there…until a new king rose over Egypt, who did not remember Joseph and his leadership in the previous crisis, or how these foreign people came to have such an integral place within the nation. That pharaoh began to imagine that the Israelites were dangerous, and so shifted the policy and the culture of Egypt until the Israelites ended up oppressed and enslaved, and the Egyptians were commanded to throw the Israelite children into the Nile to die. As a baby, Moses was drawn out of the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter, and brought up as her own. After an altercation that ended with him killing an Egyptian taskmaster, he fled into the desert, where he married and looked after the flocks of his father-in-law. God met him out in the desert, in a bush that was aflame yet not burned up, and called him to go back to Egypt to set his people free. Moses and his brother Aaron had a number of conversations with Pharaoh in which Pharaoh refused, and so God began to send plagues on Egypt. We pick up the story in between the ninth and tenth plagues, on the eve of the Israelites’ escape from Egypt, in the book of Exodus, chapter 12, verses 1-13, and then continuing at chapter 13, verses 1-8. I am reading from the New Revised Standard Version.

The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt: This month shall mark for you the beginning of months; it shall be the first month of the year for you. Tell the whole congregation of Israel that on the tenth of this month they are to take a lamb for each family, a lamb for each household. If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbour in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it. Your lamb shall be without blemish, a year-old male; you may take it from the sheep or from the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month; then the whole assembled congregation of Israel shall slaughter it at twilight. They shall take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the houses in which they eat it. They shall eat the lamb that same night; they shall eat it roasted over the fire with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. Do not eat any of it raw or boiled in water, but roasted over the fire, with its head, legs, and inner organs. You shall let none of it remain until the morning; anything that remains until the morning you shall burn. This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the Lord. For I will pass through the land of Egypt that night, and I will strike down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, both human beings and animals; on all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments: I am the Lord. The blood shall be a sign for you on the houses where you live: when I see the blood, I will pass over you, and no plague shall destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.

And continuing in chapter 13:
The Lord said to Moses: Consecrate to me all the firstborn; whatever is the first to open the womb among the Israelites, of human beings and animals, is mine.
Moses said to the people, “Remember this day on which you came out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, because the Lord brought you out from there by strength of hand; no leavened bread shall be eaten. Today, in the month of Abib, you are going out. When the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, which he swore to your ancestors to give you, a land flowing with milk and honey, you shall keep this observance in this month. Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread, and on the seventh day there shall be a festival to the Lord. Unleavened bread shall be eaten for seven days; no leavened bread shall be seen in your possession, and no leaven shall be seen among you in all your territory. You shall tell your child on that day, ‘It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’

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: An Urgent Need For Community

Over the past 450 years, some things had changed. When Joseph’s family arrived in Egypt, they were welcomed, they settled in the fertile land of the Nile Delta, they raised their families and got on with life. Over time, though, things started to change. Slowly at first…a slight shift here, a minor move there. And most people don’t pay much attention to politics, as they’re focused on their farms and families. Eventually, though, the culture and economy and politics had moved so far to one side that it started to be a little concerning…but what can you do? We learned to live with it, because it is what it is, after all. You can get used to just about anything, adjust and adapt…and that’s true on both sides of the story. The people who were being oppressed found ways to cope, and the people doing the oppressing found ways to justify it. By the time we get to enslaving the neighbours and attempting genocide, we’re like the proverbial frog in the pot of water. We’ve gotten so used to the way things are, that even a series of disasters just starts to feel like another headline in the endless news cycle. What can we do, but lament that things aren’t like they used to be, and then turn our attention back to the work right in front of us, hoping someone, somewhere, will do something about that bigger issue before it gets any worse?

We may recognise that sense of dejected apathy or complacency…and that moment is the one where God broke in and said “something new is about to happen, and it’ll be so big you’ll literally need a new calendar. It’ll be like nothing you’ve ever seen. Get ready. Put on your shoes, pack your bags, grab the keys, throw the dough on the fire without waiting for it to proof, you don’t even have time to boil water for soup, just roast the lamb whole…honestly, hurry up, people!”

I wonder if the Israelites understood the urgency of the situation, or if they thought “but we’ve been living with this for ages, what’s the rush?” After all, when God commands this ritual, they don’t yet know that they are going to be leaving Egypt that night — it isn’t until after all the instructions are given that they find out that the tenth plague is coming, and even then, God doesn’t say they’re going to be running for their lives and heading for the sea and the desert on the other side, only that there will be deaths among the Egyptians. So why did they need to hurry? They were used to this.

If we are able to recognise ourselves and our current situation in this biblical story, then what is it that might be this urgent now? We’ve gotten used to the political atmosphere and believing we can’t do much about it, we’ve decided to just cope with an economic system that destroys the environment and privileges a very few while the rest are expendable, and we have become complacent about a culture that is more about us-and-them divisions than about welcome and inclusion and wholeness. Every time we adapt without pushing back on a move that shifts those things even more to one side — whether it’s floating the idea of creating a migrant-processing island; or closing the ICU at the hospital in the most deprived area of the country; or letting some people get away with breaking the law or lying even though they put others at risk; or both companies and governments greenwashing their policies while still spending money on fossil fuels behind the scenes — we are making it even harder to see the urgency of God’s call to a new thing.

The Israelites may not have understood what the big rush was, any more than we do most of the time. But the ritual that God commanded them to do was designed to help them get ready for the big changes that were coming.


