Skip to main content

Introduction to Worship for 1/29/2017

By
This week begins a four-week exploration of the Sermon on the Mount, a collection of Jesus’ sayings. It appears only in the gospel of Matthew in this form; Luke has a similar collection of sayings (including another version of Beatitudes) called the Sermon on the Plain. In Matthew, the sayings are placed at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry and function as the vision statement for his ministry: he lays out a radical vision of what God’s reign on earth might look like, a vision of wholeness for all people.

Matthew 5: 1-12

The Beatitudes begin the Sermon on the Mount. They are a series of sentences beginning with the word blessed, or happy in some translations. Blessing is God’s free gift to humankind, a sign of covenant relationship with God. Jesus’ first teaching to the disciples turns a world view on its head. We have learned the ways of the world from our earliest days: that the blessed are the rich, blessed are those with good healthcare and retirement plans, blessed are the powerful and popular, and blessed are the young and good looking.

There is urgency in Jesus’ teaching. He uses the present tense – this is happening right now. In Jesus’ coming, God’s love is revealed and made manifest. This teaching is directed to the disciples, the Twelve and the larger group of men and women who accompany Jesus. The Beatitudes describe the way of life for those who commit themselves to follow. For Matthew’s community, this re-imagined realm is what life should be like. Those who mourn will be comforted; those who make peace will be called God’s children. Those who are persecuted in the cause of justice will find themselves part of God’s transforming reality.

Our experience today is, in many ways, similar to that of Matthew’s community. We may not be persecuted for our faith, but the ways of faith often seem foolish compared with the values of society. What challenges do we find when we immerse ourselves in the extraordinary and wise ways of God?

Connecting Scripture and Life

Close your eyes and imagine yourself receiving a blessing from God: What do you feel? (pause) What do you see? (pause) What do you hear? (pause) What do you smell? (pause) Do you taste anything? (pause) What emotions do you experience? (pause) Have you felt this way before? (pause)

Use the attached resource sheet to explore moments you have seen or experienced or needed God’s blessing and then take that moment to talk to God in prayer.

Invite children to think of people who might be feeling sad, hungry, lonely, without friends and draw a face for each person they think about. Suggest they sit quietly in the prayer space and say a gentle prayer, asking that each person will know God’s love and care. For each person/prayer they might ring a bell and listen as the sound of the bell disappears. Then move on to the next prayer.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Introduction to Worship for 9/24/2017

By
Bless the Water: This week our creation theme is Water. As an introduction to the theme, we will be looking at the beginning of the second creation story in Genesis. Genesis 2:4b–14 In the first story (Genesis 1:1––2:3), water is there from the beginning, and creation is an act of separating everything else from the waters, and then bringing life to the land—after light and darkness and planets and the sun and moon are brought forth.      In the second story, the land has already been created, and there is a stream that waters all of the land. God creates the human from the land, and we can’t grasp the pun in English, but adam (human or man) is made from adamah (humus or earth). We’re probably most familiar with verses 8 & 9 in this text, when God creates a garden and puts adam into the garden with the green and growing things, including the tree of life and the tree of good and evil. But then the author describes the four rivers that surround the garden, a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introduction to Worship for 4/2/2017

By
Hope Against All Hope There are disappointing moments in life, times when it seems as though there may be no hope. And then there are those times when we are, literally, beyond hope—times when it would appear that, no matter what, there is no going back. Our story this week reminds us that with God the impossible is, at best, a slight inconvenience. As Paul points out in Romans 8:11, “if the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, [this same Spirit] will give life to your human bodies also…” John 11:1–45 The story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead can stretch the limits of our believing. But getting hung up on whether or not the story took place as written can distract us from the great point of the story. We know that John presents us with stories that are not in the synoptic gospels, and which (such as turning massive amounts of water into wine at Cana) seem questionable. But John’s points are not confined by fact; they are about something much more...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introduction to Worship for 8/27/17

By
Disappearing: The gift of Disappearing is a tricky one, although I think it is a terrifically important one for American Christians, and particularly mainline WASP Christians to understand and claim. Psalm 19 Galatians 2.20: “...[I]t is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” Disappearing comes in those moments when we can see the world beyond ourselves as it is, undistorted by ourselves in the frame. Sometimes, as in Psalm 19, it comes in moments of awe, when we are so caught up in beauty or in process or in relationship that our sense of self ebbs away, leaving only the experience. Sometimes it comes when our illusions about our false self are stripped away, and we stand undefended before the truth of our lives. Either one can be a powerful motivation for change. Both allow us to see ourselves as part of God’s plan, in relationship to others. Both...
Post a Comment
Read more