29th. August. 2021. Service.

Service of Worship  29^th  August 2021

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

 Prelude: Our Father which art in heaven

 Introit: 194 “This is the day”

 Collect
Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all good things: Graft in our hearts the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; nourish us with all goodness; and bring forth in us the fruit of good works; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God for ever and ever. Amen.

 Hymn 152 Praise the Lord, His glories show

 Hymn 463 Fairest Lord Jesus

Call to Prayer

 Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good.
His love endures for ever.
2 Let Israel say:
‘His love endures for ever.’
Let the house of Aaron say:
‘His love endures for ever.’
Let those who fear the LORD say:
‘His love endures for ever.’

Faithful God,
In this world which you have created in all its beauty, you cause the seasons to change, the sun to shine and the rain to fall,
the vines to bear fruit and the fields to produce food for all your creatures.
You alone are our strength and security,
you alone give us rest and minister comfort to our tired lives.
We here acknowledge you as the fountain of all life, and we rejoice in its ever flowing fulness and marvel at its wondrous diversity. In you we find purpose for our lives and seek wisdom and understanding as we face the challenges by which our souls are strengthened through our lives upon the earth. We ponder your greatness and humble ourselves before your holy presence as we offer you our praise and thanksgiving. You are the God who made us as you are the Christ who heals and restores and the Holy Spirit who imparts eternal live to us as we wait in worship before you.

Faithful God, even though we know that you are the Source of our lives, we confess that we forget you too easily, neglect your worship and fail to keep your commandments or show your love.
We think and speak in ways that deny our loyalty and love for you. We do not love our neighbour as ourselves and we are quick to speak ill of them and slow to forgive their misdeeds. We harbour anger and let resentments rule our thoughts and behaviour. Looking over our lives there is much to confess.
In your mercy, restore us to right relationships with you and with one another.

Assurance of Pardon
While it is true that we have all sinned, it is a greater truth that we are forgiven through God’s love in Jesus Christ. To all who humbly seek the mercy of God, in Jesus Christ our sin is forgiven.
Let us be at peace with God, with ourselves and with one another.

Prayer for Understanding
God of Wisdom and Grace may your word be clear and direct in its challenge to us today. Help us to be doers of your Word, not mere listeners,
so that our lives shall reflect the truth we receive in Jesus Christ, your living Word.

The Lord’s Prayer in the version most familiar to you.

 North Queensferry

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.

Intimations

The Children’s Church will resume during worship on Sunday 5^th September.

 Invitation to the Offering

 James records that every generous act comes from God. So let our offering today reflect God’s generosity and our gratitude for every blessing we have received from God in his faithful providence.

Prayer of Dedication

Great is your faithfulness, O God, as we offer to you a portion of what we have received in your unfailing goodness. Bless these gifts and our lives, that your love may be proclaimed to the world through all we accomplish in the name of Jesus Christ, our Friend and Saviour. Amen.

 

Hymn 125 “Lord of all being, throned afar

 Reading: Song of Solomon 2:8-13

 Listen! My beloved!
Look! Here he comes,
leaping across the mountains,
bounding over the hills.
⁹ My beloved is like a gazelle or a young stag.
Look! There he stands behind our wall,
gazing through the windows,
peering through the lattice.
¹⁰ My beloved spoke and said to me,
‘Arise, my darling,
my beautiful one, come with me.
¹¹ See! The winter is past;
the rains are over and gone.
¹² Flowers appear on the earth;
the season of singing has come,
the cooing of doves
is heard in our land.
¹³ The fig-tree forms its early fruit;
the blossoming vines spread their fragrance.
Arise, come, my darling;
my beautiful one, come with me.’

Hymn 463 “Fairest Lord Jesus”

 Reading Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

 7 The Pharisees and some of the teachers of the law who had come from Jerusalem gathered round Jesus 2 and saw some of his disciples eating food with hands that were defiled, that is, unwashed. 3 (The Pharisees and all the Jews do not eat unless they give their hands a ceremonial washing, holding to the tradition of the elders. 4 When they come from the market-place they do not eat unless they wash. And they observe many other traditions, such as the washing of cups, pitchers and kettles.
5 So the Pharisees and teachers of the law asked Jesus, ‘Why don’t your disciples live according to the tradition of the elders instead of eating their food with defiled hands?’
6 He replied, ‘Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you hypocrites, as it is written:
‘“These people honour me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
7 They worship me in vain.
Their teachings are merely human rules.”
¹⁴ Again Jesus called the crowd to him and said, ‘Listen to me, everyone, and understand this. ¹⁵ Nothing outside a person can defile them by going into them. Rather, it is what comes out of a person that defiles them.’
21 For it is from within, out of a person’s heart, that evil thoughts come – sexual immorality, theft, murder, 22 adultery, greed, malice, deceit, lewdness, envy, slander, arrogance and folly. 23 All these evils come from inside and defile a person.

Hymn 191 “Do not be afraid for I have redeemed you”

 Sermon
Last week in North Queensferry, we lined up to receive communion instead of waiting in our seats to be served by the elders. A new way of doing.
You may imagine my surprise when I read this from Janet Hunt on Monday

And so on the first Sunday in Lent we knelt for communion. Again, remember these were kind people and they had a deep respect for the office of pastor and so almost without exception they would accept the pastor’s suggestions even if they were dumb.  I’ll never forget that morning as the good people of St. Paul Lutheran Church did as their pastor asked.   Winifred, the matriarch of the congregation, sat on the right hand side near the back. She was a round faced woman whose wrinkles had been etched from years of smiling. Indeed, she was not young, and her knees were not what they used to be.  After most of the rest of the congregation had come forward, Winifred made her way to the front as well and knelt with all the rest. I remember wincing to watch as she struggled to get up again.  And it hit me that this was why the people of St. Paul Lutheran Church did not kneel to receive the sacrament.  They did not do so out of kindness.  If Winifred could not kneel, then no one would.  The next week we quietly returned to standing as the bread and wine were shared.

The questions, of course, are indirectly posed by this week’s Gospel.  “Why do we do what we do?” “Is it rooted in God’s intent for us or is it simply our ‘human traditions’ which guide and inform us?”  “What matters and what doesn’t?”

Now to be sure a lot of our ‘human traditions’ may well be rooted in a great deal of good.  Although they are far outside my own experience, and I would be hard pressed to explain them, I am certain this was also true of the practices observed by the Pharisees in today’s Gospel lesson.  Only Jesus would remind us, along with the prophets of old, that what we speak or the rituals we keep mean nothing at all if our lives are less than charitable.  In the same way, while what we do on the outside can enhance our faith, such practices also may have no bearing at all.  It is, finally, what comes out of us that is a truer reflection of who we are, not what goes into us.

 “Listen carefully and understand. There is nothing outside a person that can corrupt them; it is the things which come out of them that corrupt…. For out of the human heart come evil thoughts, promiscuous sex, theft, murder, adultery, money lust,, wickedness, deceit, wild lusts, envy, slander, pride and foolishness. When these things come out, they defile a person.”  Mark 7: 14-15, 20-23.

We begin with two comments about this

Jesus says that these things come out of the heart. In Jewish understanding of his time, the heart was the seat and source of all thoughts. They used heart as we would use mind. For both the conscious thoughts that focus in our awareness, and the deeper levels of the mind where many good and bad memories, regrets and hopes, needs and yearnings, old scars and new wounds, nameless anxieties or fears, stalk together in a kind of psychic zoo. The key thing is that these wild things are within us all. Even in the most righteous and the most loving person, some of them are there.

There is a place for open confrontation, self-examination, acknowledgment of guilt, repentance and forgiveness. We need to hear the hard words of Jesus as well as the comforting ones.  There are many social and personal evils in which we participate that need exposing. Painful repentance (is a very healthy thing.

An Australian minister tells this story

An evangelist was asked to conduct a mission in a rural town. He first sent friends to find out what was going on in that place. They reported a grave racist gulf between those of European heritage and the local aboriginal community, and that the church was as prejudiced as the rest of the town. The evangelist arrived and preached to a packed gathering of well washed, white people about the sin of racism. He insisted that any penitence was superficial unless they repented their participation in this evil which was so pervasive in their community.

Many of the good people of that place were shocked. This was not the religion they wanted. They might have applauded if he had spoken against sexual laxity, gossip, drug use, adultery, theft, deceit, envy and pride. They could have nodded their heads, shouted Amen, and thought about their sinful neighbours they could bring along to the next gathering. And there would be some would have wept over their adultery, bad language, envy, or deceit, or lust, and then repented, and thoroughly enjoyed a good mission. But not this message about racism. They practically ran that evangelist out of town. The mission was considered a flop, and those who chose the evangelist came in for some cutting comments.

Jesus words here may in fact make us feel guilty, until we realise that this shadow aspect of our beings is common to the entire human race. Feeling guilt and holding on to it does nothing to help us. What is important is that we acknowledge the presence of the shadow in our human personalities and allow it its place and deal with it. Guilt can make us hide our negative traits, even from ourselves. If we try to suppress them they will still be there under pressure, as it were. In an unguarded moment they will come out and shame us in the process. This is what is important here. We need to lift the burden of guilt from those who have been taught that even to think an evil thought, to be tempted to do something, is a bad as actually committing the evil. That is never so.

Jesus did not say that you are defiled if you have thoughts and feelings about illicit sex, slander, envy, greed, theft, murder, deceit etc. What Jesus says is: if we let these things out, let them be expressed in actions, then we are defiled. It is the evils that come out of a person that defiles them. It’s the things we let loose on the world.

There is in all of us, as there was in Jesus himself, an unruly tangle of fears, lusts, envy, anger, prejudice, desire for revenge, racism, greed, pride. This in itself is not cause for guilt. It is how we deal with those things that become a matter of good or evil, peace of mind or guilt.

We should not be afraid of the cauldron of nasty possibilities that exists within us They do not defile you or make us unclean. It is what you do and say that counts.

 So, only the things that come out corrupt. If we get this wrong we can cause ourselves and others to suffer. As I see it, there are at least three sad consequences if we misread Jesus.

The first is the one we have already mentioned: a constant load of guilt that burdens people and turns their lives into a ceaseless round of trying to appease God. There are some tortured souls who are constantly repenting of the same sin a, each time hoping that their contrition will deliver them from any more evil thoughts and temptations.

There is a second possible consequence of misreading Jesus. Such folk just get depressed about it all and decide that Christianity lays upon us a standard that is impossible to attain far less sustain. This is not helped when they hear Jesus say, “be perfect as your heavenly father is perfect.” It can lead to the conclusion of some that they are afraid they are not good enough to be Christians. I am a lost cause.” However, Jesus words are a call to commitment to becoming like God the Father, rather than a precondition of following him. A person who learns a skill will achieve perfection in time, but only by persisting in the process of acquiring the skill.

The third s consequence is found in those folk who are so revolted by the evil thoughts and feelings within them, that they shut out any awareness of them. They won’t admit it even to themselves. They repress the knowledge and lose touch with what is really going on inside them. They dam it all up within, unacknowledged. This can, in some cases, lead to a virulent self-righteousness that results in outright attacks on those whom they perceive to be sinners In other cases, this loss of self-honesty can lead to a moment when the dam wall breaks, and they find themselves committing an evil they thought impossible until it happens.

How often we hear of people who, totally out of character do something outrageous. There was a case this week of a solicitor who for some strange reason injected blood into foods in a supermarket. He was described in the paper as “a man of previous good character.” Who knows then, what inner battle he was losing to do what he did.

When we are honest with ourselves and recognise what is happening inside our private psyche, it puts us in a good position to deal with temptation before it gets out of hand.

It is important to know and to accept our dualistic nature in this life. Jesus himself was sorely tempted. He was thoroughly human as we are human. He knew the full range of temptations from the unruly zoo within. That does not mean he was defiled.

Many of the things Jesus warns us not to let out are tied up with the natural raw drives and instincts which make us human.  We know the sort of things that get people into trouble: sexual promiscuity, love of money, and pride.

The God-given ­sexual nature, with its powerful drive, is not evil. It is when it is expressed in unloving, destructive ways, that it becomes a defiling thing. We are seeing a backlash in society against those who have abused it. It is not just men, the so called “incel” rage is an expression of anger and frustration which rejected men are feeling. The backlashes are also dangerous in that they can also go too far.

Behind covetousness and greed is our natural human longing for security in an extremely insecure existence. That longing for security is not defiling us. It is when we allow that longing to drive us towards accumulating possessions, and often doing so at the expense of others, that we become defiled.

In a similar way our propensity to pride is linked to our basic need to feel good about ourselves and feel that we are valued.  This is what is behind racism a narcissistic belief that our race is superior and that others are less. Natural self-respect or pride is not a defiling thing. But when we set that drive loose, putting others down, gossiping about them, being judgemental, craving self-importance and power at the cost of others, then we are certainly defiled.

The potential evil within us is just that: potential. Evil thoughts, unsettling lusts, angry mutterings in the soul, wanting to have wealth and never a moment’s financial worry, thoughts about how we would like to hurt or denigrate an opponent, adulterous phantasies, wishing someone would drop dead, being aware of opportunities to deceive others: all are potential evil! These inner thoughts and feelings are not wickedness. It is only when we permit them to move out of us into deeds, that we become corrupted.

We know what these things are especially when we look to God, when we are reminded and challenged about them by his Word.

We must be honest about what is going on inside. Forewarned is forearmed. The most dangerous thing we can do is to pretend sin is not possible.

We should not wallow in guilt, or mentally berate ourselves as wicked sinners for having these thoughts and feelings.

Let the Spirit of Christ, who “in all points was tempted like we are, yet without sin,” help us to deal with these inner pressures.

Accept the fact that at times some of these inner pressures may break out into our words and deeds. Then we must face up to what has happened, and accept the healing grace of Christ, allowing Jesus to forgive and restore us.

When other people around us do let those nasties out and sin in ways that alarm us, be merciful even as God is merciful with you.

Going back to Janet Hunt’s comments earlier. Whatever we do in our daily lives and indeed within our church, our motive should always be to honour God be keeping self in check out of love for others. That always by acknowledging our shadow side, that is part of self-love, and self-forgiveness. We do the same when we love and forgive others and take them into account. Evil triumphs when we deny its existence. Amen.

Prayers of Intercession
God our Father, hose Word created life, we bless and thank you for the abundance we enjoy from earth’s goodness. Make us wise caretakers of the planet’s fragile balance, o vulnerable to drought and disaster. May your world be restored as place of plenty for all your creatures, for we know all our lives depend on you. Lord, in your mercy, Hear our prayer.

God of transforming love, we are grateful that we live in a land which is mostly peaceful and safe with plentiful provision for our needs. We hear daily of places where there is poverty violence and conflict. We pray for people who faces we see in the news who are suffering from the burdens of racism, violence and greed in our own communities and in many other nations. We ask that your Spirit calm the strife in Afghanistan and strengthen the hand of everyone who is trying to bring order and relief to a very troubled nation.

We hear of selfish and ruthless leaders in many countries with leaders seem to be unaccountable for their decisions. Give courage to all who stand up against tyranny and oppression and bring healing change to the nations.

Where we see abuse and exploitation help us to build a common life where all people find dignity in their work, are rewarded fairly and respected fully.

Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of vigilant care, thank you for the strength and comfort you give us when we are caught in times of sorrow and stress.

We pray for people who do not know security in their daily lives, and for those facing manipulation hatred or violence at home or on the streets, for the vulnerable who must depend on others for their care.  Help us to shape a society in which violence is not tolerated, where the weak are protected, where the elderly are honoured for their experience, and children are cherished for who they are.  Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

God of all times and places, as the summer moves toward autumn, and our community begins to open up while the coronavirus is still present, we pray for parents who face decisions about schooling, and leaders in churches and organizations who must make wise choices about how we shall live and work. Equip us all with the wisdom we need to plan well, and to act with understanding towards folk who are eager to get things going and for those who are anxious or reluctant to move too quickly. Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.

We know that you know our prayers and our desires even before they are formed in the silence of our hearts, so inspire us to remember and name before you the people and situations which concern us most. Let your blessing rest upon our families and friends and all whom we love and receive all our prayers in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, Amen.

Hymn 716 “Come and find the quiet centre”

Sending out and Benediction

God give you purity of heart and thought as you go into the world with grace and love, ministering hope, and justice to others. Go in peace and may the blessing of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit always be with you. Amen.

“May God’s blessing surround you each day”

 Postlude: Taste and See

 For Children

People today are very concerned about having clean hands. Many people carry packages of wipes or hand sanitizer. Keeping your hands clean is good, right?

The Bible tells about some Pharisees who came to Jesus. They liked to be bossy about the rules. “We’ve noticed that some of your disciples are eating without washing their hands,” they told Jesus. “Why don’t they follow our tradition of washing their hands before they eat?”

“You bunch of phonies!” Jesus responded. “Isaiah must have been talking about you when he said, ‘These people honour me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’ ”

Then Jesus called the people to gather around. “All of you listen. It’s not what goes into your body that makes you unclean, it is the bad words that come out of your mouth. Out of your hearts come evil thoughts, greed, cheating, and envy. This is what makes you unclean.”

The Pharisees were more worried about having clean hands than they were about having a clean heart. Are we any different? We work hard to keep our hands clean, but do we guard our hearts against evil thoughts? What kinds of books do we read? What kinds of TV shows and movies do we watch? What kind of language comes out of our mouth?

Clean hands or a clean heart, which is more important?

God, forgive us for our unclean thoughts. Create in us clean hearts to honour You. In Jesus’ name, amen.

 

Here is a song about this: