From Famine to Fullness

Welcome & Announcements

Good morning, everyone! And what a glorious morning it is. Welcome! Welcome to the people of Amboy United Methodist Church, and welcome to the people of Ashtabula First United Methodist Church. It is such a joy to see all of you here together, gathered in this beautiful place that God has made.

You know, it feels so right for us, as United Methodists, to be worshiping out here in the open air. We are standing in a long and proud tradition. When our founder, John Wesley, felt God's call to preach the good news of grace for all people, many of the established church buildings of his day closed their doors to him. So, what did he do? He took the church to the people! He went to the town squares, the farmers' fields, and the coal mines, famously declaring, 'The world is my parish!' He believed that no wall should stand in the way of the Gospel, and today, we live out that truth.

Of course, we're also following an even older tradition. The Gospels tell us about a time Jesus was preaching right next to a lake, much like this one, and the crowd was pressing in on him so much that he had to get into a boat and ask Peter to push out a little from the shore just so he could be heard. (pause with a smile) Luckily for me, you're all a bit more organized this morning and we have this wonderful pavilion and sound system, so I don't need to borrow anyone's fishing boat today!

Before we begin our worship in song, just a couple of practical announcements to help our time together run smoothly:

First, thank you so much for being here. You'll see two offering plates at the back. One is clearly marked for Amboy and the other for Ashtabula First. We invite you to give to your home church as you feel led.

Second, immediately following our final hymn and blessing, the real fun begins with our combined church picnic! We encourage you to not just sit with the folks you know, but to find someone from your sibling church and share a conversation along with your meal. This is a day for fellowship and building new friendships.

And finally, for your comfort, the restrooms are located right over there (gesture in the correct direction).

With all that said, let us now turn our hearts and our minds toward the reason we are here: to worship our good and gracious God. Let us stand as we are able and join our voices together in our opening hymn, 'Holy, Holy, Holy'."

Opening Hymn UMH#64 “Holy Holy Holy” Verse 1&4

Opening Prayer

Let us pray.

Creator God, God of wonder and grace, we thank you for the stunning beauty of this day. We thank you for the sunlight sparkling on the water of the lake, for the cool shade of these trees, and for the solid ground beneath our feet. In this magnificent cathedral of your own making, we feel your majesty and we thank you for your presence.

We also thank you for the gift of each other. You have brought together your people from Amboy and from Ashtabula First, and we are so grateful. You have called us by two different names, but today we stand together as one family, united in our love for you and for one another.

As we continue our worship, we ask you to quiet the distractions in our minds and open our spirits to hear from you. Fill this space not just with our voices, but with your Holy Spirit. In a world that can feel empty, fill us with the fullness of your joy. In a world full of noise, speak your word of life into our hearts.

Prepare us now to worship you in spirit and in truth. We pray all of this in the strong and loving name of Jesus Christ, our rock and our redeemer.

Amen.

Scripture Reading 1

Our first scripture reading this morning comes from the prophet Amos. Amos was not a priest or a professional religious leader; he was a shepherd and a farmer. God called him to deliver a hard message to the northern kingdom of Israel during a time that, on the surface, seemed very prosperous and peaceful.

As we listen to this passage, you will hear God give Amos a vision of a simple basket of summer fruit. But God uses this ordinary image to deliver an extraordinary word of judgment. Listen for the connection God makes between how the people were treating the poor and the spiritual consequences that followed. This is a challenging word, but a necessary one.

Listen now for the Word of God.

