Showing posts with label celebrate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label celebrate. Show all posts

Sunday, May 13, 2018

Twelve Disciples of Christ-the Women!



Twelve Disciples of Christ

A reading for Mother’s Day 2018 adapted from Wild Goose Worship Group from Iona.


Monica: Let us remember and celebrate twelve disciples of Jesus, people who were touched by and tended him.

Pam: Remember Mary, the girl from the country town, the poet and the singer, who became pregnant with God, by God, for God’s sake.

Anne: Remember Elizabeth, Mary’s older cousin, who shared Mary’s excitement who herself bore John, the friend of the and baptizer of Jesus.

Joan: Remember Anna, the old widow and faithful believer, who saw an eight day old baby and recognized that the Messiah had come.

Carol: Remember Martha, the cook and housekeeper, the plain speaker, who gave Jesus her anger, so he could give her his love.

Pam: Remember Joanna, who with Susanna, and many other women provided the hospitality which Jesus saw as crucial to the gospel.

Anne: Remember Peter’s mother-in-law, who was so grateful to be healed, that her first act after recovery was to make a meal for Jesus.

Joan: Remember the Samaritan woman, whose conversation with Jesus was full of double entendres, but whose life was so changed by him, that she became the first real evangelist.

Carol: Remember the Canaanite woman, who gave Jesus a hard time, taking his exclusive language to task, until he saw and admired her toughness, and devotion.

Pam: Remember the hemorrhagic woman, who contaminated countless men, or so they thought, in order to touch Jesus, who named her faith as the root of her cure.  

Anne: Remember the poor widowed woman, who, in giving the smallest coins to God, gave Jesus his model for generosity.

Joan: Remember the woman caught in adultery, who let Jesus show how the grace of God is greater then the moralizing of men.

Carol: Remember her, whose perfume filled a room with fragrance, yet, who let her costliest gift be offered, in love, to God.

Pam: Remember the woman, who mothered many children not her own, the woman who taught in schools and watched a generation graduate to new life.

Anne: Remember the woman, who sacrificed her dreams, so her daughter could realize hers.

Joan: Remember the woman, who was known as the church lady, who taught Sunday school, watched babies, baked cookies, pies, and casseroles, who was an elder, acted as clerk, treasurer, communion server, usher, choir member, preacher, pastor, teacher, bell ringer, and was a pillar of the church.


Carol: Remember the women, who touched our lives because of their bravery, their courage, their intelligence, their joy, who helped us see Jesus in the face of others.

Monica: Remember the women who we have loved and who loved us, our mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, and cousins. Remember the women who are no longer here, who have gone before us, whose energy, imagination, tenacity, witness, and joy provide us with warmed hearts and renewed hope. Amen.

Monday, August 3, 2015

Celebration!

Sermon 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 Psalm 16:5-11 August 2, 2015 Ordinary time

Celebration!

We say on the Sundays when we share the Lord’s Supper that we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Have you ever wondered what celebrate means? We’re here this Sunday ready to gather at this Lord’s Table as we do once a month and so I wonder again, ‘How can we celebrate little pieces of bread and a small taste of juice?’
What does the word mean and how in the world do we do that?
I believe celebration begins with joy.
  1.  Chara which is the Greek which means: joy, gladness
    1. the joy received from you
    2. the cause or occasion of joy
      1. of persons who are one's joy
(While in Greece this summer I realized all my seminary training of Baby Bible Greek wasn’t a match for modern Greek. I had no clue what people were saying and when I thought I understood something said or read I was way off. I kept hearing people saying, ‘Kaliméraas they greeted one another and I thought they were talking about squid (calamari) not, ‘good morning.’ Kalos in Greek means good and imera is day. Good morning, good day, is the greeting people share with each other.)

Joy is something that God wants us to experience through God’s love for us.
Joy is a song of confidence, a song of wonder and a song of assurance.
Listen again to the words of the psalmist in Psalm 16, “The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup, you hold my lot…I keep the Lord always before me, because he is at my right hand I shall not be moved, Therefore my heart is glad and my soul rejoices, my body rests secure…in your presence there is fullness of joy, in your right hand are pleasures forever more.” The psalmist reflects on the story of his life and chooses to praise God for all of his life. He rejoices because of his confidence in God’s presence and because he recognizes God’s presence he rejoices.  

When we enter into God’s courts and into worship we enter with praise. We enter to come to worship God and offer ourselves to God for this one hour a week. In his ‘Wishful Thinking’ book Frederick Buechner says, “To worship God means to serve him. Basically there are two ways to do it.
One way is to do things for him that he needs to have done-run errands for him, carry messages for him, fight on his side, feed his lambs, and so on.
The other way is to do things for him that you need to do-sing songs for him,
create beautiful things for him,
give things up for him,
tell him what’s on your mind and in your heart,
in general rejoice in him
and make a fool of yourself for him
the way lovers have always made fools of themselves for the one they love.”

While we sing and pray and do foolish things for God something happens to us.
We become open to the power of the Spirit to change us,
to fill us
and to move our hearts
into new directions.
Our hearts get that feeling of joy inside,
a deep sense of confidence that in all things God will be with us
and somehow that is enough.

I have just returned from a month of extraordinary joy.
A dream of visiting the country of Greece has finally been realized.
Taking time to be fully engaged with the one God gave me in marriage and to be foolish together with the things we love to do as sailors reminded me again of what it means to give oneself over to another.
That is what God wants from us!
God wants us to be fully engaged with the life God has given us.
God wants us to be fully wrapped up in the grace poured out upon us through the love of Jesus Christ.
It is a love so powerful that it has turned the world upside down and will continue to do so. Crazy love is one way to look at our relationship with God. And that is something to celebrate!
·         
      And when we gather for the Lord’s Supper it is in the spirit of joy, the spirit of that crazy love for God and that foolishness of the cross of God’s love for us that we partake.
·         Our taking part in the Lord’s Supper is a proclamation.
It is an announcement.
It is a declaration.
We tell the story of Christ and it is no longer a story of two thousand years ago it is a story of today.
It is our story of God’s love for us today that we carry into tomorrow.

Those little pieces of bread that we break off the loaf or are already cut for us into nice bite size shapes are our remembering.
Christ said his body is given for us.
Our bodies are members of Christ.
In the Lord’s Supper we receive our identity
as belonging to Christ and to one another.
In this identity we live our lives, we live our stories.
We can live our stories in a way of infectious zeal,
in way of sound confidence,
in a way of incredible joy,
in a way of serious testimony,
in a way of crazy celebration.
Friends everything about us is a living testimony,
let us begin today and celebrate the new life offered to us in Jesus Christ through the gift of grace as we receive the bread and the cup.
To God be the glory.
Amen.


Benediction Romans 15:13 (NIV)
May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the