Worship on the Lord’s Day
23rd Sunday after Pentecost Reformation Sunday
10:00 am October 27, 2024
Minister: Rev. Brad Childs
Music Director: Binu Kapadia Vocalists: Peter and Cheryl Sheridan
Welcoming Elder: Renita MacCallum Children’s time presenter: Vivian Houg
We gather to worship God
Music Prelude
Greeting
L: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you
P: and also with you
Lighting of the Christ candle
Welcome and announcements
Preparation for worship
Call to worship:
L: Praise the Lord, in every time and place.
P: We will tell of God’s goodness each day.
L: Boast only in the Lord.
P: We will praise God’s wonderful deeds.
L: Spread the news of God’s greatness.
P: We will give God glory everywhere we go. So, let us worship God together here and now, now and always!
Opening praise: Forever God is faithful
Prayers of adoration and confession
Great and holy and sovereign God, your glory is beyond imagination, your majesty infinite, and your power incomparable.
Your grace is strong enough to resurrect all that seems deadly; your love is wider than all the universe, your mercy greater than the heights of heaven, with our lips we sing your praises, with our work we give you our days and with our lives we offer you our worship and our adoration, Creator, Son, and Holy Spirit, three in one and one in three, yesterday, today and always.
We confess the evil we did and the good we let go undone, the right words not spoken, and the wrong ones too quickly said: the hatred and pain we have nursed and the callousness with which we have acted.
Forgive us, renew us, and make a fresh start in us; help us avoid the snares and pitfalls along the way.
Restore the joy and assurance of a right relationship with you and our brothers and sisters.
Free us from any guilt and make us free to do better today than we did yesterday and better tomorrow still.
Response: I waited, I waited on you, Lord
Assurance of God’s grace
Our God breaks the chains and sets the captives free. God’s grace is new every morning; unending is God’s kindness. Know that you are forgiven, forgive each other and live at peace.
We listen for the voice of God
Song: Jesus loves me (373)
Children’s time
Story
If you were on a big ship in the middle of the ocean, and you fell overboard, what might the captain of that ship do when he saw that you had fallen into the sea? What would the captain do?
* Would he tell you to start swimming and point in the direction of land? (Let children consider this and answer.)
* Do you think the captain, seeing that you were drowning in the ocean, might say something to you like: “I’ll throw you the life ring but only if you can prove to me that you’re really worth saving. What have you done with your life so far? Have you created any useful inventions? Have you won the Nobel Peace Prize or any other important awards?” Would the captain ask that of you while you were drowning?
* Do you think that the captain would say, “If you can climb halfway up the side of the ship, then I’ll pull you the rest of the way up.” Would the captain make you try to work your way up the side of the ship when she can see that you’re almost drowning?
Of course not! He would rescue you, right? The captain, or one of the crew, would probably throw you a life preserver or something that you could hang onto to keep you afloat. (You could show your prop at this point or even act out a rescue with one of the children.) Once you had a good hold on that flotation device, they would pull you back onto the ship and thus save you from drowning.
There’s a verse in the bible in the book of Ephesians that says: “For by grace you have been saved through faith; and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God– not because of works, lest any man should boast.”
We are like that person drowning in the ocean and God rescues us, not because of anything that WE do, but simply because he loves us.
Today is Reformation Sunday. On this day, we remember how Martin Luther and other Christians of his time, long long ago, wanted to change the way the church taught people about God’s love. At that time, the church was telling people that they had to work their way into heaven. Some people even thought they could pay their way into heaven! Luther knew that this was not what the Bible said. He knew that all of us are sinners and we need to be saved by Jesus. So, Luther reformed, or changed the church for the better, by telling people what the Bible said. The printing press was invented around the same time, so lots of Bibles could be printed and people could read for themselves what the Bible said.
We are saved by grace, just because God loves us. It’s nothing that we can brag about. It is simply a wonderful gift.
Let’s bow our heads and thank God for this gift.
Prayer: Thank you, God, for sending Jesus to save us from our sins. Thank you for throwing us the life preserver and saving our eternal lives. In Jesus’ name, we pray. Amen
The Lord’s Prayer (535)
Transition music
Song: Open my eyes, that I may see (500)
Scripture reading: James 3:14-4:6 (Corrie Magdalene)
Response: Thy word is a lamp unto my feet
Message: Cleanliness is next to what?
There are a lot of sayings that people commonly attribute to the Bible that aren’t actually in it.
Sometimes, like “spare the rod, spoil the child” they are sort of paraphrases of verses, but other times they just have nothing really to do with the scriptures.
Still, many will attribute them to the “good book” nonetheless.
We’ve all heard them before.
As it says in the Bible, “God helps those who help themselves.” Nope, not in there.
“Well When God closes a door he opens a window.” Nah. Not a verse.
“God helps those who help themselves” is from a Greek play called The Parisians and is nowhere found in the Bible.
Another one is “to thine own self-be true,” but this is actually from Shakespeare.
There are more of course.
“Love the sinner / Hate the sin” (a favorite recently) is not to be discovered in our sacred text. But it is from St. Augustine.
“The Lord moves in mysterious ways” is from a hymn which itself was based upon a poem by William Cowper but it’s not from the Bible.
“This too shall pass” is an Arabic proverb.
“God will never give you more than you can handle” is a mistake. It’s actually “you will not be tempted with more than you can handle” which is a very different thing.
In the same way, “Money is the root of all evil” is an omission. The verse actually reads, “The LOVE of [or the Obsession with] money is the root of all evil.”
But I think the one imaginary verse I hear the most is “cleanliness is next to Godliness” (which if you stop to think about it), doesn’t even sound like something you might find in the Bible.
Still, that odd little phrase does beg an interesting and a very important question… What (if anything) is close to Godliness?
In a sense, the answer is really… Nothing.
After all, what are earth could bring creature in the realm of the creator?
But… if you could ask James (the brother of Jesus and the author of our epistle reading from today) what he thinks is close to Godliness… I bet I know what he would say.
I bet James would say, “peacemaking is next to godliness.”
Or at the very least, “peacemaking is what brings us closer to God.”
This section of the book of James that we just heard from is about drawing closer to God. In it, James writes that “true wisdom is pure” and then he defines what he means by true wisdom and being close to Godliness. He says to be close to God, first, you need to “love peace.” And then he adds to that saying that after you “love peace” then you need to act on it… by being “gentle” with people. And next it gets a little harder because next James says, you need to “yield to others,” and then harder still, to be “full of mercy… for people you feel have wronged you,” and then by all this, you will “plant seeds of peace wherever you go.” That James said, is what true “righteousness” and “godliness” looks like. Godliness has nothing to do with being clean and everything to do with loving peace.
Being at peace with self and others is the key to being close to godliness.
Are you at peace or are you all mixed up inside?
Do you love peace? Are you gentle with people, “full of mercy for those who have harmed you?”
Mother Theresa once wrote, “If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” I like that.
I think we live in a very individualistic, anthropocentric and self-centred world.
And then we wonder why we’re lonely and bitter.
Well… it’s because we pit ourself against others, divide into Us/Them categories at the drop of a hat.
We live in contrast to the basic biblical understandings of community expressed throughout the Bible which holds to collective identity, focuses on collective joy and reminds the people that they live collectively in sin and later forgiveness.
But what if we got back into that kind of a mindset? What if we considered the possibility that “we belong to each other.”
Of course, that’s easier said than done.
From the time of Cain and Able, it’s been ingrained in us to do otherwise.
The United States declared its independence in 1776, making it 242 years old. But it’s been embroiled in some form of war for 215 of those 242 years.
The Kingdom of Great Britain is far worse. It dates officially from 1707, (so the time frame is fairly similar to that of the US). However, Britain fought far more wars than the US in this time period. It engaged in some form of military conflict in every year of Queen Victoria’s reign, fighting an incredible 230 wars in just this 64-year period alone.
Battles rage the world over.
Not to mention personal issues.
The wars we wage within us.
The wars about – the slow car in front of us or the ones we wage – with family members or with – our own minds.
Peace with self and certainly peace with others isn’t just something that happens on its own. It takes work. We have to do it. James writes that the first thing we need to do in order to know peace “is to be gentle.”
I Love this story: Jake Kessler writes –
“I once questioned a state trooper who was presented with an Outstanding Trooper Award about what the Governor said when presenting the award to him. He replied The Governor asked, ‘You haven’t once roughed up a drunk or used excessive force on anyone? How can you be a state trooper for 15 years; dealing with the kind of things you deal with and never have anyone write a single complaint about you? It’s unheard of.’
So I answered him. ‘Two things: I said, First, if I am called to break up a fight at a bar, I never say to myself ‘there’s a drunk’; I always pause for just a second say to myself, ‘there’s a man, someone’s husband, someone’s son, someone’s brother, someone’s neighbour, someone’s grandchild… who got drunk. I try to think of him as a man involved in a crime and not a criminal who is someone defined by crime’. ‘Secondly,’ I said, ‘The Bible says that “a soft answer turns away wrath.” And so whenever I walk up to the window of an automobile or speak to someone in any fashion, I always and very intentionally speak just a little bit softer than the person I’m speaking to. Being gentle with people creates a ripple effect where people respond in kind’.” (228)
You don’t find peace by being aggressive or impulsive. To find peace, we have to be peaceful. We have to be gentle, and not just when it suits us. But as the Bible says, “at all times.”
And you know what, that is not fun.
We have this 15-year-old kid living two doors down from us. And he twice now has sat in the alley cleaning a car with the doors all wide open while we sit waiting for him to let us go by and on both occasions, he looks at us until we back all the way out of the alley the other way, because he’s too rude or too lazy to close the door for the 10 seconds, it might take for us to pass. And there is no reason for this. He is obviously just trying to be a little jerk. AND you know what… I don’t want to be gentle.
The other night I looked up the kid’s address, and for more than a moment, I seriously contemplated going to the Mormons website to tell them that I was him and that I really, really wanted a team of missionaries to come to the house to speak with me about the time Joseph Smith met the moon angels.
(I was this close)
But I didn’t.
But I bet you can relate!
James adds, be gentle and “willing to yield to others.”
Castle Ward, a stately home, was built in the 1760’s in Northern Ireland. The original owners of the home standing today were Lord Bangor and Lady Anne Bligh.
One of the most striking features of this now famous house is its two very distinct styles of architecture. See the rear of the house is built in an obvious dark Gothic style, while the front is a neoclassical form; complete with large, white, Roman columns. This pattern continues throughout the inside. Down the center of the house one half is dark and gothic with gargoyles and the other side sort of resembles a clean white bank.
So why?
It’s built that way because Bernard Bangor and his wife Lady Ann could never agree on one style of home; so they built one half of the home her way and the other half in a completely different way. Not only did they differ on their architectural preferences; they apparently had other differences as well, because eventually, (as you might have guessed) Lady Ann walked out on the marriage leaving Lord Bangor with this strange home as a constant reminder of a real life “house divided amongst itself.”
Depending on your point of view, some see the house as a celebration of diversity and defiance, most, however, see it as a huge monument to two peoples stubbornness and an unwillingness to yield even at the cost of a marriage.
In contrast, we are called to something very different… to something radical… to something unnatural to us, something that gives more than it takes and hurts and has a cost. We are called to peace even if it means yielding to someone else when we would really rather not.
It’s a tall order to be sure. But it gets worse. James goes on to describe what being next to Godliness looks like by telling us that we not only must seek peace through gentleness and being willing to yield but we need to do so for the very people we don’t believe deserve it.
Real godliness is to be “full of mercy and the fruit of good deeds”; not showing favouritism to some but by granting mercy to all.
But here is the crazy thing. The thing about mercy… is that always you give to people that don’t deserve it. That’s the whole point. That’s what makes it mercy. They don’t deserve it.
That’s why it’s not easy. That’s why it is noble.
If your best friend steals a dime from you and has never done anything remotely wrong to you before, forgiving them means nothing.
Forgiving those that have actually done you real harm on the other hand – that does something grand. That is what takes pain in life away and brings real peace.
Now I don’t want you to get me wrong here, because I am not saying that we have to let everyone just walk all over us all the time. But what I am saying is that we need to be honest and upfront when we are hurt and willing to move on.
Garry Sinclair tells this amazing story. He writes, “When my mother-in-law was first married, she was in a serious car accident that threw her into the windshield of her car. It was in the days long before the mandatory seat belt, and it was a nasty crash. Still, long after the glass had been removed from her face and the scars had healed, she would still periodically find small pieces of glass rising to the surface of her skin.
Although the shards of glass didn’t hurt her while they lay beneath the surface of the skin, it became very painful as it moved towards the surface.
In a similar way, we all have tragedies, accidents and times when we “hit the windshield” in life. We have all loved people that hurt us. We go through the healing process and fight through the pain that accompanies it. We think all the pieces of glass are gone, only to have some new event, person, holiday, or something else simply bring another piece of glass to the surface and then we suffer all over again because we never really dealt with it.
Complete healing often takes longer than we think. And we need to be honest with the people that hurt us, or we’re really just burying it down just below the surface where it will certainly just rise again.
During World War II Zenaida Botswana of Ukraine was sitting by the window sewing. Suddenly she heard a whistling noise. Then she was struck by a blast of wind. When she came to, her sewing machine was gone, and there was a hole in the floor of her bedroom.
