1st. January. 2023. Service.
Inverkeithing linked with North Queensferry
Service of Worship 1st January 2023
First Sunday after Christmas
Prelude: “We three kings of orient are”
Call to Worship
Introit Hymn 774 “Jesus, Name above all names”
Opening Prayer
Eternal Father, you gave to your incarnate Son the holy name of Jesus to be the sign of our salvation: Plant in every heart, we pray, the love of him who is the Saviour of the world, our Lord Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.
Hymn 126 “Let’s sing to the Lord,”
Call to Prayer
People of the world, come, celebrate a new beginning.
We step into the new year with faith!
People of faith, come look ahead with hope.
We step into the unknown with hope!
People of hope, come, walk in the footsteps of Jesus.
We go forward together within the family of God.
Let us pray:
Glorious and blessed God, maker of heaven and earth and sea and sky and all that is in them, we come into your presence with thanksgiving and praise. We worship you with gladness. Thank you for the good news of great joy in the Christ child of Bethlehem. Because he is with us, we are not afraid!
Thank you for the gift of your grace in this season and all year long. For daily health and security. For friends and loved ones. For newborn babies and the laughter of children at play. For the companionship of our pets. Thank you for watching over our sleep and dreams, always guarding our minds and hearts. Thank you for making us strong in ways we did not know we could be strong, and for helping us endure what must be endured, with patience.
Thank you for your forgiveness when we make poor decisions, when we accuse someone falsely, or thoughtlessly criticize people we do not understand. Forgive when we forget the poor, those who are sick or in prison or oppressed, those whose hearts are broken. Please understand when our disappointment in you causes us to lose hope. Hear now our silent prayers of confession.
(Silence)
As we listen to the familiar story of your coming among us as a child of flesh and blood, give us fresh eyes and ears so that we may hear these wondrous events with new understanding, wisdom, and joy.
Thank you for your faithful love, and for your advent among us once more. We worship you. In your presence, Emmanuel, we find fullness of joy, and because you are with us, we are not afraid! We offer these prayers in the name of Jesus in whom we find our true rest, and who still teaches us to pray together, Our Father… (In the words most familiar to you)
Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy Kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, The power, and the glory, For ever. Amen.
All Age Talk
Listen to this Spiritual
Children’s Talk
Have you ever heard the song, “Angels Watching Over Me?” It is a beautiful Black Spiritual which tells about how God sends his angels to watch over us. No one knows who wrote the song, but it is believed to have originated in the southern part of the United States during the days of slavery. The song goes like this: (Sing it, if possible.)
All night, all day,
Angels watching over me, my Lord.
All night, all day,
Angels watching over me.
Sun is a-setting in the west;
Angels watching over me, my Lord.
Sleep my child, take your rest;
Angels watching over me.
When Jesus was born, Herod was King. When he heard about the birth of Jesus, he thought that Jesus had come to set up a kingdom here on earth and he was not at all happy about that. He tried to find out where Jesus was so that he could kill him. An angel appeared to Joseph in a dream and warned him of the danger. “Get up! Flee to Egypt with the child and his mother,” the angel said. “Stay there until I tell you to return, because Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.” That night Joseph left for Egypt with Jesus and Mary. They stayed there until Herod died.
When Herod died, God’s angel spoke to Joseph in a dream again. “Get up, take the child and his mother and return to Israel. All who were out to kill the child are dead.”
Isn’t it wonderful that God sent angels to watch over his infant son and protect him from harm? Well, God loves all his children. He loves you and me and he sends angels to watch over us. In Psalm 91, the Bible says:
Evil can’t get close to you,
harm can’t get through the door.
He ordered his angels
to guard you wherever you go.
If you stumble, they’ll catch you;
their job is to keep you from falling.
(Psalm 91:11-12 – The Message)
I’m glad that we have God’s angels watching over us as we walk – even in dangerous places. Be thankful that God’s angels are watching over you today! (Sing) “All night, all day, angels watching over me, my Lord. All night, all day, angels watching over me, my Lord.”
Hymn 481 “Jesus is the Name we honour”
Intimations
The minister will be on holiday from 2-15th January inclusive and the services will be conducted by Morag Wilkinson on January 8th and by the Rev’d Andrea Fraser on January 15th.
Bruce Davies, singer, songwriter and guitarist will be in concert in Dalgety Parish Church on 21st Jan 2.30pm- a gentle and fun afternoon concert. Tickets £6.
