Sunday Service for 27 June 2021

Sunday Service for 27 June 2021, 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Sunday school Revisited 5)
Prepared by the Rev. Teri Peterson, Gourock St. John’s
Manse phone: 632143
Email: tpeterson (at) churchofscotland.org.uk

Prelude Music (in person only)

Welcome/Announcements

Call to Worship
Come, praise the Lord!
Come, seek God’s kingdom!
All: Glory to God in the highest!
We are called to proclaim God’s goodness
We are called to live God’s love
All: Glory to God in the highest!
Day in and day out, doing God’s will first
Day in and day out, trusting God’s way
All: Glory to God in the highest!

Prayer
Your breath is our breath, O God,
your life gives us life,
and your love is the foundation of all things.
Yet we confess that we often use your breath to speak words that are not yours.
We live as if we are self-sufficient have everything under our control.
We keep love for a few who are like us, and make rules to keep the rest out.
Forgive us for so fully inhabiting our own kingdoms of this world
that there’s no room for your kingdom to come.
Forgive us for building up walls and reserves
rather than building up community and compassion,
and for holding on to things, and control, and grudges,
even while you are calling us to let go and find freedom.
Take from us any thought, any word, any action that does not glorify you,
and fill us instead with your grace that makes all things new.
We ask in the name of Jesus the Christ. Amen.

Music
Online: Hymn 550, As the Deer
In Person: The Rose Wreath, Schubert

Children’s Time (in person only)

Reading Luke 11.1-4 (NRSV)
Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ He said to them, ‘When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.’

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: Exchange
Who taught you how to pray?

Some of you probably learned by saying grace before meals, or saying thanks for the day and naming people in your family for God to look after before you went to bed.

Perhaps some of you learned the way our children learn in church, by repeating after the minister or Sunday school teacher.

I would be willing to guess that almost everyone was taught two main prayers, which author Anne Lamott calls “Help” and “Thanks” — both prayers where we talk to God about something, either something we are happy about or something we are unhappy about.

As I didn’t grow up in the church, no one taught me to pray when I was young. I remember when I first began attending a church at age 18, it was with a congregation whose worship services included the Apostles Creed and the Lord’s Prayer every week, and also included the 23rd Psalm, in the King James Version, after communion — none of which were printed in the order of service. You just had to know them by heart.

Sure, the Apostles’ Creed had a page number next to it, but who wants to be literally the only person in a thousand-member congregation who is flipping through the hymnbook to find it? It was so embarrassing.

So for a few weeks, I arrived early and sat there memorising the words everyone was just expected to know.

A few years later, I don’t remember exactly how or where I also learned a handy acronym meant to remind us how to lead prayers…ACTS ID. Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication, Intercession, Dedication. Prayers on behalf of a congregation, and maybe even our own prayers, were supposed to follow this formula. That sounds really long, but it basically means that a prayer ought to go something like:
Holy and Gracious God, your wondrous ways are greater than we can imagine. Even when we try to contain you, your amazing grace surprises us again, and we are grateful. Help us to be the people you created us to be. Send your Spirit to guide and nurture, to bring healing to the sick and hope to the despairing and light in the darkness, that we may serve you as your holy people. Amen.
Did you catch all of those? We adore God for who God is, holy and gracious and with wondrous ways. We confess that we’ve tried to contain God, and expressed gratitude that God can’t be contained. We’ve prayed for ourselves, supplication, and for others, intercession, and said why we want God to answer our prayers, so we can be dedicated to God’s purpose.

It’s a useful tool, for sure, though not exactly what the disciples asked for on this occasion.

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them, he didn’t give them three things to memorise, nor did he give them an acronym to help them remember. He taught them five phrases that were really one thing in five angles, and that were almost more a picture of the relationship between God and people than they were an instruction about what or even how to pray.

This week I learned something fascinating. The disciples say “Lord, teach us to pray”…but if you were going to be SUPER literal about translating the word for what they asked, it’s something more like “Lord, teach us to continuously and repeatedly exchange our wishes for God’s.” Or perhaps to continuously and repeatedly offer our wishes toward God and receive God’s wishes back.

That’s not really the same thing I think most of us think of when we hear the word “pray.” We have mostly been taught prayers that ask God to do something or give us something. Even the ACTS ID form of prayer is about asking for things and then promising something at the end, and then our prayer is finished until the next time — even though we know that Paul teaches to pray without ceasing, that feels confusing since prayer is mostly talking to God about what we want God to do.…and, to be fair, not long after teaching this prayer, Jesus did tell his disciples to ask God for what they needed, wanted, or were worried about, and to trust that God would give us what we asked for!

But the way Luke wrote this particular part of the gospel, the disciples aren’t really asking how to talk to God occasionally. They know how to do that, as many of us do. They are asking how to continually exchange their desires for God’s desires.

When I learned this, I was reminded of something Richard Rohr once wrote. He said “To pray and actually mean ‘thy Kingdom come,’ we must also be able to say ‘my kingdoms go.’”

The kingdoms of this world, as the Hallelujah Chorus names them — quoting from Revelation — cannot co-exist with the kingdom of God. One must give way to the other. And to pray for the coming of God’s kingdom is literally to exchange our kingdom for God’s, like exchanging the wrong size jacket for one that fits properly. The ways of the world don’t really fit the people God made us to be, but God’s ways will fit perfectly if we give them a try, though they may look a little strange at first!

The prayer Jesus teaches involves asking for God to give us the essentials that will meet the needs of the coming day, every day. Not enough to hold onto and save up for the future, not a bunch of stuff we might need but we probably won’t use…just exactly the things we need to survive and thrive the next day. It’s the opposite of how we normally think to prepare, by stocking up on everything we could possibly want and then some. Think of packing for a holiday, and how many things come home unworn, or the weekly shop, and how much ends up in the green bin…and expand that to look at other areas of our lives where we have extra that isn’t about meeting the needs of today, and isn’t being used to help meet the needs of others, but is really just about storing up treasures for our own kingdoms.

The Israelites in the wilderness had to learn to collect manna for just one day at a time, because God provided exactly what they needed each day…and at the end of the week, God provided enough for two days, so they wouldn’t have to work on the Sabbath. They had to trust that tomorrow, God would provide enough for tomorrow…but today would be enough for today. That way, when everyone had enough for today, then everyone had enough. No one went without, while some squirrelled extra away for a rainy day. There was plenty for everyone’s needs to be met, but not enough for greed. And so Jesus teaches us to pray for God to meet the needs of today in God’s kingdom…and in exchange, we give up our own kingdom’s desire to have more than we need.

When Jesus teaches us to ask God to forgive us for missing the mark, he also says we should be able to affirm that we forgive others. Not just when they miss the mark with us, but also when they owe us. Anyone with an obligation to us — a legal or monetary obligation, a moral obligation, a cultural reciprocity obligation — is to be set free from that. We don’t call in favours, holding onto that leverage over someone else, because God doesn’t do it to us. We exchange our kingdom of power over others, that desire to be able to manipulate people through quid pro quo, and ask instead for God’s kingdom economy of forgiveness and the freedom that comes with it — freedom to try again, to change and be different next time, to go about life without worrying when the reckoning is coming.

Both of these are hard things, big things that we are asking God to do. When Jesus teaches us to pray for God’s kingdom, and therefore to be willing to let go of our ways, our control, it’s not just a few easy words to repeat without thinking — though they are words we ought to repeat often. Remember the disciples asked him to teach them how to continually exchange their wishes for God’s. They didn’t ask for a few magic words, they asked for the keys to a relationship that would change them, and therefore change the world.

This kind of prayer — exchanging our kingdoms for God’s kingdom, over and over again — isn’t about memorising a formula to ask God for things, as useful as those can be. Praying like Jesus changes our relationship with God, and in that relationship, God transforms our view of the world — from a world where we have to fend for ourselves and earn and store up as much as we can, to one where we trust God to provide what we need day by day; and from a world where we gather up power over others by getting them to owe us favours, to one where we release others from those debts because God has set us free from that fearful economy.

And all of that is how God answers the first line of the prayer: let your name be made holy. This is what it means to make God’s name holy in this world: to exchange our ill-fitting kingdoms for God’s perfect fit, day in and day out.

May it be so. Amen.

Online Music: hymn 805 Mayenziwe

Prayer and Lord’s Prayer

Today I invite you to join in the prayers by offering those things that come to mind as we pray — you can speak them aloud, or perhaps write or doodle them on a piece of paper, or simply imagine holding them in God’s light.

Loving God, we give thanks today for the wonders of your creation,
for the ways it provides beauty, and food, and a home to all creatures.
…
We give thanks today for your church, gathered and scattered,
sharing your love far and wide.
…
We ask that you would make us a visible sign of your presence,
your Body on earth,
so that all longing for a glimpse of your grace or the sound of your word
might see your kingdom among us.
…
We bring before you those who are ill, in body, mind, or spirit,
and ask for your healing power to surround and infuse them,
to bring comfort and hope and new life.
…
We lift up those who do not have enough —
whose tables are bare, accounts empty, and hope disappearing.
Show us how to live in your kingdom where all are fed and housed and cared for.
…
We remember those who are in debt,
owing money, owing favours, owing time…
especially both individuals and nations who borrowed to survive
but will never be out from under that weight,
and we ask for your spirit of freedom to balance the ledger toward forgiveness.
…
We ask for help for all who are suffering,
in shock after tragedies,
grieving loved ones,
missing milestones and celebrations,
anxious about rising case numbers,
desperate for a break.
May your strength and courage sustain them.
…
We bring all our prayers to you, trusting in your gracious mercy,
and now we open our hearts and minds to hear your desires, your calling, your word for us today.
Speak, Lord, for your servants are listening.
…
Exchange our desires for yours, our kingdoms for yours,
our shallow ways for your deeper love.
We ask in the name of Jesus the Christ,
who taught us to continually renew our relationship with you by praying 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.

Hymn 124: Praise to the Lord, the Almighty

Benediction
Go into your week asking God to continually exchange your kingdoms for God’s. 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 (tune: Gourock St. John’s, words by 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.

Postlude Music (in person only)

Announcements

* 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 some limited singing! We can welcome approximately 35 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.

* Tonight we will gather with Christians across the nation for evening prayer on the Connect Facebook Page. Jonathan is 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!

* 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!