Sermon Tone Analysis

Prelude

Welcome

Call to Worship

LEADER: Like a whisper that lures us to safety, \\ \\ PEOPLE: Strong as a shout that bids us to come, \\ \\ LEADER: Gentle as a prayer that eases our worry, \\ \\ PEOPLE: Like a clear bell that rings out our name, \\ \\ LEADER: Your Word comes to us, Loving God.

\\ \\ PEOPLE: It calls us, comforts us and urges us to depart from evil and do good, to seek peace and pursue it.

\\ \\ LEADER: Talking God, open our hearts to hear you \\ \\ PEOPLE: And free our voices to praise you.

\\ \\

~*Hymn of Praise                       # 383               “Are Ye Able,” Said the Master

Invocation (the Lord’s Prayer)  O God of all power and majesty, you created the heavens and stretched them out.

You spread forth the earth and what comes from it.

You give breath to the people and spirit to those who walk on the face of the earth.

You are our Lord; glory is due your name.

The former things have come to pass; we now await the new things you shall bring forth.

We do praise you as we gather to worship your name.

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.

Psalm Response                       Psalm 29

            (print out psalm)

Our  Offering to God                Deut 16:17    all shall give as they are able, according to the blessing of the LORD your God that he has given you.

Doxology

Prayer of Dedication                 We acknowledge our baptism, O God, and the call to become members of Christ’s body.

Accept our gifts, that others may be led into your way.

Help us so to arrange our priorities that we may seek first the reign of God on earth.

~*Hymn of Prayer                      # 215               Come, Holy Spirit, Dove Divine

Pastoral Prayer             Your voice is upon the waters, O God.

It is a voice full of power and majesty.

You show no partiality; you judge the nations with fairness.

You sent the message of peace to all people through your anointed one, Jesus of Nazareth.

He commanded his disciples to proclaim to all the good news of reconciliation.

We hear that commandment and seek to respond.

Fill us now with the same Spirit of truth.

~/~/ We confess before you that Jesus Christ is our Lord.

As a sign of our trust in him we seek boldly to follow his way.

We know that the paths of obedience and love will test us, yet we accept the risks of mission, relying on your Spirit  to sustain us.

O God, you have called us to be a part of the ministry of Christ.

We are part of his body with a task to perform., and the gifts of Christ are ours.

We join sisters and brothers in one household of faith.

Let each voice be heard as worthy of trust, so that envy and suspicion will not arise.

When unity is breached by alienation and strife, may the diversity of strengths keep the body intact.

In baptism you cleansed what we have been, so that we may become what you meant us to be.

Let the waters of new life be poured over us each day.

Send down your Spirit, Lord, to infuse us with power and ignite our zeal.

In all we do may you receive the glory due your name.

Thank you for the timeless and endless good news: God shows no partiality.

Everyone who believes in Jesus Christ receives forgiveness of sins through his name.

The burden is lifted; we are free to live and love.

\\ ~*Hymn of Praise                       #214                We Bless the Name of Christ the Lord

Scripture Reading                     Matthew 3:13-17 (NIV)

The Baptism of Jesus 13Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John.

14But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”    15Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.”

Then John consented.

16As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water.

At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and lighting on him.

17And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Message                                   Listening for God

*Much of the church today is based on speaking before listening.

There are lots of policies and procedures for speaking in the church but none for listening.*

There is a cartoon of a little boy sitting under a tree with his dog.

The boy is reading the Bible.

He reads, "And then a voice came to Moses from above ..." He turns to his dog and asks, "Have you ever heard a voice from above?

" You can see the dog's thoughts in a bubble above its head: "Attention K-Mart shoppers ... " (As cited by Bob Olmstead, 15 March 1992, Reno, Nevada).

\\ Today we are bombarded by disembodied voices and background noises.

Radios blare at us in our cars, stereo systems squawk at us in our homes, elevators sing to us at work and computer generated "voices" nag us about the empty gas tank or door that is ajar.

While we routinely live with all this noise, we remain highly susceptible to the messages shouted by these various voices, or we learn not to listen to the noise that we hear.

The commercial ads on radio and television pay the station's bills as we pay for the products they advertise.

It is not just people who "hear voices" who are locked away or medicated into a state of suspended thinking.

In truth, we all hear voices "from above," and the voices we hear from "above" control our lives, even locking us in "rooms with open doors" (Ernest T. Campbell) and suspending us in alien states of animation or thinking.

Voices determine what we buy, what we eat, what we expect from others, even what we think about ourselves.

\\ Why isn't God's voice more discernible than all those other shouted sounds?

Perhaps our problem is that we only listen to voices that sound like our own.

We have become overly enamored of our own tonal qualities.

The popularity of "saloning" and "dialoging" is not based on giving everyone a chance to listen, but because everyone expects to have an opportunity to speak.

Voices that sound too different - that have a different accent, that speak a different language, that are higher or lower in timbre than our own, that use too large a vocabulary, or ignore basic rules of grammar - too often fall on dumb ears and dull hearts.

\\ Americans have enjoyed a kind of cultural monolingualism for too long.

We insist that everyone speak our languages - English, scientific rationalism, free-market consumerism.

These are powerful, persuasive languages.

But in the 21st century we are being called to listen ever more attentively to multilingual voices that are carrying different messages.

~/~/

God sent Jesus to a multicultural, polyglot population.

Jesus was raised to be a multilinguist.

Yet Jesus could always discern God's voice among all the dialects he encountered throughout his ministry.

\\ Orlando E. Costas, who at the time of his untimely death was Dean of Andover Newton Theological School, presented what he calls a "Galilean model" for evangelization.

He has emphasized the central importance of Galilee to understanding Jesus' ministry and New Testament christology.

(see his "Evangelism from the Periphery: A Galilean Model," Apuntes 2 [1982], 51-50).

In Jesus' day, Galilee was a cultural crossroads.

Literally meaning a ring or circle, Galilee was a ring of land that encircled peoples of a variety of nations and cultures, with new peoples infiltrating the region all the time.

In its history, Galilee was controlled by Babylon, Persia, Macedonia, Egypt, Syria and Assyria.

In the words of religious education professor Robert W. Pazmino, "In the first century, Galilee, with a population of approximately 350,000 persons, had a large slave element of about 100,000.

God could hardly have chosen a more multicultural context into which to send Jesus of Nazareth."

\\ Galilee is a symbol of the anchoring of biblical faith not in the centers and corridors of power, but in the periphery and margins of the social order.

Jesus' Galilean evangelistic model means that wherever there is the forgotten and voiceless, the "lowest level or most marginated space of society," writes Costas, there is the base for evangelization.

(See Costas, "Evangelism From the Periphery The Universality of Galilee," in Voces: Voices from the Hispanic Church, ed.

Justo L. Gonzalez [Nash ville: Abingdon, 1992], 17.) \\ In an attempt to experience firsthand the world's "shanty towns" as the "new universal" - seeing global evangelization from the perspective of the favelas (Brazil), the villas miseries (Argentina), the arrabales (Puerto Rico), the tugurios (Central America), urban ghettoes (United States) -Costas and some other seminary professors went on a plunge experience (he calls it "immersion exposure") into urban Colombo, Sri Lanka.

While listening to the vast chorus of sounds God's voice embodied there, Costas encountered this local song that describes the horrid conditions of the "Galilees of the nations": \\ Cardboard and tin cans all straightened out, \\ Patched up with these and blocked round about, \\ Every man's junk we've built up our house.

\\ That's one of many in old shanty town.

\\ A million mosquitoes, we wait for the rain \\ To wash away all the dirt-filled-up drains.