Righteousness

 Eastern Parkway United Methodist Church 

 
 

 

 A warm welcome to each worshiper today. We celebrate you and offer you our friendship and love. We are a congregation of people who seek to grow spiritually, to become more like Christ in His compassion and acceptance of everyone while growing more aware of what it really means to be Christians today. 

As a Reconciling Congregation, EPUMC affirms the sacred worth of persons of all sexual orientations and gender identities and welcomes them into full participation in the fellowship, membership, ministries, and leadership of the congregation.   

943 Palmer Avenue, Schenectady, NY 12309 / 518-374-4306 epumc943@gmail.com / www.easternparkway.org 

 

Order of Worship 

November 20, 2022 

10:00 a.m. 

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit. 

  

Prelude Sonata IV Tomaso Albinoni 

Greeting and Announcements 

 
 

Mission Statement: 

We are a faith community striving to be, to nurture, and to send forth disciples of Jesus Christ. 

  

Call to Worship: 

God has called all of us here beloved. 

We are given new names of hope and promise. 

Even though storms and trials have assailed us, 

God has drawn us through to the time of salvation. 

Thanks be to God for God’s victory in Jesus Christ! 

May Jesus reign in our hearts all of our days. AMEN. 

Nancy C. Townley 

  

*Hymn Come, Ye Thankful People, Come #694 

              

Prayer of Confession: 

Forgiving God, how many times we have spoken words of commitment and faith and then turned our backs on these commitments to follow the temptations of the world. We wander after the false prophets of greed, selfishness, arrogance, ignorance, hatred, stubbornness, and then shout our displeasure at how we are being treated. We want you to come in and clean up all our messes, excusing us from any responsibility for them. Forgive us for such foolishness. Help us remember the power of your healing love, which has been given for us. Forgive us when we think we know everything and then discover that we have behaved and thought in ignorant ways. Teach us to listen and to place our trust in your abiding power. For we ask this in Jesus’ Name. AMEN. 

  

Assurance: 

Even though we doubt God’s faithfulness to us, yet God is steadfast in God’s love for each one of us. Receive that love in your hearts this day. Know that you are healed and forgiven in God’s sight. AMEN. 

 
 

Scripture Reading Jeremiah 23:1-6 

Restoration after Exile 

23 Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord. 2 Therefore thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the Lord. 3 Then I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. 4 I will raise up shepherds over them who will shepherd them, and they shall no longer fear longer or be dismayed, nor shall any be missing, says the Lord. 

The Righteous Branch of David 

5 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land. 6 In his days Judah will be saved, and Israel will live in safety. And this is the name by which he will be called: “The Lord is our righteousness.” 

 
 

Anthem Sing to the Lord of Harvest Lloyd Larson 

 
 

Sermon Righteousness 

 

Friends, this Sunday is the very last Sunday of the Church calendar year, one that we name “Christ the King Sunday.” No matter where we’ve been all year, no matter what we’ve done or left undone, we stop and take a pause this Sunday. Thursday we get Thanksgiving, then we turn around and have Black Friday, and we kick off the Christmas shopping and stress-eating season. Next Sunday we begin the season of Advent, then we count down the days until Christmas. At my house we try as hard as we can to have a healthy balance of Christmas caroling and holiday crafts mixed with an endless parade of “I wants” related to Santa and presents, the tree getting knocked over at least three times and hopefully not falling on anyone small, and awkward exchanges dinner exchanges with relatives. Your house is no doubt very different from mine, but I can’t imagine any less stressful. It’s just what happens to all of us this time of year. 

But today is Christ the King Sunday. It’s not Thanksgiving yet. It’s not time to spend a whole day cooking only for your kids to eat nothing but the rolls, it’s not time to see your friend who works in retail stuff down her dinner as fast as possible so she can work at 4pm on Thanksgiving, it’s not time to wrestle with a stranger at Wal-Mart for a good deal on a big screen TV, it’s not time to watch nostalgic old cartoons in one room while your dad and your uncle fight about politics in the other room. This day is a gift, one that, unlike our friends in Buffalo, we get to enjoy without 3 feet of snow on the ground, and who knows how long that will last. 

Pause today. Your to-do list will still be there tomorrow. Despite what those stress-inducing commercials are telling you, those “unbeatable low prices” aren’t going anywhere. Even your neediest family members can manage for five minutes here and there. So stop. Clear your mind. Clear your calendar. Try a little mindfulness exercise with me: 

Be still. Get comfortable. And just focus on your breath. You’re going to have thoughts, and that’s fine, it’s what your brain is built to do. Acknowledge them without judgment and let them go. For 10 seconds. Go. 

That was so hard. And it was just ten seconds. Notice how quickly our brains try to convince us we’re wasting time, and we need to get busy? That’s not true, but the anxiety of our capitalistic culture tells us that. We’ve been trained to base our worth off of our productivity. One of my favorite spiritual authors, Walter Brueggemann, discusses this at length in his book Sabbath as Resistance. When you take even part of one day to stop working and worrying, you stand up to this culture that grinds us into the ground, moreso this time of year than any other. God commanded us to carve out one whole day every single week, 24 entire hours, to do no work at all. If 10 seconds of silence was nerve-wrecking, imagine how it feels when you shut out the world’s noise for a whole Sabbath day. Actually, I observe the Sabbath as a spiritual practice, one whole day with no work. I gotta tell you, it feels pretty great. 

