The Third Sunday of Easter

May 8^th 2011

Happy Mother’s Day

Welcome & Announcements

The BRPC EMAILING LIST –email thebrpc@gmail.com to be added

St. Mark’s Hall will be hosting a breakfast on May 28^th, Beersville Community center will be hosting on May 14th

 

Call to Worship As the deer pants

 

Prayer of Approach & Confession & The Lord’s Prayer (NBoP 831; BoP 605)

 

Opening Praise: BoP 105 All things bright and beautiful

 

Responsive Reading  – Psalm 116 [BoP 657]

 

Children’s story –

Children’s Hymn: BoP 159 Mother’s of Salem

 

Scripture Readings:

NT – Acts 2:36-41

³⁶“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ.”

³⁷When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

³⁸Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. ³⁹The promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off—for all whom the Lord our God will call.”

⁴⁰With many other words he warned them; and he pleaded with them, “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” ⁴¹Those who accepted his message were baptized, and about three thousand were added to their number that day.

NIV

Epistle – 1 Peter 1:17-25

¹⁷Since you call on a Father who judges each man’s work impartially, live your lives as strangers here in reverent fear. ¹⁸For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your forefathers, ¹⁹but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. ²⁰He was chosen before the creation of the world, but was revealed in these last times for your sake. ²¹Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.

²²Now that you have purified yourselves by obeying the truth so that you have sincere love for your brothers, love one another deeply, from the heart. ²³For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. ²⁴For,

“All men are like grass,

and all their glory is like the flowers of the field;

the grass withers and the flowers fall,

²⁵ but the word of the Lord stands forever.”

And this is the word that was preached to you.

NIV

 

Hymn of Illumination: BoP 211 Speak, Lord in the stillness

 

Scripture Readings:

Gospel – Luke 24:13-35

¹³Now that same day two of them were going to a village called Emmaus, about seven miles from Jerusalem. ¹⁴They were talking with each other about everything that had happened. ¹⁵As they talked and discussed these things with each other, Jesus himself came up and walked along with them; ¹⁶but they were kept from recognizing him.

¹⁷He asked them, “What are you discussing together as you walk along?”

They stood still, their faces downcast. ¹⁸One of them, named Cleopas, asked him, “Are you only a visitor to Jerusalem and do not know the things that have happened there in these days?”

¹⁹“What things?” he asked.

“About Jesus of Nazareth,” they replied. “He was a prophet, powerful in word and deed before God and all the people. ²⁰The chief priests and our rulers handed him over to be sentenced to death, and they crucified him; ²¹but we had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel. And what is more, it is the third day since all this took place. ²²In addition, some of our women amazed us. They went to the tomb early this morning ²³but didn’t find his body. They came and told us that they had seen a vision of angels, who said he was alive. ²⁴Then some of our companions went to the tomb and found it just as the women had said, but him they did not see.”

²⁵He said to them, “How foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! ²⁶Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” ²⁷And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.

²⁸As they approached the village to which they were going, Jesus acted as if he were going farther. ²⁹But they urged him strongly, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening; the day is almost over.” So he went in to stay with them.

³⁰When he was at the table with them, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and began to give it to them. ³¹Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him, and he disappeared from their sight. ³²They asked each other, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and opened the Scriptures to us?”

³³They got up and returned at once to Jerusalem. There they found the Eleven and those with them, assembled together ³⁴and saying, “It is true! The Lord has risen and has appeared to Simon.” ³⁵Then the two told what had happened on the way, and how Jesus was recognized by them when he broke the bread.

NIV

Sermon: Found in faith

I remember my mother, sitting at the kitchen table at the end of a very hard day; full of chores, and work and household duties. She be sitting at the table with a piece of orange loaf, a cup of steeped tea, and her bible open.

That old bible of hers has long been one of her greatest treasures. It has been open under her prayers, taken her tears, provided answers and new questions.

On family vacations she packed that bible up in her cloth bag where she kept cross-word and a couple of apples in case someone got hungry. She would open her bible sometimes as we traveled and ask Dad and even my sister and I questions about what we believed. And all our answers were valid, all of them were given fair weight, and no one would have the final word, except God.

My mother is one of several people in my life whose faith was always with them. My mother struggled with her faith, she has seen things that made her doubt God’s love like others, but it always seemed that even in the harshest of circumstances it never got to the point where I would think it wasn’t there. I always found her in her faith, no matter where she was on her faith journey.

So, if angels were to take a snapshot of you life today, would you be found in faith. I am not saying that you’d be found to be a roomful of saints, but is that kindled flame of faith alive in you. Do your children, your neighbours, your friends, look at you and find you a faithful Christian.

When Christ finds our faith broken or weakened by our experience in life, Christ does not condemn us, even if we might sense God’s critical eye on our circumstances. Look at our reading today from the Gospel of Luke; Christ Jesus comes upon two of his disciples Cleopas and another that the gospel does not name. Both of these disciples are at a low point of faith. If they had believed Jesus was anything more than a good teacher, or a prophet, they would have believed the rumors that were circulating, but they have gone from doubt and into despair.

And there is a difference, and it is a difference that is often mistaken. Doubt is trying to wonder at the things God has done without fully understanding the scope of God’s power. Doubt is the rough path of disbelief that hits us when we find out that everything is not going according to OUR plan. Doubt is what happens to a lot of good Christians when God takes them down a path in life that is not all church services and picnics, but is hard work and mission.

Despair is what happens when you’ve doubted for a while, been listening to the wrong sort of people, been going to the wrong kind of parties, and centering your life on anything but God’s word and the fellowship of God’s people. Despair is that kind of attitude you see with people that have not gone to church in a while and are now so afraid that they are going to be pointed out, teased, or just burst into a ball of flames as the steeple of the church falls right on them because they have been away for so long. In other words, when confronted by God’s love for us we should see just how foolish our despair really is. Foolish, because it takes a real choice fool to say that God will not welcome them, accept them and rejoice in their return to fellowship and faith considering the other faithless fools of history that have found faith and rediscovered their salvation.

So there they are, Cleopas and choice fool #2 walking the road to Emmaus, in the midst of their despair, when Jesus comes up along beside them. Now the roads around Jerusalem are not foot-paths like we have around here, with the forests all drooping in around. This is an arid, near-desert land a lot of it. There are shrubs and the occasional trees, but for the most part you can see for quite some distance. That means that no one is going to stand much of a chance of sneaking up on you. Even the ground it dry and rough, so you can hear the crunch of dirt and gravel before anyone can come up to you on the road.

We also tend to forget part of the context of the crucifixion and the resurrection, and that it took place during the celebration of the Passover. There would have been others who having observed Passover in Jerusalem, would begin the journey to their homes. So Cleopas and the other disciple would not have been surprised to see others on the road with them.

Now an interesting thing happens when Jesus comes up to them; they don’t recognize him. Now you would think that any disciples worth his salt would recognize Jesus, but the bible says that they were kept from recognizing him. In verse seventeen, in the last phrase of that verse we find out just how this was done. It says: “they stood firmly (or still), with their eyes downcast.”

Now when you meet someone, especially a stranger it is advisable to at least take a peak at their eyes. There is a lot of a person’s character in their eyes. These disciples have forgone the practice of looking the stranger in the eye simply because one of the main things that despair does is it pulls us away from each other. When we despair we turn our backs on each other, we turn our backs on God as well. When we despair we can only look at our sadness, our pain, our frustration to the point where even though our bodies continue to move and go through the motions of living, inside our souls have stumble and fallen and are broken upon our journey of faith.

But when we despair we are not left there. When Cleopas and the other disciples trudged their seven-mile journey home, they did so in the blindness of their despair. Even though it was the short journey of seven miles they would likely walk it as if it were seventy. It certainly did not take Jesus long to catch up to them.

Jesus did not find them dwelling on faith. One of the important teaching about the Passover is it a time to remember and rejoice in all of God’s promises, the way that God has fulfilled them, and the what God will still do for His people. Cleopas and the other disciple were not discussing faith, but were discussing everything that had happened that caused them to despair their faith, despair even their lives and their purpose.

Jesus comes up to them, not at the high point of their faith, but at the lowest possible moment. These two disciples were in the depths of their despair and Jesus comes to them then. Look at the track record in this, Jesus appears to Mary who is weeping, to the disciples in their fear and disbelief, to Thomas in his doubt, and now to Cleopas and the other in their despair.

Jesus does not speak to our lives only when everything is ‘hunky-dory’. God does set his angels on the edge of horizon to be on the look-out for the really good people. And if you have been doubting and your have suffered through despair and if your faith is challenged by the real circumstances of living real lives, then maybe you take another look at your life and rediscover how Christ is in your midst and speaking to you; not just from pulpits either, but through people in your life. I used the example of my mother today, as its mother’s day, but truthfully Christ will speak through father, grandparents, best friends, new acquaintances, and of course the simple truths our children teach and remind us of.

Jesus comes into our moments of despair, and if we listen, open our eyes, opens our lives to the fullness of his love. Jesus came to the two displaces on the road to Emmaus and shared that Passover tradition. He told them about God’s promises and he showed them the light in the darkness they were seeing. The disciples would describe the experience as having their spirits, the center of their being set alight.

Listen to the continuous joy of our children and discover the wonder of God’s love streaming into our lives through them. Rejoice in the fellowship you now share, one that is bound and held by God’s love no matter how far from each other we travel. Today the Lord is with us. Christ gathers with us, in the midst of our happiness and our sorrow, amongst those who know him and especially with those struggling to find Him in their lives. See who it is that Christ has placed in your life, that you might know God’s love and look onto the everlasting joy that will be ours when we at last break bread with Christ at his table in heaven.

Thanks be to God; for God love knows no bounds, and the walls of our sin and despair have broken by the strain of his love.

Amen.

 

Prayer of Thanksgiving and Intercession

God’s Tithes and our gifts

Doxology (NBoP 830; BoP 603)

Offertory Prayer

Commissioning Hymn: BoP 233 Love divine, all loves excelling

Benediction

Dismissal: Alleluia, Alleluia [see opposite]

 

Chorus: Alleluia, Alleluia
Give thanks to the risen Lord
Alleluia, alleluia, give praise to His name