It may seem on the surface like having a particular evening meal cooked in a particular way and while sitting in a particular position wouldn’t make much difference. But the reality is that when they participated in this religious ritual, it prepared their minds and hearts for what God was doing next. Choosing a lamb and looking after it for a few days to be sure it was perfect meant that their attention would be focused and their sense of personal investment would be heightened. Smearing the blood on the doorposts meant that they were declaring their membership as part of this family of faith, and their trust that God was in their midst that night. Knowing that the entire community was preparing the same meal on the same night meant that their sense of community spirit and togetherness would increase. Cooking and eating in a hurry, with their shoes and coats on and their bags in their hands, meant that they had that adrenaline rush of excitement and nerves that they were living through history being changed.

And they were. This moment in history, when the Israelites left Egypt, will be the moment that God uses to define Godself from now on. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt” will be the way God speaks and is described throughout the rest of history, so it isn’t only the people who are being told that this is the first month, the beginning of a new calendar and new sense of time — that’s true for God too. This is the defining moment for God and for God’s people. It is so important that they’re told, as we heard, to be careful to remember, so they can observe these traditions and tell the stories to the next generation, so that hopefully they too will remember the urgency of God’s liberating love.

So what’s urgent now, in 2020? And how might God be calling us to get ready for a new thing, even though we don’t understand it yet? What spiritual practices would help us to get ready?

There can be a lot of different answers to that, of course. Though there is one little line in today’s reading that I think might be a word for us today. It’s a line that’s easy to gloss over, but in our current environment it speaks volumes. In chapter 12 verse 4, it says “If a household is too small for a whole lamb, it shall join its closest neighbour in obtaining one; the lamb shall be divided in proportion to the number of people who eat of it.” In other words, no one is to be left out of this ritual preparation for God’s new thing. The entire community is to ensure that every single household can participate. No family is too small or too poor to be included, and it is the responsibility of the larger or wealthier family to divide up their lamb to include their neighbours.

Now, this would require actually knowing our neighbours, both who they are and how they are. It would require taking initiative to reach out and offer. It would require every single one of us noticing each other and taking every step to ensure that everyone is included and welcomed. Even though this first passover was celebrated with every family in their own homes, the whole community worked together to make certain that no one was left out or went without. And even though the command was urgent and hurried, they were still to make time to care for everyone.

In a world that is fractured and fearful and often complacent about the precipice on which we stand, we have an urgent need for community. More than ever it is crucial to bring people together, regardless of their status or their ability to buy in. Every single person in the community is important and we do not get to simply overlook God’s command to include them and care for them, no matter how inconvenient or expensive it might be for us — and that should be reflected in our political, economic, cultural, and relational decisions. Ultimately, it will be all of us together that participate in this ritual meal, and all of us together that walk through the red sea, and all of us together that will walk in the wilderness, all of us together that make up the Body of Christ…it takes all of us together to become God’s people.

May it be so. Amen.

I want to share with you today a couple of verses of a hymn. It has a refrain that reminds us how the whole creation will respond with joy and wholeness when we are following God’s call — rather than singing the refrain after each verse, I am going to only sing two verses and then the refrain one time. This hymn is called “Light Dawns on a Weary World.” (words: Mary Louise Bringle; tune: Temple of Peace by William Rowan)

Light dawns on a weary world
When eyes begin to see
All people’s dignity.
Light dawns on a weary world:
The promised day of justice comes.

Love grows in a weary world
When hungry hearts find bread
And children’s dreams are fed.
Love grows in a weary world:
The promised feast of plenty comes.

Refrain:
The trees shall clap their hands;
The dry lands, gush with springs;
The hills and mountains
shall break forth with singing!
We shall go out in joy,
And be led forth in peace,
As all the world in wonder
echoes shalom.

Prayer

God of love and justice,
you have brought us again to a new beginning.
We thank you for your creating word,
for your constant presence guiding our way,
for your call that echoes through the generations.
With gratitude for your gifts of freedom and community,
we remember all you have done for us —
creating, redeeming, and sustaining,
drawing us ever nearer to you.
We thank you for the gift of your Son,
for how he worked with urgency to bring your kingdom near,
and that through your Spirit your power of life continually rises,
challenging the ways of this world.
Where we have grown apathetic or complacent,
we pray your Spirit would move our hearts
to care for our neighbour as for ourselves.
Where we have felt helpless in the face of too-big problems,
we pray your Spirit would empower us
to work for your kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven.
Where we have abdicated our responsibility
as people of privilege,
we pray your Spirit would call us back to your vision
and give us courage to follow your way.
Where we have believed ourselves separate
from the rest of your Body,
we pray your Spirit would draw us together,
stretching our minds, our hearts, and our hands
to reach to your people across this space and across the globe,
each beloved, each valued, each needed, each welcomed.
We bring to mind
those for whom a good hearty meal is a distant dream,
those who long for just a cup of clean water,
those who have been turned away from your table,
those who feel unworthy and unwanted,
those who are living with loss, illness, or despair,
those who have been silenced or forgotten,
those who have waited patiently for our attention,
those who cannot afford to wait one more minute.
In your Body, you join us together,
wherever we are on the globe,
whatever the strength of our faith,
calling us to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep,
and to build up your body with compassion and grace.
We pray for your wholeness, your healing, and your justice
for your world.
We ask these and all things in the name of the One
who lived your Love,
and even now brings us into your story, Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Benediction
As you go into your week, keep your eyes open for God’s urgency, and for ways to ensure all are included as we build up community for God’s kingdom.
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
Words and tune (Gourock St. John’s): 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.