Amos 8:1–12 MSG

My Master God showed me this vision: A bowl of fresh fruit. He said, “What do you see, Amos?” I said, “A bowl of fresh, ripe fruit.” God said, “Right. So, I’m calling it quits with my people Israel. I’m no longer acting as if everything is just fine.” “The royal singers will wail when it happens.” My Master God said so. “Corpses will be strewn here, there, and everywhere. Hush!” Listen to this, you who walk all over the weak, you who treat poor people as less than nothing, Who say, “When’s my next paycheck coming so I can go out and live it up? How long till the weekend when I can go out and have a good time?” Who give little and take much, and never do an honest day’s work. You exploit the poor, using them— and then, when they’re used up, you discard them. God swears against the arrogance of Jacob: “I’m keeping track of their every last sin.” God’s oath will shake earth’s foundations, dissolve the whole world into tears. God’s oath will sweep in like a river that rises, flooding houses and lands, And then recedes, leaving behind a sea of mud. “On Judgment Day, watch out!” These are the words of God, my Master. “I’ll turn off the sun at noon. In the middle of the day the earth will go black. I’ll turn your parties into funerals and make every song you sing a dirge. Everyone will walk around in rags, with sunken eyes and bald heads. Think of the worst that could happen —your only son, say, murdered. That’s a hint of Judgment Day —that and much more. “Oh yes, Judgment Day is coming!” These are the words of my Master God. “I’ll send a famine through the whole country. It won’t be food or water that’s lacking, but my Word. People will drift from one end of the country to the other, roam to the north, wander to the east. They’ll go anywhere, listen to anyone, hoping to hear God’s Word—but they won’t hear it.

That is a heavy word from the prophet Amos. He leaves us with a haunting image: a people starving for a word from God, searching and not finding.

This hymn is a bit of a spoiler for the rest of the message. It reminds us of the good news that the Word we seek is a person, Jesus, who desires to meet with us in the quiet places of our hearts. Let us find that peace now as we sing.

Hymn Sing UMH#314 “In The Garden”

Scripture Reading 2

That hymn, 'In the Garden,' speaks of such a beautiful, personal relationship with Jesus—a quiet walk and talk with the one who knows our hearts. It's the perfect answer to the silence and searching we heard about in Amos.

Our next reading, from Paul's letter to the Colossians, takes that same Jesus we meet in the garden and zooms the camera all the way out. It shows us the full, cosmic scale of who He is.

This passage is one of the earliest and most powerful hymns of the Christian faith. If Amos described the famine of God's word, this passage is the feast. It proclaims the absolute fullness of Christ. Listen for how Paul describes Jesus not just as our personal friend, but as the very image of God, the power that created and holds together the entire universe.

Listen now for the Word of God.

Colossians 1:15–28 MSG

We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created. For everything, absolutely everything, above and below, visible and invisible, rank after rank after rank of angels—everything got started in him and finds its purpose in him. He was there before any of it came into existence and holds it all together right up to this moment. And when it comes to the church, he organizes and holds it together, like a head does a body. He was supreme in the beginning and—leading the resurrection parade—he is supreme in the end. From beginning to end he’s there, towering far above everything, everyone. So spacious is he, so roomy, that everything of God finds its proper place in him without crowding. Not only that, but all the broken and dislocated pieces of the universe—people and things, animals and atoms—get properly fixed and fit together in vibrant harmonies, all because of his death, his blood that poured down from the cross. You yourselves are a case study of what he does. At one time you all had your backs turned to God, thinking rebellious thoughts of him, giving him trouble every chance you got. But now, by giving himself completely at the Cross, actually dying for you, Christ brought you over to God’s side and put your lives together, whole and holy in his presence. You don’t walk away from a gift like that! You stay grounded and steady in that bond of trust, constantly tuned in to the Message, careful not to be distracted or diverted. There is no other Message—just this one. Every creature under heaven gets this same Message. I, Paul, am a messenger of this Message. I want you to know how glad I am that it’s me sitting here in this jail and not you. There’s a lot of suffering to be entered into in this world—the kind of suffering Christ takes on. I welcome the chance to take my share in the church’s part of that suffering. When I became a servant in this church, I experienced this suffering as a sheer gift, God’s way of helping me serve you, laying out the whole truth. This mystery has been kept in the dark for a long time, but now it’s out in the open. God wanted everyone, not just Jews, to know this rich and glorious secret inside and out, regardless of their background, regardless of their religious standing. The mystery in a nutshell is just this: Christ is in you, so therefore you can look forward to sharing in God’s glory. It’s that simple. That is the substance of our Message. We preach Christ, warning people not to add to the Message. We teach in a spirit of profound common sense so that we can bring each person to maturity. To be mature is to be basic. Christ! No more, no less.

Sermon “From Famine to Fullness”

We have heard the stark warning of a spiritual famine, and we have heard the glorious promise of the fullness of Christ. Now, let us ask God to help us understand what these powerful words mean for our lives today. Please join me in a brief prayer."

(Pause, bow your head)

"Let us pray.

Gracious God, you have spoken to us through your Word. Now, by your Holy Spirit, speak within us. Quiet our minds, open our hearts, and illuminate our path, that we may not only hear your truth, but be transformed by it. May the words of my mouth, and the meditations of all our hearts, be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

Introduction

Just look around us for a moment. Take a deep breath of this fresh air. What a beautiful day God has given us. Here we are, the families of Amboy United Methodist and Ashtabula First United Methodist, gathered together as one church in this gorgeous park by the lake. In just a little while, we're going to share in a picnic—tables will be full of food and coolers will be full of drinks. On a day like today, surrounded by God's creation and good company, it's easy to talk about blessings. It's easy to feel a sense of... fullness.

But I wonder if you've ever had the opposite experience—that feeling of having a life that is completely full, but a spirit that is running on empty. Maybe you've just finished a long week where your calendar was packed from morning 'til night with work, errands, and obligations. You finally collapse on the couch, and in that quiet moment, you feel exhausted but not truly fulfilled. Or maybe you've been scrolling on your phone, your screen filled with an endless stream of news, updates, and other people's perfect-looking lives, only to put it down and feel more disconnected and anxious than you did before.

It's a strange paradox of our time, isn't it? We can be surrounded by so much abundance and activity, yet feel a profound spiritual hunger. We can have full calendars and full refrigerators, but empty souls.

This morning, our scriptures invite us to look at this very journey. It's a journey from a hidden and dangerous spiritual famine to a genuine, lasting, and life-giving fullness. Our guides for this journey might seem like an odd pair: a grumpy old prophet from the Old Testament named Amos, and a beautiful, soaring hymn from the very first Christians.

Part Two: The Famine We Don't Always See

Our first guide on this journey, the prophet Amos, isn't known for pulling his punches. His message isn't always comfortable, but it is necessary, because he shows us a truth we might otherwise miss.

The reading begins with God showing Amos a simple vision: a basket of ripe, summer fruit. It's the end of the harvest season. And God, in a bit of Hebrew wordplay, basically says, 'The fruit is at its end, and so is my patience with my people.' God is looking at the nation of Israel—a nation that, from the outside, looked prosperous and deeply religious—and God's heart is breaking.

Why? What had they done that was so terrible? It wasn't that they had stopped going to temple. In fact, Amos tells us they were very religious! They observed the new moons and the Sabbaths. The problem was that their religion on Saturday had absolutely no connection to their lives on Monday. They would worship God, and then, as Amos says, they couldn't wait for the holy day to be over so they could get back to "trampling on the needy," cheating the poor in the marketplace, and valuing a profit far more than they valued a person.

From our Wesleyan heritage, we know this is a critical failure. John Wesley taught that there is no holiness without social holiness. Our love for God is proven by our love for our neighbor. When those two things get disconnected, our worship, no matter how beautiful it sounds, just becomes noise to God.

So God declares a punishment that is perfectly designed to fit the crime. It's one of the most chilling lines in all of scripture: "the time is surely coming... when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord." They had ignored God's word about justice and mercy for so long that God was going to stop speaking altogether.

