29th. January. 2023. Service.
Inverkeithing linked with North Queensferry
Service of Worship 29th January 2023
Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
Prelude: “I know Whom I have believed”
Call to Worship
Introit Hymn 774 “Jesus, name above all names”
Opening Prayer
Almighty and everlasting God, you govern all things both in heaven and on earth: Mercifully hear the supplications of your people, and in our time grant us your peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Hymn “When morning gilds the skies”
Call to Prayer
God calls us to seek justice:
Let Christ’s love for the poor and hungry fill the earth.
God calls us to show kindness
Let Christ’s light shine in places of brokenness and despair.
God calls us to walk humbly in the Spirit,
Let us join the work of the kingdom in humility and hope.
Called, blessed, and inspired, let us worship God together.
God of wisdom and blessing,
On this (cold) day we come into the warmth of your presence.
Here we find shelter in the strength of your promises;
here we find welcome in your tender care.
Grateful for the protection you provide,
thankful for the comfort of your community,
we offer our praise to you.
For you give blessing when the world condemns;
you bring freedom when the culture confines.
Embrace us with your love in this hour of worship
as we offer you our love in return.
Through Christ our Lord we pray. Amen.
God of the ages,
we confess the world’s wisdom attracts us, in advertisement and argument.
We fail to measure messages according to the wisdom in your Word.
We find calls to do justice too demanding,
for the world has taught us to look to our own interests first.
Forgive us, we pray.
Renew us with your mercy,
so that we may walk more humbly with you and each other day by day. Amen.
Assurance of Pardon
Jesus said, “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Though God knows our failings, forgiveness is ours in Jesus Christ. Rejoice and be glad for his renewing love.
Prayer for Understanding
Holy God, your people turn to your Word for truth and guidance in every age. Send your Holy Spirit to inspire our understanding of your Scripture, read and interpreted today. Help us hear the truth for our lives and our times through Christ, your Living Word. Amen
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 Inverkeithing Coffee morning will be held in Inverkeithing on Tuesday 31st from 9:45-11:45 The next coffee morning in North Queensferry will be on Wednesday 1st February from 10:30-Noon.
St Fillans Church Aberdour are celebrating their 900th Anniversary with several events: Friday 10th February a live broadcast of “Any Questions” on BBC 4 Radio. One ticket has been allocated to Inverkeithing and claimed, but you may wish to listen in after the news at 20:00 hours.
Sunday 19th February, the Rev. John Bell, Hymn writer, broadcaster and member of the Iona Community will lead worship at 10:30am and give a talk from 3-5pm entitled “Humour in the Bible.” Please speak to Joan More if you are interested.
Inverkeithing: There is a new Flower Calendar in the vestibule. Please add your name if there are special dates on which you wish to put flowers in the church. Money can be given to Janet McCauslin or Robert Dowie. Two other rotas are posted for volunteers to help with refreshments following worship on the last Sunday of the month and for a coffee morning on the final Saturday of each month.Following the minister’s retirement this week, Mr Alan Monk has been appointed Interim Moderator and will conduct worship in both congregations on Sunday 15th February. Next Sunday Morag Wilkinson will officiate in both congregations.
Invitation to the Offering
The prophet Micah declared that God calls us to do justice, love kindness and walk with humble hearts. So we offer our gifts humbly, trusting God will use them and us for kind and just purposes in the world God loves.
Prayer of Dedication
God of Life, from you all loving kindness, justice, and mercy flow. Bless these gifts so that acts of kindness, justice and mercy flow from them, too. And bless our lives so the world may see in us signs of your kingdom at work in the church and community, in Christ’s name. Amen.
All Age Talk
Did you know that Jesus gave us a recipe for living a happy life? In the book of Matthew, the Bible says, “Now when Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to Him, and He began to teach them.” He taught them a lesson we call “The Beatitudes.” Each one of the beatitudes starts with the words, “Blessed are they…” Some translations of the Bible use the word happy instead of blessed. This is Jesus’ recipe for us to be happy.
I like that the word “beatitudes” has two parts to it: be and attitude. The Beatitudes are ways that we can be and attitudes we can have. Let’s look at a few of these be-attitudes.
Jesus said to…
- Be merciful to people. To be kind when they are hurting.
Jesus said to…
- Be peacemakers when people are fighting.
Jesus said to…
- Have an attitude of pure thoughts.
Jesus said to…
- Have an attitude of wanting to do right.
Jesus also said that when we are sad, God comforts us and then we are happy.
I like that Jesus gave us a recipe for how to be and what kind of attitudes to have. And Jesus says that we will be happy if we follow His recipe.
Dear God, thank You for the beatitudes. Please help us follow Your recipe for a happy and blessed life. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
Hymn 181 “For the beauty of the earth”
Reading: Micah 6:1-8
6 Listen to what the Lord says:
‘Stand up, plead my case before the mountains;
let the hills hear what you have to say.
2 ‘Hear, you mountains, the Lord’s accusation;
listen, you everlasting foundations of the earth.
For the Lord has a case against his people;
he is lodging a charge against Israel.
