Sunday service for 8 February 2026
Sunday 8 February 2026
Gourock St. John’s Church of Scotland
Service prepared by Rev. Teri Peterson
Manse phone: 632143
Email: TPeterson (at) churchofscotland.org.uk
Email Charlene, Parish Assistant: CMitchell (at) churchofscotland.org.uk
If the video doesn’t play here, please click here to see it on our YouTube channel!
Sanctuary Prelude Music (praise band)
Welcome
God-sightings
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
One: Whoever you are, whatever life has been for you:
All: The One who knows us meets us here.
One: Whatever your questions, whatever your need:
All: The One who gives Living Water meets us here.
One: However you heard, wherever you’ve come from:
All: The One who is Saviour of the world meets us here.
Sanctuary Hymn 540: I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say
Prayer
You are a God who wants to be known,
revealing yourself in so many ways.
In the words of scripture,
in the stories of friends,
in silence and in song,
in ancient prayers and in beauty beyond imagining,
you show yourself and invite us in
to a life of spirit and truth.
May today be an entry point,
and a deepening,
and a spring that bubbles up to share.
God who loves the world,
we confess that we draw lines and build walls
and treat them as law.
You cross those barriers
and we confess we don’t know how to respond.
You invite us to look beyond our divisions,
to truly and deeply know one another,
and we confess we aren’t sure we want to.
Forgive us for staying in our own entrenched camps.
Forgive us for keeping your good news for ourselves.
Forgive us for our assumptions that block our ability to relate.
Overcome our surprise and our resistance
with your grace that bubbles up like living water
and make us ready to listen and to share your word
that reaches across even heaven and earth to become flesh.
Friends, Jesus knows us — and from his fullness we have all received grace upon grace: a well of living water that springs up to eternal life. Trust in his forgiveness today and let the living water flow through you to the world God so loves. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Online Hymn 540: I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say
Sanctuary Hymn 550: As the Deer (praise band)
Sanctuary Children’s Time
(Imagine meeting your opposite…what would you talk about?)
Holy Spirit, fill our hearts
overflowing with love.
May we shine with the light of God,
come, Spirit, come.
Scripture Reading: John 4.1-30, 39-42
Today’s reading picks up where we left off last week, when Nicodemus and Jesus met in the middle of the night and Nicodemus was very confused, even after Jesus explained he was here to embody God’s love for the whole world. Today we continue at the next verse, reading the gospel according to John, chapter 4, from the New Revised Standard Version.
Now when Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard, “Jesus is making and baptising more disciples than John” (although it was not Jesus himself but his disciples who baptised), he left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.
A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.” The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?” Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”
Jesus said to her, “Go, call your husband, and come back.” The woman answered him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband,’ for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!” The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.” Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.” Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”
Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?” Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” They left the city and were on their way to him.
…
Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them, and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Saviour of the world.”
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: leave the jug
This is the gospel reading I chose for my ordination, and the minister opened his sermon with this statement: all the water in the world is all the water we have ever had in the world, which means that when you get a drink of water, that water was once dinosaur pee.
I confess that’s the memorable bit of his sermon!
I wonder if now, 20 years on, he would have continued on to point out that a data centre housing AI servers uses as much water as a town of 50,000 people…and every chat with Chat GPT uses about 500ml of fresh water… which pulls that ex-dinosaur pee out of use for a generation or more.
Meanwhile, a woman came looking for water at midday — she had to walk some distance out of town to the well, draw the water up from from the deeps, and carry it back home…as millions of women still do today. And Jesus offered her a spring of living water which perhaps didn’t mean literal water but you can hear her longing when she says “give me this water so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.” Not only is it a difficult chore to be done several times each day, it’s never enough…even drawing water, she’s still thirsty. How much more if so much of it were siphoned off for something else.
Jesus promised a spring of water gushing up to eternal life…and yet how often do we feel like we are toiling to bring up water from a well that feels like it gets deeper and deeper…we have to work harder and harder…and once we do pull up that bucket, there are so many demands that we don’t even get home before the bucket is empty and we need to go back. It’s true for our internal spiritual and emotional resources as it is true for our physical resources where fresh water is a precious commodity in a changing climate and the data giants want it first. And so it happens that we end up keeping what we do have for ourselves, even though that is the opposite of what Jesus says and does in this story.
That opposite-ness begins at the start when Jesus crosses the border…John says he “had to” go through Samaria. That isn’t geographically true — most Jews wouldn’t have. There were other, preferred ways to go. But something about Jesus’ mission made it necessary for him to cross the border into a foreign territory, populated by people who were usually thought to be wrong about everything, antagonistic, dirty, and probably dangerous. And the feeling was mutual.
