A Fellowship of the Christian Church

The Bass River Pastoral Charge

The Presbyterian Church in Canada

St. Mark’s, Bass River; St. James, Beersville; St. Andrew’s, Clairville & Zion, West Branch

Minister: Rev. Alexander [Sandy] D. Sutherland; B.A., B.Th. M.Div

Manse #: 506-785-4383 Cell #: 506-521-0705 Email: thebrpc@gmail.com Twitter: thebrpc

Bulletin Announcements:  Cathy Little @ Fillmore Trucking #785-1083

www.pccweb.ca/brpc

ORDER OF SERVICE

The forth Sunday of Pentecost

July 3^rd 2011

Welcome & Announcements

 

Call to Worship Give thanks

 

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

Opening Praise: BoP 307 The church’s one foundation

Responsive Reading  – Psalm 40 [BoP 634]

 

Children’s story – A Field of Corn

Children’s Hymn: BoP 515 Will you anchor hold

 

Scripture Readings:

OT – Genesis 2:15-25

¹⁵The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. ¹⁶And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; ¹⁷but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”

¹⁸The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

¹⁹Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name. ²⁰So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.

But for Adam no suitable helper was found. ²¹So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs^£ and closed up the place with flesh. ²²Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib^£ he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.

²³The man said,

“This is now bone of my bones

and flesh of my flesh;

she shall be called ‘woman,’

for she was taken out of man.”

²⁴For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.

²⁵The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

Epistle – Romans 7:14-25

¹⁴We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. ¹⁵I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. ¹⁶And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. ¹⁷As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. ¹⁸I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. ¹⁹For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. ²⁰Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it.

²¹So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. ²²For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; ²³but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. ²⁴What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? ²⁵Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord!

So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God’s law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.

 

Hymn of Illumination: BoP 366 Pour out Thy Spirit

 

Scripture Readings:

Gospel – Matthew 11:16-19

¹⁶“To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others:

¹⁷ “‘We played the flute for you,

and you did not dance;

we sang a dirge,

and you did not mourn.’

¹⁸For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ ¹⁹The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and “sinners.”’ But wisdom is proved right by her actions.”

 

Sermon: One way or the other

Who do you think you are . . . in God’s eyes? We can think a lot of ourselves. We can be proud of the things we do that we believe to be good. We can think of ourselves as not good enough. Sometimes we even define who we are by what other people say about us and react to us. And sometimes we can try to be so much like other people it is hard to tell who we really are.

But when we ask that question of someone – ‘who do you think you are?’ – do we usually leave that question hanging in the land of rhetorical, or do we really expect an answer. Today I want you to listen to your own answer. Who do you think you are?

Paul asked the Romans that question, but he asked them that question after already asking himself who he think he is. And Paul’s answer might startle us. Usually we like to think of those early disciples and apostles and preachers of the church as the near Christ-like examples of what it means to be Christian in every sense of the word. The honesty of Paul is a bit of a wake-up. We are called to follow Christ, to be Christ-like, but we cannot nor should we ever try to be Christ. Paul has to say that a number of times, in a number of his letters to many different churches. It is not so different than what is done today with congregation trying to find reasons to worship their ministers or remembering back to the very best minister they ever had, and literally worshiping their memory: Oh, remember ‘Rev. So-and-So’ she was the best preacher that ever blessed our pulpit’, Oh and there was Pastor ‘what’s-his-name’ he never missed a beat, always there when needed.

I am sure, had anyone ever asked one of those ministers of the church how they would feel about that sort of idolic worship, and they would set every one right on just how good and righteous they really were.

Paul’s sigh of frustration with the people of the church is almost vocal in some of his writings. In this passage from his letter to the church in Rome Paul berates himself, he puts himself down, and he does that to show some integrity in what he is saying. His authority does not come from being a really good guy in all he does and in what he knows. Paul is good because Christ is good. Paul calls himself, on his own, a slave to sin. It is as if he does not have control over his own actions, and Paul complains that even though he does not want to sin, he still sins.

Do you share Paul’s frustration? Isn’t it awful when we try to be doing good in our community, we reach out and help our neighbour, and then we realize that we are so full of self-righteous pride in what we have done that everything is null and void. It is like we did nothing at all. In fact all the good we have done is now tainted. Paul cries out in his letters and he tells the church to be full of Christ and not full of themselves.

I wish the church was still listening. One of the hardest things for me to swallow at the General Assembly of our church when it met in London this year was our pretentious some of our actions and behaviour as a church really are. It was disgusting to watch ministers and elders treat the people serving our breakfast and meals rudely or with little regard, but it was a keen reminder just how great God is, because even that fault and that error in our church and the way we as a fellowship of faith behave is forgivable by God, even though it aches my gut to try and forgive it myself.

We have a messed up idea of what it means to be right, and what it is to do good. Society will tell that to do good you need only feel good, but Christ tells us something much deeper and truer, in order to do good and be good, do the things that make people who come into your life able to feel Christ’s goodness; to know God’s love.

There is many ways to do this. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life.” And a lot of people have come along since and said many things about that one way that is Christ. We have been told that a certain way of being the church is the only way of being the church. Some have put unnecessary tasks and rituals in the way of showing our love for God. Others have taken very helpful practices away because they were afraid of things that are hard to understand.

Jesus asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” If we are to understand the way, the truth and the life, we need to ask the same sort of questions. People still say Jesus was a great teacher, a prophet, but to know Jesus as the only begotten Son of God our Saviour and Lord and to claim it not only in what I keep deep inside your heart but in how you live you life and how you show Jesus Christ to other people.

We’ve done that here, at the table where we gather and we proclaim Christ’s life and death and resurrection simply by eating bread and drinking juice. We do it in the spirit of faith so that we can see our faith together as a community, but when we go out those doors there are many other things that we can do in much the same spirit.

The apostle Paul sought to build up the awareness of the Church so that it could recognize the weaknesses that needed to be overcome. We need to have the integrity and humility in ourselves to continue that hard but amazing journey in our lives of faith as well. We need to recognize our struggle with sin, and see how the people around struggle in their own way as well. In the same grace we are offered we can also show grace to others, especially those who have sinned against us.

We do not rejoice because we are free from sinning, we rejoice because even though we struggle with sin we can look beyond our own sorry limits into God’s unlimited grace, poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.

Rejoice, for in Christ our Lord, our salvation is sure.

 

Prayer of Thanksgiving and Intercession

 

God’s Tithes and our gifts

Doxology (NBoP 830; BoP 603)

Offertory Prayer

The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper (NBoP 539; BoP 616) [St. Mark’s Only}

Commissioning Hymn: BoP 362 Lord of all power

Benediction

Dismissal: Holy Spirit, on us fall (see back of bulletin)