Worship for Pentecost 15 - 2010

Thursday after Pentecost 14
Commemoration of Hannah
September 2, 2010

The Lord be with you

This Sunday is the Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost. It is also the Commemoration of Zacharias and Elizabeth. I will remember this commemoration in my childrens' message.

We will use the Service of Prayer and Preaching (page 260) for our liturgy Sunday. The appointed lessons will be Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Philemon 1-21, and Luke 14:25-35. The appointed Psalm is Psalm 1. The antiphon is verse 6. Our opening hymn will be the one we are learning this month, “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven” (LSB 793). The Sermon hymn will be “Son of God, Eternal Savior” (LSB 842). Our closing hymn will be “God of Grace and God of Glory” (LSB 850). The sermon will be based on our reading from Philemon and is titled “The Bible & Slavery.”

The following video is of a Methodist congregation singing “God of Grace and God of Glory. This hymn was written by Harry Emerson Fosdick, a man whose theology has been questioned by many, but whose hymns have blessed even more. His hymns often reflect a social concern which is mistakenly overlooked by many in the Church. While Fosdick may well have been wrong about many things, he was dead-on when he felt that being a Christian should impact how we live. The fact that this hymn is in our hymnal indicates that our Synod agrees.

Preview of the Lessons

Deuteronomy 30:15-20: This reading is a selection from Moses’ final sermon to the people of Israel. They are powerful words encouraging the Israelites to remain faithful to God. Faithfulness constitutes not only a right confession, but also a life lived in harmony with that right confession. The Israelites did remain pretty much faithful during the lifetime of Joshua, the man who succeeded Moses, but after that it was an up and down history for the next four-hundred years.

Philemon 1-21: Philemon was a “beloved fellow worker” of Saint Paul’s. Paul was in prison. While there he met Onesimus, a runaway slave, who became a Christian. The owner Onesimus had run away from was Philemon. Paul sent Onesimus back to Philemon, with this letter. This brings up the whole question of slavery. It is a question we will look at in Sunday’s sermon. It is important, not only from an historical perspective, but also from a contemporary point-of-view because there are more slaves in the world today than ever before. One country you can find slaves in is the United States of America. This lesson relates to our other readings in that Paul clearly expects that Philemon's faith will impact how he receives Onesimus.

Luke 14:25-35: Jesus’ message in this reading is an echo of Moses’ message in our Old Testament lesson. Following Christ is more than a right confession. It is also living in harmony with that confession. Following Jesus is more than just saying the words, “I follow Jesus.” It is putting Christ and his will first. So we pray in the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Sunday’s Collect

O merciful Lord, You did not spare Your only Son but delivered Him up for us all. Grant us courage and strength to take up the cross and follow Him, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Gradual (Psalm 34:9, 19, alt.)

Fear the LORD, you his saints,
for those who fear him lack nothing!
Many are the afflictions of the righteous,
but the LORD delivers him out of them all.

Verse (Galatians 6:14)

Alleluia. Far be it from me to boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Alleluia.

Introit

We will be using Psalm 1 for our Introit this coming Sunday. This is a beautiful Psalm about the blessings of being in the Word of God.

Adult Bible Study

We continue our series “Puzzlers and Questions about the Bible.” Last week we began our look at the question “Mark 16:18 & Luke 10:19 – What is the intent of these verses? What is the meaning of ‘evil spirits’?” by considering the evidence for and against Mark 16:9ff as being part of Mark’s original Gospel. This Sunday we will actually do the exegetical work the question asks us to do. If you read the passages cited it is clear why someone submitted this question.

“… they will pick up serpents with their hands; and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (Mark 16:18)

“Behold, I have given you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy, and nothing shall hurt you.” Luke 10:19

The name of our study is “A Deadly Battle - II.”

Well, I hope to see you Sunday.

Blessings in Christ,
Pastor John Rickert

Hannah

Commemoration of Hannah
Thursday after Pentecost 14
September 2, 2010

The Lord be with you

Today is the Commemoration of Hannah in the Church Year. Hannah was the favored wife of Elkanah, the Ephraimite, and the devout mother of the prophet Samuel. He was born to her after years of bitter barrenness (1 Samuel 1:6-8) and fervent prayers for a son (1 Samuel 1:9-18). After she weaned her son, Hannah expressed her gratitude by returning him for service in the house of the Lord at Shiloh (1 Samuel 1:24-28). Her prayer (psalm) of thanksgiving (1 Samuel:2:1-10) begins with the words “My heart exults in the LORD; my strength is exalted in the LORD.” This song foreshadows the Magnificat, the Song of Mary centuries later (Luke 1:46-55). The name Hannah derives from the Hebrew word for “grace.” She is remembered and honored for joyfully having kept the vow she made before her son’s birth and offering him for lifelong service to God.

Blessings in Christ,
Pastor John Rickert

More Blog Changes

Wednesday after Pentecost 14
Commemoration of Joshua
September 1, 2010

The Lord be with you

One of the changes to my blog the Church Council of Lamb of God Lutheran though would be worth making is adding our church newsletter. Well, that change has now been made. I have discovered how to add pages to this blog. In the upper left-hand portion of the blog are two words: “home” and “newsletters.” If you click on “home” you will be taken to the main page, which is also the page this post is on. If you click on “newsletters” you will be taken to our newsletters. So far we only have the September newsletter posted. We are not planning to post past newsletters. So this newsletter page will be updated once a month. The next newsletter will be the one for October 2010 .

Blessings in Christ,
Pastor John Rickert

Joshua

Wednesday after Pentecost 14
Commemoration of Joshua
September 1, 2010

The Lord be with you

Joshua, the son of Nun, of the tribe of Ephraim, is first mentioned in Exodus 17 when he was chosen by Moses to fight the Amalekites, whom he defeated in a brilliant military victory. He was placed in charge of the tent of meeting (Exodus 33:11) and was a member of the tribal representatives sent to survey the land of Canaan (Numbers 13:8). Later, he was appointed by God to succeed Moses as Israel’s commander-in-chief. Joshua eventually led the Israelites across the Jordan River into the Promised Land and directed the Israelites’ capture of Jericho. He is remembered especially for his final address to the Israelites, in which he challenged them to serve God faithfully (Joshua 24:1-27), concluding with the memorable words, “As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD” (24:15).

Blessings in Christ,
Pastor John Rickert

Jim & Casper go to church

Tuesday after Pentecost 14
August 31, 2010

The Lord be with you

Jim & Casper go to Church: Frank Conversation about Faith, Churches, and Well-meaning Christians (Carol Stream, Illinois, BarnaBooks, an imprint of Tyndale House Publishers, INC., 2007) is a book by Jim Henderson and Mat Casper. Jim is a Fifty-nine-year-old ex-Pentecostal preacher, ex-housepainter, current leader in the organization called Doable Evangelism, Christian, and resident of Seattle, WA. Matt Casper is a thirty-seven-year-old marketing copywriter, musician, atheist, ex-New Yorker, and current resident of San Diego, CA.

Jim was puzzled by the fact that many non-Christians say they like Jesus, but not his followers (Christians). There is a famous quote attributed to Gandhi where he said this very thing. However Gandhi’s sentiments have been echoed many times by others. So what is it about Jesus that attracts the admiration of Atheists, Hindus, Moslems, and more? And what is it about his followers that these same people find off-putting?

In order to discover at least a piece of the answer, Jim hired an Atheist (Mat) to attend Christian worship services with him (Jim) and give his (Mat’s) honest impressions. Jim advertised in the Wall Street Journal, and Mat won the job. Together they visited twelve different churches around the country, dialogued about their experiences, and wrote this book. At the time of the book’s publishing Mat was still an Atheist and Jim was still a Christian.

The great strength of this book is that it provides the honest impressions of a non-antagonistic atheist of the worship services he attended. The great weakness is the selection of churches Jim made. For the most part they went to “megachurches.” These are churches that accent, as Jim calls them, the three “Bs” (Buildings, Butts, and Bucks), They pack in thousands each Sunday, meet in multistoried buildings or even sports arenas, have restaurants, book stores, waterfalls, lighting and sound systems that would make any director in New York green with envy, etc., and are on the cutting edge of “contextualizing” the Christian message ("compromising" the Christian message if you are not a supporter of such moves). The real problem with these choices is that Mat visited churches that represent less than 1% of the churches in America. These churches all had a similar style of worship, and it certainly wasn’t historical. There was one exception, a Presbyterian service (which Mat seemed to appreciate greatly). Even then the Sunday services attract about 500 people each Sunday, which makes it a large church. Well over half of the churches in America have under a hundred worshipers each Sunday. The only service of that size Mat attended was on an “off” Sunday, when he visited a worship service of a friend of his. At that, though, it was not an historical worship format.

The reason for this selection is clearly Jim’s bias against historic worship services, and the historic expressions of Christianity in general. He believes that, with the legalization of Christianity in the Roman Empire by Constantine, the followers of Christ abandoned what Jesus intended his followers to be and slipped into what he calls “beliefism.” In short, this is when Christianity became a “religion,” in Jim’s view.

Because of the churches Jim selected, some of Mat Casper’s observations miss the mark for most churches in America. Just one exchange between Mat and Jim illustrates this point.

Jim said, “So are you saying that at a megachurch, it’s impossible to connect to God? It seems like you’re saying that the larger a church grows, the more difficult it is to keep people connected, and not only to God but to each other.”

“I hate to simplify it like that, but yes,” he responded. “Think about it: How do schools sell themselves? By class size. The lower the student/teacher ratio is, the smaller the class size, the better the education. It’s because you get more interaction with ‘the expert,’ and more interaction with your classmates.

“Why do churches seem to do just the opposite? Why is a church deemed successful by its size rather than its ability to truly teach its people?”

As Jim says in the book, “Atheists say the darndest things.”

In spite of the book’s obvious weaknesses, I can strongly recommend it. It can give you a refreshing look at contemporary Christian culture from an outsiders view. If we agree that the Church has been called to reach those who are not part of it with the love of Christ Jesus, knowing who we are reaching out to and what they think is a wonderful asset. I should also add that the book is entertainingly written. On more than one occasion I did laugh-out-loud and also felt compelled to read Kitty this or that passage.

A Word about Contextualizing the Faith: The Church has always contextualized the Christian Faith. The very fact that you have an English-language translation of the Bible is more than enough proof of that. The question is: How much contextualizing to your current culture can you do before you start compromising the Christian Faith? On that question, there is much debate.

Blessings in Christ,
Pastor John Rickert

Christians Persecuted in England

Monday after Pentecost 14
August 30, 2010

The Lord be with you

First, I am not Roman Catholic. I do feel that they have some serious doctrinal issues. I do not wish the fact that I’m posting the following news article to be understood as denying this position. The reason I am posting it is to remind us of the importance of keeping the Church of Christ around the world in our prayers. Yes, I do believe that there are many Christians in the Roman Catholic Church. I also do not believe that something is wrong just because the Roman Catholic Church teaches it. For example, the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran Church both teach that God is Triune. With that introduction, read what some brothers and sisters in Christ are facing in the UK.

Blessings in Christ,
Pastor John Rickert

Pope to Brave Persecution in UK
Hostility Intensifies With Trip 18 Days Away
By Father John Flynn, LC

ROME, AUG. 29, 2010 (Zenit.org).- As the date for Benedict XVI’s mid-September trip to Scotland and England draws closer, the anti-religious hostility is becoming more intense.

Peter Tatchell, a well-known critic of the Catholic Church, penned an opinion article published Aug. 13 in the Independent newspaper. “Most Catholics oppose many of his teachings,” he claimed in regard to the Pope.

In his role as a spokesperson for the Protest the Pope Campaign, Tatchell then went on with a long laundry-list of Church teachings, which he described as harsh and extreme.

Tatchell has also been chosen by the television station Channel 4 to front a 60-minute program on the Pope, which will be broadcast around the time of the papal visit, the Telegraph newspaper reported on June 4.

It won't be the only television special critical of the Catholic Church. The BBC is working on an hour-long documentary on the clerical abuse scandals, the Guardian newspaper reported Aug. 3.

Along with the unsurprising opposition to the visit from the Orange Order of Ireland and Protestant preacher Ian Paisley, the British government also got caught up in an embarrassing instance of anti-Catholic prejudice.

The Foreign Office had to issue an official apology after a government paper on the visit became public, the Sunday Times reported on April 25. A document that was part of a briefing packet sent to government officials suggested that the Pope should sack “dodgy bishops," apologize for the Spanish Armada, and open an abortion clinic.

Nervous

The attacks have not gone unanswered. Although not official representatives of the Church, a group of Catholic speakers was set up under the name of Catholic Voices. Under the leadership of Jack Valero, who is a director of Opus Dei in the United Kingdom, the team of speakers are offering themselves to defend the Church’s teachings.

Support is also coming from secular sources. Self-declared atheist Padraig Reidy criticized the extreme nature of the anti-Catholic rhetoric in an article published by the Observer newspaper on Aug. 22.

On July 28, Kevin Rooney, also an atheist, writing for the online site Spiked, described the attacks on the Church as “illiberal, censorious and ignorant.”

Rooney, who grew up as a socialist republican in Belfast, said that not only do the critics oppose the teachings of the Church, but they also want to prevent it from speaking out at all. Moreover, he noted, any accusations made against the Church are immediately taken as being true, without any need for proof.

“As with the right to free speech, it seems the right to be considered innocent until proven guilty does not extend to the Catholic Church,” he observed.

The problems faced by the Church are far from being limited to verbal hostility. A raft of laws on so-called hate crimes and anti-discrimination create a continual series of legal challenges for Christians in the United Kingdom.

According to a booklet just published on this topic by Jon Gower Davies, there are more than 35 Acts of Parliament, 52 Statutory Instruments, 13 Codes of Practice, three Codes of Guidance, and 16 European Commission Directives that bear on discrimination.

In "A New Inquisition: religious persecution in Britain today," (Civitas) he outlined a number of recent cases where Christians have suffered from these laws.

Adoption

The latest example of this was the loss by Leeds-based Catholic Care in a High Court appeal on the issue of whether they could continue to deny placing adopted children with same-sex couples.

The origin of the case was a 2007 sexual orientation regulation, which outlawed adoption agencies from such "discrimination."

According to an article published Aug. 19 by the Telegraph newspaper, Catholic Care is the last remaining Catholic adoption agency to resist the regulations. Since the law came into effect in January 2009, the other 11 Catholic adoption agencies have had to either shut down or sever their ties with the Church.

There have been numerous other cases in past months where Christians have faced legal battles.

-- A foster carer won her struggle to continue fostering children, after she had been banned by Gateshead Council. The ban was due to the fact that a girl aged 16 that she was caring for decided to convert from Islam to Christianity. The carer, who remained anonymous in order to protect the identity of the girl, had fostered more than 45 other children. Although the matter was righted in the end, the woman suffered considerable financial losses due to the ban. (The Christian Institute, July 11)

-- A Christian preacher was arrested for publicly saying that homosexuality is a sin. Dale McAlpine was locked up in a cell for seven hours and subsequently charged with "causing harassment, alarm or distress” (The Telegraph, May 2). After widespread protests the charges were dropped. (The Christian Post, May 18)

-- A Christian relationship counselor was denied the opportunity to go to the Court of Appeal regarding his dismissal by Relate Avon after he admitted he could not advise same-sex couples because of his beliefs. Gary McFarlane lost his claim of unfair dismissal at an employment tribunal and at a subsequent tribunal appeals hearing. (Christian Today, April 29)

-- Shirley Chaplin, a Christian nurse, lost a claim for discrimination after she was moved to desk duties following her refusal to remove a crucifix on a necklace. Even though John Hollow, the chairman of the employment tribunal panel, admitted that Chaplin had worn the crucifix for 30 years as a nurse, he said that wearing it was not a requirement of the Christian faith. The archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, mentioned the case in his Easter sermon. He said there was a ''strange mixture of contempt and fear'' toward Christianity. (The Telegraph, April 6)

Earlier this year the situation reached the point where the former archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, together with six other Anglican bishops, wrote a letter to the Sunday Telegraph complaining that Christians in Britain are being persecuted and treated with disrespect.

As an article on the letter in the March 28 edition of the Sunday Telegraph explained, the bishops argued that, while believers of other religions are shown sensitive treatment, Christians are punished.

"There have been numerous dismissals of practicing Christians from employment for reasons that are unacceptable in a civilized country," the letter declaimed.

Right to be heard

The notoriety of restrictions on Christians reached the point where the Pope publicly intervened. During his speech on Feb. 1 to the bishops of England and Wales, present in Rome for their five-yearly visit, he commented on the topic.

Benedict XVI observed that their country was noted for its equality of opportunity to all members of society. He then urged the bishops to stand up when legislation infringed on the freedom of religious communities.

"In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed. I urge you as Pastors to ensure that the Church’s moral teaching be always presented in its entirety and convincingly defended," the Pope said.

"Fidelity to the Gospel in no way restricts the freedom of others -- on the contrary, it serves their freedom by offering them the truth," he added.

Given the Pope's concern over this matter, and the continuing cases of Christian persecution, we may well expect him to speak out on it during his visit next month.

The Book of Concord and You

Monday after Pentecost 14
August 30, 2010

Blessings in Christ,

The following video was made by Rev. Fisk and can be found on his blog Worldview Everlasting. My sister in California sent it to me. Fisk askes the question, "Is the Book of Concord of practical value for the everyday Christian?" Check it out!





Blessings in Christ,
Pastor John Rickert