St. Andrew Presbyterian Church
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Worship Guide - 26th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

9/27/2020

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Worship with One Click

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You can choose to watch all of this Sunday's worship service in a series of linked videos, one after the other by clicking this link. Just press the button that says "PLAY ALL" and sit back and relax. You can also just click on the graphic to the left.​ Otherwise, proceed as normal through the sections.


​…get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! … Turn, then, and live.
~Ezekiel 18:31b, 32c
 
Etty Hillesum (1914-1943) was a Dutch author who wrote both of her religious awakening, and of the persecution of Jewish people in Amsterdam during the German occupation. In 1943, she was deported and killed in Auschwitz concentration camp. While at the Westerbork transit camp, she wrote these words:
 
There is a really deep well inside me. And in it dwells God. Sometimes I am there, too … And that is all we can manage these days and also all that really matters: that we safeguard that little piece of You, God, in ourselves.
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There is something very important, pivotal, and fragile being revealed about this moment in history. The ancients used the word apocalypse to describe an urgent unveiling, the bringing into light of an ultimate state of affairs.
 
While engaging the chief priests and elders in an exchange that seems eerily similar to many that dominate our politics of late, Jesus enters into the fray, but in a way that exposes the deadly whirlwind of their ambition, and the life-giving turn toward “a new heart and a new spirit” that restores the whole of creation.
 
What perhaps is most surprising is the power that each of us has to turn the tide, to restore the Divine Center, as Richard Rohr names it, by “holding it and fully occupying it ourselves,”—taking on the “mind of Christ” (Philippians 2), or as Etty Hillesum knew, that we can “safeguard that little piece of … God in ourselves.”
 
Indeed, this may be some of our most important work in this apocalyptic time. Turn, then, and live. Enter into God’s rest. Enter into worship.

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Worship Guide - 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

9/20/2020

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Worship With One Click

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You can choose to watch all of this Sunday's worship service in a series of linked videos, one after the other by clicking this link. Just press the button that says "PLAY ALL" and sit back and relax. You can also just click on the graphic to the left.​ Otherwise, proceed as normal through the sections.


Jonah just blurts it out! The problem is God’s readiness to forgive: “That is why I fled to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.”
​ 
Jonah’s disarming honesty is nothing, if not refreshing, and, perhaps, a bit of comfort to those of us (all of us?) who struggle not to allow our privilege to short-circuit our grace and generosity toward others, who find that, to the injury of others, our passion for justice has limits we would rather not acknowledge . 

But Jesus’ parable in Matthew draws us to another insight that may just have the power to save us all—a landowner, and workers paid equally for unequal work. Jesus both envisions the new order
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of God and unmasks the deadly spirits of our disorder. Instead of using wages to reinforce distinctions, Jesus uses them to express equality and solidarity—a living wage, a day’s wage for each worker. Not equal pay for equal work, but plenty and not too much for all—an economy for all souls!​
​
We nod our heads in agreement even as we remember the Spirit is often in the details. And the one detail that may be most essential, and at the root of America’s original sin is captured in the complaint of the first vineyard workers: “You have made them equal to us…” Indeed, God has! And therein lies the saving Good News. Enter into worship.

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Worship Guide - 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

9/13/2020

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Worship With One Click

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You can choose to watch all of this Sunday's worship service in a series of linked videos, one after the other by clicking this link. Just press the button that says "PLAY ALL" and sit back and relax. You can also just click on the graphic to the left.​ Otherwise, proceed as normal through the sections.


Absence makes the heart grow fonder. The clarion truth of this old adage rings through these ancient scriptures for this Sunday. Joseph forgives his brothers, despite the worst of their intentions, understanding that God has bent a universe toward the unity and reconciliation we know as justice in which we are better and stronger together than we are apart. Romans encourages accommodation of those (of us!) who are “weak in faith.” Here we find an invitation to clarify between what is essential and what is not, what is a matter of truth and life and what is a matter of opinion. No easy answers here, of course, but the journey is essential. Peter wonders to Jesus the extent of forgiveness…and we may wonder of the tipping point between forgiveness and the dysfunction of abuse—personal and systemic.
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All this as we navigate the impossible demands of schooling, parenting and grandparenting, working, supporting, hoping, and simply living amidst pandemic life.  Is there a word for us today? Enter into worship. 

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Worship Guide - 23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

9/6/2020

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Worship With One Click

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You can choose to watch all of this Sunday's worship service in a series of linked videos, one after the other by clicking this link. Just press the button that says "PLAY ALL" and sit back and relax. You can also just click on the graphic to the left.​ Otherwise, proceed as normal through the sections.


Thousands of years ago an artist is at work on a painting that shows a mountain rising out of a desert. The sky glints with gold leaf. A cut-out of the rock reveals seven men asleep in the shadows of the underland. They lie close together, encased by the rock: The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, known in Arabic as “the people of the cave,” for the story is found both in the Christian and Islamic traditions. Fleeing persecution, they wait in darkness, sheltered by the rock, until it is safe to emerge. They will sleep 300 years and emerge when danger is gone.
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Consider this: church is not so much what we do as who we are together. “Church is the people I’m trying to follow Jesus with and the people who are following Jesus with me,” says Daniel Kirk. “It’s the intentional community of people who walk in self-giving love for each other while trusting themselves to the care of God.”
 
“Teach me, O Lord, the way of your statutes, and I will observe it to the end,” prays the psalmist (119:33).
 
We “mortals” long to discern between the ways of the “wicked” Ezekiel (33:7-11) so confidently distinguishes from the word of salvation that God’s servants who “put on the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 13:14) are compelled to speak. Otherwise, “lest we die” says Ezekiel, the servants are responsible for their demise. Whatever you bind or loose on earth will be bound or loosed in heaven, says Matthew (18:18). If we are indeed the servants, the “binders” and the “looseners” how can we be so obliged to “wake from sleep,” so responsible when we feel ourselves so tired, and offended and in need of shelter?
 
What do the simple ways of empathy and engagement and resistance that we encounter in parental care and prophetic dissent—in pandemic, no less!—teach the people together trying to follow Jesus? In these chaotic and unsettling days flooded with threats both real, imagined, and manufactured what paths of faith navigate us to the salvation so near? Enter into rest. Enter into hope. Enter into worship.

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  • Home
  • New Here?
    • Belonging Here
    • Contact Us
    • Directions
  • Who We Are
    • Stories
    • About Our Ministries
    • Leadership
    • Staff
    • Manantial de Vida Congregation
  • Worship
    • Worship in Absentia
    • Sermons
    • Audio excerpts
    • Aftertalk
  • News
    • On our Minds
    • Newsletter
  • Give
  • Get Involved
    • Choirs and Music
    • Social Groups
    • Community Service
    • Missions >
      • NICHE
      • Gulfport Mississippi 2008
      • Honduras 2012
      • Honduras 2015
      • Honduras 2018 >
        • NPH 2018 photos
    • Christian Formation
    • Sustainable Living
    • Worship
    • Youth Group
  • Calendar
  • File Cabinet
    • Donations - Electronic
    • Clerks Drawer
    • Elder/Deacon Resources
    • Policies and Procedures
    • Personnel and Budget Drawer
    • Media
    • Members & Metrics
    • Our Discernment Process
    • SHALOM
    • Directory & Deacons' Lists
  • Coronavirus Updates
  • Bridge Ministries Sunday