Sunday service for 28 August 2022

Sunday 28 August 2022, third Sunday of Season of Creation
Gourock St. John’s Church of Scotland
Service prepared by Rev. Teri Peterson
Manse: 632143
Email: tpeterson (at) churchofscotland.org.uk

Prelude Music

Welcome/Announcements

Stilling Video: flowers and trees

Hymn 147: All Creatures of our God and King, v4
Dear mother earth, who day by day
unfolds God’s blessings on our way,
O praise him, alleluia!
All flowers and fruits that in you grow,
let them God’s glory also show:
O praise him, O praise him,
alleluia, alleluia, alleluia!

Psalm 1 (eco-chaplain David Coleman)

Hymn: God the Maker of the Heavens (Resound Worship)
Sanctuary Hymn 181: For the Beauty of the Earth

Prayer (adapted from Creation Time resources: Land Sunday)
Holy creator God, we give you thanks for your gift of
a planet filled with your presence,
quivering in the forests,
vibrating in the land,
pulsating in the wilderness,
shimmering in the sands.
God, reveal yourself to us in this place and show us your face in all creation.
We remember the dry land that rose
from the waters in the beginning of creation,
and the plants that emerged from the soil to cover the land with vegetation.
We remember with delight the gardens, fields, and forests of our childhood,
the places where we have played in the sand,
when we felt close to the ground, to beautiful flowers and plants that are good to eat.
Thank you, God, for the land, for soils, and for plants,
for the ways they sustain life, nurture growth, clean the air,
and provide a home for your creatures.
We confess that we have become alienated from Earth
and cleared much of the life from the land in our garden planet.
We have killed living soils with excessive chemicals.
We have turned fertile fields into lifeless salt plains.
We have cleared rich lands of wild life.
We have swallowed Earth’s resources to feed our own desires.
We are sorry.
Forgive us, God.
Forgive us and also teach us to love the earth as our home
and the planet as a precious sanctuary.
Help us to empathise with your creation’s suffering.
God, our Creator, we celebrate your vibrant presence among us and our kin in creation,
especially in the soil, the fields and the land.
Turn our minds, hearts, and lives to live in harmony with the land,
the flowers of the field and all the creatures of the countryside.
In the name of Christ, who reconciles and renews all things in creation. Amen.

Sanctuary only Children’s Time with “bee bombs”— Song: Oh the earth is the Lord’s (chorus)

Readings: Genesis 2.8-9, 15 (Robert Alter’s translation) and Luke 13.6-9 (NRSV)
The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, to the east, and placed there the human he had fashioned. And the Lord God caused to sprout from the soil every tree lovely to look at and good for food, and the tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge, good and evil.
And the Lord God took the human and set him down in the garden of Eden to till it and watch over it.
……..
Jesus told this parable: ‘A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, “See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?” He replied, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig round it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.” ’

Sermon: Tend
Many of you will already know that gardening is not my strong suit nor my passion. I don’t have the talents many of you have, to coax the soil and seeds to work together to bring colourful or delicious plants to life…and keep them alive. I have managed to grow kale for myself to eat a few times, though last year my autumn kale all got eaten by slugs before I got any! And while I love to go for walks in beautiful places, marvelling at trees and plants and hills and valleys, I really really don’t like to be dirty.

Now I know that the soil is beautiful, rich, wondrous, and full of micro-organisms that make life on earth possible. I know that without it I could not eat all the gorgeous foods I love. I also know that I personally do not like to have it on my hands or my clothes, really for any reason. Thomas Jefferson and many other enlightenment thinkers — people who, like me, live in their heads — insisted that a truly free and intelligent person is a person with their hands in the soil, feeling the life-giving power of the earth, connected to the source of our nourishment. And here, 200 years later, I am sure they’re right, but I don’t think I have to like it!

One of the things that has happened since the beginning of the story in Genesis is that we have become progressively more disconnected from the earth. In the beginning, God planted a garden. It was, in this second creation story, the second act God did. The first was to form a human being out of the dirt…and then the second was to plant a garden in that very dirt, and put the human there to take care of it. God created us from the same stuff that would host and nurture all life…the very stuff I don’t like to have on my own hands. And God put us together, creature and garden, to grow together, to be nourished by each other, cared for by each other, all connected to the stuff from which we were made.

In fact if you back up a few verses from where we read today, you hear that at the very beginning there were no plants or trees or herbs or even rain, “for there was no one to till the ground.” There was no one around to take care and tend the earth, and therefore it was not yet growing. Only when God had moulded the dirt — the host, the medium, the potential — into a caretaker did God then proceed to plant the garden.

It wasn’t long before the relationship between God’s garden and we who were created to take care of it started to break down. The desire for domination rather than stewarding took over and we began to view the garden as something that serves us, rather than a partner in relationship among the whole creation. Ultimately we began to think of ourselves as almost outside the creation, separate from it, and we became its master rather than its tender and friend.

Even by the time of Jesus we can see the distance that has grown up between humans and creation. It had been a couple of thousand years since the stories of Genesis were told, and of course many millions since the beginning of life on earth. But even then, 2,000 years ago, which is a time we think of as long ago, pre-technology, when the society was more agriculturally based and people were, of necessity, more connected to the rhythms of the earth, even then Jesus was able to tell this parable of the fig tree that bore no fruit.

The beauty of parables is that they can have so many different messages for us, depending on which angle we look from, how we walk round and through and turn about and see what new thing the Spirit is revealing. Like the parabola for which it is named, the parable is open ended, always holding something else. So we may recognise this parable as one about how God expects us, as people of faith, to bear fruit, and that we need our lives to be fed by the living Word who is like a master gardener. I think the way Jesus tells the parable, though, also offers us some insight into the relationship between people and the earth. The landowner has had a fig tree planted — he doesn’t seem to have done that planting himself. It’s in the vineyard, which is not the normal place one might plant one random fruit tree! And he then seems to have simply left the tree unattended, for at least three years. Now I learned this week that it takes a fig tree between 8 and 10 years to produce fruit, so it isn’t clear whether this tree has actually been planted there for that long and should now be productive, or if he wants it to be doing something it simply isn’t ready to do.

But more to the point, the tree has simply been left there without any attention, and then expected to produce what the man wants, when he wants it.

And that, to me, feels an awful lot like the way we have generally treated God’s garden. We expect it to provide what we want, when we want it, but without any tending or effort on our part. We feel we should be able to neglect or even abuse it, and yet have the world simply continue producing whatever we desire. We have grown disconnected from the earth, caring little for it until the moment it does not yield the thing we want, at which point we channel that disappointment and anger into destruction, blaming the earth for not living up to our expectations.

That disconnect has only gotten worse as cities have grown and a global economy has developed. Most of us don’t need to go anywhere near the places where food is grown, it just comes from the shop — even delivered right to the door in a nice neat package. We are protected from the elements and from the vagaries of the cycle of the seasons. We think nothing of eating tomatoes or strawberries in the dead of winter, or squash at the height of summer, because we can get whatever we want without having to worry about whether it’s in season or not. About 15 years ago I took a group of teenagers from suburban Chicago out to visit a farm in the countryside, and the grower pulled a carrot out of the ground and offered it to them. The entire group of more than a dozen young people gasped and took a step back, and one said “you can’t eat that, it came from the dirt!” They literally did not know that their food was grown in the dirt and would come out dirty…to them, carrots came from a plastic bag in the supermarket.

That level of disconnect between us is astonishing and problematic. In the beginning we were created to tend the garden. When we think of ourselves as outside or above it, then it’s very easy to use and abuse. To expect things of the earth and its plants that are unreasonable, and to insist that it simply serve our every whim without any investment or care or attention from us. We demand fruit from a tree that has not been nurtured and decide it’s a waste of space before it ever grows to maturity, simply because we didn’t get what we wanted from it.

The gardener in Jesus’ parable knew better though. He spent his life with his hands dirty. He had a connection to the earth even if the landowner did not. And he knew that he had put his attention elsewhere rather than on that tree…perhaps tending the more plentiful grapevines rather than the lone fig tree. But even the one tree needs its tender. And that work will be messy. It will be smelly with manure, and involve hard labour digging around the now packed soil, it will involve carrying water, pruning branches, and maybe even protecting the tree from cold weather.

To tend the garden of God’s creation is our task, no one else’s. We humans cannot outsource that attention and labour to some other animal…we have to be the ones to pay attention, we have to put in the effort, we have to put up with the smell…and since we haven’t tended it well thus far, it will be harder now than it would have been if we’d been good stewards from the beginning, and the time is now short. We have to re-learn our interconnectedness, rather than seeing ourselves as simply the pinnacle of it all, looking down with disdain or apathy at the lowly servant of our happiness.

In the beginning, God created us from the soil, and in that same soil planted the garden. We are in this together, to grow and nurture and cross-pollinate and fertilise and, ultimately, to produce fruit that gives abundant life— that is what both the garden and the humans who tend it are designed to do.

May it be so. Amen.

Online hymn 243: Touch the Earth Lightly
Sanctuary Hymn: Creation sings! (Words: Martin E. Leckebusch (CCLI/Kevin Mayhew), tune: 188 St Petersburg)

Prayer and Lord’s Prayer (Adapted from Creation Time prayers)
**seed paper prayers: you can pick up your seed paper at the manse to write your prayers on!
We bring our prayers to the God who planted a garden full of good things,
nurturing abundant life from the soil.
And just as the sower plants seeds and prays for their growth — we know not how —
we too plant our prayers like seeds,
trusting that Christ the master gardener will bring them to fruition.
You are invited to write your prayers — for people, for our community, for the church, for the world, for the earth, for yourself. Nothing is too small a seed, nothing too big for God’s hand. Write them on the paper, and then offer them to God’s nurturing loving care. When you are ready, soak your paper for about five minutes in lukewarm water and then plant in a pot with about half a centimetre of soil on top. Tend it and keep it…in a window, keeping it moist, and see what God will do, in God’s own time.
…
…

Online Hymn 727: in the bulb there is a flower

…
…
God our Creator, teach us to empathise with Earth.
Make our spirits sensitive to the cries of creation,
cries for justice from the land, the soil and plants, fields and flowers, trees and bushes —
they grow from the soil from which you made us,
they are your delight, the lungs of the earth and home to multitudes.
Lord Jesus Christ, make our faith sensitive to the groaning of creation,
staggering under our weight and begging for relief.
Holy Spirit, make our hearts sensitive to the songs of our kin,
songs of celebration and praise, songs of lament and pleading from
the plants and trees and foods and grasses whose beauty withers in the hotter days,
whose miraculous healing we may never know as extinction looms,
whose shade is taken for granted and whose roots hold the mountains and fields in place,
whose existence is threatened by monoculture,
and whose seasons are manipulated to feed a greedy world.
Christ, teach us to care.
We pray in your holy and loving name, joining in as you taught your family 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: The Earth is the Lord’s (Carolyn Winfrey Gillette 2001, tune: 132 St Denio)

Benediction
Friends, go reconnect with the earth from which we are made. Go and tend God’s garden — even if it means getting your hands dirty, for it cries out for our attention and our care, and though the work will not be easy it will make a literal world of difference.
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
*You are invited to join in reading the Bible in a year for 2022 — immersing ourselves in God’s word throughout the year. We get together to discuss each week on Wednesday at 7:30pm in the manse at 6 Barrhill Road. All are welcome, no experience necessary! Feel free to invite a friend, too! Anyone who has ever wondered just what the Bible actually says and what it has to do with us is welcome. We are beginning to read Matthew this week so it’s a perfect time to join in!

* All worship is online (or on the phone at 01475 270037, or in print) and we also meet in the sanctuary at 11am. Hand sanitiser is available at every entrance, and mask-wearing is optional. Masks are available at the door if you would like one. 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 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!

* Youth Organisations are starting the new session. If you or anyone you know is interested in the Boys Brigade (P1 – S6), please contact Alan Aitken or 2ndgourock (at) inverclydebb.org.uk. If you or anyone you know is interested in the Brownies or Girl Guides, please visit the website to register. For the Smurfs, our youngest girls, please contact Teri and ask to be put in touch with the leader.

* Young Adult Bible Study returns today, 28 August at 7pm, with pizza as we begin our study of John’s gospel. We will meet in the manse on the 2nd and 4th Sundays at 7pm. If you’d like more information, for yourself, a family member, a friend, or neighbour who is in their 20s, please contact Teri for the dates/times and other information.

* Philip is organising a choir for any interested singer to come and have fun, learn some of the new hymns, and sing sometimes in worship. The choir will rehearse on some Thursday evenings at 7:30pm in the sanctuary — you can meet Philip to register your interest after worship today, and the first rehearsal will be on Thursday 8 September.

* Looking ahead: A Bowl & a Blether on 5 September will also be a Macmillan Coffee Morning! Come along for a cup of tea or coffee and a scone from 10:30, and/or a bowl of soup from noon – 1:30…whether you come for a bit or stay all day, we can guarantee a good fun time, a chat with friends old and new, and a chance to donate to a good cause. Why not invite a neighbour to join you? We are looking for some volunteers to help with set up and serving in the morning and at lunchtime, and with cleanup at the end. If you’re available and willing, please contact Teri. Thanks!

* 2nd Term update from Venda:
In a world of uncertainty and challenge, we needed to step up. We needed people to show kindness and compassion. We needed people who were willing to make a difference. Thank you very much for your continuous support.
Term 2 came to an end on the 24th of June 2022 and term 3 started on the 19 of July 2022. We are starting this term with the national mandatory mask requirement for indoor spaces is no longer in force and therefore learners and staff are no longer required by law to wear these indoors or on any form of public transport which includes classrooms, halls and passageways.
At the end of the term, we had 81 students in our care of which 51 students are orphans and vulnerable children, some are born with chronic illness such as HIV/AIDS and 15 of them are staying at a local orphanage home as have been abandoned by parents and some parents are in jail (Takalani Children’s home) and 30 students come from middle income family.
The children are divided into three groups: toddlers aged 1 year to 2 years old with 27 students, preschool aged 3 to 4 years old with 29 students, grade R aged 5 years with 16 students and Grade 1 with 9 students. The academic development of learners is going well. It includes computer literacy and dancing lessons. On the 22nd of June 2022, we had a birthday celebration for all the children born from January to June to show them love and make them feel special as these moments contribute to their childhood memories. It was a great day and each child got an individual photo and a present. All the vulnerable got winter tracksuits as we are experiencing a very cold winter.
Because of your support Vhutshilo continues to be the best community project by bringing solutions where we can.  We provide water for neighboring households (there is no water in the houses in the area) which helps women and children directly, as they are the ones who are expected to collect water, clean, cook, and perform general household duties. For the past four months over 41 decant food parcels have been distributed including vegetables from our community garden that every Friday children at the school take home fresh vegetables. Sometimes the cabbages are bigger than the children, and it takes two of them to cart them away for the weekend. We are very grateful for the community members who volunteer their time to work in our garden.
One of the families we helped is of a single mother Norah living with HIV/AIDS since 2010 and have 5 children and one of her sons is also HIV+ aged 12 years old this year. She is unemployed and survives by government grant, after receiving food parcels in December 2021 Norah became a volunteer at our community garden, she comes twice a week to work and receives two healthy meals and also takes vegetables to cook for her children.  Her life has changed a lot as she has her own vegetable garden at home and is able to sell vegetables to her community so she can buy bread for her children.
We are happy to announce that we have won R20,000 from The Woolworths my school reward program. VMS entered completion in February 2022 and on the 23rd we were informed that we have won the cash prize.  The cash will be used to build toilets for the grade 2 learners together with other donations received.

Once again, on behalf of VMS staff, children and the community we serve. Thank you very much.
Warm regards,
 Khathu Nemafhohoni
(Director)