Sunday Worship March 30 2025
Today’s service is led by the Revd Ryan Sirmons
Welcome and Introduction
May the grace and peace of Christ be with you and greetings from all the saints of the churches of the Northwest and Central, Newcastle upon Tyne pastorate of the United Reformed Church. Jesmond, St. Andrews and Kenton, St. James is in the city centre and West End United Reformed Churches. This message is for Sunday, the 30th of March 2025, the fourth Sunday in Lent and also Thursday. Mothering Sunday. Our scripture readings are Joshua chapter 5 verses 9 through 12 in the Hebrew Bible on what happened when manna from heaven ceased after the wilderness wanderings of the Israelites had ceased and their disgrace of their enslavement had been rolled away. And St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians chapter five, verses 16 through 21, where we are reminded that in Christ we are a new creation and we can see things in a new way. Please pray with me.
Your word, O God, lights our way.
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts
radiate with the light of the way, the truth, and the life. Amen.
Call to Worship
No matter how long you have wandered,
come, let us worship God here.
No matter what you have done or not done,
come, let us worship God here.
No matter how lost you might think you are,
no matter how much you think you cannot be found,
the mothering Spirit of God is here.
Come, let us worship God here,
and return the embrace that has always been.
Hymn You Are Welcome Here
© 2017, 2018, Chris Muglia. Published by Spirit & Song®, a division of OCP. All rights reserved. OneLicence # A-734713 Sung by Chris Brunelle and used with his kind permission.
Come, all you wounded and weary.
Come, all you heavy of heart.
Come with your fear and your burden.
Come with your pain and your scars.
Come to the ocean of mercy.
Be revived, renewed and refreshed.
Wherever you are, no matter how far,
come, find your peace and your rest.
You are welcome here; come as you are.
You are welcome here, with open arms.
Bring your burdens, bring your pain bring your sorrow and shame.
You are welcome here; come as you are.
Come, all you tired and lonely,
all you anxious who long for your place.
Bring your addictions and battles;
find your forgiveness and strength.
You are welcome here; come as you are.
You are welcome here, with open arms.
Bring your burdens, bring your pain bring your sorrow and shame.
You are welcome here; come as you are.
Open your heart; discover your place
and your purpose.
Open your eyes; see the new life
that awaits you here.
You are welcome here; come as you are.
You are welcome here, with open arms.
Bring your burdens, bring your pain bring your sorrow and shame.
You are welcome here; come as you are.
Prayers of Approach, Confession and Grace
God of all,
You wander through the wilderness of life with us.
You feed us and call us.
Your love never leaves us.
You invite us to be Your people, and You will be our God.
You call us here to worship, praise, sing, hold silence, repent,
and turn again to You, the source of love and life.
Illuminate our hearts, Holy One,
so that we see no-one only by their usefulness to us.
Open our ears to hear afresh the sacred stories of Your steadfast love,
so that we might be a story-full people.
Let our joyful imaginations aide us
in seeing ourselves in these sacred words
so that Your Word may fill our hearts.
This we pray in the name of our brother Jesus,
who gave up his life so that we may know abundant life,
Amen.
If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, God, who is faithful and just, will forgive us our sins. 1 John 1.8-9a
Let us confess our sins together and seek God’s grace.
Gracious God, in striving for comfort and ease,
in the seeking of advantage over neighbour,
in participating even distantly in the violence of the world,
or in shielding ourselves in ignorance
so that we might avoid the hurt that comes
with loving the world as You love it,
we confess we have sinned,
in thought, word, and deed.
We have not loved our neighbour as ourselves.
We seek your mercy and forgiveness,
that we may turn again to You,
and recover our true identity,
shaped in Your image,
filled with Your grace and truth. Amen.
Silence
God is always making all things new! We are a new creation in Christ Jesus! The Lord says: If you want to become my followers, deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me. Give us the courage to live as Your new creation, forgiven, loved, and whole. Amen.
Kyrie Eleison
Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal, have mercy upon us.
Glory to God in the highest, glory to God’s people on earth. Amen.
Hymn For the Healing of the Nations
Fred Kaan (1965) Hope Publishing Company OneLicence # A-734713 sung by Frodsham Methodist Church Cloud Choir and used with their kind permission.
For the healing of the nations, Lord, we pray with one accord,
for a just and equal sharing of the things that earth affords.
To a life of love in action help us rise and pledge our word.
Lead us forward into freedom; from despair your world release,
that, redeemed from war & hatred, all may come and go in peace.
Show us how through care & goodness fear will die and hope increase.
All that kills abundant living, let it from the earth be banned:
pride of status, race, or schooling, dogmas that obscure your plan.
In our common quest for justice may we hallow life’s brief span.
You, Creator God, have written your great name on humankind.
For our growing in your likeness, bring the life of Christ to mind
that by our response and service earth its destiny may find.
Reading 2 Corinthians 5:16-21
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way. So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Hymn God of Freedom, God of Justice
Shirley Erena Murray © 1992 Hope Publishing Company sung by members of Franklin United Methodist Church. OneLicence # A-734713
God of freedom, God of justice, you whose love is strong as death,
you who saw the dark of prison, you who knew the price of faith —
touch our world of sad oppression with your Spirit’s healing breath.
Rid the earth of torture’s terror, you whose hands were nailed to wood;
hear the cries of pain and protest, you who shed the tears and blood —
move in us the power of pity restless for the common good.
Make in us a captive conscience quick to hear, to act, to plead;
make us truly sisters, brothers of whatever race or creed –
teach us to be fully human, open to each other’s needs.
Reading Joshua 5:9-12
The LORD said to Joshua, ‘Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt.’ And so that place is called Gilgal to this day. While the Israelites were encamped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho. On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.
Sermon
In my first pastorate, something was explained to me. “You see, Ryan”, my church secretary said, “when we moved here, the question was, which church do you go to? Then it became, do you go to church? Now, no one asks, and it’s a surprise that a new neighbour might actually want to go to any of the churches.” It’s been a rapid shift in the course of one person’s lifetime for an institution as iconic as the Church to find itself down to only 5 percent of the nation’s attendance on a Sunday.
And that’s combining cathedrals, mega churches, and all the rest, such as us. A huge shift for an institution that anchors itself across the countryside and in the centre of cities. An institution which has inspired passion and rage, lifetimes of dedication, attention to detail, and a call to look into one’s own life.
Pilgrimages, incredible wealth and devotion, wars, and so much else not to mention. An institution charged with a very real and life changing task. of introducing people to Christ and nurturing disciples along their life’s journey. Church was, for the generations which preceded us, not only a given, but important, necessary, like manna.
This might feel like a bit of a reversal of the biblical story but bear with me. When the Hebrews were liberated from Egyptian slavery, they wandered in the desert for 40 years. During that time, an entire generation were fed with a miraculous bread, manna, that appeared as if from the very ground itself.
It was a given nourishment that came from God sustaining people in body and spirit along their journey. It could not be stored up, for even one day later would lead to corruption and rot. The people had to appreciate it in the moment. And yes, they got sick of it and complained to God and Moses alike.
They desired variety, spice, difference. When they finally had their own land, they celebrated their first harvest earned by the sweat of their brow at the Feast of Passover with their own grain, harvested by their own hands, freed from enslavement. Now that they could grow and harvest their own sustenance, the manna disappeared.
Did they panic? No. Maybe they got a little anxious. But they let go of the lifeline that had sustained them through an age, and then turned to adapting their knowledge and work to the fields at hand. What’s this to do with us? Church. The manna we relied upon is coming to an end. For us, it might not be bread from heaven.
Our manna was the cultural Christendom, which built temples of faith, such as this one. It envisioned a world where cross and empire fused together, inseparable for an eternity, united in grand benevolence. It assumed that people would always be loyal to the church, always invest in it, and raise their children to think the same.
Any deviation of that was to be pitied. And yet, after over 300 years of challenge to the dominance of cultural Christendom, Christendom is on fire, to borrow a phrase from Brian Zahn, an American pastor. What has long and faithfully served as the gravity for how we understood Church is on fire. What to do?
The first is to acknowledge that our cultural manna was not bad. There’s often a somewhat youthful temptation to challenge it in its entirety. Yet it provided strong reinforcements for how people could access and live good and faithful lives in service to God and humanity. It was a faith adapted for its time and its place, and where it was abused, coopted for things that were not of Christ, we can and should acknowledge that was sin, not Christianity.
But it was manna. It fed and nourished us through a long journey. And it saw a lot of winning of justice and hope for people along that journey. Our second action is to realize that we are supposed to grow up and grow out of dependence on manna. Today, being Mothering Sunday, an apt metaphor is that mothering is that mothering, an act that can come from male and female alike.
But also recognizing the unique role of women and mums in society is to help our children to grow up into strong and successful, creative and inventive, prophetic adults. But children are not born that way. We mother them with what is appropriate for infants and then children growing up and up and up until such time as they must be weaned off that and become as independent of the parent as possible.
Our cultural manna was what was needed at a time, perhaps, but now we are being weaned off of it. Like a mother, God is reminding us that we will need to tend the fields around us to create a harvest which we can celebrate together, free of the cultural manna that long sustained us. Yet the need for a ministry that invites people into a relationship with Christ is very real.
We are in an age of unbelief where our faith, our church, our morals, and our ethics can feel dusty or even despised. And we can tell from our own lives and our own experience that, quote, believers, pastors, and well-known Christian leaders publicly lose their faith. We cannot help but ask, in dark corners of our hearts, if our faith is indeed in vain.
It’s certainly being asked in the world around us. Pastor Zond asks, as we all should, does that mean we who still believe are simply whistling past the graveyard and stubbornly, stubbornly forestalling our own inevitable loss of faith? Is it possible to hold on to Christian faith in an age of unbelief?
To which we could, I hope, say yes, but the yes we say will be different than the one long prescribed by our addiction to the cultural manna of Christianity, our old cultural Christianity. It perhaps follows the beliefs of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote, “I believe in Christ and confess him not like some child. My Hosanna has passed through an enormous firmness of doubt”.
Our present age is an enormous furnace of doubt that will challenge, deconstruct, and reconstruct our faith. But it forges our hosanna. Our faith will come as it did for the newly settled Israelites, from knowing the fields we are ploughing and tending them by our own hand.
God has given us the fields and the climate in which to do ministry, but gone are the days when we could rely upon cultural Christianity alone to develop our ministry. The Spirit is calling us into that work now. In Sunday school, you always know the answer when you don’t know the answer. Christ. It’s the same here.
While so much may be changing, at the core of it all is a call. to turn to Christ. The ancient Church used the word repentance for that turn toward Christ, and it’s been turned into some fire and brimstone thing that adorns sandwich boards of street preachers. But that’s not what it is. Repentance is a recognition that we often go the wrong way.
The breadcrumbs of manna are no longer there to feed and guide us. Though we do have the witness born through history, that people have found faith, justice, and love, and often had to re-find it after losing it. And Christ has always been found amongst the people around us in the community with whom we minister.
So the problem with repentance is that it isn’t exactly as straightforward as the sandwich board carriers demand it be. It’s hard work. It was hard work for the Israelites to produce their own grain, yet the reward was significant. Their grain was the representation of a partnership between them and God, born of the soil, nurtured by the sun and the water, and tended and harvested by human hands, shaped into creative, delicious, and nutritious things. But they had to work hard to know that soil, to know the crops, and care for them. Repentance, for us, will be hard, too. The potential harvest of connecting lives with real, visceral, and meaningful faith is massive. We may not feel up to it. But Church, we’re literally in the Promised Land right now. Turning to Christ is not some form of magical thinking, it’s modelling our collective lives in the way Jesus himself did by prioritizing people.
Developing relationships, leveraging everything in our power and beyond to participate in thriving lives and thriving communities. To pray, to hold silence, to honour the Sabbath and stop. It’s what those who mothered us wanted for us. It’s what God wanted for the Israelites. And as the manna of cultural Christianity dries up, it’s what God is calling us into as well. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymn Wonders of Your Love
© The Revd Amy Sens Used with express permission for this service.
My going out, my coming in
You know them all before I do.
You made my body secretly,
you knit me in my mother’s womb.
Our hearts are restless ‘til they rest in You, they rest in you O God.
Your everlasting gracious mercy and wonders of your love.
If I should fly over the moon
or hid deep in the salty sea
You’d know where I was every second,
You would be right there with me.
Our hearts are restless ‘til they rest in You, they rest in you O God.
Your everlasting gracious mercy and wonders of your love.
When I look at the things you’ve made,
the stars, the trees or my two hands,
Creation is a wonder to me,
more than I can understand.
Our hearts are restless ‘til they rest in You, they rest in you O God.
Your everlasting gracious mercy and wonders of your love.
Affirmation of Faith
With the whole church:
we affirm that we are made in God’s image,
befriended by Christ, empowered by the Spirit.
With people everywhere:
we affirm God’s goodness at the heart of humanity,
planted more deeply than all that is wrong.
With all creation:
we celebrate the miracle and wonder of life,
the unfolding purposes of God forever at work in ourselves and the world.
Prayer of Intercession
Grant us your loving grace in the morning,
and we will live this day in joy and praise. Ps 90.14
Eternal God, we rejoice this morning in the gift of life,
which we have received by your grace,
and the new life you give in Jesus Christ.
Especially we thank you for: