A History Together
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For August 25, 2024:
A History Together
by Tom Willadsen
Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Choose you this day whom ye will serve…as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. (Joshua 24:15, King James Version)
There is a crucial, definitive, ultimate mood to Joshua’s challenge to the Israelites as they are settling, at last, into the Promised Land. He lays before the people their options — they could serve the gods their people used to serve before the descent to Egypt and the Exodus — or they could follow his example, and serve the God that had set them free. “Pick one. Right now. My family is all-in with the Lord Almighty, but you’re free to choose,” he challenges them. They follow his lead and accept the risks and benefits.
What if this weren’t a crucial, definitive, ultimate decision? What if we (and they) thought of it as a milestone, one of many on a lengthy journey? What if they decided to choose the Lord “this day,” and tomorrow, and the next day? Perhaps it would be wise to think of this moment as the first step on a new journey, rather than making a binding promise they were certain to break. What if it was like getting married?
In the Bible
Ephesians 6:10-20
The whole armor of God
While this language can be coopted to be read as though Christ calls for warriors, it’s helpful, even wise, to note that all the tools mentioned as “the whole armor of God” are defensive. It must have been revelatory and shocking for Christians living as a misunderstood and distrusted minority under foreign occupation to don the very tools of their occupying oppressors.
Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Pick one, people
The Lord has been with the people since before they became slaves in Egypt. Earlier, in the eighth chapter of Joshua, they held a ceremony of dedication when they accepted God’s law as soon as they attained a foothold in the Promised Land. This is one of many points of decision that the Hebrew scripture depicts. Yes, yes, they make the commitments. Then, yes, yes, yes, they fall short. Does that remind you of everyone?
John 6:56-69
Bread, again with the bread
This is the fifth Sunday in a row the gospel lection has been from John 6, with Jesus talking about bread. This time, it says his teaching was so difficult to accept that many of his followers turned away. Simon Peter spoke for the lot of the remaining disciples, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” And, at last, Jesus started to talk about something other than bread.
Psalm 34:15-22
The Lord is near the brokenhearted
A powerful psalm portion, which is in tension with the Israelites’ willing acceptance of God’s law, even though (spoiler alert) they’re going to sin. The righteous know affliction, but the Lord’s care is still available to them.
In the News
We are facing the most consequential presidential election in American history. It’s only 81 days away. Four years ago, we also faced the most consequential presidential election in American history. I cannot remember an election — and I’ve been voting for more than 40 years — that was not heralded as “the most consequential in American history.” It’s tradition. With every election the stakes get higher. Just ask the candidates.
Either “We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore,” as former President Trump said on January 6, 2021, or, as Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California wrote, “This year democracy is on the ballot, and if we are to save it, we must vote against authoritarianism.”
Hyperbole aside, I boldly predict that the sun will rise on Wednesday, November 6, 2024.
The way the candidates and pundits are approaching this election feels like it is all or nothing, decisive, do or die, pivotal. There is reason to believe the hyperbole this time.
Project 2025 has been described by Americans United for Separation of Church and State as the “long term playbook for Christian Nationalists.” Its more than 900 pages cover plans to profoundly change public education, LGBTQ rights, immigration policy, and many other aspects of public life in the United States.
Among many troubling, anti-democratic initiatives proposed in Project 2025, perhaps the most disturbing is the reinstatement of President Trump’s Executive Order 13957 (Schedule F), which would make many currently non-partisan jobs held by federal employees subject to political appointment. The people who deliver the mail or monitor slaughter houses for safety could be replaced by political appointees.
Former President Trump has said he’d only be a dictator for one day if elected. If Schedule F is enacted on that day, the dictatorship would only be the beginning.
Whichever side prevails in the national election, the other side will not go away. The fight, the tension, the division in American society, will not disappear regardless of who wins. Voting is, of course, essential, but for civil society to continue, we must continue to participate to maintain it. Just as Israel’s choice to choose the living God was momentous, it was not terminal. It was a moment in time.
In the Sermon
I’m always curious about the passages that the lectionary skips. “What’s going on there that the powers that be think we can just ignore?” I ask myself. In the case of today’s reading from Joshua it’s another recitation of all the things that God almighty has done for Israel, from picking Abram a long time ago, way up on the other side of the Euphrates, to today when the Israelites are about to settle in the Promised Land. There are similar rehearsals in the psalms. I always imagine the Lord using a tone of voice that conveys an “I do and do and do for you people” vibe.
This time, however, I hear a different subtext, something more along the lines of the Lord saying, “We’ve been through a lot together; we have a history.”
Let’s stay together, loving you whether
Times are good or bad, happy or sad…
God sounds a lot like Al Green this week.
About ten years ago a couple from my congregation — let’s call them Fred and Wilma — asked me to preside at a renewal of their marital vows for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. I went to the meeting ready to put them through an abbreviated version of the pre-marital counseling I require for couples getting married. This was completely the wrong approach. After about two minutes I started asking the questions I asked to families when planning funerals. While Fred and Wilma were very much alive, this ceremony would be a recognition and celebration of their commitment and loyalty to one another. They looked back at their life together, at the family they created, and the families they launched, and saw with the wisdom and clarity of hindsight, how blessed they had been, and continue to be, by the love they have found in each other, a gift from the living God.
At the end of the meeting, Fred took a deep breath and said, “I didn’t know what I was in for when I said, ‘I do,’ but I’m glad I did, and I’d do it again.”
When my older brother graduated from high school, I asked “What does ‘commencement’ mean?” The idea that the conclusion of his high school career was a beginning struck me as absurd! It was an ending! The polar opposite of a beginning!
Maybe we should think of weddings as commencements. These two people are publicly affirming their love, commitment, and loyalty to one another.
White lace and promises
A kiss for luck and we’re on our way
Wilma and Fred didn’t make it through five decades together solely on the basis of the promises they made as new college graduates. They stayed together because they chose each day whom they loved. Like recovering addicts, they lived one day at a time. Loving, forgiving, and choosing to love again. Repeatedly. Serially. Daily.
So it is with our walk with Christ. There are pivotal moments — baptism, epiphanies — but there are also moments when we stray, when we get it wrong, when we fall short, when we do not live up to our ideals and idealism. The Israelites made a promise as they entered the Promised Land that they couldn’t keep. No nation could. The Lord remained faithful. Peeved at times, but faithful.
SECOND THOUGHTS
Lord, To Whom Shall We Go?
by Chris Keating
John 6:56-69
It seems we may have reached the last slice in the package of bread we opened a month ago from John’s gospel. Jesus’ words about bread have given us plenty to chew on these past five Sundays, and it is possible that some in our midst are beginning to grumble like the crowd in Capernaum.
In the beginning, Jesus’ words were sweet relief to growling stomachs. The conversation quickly turned into something more. It started with the crowd’s raving over ever-multiplying loaves and fishes. It then morphed into a dialogue about bread from heaven, before finally landing into a bristling, if somewhat cannibalistic-sounding, interchange about gnawing on Jesus’ flesh.
It’s been quite a conversation which now teeters on division. The grumbling that began earlier has persisted, and now even seems to be nearly scandalous teaching. “Does this offend you?” Jesus asks some of his followers. They appear ready to bolt, frustrated that the one they thought had all the answers has instead fanned the fires of doubt. “This teaching is difficult,” they murmur. “Who can accept it?”
This hard teaching takes time to digest.
When I was a younger pastor, an elderly white man wagged his finger toward me to deliver a word of warning. “I like you,” he said, “but just know if you start preaching about politics, I’m out of here. Just remember what happened over Angela Davis.”
He was referring to a brouhaha from 1972 that erupted when a church committee offered to help pay bail for Davis, a Black activist and Marxist who had been accused of murder and kidnapping. (She was eventually acquitted of all charges.) “Ed,” I replied, “I was barely ten years old in 1972. Unless it was reruns of Batman or The Brady Bunch, I wasn’t paying attention.” I didn’t know much about the episode, except that it had been both widely misunderstood and created widespread controversy. The teaching was difficult, and many left the church.
