Make up your Mind
Prelude
Welcome
Call to Worship
“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!” (Ps. 133:1 KJV)
*Praise insert “God is Here”
*Invocation (Lord’s Prayer) Father, as we worship, may authentic praise rise within, expressing our gratitude for the salvation we know in Christ Jesus, the Lord. Give us the grace to live joyfully, obediently, and triumphantly as your children in this world. May your Spirit reign within our hearts.
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
*Gloria Patri (Sung together) #575
*Psalm for Today Psalm 146 (NRSV)
Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord, O my soul!
I will praise the Lord as long as I live; I will sing praises to my God all my life long.
Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.
When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.
Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord their God,
who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever;
who executes justice for the oppressed; who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow,
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.
The Lord will reign forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations. Praise the Lord!
Just for Kids
Our Offering to God “I will freely sacrifice to thee: I will praise your name, Lord; for it is good” (Ps. 54:6)
*Doxology #572
*Prayer of Dedication Lord, as we return to you a portion of the bounty you have provided, may our gifts reflect the glad heart of your people. We rejoice in your favor and celebrate together our participation in the gospel, from the first day until now.
Scripture Reading 1 Kings 17:17-24 (NRSV)
17 After this the son of the woman, the mistress of the house, became ill; his illness was so severe that there was no breath left in him. 18 She then said to Elijah, “What have you against me, O man of God? You have come to me to bring my sin to remembrance, and to cause the death of my son!” 19 But he said to her, “Give me your son.” He took him from her bosom, carried him up into the upper chamber where he was lodging, and laid him on his own bed. 20 He cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, have you brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I am staying, by killing her son?” 21 Then he stretched himself upon the child three times, and cried out to the Lord, “O Lord my God, let this child’s life come into him again.” 22 The Lord listened to the voice of Elijah; the life of the child came into him again, and he revived. 23 Elijah took the child, brought him down from the upper chamber into the house, and gave him to his mother; then Elijah said, “See, your son is alive.” 24 So the woman said to Elijah, “Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth.”
*Hymn of Prayer insert “Lord, Listen to Your Children Praying”
Pastoral Prayer Loving God, sometimes it feels like our dreams have dried up and our hopes are lost. We sometimes feel that your Spirit, which blows where it will, has passed us by. We confess, O God, that we often find ourselves in such a predicament because we have not been receptive to your presence. We ignore the winds of your Spirit and the light of your promise to be with us in all the times of our lives. And so this morning, we seek to be open to your presence and to be receptive to your Spirit that dwells in our midst. For you, O God, create life, overcome darkness, and conquer death. We know this in our hearts, but sometimes we can’t comprehend what that means for our lives at this moment. Violent events in the world frighten us. The magnitude of problems weakens our resolve to take positive action for constructive change. Yet we want to be made new. And so give us hearts of courage that we may not hide from those who suffer but rather walk up to their tombs and call out for new life.
Give us strength to walk with and, if need be, to hold up those among us who are surrounded by grief, illness, broken relationships, depression, unemployment, or simply a sense of having lost their way. Our souls rest in you, in the promise of new possibilities and in the newness of life that you continually make available to us. We open ourselves to the wind of your Spirit that blows where it will.—Susan Gregg-Schroeder
*Hymn of Praise # 41 “Children of the Heavenly Father”
Scripture Text Luke 7:11-17 (NRSV)
11 Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. 12 As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother’s only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. 13 When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” 14 Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” 15 The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. 16 Fear seized all of them; and they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen among us!” and “God has looked favorably on his people!” 17 This word about him spread throughout Judea and all the surrounding country.
Message Rev. Irish
“Make up your Mind”
I. Jesus is the miracle-working prophet. The Jesus that Luke portrays is an honest-to-God prophet. In the story just before this one, he heals the slave of a Gentile centurion, reminding us of how the prophet Elisha cured Naaman the Syrian of leprosy (2 Kings 5:1–14). In this story, Jesus gives life to the only son of a widow, reminding us of the prophet Elijah’s similar miracle (1 Kings 17:1–16).
At the end of the story the crowd gets the point, and their reaction makes sure Luke’s readers get it, too: “A great prophet has risen among us! God has looked favorably on God’s people!”
II. The prophet has compassion. The widow story gets at the very core of what’s prophetic about Jesus in Luke. She has no money to use to gain influence in her community; she has no employees she can order to go ask Jesus for a favor; she has no friends to send to intercede for her, as Jesus approaches her town. She has only her dead son, // the way Luke constructs the scene really directs our attention to her loss. There is a procession coming out of the little hamlet of Nain: first the corpse, carried by mourners; then the grieving mother, who is also a widow bereft of her only family; and then a large, undifferentiated crowd from the town. Note: they were not employees (as 7:4), not friends (7:6), and not family, but just townsfolk. She’s all alone, and in her society as in ours, she is vulnerable.
On the other side of the entrance to the village is Jesus, who has a entourage of his own: his disciples and a large crowd of onlookers are with him. Jesus and the widow meet over her son’s funeral bier, and Jesus was “moved with compassion.” This is the only time Luke uses that expression to describe Jesus having that emotion. Think about what that says. Out of all the folks Jesus helps in Luke, it is the plight of this one bereaved widow that turns the Lord’s heart over and moves him to do what he does next. “Don’t weep,” he says, and then he commands the son to be raised. When the young man sits up and talks, Jesus gives him back to his mother.
III. Give him back to his mother: “Blessed are those who weep now, said Jesus, for they will laugh” (6:21), but that is little consolation for those who experience the deep loss of losing a child.
We cannot in good conscience promise that if we pray hard enough, God will restore the dead, as Jesus did on that day. But the church that ministers in Jesus’ name can certainly become family to those who suffer so much. We cannot give their sons and daughters back to them now, but we can be brothers and sisters and children to them, if we choose, and enfold them in God’s love.
And a ministry in the name of Jesus, who gave the widow her son back, could also challenge some of the structures that make life vulnerable for widows and orphans and strangers.
Why is it that, given the entire biblical witness about charity to the poorest and most vulnerable among us, American Christians continue to spend more on pet food, chewing gum, video rentals, and so on, than they give to the poor? Why is it that so few followers of Jesus are engaged on a regular basis in hands-on ministry to the poor? We can, if we so choose, make life much less dangerous and much more secure for the vulnerable groups: the widows, the orphans, and the strangers.
A prophetic ministry in Jesus’ name would certainly challenge some of the causes that kill young men and women, leaving their mothers bereaved. Too many are dying, as I write this, in war. Too many are incarcerated, too many killed or ruined by drugs. Too many are killed or maimed by others’ addictions. Can we, like Jesus the prophet from Nazareth, give some of these back to their families by working to change the factors that took them away?
On that day in Nain, the Lord met the widow over her son’s bier; life met death, God’s grace met poverty, compassion met grief and loss, and all who saw it were amazed. Let Jesus’ followers look and learn—learn to be heartbroken and learn where our emphasis should be: “give him back to his mother.”—Richard B. Vinson
The Church is different from the world. The values that we hold are different from the values of the world. We live by a different standard of behavior. In the world all things are permissible. In the Church not all things are permissible. To be Christian is to be different.
I. Early on, churches began to baptize children because parents said, “We want to raise our children in the church, with the values of the Kingdom.” Children are in the church because raising children in this kind of a world is not only a parental responsibility, it is a community responsibility. Children have always been part of the church. Every so often I run into somebody who says, “We chose not to raise our children in the church because we wanted them to make up their own minds about religion.” But the problem is that you cannot raise children in a neutral environment. Children learn what the world is all about from the environment in which they are raised, which means that they will learn from everything else except the church. To raise a child in the church is to at least give them a choice.
Children learn from the communities in which they are raised. Throughout childhood there is a tremendous capacity to learn. The brain is constantly building structures, circuits, to process information from the world. In the first six months, a child’s brain doubles in size.
It’s in childhood that children are learning what the world is all about. You see the world through eyes that have been trained by the environment in which were raised.
II. Jesus said to Nicodemus, “Unless you are born anew you cannot see the kingdom of God.” We often say, “Seeing is believing.” It’s true to say, “Believing is seeing” because our beliefs, our values, our morality will determine what we see. Unless one is born anew, one cannot see the Kingdom of God. Nicodemus was raised in a different world. He saw things differently. Therefore, in adulthood he had to be jarred loose, to go back, as it were, to childhood to learn how to see the world all over again. There is a Christian way of seeing the world, and it is the church’s job to teach it and to model it. That’s why we are here.
The way you teach children well is to get them into a community of adults who will surround them with love and forgiveness, show their care for them, and model for them what life is all about.—Mark Trotter
*Hymn of Response #393 “There’s within My Heart a Melody”
*Sending forth
*Postlude