Sunday service for 8 September 2024

Sunday 8 September 2024
Gourock St. John’s Church of Scotland
Service prepared by Rev. Teri Peterson
Manse: 632143 
Email Teri: TPeterson (at) churchofscotland.org.uk
Email Charlene, Parish Assistant: CMitchell (at) churchofscotland.org.uk

Prelude Music (praise band)

Welcome & Announcements

We Gather As God’s Family (As the Bible is brought in, we stand and sing)
A family gathered in love,
striving for justice and joy,
blessing the broken-hearted,
and sharing the hope of God’s kingdom.

Call to Worship
1: Handmade
unique
2: Fearfully and wonderfully made
1: Created to tend God’s garden
2: Beauty and delight and purpose
mingled with dust and breath and love
1: We are God’s own handiwork
2: and we bring our praise

Sanctuary Hymn 124: Praise to the Lord

Prayer
Your creation is good, O God —
a delight, a joy.
We confess that we don’t always believe you when you say so,
and instead we use your creation for our own ends,
forgetting it is more than just a tool to serve us,
forgetting we are made to tend and serve creation too.
Forgive us, Creator God.
Your breath fills us and brings us to life, O God.
We confess that isn’t always enough for us,
and so we use your breath for our own ends,
speaking words that manipulate, confuse, and sow division.
Forgive us, Breath of Life.
You offer yourself to us, O God.
We confess that some part of us wants both more and less,
and so we talk about you rather than to you,
hiding from full relationship behind interpretations that serve our own ends,
refusing to take responsibility for pain we perpetuate.
Forgive us, Living Word.
~silence~
God who makes beautiful things,
getting your hands dirty,
looking into the eyes of your creatures,
so close we share the same breath,
move us first to gratitude for this precious gift of life,
and then move us to action,
tending your gorgeous garden to bear fruit for your kingdom.
Amen.

Online Hymn 160: Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven

Sanctuary Children’s Time

Scripture Reading: Genesis 2.4b-7, 15-17, 3.1-8 (Common English Bible)
On the day the Lord God made earth and sky— before any wild plants appeared on the earth, and before any field crops grew, because the Lord God hadn’t yet sent rain on the earth and there was still no human being to farm the fertile land, though a stream rose from the earth and watered all of the fertile land— the Lord God formed the human from the topsoil of the fertile land and blew life’s breath into his nostrils. The human came to life.
The Lord God took the human and settled him in the garden of Eden to farm it and to take care of it. The Lord God commanded the human, “Eat your fill from all of the garden’s trees; but don’t eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, because on the day you eat from it, you will die!”

Continuing in chapter 3, after all the animals have been named, none were found to be a full partner for the human, and so the human has been split into man and woman:
The snake was the most intelligent of all the wild animals that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say that you shouldn’t eat from any tree in the garden?”
The woman said to the snake, “We may eat the fruit of the garden’s trees but not the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden. God said, ‘Don’t eat from it, and don’t touch it, or you will die.’”
The snake said to the woman, “You won’t die! God knows that on the day you eat from it, you will see clearly and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The woman saw that the tree was beautiful with delicious food and that the tree would provide wisdom, so she took some of its fruit and ate it, and also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. Then they both saw clearly and knew that they were naked. So they sewed fig leaves together and made garments for themselves.
During that day’s cool evening breeze, they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden; and the man and his wife hid themselves from the Lord God in the middle of the garden’s trees.

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.

*Sanctuary Hymn: We Are the Tenants of the King (Resound — Praise Band)

Sermon: un-hide
Many of you will know about me that I like to know things. Perhaps you are also a person who likes to know things. I love learning, I love hearing people’s stories, and I love having information. Some might call me nosy, some might call me an insufferable know-it-all — both have been said, and worse! But the honest truth is that I’m a head person, I like thinking things through and figuring things out and turning around pieces of knowledge until everything makes sense.

The flip side, though, is that it can feel like there’s never enough information, like I always need to learn one more thing before I can move forward. And sometimes it means that I spend far more time than I should in today’s ever popular pastime of doomscrolling — scrolling through the news and reading more and more about the terrible things that are going on in the world, trying to learn that one thing that will make it all make sense, when the reality is that a lot of what’s happening seems so senseless. Genocide in one place, famine in another, drought in still another, civil war here and there, religious and ethnic repression somewhere and politics and greed in bed together somewhere else, children killing each other at school and girls never getting a chance to go to school just because of their gender, and on and on and on. There is so much to know about what is happening in the world, so much injustice our neighbours suffer, so much information needed in order to try to be a part of the solution instead of part of the problem, so much pain to bear witness to and to pray about and to work to alleviate. Even being a head person who likes to know things, it’s honestly too much.

And God said to the human: don’t eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat of it, you will die.

On the surface, that doesn’t seem to be what happened. But on another level…maybe it is what happened, though it isn’t always obvious just how.

They didn’t stop breathing, but they did look at themselves and each other and decide they had to hide.

First they hid from one another. They used tree leaves and hid their bodies, because now that they know things, they can’t stand to be seen, even by their closest partner and kin.

Then they hid from God. As if it was possible to hide from God, they tucked themselves behind the bushes and trees and hoped God wouldn’t notice that his companions were missing from the garden. Because now they know things, they can’t stand to be seen by God, who knows all.

Later on in the story, past the point we read today, they will hide behind words — using language to create distance rather than to create relationship, saying things like “they made me do it” which will evolve throughout history into “mistakes were made” or one I read yesterday that said “a person died as a result of shots fired.” All if it a way to hide.

Sometimes we talk about the knowledge of good and evil as being the knowledge of what is right and wrong, how to discern and make good choices. And that is a perfectly fine interpretation, though it does lead to some other questions. But the phrase “knowledge of good and evil” is also used throughout the scripture and other ancient literature to talk about knowledge of everything — like from A to Z, the whole lot, including things that are good and things that are evil and everything in between.

And according to the story, human beings were not created to hold all of that. All the everything that I like to know, that is available to see…we weren’t made to handle it. On the day we try to hold it all, we die.

Perhaps not an instantaneous physical death, but there is a death that comes with knowing and trying to carry all the things, good and evil. A death of innocence, a death of possibility, a death of clarity. A loss of the lightness of spirit we once had. And a death of the full and easy trusting relationship we had with each other and with God.

The first things the humans do when they begin to know everything is to hide. Isn’t that what many of us do when we are overwhelmed? We take the too-much-ness that we were never created to bear, and we hide away. Maybe that looks like retreating under the covers and trying to ignore it all for a while, or zoning out in front of the television, or mindlessly snacking. Maybe when we’re overwhelmed, we scroll social media or the news, trying to get something that will make it make sense or commenting on random things to people we won’t ever have to look in the eye. Maybe we hide by going through the motions throughout the day and just saying we’re fine to anyone who asks, then changing the subject, or using those distancing phrases like “mistakes were made.” Maybe we hide by staying home from church or the cafe where people might notice us struggling, and we don’t want anyone to know, or by spending too much money, or by over-controlling what we eat and how we exercise. There are so many ways to hide from each other, and to try to hide from God.

It’s an understandable reaction — one that we humans have had since literally the beginning of time. We get overwhelmed, and we hide.

But that only makes the problem worse. Because we were not created to hold and carry all of that knowledge of everything good and evil. So the more we try to do something we were never meant to be able to do, the worse it gets. We hide, and we get more overwhelmed, and so we hide more, and the burden gets heavier as we try to think or work or scroll or numb or spend our way out of it, so we hide it deeper and pretty soon we’re drowning….in debt, in grief, in anxiety, in fear, in loneliness, in poor health. And we’ve become so used to hiding that we don’t know how to stop, so we say things like “keep calm and carry on” or “just got to get on with it” or “it’s just how things are.” But underneath, we’re dying.

The trouble is, of course, that there’s no going back. Once the fruit was eaten, it couldn’t be un-eaten. Once we see the fullness of everything, good and evil and everything in between, we can never un-see. Once we have seen the horrors that humanity can perpetrate, we can never un-see those images. Once we have been exposed to the never-ending global news cycle, we can never again be ignorant of our part in the story of our neighbours far away or close to home. We can never un-see…

But we could un-hide.

I’m sure many of us have heard the saying that joy shared is doubled and sorrow shared is halved. When we are willing to un-hide enough to share our overwhelm with another, we find that it becomes a bit less heavy, because we’re no longer carrying it entirely by ourselves.

Granted, trusting one another enough to be willing to un-hide can be hard. Trust comes only through building up relationships, through sharing everyday stuff of life and strengthening community so that we can be real without fear that others will look down on us for being weak, or worrying that they’ll turn our story into gossip instead of holding it with grace. What would it take for us to be the kind of community where we can un-hide? Where we can be real enough to admit when we have made mistakes and take responsibility for our part, where we can share the things that overwhelm us and be supported without being shamed, where we can be held together when we are no longer able to hold ourselves together. How can we build the kind of community that is trustworthy like that?

It will begin — but not end — with each of us re-learning how to un-hide from God. Jesus said “come to me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.” His purpose on earth was to erase the distance created when we started hiding…to come among us and live here so that we would realise there’s nowhere we can run and hide, and there’s no need to anyway. God is with us, even when we are overwhelmed.
Even when we want to hide ourselves because we can’t imagine God seeing us like this.
Even when we feel like we got ourselves into it and we have to get ourselves out of it.
Even when we would like the earth to open up and swallow us to save us from embarrassment, or from having to admit what happened, or from getting called on and not knowing the answer.
God is with us.
And God is the most trustworthy.
When God says come and bring your burdens to me, we can trust that God will handle those burdens with care.
We can trust that we can come out from behind the bushes and the trees and the passive-voice third person statements and the “it wisnae me” and find ourselves standing in front of the One who meets us with compassion every time…
because God knows perfectly well that we were not created to hold all this.
We weren’t made to handle it all ourselves, A to Z, good and evil and everything in between.
Our human forms are finite and limited, and this knowledge, this world, this trauma, this everything is too much.
God already knows that, and has always known that.
And God loved us even before he got his hands in the dirt and made these fragile finite limited forms.
God loved us even when we made mistakes.
God loved us even when we hid.
God has never once stopped begging us to bring the burden to him and lay it down.
God has never once stopped coming to us — in word, in flesh, in bread and wine, in water, in prophets, in community, in our very breath, for goodness sake — and offering to do the heavy lifting so we could walk the still more excellent way.

So friends, let’s just give it a try: bringing our whole selves before our God who is trustworthy. Un-hiding long enough that we can see God’s compassionate face and see God’s love taking those burdens we have carried. And then we’ll be able to un-hide with each other too, building a community of trust and compassion…the Body of Christ, made to tend and care for the world God so loves.

May it be so. Amen.

Hymn GWA 153: God, the Maker of the Heavens (tune: Converse)

Sanctuary Offering (Praise Band to play Beautiful Things by Gungor during the offering)

Sanctuary Offering Response: Doxology (tune: Old Hundredth)
Praise God from whom all blessings flow;
Praise Christ all creatures here below;
Praise Holy Spirit evermore;
Praise Triune God whom we adore.
Amen.

Prayer and Lord’s Prayer
We will lay our burdens down
we will lay our burdens down
we will lay our burdens down
in the hands of the risen Lord.

Loving God,
this world you made is full of wonders,
depths we have not begun to plumb,
complexity and beauty all at once.
And we, too, are complicated and beautiful,
capable of incredible, amazing, and terrible things.
We thank you for life in all its fulness,
even as we pray for help in growing into the people you would have us be.
There is so much going on in the world, O God,
and in our quest for knowledge we find ourselves facing more than we were created to hold —
and you have invited us to lay our burdens at your feet,
trusting you will carry the hurts and longings that weigh heavy on us.

We will lay our burdens down…

And so we bring our prayers
for those who struggle with the complexity and fear and hard parts of life in these days…
for those whose lives are marred by violence, and those who work to untangle the path to peace…
for those who use your name to bring division rather than love…
for those struggling to take responsibility,
and those who bear more than is rightly theirs…
for the earth, so often used and abused rather than known as partner or gift,
and for the others in creation dependent on its health and providing…
for those fractured relationships where we hide from one another,
unable or unwilling to be our full true selves…
for all of us as we interpret your word to share your good news with others.

We will lay our burdens down

And on this 8th day of the month we join our hearts as your church family to pray:
*For all who live and work in the centre of Gourock — for those who are neighbours of our churches, those who own businesses, those who use the library, and those who come into the centre of town for any reason.
*For the music ministry of St John’s: for the choir, the praise band, the organist, and all who enable our worship and prayer through music.
*For the land, people, and governments of the nations of Serbia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, North Macedonia, and Greece.

