Sunday Service for 20 September

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

* At this time the St John’s Kirk Session has decided, for a variety of reasons, not to open the building yet. We will continue to worship online and via the telephone recording ministry, with mid-week offerings on video and by email, and through phone calls and zoom gatherings. If you have questions about this, please do contact Teri, or Cameron, or your elder. However, the building works that were suspended during lockdown are again underway. If you see people around the church building, they are likely contractors, and we would ask that you go ahead and say hello but keep a safe distance, and do not enter the building at this time. It’s important that we do everything we can to ensure they have a safe worksite, so that they can continue the work both on the tower and inside the sanctuary as quickly and safely as possible.

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

* Coffee Fellowship Time will happen today on Zoom! The room will be open from 11:45 – 12:45 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 3 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 our “Fuzzy Parish” (now called CONNECT). Tonight’s service will be led by Teri, beginning at 6:58pm 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.

* Sign up to our YouTube Channel so you never miss a video. Don’t miss “wine and the word” — an occasional series during the 5pm hour that helps us transition from one part of the day to the next, via reflections similar to those that would normally have been in the “God’s Story, Our Story” take home inserts given out each week. 

* Mid-week there is a devotional email, which is also printed and included with the following Sunday’s sermon distribution to those without internet access. You can sign up for the email here.

* If you or a church member you know is in need of friendly phone calls or help with anything while they self-isolate, please contact Teri. Elders are already in contact with people in their districts as well, and you can pass information to them! We are hoping to continue and even deepen our connections to one another, building up the Body of Christ even when we can’t be in the building.

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Hymn 465: Be Thou My Vision

Prayers, Readings, Sermon:

Hymn: We Rejoice to be God’s Chosen (lyrics below video)

words: John L Bell (c) WGRG
tune: Nettleton

We rejoice to be God’s chosen
not through virtue, work or skill,
but because God’s love is generous,
unconformed to human will.
and because God’s love is restless
like the surging of the sea,
we are pulled by heaven’s dynamic
to become, not just to be.

We rejoice to be God’s chosen,
to be gathered to God’s side,
not to build a pious ghetto
or be steeped in selfish pride;
but to celebrate the goodness
of the One who sets us free
from the smallness of our vision
to become, not just to be.

We rejoice to be God’s chosen,
to align with heaven’s intent,
to await where we are summoned
and accept where we are sent.
We rejoice to be God’s chosen
and, amidst all that we see,
to anticipate with wonder
that the best is yet to be.

~~~~~~

Call to Worship and Opening Prayer
Come with thanks and praise, for the God of every blessing calls us to worship.
Come with your whole self, trusting and doubting, to meet the God who longs for relationship.
Come with trust that God is faithful.
Come, let us seek to be faithful in our worship and our lives.

Let us pray.
Creator God, you know us better than we know ourselves.
We come today with gratitude and with hope,
for we know you are everywhere present
and you will never forsake us.
Before a word is on our tongues, you know it completely. 
You always meet us with mercy, even before we can articulate
our desires, our needs, or our failings.
Your world of wonders surrounds us
with reminders of your grace and your power.
You are a God who makes and keeps promises.
When we are worried that your timeline and ours
don’t seem to match up,
and we get tired of waiting for your promise to come true:
lift our eyes to the stars.
When we have boxed you in to just one nice,
manageable way of being God,
uncomfortable with a dynamic, living relationship:
lift our eyes to the stars.
When we have kept our faith in our heads,
rather than living out our trust in you:
lift our eyes to the stars.
When we have narrowed our understanding of blessing,
and our vision of your promise is too small:
lift our eyes to the stars.
Forgive us, and open us to the fullness of your grace.
We trust in your mercy, and long for the power of your Spirit, and so we ask these things in the name of Jesus the Christ,
who showed us a still more excellent way,
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,
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.

Friends, hear and believe this good news: God’s love is beyond our imagining, and reaches even to us, even now, even here. Whatever our fears, anxieties, pains, or pasts, Christ meets us with grace and the Spirit opens our hearts and minds to live at peace. Thanks be to God. 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: Genesis 15.1-6

When God called Abram and Sarai to leave their home in Ur and go to a new land, they went without question, believing God’s promise of descendants as numerous as grains of sand, trusting that God would use them to bless the whole world. When the camp grew too large for the land to sustain all the herds and people, Abram’s nephew Lot took his part of the family and animals, and went to settle in another area. During a war between Canaanite tribes, Lot was kidnapped by raiders. Abram took his men and went to battle the hostile tribe, rescuing Lot and all his family and their possessions. Abram then refused to take any of the spoils of war, returning home having received only a blessing from the high priest of the area where Lot lived. We pick up the story from there, in Genesis 15, verses 1-6 (New Revised Standard Version)

15:1 After these things the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision, ‘Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great.’ 2 But Abram said, ‘O Lord God, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?’ 3 And Abram said, ‘You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.’ 4 But the word of the Lord came to him, ‘This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir.’ 5 He brought him outside and said, ‘Look towards heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.’ Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be.’ 6 And he believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.

Sermon: Look to the Stars

Many of you know that I have a tendency toward what I call “thinking about things.” Some of my friends might prefer the term “obsessing” and a mental health professional might use the term “ruminating” or “perseverating,” but I prefer “thinking about things” — and I do, I think about things a lot. Constantly. I like to go through everything in my mind, logically, and work out the different scenarios. If I do this, then this and this and this…..if we choose this other path, then this and this and this. I can spend hours, days even, thinking through all the possibilities and the different ramifications of each one.

Now, sometimes that leads to quite a bit of anxiety, because not enough of the options are good. I prefer win-win scenarios, where everyone has a good time and there’s peace and justice and goodness and maybe some adventure as the outcome. Sometimes that’s not possible and compromises have to be made. Other times there are no good options, no matter how hard I think, and that’s a pretty bleak spiral to find myself caught in.

That’s where Abraham is in today’s story — and God knows it. Though it isn’t clear that God had actually been reading Abraham’s mind, it is clear that God recognised that Abraham wasn’t feeling his best. God promised him blessing, and to make him a blessing to the whole world, but no matter which way Abraham turned over this problem in his mind, the facts were still the same: he had no children. So even though he had become a very wealthy man, and even though he had managed to settle down in the land and make peace with the neighbouring tribes and take care of Lot and his family, all those blessings kind of don’t matter since there would be no one to carry them on. All those blessings are temporary, and Abraham, now well into his 80s, was feeling his temporary-ness. If only he had an heir who could carry on his name and pick up the mantle of the promise to be a blessing to the world. But no…and so he concocted a legal workaround, making one of his enslaved servants his heir. That wasn’t exactly what he thought God had promised, but then again, that promise seemed like it wasn’t as durable as he’d hoped, so it was better to have a plan than no plan.

I know it might be hard to imagine being in such a situation, where things aren’t going the way we’d hoped, everything is taking way longer than we expected, and it’s impossible to plan for the future…but just try for a moment. You can see how easily Abraham might get mentally stuck in what I call a swirling vortex of despair, when it’s just him and Sarah, with no outlets, nowhere to go, and no future in sight. All Abraham needs is one son. That’s all. And it’s all he can think about, the one thing he wants, but seemingly can’t have. No matter how many other blessings there might be, the lack of that one thing overpowered everything else. And so God’s promise was frustratingly out of reach.

Into that anxiety comes God, starting off the conversation with “do not be afraid.” That’s quite an opening line, when speaking to an elderly gentleman who has been waiting years for God to fulfil a promise that was now physically impossible. So perhaps it isn’t surprising that Abraham’s response was quick and sharp: “what can you possibly give me that would matter? You haven’t given me the one thing that would make your promise true, so I’ve had to think up a backup plan on my own.”

I think we sometimes gloss over the way people speak to God in a lot of these stories. When we think about talking to God, we think about praying lovely words and asking nicely for things, saying thank you a lot in between each polite request. Even when we are desperate, in the middle of a global pandemic, begging God for healing and for relief from all this uncertainty and suffering, I think most of us at least try to ask nicely through our tears and loneliness. But Abraham here does not follow the acronym I was taught for prayers: ACTS—Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. You’re supposed to first tell God how great God is, then admit to not being great yourself, then thank God for all sorts of things, and then you ask for stuff.

For some reason, people in the Bible rarely follow this rule.

Abraham jumped right in with “what are you going to give me to make up for the fact that you have not fulfilled the promise you made all those years ago? Because I’ve been trying to work it out but really this was your job and you failed at it. I just need one thing, and it’s the one thing that even you can’t give me anymore. It’s too late. Thanks for nothing.”

There’s a part of us, I think, that recoils a bit at the idea of talking to God like this. But this is part of what it means to be in a real relationship — full honesty. Part of becoming God’s people is learning to be 100% ourselves with God, because God already knows us. There is nowhere we can hide from God, and we don’t need to. Look what happened, when Abraham spoke to God with that tone: God took him by the hand and led him outside, and lifted his eyes out of the swirling vortex of despair and toward the stars.

God didn’t say “how dare you speak to me that way! Time to wash out your mouth with soap.” God said “come for a walk. Look at what I’ve made before. Look how beautiful this world is. Look at your part in it. The promise I’ve made you is even bigger than the stars you can count in the sky, and given that I made that, you can trust that I’ll make you into something bright and beautiful too.”

There’s plenty of uncertainty around, and I know we’re all familiar with delayed dreams and plans. The world is not what we hoped it would be. We are tired of waiting…tired of waiting for an end to pandemic restrictions so we can go on holiday or have a birthday party, tired of waiting for justice and for society to be equitable for all people, tired of waiting for people in power to care about climate change, tired of waiting for an economic system that works for everyone rather than just a few, tired of waiting for a cure for cancer, tired of waiting for the chance to safely gather in church, tired of waiting for so many things. Jesus said God’s kingdom was here among us, but we have yet to see it fulfilled. So we, like Abraham, try to figure something out for ourselves. We create solutions that seem okay for now, and we pretend they’re good enough. We long for a return to normal, even though normal wasn’t anywhere near as good for everyone as we think we remember.

Remember, Abraham only wanted one thing: just one child.

And God showed him the stars. That’s how many descendants he would have.

What if our vision is too small, and God’s promise is even bigger than the things we are waiting for?

What if God’s promise is way better than simply “back to normal”?

Look to the stars.

Count them, if you are able.

And remember that the light you see today is already many years old. There are only around 100 stars within 20 light years — meaning that for nearly all the stars we see in the sky, it takes more than a generation for their light to reach our eyes! That light has been shining into space…and only now is it visible to us. God’s work is a long game, and we may not always be able to see it. But it is still there.

It says then that Abraham looked at the stars — lifted his eyes and his mind out of his swirling vortex of despair, stopped his obsessive thinking about one small aspect of blessing that he was missing, and looked at the stars…and he trusted God. He trusted the relationship that God had built with him, and that the promise was true, even if it didn’t seem true yet. The light was still traveling through space, but at some point, he would see it twinkling on the horizon.

This trust is the foundation of the kind of relationship we see between God and Abraham…and the kind of relationship God wants to have with us, too. Trust is what makes it possible to talk so openly and passionately to God, knowing God won’t get angry and walk away. Trust is what makes it possible to listen when God whispers “look at the stars” and to wonder at the vastness of God’s vision. Trust is what makes it possible to live toward the promise even when we can’t see it yet.

As we continue this journey of becoming God’s people, may we grow in trust — the trust that enables honesty and that opens our hearts and minds to see God’s promise that is for far more than we can imagine.

Amen.

Prayer
You are the God who protects,
and the God who gives,
and the God who promises.
We come longing for your protection
for the earth, the seas, and the skies.
Especially we pray for those places facing fire and flood.
We lift our eyes to the stars and pray for your creation,
and all who dwell within it and depend upon it.
May we treat this world as a blessing,
not only a tool to be exploited.

We join our voices with our ancestors in the faith,
boldly asking for your gifts —
of healing for those who suffer in body, mind, or spirit;
of peace for those who live in the midst of violence;
of hope for those who cannot see past the shadows;
of nourishment for those who are hungry.
Especially we pray for those who are ill or grieving alone during these times,
for those whose livelihoods are in danger as we struggle through the pandemic,
for those seeking a safer or more prosperous home,
facing treacherous travel and uncertain welcomes,
and for the leaders of our communities and nations,
that they may do justice and love kindness and walk humbly
through the task of seeking the common good.
We lift our eyes to the stars and pray for our neighbours, near and far.
May they experience your abundant life.

We look to your promises,
praying for the grace and courage to trust your word.
Make our lives an image of your love,
and guide us to act on your call —
to reach out with your compassion,
to offer your care even when we don’t fully understand,
to make your kingdom visible here and now.
We lift our eyes to the stars and pray to see your vision.
May we be faithful to your Way.

We bring these prayers to you, our Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. Amen.

Benediction

Friends, as you go into your week, look to the stars. God’s vision is greater than we can imagine, and you can trust God’s promise.
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.