Peace Like a River

 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 

December 4, 2022 

10:00 a.m. 

*You are invited to rise in body or spirit. 

  

Prelude  

Greeting and Announcements 

 
 

Mission Statement: 

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

 
 

Lighting of the Advent Wreath: 

Reader 1: O God, we light the second candle of Advent. 

Reader 2: We seek your comfort. Both mighty and tender, you come. Prepare our hearts to be transformed by you. 

Reader 1: Isaiah announced God’s coming to a people exiled in a broken and parched wilderness. He declared that God’s redemption would make a highway in the desert and change the rough places into plain. God would come as a shepherd—feeding, leading, and cradling the weary flock. This Advent, we seek such a God. 

People : Saving God, look upon your world and heal your land and your people. Prepare us to be changed. This Advent, teach us to be tender and just, as you are. Amen. 

 

Call to Worship: 

In this season of prophecy, promise, and preparation, we come to be renewed and refreshed.  

We come to be inspired by stories of a messiah 

who will change the world—and change us. 

We come to listen for words of hope and joy, 

promise and challenge. 

We come with open ears, open minds, 

and open hearts. We come to receive 

the blessings God has in store for us 

in this season of waiting. 

Come! Let us worship our God— 

the One who brings all things to fulfillment. 

Let us worship God. 

Joanne Carlson Brown 

  

*Hymn Lift Up Your Heads, Ye Mighty Gates #213 

              

Prayer of Confession: 

O God, 

the stories of our faith have lost their power. 

We have heard the prophecies spoken so many times, 

the promises retold again and again, 

the call to prepare ourselves for your coming 

repeated so often, 

we don’t really hear or heed them anymore. 

We have replaced these messages of life: 

with guessing what presents we are getting, 

with preparing for parties 

and the social obligations of Christmas. 

Bring us back to a sense of mystery: 

a sense of awe, a sense of wonder, 

a sense of excitement, a sense of anticipation, 

a sense that something special 

is about to break into our everyday world. 

Help us prepare our hearts, souls, and minds 

for the coming of the messiah. Amen. 

  

Assurance: 

God’s promises are sure— 

promises of steadfast love and forgiveness. 

God deals with God’s people 

with righteousness and justice. 

Rejoice and be glad! 

 
 

Scripture Reading Matthew 3: 1-12 

The Proclamation of John the Baptist 

3 In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2 “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”[a] 3 This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, 

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 
‘Prepare the way of the Lord; 
    make his paths straight.’ ” 

4 Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5 Then Jerusalem and all Judea and all the region around the Jordan were going out to him, 6 and they were baptized by him in the River Jordan, confessing their sins. 

7 But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming for his[b] baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance, 9 and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 10 Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. 

11 “I baptize you with[c] water for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is more powerful than I, and I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with[d] the Holy Spirit and fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” 

 
 

Sermon Peace Like a River 

When I titled this sermon, I was inspired by the African American spiritual “Peace Like A River”: 

I’ve got peace like a river 

I’ve got peace like a river 

I’ve got peace like a river in my soul 

True to form for its time and genre, there are few lyrics to memorize, and they are repetitive. This leaves a soloist, choir, or congregation free to improvise as much as they want—instrumental melodies and harmonies, free form solos and descants, body movements, and whatever else speaks to you. Most of that is well outside of my comfort zone. My ancestors weren’t comfortable with ad libbing, they stuffed their hymns so full of lyrics that you could barely keep up, let alone add extra stuff. My grandparents in the faith liked being told exactly what to do. Consider, for example, a German hymn that we know by its translation, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”. The German sounded like this: 

Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott, 
ein' gute Wehr und waffen; 
er hilft uns frei aus aller Not, 
die uns jetzt hat betroffen. 

Believe it or not, I was once asked to use more German from the pulpit. Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it. 

It’s a holy experience for me to sing either or both of those melodies, though has a back story that automatically evokes feelings of “peace”. “I’ve Got Peace Like a River” emerged from enslaved peoples on plantations in the South, who bonded, passed the time, shared the Good News, and even passed along covert messages from the Underground Railroad by singing. This peace was one of reclaiming power. Martin Luther wrote “Ein Feste Burg” between the years 1527 and 1529, a decade after taking his first stand against the Roman Catholic Church, and after the Church had put a target on his head. He had a large scale goal, in the wake of the invention of the printing press, of making the Bible available for you to buy and read in your preferred language, and for there to be worship songs that would be easy for you to sing. After he came up with these lyrics about the strength and protection of God, he set them to a popular drinking song. The peace he delivered forth was one that emboldened the meek and brought the Church down from the high places to the average Joe (or Johann). 

Peace doesn’t always look like you think it will. Often in our spiritual practices we conflate the word peace with words like “tranquility”, “serenity”, or even “silence”. Though these essences of any of these words could add a whole lot to your spirit, none of them mean the same thing as “peace”. Per the dictionary, “peace” means “freedom from disturbance”, and “a period of no war”. Those are broad terms that leave miles of wide open space for God to act in any number of ways to bring about something that you’ll eventually call “peace”. And as a lot of you may know, God likes to surprise us. 

Thus, in creating a man who would go on to baptize many to repentance, including Jesus, God pulled something out of the Divine hat that no one could have predicted. Mary’s cousin, an elderly woman named Elizabeth who had never been able to conceive children and who had long, long since concluded she never would, was married to a highly respected priest named Zechariah. When this octogenarian clergy prepared to pray in his synagogue, he may or may not have expected to hear any words, but he absolutely didn’t expect to hear what he did: Hey bro, I’m Gabriel! Stock up on diapers and buy a crib, you’re going to be a dad! Because he doubted Gabriel, and Gabriel was in a particularly bad mood that day, Zechariah was muted for the remainder of Elizabeth’s pregnancy—a vacation for Elizabeth—and once their son was born, and his parents named him John, things only got more bizarre. Elizabeth and Zechariah would have had every reason to believe that their only son would follow in his father’s footsteps, behind a long line of priests, and become a priest himself, dedicating himself to a highly socially respected life of service to the synagogue. What John did instead was anything but. I can only imagine what his teen years were like, considering where we find John in this morning’s scripture lesson as a 30 something: homeless, scraggly, smelly, eating bugs and wild plants, yelling at people from the side of the road about the Lord coming, and offering to dunk you in the river. I come back to this striking image every Advent. This isn’t the kindly looking guy in the crisp white robe that you introduce yourself to at a worship service, this is the guy you run from. Of all the words I’d use to describe him, “peace” wouldn’t be one of them. This is the kind of guy that disturbs us, after all. If anything, he disrupts our peace, right? 

Or so we think. Actually, this is the man who begins to show us that the state we’ve settled for and misnamed “peace” is actually a dull in the storm, and a dulling from which only the most privileged among us benefit. He demands that we put down our smart phones and see him: a homeless man of color, poorly dressed and food insecure. He’s vulnerable. He was a target of discrimination in his time for being poor and defying his parents’ expectations; he’d be a target of hostility now for so many more markers. Our society has only gotten harsher. And he dies a violent death not long after this story. See him, and see everyone else we pretend not to: the guy on the corner outside Target with the cardboard sign asking for help, the guy who borrows a shopping cart and uses it to collect stuff off the side of the road to live off of, the person struggling with addiction who has reached the end of their resources and is now homeless, the person with a record of disorderly conduct and “disturbing the peace” who is likely to end up back in jail soon. That’s Jesus’ cousin. And if you can’t look at him, her, or them, then you aren’t ready to look at Jesus. If we can’t face our prejudices and dismantle them, we won’t ever have peace. 

Peace requires connection. Peace requires relationship. It requires sincere friendship, a covenant to look out for one another, to love one another, to want the same benefits for another that we enjoy. A willingness to sacrifice for another’s well being. Without those qualities, we’re never more than a few missteps from warfare. On our bad days, we’re lightyears away from that kind of true friendship. But on our good days, we get close enough to touch it. We may even get schmaltzy and call a few of those good days “the Christmas spirit.” 

Sean got to see such a moment yesterday. I had been awake since 4am (trust me, not by choice), and I would have benefitted from a short break from our little blessings. Sean can always see that on me, which is one of many sources of proof that I married well. He took blessings 2 and 3 to the grocery store with him, to pick out food for the whole week. He got to the checkout line the picture of the Exhausted Dad: heavy cart stuffed to feed our small army, with two small people pulling on his legs asking for candy. Sidebar: why, whyyyyyy, do they have to put the candy at eye level for a three year old right next to the register? Anyway, as Sean got out his wallet and prepared to pay for that haul, an angel tapped him on the shoulder--”Can I pay for your groceries?” Sean has to turn all the way around because he can’t turn his head. The word repentance, which John the Baptist calls us to, means “turn”. Sean very humbly accepted this gesture of friendship, and the hug that went with it, from Anna. Anna wouldn’t accept anything in return, she said “call it a Christmas present.” She told Sean that if he wanted to repay her friendship, he should pay for someone else’s groceries one of these days. 

This is the beginnings of peace. It doesn’t look like you think it will. It doesn’t come when you expect it to. It surprises you. It comforts the disturbed, and settles the warfare in the checkout lane at Hannaford. It initiates friendships. And it’s what Jesus called us to. It’s the River Jordan, where we come face to face with Jesus’ cousin. 

May we have peace like a river. 

Amen. 
 

*Hymn Lo, How a Rose #216 

 
 

Offering  

 
 

Offertory  

Chancel Choir 

 

*Doxology See projection Tune at #229 

*Prayer of dedication             

  

Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer 

Good and gracious God, 
we give you thanks for gifts of life, 
for gifts of love and joy during this season, 
for gifts of comfort when we do not or cannot feel that joy, 
for gifts of healing and mercy, 
for gifts of patience and serenity, 
for gifts of hope as we prepare our hearts for Christmas. 

 

Christ’s presence changes our world, 
so we pray that he may indeed be born in us once again, 
that we may be continually born anew, 
that the whole world would be reshaped and reborn 
as your kingdom emerges around us and within us. 

 

May your Spirit stir within us, 
and cause us to long for the day 
when earth will in fact be like heaven. 

 

It is this radical vision of a new heaven and a new earth 
for which we pray, 
using the words Jesus taught us. 
 

~ written by John W. Vest, and posted on John Vest. http://johnvest.com/ 

 

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, the Power, and the Glory forever. Amen. 
 

The Lord’s Supper 

 
 

*Hymn All the Earth Is Waiting #210 

 
 

Benediction 

 
Postlude  

 
 

Staff 

Natalie Bowerman Pastor 

Betsy Lehmann Music Director 

Joe White Custodian 

Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant