Morning Worship
27 July 2014
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your paths straight. Do not be wise in your own eyes; fear the Lord and shun evil.
Proverbs Chapter 3 verse 5 - 7
1st Reading: Genesis Chapter 29 verses 15 to 28 (GNT)
2nd Reading: Romans Chapter 8 verses 26 to 39 (NIV)
3rd Reading: St Matthew Chapter 13 verses 31 to 33 and 44 to 52 (GNT)
2nd Reading: Romans Chapter 8 verses 26 to 39 (NIV)
3rd Reading: St Matthew Chapter 13 verses 31 to 33 and 44 to 52 (GNT)
Sermon
Lamentations 3:22-23
English Standard Version (ESV)
22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
This is a special day. It is a special day for Mary and Stan who, together with their family, are celebrating 60 years of marriage. We have included in our service this morning things that have meant something to them over the years. The opening verse of scripture was one given to Stan before he began his military service. That injunction to ‘trust in the Lord,’ believing that ‘he will make your way straight,’ has stayed with him ever since. Most of the singings that have been included in the service are Stan and Mary’s choice. They represent aspects of that experience we call ‘love’ and which we rejoice at knowing to be at the heart of true relationships.
This is a special day. It is the Lord’s Day. It is the weekly occasion where Christians come together to remember a Sunday on which a tomb was empty and the first tremendous news began to spread abroad, ‘We have met the Lord.’ This still brings us together each week that we can tell one another of our experiences of Jesus through the power of Holy Spirit that have been ours since the last time that we meet, and equally importantly, we can offer this good news to those who coma among us. And so I deliberately chose to stay with the three readings that are set for this 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time in the lectionary that I follow week by week. And what three readings they are!
The Old Testament reading comes from the long sequence of weekly episodes of the life of the dysfunctional family of God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – patriarchs and rum characters. The Holy Spirit writes the script for our weekly dose of a kind of ‘Home and Away’ set not in Sunny Bay but Canaan. And this week Jacob is away having fled the inevitable confrontation that would come from having stitched up his elder brother. His going included the story of a ladder to heaven, the gateway to the presence of God. His return home will include wrestling with the very presence of God himself at Penuel. But that is to get ahead of the story. Here Jacob has been tricked by Laban. It is not just ‘seven years for Rachel’ but rather fourteen. What shines through the story is not just the rather pathetic fatherly love for a daughter in danger of being left on the shelf but the steadfast love of Jacob for the girl with whom he has truly fallen in love. There is a kind of appropriateness of this reading for today. We are celebrating 60 years of married life and somewhat more than that of the love that it symbolises. Equally we are celebrating our experience of human love is a way of appreciating that we are the recipients of a divine love. If human love can be like this how much greater the nature of the divine love? No wonder that John was to write that ‘God so loved the world’ that he attempted a new way to forge a relationship built in that love, giving his Son for us.
The New Testament reading opened with the words, ‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.’ Was Paul thinking of the phrase ‘Love is Blind’? Not if that means that’s love is myopic, unable to see things clearly. As he goes on to write in this tremendous outpouring of his understanding of what it means to stand in the power of the crucified and risen saviour, life can be hard and even brutal. We can experience a whole variety of very real hardships in life, but, he asks, can they separate us from the love of Christ? No! He declares with ringing confidence, that ‘Nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ If today we are able to celebrate that for Stan and Mary the various trials of the last sixty years can be looked back upon as moments on a journey on which their love has carried them, so too we can see that recognising and responding to the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord gives us a different world view. His love is displayed to us not just when life is successful and we are happy. It is there when things are going wrong and we are in the depths of depression. The stoical nature of Job’s relationship with God in face of adversity is one thing but for Paul that lacked the essential ingredient of love that he saw in the face of Jesus, and which transformed his understanding of the relationship between a human creature and his creator. I deliberately did not choose what many think of as Charles Wesley’s great hymn. But the opening words sum up Paul’s sentiment,
Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven to earth come down.
Fix in us thy humble dwelling,
All thy faithful mercies crown.
And so to our Gospel. These series of pithy little stories jumbled up with the longer agricultural parables that Jesus has been sharing with his friends. Let me direct you to the final one. A story of a merchant who stumbles across a fine pearl and sells everything so that he can own it. Probably of course so that he can see it at a vast profit, that is what merchants are about, buying and selling. In contemporary terms it is the example of a team on bargain hunt who recognise that the rather non-descript pot they are being offered for a few pounds is an ancient Chinese treasure worth thousands. Would you not dive in and buy it? Well, of course it takes the expert to recognise that this something of inestimable wealth. Marriage is like two merchants discovering their treasure and giving up everything from their singleness to create a completely new experience in a family together. We celebrate those for whom it has brought happiness of an unimaginable value and amount over the years. No wonder the writer of Proverbs was moved to extol his perfect wife as being above the value of any treasure. We have the opportunity this morning to say that there is another treasure that we have discovered. We are rich because we have found God’s love for us. Like the treasure it is out there. Nobody needs to spend endless years looking for it. There is a map to locate it, given to us in God’s word. We can make people happy by sharing it with them so that they discover that when we have taken what we want there is still enough for all.
For Stan and Mary this day is but a stage on a continuing journey. I hope someone might be preaching at your Platinum anniversary. However long is left to any of us may we be able to continue to say that God’s steadfast love is with us and is new every morning. May we be able to proclaim the faithfulness of God. May we be able to invite others to come and experience this great love for man which the Creator God has showed in the gift of Jesus to us, which Jesus showed in his relationships with the people around him, and which the very breath of God in his Spirit infuses us with the truth of that love. So in the fullness of time we shall come to the fullness of that love in the very presence of God and in his nearer light.
Amen.
Rev Dr Peter Howson
English Standard Version (ESV)
22 The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;
his mercies never come to an end;
23 they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
This is a special day. It is a special day for Mary and Stan who, together with their family, are celebrating 60 years of marriage. We have included in our service this morning things that have meant something to them over the years. The opening verse of scripture was one given to Stan before he began his military service. That injunction to ‘trust in the Lord,’ believing that ‘he will make your way straight,’ has stayed with him ever since. Most of the singings that have been included in the service are Stan and Mary’s choice. They represent aspects of that experience we call ‘love’ and which we rejoice at knowing to be at the heart of true relationships.
This is a special day. It is the Lord’s Day. It is the weekly occasion where Christians come together to remember a Sunday on which a tomb was empty and the first tremendous news began to spread abroad, ‘We have met the Lord.’ This still brings us together each week that we can tell one another of our experiences of Jesus through the power of Holy Spirit that have been ours since the last time that we meet, and equally importantly, we can offer this good news to those who coma among us. And so I deliberately chose to stay with the three readings that are set for this 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time in the lectionary that I follow week by week. And what three readings they are!
The Old Testament reading comes from the long sequence of weekly episodes of the life of the dysfunctional family of God. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob – patriarchs and rum characters. The Holy Spirit writes the script for our weekly dose of a kind of ‘Home and Away’ set not in Sunny Bay but Canaan. And this week Jacob is away having fled the inevitable confrontation that would come from having stitched up his elder brother. His going included the story of a ladder to heaven, the gateway to the presence of God. His return home will include wrestling with the very presence of God himself at Penuel. But that is to get ahead of the story. Here Jacob has been tricked by Laban. It is not just ‘seven years for Rachel’ but rather fourteen. What shines through the story is not just the rather pathetic fatherly love for a daughter in danger of being left on the shelf but the steadfast love of Jacob for the girl with whom he has truly fallen in love. There is a kind of appropriateness of this reading for today. We are celebrating 60 years of married life and somewhat more than that of the love that it symbolises. Equally we are celebrating our experience of human love is a way of appreciating that we are the recipients of a divine love. If human love can be like this how much greater the nature of the divine love? No wonder that John was to write that ‘God so loved the world’ that he attempted a new way to forge a relationship built in that love, giving his Son for us.
The New Testament reading opened with the words, ‘And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him.’ Was Paul thinking of the phrase ‘Love is Blind’? Not if that means that’s love is myopic, unable to see things clearly. As he goes on to write in this tremendous outpouring of his understanding of what it means to stand in the power of the crucified and risen saviour, life can be hard and even brutal. We can experience a whole variety of very real hardships in life, but, he asks, can they separate us from the love of Christ? No! He declares with ringing confidence, that ‘Nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’ If today we are able to celebrate that for Stan and Mary the various trials of the last sixty years can be looked back upon as moments on a journey on which their love has carried them, so too we can see that recognising and responding to the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord gives us a different world view. His love is displayed to us not just when life is successful and we are happy. It is there when things are going wrong and we are in the depths of depression. The stoical nature of Job’s relationship with God in face of adversity is one thing but for Paul that lacked the essential ingredient of love that he saw in the face of Jesus, and which transformed his understanding of the relationship between a human creature and his creator. I deliberately did not choose what many think of as Charles Wesley’s great hymn. But the opening words sum up Paul’s sentiment,
Love divine, all loves excelling,
Joy of heaven to earth come down.
Fix in us thy humble dwelling,
All thy faithful mercies crown.
And so to our Gospel. These series of pithy little stories jumbled up with the longer agricultural parables that Jesus has been sharing with his friends. Let me direct you to the final one. A story of a merchant who stumbles across a fine pearl and sells everything so that he can own it. Probably of course so that he can see it at a vast profit, that is what merchants are about, buying and selling. In contemporary terms it is the example of a team on bargain hunt who recognise that the rather non-descript pot they are being offered for a few pounds is an ancient Chinese treasure worth thousands. Would you not dive in and buy it? Well, of course it takes the expert to recognise that this something of inestimable wealth. Marriage is like two merchants discovering their treasure and giving up everything from their singleness to create a completely new experience in a family together. We celebrate those for whom it has brought happiness of an unimaginable value and amount over the years. No wonder the writer of Proverbs was moved to extol his perfect wife as being above the value of any treasure. We have the opportunity this morning to say that there is another treasure that we have discovered. We are rich because we have found God’s love for us. Like the treasure it is out there. Nobody needs to spend endless years looking for it. There is a map to locate it, given to us in God’s word. We can make people happy by sharing it with them so that they discover that when we have taken what we want there is still enough for all.
For Stan and Mary this day is but a stage on a continuing journey. I hope someone might be preaching at your Platinum anniversary. However long is left to any of us may we be able to continue to say that God’s steadfast love is with us and is new every morning. May we be able to proclaim the faithfulness of God. May we be able to invite others to come and experience this great love for man which the Creator God has showed in the gift of Jesus to us, which Jesus showed in his relationships with the people around him, and which the very breath of God in his Spirit infuses us with the truth of that love. So in the fullness of time we shall come to the fullness of that love in the very presence of God and in his nearer light.
Amen.
Rev Dr Peter Howson
| Printable version of sermon 270714 |
