December 4, 2022, Advent 2

Welcome and Announcements:

St. Andrew’s welcomes you to this Advent service of Peace. May the Peace of Christ Jesus dwell in your hearts and minds richly as you worship with us today.
Our Loonie Offering for the month of December will go to the SAFE house to help relieve and deliver many from the pain and suffering that is so prevalent at this time of year. Christmas is not a happy time for everyone and so once again we pray that all may know the peace of Christ in their lives. Check the “Recent Posts” to learn how you can support the SAFE House.

Called to Worship: Advent Liturgy

 

Hymn: 110 Come thou long expected Jesus

Prayer of Adoration

God our caring Father, we gather to praise you and to express our hope in your salvation. WE remember that you gave your beloved Son to ransom all people. You see us as we are, see our human fears and doubts and even our rebellious nature and love us anyway.

 

Guide us through this season with quiet, glad anticipation. Help us to pay attention to the important things that Advent shows us. Focus our attention on the poor and needy, and the lonely among us, and remind us of to live out our calling as an expression of our faith.

 

Give us a spirit of reflection, that we may fully understand and share your grace. Show us how to be patience with each other, and to have hearts brimming with thanks.

We thank you for hearing our prayers, and for listening to our confession:

 

Unison Prayer of Confession:

Creator God, You created the earth, whole and round; You created us to be whole people.

But we have become fragmented, cracked and broken. We have been broken by false promises, lost relationships, shattered trust.

We have become cracked with the experience of sin, prejudice, oppression and fear.

We have become fragmented, building up walls instead of lending hands.

Forgive us when we have done the breaking, heal us where we have been hurt.

Let Your light shine through our cracks and scars so that we might bring light to the world, showing that in You we are made whole.

In You we find healing. In You we find renewed life. Help us to forgive, to love, to mend. Amen.

 

Assurance of Pardon

God knows that in our heart of hearts we would rather keep his grace active in our hearts. We remember that through his Grace, our life-giving God, accepts us as we are and helps to move into a new way of being.

So let us hear the Good News and store it in our hearts.

God’s Grace is wider than our wildest imaginings.

God’s Grace embraces us as we are and where we are

and draws us out to be the people we were created to be.

Thanks be to God in Jesus we are forgiven, and our hearts are filled with hope.

The Peace

May the peace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.

Hymn: 117 Herald sound the note of judgement

Scripture Lessons:

Romans 15: 4-13 Matthew 3: 1-12

Sermon: Repentance and Hope

Today is Peace Sunday. Today’s Scripture Lessons don’t at first glance speak about peace, and yet, the peace they point to is the peace we so often seek.

The peace we seek, the peace that God desires us to have, is that inner stillness and confidence that comes from knowing that God has redeemed us, given us a purpose and proven himself reliable in every way. When we remember that, we can place our confidence and our hope in what God will yet do in us, for us and through us. The peace that we are called to know is to simply rest in God’s grace and calling.

We begin with John the Baptist, calling people to repentance. John is the first prophet the people have known in about 400 years. He comes at a time of great turmoil for Israel. Roman occupation. Corruption in the reign of Herod. Corruption in the religious leaders.

Into this chaos John comes to call ALL people to repentance. That is significant because in Judaism the call to repent was only for the Gentile people who came to convert.

We still speak in that same way, when we call for people to repent and to be baptized. Yet we forget that we are all sinners, and none of us is free from the reality of continuing to sin, whether in thought or deed, or because of a failure to fulfill the calling God has placed on us.

At the very least all of us are guilty of failing to listen to the prompting of the Holy Spirit…

And this is why John’s call to repentance is significant. John announces that God is preparing a new thing that will bring redemption for all people; but before anyone can receive the gift, they must repent.

Repentance requires preparation. It is only through self-examination that we can know what holds us back from fully enjoying the redemptive gifts that God longs to give us. It is important to recognize the problem before we can be redeemed. This is why we engage in confession at worship, as a recognition of the sinfulness that holds us back.

But the gift of forgiveness does not end at repentance, it all requires obedience, as we demonstrate our faith in living.

Faithful living cannot be done on our own; repentance requires dependance. We are completely dependent on God to find our purpose and our calling and ultimately that deep inner peace that marks a life securely held in God.

John reinforces this message when he says that he has come to bring the baptism of repentance, and then announces that there is one coming who is greater than he, the one who will baptize us with fire and the Holy Spirit. God is the source of our hope, our passion, our purpose and our peace.

 

For that reason, Paul when writing to the Romans, reminded them that they are called to live a life of hope. He points out that everything that has been written in Scripture is there to point us to hope. He reminds us that God is a God of hope, and that to trust him is to be filled with hope.

We don’t always recognize that hope in our lives. There are days when just putting one foot in front of the other is all we can do; and then, comes the day when we recognize that we are singing the song of hope. We have endured the storm and we can see the future that God is preparing for us.

Paul is all too aware of the reality of human life and the setbacks and difficulties that we encounter in our journeys. For this reason, he writes to the church that he prays for them to have harmony and hope.

In his commentary McFarland points out that the problems in Rome, like the problems in the other congregations to whom Paul wrote, was a lack of the life of harmony in which not all members were accepted. Yet all are meant to be accepted. Jew or Gentile. Male or Female. Young or Old. All were redeemed in Christ, and all are loved by God. Each came with their own view of what membership in the body meant. For some that meant keeping all the food laws. Others held strongly that everyone needed to be circumcised. Yet others found it acceptable to eat food offered to other gods, because those gods were not real and held no power. But those who had left those religions could not eat the food for a variety of reasons. All were members of the same congregations whether in Corinth or Rome or Ephesus.

Learning how to love and accept each other was an important part of the journey of repentance and faith. First comes the recognition that we are all sinners, and then the understanding that in God’s love, through the sacrifice of Jesus we are all forgiven, redeemed and gathered in. For that reason, the Mennonite church holds the view that what is important is Jesus; crucified, buried, risen…. everything else is just details.

What is important is that we all love one another, as we learn what it means to live so that the work of Jesus shapes and encourages the present and orients us in hope for God’s future.

McFarland points out that in Jesus we have the fulfillment of God’s promises which is the cause for hope that God gives us in the Holy Spirit. Our unity, our hope, our peace depends on God’s work of grace active in us.

That grace is found in Jesus, to whom we look, and for whom we look. Jesus empowers our present, and also the future of the Kingdom when he returns in power.

We look to his coming as we come through these weeks of preparation in Advent. Too often the focus is only on the coming of a baby to Bethlehem, but we are warned that we need to be looking for the return of Jesus as the source of our hope.

If we don’t believe that Jesus is coming back to claim what is his own, then what hope is there? The commentator Anderson points out that the return of Jesus is our only source of hope. Our day-to-day hope that life’s challenges are held in God’s hand are rooted in the hope that Jesus will come back for his own.

Paul writes: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

God is hope. God fills us with hope.

Having hope involves trusting that God, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is forming the church into a Christ-like community. It may not always look that way, but this congregation and the world-wide Church, of which we are a part, are the community that God redeems, calls, forms and grows.

No matter what we see, no matter what we hear, our hope is securely held by God and this hope is the source of our peace.

Praise be to God. Amen.

 

We Respond in Faith:

God of surprises you call us from the narrowness of our traditions to new ways of being church, from the captivities of our culture to creative witness for justice, from the smallness of our horizons to the bigness of your vision.

Clear the way in us, your people, that we might call others to freedom and renewed faith.

Jesus, wounded healer, you call us from preoccupation with our own histories and hurts to daily tasks of peacemaking, from privilege to pilgrimage, from insularity to inclusive community.

Clear the way in us, your people, that we might call others to wholeness and integrity.

Holy, transforming Spirit, you call us from fear to faithfulness, from clutter to clarity, from a desire to control to deeper trust, from the refusal to love to a readiness to risk.

Clear the way in us, your people, that we might all know the beauty and power and danger of the gospel.

Hymn: 115 Hail to the Lord’s anointed

Offering Doxology Offertory Prayer

Gathering Prayer Requests Prayers of the People and the Lord’s Prayer

We praise you, Our God, mighty and sovereign because you never forget your human creation. We thank you for your gifts to us—the beauty of the world, the grace which lifts our souls, and the Scriptures that reveal the truth of the depth of your love.

We thank you for the vision of your kingdom which directs our footsteps, and ask that you bless and disturb us with that vision of your kingdom as we bring our hopes to you now that we may be strengthened, reassured and sent forth.

We pray for those in wars:

 

We pray for the homeless:

Candles, gift cards for food and propane

 

We pray for those who are ill, or grieving:

 

 

 

 

We thank you O God, that you are with us and that hope is reborn in us when we worship. In a cynical and despairing world, you O God, give us a quietly prophetic voice to proclaim your hope.

In a violent and angry world, O God, give us a quietly prophetic voice to proclaim your peace.

In a dismissive and disinterested world, O God, give us a quietly prophetic voice to proclaim your compassion.

In a lonely and inhospitable world, O God, give us a quietly prophetic voice to proclaim your love.

In a grieving and weeping world, O God, give us a quietly prophetic voice to proclaim your joy.

May we be so captivated by your hope, O God, that we cannot help but to whisper, to sing, and to enact, the message of your reign which is always coming into our world; and may our quietly prophetic lives, be channels of your restoring grace wherever we may go.

In commitment to being your people of grace we pray together 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: 137 Born in the night

Charge and Benediction

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

 

Sung Blessing 112: Prepare the way of the Lord

Prepare the way of the Lord Prepare the way of the Lord And all people will see The salvation of our God