We will lay our burdens down

May your breath flow freely,
may we allow your hands to mould and shape us…
may all your creation live at last in harmony,
delighting in the wonders of your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
We ask in the name of the Master Gardener, 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.

Sanctuary Hymn 513: Courage, Brother, Do Not Stumble

Benediction
Remembering you are earth and breath, both impermanent and precious, go from this time together alert to the presence of God. Keep that relationship open without hiding or fear, trusting that God is even now creating and re-creating a world of beauty and delight for all.
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

* Youth Organisations are starting the new session — please contact us or come along to register for the Boys’ Brigade (Anchor Boys Tuesdays 5:30pm, Junior Section Mondays 7pm, Company Section Fridays 7pm) or the Girl Guides (Smurfs Thursdays 6pm, Brownies Wednesdays 6 pm, Guides and Rangers Wednesdays 7:30pm).

* Teri is available for a walk-and-talk on Tuesday 10 September at 4pm, for a walk along the front and back. All are welcome to meet at the manse gate and come along to get your steps in or to talk about anything on your mind. (Weather permitting!)

* Charlene, our parish assistant, will be available for “Conversation Corner” (Vestry Hour) in the Vestry every Wednesday in September from 2-3-ish pm. Feel free to stop by for a chat, a pastoral conversation, or anything else on your mind! Please use the St John’s Road door, and ring the bell if it’s locked, she’ll come to let you in!

* Teri is away on Study Leave from 15-30 September. Please contact Charlene or Cameron if you have a pastoral need. We look forward to welcoming to the pulpit during this time: the Rev. Robbie Hamilton, Presbytery Clerk for Clyde Presbytery, and Charlene Mitchell, our parish assistant and candidate for ministry, as well as having our favourite-hymns Sunday. Please submit your favourite hymns by TODAY!!
There will be no online service during the three Sundays Teri is away — apologies! We recommend tuning in to the livestream from the Lyle Kirk, where Charlene is doing a placement, to join an online service on those days.

* We have the latest newsletters from the school in Venda — still going strong thanks to your generosity of prayer and monetary gifts! You can click here to read the May newsletter, and here is the August one.

* We worship in the sanctuary on Sundays at 11am, and Sunday worship is also online. 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. If you feel unwell, please worship online, to protect both yourself and others in our community.

*** The Sunday evening service is TONIGHT and then, because of September having five Sundays, on the 29th instead of the 22nd. We’ll have toasties and sandwiches together from 5:30 and the service will start at the back of 6. All are welcome for this simple meal and time of worship. The Sunday evening service is informal and reflective, with guitar-based music, Bible readings, and prayer for our parish. Come along and discover practical ways to apply the word to your life, in a chilled vibe that fosters connection and reflection.

* The first Sunday of the month at 11am is now an all-age service, with different ways of encountering God’s word without a traditional sermon. All people — young and old, different personalities and learning styles, are welcome! You’ll find a more informal service with a variety of music, a Bible story, prayer, and some more interactive elements. The online service for the first Sunday will therefore also be different — there will still be a reading, prayers, and music, but usually not a sermon.

* The Contact Group meets on Tuesday 24 September at 2pm in the Large Hall for an opening social with afternoon tea and entertainment from the Skelpies Ukulele Band!

* Starter Packs are in need of Teabags, kitchen roll, kitchen & bathroom cleaner.
The FoodBank are in need of diluting juice, cereal (but not porridge), tinned potatoes, pasta sauce & tinned meat. You can bring donations to the church and place them into the boxes in the vestibule. Thank you!

* Did you know that the ministry we do at St John’s costs about £3000 per week? Everything we do is funded by your generous giving — all our support for young people, older people, bereavement care, community outreach, worship, study, spiritual growth, and community work is because of your offering. If you would like to 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 Teri and she can give you the treasurer’s details. You can also send your envelopes to the church or the manse by post and we will ensure they are received. 
It is also possible to donate to the work of the parish assistant, speak to Anne Love about how to go about directing new donations to that new item in the budget.

* 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!

* Wednesday Evening Bible Study is off the rest of September while Teri is away on Study Leave. Bible Study will resume the 2nd of October and will begin a study of Jonah.

* Free period products are available in the church toilets for anyone who might need them, thanks to Hey Girls and Inverclyde Council.