3 ‘My people, what have I done to you?
How have I burdened you? Answer me.
4 I brought you up out of Egypt
and redeemed you from the land of slavery.
I sent Moses to lead you,
also Aaron and Miriam.
5 My people, remember
what Balak king of Moab plotted
and what Balaam son of Beor answered.
Remember your journey from Shittim to Gilgal,
that you may know the righteous acts of the Lord.’
6 With what shall I come before the Lord
and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
8 He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God. Amen
Hymn 738 “Glorious things of thee are spoken”
Reading: Matthew 5:1-12
5 Now when Jesus saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, 2 and he began to teach them. He said:
3 ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5 Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 ‘Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you. Amen, this is the Word of the Lord, to Him be all glory and praise.
Hymn 198 “Make me a channel of your peace”
Sermon
I find significance in the fact that the final sermon of my ministry is, not by chance, but by the leading of the Holy Spirit on the Sermon on the Mount. This passage for me sums up the essence of the gospel for it is at the heart of Jesus ministry his invitation to, challenge and assurance of the wonder of the Kingdom of God. I found in this inspired message last week a very apt way of summing it up.
Imagine the Hope of My Heart that day on the mountainside when I told My followers that to no throne on earth, I led them; old forms and negations that had meant so much in the past were to be swept away; motives and impulses were to be all-important.
By the thoughts of his heart was a man to be judged. Prayer was like a son appealing to a father. Love was to be the foundation, the Golden Rule. Tribal, even racial, distinctions were to be ignored and the claims of the whole great family of God were to be met.
To such heights as they had never before scaled, I led them, up to Peak-truths they had thought unscalable.
What hopes I had of them as their wonder turned to Vision and they responded to My Message.
What hopes I have today of each of you My Followers as you catch sight of your Land of Promise ahead.
We humans sometimes make up phrases to reflect conventional wisdom. The author Kate Bowler wrote about some of those phrases in her book, Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved.
The phrases can be reassuring. “God never gives you more than you can handle,” for example. That one, however, raises the question of why our mental health institutions are so busy helping overwhelmed people. Or this phrase you sometimes hear spoken to grieving parents of a dead child: “God needed another angel.” It’s meant to be reassuring but Bowler calls the god it depicts “sadistic.”
Making up sayings is not new. For instance, the point of the book of Job was to challenge the conventional wisdom that suffering is a sign that someone sinned.
In the ministry of Jesus, we find that he, too, challenges conventional wisdom. And there’s no better example of that than the Beatitudes.
The Beatitudes are countercultural. They take what people think are true sayings and they turn them on their head. The Beatitudes make people stop and say, “Wait. What?” And that response is a clue that maybe we haven’t fully understood the way Jesus challenges the systems that rule our culture and our world.
He asks us to stop and reimagine how the world would be different if we actually tried to live out the values of love, compassion, mercy and justice instead of the ideas our culture often values -such as the importance of power and wealth and consumerism and mindless entertainment.
The Jesus who spoke the Beatitudes isn’t the meek-and-mild child we imagined when we first met him in the manger in Bethlehem. Rather, he’s out to shake up our world in fundamental ways and to change us.
Some people have tried to tame or domesticate the Beatitudes. When I was in Canada occasionally, I would listen to “The Hour of Power” from the Crystal Cathedral Golden Grove California. The preacher Robert Schuller wrote a book called The Be (Happy) Attitudes. He refused to take seriously the idea sin. Jesus’ Beatitudes, however, weren’t designed as a recipe for happiness but, rather, as a way of understanding what the reign of God is all about. That reign, of course, doesn’t exclude happiness, but being reviled and persecuted and called evil things on account of our love of Jesus seems like an odd way to achieve happiness. And it’s meant to sound odd.
The term Beatitude, by the way, comes to us through the Latin translation of the Bible called the Vulgate because each verse begins with the words beati sunt, meaning “blessed are.” The Beatitudes as they are found in what’s commonly called the Sermon on the Mount from the book of Matthew, but we can also find some Beatitudes in chapter six of Luke’s Gospel in what’s sometimes called the Sermon on the Plain. There, however, four Beatitudes are followed by four Woes, such as “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep.”
You will have heard the Beatitudes may times in your life, but just for today, let’s pretend that we are hearing them for the very first time. To help with that, we’ll use several different translations.
From the Common English Bible: Happy are people who are hopeless, because the kingdom of heaven is theirs.
A footnote in that translation says that its use of the word “hopeless” there instead of the traditional phrase “poor in spirit” does not “refer to ‘humility’ but to those who continue to look to God for help because of their needy state.”
When Jesus began his ministry among the very first words he said, were that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, or has come near. He was telling people that God’s reign is not limited to the afterlife in sweet heaven but, rather, can be experienced now if we live by God’s values, which a few minutes ago we identified as of love, compassion, mercy and justice.
What Jesus seems to be saying here is that people who have come to the end of their human resources for fixing the problems they face can be glad that they haven’t really run completely out of resources because God is the God of possibilities and who can open way even when we cannot.
From the 1560 edition of the Geneva Bible: Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Notice that no timeline is promised here. That’s because all of us who have ever mourned the death of someone loved knows that grief never ends. Rather, we eventually accommodate ourselves to the reality of the loss. And one way we do that is through the comfort given to us by others, sometimes merely by their presence. Beyond that, we hold to the hope that one day we will be reunited with lost loved ones in God’s presence.
From The Holy Bible Translated by Ronald Knox in 1954: Blessed are the patient; they shall inherit the land.
This Beatitude is talking about people who seem powerless by earthly standards. Such people often know that earthly power is fleeting, unreliable, sometimes destructive. Recognizing that, they can accept the world as God’s beautiful gift to everyone, and that is riches enough. And it’s helpful here to think of “the land” in the way indigenous people often do – as something we don’t own but, rather, something to which we belong and from which we can learn.
From the English Standard Version: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Righteousness can refer to individual goodness, of course, and the world could use more of that. But Jesus seems more interested in critiquing and fixing systems that crush others than in whether someone prays three times a day or never says anything stronger than “darn.” You can be righteous because you have accepted Jesus and believe the right things whilst ignoring the fact that righteousness calls for justice for all. Jesus called out the hypocrites who pretended to be pious but were simply whited sepulchres. He had little patience with people who prayed loudly in public but supported an economy that favoured the wealthy.
From the Holy Bible from the Ancient Eastern Text, a translation of the Aramaic (the language Jesus spoke) version of the Bible. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall have mercy.
Reputations get around. If you forgive someone for something, don’t be surprised if that forgiven person lets others know of your kindness. Just as vengeance given results in vengeance received, in the end, mercy comes back to the merciful, and conflict in the world is thereby reduced.
From the Revised English Bible: Blessed are those whose hearts are pure; they shall see God.
Heart here, of course, is a metaphor for our centre, our essence. How our hearts got that designation is a story for another day. But having a pure heart surely means that one has been forgiven, redeemed, rescued from evil. And when we remove evil, what’s left to see? God, of course. Now, there are people who seem unable to see God anywhere and people who see God everywhere. Cast your lot with the latter group.
From the New International Version: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
Peacemakers -male and female -can be thought of as direct descendants of God because God is the ultimate peacemaker, reconciling humanity to God through Christ. That means peace is not simply the absence of war but, rather, an atmosphere in which humanity can flourish. It’s the task to which Christ, who is our peace, calls all of us.
From the New American Bible: Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Who gets persecuted or harassed for trying to be righteous? The goody-two-shoes people. That’s the dismissive term they get called, anyway, even when they aren’t virtue signalling by being ostentatiously righteous. Rather, they’re the people trying to understand and do God’s will. In fact, Jesus says that if you live by God’s will, you can live in the kingdom of heaven today.
From the Contemporary English Version: God will bless you when people insult you, mistreat you and tell all kinds of evil lies about you because of me. Be happy and excited! You will have a great reward in heaven.
Being reviled and persecuted doesn’t sound like the kind of job description for which most of us would sign up. But look. Christianity is not an easy faith. It calls for sacrifice, for following someone who loved us enough to be executed for us. Jesus here is simply telling us what the author of Psalm 30 told us: Mourning may last through the night, but joy comes in the morning.
Imagine a world in which people really tried to live by the Beatitudes. Well, we can do more than imagine it. We can help bring such a peaceful, loving world into existence by following the One who told us how we can be blessed. And we can begin today. May it be so for you as you continue your work and witness in this spiritual community. Amen.
Prayers of Thanksgiving and Intercession
Blessed are you, most holy God,
for you give release to the captives and food to the hungry.
Bless us as we hunger and thirst for your justice and righteousness. May all who are needy find their hope in you.
Compassionate God, we thank you for your mercy.
You give pardon for our sin and call us to forgive others.
Embrace with your renewing grace those who are resentful or discouraged. Help us serve as instruments of reconciliation when discord or conflict arises.
Righteous God, we thank you for your justice.
You watch over all who suffer and empower your people to act for good.
Bless the work of our church in all its ministries
to advocate for justice and dignity in our communities and in your world.Keep safe all who live under threat of violence or struggle for life’s necessities.
Caring God, we thank you for your comfort.
You strengthen us when we are weak and pick us up when we fall.
Bless us as we support and care for one another in this community.
Surround all who mourn with the warmth of your love and the light of our hope in Christ Jesus.
God of new life, we thank you for your enlivening Spirit.
You give courage to the persecuted and inspire the weary.
Bless us as we strive to make a difference as a community in Christ’s name.
Unite your Church through the power of your Holy Spirit,
and strengthen our common witness with the gifts you offer us through Jesus Christ.
And now we gather our prayers in one voice and offer them in the Name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Hymn 511 “Your hand, O God has guided”
Sending out and Benediction
May the God of justice strengthen your will to serve.
May the Christ of compassion inspire your heart to love.
May the Holy Spirit walk with you in wisdom today and always.
The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. Amen.
“May God’s blessing surround you each day”
Postlude: “Blest be the tie that binds”