£181 was raised for the local food bank through the Christmas card appeal in Inverkeithing. Thank you!
We wish everyone a very Happy and prosperous New Year.
Invitation to the Offering
The Magi offered rare and expensive gifts to honour the new-born Christ child. We may not bring gold, frankincense and myrrh, but all our gifts are used by God to build God’s kingdom in the world. Let us present our gifts and offerings.
Prayer of Dedication
God of neighbourhoods and nations, we bring our gifts to you, grateful that you are with us in good times and hard times. We do not know what the year ahead will hold but your love shines like a star to guide us. Bless these gifts and bless us and use them and us in the service of your mission in the world. Amen.
Isaiah 63:7-9
7 I will tell of the kindnesses of the Lord,
the deeds for which he is to be praised,
according to all the Lord has done for us –
yes, the many good things
he has done for Israel,
according to his compassion and many kindnesses.
8 He said, ‘Surely they are my people,
children who will be true to me’;
and so he became their Saviour.
9 In all their distress he too was distressed,
and the angel of his presence saved them.
In his love and mercy, he redeemed them;
he lifted them up and carried them
all the days of old. Amen.
Hymn 327 “Brightest and best of the sons”
Or
Matthew 2: 13-23
When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up,’ he said, ‘take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.’
14 So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt, 15 where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: ‘Out of Egypt I called my son.’
16 When Herod realised that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. 17 Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18 ‘A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.’
19 After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt 20 and said, ‘Get up, take the child and his mother and go to the land of Israel, for those who were trying to take the child’s life are dead.’
21 So he got up, took the child and his mother and went to the land of Israel. 22 But when he heard that Archelaus was reigning in Judea in place of his father Herod, he was afraid to go there. Having been warned in a dream, he withdrew to the district of Galilee, 23 and he went and lived in a town called Nazareth. So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets, that he would be called a Nazarene. Amen, this is the Word of the Lord, to Him be all glory and praise
Hymn 326 “As with gladness men of old”
Sermon
Do you remember what the end of the year 2020 felt like? Covid had ravaged the country, bringing isolation, business closings and far too many deaths in its wake. Some social media memes depicted 2020 as Satan, the year from hell. We all hoped 2021 would bring an improvement. How could it not? Yet 2021 and 2022 gave us political turmoil, division and a resurgence of Covid and a terrible war. Even in ordinary years, we look at New Year’s Day with hope in our hearts. Maybe the upcoming year will bring new possibilities, new progress, new plans.
How do we feel at the start of 2023? We know that without a sense of hope, we give in to negativity. We don’t want to start the coming year feeling down and glum. Whatever we feel right now, when we turn to scripture, we may find a shock.
The passage for today, chosen by the church for January 1, presents us with as dark a story as we find anywhere in the Bible. Jesus had come into the world some months previously. The angel had described Jesus as the one to save us from our sin. Let’s get past the idea of the magi coming to a stable on the night of Jesus’ birth. Clouded in mystery as it was, with Joseph wanting to end the relationship with Mary, the birth brought reason to take heart. Matthew doesn’t play the birth itself up the way Luke does. No angelic visit to shepherds, no announcement of good news of great joy. Mark tells us only that Mary gave birth, and they named him Jesus. The name, which is the Greek form of Joshua, denotes “salvation.” Otherwise, Matthew considers the birth itself routine.
Some months after Jesus’ birth, the magi arrive with their gifts. At that point, we learn of Herod’s plot. He ingratiates himself with the magi, lying to their faces. He tells them that he wants to pay homage to Jesus. But, as we know, he has a much darker purpose. He considers the baby a threat to his lineage. If Jesus becomes king, he cannot pass on the rule in his own family. Then the magi have a dream. Their dream warns them to avoid Herod, so, in an act of civil disobedience, they sneak out of town.
At that point, the curtain pulls back on our story for this morning. A great horror will soon unfold. Herod ordered the death of all the baby boys two years old or under in Bethlehem. Matthew spares us the details. He understates the viciousness in half a verse. We must imagine the mothers screaming at the top of their lungs, “Don’t hurt my baby!” We must imagine their shoulders heaving with great weeping after the soldiers left. We must imagine soldiers holding fathers back, who are straining with every ounce of strength to get past the soldiers. We then imagine husbands and wives holding each other, each outdoing the other in weeping, having no words to say to each other.
Matthew quotes Jeremiah 31:15, where “Rachel,” the mother of Israel weeps at the death and destruction caused by the exile. Both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah experienced military defeat, so, in one sense the “children” which Rachel lost were the two countries. The attack and the exile would have caused the death of actual children, as well, and “Rachel” wept in Jeremiah because the children, the two countries, had experienced exile and the prospect of ceasing to exist, as the northern kingdom did, as well as the death of the children who became collateral damage. The people of God had experienced agonizing grief before. Children had died before.
When we read this story in Matthew, we might think of mass shootings, especially school shootings, where children die. We recoil in horror at the deaths of children, just as the people of Jeremiah’s time, and the parents, families and friends did in Bethlehem of Jesus’ day. When we read this story, we think of Sandy Hook, Columbine, Uvalde and other school shootings. Reports from the shooting in Uvalde, in May of this last year, included a story of one girl who covered herself in her friend’s blood, so that the shooter would assume she was already dead. We shudder just thinking about that.
I am reading a book called The Body keeps the Score about the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder by a physician by Ressel van der Kouk a. Professor Joni Sancken has written from a theological perspective about trauma. Trauma pushes deeper than a bad experience; it is more profound than ordinary grief, as bad as that is. Trauma comes from an experience that wounds us all the way through. Trauma changes lives. Trauma goes to the core of our being. Trauma can occur because of abuse, violence, assault, persistent racism, war, even from weather-related events such as a hurricane or a tornado. Whole communities can experience trauma. Trauma can linger through generations, as families react in ways that affect how they treat their children.
Sancken makes clear that even the perpetrators of violence can experience trauma. Within the narrative world of Matthew, the trauma in this chapter would have extended in many directions. The parents and siblings would have felt the deepest trauma from the grief and rage of watching the murder of the children. The town of Bethlehem would have shared the trauma, feeling the pain of their neighbours. Even the soldiers would have struggled with guilt and self-hatred at their actions, perhaps drowning their feelings in wine. None of those involved would ever have been the same. They could pray; they could cling to each other. They could never purge the trauma from their minds or even their bodies which exhibit physical symptoms expressing trauma
The lectionary has this passage for today, not because this is the first day of the new year, but because the reading tells part of the aftermath of Christmas. But this year, 2023, this passage falls on New Year’s Day, the first day, and the first Sunday of the year. Right at the start of the year, when we long for hope, the church gives us a story that brings us down, that reminds us of some of the darkest days we have experienced, that might trigger deep pain in us.
Many questions hang over this story. Joseph, who has dreamed before, received a dream that told him to escape Herod’s horrible plot. Why no dream for the other parents? Even if they couldn’t flee to Egypt, couldn’t they have left town? For that matter, why no dream for Herod, warning him not to carry out this monstrosity? We cannot answer these questions, as much as they might trouble us. We don’t know why God didn’t protect the other children, or why God doesn’t intervene to prevent horrors in our world.
We can affirm that the Bible does not sugar-coat the message. The biblical writers speak of hope in the darkest of situations. They have seen the worst that life can carry out. They do not write their message from a place of safety, carefully shielded from what life is really like. They find God’s voice through war, exile and a brutal king who slaughters children because he feels threatened.
What will 2023 hold for us? We cannot know. No year passes without grief and trouble. Matthew’s narrative reminds us that we will have unanswered questions, especially about why something happens. Matthew’s story helps us face the reality that faithfulness will not protect us from tragedy or trauma. One of the essential messages of Matthew is that, whatever happens, God will remain with us. Jesus is “Emmanuel,” God with us Because of this frightening story, we know that Jesus has been with us in the darkest of times. When the biblical writers offer us God’s presence, they know that we can go through horrifying times in our lives.
Christmas is severely diminished without the story of the massacre of the innocents, and without identifying the Holy Family as refugees: Christ at His most vulnerable in firm solidarity with the millions displaced by the twin and related injustices of climate crisis and war, over and above any purely natural tragedies. A ‘suicidal war against nature’ as the Secretary General of the United Nations described it last June. Refugees are created – and will be created – by the continued and expanded new exploitation of oil and gas.
This will kill and evict sisters and brothers in Christ. The science we have seen at the COP conferences has made the connections. That is the post-Christmas message!
But globally, as 2023 begins, Herod is still in power, calling the shots, complacently oblivious to calls for ‘loss and damage’: for compensation for the damage consciously chosen and caused to the homelands of those who have contributed least to the crises which are part of all our lives for as long as we live. This, too, is what ‘fulfilment’ means – that greed and injustice are called to account.
We stand then at the first of the year. This gut-wrenching narrative ends with Jesus and his family in Nazareth, a new town and a new beginning. They have had to migrate a second time, but they have found temporary safety. We don’t know what this new year will bring, but we take heart in the confidence that God will be with us. God will be with us in the uncertainty. Even if 2023 leaves us wounded, God will walk with us in the healing. Whatever we face in 2023, we do not enter this year alone. The God of presence, of comfort, of strength, of sustaining grace will be with us. The God of resurrection goes with us into this year.
We close by quoting Minnie Louise Haskin’s poem “God Knows” from a book called the Desert. The late Queen Elizabeth gave a copy to her father George VI who quoted it during his Christmas day broadcast in 1939. Here are the opening words.
God Knows
And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown”.
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way”.
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East. Amen
Prayer
God above time, God in our history, God in our present, God of our future we are thankful that you govern the times and seasons. Our times are in your hands, and we are grateful for days of joy as well as sorrow, for dancing as well as mourning, for the time of Christ’s birth as well as his death. Our own families know these cycles of change as generations rise and pass away. We rejoice in the babies, the children, and grandchildren among us, and in the long life which allows many of us to see them grow up. Hear our praise in voices young and old, high and low, weak and strong, until our time of silence comes. Amen
God, who comes to share our sorrows, we know that you care because you come among us during the darkness. We pray for those who are sad at this season, who have lost loved ones, and whose families are divided. Grant the peace that only you can give.
God of peace and justice,
we pray for the people of Ukraine today.
We pray for peace and the laying down of weapons.
We pray for all those who fear for tomorrow,
that your Spirit of comfort would draw near to them.
We pray for those with power over war or peace,
for wisdom, discernment and compassion to guide their decisions.
Above all, we pray for all your precious children, at risk and in fear,
that you would hold and protect them.
We pray in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace.
Bless those strong characters who have no fears about what this year will bring them. May they set their goals wisely, use their strength humbly, and help their weaker neighbours unpretentiously.
Bless, generous God, those fragile folks who are fearful about many things, and who have doubts about their ability to cope with new challenges. May they trust the resources of your Spirit and gain in confidence and serenity.
Bless those brave folks for whom each day is a struggle against depression and anxiety. May they be blessed with understanding friends and learn to congratulate themselves on each small victory.
Bless those optimistic folks who face every new day buoyantly. May they temper their heartiness with an awareness of the trials of others, and be patient with the more timid family members, friends and workmates.
Bless those suffering ones who find it hard to remember a day when pain was not present. May they receive the best medical help available and ground their frail existence on the solid rock of your love.
Bless those healthy people who have never had a day’s sickness, and who may tend to see the poor health of others as spiritual weakness. May they learn humility and develop compassion for the less fortunate.
Bless those who despite hard work and careful financial management, endure misfortunes which keep them close to poverty. May they receive justice from those who have the power to improve their wellbeing.
Bless those who find themselves with many material possessions, and who are tempted to put it all down to their own virtue. May they come to learn gratitude, and to use their prosperity humbly to be a blessing to others.
Bless those who are of small faith trusting Christ enough to do justly, love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God. May they experience the divine gifts of peace and joy which go beyond all human understanding.
Bless those of strong faith, who may imagine that theirs is of a superior kind and try to direct others what to believe and how to act. May they realise that it is the poor in spirit who receive the kingdom of heaven.
Bless each of us who present here today. In this new year, remind us to count our blessings, give thanks for our gifts, accept our deficiencies, and trust the Holy Spirit to guide us in ways that will bring glory “to our Father who is in heaven.” Through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen!
Hymn 532 “Lord, you have come to the seashore”
Sending out and Benediction
The New Year stretches before us with few certainties, but many possibilities for those who live each moment with Christ Jesus.
Go forth to love and serve God in all that you do. In God’s strength, comfort the afflicted, stand with those who weep, and defend the oppressed. And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit abide with you, now and always, and unto ages of ages. Amen.
“May God’s blessing surround you each day”
Postlude: “The Coventry Carol”