It happens. The mouthful of teaching we ingest becomes hard to chew. A mild case of heartburn creates bitterness and confusion. Finger waving often follows. Sometimes people leave. For Presbyterians, the history of that sort of difficulty includes the division of the “northern” and “southern” church during the Civil War, and more modern schisms over the ordination of women, church property, and Biblical authority.
Instead of taking our time to process words that challenge our presumptions, we spit out the bread we’ve been given. It’s too much. It’s no surprise that Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue creates a theological kerfuffle. His words call those gathered around them to see God’s glory appearing before them. They evoke the abundance of life God offers. This is the reality of John’s understanding of incarnation. Jesus is God con carne — God with meat, standing before them.
But this teaching is hard. Who can accept it?
Jesus is clear: Only those who abide (remain) in him. These are the hints that John’s gospel has been dropping about Jesus from the start. Jesus has been proclaiming the way God’s gift of abundance works. It is a word of life that calls the living from the tombs. It appears like water transformed into the finest wine. It is a new birth from above, or water springing up eternally from the ancient well, new sight for the blind, food for the hungry. Jesus, the bread of heaven, has come so that “whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven.” (vv. 57-58)
But this sort of bread is not easy to eat. In fact, the toughness of this bread may cause some to spit it out, exchanging the full-grain heartiness of Jesus’ bread for something less substantive. The scores of reporting about the decline of Christianity in America confirm this. That number has been declining for decades, and represents some of the seismic shifts occurring in North American denominations. Millions have fled as they have perceived the church to become too rigid, out of touch, or simply irrelevant.
Case in point: A family attending our church a few years ago abruptly stopped attending a few weeks before school started. When I called them, they were friendly and chatty. They weren’t upset with the church. They just looked at their schedules and decided they no longer had time. They needed bread that took less time to digest.
The result has been an increase in fast-food versions of faith. We no longer desire the bread that does not perish.
Even worse, however, is the sort of “hangry” anxiety that results. Malnourished, we’ve turned against each other, generating policies influenced by extremist Christian beliefs that attack others. Four years ago, a report from the Center for American Progress listed and detailed the many ways President Donald Trump’s policies had become attacks on religion. Policies ranging from the ban on Muslims entering the United States, attacks on LGBTQ rights, limitations on reproductive rights all emerged from ultra-conservative Christian beliefs to attack other faiths.
Ironically, many of the former president’s aides have said he privately holds religious leaders in disdain. They report the ways he has mocked and derided them, sometimes ridiculing these leaders with “cartoonish stereotypes.”
We no longer seek the words that lead to eternal life. Instead, some bring their religious fervor to Trump’s rallies, which generally begin with a word of prayer. But a study of those prayers raises alarming concerns that are rarely reported. For example, a survey of 58 such prayers from Trump rallies indicates the following:
In such a battle, we need the full-grained goodness of the bread of life.
ILLUSTRATIONS
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From team member Mary Austin:
Psalm 84
At Home With God
The psalmist speaks beautifully about finding a home in God’s presence. “My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord,” adding, “a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.”
Allison Deraney shares that her idea of being at home has changed since she became sober. Like the psalmist, she finds her home in new places. “One of the many gifts that sobriety has instilled in me is the concept be where your feet are. Prior to working a program of recovery, I was hardwired to boomerang right back to yesterday or last week or last year. I would lament over that thing I did or didn’t do, replaying all my transgressions. And when it wasn’t stuck in the gutter of regret, my mind loved to show me how futuristic it could be by catastrophizing over what might happen when that other shoe drops. If worrying was an Olympic sport, I had that gold medal in the bag. It would be me on that podium, gripping my medal, all while future tripping my way to tomorrow’s calamity.
“While I still slip into old ways of thinking now and again, my sober tools shift me into a gentler gear. And it took time to trust myself enough to know I don’t need substances to get me through life, the good and the bad, and the big holidays where booze is abound.”
She finds herself rooted in a way that the psalmist would understand.
* * *
John 6:56-69
Eating on the Ground, Or the Sofa
As Jesus feeds the people al fresco, he’s ahead of a trend in American home building. The dining room, a place to eat with other people, is disappearing from American homes. “The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix — a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next “dinner holiday” on Easter or Thanksgiving. That’s why the classic, walled-off dining room is getting harder to find in new single-family houses. It won’t be missed by many. Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms — a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage.”
In smaller spaces, like apartments, “even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis — and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it — is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. If dining space keeps dying, the US might not have a chance to get it back.”
This change “is partly a response to shrinking household size. According to the US Census Bureau, the share of one-person households more than tripled from 1940 to 2020. A dedicated dining space might feel wasted on someone who lives alone. And for young, unmarried apartment dwellers with only a roommate or two, developers typically sacrifice a common dining space in order to maximize personal space.”
The experience of eating with other people, as Jesus, the disciples, and the crowd do, may be gone from our lives soon.
* * *
John 6:56-69
Getting Up and Leaving
In this passage, Jesus’ disciples are torn about whether to leave him or not, and we hear that some of them have already moved on. Barbara Brown Taylor is well known for leaving parish ministry and writing about what she gained and lost in leaving a church community.
She says that after she left parish ministry, “I got many consolation notes shortly after that offering to help me find my way back to God. And I said, “Nope, don’t need help with that. Just needed a vocational change.” But what it meant was leaving a church where I was solo pastor — I had special vestments I put on. I had a time when I got to talk and nobody else talked. I had a parking spot. But to move into a college situation where there was not even a religion department, but that came under the Department of Humanities meant that literally, I walked to the door of my new office and it said “Barbara Taylor, Department of Humanities.” And I thought that is such a long ways from being a “Master of Divinity”…And I had a lectern instead of an altar. And the most distressing thing was to find my language didn’t work anymore. The plural “we”: we believe, we’re called, we are here because we’ve come to baptize this child. All my language was gone.”
Staying and leaving are complicated decisions, as the disciples’ conversation reveals here.
* * *
John 6:56-69
Losing Confidence
We can hear the disciples’ disappointment as they answer Jesus about whether they’re staying with him or going on. They affirm that he has something unique to offer, and yet they don’t sound enthusiastic. They know now how hard this work of following God is. Perhaps it’s not Jesus they’re disappointed in but themselves?
Stacy Swain finds a modern parallel. “I have had many heartbreaking conversations in which people lament that they are not the pillar of faith they think they ought to be. They are not scrubbed up, ornamented, beautiful monuments of faith, and the gap between what they are and what they think they should be is often filled with shame, self-loathing, and pain. It breaks my heart, because more often than not these people are the very same ones who I see as living the gospel most faithfully. They are some of the most generous, loving, service- minded, self-forgetting people I know. And yet when they look at themselves, all they see is what is lacking in their edifice of faith — an edifice that they believe they alone are responsible for constructing.”
She adds, “This happens not just with individuals, of course, but also with the church. We can get so caught up pointing to what needs to be fixed, what is not working right, and what needs to change that we can forget the very reason we exist in the first place. We can get so caught up with the form our church is taking that we can forget our function, our purpose.”
* * *
John 6:56-69
Serving the Bread Like Jesus
When we celebrate communion, we evoke Jesus at the last supper, and also Jesus on the hillside. Melissa Florer-Bixler observes that we take on the shape of Jesus the host when we serve communion to each other. She writes, “Our congregation receives communion in a variety of ways, but I am especially attentive when a group of people come forward and form a small circle beside the table. When I am the presider, I hand the bread to the first person, offering them a torn piece of the loaf with the words “the body of Christ, for you.” Around the circle, each person tears the bread, places it in the palm of their neighbor, and repeats the words. The cup is then passed around the unbroken circle as well.”
As a pastor, she says, “I’ve noticed that at the end of this small-group ritual, people linger for a moment before taking their seats. They often embrace. Communion is a corporate grace. It requires other people. To receive the bread is also to pass it on. To take the cup is to pour it out for another. “You are what you eat,” my congregation has heard me say over and over. You become the body of Christ in the eating of the bread, become the actual, living person of Jesus when you take the cup.”
Like Jesus with the crowd, we have an opportunity to pass on the grace we receive.
* * *
Ephesians 6:10-20
Pray at All Times
“Pray in the Spirit at all times,” the letter to the Ephesians urges. Edward Hays notes that this kind of prayer requires patience, to keep it up at all times. “As spider-like patience is essential to prayer, so prayer is essential to life. Prayer — true prayer — never lives in isolation. For those persons who understand its meaning, it is not the hobby of the holy or a luxury in life; it holds the pattern for all life.” He says that “we reweave each day the elements of life in our prayer.”
This is all a spiritual skill, he counsels. “We must learn how to sit still, to stop being in a hurry, and wait for God to move within our lives. We still ourselves in prayer, aware that the graces we need, the special gifts we desire, will come to us when we are ready. Whatever is necessary for our spiritual journeys will come when the time is ready. Until that time we simply sit in stillness, waiting, and even seeing pleasure, finding fun, in waiting!”
Praying always, as the epistle invites, feeds our patience, another part of our spiritual armor.
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From team member Dean Feldmeyer:
Discipleship is Hard Work
John 6:56-69, Joshua 24:1-18
Hard Work In Sports (Business Insider)
Harry Leroy “Roy” Halladay III (May 14, 1977 – November 7, 2017) was an American professional baseball pitcher, who played in Major League Baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies between 1998 and 2013. His nickname, “Doc", was coined by Toronto Blue Jays announcer Tom Cheek, and was a reference to Wild West gunslinger Doc Holliday. An eight-time All-Star, Halladay was one of the most dominant pitchers of his era and is regarded as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Known for his outstanding durability, he led the league in complete games seven times, the most of any pitcher whose career began after 1945. He also led the league in strikeout-to-walk ratio five times and innings pitched four times.
Doc Halladay didn’t rest on his innate talent, however. He was considered by nearly everyone who knew him to be one of the hardest working men in baseball. According to Sports Illustrated, he routinely put in a 90-minute workout before his teammates even made it to the field.
His former pitching coach told SI that when other pitchers attempted one of his workouts, none of them could complete even half of it. His pre-game preparation was so intense that he had a personal entrance card to his team's training facilities.
In a piece at NBA.com, Michael Jordan’s former coach Phil Jackson wrote that Jordan's defining characteristic wasn't his talent, but having the humility to know he had to work constantly to be the best. When Jordan first entered the league, his jump shot wasn't good enough so spent his off-season taking hundreds of jumpers a day until it was perfect.
* * *
A Key, Not The Key
“If hard work was all it took to be successful, every woman in Africa would be a billionaire.” (Anon.)
Hard work is a key to success, a contributing factor for many people, but it is not the only key and, in some cases, it isn’t a key at all.
In a 2012 article for Psychology Today, F. Diane Barth L.C.S.W., tells of a school guidance counselor at an inner-city school who was worried about a student of hers who had been accepted with a scholarship to a good college.
Her concern was that he had been able to get accepted because he had the talent and did the hard work to do well in his high school classes and on all of the entrance exams, but that he was at home with the huge support of his family and his school. She worried that, when he was away from that support, he might not be able to keep it up.
It was like a teeter-totter with talent and hard work on one end and support from home and school on the other. Without both, she feared that he would never have received the scholarship. And once the support was pulled away, she didn’t know if the talent and hard work without the support would be enough to get him through.
She concludes the article: “The myth that we can achieve anything we want if we just work hard enough, then, is just that — a myth. The hard work is accepting that everyone and everything has limitations. And finding ways to accept those limitations are just part of being human — not signs of failure.”
* * *
It Ain’t Easy I’m After
In the television program Justified, the main character, U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens is a tough guy who wears a cowboy hat even though he lives and works in Appalachia Kentucky.
In one episode, he is waylaid by two men at a roadhouse bar, beaten, and left bleeding in the parking lot without his hat.
A couple of weeks later, when his wonds have nearly healed, he goes back to the roadhouse and asks the bartender about the two men. The bartender tells him that, yes, one of the men has his hat and they usually come into the bar at the same hour every day.
Raylan says he’ll wait and orders a soda. The bartender leans over and says, conspiratorially, “You know, it’d be a lot easier to just buy yourself a new hat.”
Raylan smiles and answers, “It ain’t easy I’m after.”
He gets his hat back.
* * *
History and Tradition
Joshua 24:1-18, John 6:56-69
Mysterious Tradition
A very poor holy man lived in a remote part of China. Every day before his time of meditation, in order to show his devotion, he put a dish of butter up on the window sill as an offering to God, since food was so scarce. One day his cat came in and ate the butter. To remedy this, he began tying the cat to the bedpost each day before the quiet time. This man was so revered for his piety that others joined him as disciples and worshiped as he did. Generations later, long after the holy man was dead, his followers placed an offering of butter on the window sill during their time of prayer and meditation. Furthermore, each one bought a cat and tied it to the bedpost.
* * *
Murdered Innovation
The two phrases that murder innovation are “We’ve never done it that way,” and “We’ve always done it this way.” But without innovation, finding new ways of doing things, institutions, including churches, and people, even Christian people, die.
Less than a century ago, patients requiring a blood transfusion were in a race against time. There was no organized network for people to donate blood, and because blood was difficult to preserve, there was no way to store it for future use. Patients had to find their own blood donors before it was too late. They’d always done it that way.
Then, in 1937, after devising a technique for preserving blood for up to ten days, physician Bernard Fantus set up the nation’s first “blood bank” at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. People could make “deposits” of their own blood for their own use or to be given to others with matching blood types.
At about the same time, surgeon Charles R. Drew figured out a method for separating plasma from whole blood, and found that if whole blood wasn’t necessary, blood transfusions could be successfully performed with plasma alone. Plasma could be dried for long-term storage in blood banks. As World War II decimated Europe, Drew and the American Red Cross launched a groundbreaking program to collect donated plasma in the US and ship it to Britain, essentially creating a national system for blood donation. During the war, he collaborated with the Red Cross to set up “bloodmobiles” — mobile blood donation centers that made sustaining blood banks more practical. Today, about 13.6 million units of whole blood and red blood cells are collected in the US each year, saving countless lives.
* * *
Overcoming Institutional Fear And Lethargy
In his book, David and Goliath, Macolm Gladwell profiles Dr. Emil “Jay” Freireich, an American hematologist, oncologist, and cancer biologist who was recognized as a pioneer in the treatment of cancer and use of chemotherapy and is often known as the father of modern leukemia therapy.
Freireich was the child of Hungarian immigrants who grew up in poverty with detached parents who provided little or no emotional support. He put himself through medical school by cleaning tables in the college cafeteria and, after being fired from several jobs becaue of his bulldog determination and fiery temper, he eventually became one of the pioneers in the use of chemotherapy in treating childhood leukemia.
In the early sixties and seventies drugs were administered to children with leukemia one at a time and, even then, hesitantly and with great fear and trepidation. When he suggested administering two drugs at a time he was immediately turned down by the governing body of the hospital where he worked for fear the drugs would harm or even kill the children. He argued that the children were already dying and did it anyway. Then he suggested that three drugs be used, simultaneously. Same response, same result. He did it anyway, staying up all night at his patients’ bedsides.
Finally, he began administering a “cocktail” injection of four cancer fighting drugs and, much to everyone’s surprise, after the children recovered from their initial bad reaction, they began to get better.
Today, drug cocktails are standard protocol for treating many cancers, including leukemia, which has a cure rate of 90%.
Freireich stated that he was unfazed by the criticism he initially received for attempting this pioneering method of treatment. He led the Center's Leukemia Research Program during the 1980s and 1990s. He made contributions to over 600 scientific papers and over 100 books. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he worked, established the Emil J. Freireich Award for Excellence in Education to honor his efforts of setting up graduate teaching programs to promote research. It gives recognition to “members of the teaching faculty for excellence in education contributions.”
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WORSHIP
by George Reed
Call to Worship
One: How lovely is your dwelling place, O God of hosts!
All: Our heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.
One: Happy are those in your house, O God, ever singing your praise.
All: Happy are those whose strength is in you, our redeemer.
One: For God is a sun and shield who bestows favor and honor.
All: No good thing does God withhold from those who walk uprightly.
OR
One: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob comes to us.
All: We welcome the God who is faithful and true.
One: The God who dwells within our world guides us.
All: We will follow you, O God, wherever you lead us.
One: The God who holds the future beckons us onward.
All: With God’s help we will be faithful disciples of Jesus.
Hymns and Songs
O God, Our Help in Ages Past
UMH: 117
H82: 680
AAHH: 170
NNBH: 46
NCH: 25
CH: 67
LBW: 320
ELW: 632
W&P: 84
AMEC: 61
STLT: 281
The God of Abraham Praise
UMH: 116
H82: 401
GTG: 49
NCH: 24
CH: 24
LBW: 544
ELW: 831
W&P: 16
Renew: 51
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God
UMH: 110
H82: 687/688
PH: 260
GTG: 275
AAHH: 124
NNBH: 37
NCH: 439/440
CH: 65
LBW: 228/229
ELW: 503/504/505
W&P: 588
AMEC: 54
STLT: 200
To God Be the Glory
UMH: 98
PH: 485
GTG: 634
AAHH: 157
NNBH: 17
CH: 39
W&P: 66
AMEC: 21
Renew: 258
If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee
UMH: 142
H82: 635
PH: 282
GTG: 816
NCH: 410
LBW: 453
ELW: 769
W&P: 429
Dear Lord and Father of Mankind
UMH: 358
H82: 652/653
PH: 345
GTG: 169
NCH: 502
CH: 594
LBW: 506
W&P: 470
AMEC: 344
Jesus Calls Us
UMH: 398
H82: 549/550
GTG: 720
NNBH: 183
NCH: 171/172
CH: 337
LBW: 494
ELW: 696
W&P: 345
AMEC: 238
A Charge to Keep I Have
UMH: 413
AAHH: 467/468
NNBH: 436
AMEC: 242
O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee
UMH: 430
H82: 659/660
PH: 357
GTG: 738
NNBH: 445
NCH: 503
CH: 602
LBW: 492
ELW: 818
W&P: 589
AMEC: 299
Trust and Obey
UMH: 467
AAHH: 380
NNBH: 322
CH: 556
W&P: 443
AMEC: 377
Great Is the Lord
CCB: 65
Humble Yourself in the Sight of the Lord
CCB: 72
Renew: 188
Music Resources Key
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
H82: The Hymnal 1982
PH: Presbyterian Hymnal
GTG: Glory to God, The Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African American Heritage Hymnal
NNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
NCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
LBW: Lutheran Book of Worship
ELW: Evangelical Lutheran Worship
W&P: Worship & Praise
AMEC: African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal
STLT: Singing the Living Tradition
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
Renew: Renew! Songs & Hymns for Blended Worship
Prayer for the Day/Collect
O God who is ever faithful and true:
Grant us the faith to trust that you will guide us today
as you have guided us throughout the ages;
through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We praise you, O God, because you have always been there to guide and direct us. Help us to allow you to guide us once more as we face the uncertainty of our times. Amen.
Prayer of Confession
One: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially when we forget that God is always here to guide us.
All: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We look at the world around us and we are overwhelmed with the problems and issues we face. We think we have to face them by ourselves. We have forgotten how often you have been with us to guide us. We forget that your wisdom is the true way to look at life. Open our eyes, our hearts, and our minds that we might trust you to guide us now. Amen.
One: The God who guided us in the past will guide us now. Receive God’s grace and assurance and face the world with God.
Prayers of the People
We bless you and praise your holy name, O God, who created us and never deserted us. You have been our shepherd and guide always.
(The following paragraph may be used if a separate prayer of confession has not been used.)
We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We look at the world around us and we are overwhelmed with the problems and issues we face. We think we have to face them by ourselves. We have forgotten how often you have been with us to guide us. We forget that your wisdom is the true way to look at life. Open our eyes, our hearts, and our minds that we might trust you to guide us now. Amen
We thank you for all the ways in which you have been faithful to us even when we have been unfaithful. We thank you for those who have heeded your voice and taught us to listen to you as you speak quietly in our hearts. We thank you for those who have lead the way for us as we tried to follow you.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for all your children in their need. We pray for those who suffer because we have forgotten your ways. We pray for those who have been deprived of justice and those who have found no mercy. We pray for those who strive to follow you and bring healing to your children.
(Other intercessions may be offered.)
Hear us as we pray for others: (Time for silent or spoken prayer.)
All these things we ask in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ who taught us to pray saying:
Our Father....Amen.
(Or if the Our Father is not used at this point in the service.)
All this we ask in the name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Amen.
* * * * * *
CHILDREN'S SERMON
Seeing It Through
by Katy Stenta
John 6:56-69
Jesus goes on so long about bread that the disciples find it confusing.
Do you ever have that happen? Do you ever get reminded of things so much that you are unable to listen to it anymore?
If you have ever watched the Charlie Brown cartoon, which is really old, one thing they do well is present the adults in that cartoon sounding like this “wah-wah-wah,’ making it impossible to understand them.
Some of Jesus’ followers decide that his teachings are too hard, or boring, or whatever, so they leave.
Jesus asks the twelve disciples, “Are you going to leave, too?”
The disciples reply, “Where can we go?”
In other words, they have come too far and learned too much, they feel like they have to finish.
I think it’s like something called summit fever. Summit fever is when you see the top of a mountain you are climbing, and suddenly you feel like you have to get to the top no matter what. Sometimes, even though you know it’s hard, you keep going at the end because you know you are going to finish.
What are things do you feel like you have to finish sometimes? Is it homework? Cleaning? Sports? Some activity you don’t like anymore but have decided to you need to see it through? You don’t have to do hard things forever, but sometimes it is worth it to keep working on hard things so you can actually understand how good it feels to finish something difficult.
That’s how the disciples feel in this reading.
Let’s pray.
Dear God
Thank you
For being with us
Even when
Things are hard.
Help us
When we
Don’t know
What to do
Or where to go next.
Amen.
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
The Immediate Word, August 25, 2024 issue.
Copyright 2024 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
- A History Together by Tom Willadsen based on Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18; Ephesians 6:10-20, John 6:56-69, and Psalm 34:15-22.
- Second Thoughts: Lord, To Whom Shall We Go? by Chris Keating. In this last slice of John 6’s bread of heaven, we are called to consider the difficulty of the teaching Jesus provides.
- Sermon illustrations by Mary Austin, Dean Feldmeyer.
- Worship resources by George Reed.
- Children’s Sermon: Seeing It Through by Katy Stenta based on John 6:56-69.
A History Togetherby Tom Willadsen
Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Choose you this day whom ye will serve…as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. (Joshua 24:15, King James Version)
There is a crucial, definitive, ultimate mood to Joshua’s challenge to the Israelites as they are settling, at last, into the Promised Land. He lays before the people their options — they could serve the gods their people used to serve before the descent to Egypt and the Exodus — or they could follow his example, and serve the God that had set them free. “Pick one. Right now. My family is all-in with the Lord Almighty, but you’re free to choose,” he challenges them. They follow his lead and accept the risks and benefits.
What if this weren’t a crucial, definitive, ultimate decision? What if we (and they) thought of it as a milestone, one of many on a lengthy journey? What if they decided to choose the Lord “this day,” and tomorrow, and the next day? Perhaps it would be wise to think of this moment as the first step on a new journey, rather than making a binding promise they were certain to break. What if it was like getting married?
In the Bible
Ephesians 6:10-20
The whole armor of God
While this language can be coopted to be read as though Christ calls for warriors, it’s helpful, even wise, to note that all the tools mentioned as “the whole armor of God” are defensive. It must have been revelatory and shocking for Christians living as a misunderstood and distrusted minority under foreign occupation to don the very tools of their occupying oppressors.
Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Pick one, people
The Lord has been with the people since before they became slaves in Egypt. Earlier, in the eighth chapter of Joshua, they held a ceremony of dedication when they accepted God’s law as soon as they attained a foothold in the Promised Land. This is one of many points of decision that the Hebrew scripture depicts. Yes, yes, they make the commitments. Then, yes, yes, yes, they fall short. Does that remind you of everyone?
John 6:56-69
Bread, again with the bread
This is the fifth Sunday in a row the gospel lection has been from John 6, with Jesus talking about bread. This time, it says his teaching was so difficult to accept that many of his followers turned away. Simon Peter spoke for the lot of the remaining disciples, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” And, at last, Jesus started to talk about something other than bread.
Psalm 34:15-22
The Lord is near the brokenhearted
A powerful psalm portion, which is in tension with the Israelites’ willing acceptance of God’s law, even though (spoiler alert) they’re going to sin. The righteous know affliction, but the Lord’s care is still available to them.
In the News
We are facing the most consequential presidential election in American history. It’s only 81 days away. Four years ago, we also faced the most consequential presidential election in American history. I cannot remember an election — and I’ve been voting for more than 40 years — that was not heralded as “the most consequential in American history.” It’s tradition. With every election the stakes get higher. Just ask the candidates.
Either “We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore,” as former President Trump said on January 6, 2021, or, as Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California wrote, “This year democracy is on the ballot, and if we are to save it, we must vote against authoritarianism.”
Hyperbole aside, I boldly predict that the sun will rise on Wednesday, November 6, 2024.
The way the candidates and pundits are approaching this election feels like it is all or nothing, decisive, do or die, pivotal. There is reason to believe the hyperbole this time.
Project 2025 has been described by Americans United for Separation of Church and State as the “long term playbook for Christian Nationalists.” Its more than 900 pages cover plans to profoundly change public education, LGBTQ rights, immigration policy, and many other aspects of public life in the United States.
Among many troubling, anti-democratic initiatives proposed in Project 2025, perhaps the most disturbing is the reinstatement of President Trump’s Executive Order 13957 (Schedule F), which would make many currently non-partisan jobs held by federal employees subject to political appointment. The people who deliver the mail or monitor slaughter houses for safety could be replaced by political appointees.
Former President Trump has said he’d only be a dictator for one day if elected. If Schedule F is enacted on that day, the dictatorship would only be the beginning.
Whichever side prevails in the national election, the other side will not go away. The fight, the tension, the division in American society, will not disappear regardless of who wins. Voting is, of course, essential, but for civil society to continue, we must continue to participate to maintain it. Just as Israel’s choice to choose the living God was momentous, it was not terminal. It was a moment in time.
In the Sermon
I’m always curious about the passages that the lectionary skips. “What’s going on there that the powers that be think we can just ignore?” I ask myself. In the case of today’s reading from Joshua it’s another recitation of all the things that God almighty has done for Israel, from picking Abram a long time ago, way up on the other side of the Euphrates, to today when the Israelites are about to settle in the Promised Land. There are similar rehearsals in the psalms. I always imagine the Lord using a tone of voice that conveys an “I do and do and do for you people” vibe.
This time, however, I hear a different subtext, something more along the lines of the Lord saying, “We’ve been through a lot together; we have a history.”
Let’s stay together, loving you whether
Times are good or bad, happy or sad…
God sounds a lot like Al Green this week.
About ten years ago a couple from my congregation — let’s call them Fred and Wilma — asked me to preside at a renewal of their marital vows for their fiftieth wedding anniversary. I went to the meeting ready to put them through an abbreviated version of the pre-marital counseling I require for couples getting married. This was completely the wrong approach. After about two minutes I started asking the questions I asked to families when planning funerals. While Fred and Wilma were very much alive, this ceremony would be a recognition and celebration of their commitment and loyalty to one another. They looked back at their life together, at the family they created, and the families they launched, and saw with the wisdom and clarity of hindsight, how blessed they had been, and continue to be, by the love they have found in each other, a gift from the living God.
At the end of the meeting, Fred took a deep breath and said, “I didn’t know what I was in for when I said, ‘I do,’ but I’m glad I did, and I’d do it again.”
When my older brother graduated from high school, I asked “What does ‘commencement’ mean?” The idea that the conclusion of his high school career was a beginning struck me as absurd! It was an ending! The polar opposite of a beginning!
Maybe we should think of weddings as commencements. These two people are publicly affirming their love, commitment, and loyalty to one another.
White lace and promises
A kiss for luck and we’re on our way
Wilma and Fred didn’t make it through five decades together solely on the basis of the promises they made as new college graduates. They stayed together because they chose each day whom they loved. Like recovering addicts, they lived one day at a time. Loving, forgiving, and choosing to love again. Repeatedly. Serially. Daily.
So it is with our walk with Christ. There are pivotal moments — baptism, epiphanies — but there are also moments when we stray, when we get it wrong, when we fall short, when we do not live up to our ideals and idealism. The Israelites made a promise as they entered the Promised Land that they couldn’t keep. No nation could. The Lord remained faithful. Peeved at times, but faithful.
SECOND THOUGHTSLord, To Whom Shall We Go?
by Chris Keating
John 6:56-69
It seems we may have reached the last slice in the package of bread we opened a month ago from John’s gospel. Jesus’ words about bread have given us plenty to chew on these past five Sundays, and it is possible that some in our midst are beginning to grumble like the crowd in Capernaum.
In the beginning, Jesus’ words were sweet relief to growling stomachs. The conversation quickly turned into something more. It started with the crowd’s raving over ever-multiplying loaves and fishes. It then morphed into a dialogue about bread from heaven, before finally landing into a bristling, if somewhat cannibalistic-sounding, interchange about gnawing on Jesus’ flesh.
It’s been quite a conversation which now teeters on division. The grumbling that began earlier has persisted, and now even seems to be nearly scandalous teaching. “Does this offend you?” Jesus asks some of his followers. They appear ready to bolt, frustrated that the one they thought had all the answers has instead fanned the fires of doubt. “This teaching is difficult,” they murmur. “Who can accept it?”
This hard teaching takes time to digest.
When I was a younger pastor, an elderly white man wagged his finger toward me to deliver a word of warning. “I like you,” he said, “but just know if you start preaching about politics, I’m out of here. Just remember what happened over Angela Davis.”
He was referring to a brouhaha from 1972 that erupted when a church committee offered to help pay bail for Davis, a Black activist and Marxist who had been accused of murder and kidnapping. (She was eventually acquitted of all charges.) “Ed,” I replied, “I was barely ten years old in 1972. Unless it was reruns of Batman or The Brady Bunch, I wasn’t paying attention.” I didn’t know much about the episode, except that it had been both widely misunderstood and created widespread controversy. The teaching was difficult, and many left the church.
It happens. The mouthful of teaching we ingest becomes hard to chew. A mild case of heartburn creates bitterness and confusion. Finger waving often follows. Sometimes people leave. For Presbyterians, the history of that sort of difficulty includes the division of the “northern” and “southern” church during the Civil War, and more modern schisms over the ordination of women, church property, and Biblical authority.
Instead of taking our time to process words that challenge our presumptions, we spit out the bread we’ve been given. It’s too much. It’s no surprise that Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue creates a theological kerfuffle. His words call those gathered around them to see God’s glory appearing before them. They evoke the abundance of life God offers. This is the reality of John’s understanding of incarnation. Jesus is God con carne — God with meat, standing before them.
But this teaching is hard. Who can accept it?
Jesus is clear: Only those who abide (remain) in him. These are the hints that John’s gospel has been dropping about Jesus from the start. Jesus has been proclaiming the way God’s gift of abundance works. It is a word of life that calls the living from the tombs. It appears like water transformed into the finest wine. It is a new birth from above, or water springing up eternally from the ancient well, new sight for the blind, food for the hungry. Jesus, the bread of heaven, has come so that “whoever eats me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven.” (vv. 57-58)
But this sort of bread is not easy to eat. In fact, the toughness of this bread may cause some to spit it out, exchanging the full-grain heartiness of Jesus’ bread for something less substantive. The scores of reporting about the decline of Christianity in America confirm this. That number has been declining for decades, and represents some of the seismic shifts occurring in North American denominations. Millions have fled as they have perceived the church to become too rigid, out of touch, or simply irrelevant.
Case in point: A family attending our church a few years ago abruptly stopped attending a few weeks before school started. When I called them, they were friendly and chatty. They weren’t upset with the church. They just looked at their schedules and decided they no longer had time. They needed bread that took less time to digest.
The result has been an increase in fast-food versions of faith. We no longer desire the bread that does not perish.
Even worse, however, is the sort of “hangry” anxiety that results. Malnourished, we’ve turned against each other, generating policies influenced by extremist Christian beliefs that attack others. Four years ago, a report from the Center for American Progress listed and detailed the many ways President Donald Trump’s policies had become attacks on religion. Policies ranging from the ban on Muslims entering the United States, attacks on LGBTQ rights, limitations on reproductive rights all emerged from ultra-conservative Christian beliefs to attack other faiths.
Ironically, many of the former president’s aides have said he privately holds religious leaders in disdain. They report the ways he has mocked and derided them, sometimes ridiculing these leaders with “cartoonish stereotypes.”
We no longer seek the words that lead to eternal life. Instead, some bring their religious fervor to Trump’s rallies, which generally begin with a word of prayer. But a study of those prayers raises alarming concerns that are rarely reported. For example, a survey of 58 such prayers from Trump rallies indicates the following:
- Jesus’ name is mentioned 61 times, while Trump’s is mentioned 87.
- A consistent theme is the way America has fallen into a moral freefall. One pastor prayed, “Our enemies are trying to steal, kill, and destroy our America, so we need you to intervene.”
- A growing change from asking that Trump seek God’s will to an assumption that God needs to do right by Trump, who is often described as God’s warrior.
- As a result, Trump’s legal problems are viewed consistently as a sign of victimhood, not as evidence of wrongdoing.
In such a battle, we need the full-grained goodness of the bread of life.
ILLUSTRATIONS
* * * * * *
From team member Mary Austin:Psalm 84
At Home With God
The psalmist speaks beautifully about finding a home in God’s presence. “My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord,” adding, “a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.”
Allison Deraney shares that her idea of being at home has changed since she became sober. Like the psalmist, she finds her home in new places. “One of the many gifts that sobriety has instilled in me is the concept be where your feet are. Prior to working a program of recovery, I was hardwired to boomerang right back to yesterday or last week or last year. I would lament over that thing I did or didn’t do, replaying all my transgressions. And when it wasn’t stuck in the gutter of regret, my mind loved to show me how futuristic it could be by catastrophizing over what might happen when that other shoe drops. If worrying was an Olympic sport, I had that gold medal in the bag. It would be me on that podium, gripping my medal, all while future tripping my way to tomorrow’s calamity.
“While I still slip into old ways of thinking now and again, my sober tools shift me into a gentler gear. And it took time to trust myself enough to know I don’t need substances to get me through life, the good and the bad, and the big holidays where booze is abound.”
She finds herself rooted in a way that the psalmist would understand.
* * *
John 6:56-69
Eating on the Ground, Or the Sofa
As Jesus feeds the people al fresco, he’s ahead of a trend in American home building. The dining room, a place to eat with other people, is disappearing from American homes. “The dining room is the closest thing the American home has to an appendix — a dispensable feature that served some more important function at an earlier stage of architectural evolution. Many of them sit gathering dust, patiently awaiting the next “dinner holiday” on Easter or Thanksgiving. That’s why the classic, walled-off dining room is getting harder to find in new single-family houses. It won’t be missed by many. Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms — a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage.”
In smaller spaces, like apartments, “even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis — and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it — is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. If dining space keeps dying, the US might not have a chance to get it back.”
This change “is partly a response to shrinking household size. According to the US Census Bureau, the share of one-person households more than tripled from 1940 to 2020. A dedicated dining space might feel wasted on someone who lives alone. And for young, unmarried apartment dwellers with only a roommate or two, developers typically sacrifice a common dining space in order to maximize personal space.”
The experience of eating with other people, as Jesus, the disciples, and the crowd do, may be gone from our lives soon.
* * *
John 6:56-69
Getting Up and Leaving
In this passage, Jesus’ disciples are torn about whether to leave him or not, and we hear that some of them have already moved on. Barbara Brown Taylor is well known for leaving parish ministry and writing about what she gained and lost in leaving a church community.
She says that after she left parish ministry, “I got many consolation notes shortly after that offering to help me find my way back to God. And I said, “Nope, don’t need help with that. Just needed a vocational change.” But what it meant was leaving a church where I was solo pastor — I had special vestments I put on. I had a time when I got to talk and nobody else talked. I had a parking spot. But to move into a college situation where there was not even a religion department, but that came under the Department of Humanities meant that literally, I walked to the door of my new office and it said “Barbara Taylor, Department of Humanities.” And I thought that is such a long ways from being a “Master of Divinity”…And I had a lectern instead of an altar. And the most distressing thing was to find my language didn’t work anymore. The plural “we”: we believe, we’re called, we are here because we’ve come to baptize this child. All my language was gone.”
Staying and leaving are complicated decisions, as the disciples’ conversation reveals here.
* * *
John 6:56-69
Losing Confidence
We can hear the disciples’ disappointment as they answer Jesus about whether they’re staying with him or going on. They affirm that he has something unique to offer, and yet they don’t sound enthusiastic. They know now how hard this work of following God is. Perhaps it’s not Jesus they’re disappointed in but themselves?
Stacy Swain finds a modern parallel. “I have had many heartbreaking conversations in which people lament that they are not the pillar of faith they think they ought to be. They are not scrubbed up, ornamented, beautiful monuments of faith, and the gap between what they are and what they think they should be is often filled with shame, self-loathing, and pain. It breaks my heart, because more often than not these people are the very same ones who I see as living the gospel most faithfully. They are some of the most generous, loving, service- minded, self-forgetting people I know. And yet when they look at themselves, all they see is what is lacking in their edifice of faith — an edifice that they believe they alone are responsible for constructing.”
She adds, “This happens not just with individuals, of course, but also with the church. We can get so caught up pointing to what needs to be fixed, what is not working right, and what needs to change that we can forget the very reason we exist in the first place. We can get so caught up with the form our church is taking that we can forget our function, our purpose.”
* * *
John 6:56-69
Serving the Bread Like Jesus
When we celebrate communion, we evoke Jesus at the last supper, and also Jesus on the hillside. Melissa Florer-Bixler observes that we take on the shape of Jesus the host when we serve communion to each other. She writes, “Our congregation receives communion in a variety of ways, but I am especially attentive when a group of people come forward and form a small circle beside the table. When I am the presider, I hand the bread to the first person, offering them a torn piece of the loaf with the words “the body of Christ, for you.” Around the circle, each person tears the bread, places it in the palm of their neighbor, and repeats the words. The cup is then passed around the unbroken circle as well.”
As a pastor, she says, “I’ve noticed that at the end of this small-group ritual, people linger for a moment before taking their seats. They often embrace. Communion is a corporate grace. It requires other people. To receive the bread is also to pass it on. To take the cup is to pour it out for another. “You are what you eat,” my congregation has heard me say over and over. You become the body of Christ in the eating of the bread, become the actual, living person of Jesus when you take the cup.”
Like Jesus with the crowd, we have an opportunity to pass on the grace we receive.
* * *
Ephesians 6:10-20
Pray at All Times
“Pray in the Spirit at all times,” the letter to the Ephesians urges. Edward Hays notes that this kind of prayer requires patience, to keep it up at all times. “As spider-like patience is essential to prayer, so prayer is essential to life. Prayer — true prayer — never lives in isolation. For those persons who understand its meaning, it is not the hobby of the holy or a luxury in life; it holds the pattern for all life.” He says that “we reweave each day the elements of life in our prayer.”
This is all a spiritual skill, he counsels. “We must learn how to sit still, to stop being in a hurry, and wait for God to move within our lives. We still ourselves in prayer, aware that the graces we need, the special gifts we desire, will come to us when we are ready. Whatever is necessary for our spiritual journeys will come when the time is ready. Until that time we simply sit in stillness, waiting, and even seeing pleasure, finding fun, in waiting!”
Praying always, as the epistle invites, feeds our patience, another part of our spiritual armor.
* * * * * *
From team member Dean Feldmeyer:Discipleship is Hard Work
John 6:56-69, Joshua 24:1-18
Hard Work In Sports (Business Insider)
Harry Leroy “Roy” Halladay III (May 14, 1977 – November 7, 2017) was an American professional baseball pitcher, who played in Major League Baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays and Philadelphia Phillies between 1998 and 2013. His nickname, “Doc", was coined by Toronto Blue Jays announcer Tom Cheek, and was a reference to Wild West gunslinger Doc Holliday. An eight-time All-Star, Halladay was one of the most dominant pitchers of his era and is regarded as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Known for his outstanding durability, he led the league in complete games seven times, the most of any pitcher whose career began after 1945. He also led the league in strikeout-to-walk ratio five times and innings pitched four times.
Doc Halladay didn’t rest on his innate talent, however. He was considered by nearly everyone who knew him to be one of the hardest working men in baseball. According to Sports Illustrated, he routinely put in a 90-minute workout before his teammates even made it to the field.
His former pitching coach told SI that when other pitchers attempted one of his workouts, none of them could complete even half of it. His pre-game preparation was so intense that he had a personal entrance card to his team's training facilities.
In a piece at NBA.com, Michael Jordan’s former coach Phil Jackson wrote that Jordan's defining characteristic wasn't his talent, but having the humility to know he had to work constantly to be the best. When Jordan first entered the league, his jump shot wasn't good enough so spent his off-season taking hundreds of jumpers a day until it was perfect.
* * *
A Key, Not The Key
“If hard work was all it took to be successful, every woman in Africa would be a billionaire.” (Anon.)
Hard work is a key to success, a contributing factor for many people, but it is not the only key and, in some cases, it isn’t a key at all.
In a 2012 article for Psychology Today, F. Diane Barth L.C.S.W., tells of a school guidance counselor at an inner-city school who was worried about a student of hers who had been accepted with a scholarship to a good college.
Her concern was that he had been able to get accepted because he had the talent and did the hard work to do well in his high school classes and on all of the entrance exams, but that he was at home with the huge support of his family and his school. She worried that, when he was away from that support, he might not be able to keep it up.
It was like a teeter-totter with talent and hard work on one end and support from home and school on the other. Without both, she feared that he would never have received the scholarship. And once the support was pulled away, she didn’t know if the talent and hard work without the support would be enough to get him through.
She concludes the article: “The myth that we can achieve anything we want if we just work hard enough, then, is just that — a myth. The hard work is accepting that everyone and everything has limitations. And finding ways to accept those limitations are just part of being human — not signs of failure.”
* * *
It Ain’t Easy I’m After
In the television program Justified, the main character, U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens is a tough guy who wears a cowboy hat even though he lives and works in Appalachia Kentucky.
In one episode, he is waylaid by two men at a roadhouse bar, beaten, and left bleeding in the parking lot without his hat.
A couple of weeks later, when his wonds have nearly healed, he goes back to the roadhouse and asks the bartender about the two men. The bartender tells him that, yes, one of the men has his hat and they usually come into the bar at the same hour every day.
Raylan says he’ll wait and orders a soda. The bartender leans over and says, conspiratorially, “You know, it’d be a lot easier to just buy yourself a new hat.”
Raylan smiles and answers, “It ain’t easy I’m after.”
He gets his hat back.
* * *
History and Tradition
Joshua 24:1-18, John 6:56-69
Mysterious Tradition
A very poor holy man lived in a remote part of China. Every day before his time of meditation, in order to show his devotion, he put a dish of butter up on the window sill as an offering to God, since food was so scarce. One day his cat came in and ate the butter. To remedy this, he began tying the cat to the bedpost each day before the quiet time. This man was so revered for his piety that others joined him as disciples and worshiped as he did. Generations later, long after the holy man was dead, his followers placed an offering of butter on the window sill during their time of prayer and meditation. Furthermore, each one bought a cat and tied it to the bedpost.
* * *
Murdered Innovation
The two phrases that murder innovation are “We’ve never done it that way,” and “We’ve always done it this way.” But without innovation, finding new ways of doing things, institutions, including churches, and people, even Christian people, die.
Less than a century ago, patients requiring a blood transfusion were in a race against time. There was no organized network for people to donate blood, and because blood was difficult to preserve, there was no way to store it for future use. Patients had to find their own blood donors before it was too late. They’d always done it that way.
Then, in 1937, after devising a technique for preserving blood for up to ten days, physician Bernard Fantus set up the nation’s first “blood bank” at Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. People could make “deposits” of their own blood for their own use or to be given to others with matching blood types.
At about the same time, surgeon Charles R. Drew figured out a method for separating plasma from whole blood, and found that if whole blood wasn’t necessary, blood transfusions could be successfully performed with plasma alone. Plasma could be dried for long-term storage in blood banks. As World War II decimated Europe, Drew and the American Red Cross launched a groundbreaking program to collect donated plasma in the US and ship it to Britain, essentially creating a national system for blood donation. During the war, he collaborated with the Red Cross to set up “bloodmobiles” — mobile blood donation centers that made sustaining blood banks more practical. Today, about 13.6 million units of whole blood and red blood cells are collected in the US each year, saving countless lives.
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Overcoming Institutional Fear And Lethargy
In his book, David and Goliath, Macolm Gladwell profiles Dr. Emil “Jay” Freireich, an American hematologist, oncologist, and cancer biologist who was recognized as a pioneer in the treatment of cancer and use of chemotherapy and is often known as the father of modern leukemia therapy.
Freireich was the child of Hungarian immigrants who grew up in poverty with detached parents who provided little or no emotional support. He put himself through medical school by cleaning tables in the college cafeteria and, after being fired from several jobs becaue of his bulldog determination and fiery temper, he eventually became one of the pioneers in the use of chemotherapy in treating childhood leukemia.
In the early sixties and seventies drugs were administered to children with leukemia one at a time and, even then, hesitantly and with great fear and trepidation. When he suggested administering two drugs at a time he was immediately turned down by the governing body of the hospital where he worked for fear the drugs would harm or even kill the children. He argued that the children were already dying and did it anyway. Then he suggested that three drugs be used, simultaneously. Same response, same result. He did it anyway, staying up all night at his patients’ bedsides.
Finally, he began administering a “cocktail” injection of four cancer fighting drugs and, much to everyone’s surprise, after the children recovered from their initial bad reaction, they began to get better.
Today, drug cocktails are standard protocol for treating many cancers, including leukemia, which has a cure rate of 90%.
Freireich stated that he was unfazed by the criticism he initially received for attempting this pioneering method of treatment. He led the Center's Leukemia Research Program during the 1980s and 1990s. He made contributions to over 600 scientific papers and over 100 books. The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he worked, established the Emil J. Freireich Award for Excellence in Education to honor his efforts of setting up graduate teaching programs to promote research. It gives recognition to “members of the teaching faculty for excellence in education contributions.”
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WORSHIPby George Reed
Call to Worship
One: How lovely is your dwelling place, O God of hosts!
All: Our heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.
One: Happy are those in your house, O God, ever singing your praise.
All: Happy are those whose strength is in you, our redeemer.
One: For God is a sun and shield who bestows favor and honor.
All: No good thing does God withhold from those who walk uprightly.
OR
One: The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob comes to us.
All: We welcome the God who is faithful and true.
One: The God who dwells within our world guides us.
All: We will follow you, O God, wherever you lead us.
One: The God who holds the future beckons us onward.
All: With God’s help we will be faithful disciples of Jesus.
Hymns and Songs
O God, Our Help in Ages Past
UMH: 117
H82: 680
AAHH: 170
NNBH: 46
NCH: 25
CH: 67
LBW: 320
ELW: 632
W&P: 84
AMEC: 61
STLT: 281
The God of Abraham Praise
UMH: 116
H82: 401
GTG: 49
NCH: 24
CH: 24
LBW: 544
ELW: 831
W&P: 16
Renew: 51
A Mighty Fortress Is Our God
UMH: 110
H82: 687/688
PH: 260
GTG: 275
AAHH: 124
NNBH: 37
NCH: 439/440
CH: 65
LBW: 228/229
ELW: 503/504/505
W&P: 588
AMEC: 54
STLT: 200
To God Be the Glory
UMH: 98
PH: 485
GTG: 634
AAHH: 157
NNBH: 17
CH: 39
W&P: 66
AMEC: 21
Renew: 258
If Thou But Suffer God to Guide Thee
UMH: 142
H82: 635
PH: 282
GTG: 816
NCH: 410
LBW: 453
ELW: 769
W&P: 429
Dear Lord and Father of Mankind
UMH: 358
H82: 652/653
PH: 345
GTG: 169
NCH: 502
CH: 594
LBW: 506
W&P: 470
AMEC: 344
Jesus Calls Us
UMH: 398
H82: 549/550
GTG: 720
NNBH: 183
NCH: 171/172
CH: 337
LBW: 494
ELW: 696
W&P: 345
AMEC: 238
A Charge to Keep I Have
UMH: 413
AAHH: 467/468
NNBH: 436
AMEC: 242
O Master, Let Me Walk with Thee
UMH: 430
H82: 659/660
PH: 357
GTG: 738
NNBH: 445
NCH: 503
CH: 602
LBW: 492
ELW: 818
W&P: 589
AMEC: 299
Trust and Obey
UMH: 467
AAHH: 380
NNBH: 322
CH: 556
W&P: 443
AMEC: 377
Great Is the Lord
CCB: 65
Humble Yourself in the Sight of the Lord
CCB: 72
Renew: 188
Music Resources Key
UMH: United Methodist Hymnal
H82: The Hymnal 1982
PH: Presbyterian Hymnal
GTG: Glory to God, The Presbyterian Hymnal
AAHH: African American Heritage Hymnal
NNBH: The New National Baptist Hymnal
NCH: The New Century Hymnal
CH: Chalice Hymnal
LBW: Lutheran Book of Worship
ELW: Evangelical Lutheran Worship
W&P: Worship & Praise
AMEC: African Methodist Episcopal Church Hymnal
STLT: Singing the Living Tradition
CCB: Cokesbury Chorus Book
Renew: Renew! Songs & Hymns for Blended Worship
Prayer for the Day/Collect
O God who is ever faithful and true:
Grant us the faith to trust that you will guide us today
as you have guided us throughout the ages;
through Jesus Christ our Savior. Amen.
OR
We praise you, O God, because you have always been there to guide and direct us. Help us to allow you to guide us once more as we face the uncertainty of our times. Amen.
Prayer of Confession
One: Let us confess to God and before one another our sins and especially when we forget that God is always here to guide us.
All: We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We look at the world around us and we are overwhelmed with the problems and issues we face. We think we have to face them by ourselves. We have forgotten how often you have been with us to guide us. We forget that your wisdom is the true way to look at life. Open our eyes, our hearts, and our minds that we might trust you to guide us now. Amen.
One: The God who guided us in the past will guide us now. Receive God’s grace and assurance and face the world with God.
Prayers of the People
We bless you and praise your holy name, O God, who created us and never deserted us. You have been our shepherd and guide always.
(The following paragraph may be used if a separate prayer of confession has not been used.)
We confess to you, O God, and before one another that we have sinned. We look at the world around us and we are overwhelmed with the problems and issues we face. We think we have to face them by ourselves. We have forgotten how often you have been with us to guide us. We forget that your wisdom is the true way to look at life. Open our eyes, our hearts, and our minds that we might trust you to guide us now. Amen
We thank you for all the ways in which you have been faithful to us even when we have been unfaithful. We thank you for those who have heeded your voice and taught us to listen to you as you speak quietly in our hearts. We thank you for those who have lead the way for us as we tried to follow you.
(Other thanksgivings may be offered.)
We pray for all your children in their need. We pray for those who suffer because we have forgotten your ways. We pray for those who have been deprived of justice and those who have found no mercy. We pray for those who strive to follow you and bring healing to your children.
(Other intercessions may be offered.)
Hear us as we pray for others: (Time for silent or spoken prayer.)
All these things we ask in the name of our Savior Jesus Christ who taught us to pray saying:
Our Father....Amen.
(Or if the Our Father is not used at this point in the service.)
All this we ask in the name of the Blessed and Holy Trinity. Amen.
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CHILDREN'S SERMONSeeing It Through
by Katy Stenta
John 6:56-69
Jesus goes on so long about bread that the disciples find it confusing.
Do you ever have that happen? Do you ever get reminded of things so much that you are unable to listen to it anymore?
If you have ever watched the Charlie Brown cartoon, which is really old, one thing they do well is present the adults in that cartoon sounding like this “wah-wah-wah,’ making it impossible to understand them.
Some of Jesus’ followers decide that his teachings are too hard, or boring, or whatever, so they leave.
Jesus asks the twelve disciples, “Are you going to leave, too?”
The disciples reply, “Where can we go?”
In other words, they have come too far and learned too much, they feel like they have to finish.
I think it’s like something called summit fever. Summit fever is when you see the top of a mountain you are climbing, and suddenly you feel like you have to get to the top no matter what. Sometimes, even though you know it’s hard, you keep going at the end because you know you are going to finish.
What are things do you feel like you have to finish sometimes? Is it homework? Cleaning? Sports? Some activity you don’t like anymore but have decided to you need to see it through? You don’t have to do hard things forever, but sometimes it is worth it to keep working on hard things so you can actually understand how good it feels to finish something difficult.
That’s how the disciples feel in this reading.
Let’s pray.
Dear God
Thank you
For being with us
Even when
Things are hard.
Help us
When we
Don’t know
What to do
Or where to go next.
Amen.
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The Immediate Word, August 25, 2024 issue.
Copyright 2024 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to The Immediate Word service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons and in worship and classroom settings only. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