She told the authorities there was a bomb on the floor, but she couldn’t get any officials to check it out. So she simply moved her bed over the hole and lived with it for the next 43 years.
But one day a phone line was being laid in the area, and demolition experts were called in to probe for buried explosives. Batswana waned the men she had a bomb in her house. “Where’s the bomb grandma,” asked the smiling army lieutenant. “No doubt it’s under your bed,” he said. “Yes, it is” Botswana responded, “it’s under the bed.”
And sure enough, the military found a 500-pound bomb under the bed. After evacuating over 2000 people from the surrounding buildings, the bomb squad detonated the bomb on site. Only then were people safe.
Sometimes I feel like I live with a bomb under the bed.
I think lots of people do.
They cover up some terrible little secret, anger, a great hurt, some righteous indignation, while everyone just goes on about their business; never told and not realizing it. But no one is truly safe. No one, not the person or the neighbours are safe until the bomb is uncovered and revealed for what it is.
When you are hurt, you have to make sure you are honest about it with the people you feel hurt you.
But what you can’t do is hold on to it.
I am very fond of the old saying I was reminded of from one of our Alpha videos. It says, “Bitterness is like drinking poison and then waiting for the other person to die.” (504)
You have to be honest, but you also have to let it go. And you have to forgive the very people that deserve it the least. That is what mercy is all about.
Victoria Ruvolo age 45 of Brooklyn, New York, was driving to her niece’s voice recital when she passed by a car driven by Ryan Cushing, age 19. Cushing was with 5 other teens at the time and had just used a stolen credit card to go on a spending spree in a stolen car. One of his purchases was a frozen turkey, which Cushing had decided to toss out the window into oncoming traffic. The 20-pound bird smashed through Ruvolo’s windshield, crushing her face on impact and sending her car flying sideways onto a restaurant patio that was luckily vacant at the time and into the brick wall.
Ruvolo survived. Though it took 10 hours of initial surgery to repair the damage to her face, and months of painful rehabilitation, on October 17th, 2005, Ruvolo was attending Cushing’s sentencing hearing and was asked to speak. In return, Victoria Ruvolo asked for leniency for Cushing whom she referred to quietly as a “lost boy.” Part of her statement reads “Despite all of the fear and pain, I have learned from this horrific experience that I have very much to be thankful for. Each day when I wake up, I thank God simply for being alive. I sincerely hope you have also learned from this awful experience Ryan. There is no room for vengeance in my life, and I do not believe a long, hard prison term would do you, me, or society any good in any way.”
Cushing who wept almost uncontrollably expressed his remorse, mumbling “I’m so sorry” through gasps of air and falling tears. For his actions, he was sentenced to six months in prison. He was expected to receive 25 years before Victoria Ruvolo intervened. (88)
James says that true peace comes from gentleness, from yielding, from showing mercy to all. And then he reminds us of this great truth: “Those who are peacemakers will plant seeds of peace and reap a harvest of righteousness.”
My prayer for you all this week is this,
May you find peace with God, peace within yourselves through forgiveness and mercy and peace with all those around you – for if anything is next to Godliness, it is a peacemaker. Amen
Song: Sometimes a healing word is comfort (768: vss 1, 2, 3, 5)
We respond to serve God
Our time of giving
The offering is not for the lights to be on. It’s so that our children come to know Jesus. It’s so young people have a safe place to come to learn and share. It’s so we can introduce people to Jesus. It’s so we can reach out. That is why I (we) give to God. So let us worship our Lord and be a light to the world. Let us Worship our God by making an offering to Him and to his Church in order to do his work.
Prayers of thanksgiving and intercession
Song: We are one in the Spirit (471)
Sending out with God’s blessing
I am no longer my own, but yours.
Put me to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering; let me be employed for you, or laid aside for you, exalted for you, or brought low for you; let me be full, let me be empty, let me have all things, let me have nothing:
I freely and wholeheartedly yield all things to your pleasure and disposal.
And now, glorious and blessed God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, you are mine and I am yours. So be it.
And the covenant now made on earth, let it be ratified in heaven.
Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with all of you.” Amen.
Response: Go forth into the world
Music postlude
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Numbers in brackets after a song/hymn indicate that it is from the 1997 Book of Praise of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. Those and other songs are being used in accordance with the specifications of Dayspring’s licensing with One License (3095377) and CLC (A735555).
The Rev. Brad Childs retains the copyright (© 2024) on all original material in this service. As far as Brad Childs is aware, all of the material that has not been attributed to others is his own creation or is in the public domain. Unacknowledged use of copyrighted material is unintentional and will be corrected immediately upon notification being received.