7th. August. 2022. Service.
Inverkeithing Parish Church linked with
North Queensferry Church
Worship 7th August 2022
Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
Prelude “Let us sing to the Lord
Bible Introit Hymn 769 “Holy, holy, holy”
Collect: Grant to us, Lord, we pray, the spirit to think and do always those things that are right, that we, who cannot exist without you, may by you be enabled to live according to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Hymn 162 “The God of Abraham praise”
The sacrifice that honours God is a thankful heart.
We lift our hearts with gratitude, and our voices with praise for all that God has done.
Wait upon the Lord who is your help and shield.
We trust in God’s holy name and as we come to worship.
Prayer
Lord Jesus, As the new day dawns, we arise with your spirit amongst us. We remember your resurrection morning and bring you praise, for you are our Lord. We long to be with you this day and thank you with our voices, our hearts, and our lives. Through you we approach the eternal throne of grace and offer our worship to God our Father and your Holy Spirit. Fill our hearts with love for you as we raise our eyes to you. For you are Lord of all creation, You make all things new. Our souls are filled with lasting peace when we close my eyes to sleep. For you are Lord, you’re ever beside and we are safe within your keeping. Our minds are filled with holy inspiration and when we open our eyes each morning may we be reminded that you are hope and love outspoken. Your words are full of truth. We are filled with aspiration to live for you and discover the power of the gospel in our daily experience. When we see through eyes that weep or feel the pain of others may we know that you are Lord of both strong and broken, May we be your hands and feet the agents of your love and grace
Holy God, we ask then for your help, your power, your Spirit, that we may change our lives and grow more each day into the image of Christ. We confess that we fear what is different. We confess that it’s easier to lock the doors of our hearts and minds than to receive those who don’t look like we look, love like we love, or vote the way we vote. We confess that we have not lived out your call to share in abundant life and unconditional love.
By your divine power give us a more inclusive way of living and give us the courage to change. Give us energy, intelligence, imagination, and love to be your people in all we say and do. hear this good news and see the grace of God: In Jesus Christ ours is the good news that we are forgiven and free to live in the light of love. Let your word be a lamp for our feet, a light on my path in our pilgrimage to heaven. Thanks be to God through Jesus our Lord, Amen.
Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on 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 on Wednesday 10th August at 7 pm in the Church.
The Inverkeithing Kirk Session will meet on Thursday 11th August at 7:00pm in the CC Room.
The funeral of our member, Mrs Isabella Ballantyne, will take place on Thursday 11th August at 2pm in Dunfermline Crematorium. Please remember her husband and daughter in your prayers.
The Offering
The sacrifice that honours God is a thankful heart. So let us present our offering today with thankful hearts, grateful for all God’s goodness to us.
Prayer of Dedication
Blessed are you, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have these gifts to share.
Bless what we offer for your purposes. Give us courage to offer ourselves more fully to you, so that our lives bring you honour and glory through Christ our Lord. Amen.
All Age Talk
Do you have a piggy bank at home? How often do you put money in it?
Some people, at the end of each day, put all the change from their pockets into a piggy bank. It may not be a lot of money, but when you add to it every day, it is amazing how quickly it builds up.
Whether we use a piggy bank or a savings account at the bank, it is a good idea to have a plan to save money for unexpected emergencies or when we want to do something special. But we must be careful that saving money doesn’t become the most important thing in our life.
Why do you think I say that?
In the Bible, Jesus warned His friends and the people who followed Him about making money the most important thing to them.
He said, “Don’t worry too much about building up treasures on earth.” He meant, don’t worry too much about money and things but instead, spend your time building up treasures in heaven. So, instead of putting money in this piggy bank, let’s store up treasures in heaven by putting in things we think would be treasures in heaven. (Luke 12:33) What might be treasures in heaven? Love, beauty, kindness, compassion, forgiveness
Hymn 126 “Let’s sing to the Lord”
Reading: Luke 12:32-40
32 ‘Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom. 33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near, and no moth destroys. 34 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
35 ‘Be dressed ready for service and keep your lamps burning, 36 like servants waiting for their master to return from a wedding banquet, so that when he comes and knocks, they can immediately open the door for him. 37 It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. Truly I tell you, he will dress himself to serve, will make them recline at the table and will come and wait on them. 38 It will be good for those servants whose master finds them ready, even if he comes in the middle of the night or towards daybreak. 39 But understand this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. 40 You also must be ready, because the Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him.’ Amen
Hymn 39 “God the Lord, the King almighty”
Alt: God is love, his, the care
Reading: Hebrews 11: 1-3 & 8-16
11 Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. 2 This is what the ancients were commended for.
3 By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
8 By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed, and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9 By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10 For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. 11 And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise. 12 And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.
13 All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth. 14 People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15 If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16 Instead, they were longing for a better country – a heavenly one. Therefore, God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them. Amen, this is the Word of the Lord, to Him be all glory and praise.
Hymn 141 “Oh the life of the word is a joy”
Sermon
Looking for something new to read on Kindle I came upon a book called: “All that’s wrong with the Bible. As it was one which I could borrow, I downloaded it only to discover it was the work of an embittered former Christian turned atheist. I did not keep it. I am not worried about the inconsistencies in the Bible. Although inspired by God, it is nonetheless a human compilation, and it is useful in that, if we use our God-given intellect as we read, it speaks to us from God and is our guide and help on the pilgrimage into the Kingdom of God. If it says something we find hard, looking carefully at the context may reveal a reason and allow that to inform our understanding. We need the enlightenment of the Spirit rather than blind acceptance and obedience to a teaching for it to be an instrument of grace to us.
I was taken aback to realise that our passage today from Hebrews 11 is apparently inconsistent with the story of Abraham in the book of Genesis. It seems at least at first reading that the author of Hebrews has sanitized the story of Abraham and Sarah, because the story line is clean and clear and is helpful in that it points us forward to God’s ultimate intention for us all.
So let us pause for a while and look at the Genesis account. In doing so we will discover and wonder at all their various mistakes which Abraham and Sarah make and ask ourselves what this has to say to us about the ‘faith’ by which the patriarch and matriarch left their home and familiar life in Ur of the Chaldees a city state south of the Euphrates that was then on the coast but is now well inland from the Persian Gulf. They travelled almost a thousand miles (1600Km) to what is now Israel.
We might ask how their journey of faith parallels most of our journeys in life and in faith and observe the good and the bad the clarity and cloudiness of every journey of faith. It may be helpful to lay this portion of the letter to the Hebrews alongside all that we know of Abraham and Sarah.
We first meet up with them in Genesis 12 where before anything else is said, we hear the voice of God urging Abram and Sarai, as they were then called, and Abraham’s nephew, Lot to be on the move. We do not know what triggered this move, but it is described as a call from God arising out of a spiritual awareness. Many people have a spiritual urge that they may not be able to define other than a sense that God has a purpose which impels them to act. No two calls are ever the same. Abram and Sara’s circumstances were such that they could afford to travel and clearly were people of substance and influence
At this starting point, the Lord is not specific in the promises made — only articulating that Abram and Sarai were to be the beginning of ‘a great nation’ and that blessing would follow, and that blessing would be extended to ‘all the families of the earth.’ There is no specific mention of an actual heir at this point, but that is certainly implied, and a few verses later we do hear about the promise of offspring. We know also that Abram and Sarai had been living their lives for decades and decades by now, yearning for such blessing, but with no human reason to believe it could be theirs.
Only now, of course, the promise has been spoken. The journey was undertaken, begun under a new understanding, even a new relationship of promise which has been clearly spoken at least to Abram… Abram received the seed of his faith.
Don’t you agree that it is curious that a few verses later we hear that Abram and Sarai have travelled an extra 500 miles to Egypt where Abram becomes so afraid for his own survival that he passes Sarai off as his sister, because he became convinced that otherwise Pharaoh and his officials would have him murdered to gain access to her? Never mind that a few chapters later we learn that Abram and Sarai are, in fact, half siblings… the point is that Abram was willing to trade her safety for his own. We cannot miss the fact that God has just finished promising great things and yet after months of travelling by faith Abram finds himself consumed by fear.
This or course is a very human failing on Abram’s part. Something about a powerful monarch unnerved him and he reacted with panic. And how often have we found ourselves in just such a place having just been enveloped by the promises of God and then acting out of fear instead of hope, putting at risk, even, everything that is important to us. We may wonder how often our congregations do the same, acting out of fear of loss and in so doing turning our backs on all that God intends and thereby jeopardise our future.
After the embarrassment of having to explain his motives Abram survives, does the same thing again with another king whom he feared but manages to head for the land of promise after receiving a ritual initiation into a covenant with God by which God promises that he will have natural descendants as numerous as the sands on the seashore. This time it is Sarah whose faith falters and we have the whole wretched triangle between Sarah and Hagar and Abraham (as they are now called).
Instead of trusting by faith, Sarah and Abraham end up using Hagar (and we mean that literally) to get to where they believe God is leading. Evidently, this is simply how things were done. They did what people often do to bring something about. They thought about how the promise could be realised. God seemed to bring clarity to Abraham for first he believe that another slave born in his house, Eliezer of Damascus, would be his heir. And when he decides Ishmael his son by Hagar is the answer, it is much the same. In the meantime, as we know, jealousy and fear have their way between Sarah and Hagar and in the end, it is only God’s protection which saves Hagar and the child, Ishmael. But Abraham’s precipitous action ends up in a new semitic line who were to become the Arabic nations and this line has been at enmity with Israel’s descendants ever since. Their lack of faith resulted in huge complications that have lasted for centuries.
And again, how very, human of Sarah to be so fearful that it came out in hateful jealousy. How easily and how quickly we go down this same path, forgetting God’s promises which are meant for us and through us, somehow, for all the world.
Next there is the fact that these two became so weary of waiting for the promise to be fulfilled, that their by now sceptical reaction to its repetition was captured in Sarah’s laughter, doubled over behind the tent where she had just finished providing a meal for their guests who had repeated and reinforced the promise. From the start it had seemed altogether unlikely, this promise of an heir, and we cannot really blame her for giving up all hope of God working in the way God said that He would.
There may be many times in the life of faith when we wonder how and when things are going to work out for blessing. What is the point of our plodding on by faith, trusting for the future and wondering if we are still in the centre of God’s purposes for us as individuals?
Given where we find ourselves in an increasingly secular world, a circumstance made even more so as we attempt to rebuild our congregational life when we want to believe we are living post-pandemic, but the residual effects of the past two years remain discouraging.
There are other places we could land in the story of the faith of these two as we read it in Genesis, and yet these three instances are enough to remind me that as they made their way, the journey was much more complex and layered than the writer of the letter to the Hebrews might at first have us believe. At the same time, we are reminded in this telling of the story that for these two heroes of the faith, their entire lives were lived as outsiders — as ‘strangers and foreigners on the earth.’ Even though they are portrayed as heroes, the struggle is hinted at. And yet, while their faith — ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’ may have, in fact, faltered along the way, it never abandoned them because it was always rooted in a relationship with the One who made and kept promises, who kept returning to speak much needed words of hope again and again.
In the end it was God who was true to his promise. Maybe not on their timeline, but on the only timeline that mattered.
This is helpful as we consider our own journeys of faith and that of those with whom we are called to walk. This is one of the greatest gifts of these stories which have been passed along to us. While the writer of Hebrews may have cleaned up the story line a bit in speaking of the heroes of the faith, when we go back to the original stories, those who were called to capture them for us simply told the truth as they believed it to be so. We receive these two faults and failings and gifts and joys and all. And if they were part of the bigger story God has for us all. We could read the rest of the heroes of the faith and see the same patterns that are found still among God’s people.
Perhaps the faith of Abraham and Sarah lived out where you are is also marked by clarity and cloudiness, by times of trust and times when trust is hard to hold on to. Can you see how their journey of faith with all its ups and downs is also shared by all of us? How might this be a word of hope to you? To all in this church ?
What elements of this story can you identify with: Times when fear or failure has got the better of faith and you have been tempted to doubt God or to act in a way that has complicated life? How did God speak to you to bring you back to faith and hope?
How does the writer of Hebrews’ description of them as ‘strangers and foreigners on earth’ resonate with you and your experience, individually or collectively? Have you a sense of being a pilgrim rather than a settled person? Think of the line “We walk by faith as strangers here, but Christ shall call us home”
Do you ever feel as though you, like Abraham and Sarah, are still waiting for the promise to be fulfilled? What is the substance of that promise for you? How do you hear the voice of God still speaking it? Does it help to place your own experience alongside that of these two as we hear throughout Genesis?
A final word about faith. The word faith in the Letter to the Hebrews is not “saving faith” as in Paul’s letters to Romans and Galatians. It is more the results of having been “saved by faith”. It’s faith in gear, not just starting the engine A launching out, implementing what God has done for us in Christ Jesus. Such faith is always activity, not passivity.
Faith is not a sedative to calm people down and makes them docile. It is a trust in God which thrusts people into the struggles of life. Faith places us in a position of holy tension; puts us at odds with the folly and sin around us. Faith is not an escape but a new, profound, re-creative involvement.
Faith meant leaving the comfortable existence of home, family, and country, and setting out on a journey where the destination was somewhat cloudy. “He went out not knowing where he was to end up.” It meant a long, and at times risky, adventure. There were to be joys and hardships, nasty twists in events, frustration, and danger, on their journey of faith. Faith is actively implementing as much of the hope as possible.
When I was in St Andrews, Alan McDonald liked to speak of faith as a pilgrimage, not to a shrine, or to a promised land, but into the Kingdom of God. You may not have left home physically, but the way you have been led, the experiences you have had, good or bad, have been ordained by God to bring you deeper into the Kingdom. On this earth we are sojourners, non-citizens, aliens, temporary residents and we have no final home here.
Home is the vision we have of the better future. Home is the promise from God. Here we are only sojourners. It cannot be otherwise for people who have been given the gift of hope. Without faith people desperately try to create a perfect home in this life, but like the farmer last week, they are fated to leave it all behind. The true home is the Kingdom of God, and we must move deeper and deeper into it before we die.
With mercy and with judgment my web of time he wove, and aye the dews of sorrow were lustred by his love. I’ll bless the hand that guided, I’ll bless the heart that planned when throned where glory dwelleth, in Immanuel’s land. From “The sands of time are sinking”, by Anne Ross Cousins. Amen.
Prayers of intercession
God, Creator, Healer, Sustainer, we bring to you our prayers
We pray for the world in all its beauty and pain: the land stripped bare of resources by human greed, the animals and plants driven to extinction the oceans overfished and exploited.
We pray for those who call us to account for our misuse of the planet. Give them courage to speak and give us courage to act to protect the globe. We pray for the healing of the world
We pray for your people, each one made in your image:
those caught up in war, living in fear, fleeing in terror,
those dying in places of famine, where enough is a distant dream,
those burdened by poverty in lands filled with wealth.
We pray for all who speak for justice and equity among peoples and nations:
those who broker peace in the face of hunger for power.
Give them courage to speak
and give us courage to act with and for those in need
We pray for the healing of the nations.
We pray for your Church in every place
sent out by the flame and wind of Pentecost
to tell your story and be your love.
We pray for the unity that comes through Christ.
We pray that your Church may rejoice in diversity of worship and style and that all may be pleasing to you.
We pray that your Church may serve you in Spirit and in truth
We pray for those who call us to unity and friendship,
who challenge us to inclusion for all, justice for all, fullness of life for all; give them courage to speak and give is courage to serve
We pray for the healing of the Church.
We pray for ourselves: carrying the burdens we bring and cannot let go of, the unspoken and unhealed hurts, grief in its fresh rawness or the dull ache of time.
We pray for those we know in need of your presence today
and in the days to come. Keep Silence
We pray for healing and wholeness that we may more faithfully follow Jesus and serve the world.
In the name of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen
497 “Almighty Father of all things that be”
The Benediction
Send us out with hearts filled with love.
Send us out in the name of Jesus.
Send us out in the power of the Spirit.
Send us out alert to need,
awake to opportunities to be and tell Good News.
Send us with your blessing Holy God.
And may that same God, Mother and Father to us all,
Jesus our brother,
and the Spirit of joy and hope,
be with us and in us, around us and before us,
in all our coming and going,
today and always. Amen.
May God’s blessing surround you each day
Postlude “The sands of time are sinking”