020804 Summer Service

Combined Summer Services for The United Churches of Redcliff, Irvine and Medicine Hat.

Today’s worship leader is Rev. James Farrell and all who participate in today’s service.

We Gather To Worship God

Announcements - A Time of Greeting

One: In sleepless nights where past and present and future all seem to crash together and overwhelm us,

One: Let us bring all our feelings, all our questions, all our doubts, and all our hopes, as we gather to worship our God.

When others reach out to us in love, and we reach out to others, we see you face to face, loving God. As we see you in the faces of those who minister to us, may we see your face in those we are called to serve. Amen.

Hymn #222 “Come, Let Us Sing”

We Remain in God’s Presence Through Confession

Jesus, who sat at the table with outcasts, we confess that too often our words and actions are not consistent with our beliefs. Often we ignore the needy, show indifference to the lonely, and reject those who seem different from us. Forgive us, we pray. Empower us to reach out in love and acceptance in the power of your welcoming love…(silent confession)

Take comfort in the assurance that even those things that are hidden from memory, or are too deep for our words, are not beyond God’s forgiving love. God, who knows us completely, bestows pardon and peace.

Reflection for the Day

Hymn #289 “It Only Takes a Spark”

We Respond In Giving And Gratitude

Dedication #540 “Grant Us, God, the Grace”

Grant us, God, the grace of giving, with a spirit large and free, that ourselves and all our living we may offer faithfully.

Prayer of Dedication (one) (prayer two, found on the back of the bulletin)

Hymn #240 “Praise, My Soul, the God of Heaven”

Commissioning (one)

When we have doubts, loving God, challenge and equip us: to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, to be your body in the world. Inspire us to give without holding back, and to offer our whole selves as our reasonable service.

Choral Amen

Thought For Today

Vision without action is a daydream.
Action without vision is a nightmare.

-- Japanese Proverb

(Some source material shared today is with modifications from dialogues of clergy & worship leaders in community on the net…special thanks to Joinhands.com & this Midrash community)

I think everyone was touched by the rescue recently of the 9 miners in PA. Earlier this week, one of the miners, Foley is his name, spoke at a news conference and reiterated a powerful story of their shared struggle.

The miners had said that in the flood that sealed the coal mine, their food buckets were washed away. In that desperate place and while they were talking together about their hunger, a lone bucket floated by.... as Foley told the story of how they shared the corned beef and rye sandwich and Mountain Dew.... bite and sip at a time.... you could almost see his lips smacking at the memory... what a meal that must have been for them...

As a church community, when we are sharing Communion together as the Body of Christ, it would be good that our sense of really sharing might be like the sharing of those miners or the sharing of the loaves and fishes... whether bread and wine, loaves and fishes, or a corned beef sandwich and mountain dew… the miracle that is life shared is one of the truly blessed gifts that God freely offers us.

The loaves and fishes story is terribly familiar, and often people want to deal with the question, “how?”

How did the miracle happen? How did he do that? But I think the real question is “why?” Jesus could have let the people go off to the village and get their food. Science tells us how and faith tells us why. I think the why in this case is God’s compassion.

I miss the bit about the little boy in here that you get in the other version, because I like the idea that it was his generosity that triggered sharing among everyone else. But either way it’s a miracle. It’s a miracle of community.

When God is at work in community we often see a sharing, a blending, a uniting, that gifts us all.

Sometimes however, we begin to think that is how our relationship, on a personal sense is with God, too. But it’s about then, that a story like today’s story of Jacob comes along and challenges that kind of thinking.

So many of our hymns promise us safety and protection with God. And yet it seems to me, that deciding to live in a relationship with God may be the most risky thing any of us can do. Look what God demands of us when we do! We receive a blessing, but we are marked by a limp forever after.

Following Jesus means that when people's needs are to be met, Jesus says to us, "You do it!" And we are called to risk everything, to give all of ourselves to the conviction that since we have wrestled with God and emerged blessed and changed, we may need to trust enough to risk sharing at a fundamental level …to really engage one another as Jacob engaged God.

And, do you know something, it is entirely possible that we will imerge from such encounters injured. Perhaps with injuries that we will feel all our lives.

Jacob asked for two things and only got one of them. He asked for blessing but he also asked the stranger’s name. Naming is significant in that if you’re the namer, you’re the controller. So even though he could demand a blessing from God, he could not control God. The blessing was still a gift.

People wondering about Jacob have mused about many things. Is Jacob wrestling with his past? Is he wrestling with his future?

I think he’s wrestling with his conscious. I think this is more a dream than it is a wrestling match.

Esau is more of a hero and Jacob more of an anti-hero in all of this. Esau is a good man. And Jacob’s the conniver.

After the whole experience, Jacob calls the place Peniel, because “I have seen God face to face and yet my life is preserved.” Wow, that’s new. You don’t stand in the presence of God and still roar, unless you’re Abraham, Isaac or Jacob.

In his generation, he’s the one. This is in essence what turns him into a patriarch. This is where he becomes a man of faith. It was not the quality of his life that turned him into a patriarch, it was wrestling with God.

This is not a morality tale. He did not encounter God and suddenly become a good guy and stop doing dirty tricks.

No. But he had the inner strength or courage to wrestle with his conscious if you want, or with God, whichever fits best for you. I think that alone identifies him as someone of ‘or’ with faith. It is after emerging from that intense wrestling that his name is changed.

Have you ever known anyone who has changed their name? It’s a very significant experience, whenever it happens.

Many women have that experience when they get married. I hope wrestling goes with the choice to take another’s name.

Similarly, many choose to take their own names back…not to step away from the covenant they have made with their partner but to celebrate that they are not the property of another or identified by the name of another. Before God they are who they are and their name is their name.

When Jane chose to use her maiden name it was really interesting to experience the reactions of some people. My parents were particularly vocal on the subject…my take was that it wasn’t about me but I was surprised how many people wanted to make that choice about our relationship or some kind of statement about me. It was really quite amusing.

I was proud of Jane’s choice and still am. I think folks ought to think hard about what it means to take a name. What does it mean, for example to have the name Christian?

From the book entitled Jacob’s Blessing, I would like to share a snippet with you. As we think about our collective name.

Donna Sinclair says, “In an eerily specific way, [Jacob’s story] is also the story of the North American Christian church at this moment. In what we used to happily call the “mainline” denominations, we struggle with the unknown in the darkness. While some congregations flourish, attendance is down in the majority and gray heads predominate. Finances are slipping.

Where the large denominations once had the ear of cabinet ministers, the secular world now ignores these denominations, or – with the exception of a few television shows – portrays them as quaint.

Our members are not of one mind: gay ordination, women’s rights, peace issues, the nature of Jesus, the very language we use to address God, the hymns we will or will not sing – these matters divide us, sometimes even within the same congregation.

Like Jacob, we don’t know how to name what is happening to us, we don’t know if we will see daybreak, and we fear what tomorrow will bring…

Like Jacob heading out for home, we need to know where we have come from, to recognize where we are going – because the North American church is in the process of being transformed. As Christians, we are being given a new identity, one so unfamiliar we may have trouble recognizing ourselves.

The crucial point for the Christian church, hungry in the secular age for good news, is “that blessing.” It must have been very powerful – Jacob knew the moment it was given that it was God who had embraced and wounded and renamed him.

What is the church’s blessing today? What is our wound? How can we who live within the church find the strength to hold on to our adversary in the darkness, until we too receive our blessing?

The long night of change seems endless, and we cannot discern the way ahead. At times, we seem on the verge of losing all we cherish – even our collective life. Why is God struggling with us, changing us, this way? What is this new identity God is giving us? Will we be able, like Jacob, to walk with our limp, to be reconciled with those we have wronged, and to bless generations to come?

Donna Sinclair in Jacob’s Blessing: Dreams, Hopes, & Visions for the Church, by Donna Sinclair and Christopher White (Wood Lake Books, 1999)

“God, traditionally, elects to speak to [God’s chosen] in their sleep, because that is when [we] are truly alone, removed from all alien presence to distract [us].” Elie Wiesel in Messengers of God (Pocket Books, 1977)

In what present darkness is God trying to speak to us? Perhaps collectively, perhaps personally? As we wrestle let us never forget the blessing that always comes with the struggle for shalom. Amen.

Announcements - A Time of Greeting