What does that spiritual famine feel like in our world today? It’s the constant hum of anxiety in a world that never logs off. It feels like wandering from cable news channel to social media feed, just as Amos said they would wander "from sea to sea," searching for a word of hope but finding only shouting matches and division. It's the emptiness we feel after chasing the next purchase or the next experience that promises happiness but delivers only a fleeting distraction. It is a deep spiritual aimlessness. It's the feeling of being lost in a world overflowing with information but starved of real wisdom; hungry for a word of grace, a word of truth, a word that makes sense of it all... and hearing only the deafening silence of the void.

Part Three: The Pivot

Now, let's be honest. That's a heavy word from Amos. He leaves us there, in the middle of the famine, wandering and searching in the silence. And if the story ended there, it would be a tragedy. It would be a story of our own foolishness and God's righteous anger, and that's it.

But thank God, the story doesn't end there. The Bible doesn't end there. Amos describes a world that is starving for a word from God. But the Apostle Paul, in our reading from Colossians, stands up and proclaims the greatest news in history: The Word of God has come to us.

We don't have to wander from sea to sea, desperately searching. We don't have to stumble around in the dark, hoping to find our way. The great pivot of all of human history is this: God saw us starving in the famine, and He came to find us.

Part Four: The Fullness That Fills Us Up

So what does this fullness that God offers even look like? The Apostle Paul gives us a beautiful picture in this hymn from Colossians. It’s not about having more stuff or a busier schedule. It's about being filled with Christ himself.

First, Paul says that Jesus is the "image of the invisible God." The famine of God's word ends because, in Jesus, God is no longer silent or hidden from us. If you want to know what God is like—what God’s character is, what God cares about—you look at Jesus. God now has a face we can recognize. God has hands that healed the sick and touched the outcast. God has a voice that spoke with love and authority. The search is over. The silence is broken.

Second, Paul tells us that "in him all things hold together." Look at this beautiful creation all around us... the water, the trees, the sky. Paul says the very power and love of Christ is the cosmic glue holding all of it together. And that doesn't just mean the planet—it means you and me. When our lives feel like they are flying apart at the seams, when we feel overwhelmed and chaotic, this is our anchor. The fullness of Christ is the power that holds us together when we can't hold ourselves together.

And finally, and this is the very heart of the Gospel: "For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things." That word "reconcile" means to mend what is broken, to bring together what has been torn apart. The injustice and sin from Amos's time, and from our own, created a great chasm between us and God. But God, in Christ, was pleased to cross that chasm and fix what was broken. It wasn't a chore. It wasn't an obligation. The Bible says God was pleased—delighted, even—to welcome us home.

This is true fullness. Not an empty stomach filled with food, but a broken relationship mended. Not a quiet moment in a busy schedule, but a deep, abiding peace with our Creator. It is the satisfaction of a lost soul finally being found.

Part Five: Living in the Fullness

So what does this all mean for us, right here, today? As Amboy UMC and Ashtabula First UMC, gathered as one body?

It means that our life together as the church is meant to be a protest against the famine. When the world is full of noise that devalues people, our churches must be places where every single person is known and treasured as a beloved child of God. When the world promotes a famine of kindness and an abundance of outrage, our fellowship must be a feast of grace and encouragement for one another.

Today is a taste of that fullness. Two churches, becoming one body for a morning, sharing one worship service, soon to share one meal, under one sky, held together by the love of one Lord, Jesus Christ. This is not just a nice idea; it is a powerful statement. It is the fullness of God breaking into our world.

So let's make a choice. Let us choose to turn away from the empty calories of the world that leave our souls starving. Let's feast instead on the incredible, reconciling, life-giving fullness of God, which we have been given freely in Jesus Christ. And then, filled up with that goodness, let's go and share that feast with a hungry and waiting world.

Amen.

Friends, in response to this incredible gift of fullness we have received in Christ, let us now respond with the fullness of our praise.

Let us stand together as we are able, and let us sing our praise to the God from whom all blessings truly flow. As we sing, I want to remind you of the plates at the back for your morning tithes and offerings given as an act of worship and thanksgiving for all that God has given us.

Doxology

Prayer of Dedication

"Let us pray.

Most generous God, from whom all blessings and all fullness flow, we thank you for the abundance of your love and for the gift of your Son, Jesus Christ.

In gratitude for all that you have given us, we now dedicate these offerings to you. They have been given freely from hearts you have filled. We ask you to take these gifts, bless them, and multiply their reach. Use them to do your work in our communities and in the world—to bring hope where there is despair, to serve those in need, and to share the good news that in Christ, there is no famine of your grace.

Now, bless not only these gifts, but the hands and hearts that gave them. Dedicate our whole lives to your service, that we might be a feast of love for a hungry world. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen."

Morning Prayer

Thank you. You may be seated.

As we have offered our gifts to God, let us now continue in a spirit of worship by offering the prayers of our hearts. We come to this time of Morning Prayer, a time to lift up our joys, our concerns, our community, and our world to God.

I invite you now, in the quiet of your own hearts, to lift up to God the names and situations that are on your mind this morning...

Let us first lift up those who are celebrating moments of joy... a birthday, an anniversary, good news received... (pause for 5-7 seconds of silence)

Let us now lift up those who are navigating illness, grief, or difficult times... those we know who need a special measure of God's comfort and healing presence... (pause for 5-7 seconds of silence)

And let us lift up the needs of our community and our world... praying for peace, for justice, and for our leaders... (pause for 5-7 seconds of silence)

[Begin Pastoral Prayer Here]

O Holy God, you are the one who hears. You hear the prayers we speak aloud, and you understand the prayers we hold deep within the silence of our souls.

We thank you for the joys that have been lifted up—for laughter, for new life, for milestones met, and for moments of unexpected grace. May you bless and magnify that joy, and may it be a light that we share with the world.

We also bring before you the burdens that weigh upon us. For our friends, our family members, and for ourselves, we pray for your healing touch. For those who are grieving, grant comfort. For those who are anxious, grant peace. For those who feel lost in the famine of this world, surround them with your presence and remind them that they are not alone. Be their strength, their comfort, and their hope.

And for this beautiful, broken world you have made, we ask for your mercy. Guide the leaders of nations, inspire in us all a passion for justice, and mend the divisions that tear us apart.

Loving God, you know every name spoken and unspoken. Hear now our prayers, as we gather them all together and continue by praying the prayer that your Son, Jesus, taught us all to pray...

The Lord’s Prayer

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 trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil, for thine is the kingdom, and the power and the glory forever. Amen

Having placed our joys and our concerns, our hopes and our fears, into the loving hands of God, let us now prepare to go forth from this time of worship with confidence and strength.

Our closing hymn is one of the great declarations of our faith. It is a powerful reminder that the God to whom we pray is not distant or weak, but is our refuge, our shield, and our mighty fortress in all of life's trials.

Let us stand as we are able and proclaim this truth together as we sing.

Closing Hymn UMH#110 “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”

(While the congregation is still standing after the hymn)

"And now, go from this place of worship, but never from the presence of God.

Go, knowing that the Lord is your mighty fortress and your refuge, your strength and your shield.

Go, having been filled with the fullness of Christ, to be a feast of love and grace for a world that is spiritually hungry.

And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the boundless love of God our Creator, and the sweet, unifying fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all, now and forevermore.

And now, as the first act of our fellowship, let us bless this meal we are about to share.

Let us pray.

Gracious God, we thank you for these gifts of the earth and for the hands that have prepared them. We ask you to bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies. But even more, we pray that you would bless our conversations, our laughter, and our fellowship. May this meal strengthen the bonds between our two churches and refresh our spirits for the week ahead.

In Jesus' name, we pray.

Amen!

Now, go in peace, and let the picnic begin!"