Today, whether you can engage in the practice of Sabbath or not, we mark as Christ the King Sunday, this note we reach at the end of this year’s song, where we acknowledge, if nothing else, that Jesus is in charge and we’re not. 

Can you imagine the relief that awaits us if we could accept that? Jeremiah could. Second among the prophets celebrated by the Hebrew Scriptures, and my personal favorite, Jeremiah starts off by dealing some heavy words before the soft ones: those who have done evil will pay for it. But he quickly follows that up with the good news: God is a Lord of justice. What is broken, God mends. What has fallen into abject chaos, God will restore. Is there brokenness and chaos in your life? ‘Cuz there sure is in mine. Four temper tantrums, one more than the number of children I have because the oldest threw two, happened while I was attempting to write this sermon. It’s just a sermon, kid, calm the heck down, Mommy does this every week, you really oughtta be used to it by now. But my kids, like me, like you, like us, forget to breathe. They forget to suspend their worries and expectations long enough to put their trust in something stronger. For now, that’s Daddy making that perfect straw punch in the juice box, because he is very capable of doling out snacks while I’m working, thank you very much. But someday my kids will be adults, too, responsible for tilling the soil of this earth into the Creation God called out of nothingness. And they’ll need to remember, like we do now, that we have nothing before God, we have nothing without God, and we need nothing apart from God’s love. God is in charge. And the Creator made manifest in Jesus shows us how to put aside the garbage this world stuffs our heads with in favor of a much better way of living.  

Once you empty your mind and heart of all that rubbish, if only for a minute, and allow Jesus to breathe in new life, what that life sounds like is the wonderful Hebrew word Jeremiah proclaims to his friends and neighbors in this week’s passage: Tsedekah. Righteousness. 

Jeremiah’s friends and neighbors have returned to their homeland from exile, feeling empty and alone. Jeremiah tells them: being empty is good. Fill up with God’s righteousness. God is your steadfast companion. And Jesus, promised in those days to come and save us from ourselves, is a King, taking over when holding up the whole sky becomes too much of a burden for us. It was never ours to carry in the first place, says the Lord. God creates the short, dark days that consume us in this season. God orders the freezing temperatures, the snow (sorry Buffalo), that black ice on your driveway. But also the sky filled with stars. And when the darkness is used up, God brings back the light. We can trust. 

Righteousness is the product of that trust. It’s the opposite of foolishness, the dumb stuff we get into because we’re tired of waiting for God and we take matters into our own hands. It’s the grown up equivalent of my oldest running the upstairs bathtub so long that the water starts leaking into the kitchen. The trustees know what I’m talking about. Our overflowing waters of folly are messing up the sheetrock in all of our ceilings. Can you see the cracks? Our Church is splitting. Our fair elections are being contested. Warring political factions fight over control of the government like two kids fighting over a teddy bear...not that I’ve seen that happen recently. And our planet is on fire. We can’t go on like this. 

Pause. Breathe. Stop moving for just a moment. If we refuse to stop acting long enough to listen to a better course, the whole ceiling will cave in in our kitchen.  

Listen to the King. He opposes our dumb mistakes and hands us a mop to clean up our messes. He directs all of that water out of the bathroom and onto the fires. What is he asking you to mop up right now? Which walls is he pointing at and asking you to spackle? You’ll never know if you’re not listening. 

Thanksgiving is still coming, I promise. That tryptophan coma the advertisements promised awaits you. You’ll still get to untangle those Christmas lights, sweep pine needles off the floor, and clean up spilled egg nog. Those moments are coming soon enough. 

For now, rest in the day. It’s Christ the King Sunday, for 24 hours only. Is Christ your King? If not, he’s ready to take over and give you rest. 

May it be so. 

Amen. 

 

 
 

*Hymn Thank You, Lord Front Porch Rockers 

 
 

Offering  

 
 

Offertory Thanks Be To You, O Lord Handel, arr. Hal H. Hopson 

Chancel Choir 

 

*Doxology #94 

*Prayer of dedication             

  

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer 

God of infinite patience and power, how it must try your patience to watch us hurl ourselves into a season of greed and grumbling. Your blessings, your bounty, have been poured out to us that we may be strengthened to be your people in service to others. Yet we persist in attaching ourselves to the great “gimmies” of our world--“gimmie toys, gimmie wealth, gimmie power.” Today we have gathered here with an opportunity to step out of the race to possess, to praise you and thank you for the wonderful ways in which you have blessed our lives. We spend a lot of time looking for the big blessings, when all around us are the delightful blessings of everyday living--family, home, friends, the ability to enjoy laughter and share tears. There are so many ways in which you have touched our lives with your love. Help us develop for all of our lives an attitude of gratitude, never failing to thank you each day for your love and your blessings. Help us reach out to one another and to all those in need with this compassionate love. For we ask this in Jesus’ Name, AMEN. 

By Nancy C. Townley 

 

Our Father, Mother, Creator God, 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 trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us. Lead us, not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory forever. Amen. 

 
 

*Hymn Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise #103 

 
 

Benediction 

 
Postlude We Gather Together Kremser, John Carter, arr 

 
 

Staff 

Natalie Bowerman Pastor 

Betsy Lehmann Music Director 

Joe White Custodian 

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant