6th. March. 2022. Service.
Inverkeithing Parish Church linked with North Queensferry Church
Worship 6th March 2o22
First Sunday in Lent
Prelude “What wondrous love is this?”
Bible Introit 783 “Lord, you are so precious to me”
Opening Prayer
Almighty God, whose blessed Son was led by the Spirit to be tempted by Satan: Come quickly to help us who are assaulted by many temptations; and, as you know the weaknesses of each of us, let each one find you mighty to save; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
Hymn 181 “For the beauty of the earth”
Call to Prayer
Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’.
Surely, he will save you from the fowler’s snare
and from the deadly pestilence.
4 He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart
Prayer of Adoration and Confession
Blessed are you, O Lord our God, King Of The Universe. At your word the sun rises. In your wisdom you open heavens gates, you control the elements and rotate the seasons. You set the stars in the vault of heaven; you created night and day. You cause the light to fade when darkness comes and the darkness to melt away in the light of the new day. O ever living and eternal God, you will watch over us your creatures. Blessed are you, O Lord at whose word the day dawns. (Jewish prayer).
In the presence of your holiness, we become very aware of our sinfulness and weakness, and of our need to be forgiven and made whole. Hear our prayer of confession. Lord, help us to face the truth about ourselves. Help us to hear our words as others hear them, to see our faces as others see us; let us be honest enough to recognise our impatience and conceit; let us recognise our anger and selfishness; give us enough humidity to accept our own weaknesses for what they are. Give us the grace, at least in your presence to say, “I was wrong, I’m busy go away I’m busy forgive me”.
Give us grace, dear Lord to receive forgiveness from others when we have wronged them. Take away our pride and resentment and give us the humility and courage to accept fully and freely the forgiveness that they offer to us for Jesus’ sake. We offer also for all those whom we have in anyway grieved vexed, oppressed, or scandalised by word or deed knowingly or unknowingly; that you may equally forgive us all our sins and all our offences against each other. Thomas More.
Holy Spirit of God, source of knowledge and creator of fellowship, open our minds to recognise the truth and our hearts to welcome it that in company together we may learn your will and be strengthened to obey it, through Jesus Christ our Lord, whom we worship with you and God our Father, one God, now and always, 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.
The Intimations
The North Queensferry Board and Kirk Session will meet at 7 pm on Thursday March 10th at 7pm.
Ukraine
The Very Reverend Susan Brown, former Moderator of the Church of Scotland and Convenor of the Faith Impact forum, has made contact with the Reformed Church in Hungary and in Ukraine to find the best way to help those fleeing to find sanctuary and safety. The Churches in Ukraine are using their buildings to offer support as the people move from east to west. There is an opportunity to give through donations, help for those who don’t have access to their money when the banks run out and who will need food /help, and those who cross the borders into Hungary, Slovakia or Romania.
Donations can be directed to the following account:
Royal Bank of Scotland
Church of Scotland No 1 Account
Account Number 00134859
Sort Code 83 06 08
Ref. RCHA donation.
Coffee mornings will be held in Inverkeithing Tuesdays and in North Queensferry every other Wednesday.
Invitation to the Offering
We all have something to share. As we present our offering this morning, know that what we share enables the Church to reach out in Jesus’ name, meeting needs, offering hope, and working for the justice Jesus proclaimed.
Prayer of Dedication
Generous God, we thank you for all the goodness we receive in Christ and in creation.
Bless the gifts we offer to share in the work of the kingdom Jesus declared,
and bless our lives so that we may be witnesses to his love and mercy. Amen
All Age Talk
What do you think these letters mean? It says “WWJD,” which stands for “What would Jesus do?” These used to be popular, and today some people are hearing them again. We can use these letters as a reminder to be like Jesus.
So what kinds of things have you known Jesus to do that you could follow?
Why might people want a reminder like this throughout their days?
People can be tempted to do all kinds of things at school, in their neighbourhoods, and even at home…things that aren’t God-honouring or what’s best for us, right? Well, Jesus knows what it’s like to be tempted, too. The Bible talks about a time Jesus went out into the wilderness for 40 days to be by Himself. God’s Spirit led Him out there to fast and pray. Do you know what fasting means?
During that time Satan came and tempted Jesus to do some things Jesus knew weren’t right. But just because Jesus is God and He’s powerful, that doesn’t mean the things Satan suggested weren’t tempting. Like first, Satan suggested Jesus turn stones into bread that Jesus could eat. Close your eyes for a moment and imagine what it might be like not to eat or drink anything for 40 days, and how that might feel.
Jesus could have easily done what Satan suggested, but He didn’t. Instead, He answered, “It is written, ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’ ”
Then Satan took Jesus up to a high place and showed Him the worldly kingdoms below. He said, “All of this belongs to me. If You will bow down and worship me, I will give it to You.”
Worship can mean “make more important than God.” What kinds of things are you sometimes tempted to make more important than God?
Here’s what Jesus answered to Satan’s temptation: “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve Him only.’ ”
Next, Satan took Jesus to Jerusalem and led Him up to the highest point on the temple. He said to Jesus, “If You are the Son of God, throw Yourself down from here. God will send His angels to rescue You.” Do you think God could have kept Jesus from harm if He had jumped off the temple?
Of course, God could keep Jesus safe, but Jesus quoted the Scripture, ” ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”
Do you know what the devil did? He gave up! He said, “I’ll come back and try another day.”
The next time you are tempted to do something wrong, look in the Bible and see what the Bible says. Then…Do What Jesus Did…answer Satan with Scripture!
Dear God, help us use Your word and follow Jesus’ example in our lives. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Hymn 641 “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God “
Deuteronomy 26:1-11
26 When you have entered the land that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance and have taken possession of it and settled in it, 2 take some of the firstfruits of all that you produce from the soil of the land that the Lord your God is giving you and put them in a basket. Then go to the place that the Lord your God will choose as a dwelling for his Name 3 and say to the priest in office at the time, ‘I declare today to the Lord your God that I have come to the land the Lord swore to our ancestors to give us.’ 4 The priest shall take the basket from your hands and set it down in front of the altar of the Lord your God. 5 Then you shall declare before the Lord your God: ‘My father was a wandering Aramean, and he went down into Egypt with a few people and lived there and became a great nation, powerful and numerous. 6 But the Egyptians ill-treated us and made us suffer, subjecting us to harsh labour. 7 Then we cried out to the Lord, the God of our ancestors, and the Lord heard our voice and saw our misery, toil and oppression. 8 So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. 9 He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; 10 and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, Lord, have given me.’ Place the basket before the Lord your God and bow down before him. 11 Then you and the Levites and the foreigners residing among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household. Amen.
Hymn 608 “Blest be the everlasting God”
Luke 4: 1-13
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, 2 where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.
3 The devil said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.’
4 Jesus answered, ‘It is written: “Man shall not live on bread alone.”’
5 The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6 And he said to him, ‘I will give you all their authority and splendour; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. 7 If you worship me, it will all be yours.’
8 Jesus answered, ‘It is written: “Worship the Lord your God and serve him only.”’
9 The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. ‘If you are the Son of God,’ he said, ‘throw yourself down from here. 10 For it is written:
‘“He will command his angels concerning you
to guard you carefully;
11 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.”’
12 Jesus answered, ‘It is said: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”’
13 When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time. Amen. This is the Word of the Lord, to him be all glory and praise.
Hymn 338 “Jesus, tempted in the desert”
Sermon
This weekend we are into the second week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which thus far appears to be the crime of the century. Frightened refugees spread across Europe from the hell on earth known as Ukraine. Soldiers and armoured vehicles convoy through countryside towards town and city with a ferocity like that described in Revelation and Ezekiel Soldiers tramp through the isolated villages of Afghanistan, armed to kill and perhaps to be killed many miles from home family who often to do not know where they are.
In Syria, a similar situation has been raging for the past nearly eleven years. During the first five years it is estimated that 400,000 people died. Since 2020 there has been stalemate. Nearly 12 million are either refugees or displaced and this war has involved Turkey and Russia as well. Similarly in Yemen a civil war is still raging, this time other Arab countries are involved. In 2018 more than one third of the population of 27 million were in acute need, another third is in need. At total of over 18 million people living in poverty and fear. Of course, the Afghanistan and Tigray conflicts in Ethiopia and Sudan are ongoing. The highest mortality rate is in the Mexican Drug War where in 2020 50,000 people were murdered. We don’t hear much about these conflicts, they are relatively remote from us in a way the Ukraine war is not.
Suffering comes in many forms and fear is seemingly always below the surface. We have come through the Covid 19 pandemic, and now face a return to the fear of the cold war nuclear threat. The past year has seen wildfires and floods, wind and storm, volcanic eruption and earthquakes as well as the routine troubles of ordinary human life and experience.
Today I have had a choice of topics to preach about, and I have wavered among them. Somehow, the temptations of Jesus don’t seem relevant to us although their significance is important to us in that they speak of a human Jesus with a diving calling. There is the reassurance that he understands temptation and our predicament, but we are also faced with the conundrum of “how could God fail to resist temptation?” We need something more at this point.
When I first prepared the service, I did not include the Psalm (91) in the readings. Here is a brief quote from it:
1 Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High
will rest in the shadow of the Almighty.
2 I will say of the Lord, ‘He is my refuge and my fortress,
my God, in whom I trust.’
9 If you say, ‘The Lord is my refuge,’
and you make the Most High your dwelling,
10 no harm will overtake you,
no disaster will come near your tent.
11 For he will command his angels concerning you
to guard you in all your ways;
12 they will lift you up in their hands,
so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.
13 You will tread on the lion and the cobra;
you will trample the great lion and the serpent.
It is quoted by Satan as he invites Jesus to prove God’ power by jumping from the parapet of the Temple in Jerusalem.
It has been rightly asked, to whom does the promise of God’s protection apply? The answer may be anyone who reads or hears it and places faith in the Most High.
I recall my first week in the manse in Prince Edward Island. I was living alone in a Victorian house next to the church in the middle of the countryside. The nearest neighbour was quite a distance away and out of sight. Right behind me was the cemetery and, beyond that in all directions, potato fields stretching into the distance. A truly Gothic set up which made me a little uncomfortable at night. One evening my reading was Psalm 91 and the following lines:
5 You will not fear the terror of night,
nor the arrow that flies by day,
6 nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness,
nor the plague that destroys at midday.
I was never uneasy in that house again. An amusing application of the promise. But again, we ask the question, “Who is entitled to this promise.”
Who will protect the innocent when bullets fly and rockets explode around them, when pestilence stalks in the darkness, when the floods roar or the cancer spreads? Don’t the most fragile and gentle the most innocent deserve protection?
Who will protect the guilty, even as they scheme to bully or steal or kill? Don t even the worst of us, raised on hate or seduced by fear, deserve a second or third or fourth chance to lead hopeful lives? What of the paranoid terrified tyrant lashing out at his enemies?
The Psalmist, more than two millennia ago, proclaimed God ‘s protection. Jewish tradition holds that Moses composed these words and that David included it in his treasury of Palms The Psalmist claimed that God was a God of mercy and goodness, of justice and delight, of unwavering love for everyone that he created. At least that’s how we may read Psalm 91. Beautiful words. Bold words. God will protect you! God will protect you? But does that mean only believers . . . or only believers of a certain path and certain ilk and certain attitude?
Or does it mean all? Even you, even me, and even your or my worst enemies?
How does God’s protection keep us from harm, from hopelessness, from hatred? When will that protection start, or did it end long ago when a scribe’s ink dried after composing a dreamy, deceitful Psalm?
Where is the divine, ancient, here-and-now protection? We need to be protected! We lived in Kyiv, and our home is gone, and hostile troops are everywhere. We live in an Afghanistan village that is little changed from a century ago, and just want our children to play outside and never worry about drones with rockets or soldiers with bullets.
I saw a picture of the floods in Australia yesterday and know our former neighbours in North Richmond and Windsor are worried that the Warragamba Dam will burst and inundate the whole Hawkesbury Nepean Valley region.
Or think of a hospice nurse, holding back tears while visiting a child with maybe ten days to count the fingers and thumbs of her hands before a final breath. Who protects the children riddled with disease? Who protects the innocent? Who protects the angry man carrying a gun? Who protects the guilty?
God seems a careless, lazy protector. For does not the world, this spinning, shimmering green and blue globe, desperately need protection? And yet we must believe, maybe not with all our heart, but with enough of our heart, that God does protect.
God has created us equal: equally vulnerable and equally dangerous. Everyone has the capacity to hurt and maim and murder. And we do. We always do. But everyone every single God-created, God-blessed human has the capacity to offer mercy and accept forgiveness, but also to hurt and destroy. This is particularly so for people with power. The incarnated Jesus had just the same potential. He was tempted to use his power to his own ends: to look after himself first, to claim an easy worldly power at the cost of worshipping that is indulging the corrupted ego, or to rely on his own innate intelligence and power, or to still his very human self-doubts by testing God’s protection for himself. Instead, he subsumed his ego, his power, his human fear within his complete trust in God his Father. That is ultimately what we must do.
This is something which every one of us must do throughout of our lives. Our temptation mirrors that of Jesus in that here we live at a distance from the source of our life. This is our proving ground, here we must rediscover our connection to God the source of our life. The greatest temptation we face is to believe the worldly lie that we are on our own and that somehow, we must overcome the world by ourselves. Part of the lie is that we are finite creatures and that when our bodies die that is the end, so we must make of life what we can.
Jesus was tempted to allow self to overcome love, and the devil’s lie was to suggest that the only way to use power is first of all for himself. I came across this quotation from Richard Rohr this week about evil:
Most people who do evil have fully explained it to themselves as good (meaning it is good for them), regardless of whether it is objectively good or good for society as a whole. Injustice, for example, always profits somebody. Justice is usually denied to a minority of some kind. All a politician has to do is put such a spin on it and people will often vote against their own legitimate self-interest to follow the demagogue or the group. Some theorists have called such voters “useful idiots.”
This seemed to me to explain how so many of the world’s powerful rulers and leaders justify their behaviour and hold on to power. I counted at least a dozen such leaders in the world today and there is a long list of others who are wannabes, but are currently restrained by democratic processes. Fear is the consequence of our separation from God, the fear of annihilation that we spoke of earlier. As we have often noted, the antidote to fear is not courage, but love. As John tells us repeatedly, “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” 1 John 4:18.
Fear may be exacerbated by news and social media causes us to feel like we’re hearing too much and that we don’t have the power to change the situation. Talking heads on television warn that global warming threatens our survival or will damage our homes or that this war may ravage our bank account as fuel prices rise or worse the fighting will escalate through Europe. The relentless repetition of images during disasters, the threat of nuclear war, images of people suffering around the world may makes us feel like there’s always bad weather or evil people are going to prevail.
There is no doubt that there is no guarantee that misfortune of one sort or another will not overtake us. But ultimately, we are safe. We will not escape the transition from this life into the next, how that will happen is mercifully hidden from us, but God has promised that He is with us to the end of the age, and that in Christ Jesus nothing can separate us from his love.
In the season of Lent, when our thoughts turn toward Easter, it is a time to cling to God’s protection not because it guards us from hurt, but because it calls us to serve others by expressing our love rather than our fear. We may prefer to cower in a locked room, wishing for God to keep the enemy from the door, But The God who created all of us equally vulnerable or dangerous, always has a key to our door and demands that we go out and love.
Something which struck me this week was how many people in Ukraine, set aside their fear and confronted the invaders; how many managed to find compassion for frightened young Russian soldiers. To resist a bully is to love him. Some can also have compassion on Vladimir Putin, a man whose life has been moulded by thuggery, intimidation, and the unrelenting struggle to overcome his rivals and the enemies he fears. They say his greatest terror is ending up like Muammar Gaddafi, which makes him more dangerous. But there is something greater he should fear and that is that he will have to account to God for the consequences of his actions on the lives of millions of people. How can one soul bear such an accounting? That is why we must pray for him as well.
In all we face in this life God longs for us to share hope with the neighbour and stranger and enemy as if our life and their life depended on it. It does.
One human choosing to serve another human in love is our God-given protection.
Oh God, help me leave the places where I hide my true self. Help me admit my false anxiety and seek your ways of abundant joys. Help me remember I am vulnerable . . . as is everyone You created. Help me rejoice in a protection that is grounded in Holy hope and not human hate. Amen.
Prayers of Thanksgiving and Intercession
God of infinite resourcefulness, give us the will so to pray for others that we may come to love them, and having loved them, watch out for the opportunities you send us when you would have us serve them.
We pray for those whom we find repugnant: the abusers and exploiters, the greedy and violent the rapists and murderers, the sadistic and the apathetic; for them we pray:
May the grace which nurtures us, work in them for your glory.
For the victims of inhumanity: the oppressed and the despairing, people sexually corrupted and then thrown aside, the abused child, battered spouse, the neglected grandparent, and the tortured prisoner; for them we pray:
May the grace which nurtures us, work in them for your glory.
For the foolish folk who are easily swayed to do evil; in school or home, at work or in the pub, in sporting club or politics, police force or trade union, in the ordained ministry or in the medical professions; for them we pray:
May the grace which nurtures us, work in them for your glory
For the church wherever it has yielded to popularity and material prosperity, arrogance and exclusiveness, introversion and other worldliness, self-righteousness and sectarian stridency; for these we pray:
May the grace which nurtures us, work in them for your glory.
For ourselves as members of this congregation: if we have succumbed to the immorality of our era, the self-serving habits of those around us, or allowed our faith to be diluted by cynicism or let our love for Christ grow cold; for these we pray;
May the grace which nurtures us, work in them for your glory.
God of Jesus and our God, do not let us go blindly into temptation, but open our eyes and deliver us from evil,
For yours is the gracious kingdom, the power and the glory of costly love, forever and ever. Amen
Hymn 604 “Holy wisdom, lamp of learning”
Benediction
God has never promised that we will not be tempted,
or thrown into turmoil, or stumble or fall,
but that by grace we will be saved, through trusting God.
The quiet strength of Christ, the humble power of God,
and the all-pervading light of the Spirit, be yours today and always. Amen.
“May God’s blessing surround you each day”
Postlude: “Jesus, joy of our desiring”