It should not be surprising to encounter Samaritans in Samaria. It would likely have been surprising for the Samaritans, though, to meet a Jew from Galilee or Judea in their country! However, the way the encounter began is probably exactly how both of them would expect it to go: he, the foreigner, demanded that she serve him. She seemed surprised to be spoken to, and reminded him of the divisions and boundaries he was crossing. And Jesus replied with, essentially, “do you know who I am?” to which she replied “who do you think you are?”
In many situations, that would be the end of the story, wouldn’t it? The combination of defensiveness, confusion, and ego would finish off the conversation. But in this instance, both persevere. Jesus tries again: my living water will spring up and overflow to bring life. And the woman still isn’t sure but she also tries again: okay, let’s have it because I would love not to have to do this daily task anymore. I would love not to be thirsty anymore.
Then things started to shift. Jesus could see something in this woman, and he invited her to draw up more of her story and share it with him. Her story seemed simple at first: “I have no husband.” But the tone of voice would make all the difference, wouldn’t it? Do we imagine she said it defiantly? Or sadly? Or resignedly? Jesus, who knows people before they know him, saw a deeper truth than the short version she learned to say to protect herself. She has been set aside or left behind many times…after so many deaths or abandonments, it’s a wonder she gets out and speaks to people at all, let alone to a foreigner who accosted her in the middle of her daily routine.
There’s something about that moment, when she and Jesus make a connection beyond the immediate need, the banter, and the divisions. He sees her, truly, in a way most others don’t. They see a charity case, a sad barren woman, a tragedy, a problem to be solved. He sees her whole story, a whole person. And she must also feel seen and known, because she begins to recognise him too, just as the first disciples did — not just a random foreigner, but a prophet, from God.
So she got right to the heart of the matter: the thing that divided them for dozens of generations was not only the problem of ethnicity, or of territory, though they were also problems…she asked the most pressing question:
Which church building are we supposed to go to? Whose traditions are right?
I suspect that Jesus’ answer was as unwelcome then as it would be today: the hour is coming and is now, when true worship is only about spirit and truth, not location. The future is here, and it is already growing…the only thing that will be left of our worship is that which is spirit and truth, and everything else, all the stuff that has been piled on top, all the things we have come to believe are essential, will be stripped away.
She did what most of us would do: tried to push that off into a more distant future. The Messiah will come one day and give us an answer, she says. I suspect the subtext is the same as it would be if we said it: he’ll give us an answer I like more than yours.
But he turned it around and named himself: I am…
And with that, she left her water jug and ran back to the town. She didn’t need that jug anymore — the spring of water had started to bubble up. She ran back and told anyone and everyone all about this encounter, and invited them to come see for themselves.
Notice she didn’t tell them about the theology or discuss which building. She told them that she met someone who knew her, someone who saw her, and who told her own story back to her with understanding and grace, and then she asked a question: could he be the Messiah?
Her invitation was so compelling that a crowd followed her down the path to the well, where they did something unheard of: they invited this foreigner, who would normally have been seen as wrong and dangerous, to stay. To abide. To dwell with them for a time. And…again, unheard of: he did.
And many more came to believe. They dwelt together in community and had their own experiences. They were known and seen and heard, and they also saw and heard and knew, and in that relationship across the divisions and borders, living water began to bubble up and flow out into the whole town.
What would it take for that spring of living water to rise up in us, and to flow out to our whole town? To bubble up and get us talking to people about our experience of God, about how we have been loved by Jesus, about how the Spirit has been so generous to us, so we want to invite people to come and see for themselves? The woman doesn’t have to know enough to explain anything…she just says “I had an encounter and I want you to have one too. Come and see.” And that living water sprung up stronger and faster…no more digging deep and dragging up the bucket only to have it disappear before we can even get a drink…paradoxically, it turns out that reaching across the divides, sharing the story, and inviting others doesn’t drain our resources, it refreshes them and brings new life. From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.
Because God so loves the world, not just one people inside one border. So Jesus shows us how to meet across differences, to hear real people’s stories, to reach out and bridge division, to share what we have been so generously given.
And in so doing, a spring of living water gushes up to eternal life.
May it be so. Amen.
Silence for Reflection
Online Hymn: Take Me Over (praise band)
Sanctuary Hymn GWA218: When Hands Reach Out
Sanctuary Offering: GWA208 Where the River Flows (praise band)
Sanctuary Offering Response (tune: 555 Amazing Grace)
When we’ve been there ten thousand years
bright shining as the sun,
we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
than when we’d first begun.
Concerns of the Church
*Wednesday Bible Study
*Smalls for all – new pants, children and women any size
*choir rehearsal
*baptism Bible
*Firm Foundations hot chocolate tuesday morning
*New members class
*Prayer groups
Prayer and Lord’s Prayer ** with a verse of 553 Just As I Am
Border-crossing God,
You come to us wherever we are,
and you call our attention to those we dismiss as too different.
We give you thanks for reaching out to us,
coming to us in human form,
and gifting us your living water
that flows endlessly, washing away
all that separates us from you and from one another,
nourishing new life in your kingdom.
We pray today for those whose lives are marked by borders and boundaries and barriers…
those who are targeted because of who they are;
those whose past is held against them;
those who are vulnerable or disadvantaged in the systems we have built;
those separated from loved ones;
those unable to move forward due to circumstances beyond their control;
and also those whose boundaries have been violated,
and those who hold themselves back from fear or frustration.
May all people be free to live your abundant life,
may the resources of your creation be shared,
may we love one another as you love us.
*Just As I Am verse 4
Just as I am — your love unknown
has broken every barrier down —
now to be yours, and yours alone,
O Lamb of God, I come.
We pray today for those who share your good news —
we ask that they might feel confident in sharing their own story,
and in offering an invitation to others,
without the need for having it all figured out first.
We also pray today for those who hear those stories and invitations,
that their ears and hearts and minds might be open
and that they might be willing to come and see for themselves,
and to be transformed by being known by you.
And we pray for your church,
that we may be a safe entry point,
where people will come to experience your Spirit and Truth,
and know themselves beloved.
Build us into a community that not only welcomes
but also goes out to share.
On the 8th day of the month we join our hearts as your St John’s 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.
In this world where we so often choose other ways,
set us on your path
that leads across division
that creates community
that stays in the unexpected place
that speaks the others’ language
that refuses to dehumanise
that leads with love
and bubbles up to eternal life.
We ask in the name of the One who walked this road that we might follow,
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: Take Me Over (praise band)
Sending
Friends, the time is coming and is now here, the spring of water bubbles up and overflows, no jug needed! Go out to live in Spirit and Truth and to share the good news with all whom you meet.
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.
Sanctuary Postlude Music (organ)
Announcements
* 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 first Sunday of the month at 11am is 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.
* Starter Packs are in need of Shaving Foam, Shampoo, Soap, Hand Wash.
The FoodBank are short of everything except pasta, so anything you can donate will be gratefully received!
You can bring donations to the church and place them into the boxes in the vestibule. Thank you!
* We are preparing a new member class for the spring — if you or anyone you know would like to explore becoming a member of St John’s, please speak to Teri for more information.
* During the season of Lent we will be offering two midweek opportunities for prayer, reflection, worship, and discussion: on Wednesdays from 12:15-12:45 we’ll have Lent Lunchtime Reflections in the sanctuary, and at 7:30pm in the sanctuary will be Lent Evenings. We’ll be looking at what happened on the last night Jesus spent with his disciples before his arrest, in John chapters 13-17. Everyone is welcome as we dig deeper into the last words Jesus said to his disciples!
* Bowl & Blether is on the first and third Mondays through the winter, with doors open from 11:30-1:30, and lunch served from noon. All are welcome for a bowl of soup, a toastie, a friendly chat in our warm hall! See you a week tomorrow, the 16th of February.
* The Contact Group meets this Tuesday the 10th when the speaker will be from Mercy Ships Madagascar. The syllabus of events is available from Fiona Webster or Anne Armour. The syllabus donation of £5 will go towards our charity fundraising.
* Wednesday Evening Bible Study is at 7:30pm in the manse.
* We are participating in the Rotary Club’s “Smalls for All” collection — if you can donate NEW underpants in any size (especially for women and girls), please bring them to the box by the front door over the next few weeks. Thank you!
* Free period products are available in the church toilets for anyone who might need them, thanks to Hey Girls and Inverclyde Council.
* Did you know that the ministry we do at St John’s costs about £3000 per week and we are currently running about £500 short? 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 item in the budget.
* Don’t forget to follow us on Facebook and Youtube, and to sign up for our email newsletter! Midweek you can watch Wine and the Word and Theology Thursday on Youtube, get snippets of thought or inspiration following Teri on TikTok, and of course keep up with announcements and events on Facebook and our weekly email.
