Turning the Page Week 1

Welcome

Welcome and Names

Easy to look back or look forward but invite you to right now

Stand, sit, sing, be quit

This is the Day of New Beginnings

Pastoral Prayer

Introduce “Lord in Your Mercy...” “hear our prayer”

Introduction

God you make all things new you make all things beautiful in their own time.

We confess that we so often don’t know what a day will bring. We wake up not knowing if this will be for us a day of celebration or a day of lament only you do. We enter into this new yea we give up control. We give up control of being in charge of all of the details. We give up control of our future, and we ask that in every moment of this next year that we would be faithful to you. Help us to worship you and to see you in this present moment. We know that so often the present moment is all that we know for sure. We give up our control of the past as well. We remember the joys and the pains that the last year brought us, and with your spirit we walk boldly into this day.

Lord in your mercy....Hear our prayer

Help us to remain grounded in the now that we may experience your grace in your love in each new moment.

O’ Lord we lift up to you in prayer those that are entering this new year grieving the loses of loved ones

We pray for those siting on hospital beds, surgery rooms, and in Doctors offices facing set back in health

We pray for those facing isolation and loneliness especially this time of year. We remember that we are made for community and we pray that we might find community or meaning and purpose

We pray for those struggling with addictions, that they may find not only sobriety but also connection with you and with others.

We pray for the church in Malawi Africa, and we lift to you the students and the graduates of the tailoring school as they discern your call in their midst

Homelessness -

Celebrating new birth and new life

Moment of Silence

End with the Lord’s Prayer

Green Sheet

W - Invite others to worship

C - Sermon Series Small Group

R - MOTM - Ankeny Klothing Exchange

Celebration Slide

Our church has had an ongoing relationship with Family Promise of greater Des Moines where we host families here in this building twice a year and when Covid 19 made that no longer a viable option Westminster Presbyterian church in Des Moines stepped up to house family promise. And when some of our members saw tangible needs around there they stepped up in faithfullness to paint and patch walls in the areas where the families were staying so we celebrate the ability that we have to serve in our community.

Offering

Intro

One of the things I have grown into throughout 2020 and this pandemic was just how my world slowed down a little bit

All of those meetings that I was rushing one to another, and those catching up with the right people, and bouncing between family, and school, and work and never really feeling like I had enough time for anything that feeling slowed down.

I know that probably many of us are not looking back fondly over the past year, and even just starting the sermon today with a good thing that came out of 2020 might not have been what we wanted to hear.

It seems that we so often have a fascination with living in the past or preparing and thinking about the future

I must confess that I spend a lot of my time thinking about the future

I spend a lot of time thinking about how things are going to be better, or preparing for them to be better, or even getting ready for things to be better than they are.

There have been times that I have prepared to have conversations and even arguments with people that never happened

There are time that I have thought about what my reaction might be

I have planned arguments that have never happened

I have spent great length of time imagining what my future could look like

This is a time in our culture where we so often get obsessed with the future or with the past

The new year, which is in some ways a changing of the seasons but in many times is

You see we have season that are built into our church calendar and seasons that are built into our own calendars that are supposed to have emotions associated with them

For many of us we anticipated this being a joyous Christmas, and maybe it wasn’t

In times like ash Wednesday when we anticipate in being a time of solemn remembrance maybe it isn’t for us

We make plans to prepare our hearts for many seasons that we don’t really know what they will be like until them come

This idea that we have different seasons in our life is what our scripture is about today

Cohelate takes up the burden of attempting to compile all knowledge and be ready to present it.

All that is under the sun

Ecclesiastes 3:1–13 NRSV

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing; a time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to throw away; a time to tear, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak; a time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace. What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.

We are not sure what is going to happen on any day

The irony here is that in his attempt to compile all knowledge he admits very early on that he has failed

He admits (wisely) that:

Ecclesiastes 3:11 NRSV

He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.

Eternity is not for us to know

We are beings that are made with a desire to understand eternity, a curiosity about it in fact, and yet we will never get there

We are made by an eternal God

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent

enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of

saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us."

- Prophets of a future not our own

Grave yard the dash

Everyone has a different amount of time, and we ought to live in the moment

A number of psalms speak very similarly about just how short our lives here are compared to eternity

This is not a happy thought initially, but when think about my relationship to the eternal God it becomes beautiful

A time to live and a time to die

If God was out of the picture

If there were no eternal being this passage would be really sad

There is a sense of surrender that happens for us when we wake up each day prepared to be present

It is a matter of serenity of surrendering of our control, of our needing to understand the future

Of our need for this next year to be great because the reality is that we don’t know if it will be

We wake up each day not knowing what it holds

We make plans but we never really know if they come true or not

God who understands eternity fully, who lives in eternity fully, reaches out to us who live finite lives

It is only ever in the present that we experience God

We are called to ignore the incomprehensible past, and lay aside the uncompromised future, to experience an unexpected God in the present.

This passage starts with saying that there is a time for everything, and many of the things aren’t the good things

What do you mean there is a time to kill?

Throw stones?

For war?

These are things that I don’t really want to imagine and yet they exist.

Then he says “He has made everything suitable (beautiful) for its time”

It isn’t that God has allowed for these things to happen or enabled these things to happen

It is that in the midst of all things God is there with us

That in every present moment we are given a different and new opportunity to find God

We very well might miss an opportunity to be faithful disciples if we are too distracted by the future

We very well might miss an opportunity to experience God’s love if we are held up by the past

God is working to make this moment beautiful, who am I to stand in the way of that

Today is god’s gift for you

In all times God is trying to make this present moment beautiful

Who am I to stand in God’s way

Who are we to make unholy what God has already deemed holy

The place that this passage ends is not in saying that all seasons are good, and not in saying that all season are necessary it is saying that in all seasons we are called to that particular season

It can be easy to look forward to this next year

Or to think that this year will be the year that solves all of our problems

Maybe it will

maybe it won’t

The hope that we have is not in the fact that we will understand the future

The hope that we have is that we might come to a place where we understand that only God understands our future, and that God is offering us only this present moment

When tomorrow comes we will have several moments to be present with God then, but we are offered this moment now to breath and experience the presence of God

It seems ironic that in a series about turning page we start out by saying that it actually isn’t us that turns the page but God.

Infinite God enters a finite timeline

We may never understand God fully and we aren’t supposed to

We are called to this moment

God entered the world through the person of Jesus Christ and made the presence of God known

God’s pressence is offered to us today through symbols

Communion elements - an outwards sign of God’s inward and spiritual grace

We call it this Holy Mystery for we may never understand in eternal God, but we do have an opportunity to experience that eternal God in the now, so prepare your communion elements...

Communion

Certainly the temporality of communion is a cool link

Additionally the eat drink and be merry thing particularly as we are eating and drinking the communion elements themselves.