February 16, 2025
Lighting the Christ Candle

Welcome and Announcements

Upcoming Events

March 2 AGM  Bagged Lunch 12:00

March 9 (Friday) World Day of Prayer, 1:30 at the United Church.  This year:  The Cook Islands.

Tuesdays, April 15-May 13 Bible Study 7 PM

 

 

Call to Worship

With joy and delight we gather to praise our Holy God!
We give thanks that God understands us, and calls us  to be that which we were created to become!
God, you call us to worship you as children, created in your image, with a divine spark within each of us.
God, you invite us to sink our roots deep into your love and holiness, and to grow stronger each day in our faith in you.
We give thanks that in God  the fruits
we bear are consistent with what God created us to become.
We gather to worship and praise our all encompassing  God

Hymn:  667  God you touch the earth with beauty

Prayer of Approach

God of blessings and woes,
bless us this day with lives filled with love, caring, generosity, and deep, abiding hope.  You are like the sunlight enticing us taller

and like the breeze rustling our leaves.  You are with us through hard seasons of summer heat, and in the nights when winter’s frost ice the landscape your love warms and sustains us.

You are everything to us.  O let our gratitude be great, let our praise be plentiful, let our worship be wonder-filled!

 

 

Prayer of Confession:
We seek to embrace God’s embrace, yet we often miss the mark.  For whatever ways we don’t, we confess.  In whichever ways we sin, we repent.  God of mercy, grace, reconciliation and goodness:  We are sorry for so much— for words we cannot bear to say,  for memories we cannot bear to relive, for thoughts we cannot bear to admit.
But you know our hearts.  Relieve us of our burdens.  Bind our hearts to you so that, in all ways, we may live in the joy of your salvation and the delight of your loving embrace.  Amen

Assurance of Pardon

God looks at us in our brokenness, and offers blessings to all who turn to the Him.
With the assurance of God’s faithful forgiveness and his deep love, let us choose  this day to be his people and rejoice.

Passing the Peace

Hymn:  498 Sing them over again to me

Scripture:

Jeremiah 17: 5-10
Responsive Psalm 1  

Sermon:  Planted by water

First I would like to acknowledge that not all, but much of todays sermon was taken from the writings of the Rev Julia M O’Brian on the internet.

In the beginning God created a garden and saw that it was good. Thus from the beginning of this world creation, peoples have enjoyed the blessings of nature.

Jeremiah 17:5–10 is strongly reminiscent of Hebrew wisdom literature, written in poetry and utilizing comparisons to express general truths. Like other Hebrew poetry, this passage communicates by employing metaphor. Here, those who trust in God are compared to a well-watered and deeply rooted tree, while those who depend upon human powers are like a shrub languishing in a dry desert. A similar comparison is made in Psalm 1, in which those who choose the path of life are “trees planted by streams of water” (verse 3) and the wicked are “chaff that the wind blows away” (verse 4).

However, Jeremiah packs a much harder punch than Psalm 1’s general wisdom for living. When read in the context of the chapter and the book as a whole, Jeremiah 17:5–10 undergirds the book’s repeated insistence that Judah and Jerusalem must submit to the invading Babylonian armies and abandon any claims to national sovereignty. The Babylonian military incursion of the sixth century BCE is God’s doing, it claims, the justified punishment for the nation’s failures.

In Jeremiah 17:4, God declares, “by your own act you shall lose the heritage that I gave you.” This claim is amplified later in the book: “I myself will fight against you with outstretched hand and mighty arm, in anger, in fury, and in great wrath. And I will strike down the inhabitants of this city, both human beings and animals; they shall die of a great pestilence” (23:5-6).

The opening verses of Jeremiah 17 echo the book’s frequent explanation of why this punishment has been decreed. In scandalous, language, the prophet accuses Judah and Jerusalem of unfaithfulness (verses 2–3). The verses that follow the lectionary selection underscore the book’s criticism of those who rely on their wealth and religious heritage while failing to honor God (17:11, 19–27

Anchoring this message, the wisdom poem of Jeremiah 17:5–10 paradoxically declares that letting go of traditional understandings of security and safety is the only ground in which God’s people can flourish

The plant metaphors used in this text clearly convey the book’s bold -even scandalous claim about the relative non-importance of human institutions. Strong armies, secure borders, national independence, sustainable religious bodies—Jeremiah challenges them all as ultimate goals. Such standards by which humans judge success are as shallow as the roots of a shrub. Like the other frequent natural imagery in the Prophets (people as grass and sheep; God as rock and lion), these images are a powerful vehicle for communicating a larger message.

In our current ecological context however, the tree and the shrub themselves deserve our attention. Rather than treating nonhuman life as existing solely for our benefit, what happens when we read with—and for—the plants in this passage?

As rampant deforestation turns more spaces into desert and water sources diminish on an increasingly hot and dry planet, Jeremiah’s description of parched, salty land will become an increasingly common reality. The plants struggling in these environments will be visual reminders of the greed that has treated Earth simply as a repository of resources to be exploited; they will testify to human failure.

If in the coming decades we are fortunate enough to behold well-watered and sturdy trees, they will testify to our repentance, moving beyond the simple models of “creation care” and “environmental stewardship” to face squarely the extent of Earth’s crisis and the human dynamics that fuel it. Just as Jeremiah once asked of his audience, we will have chosen to honor Earth and its Creator rather than our own interests.

The Prophets used such literary metaphors to help their audiences “see” the realities before them. To help modern audiences grasp the extent of Earth’s crisis, we have at our disposal not only words but also a powerful visual resource: photographic images of contemporary environmental devastation. Photography documents share reality in ways that paintings and graphic images cannot, taking less than 13 milliseconds for the eye to process—faster than a blink. Displaying photos of contemporary drought, deforestation, and wildfire as Jeremiah’s read and interpreted can viscerally remind us of just how deeply the fate of nonhuman life is intertwined with our own.

The image of a tree stands at the heart of the first psalm, Psalm 1 paints a neat and orderly world: good comes to those who follow the Torah, evil to those who do not. So, unlike the prosperous tree, the wicked “are like chaff that the wind drives away” (1:4). The juxtaposition is clear: the good person is a prosperous, rooted, watered tree, while the wicked men are only chaff, easily driven away by the wind.

Interestingly, while Psalm 1 describes a world easily divided into the righteous and the wicked, the psalm lacks any praise, thanksgiving, or lament. In fact, there is no speaking to God at all in this psalm. Rather, there is only a description of God, who “watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked will perish” (Psalm 1:6).

it is rarely the case that things are as neatly ordered as this psalm promises: at least not here, not now, not in our day-to-day lives in this world we live in. Psalm 1 does not grapple with the many realities of what it means to be human.

Remember, things aren’t always what they seem. “You shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. You shall not fear when heat comes.” “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven.” AMEN

 

Hymn:  641 One more step along the world I go

Offering and Doxology 830

Offertory Prayer
Gracious God, source of every blessing, you have planted us beside living waters and nourished our souls with your ways of life. In gratitude and thanks for the fruit we have born in due season, we return these gifts to you.
Bless them with your manifold grace, and multiply them in your mercy, that they may go forth to heal a world trapped in loneliness and isolation. In the name of Jesus who leads us into life, we pray.

Amen.

Gathering Prayer Requests
Prayer of Thanksgiving and Intercession

O God, you are holy, and we are gathered in gratitude for the holiness which blesses us without end.  We thank you that deep within ourselves we stand with you on holy ground, sharing in your grace and your goodness.  In the silence of our days you make us loving with your love, and make us hopeful with your hope.

Grateful to be in your presence and filled with your hope, we bring before you our deepest thanks, our most heartfelt concerns and the prayers for the world which we seek to love as you love.

JOYS

CONCERNS

WORLD

Now, as we go from this time of worship and re-enter our lives of service, we ask you to set us free to be holy and let us be a sacred space for others, so that they see that you are with us and working through us.

Dwell in us as in a holy temple, that we may know stillness and that we may bring ourselves and your word of grace into the world.

Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who taught us to pray, saying, Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.  Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors and lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever.  Amen

 

Hymn:   651  Guide me O thou great Redeemer

Benediction

Go forth, recognizing God’s grace on your journey. Go forth, discerning the Spirit’s calling in your life. Go forth, identifying the Christ as your guide. May the blessing of God; Father, Son and Spirit be with you now and forevermore.  Amen

Blessing Song:  445 Open our eyes Lord

Open our eyes, Lord, we want to see Jesus
To reach out and touch him and say that we love him.  Open our ears Lord ad help us to listen
Open our eyes Lord, we want to see Jesus

1976, PCC

3 Fold Amen