Saturday, October 30, 2021

October 31, 2021 Order of Worship

 

First Presbyterian Church

October 31, 2021

10:00 AM

Order of Worship

 

CALL TO WORSHIP

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed.

Then our mouths were filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.

Then it was said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.”

 The Lord has done great things for us. Let us rejoice and give thanks!

Let us worship the Living God.

 

*Hymn of Praise: “Lord, Speak to Me”

1. Lord, speak to me, that I may speak in living echoes of thy tone; as thou has sought, so let me seek thine erring children lost and lone.

2. O strengthen me, that while I stand firm on the rock, and strong in thee, I may stretch out a loving land to wrestlers with the troubled sea.

3. O teach me, Lord, that I may teach the precious things thou dost impart; and wing my words, that they may reach the hidden depths of many a heart.

4. O fill me with thy fullness, Lord, until my very heart o'erflow in kindling thought and glowing word, thy love to tell, thy praise to show.

5. O use me, Lord, use even me, just as thou wilt, and when, and where, until thy blessed face I see, thy rest, thy joy, thy glory share.

      PRAYER OF CONFESSION (In Unison)

God of grace and mercy, we often say that we love you with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, but when we look closely at our lives, we confess that our hearts are full of concerns that are not your concerns. Our souls are neglected. You are barely on our minds, and our strength is depleted by things that do not have anything to do with you. Please forgive us our sin. Cleanse us. Renew us. Reform us. Make us ever new. We ask this in the name of the One who died to set us free, Jesus the Christ. Amen.

*SILENT PRAYERS OF CONFESSION

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

We may not keep our promises to God, but God’s promises to us never fail. Friends, let us rejoice that because of God’s great faithfulness, we have been forgiven. Amen.

 

 

*THE GLORIA PATRI

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost; As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.  Amen.

INVITATION: “Dear Lord, I need You, please come into my life today.  Amen”

SCRIPTURAL INTRODUCTION

Micah 7: 18-20

                Ours is a relatively short passage from the Prophet Micah.  Micah is one of the “Twelve Minor Prophets” in the Old Testament.  It is not that they are less important than the “Major” prophets, but their works are not as long.  Judgement and the redemption of God are both strong themes in Micah’s work. 

                Unlike Jonah, which has a storyline that is popular from Sunday School on forward among the Bible’s stories, Micah is more typical of the prophetic book, a gathering of the words of the prophet spoken in God’s Name.  This is the style of most of the prophetic books, although some have a fair bit of historical narrative (like the prophet Jeremiah) or at least some historical context (Isaiah contains some of this). 

                One thing that Micah is well known for is one of the prophetic underpinnings of Jesus’ birth, in Micah 5:2 “But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come to me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.”  This passage is cited by the scribes when King Herod is confronted by the Magi who ask where the king of the Jews is to be born.

                Thus, in Micah can be found prophecies that are used to point directly to Jesus as well as prophecies, as our passage today, that indicate the plan and the forgiveness of God made manifest to us by Jesus’ death and resurrection.

 LESSONS: Micah 7: 18-20

18 Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity
   and passing over the transgression
   of the remnant of your possession?
He does not retain his anger for ever,
   because he delights in showing clemency.
19 He will again have compassion upon us;
   he will tread our iniquities under foot.
You will cast all our sins
   into the depths of the sea.
20 You will show faithfulness to Jacob
   and unswerving loyalty to Abraham,
as you have sworn to our ancestors
   from the days of old.

SERMON:                            Punishment and Consequence”                                    Rev. Peter Hofstra

                In Jesus Christ, we are forgiven for our sins.  Such is the grace of God extended to us through our Lord Jesus Christ.  Such is the centerpiece of God’s plan to restore the proper relationship between the creation and Godself.  The theology is pretty clear, I hope. 

                Forgiveness means that the mercy of the Lord surpasses the justice of the Lord.  For the wages of sin is death, according to Paul.  We are punished for our sins, that is how the system works.  In the act of punishment, the ideal is that we are restored to right relationship with God, that we return to obedience of our Loving Father.

                I believe that is pretty straight forward, at least I hope it is.  This is the joy of Easter morning, new life.  And our passage in Micah demonstrates for us that, in Jesus, forgiveness was not a new thing, that somehow God now forgives when God used to punish before.  But it does open the question of how punishment works in God.

                Punishment, when bad things happen, that is a working definition for some, but I believe things are more complicated than that.  So I want to distinguish between punishment and consequences.  To use a current example, a parent warns their child not to touch the hot stove.  Instructs them NOT to do so.  But the child, being the child, does what?  They touch the hot stove.  And they burn their hand.  Let’s work with that to define consequences.  One activity leads to another activity.  Then, the parent, in their emotional response to the child doing something they were told not to do, gives them a whack on the backside for ‘not listening’.  That, for the sake of our definitions, is punishment. 

                In the Old Testament, consequence and punishment are often brought together.  For example, you know the Sunday School song, “Joshua won the battle of Jericho, Jericho, Jericho…”  The reality is that Joshua had very little to do with it, God won the battle, but that is another sermon.  In that victory, God commanded that all the treasures, all the spoils of war, they all belonged to the Lord.  These were the first fruits of their victories.  The rest of the victories, the rest of the conquests, those spoils went to the people.  But the first portion belonged to the Lord. 

                That Biblical message has not changed to this day.  God provides us all that we have.  The call for the support of God’s church is the tithe, is the first portion of what we receive as the blessings of God.  How that actually works out in the giving to the church, that is another matter.

                What happens at Jericho is that some of the spoils of the victory are held back.  Achan looked upon the treasures, his greed got the better of him, and he took some and hid it.  Punishment came from the Lord upon the whole people of Israel.  After Jericho, the next target for their campaign was the small city of Ai.  It was so small, the whole army was not deployed, only some select battalions.  From God’s point of view and Israel’s point of view, that should have been enough to conquer them.  But the army of Ai beat back the Israelite attack.

                The consequence of the failed attack is that the army of Israel was defeated.  But we come to understand, from the text, that this was also a punishment against the Israelites because of the treasure NOT given to God, at God’s command, from Jericho.  God made them lose.  Consequence and punishment are here blended.

                That mindset is reinforced throughout the Old Testament.  God leads to victory in times of obedience, God punishes with defeat in times of disobedience.  The blending of consequence and punishment is deeply ingrained in our religious psyche.

                This thinking continues to this day.  Christians announced that the Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans as God’s punishment.  9/11 has been called God’s judgement on America.  Superstorm Sandy has been called God’s punishment on New York City.  Bad things happened because of these hurricanes, because of the terrorist attack, there are consequences to the loss of life and the damage done.  But is it proper to call these things ‘punishment’ from God?

                So let’s go to Jesus.  The gospel of John, chapter 9, where Jesus heals the blind man.  The presumption on the part of the disciples is that this man was blind as a punishment for sin.  “Who sinned that this man is blind?  Did he or his parents?”  Jesus’ response is that no one sinned that resulted in this man’s blindness.  Rather, this man is blind and the power of healing in Jesus is to be made manifest in him.

                That is a careful piece to interpret.  It is one thing to ask what sinned to cause this man’s blindness.  It is something very cynical to suggest that God struck this man blind for Jesus.  The man is blind.  It is the opportunity for Jesus to heal, for God’s power to be made manifest.

                In Luke 13, Jesus speaks of a local tragedy.  The tower of Siloam collapsed, killing 18 people.  Jesus talks about that and punishment for sin.  Were those 18 more guilty of sin than others?  The answer is no.  The punishment for sin is that ALL will perish.  Eighteen people died, that is a tragedy.  Maybe it was the consequence of shoddy workmanship, the Bible does not tell us, but Jesus very clearly delineates between the tragic consequences of this collapse and how God’s punishment is now carried out.

                Through Jesus, the things that God did in the Old Testament are not ended, but rather, they are fulfilled.  So the pattern of using external forces, historical forces, to exercise punishment on the people of Israel, so that consequences and punishment are virtually the same thing, that has changed as Jesus has changed the very nature of Humanity’s relationship to God, from God’s Chosen People to All the People. 

                Punishment for sin has been universalized.  Bad things are not going to happen to us because God is punishing us.  The punishment for sin is permanent death, eternal separation from God.  It is how we understand hell, a place of torment, a place where we are no longer with our Creator. 

                Punishment is universalized because forgiveness has been universalized.  So if New Jersey sins, God is not going to raise up the armies of Pennsylvania to attack us in punishment.  Rather, whomever in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and wherever else in the world turns against God and rejects the law of Love toward God and Neighbor, God’s punishment is upon each and every one.

                That was a shortfall in the punishment of the people at Ai, back in the time of Joshua.  The faithful and the unfaithful among the Israelites, the obedient and the disobedient, were punished.  It was based on the community of believers, where now it is the individual relationship with Jesus that governs our punishment and forgiveness.

                But having said all that, consequences remain.  Thousands have died as a result of 9/11, directly and in the aftermath.  Those are the consequences of the evil deeds perpetrated by those hijackers.  Katrina and Sandy, hurricanes, ‘natural disasters’, if we call those punishments, why were only New Orleans and New York singled out?  Now, we might point to global warming, we might point to antiquated levy systems and other response systems as reasons why the consequences were so much worse that they should have been, but that is something different from saying “God punished them”. 

                Which leads to something else so very important in the Christian faith.  If God had truly singled out some person or some group of people for divine punishment, how could we, as Christians, in good conscience, help them out?  If God were truly punishing New Orleans, how should we dare to defy our God and help them?  And there were Christians who were saying, essentially, let them drown.

                But in the resurrection of Jesus and the forgiveness it brings to all who call on Jesus’ name, the love of God is unleashed.  The love of God and the love of neighbor, they are the guiding principles for all that we do.  People suffering the consequences of natural or manmade events, they are not singled out as ‘bad’, they are singled out for special attention as we wield God’s love in the world. 

                That’s God’s punishment is no longer directly inflicted upon the world has opened up new advantages to our faith.  There is no one we cannot reach out to.  Where there is a need, there can the church be, there can we be.  The world calls somebody the bad guys, the immigrants, the foreigners, the people who look that way or talk that way, such is utter nonsense.  All are God’s children!  There is nowhere we cannot go in the power of the Holy Spirit.

                When it comes to sin, how liberating is this for us!  There is no punishment except the permanent death of hell.  That means there is no one here that we need turn our backs on as sinners.  Some group calling themselves Christian tell the world that ‘those’ people are sinners and therefore need to be shunned?  Absolutely NOT.  “Those people” are God’s children as surely as WE are God’s children. 

                The consequence of Jesus’ forgiveness of our sins is that we, in turn, work with others to receive that same forgiveness that we have received.  We DO NOT do so by threatening others with divine punishment.  Believe in Jesus or else.  No, the call for all Christians is to work against the consequences of sinful behavior to show to the world the love of our Lord Jesus Christ.

18 Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over the transgression of the remnant of your possession? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in showing clemency. 19 He will again have compassion upon us; he will tread our iniquities under foot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. 20 You will show faithfulness to Jacob and unswerving loyalty to Abraham, as you have sworn to our ancestors from the days of old.

God accomplishes God’s clemency, God expresses compassion, God casts our sins into the depths of the sea through our Lord Jesus Christ.  We are saved, all of us who accept the love of Christ.  Judgement is given to Jesus, punishment is given to Jesus, but that choice is ours, not His.  He did not die to kill us.  He did not rise again so that we would stay dead.  Even in the worst consequences of what happens in creation, Jesus is right there with us.  Christ is our example to be right there with our fellow human beings. 

In Jesus, we are forgiven for our sins.  Hallelujah and Amen.

 

 

AFFIRMATION OF FAITH (The Apostle’s Creed)

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth;

And in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord; who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried; he descended into hell; the third day he rose from the dead; he ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God the Father Almighty; from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.

PASSING OF THE PEACE

THE OFFERING OF OUR TITHES & GIFTS

Trusting in the generosity of God, let us now give generously to the work and ministry of the church of Jesus Christ in the world

*DOXOLOGY

Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; Praise Him, all creatures here below; Praise Him above, ye heavenly host; Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.  Amen.

 

*PRAYER OF DEDICATION

Gracious and generous God, please accept these gifts that we have brought. May these offerings serve to draw others to love, honor, and serve you. Multiply these tithes and offerings, Holy One, and use them for the edification of your people all around the world. All for love’s sake, amen.

JOYS AND CONCERNS

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE

Reforming God, our world needs you. We have wandered so far from your ways and turned away from your commands. War, violence, hatred and greed prevail, so we ask that you grant us peace, hope, love and courage so that we can be the people you created us to be in this world. Our nation needs you. Politics and fear divide us and drive us to our separate corners even though we are called to love our enemies and do good to those who curse us and despise us. Lord of love, we ask that you remind and empower us to be people of hope and reconciliation who stand up for righteousness, justice and peace. Our church, your church, needs you. We don’t know your word well enough to teach it to our children. We don’t read your word enough to draw on it during our time of need, so we ask that you prompt us to imbibe in the Bread of Life and Living Water that are found in your word and in you. Remind us that you are the source of all that we need, and then send us to be your church in the world, all the time, everywhere. We need you; each of us needs you. Please remind us that you hear our prayers and you answer them. Invite us again and again to draw near to you as you draw near to us. And hear us as we pray the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, saying,

Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.  Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil; for Thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory forever.  Amen.

*CLOSING HYMN: “For the Beauty of the Earth”

1. For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies, for the love which from our birth over and around us lies; Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.

2. For the beauty of each hour of the day and of the night, hill and vale, and tree and flower, sun and moon, and stars of light; Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.

3. For the joy of ear and eye, for the heart and mind's delight, for the mystic harmony, linking sense to sound and sight; Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.

 4. For thy church, that evermore lifteth holy hands above, offering upon every shore her pure sacrifice of love; Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.

5. For thyself, best Gift Divine, to the world so freely given, for that great, great love of thine, peace on earth, and joy in heaven: Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.

 

*BENEDICTION

*THREE FOLD AMEN

Elements of Order of Worship Liturgy written by Gail Henderson-Belsito courtesy of the Presbyterian Outlook

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