God Be With You EP
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
June 9, 2024
Third Sunday after Pentecost
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.
Call to Worship:
This is the day that the Lord has made!
Let us rejoice and be glad in it!
This is a day of new beginnings!
This is a time for growing into new disciples for Jesus.
Come, let us prepare ourselves for worship
Let us be prepared for service to God. AMEN.
*Hymn Lord, You Have Come to the Lakeshore #344, v 1, 2, 4
Prayer of Confession:
Lord, forgive us when we see your miracles all around us and still doubt your power, presence and love. Forgive us when we treat this world and each other with careless indifference or with malice. You, who have created the most wondrous things from the smallest of particles, can create in our hearts confidence and hope. From our lives you can fashion the most delightful miracles that can serve you through acts of mercy and kindness. Free us, Lord, to receive your blessings and , having received them, to find the numerous ways in which we can serve you. Heal our wounded hearts. Hear our cries. Come to us and bring us home. In Jesus’ Name, we pray. AMEN.
Assurance:
Let go of your fears and doubts. God pours God’s love on you, in you and through you to others. Be at peace. AMEN.
Scripture Reading Mark 3: 20-35
Jesus and Beelzebul
20 Then he went home, and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. 21 When his family heard it, they went out to restrain him, for people were saying, “He has gone out of his mind.” 22 And the scribes who came down from Jerusalem said, “He has Beelzebul, and by the ruler of the demons he casts out demons.” 23 And he called them to him and spoke to them in parables, “How can Satan cast out Satan? 24 If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. 25 And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. 26 And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but his end has come. 27 But no one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.
28 “Truly I tell you, people will be forgiven for their sins and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit can never have forgiveness but is guilty of an eternal sin”— 30 for they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”
The True Kindred of Jesus
31 Then his mother and his brothers came, and standing outside they sent to him and called him. 32 A crowd was sitting around him, and they said to him, “Your mother and your brothers[a] are outside asking for you.” 33 And he replied, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” 34 And looking at those who sat around him, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! 35 Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother.”
Sermon God Be with You
In the year 1573, a writer and scholar by the name of Gabriel Harvey was writing a letter to a friend. Pressed for time and page space, Harvey closed his letter with an abbreviation that he hoped his friend would read as intended: “Godbwye”. Near as anyone can tell, that abbreviation is the very first written use of the word “goodbye”. But even though we see it that way now, and even if Harvey’s friend wasn’t great at code, and tried to phonetically read out those letters, Harvey didn’t mean to write a brand new word. He meant to close his letter with a phrase that was very commonly used at the conclusion of a letter, conversation, or time spent in the company of a friend: God be with you.
“Goodbye” is far from the only English phrase that started out invoking the Divine and then morphed over time. “Good morning” evolved from the Old English “God morwen”. And if you ever wondered why the heck we call the day that Jesus died “Good Friday”, one theory proposes that Christians used to call that day “God’s Friday”, and over time we added a second “O”. For the record, though, when you wonder next year, the theory we have about that that seems to hold the most water is that “good” used to carry the connotation of “sacred or holy”.
And that brings us right back to a word we’ll be tempted to say to one another after today: Good bye. Holding one another in sacred space, we split at the fork in the road of life. Your path carries you forward with Pastor Katelyn, my path heads West to Honeoye Falls. And “goodbye” is a perfectly fine, loving way to send someone off to their next destination.
But we’ve only been saying it–and even then, we’ve only been saying that in formal English–for about 500 years. Think about the phrase Harvey intended to say to his friend: “God be with you.”
Let that hang in the air for a second. Can you feel how different that is than “goodbye”?
“Goodbye”, to a lot of us, implies an end. A conclusion. The cutting of a tie that binds. “God be with you” is different. Imagine if we started regularly saying that to one another. It’s a much weightier phrase, with a much bigger vision behind it. “God be with you” isn’t about a separation between two people. “God be with you” preserves everything that has been precious about these bonds, these friendships, this church family, these last four years. And it tells you, me, us, that wherever you go next, whatever you do, whatever you try, whoever you meet, may God hold you in the Divine hand. The other Divine hand will be holding me, and we’ll only be a sacred arm span apart. Granted, God has infinitely huge arms. But we can never be severed from one another.
Some of our friends in other cultures have absolutely maintained the holding of that sacred space when parting ways. How do our Spanish speaking friends say “goodbye”? “Adios”, of course. You know that means “to God”, right? Everytime a Spanish speaker says “adios” to another, they wish that person the Holy blessing on their way. Of course, our Spanish speaking friends who want to say that much more directly may say “vaya con dios”--”go with God.” Our French speaking friends do the same thing for one another every time they say “adieu”, which also means “to God.”
If you go down this rabbit hole with me and start dissecting the literal meanings of the phrases most commonly used as “goodbye” in other languages, you’ll discover some amazing hidden gems, implicit blessings and even hints of grief sewn into these words. Trish will have to fact check me on this one, but my internet research told me that the Japanese word “sayonara” literally means “if it is to be this way.” You can imagine two people maintaining a hand hold at fingertip level while saying that, regretful that their paths won’t intertwine for a while. As for meine andere Sprache, Deutsch, the longest and most formal way to say goodbye is “Auf Wiedersehen”. Quite the mouthful, because the second piece of that phrase is a compound word. Germans looooove compound words. “Auf” is a preposition. “Wieder” means “again”, and “sehen” means “to see”. Put together, it means “until we see each other again.”
This morning’s lectionary-appointed Gospel story is all about the importance of extending our blessings to one another, no matter where life takes us. At the beginning of the passage, Jesus and his disciples are sitting in the company of a gentleman Jesus intends to heal, a man who is rumored to be “possessed by demons”. Nowadays, we’ll see those descriptions in the New Testament and theorize that the person in question was actually sick, or mentally ill, or in a lot of poorly managed pain. But Jesus wasn’t bothered by the lack of medical knowledge in his midst, all that bothered him was the judgment, and the lack of care. In this instance, instead of jumping straight to the healing miracle, Jesus felt the need to lecture everyone within earshot–you’ll make a whole lot of mistakes in this life, and you’ll be ok. You’ll get up and dust yourself off, and keep going. But, he warned, if you blaspheme against the Spirit, you’re in for a bad time that can’t be cleaned up until you straighten that out. Using more accessible verbage, what Jesus meant was this: don’t close yourself off from the direction in which the Holy Spirit intends to push you, and don’t try to stand between the Spirit and another person. Stay soft. Stay bendable. Stay teachable. Stay adaptable. And when the Spirit pulls on your hand, even if you were perfectly comfortable where you were, follow her.
That’s what brings me to Honeoye Falls. That’s what brings you all to these pews every Sunday. That’s what brings Pastor Katelyn here, and fills your sails with wind as you sail off together on her canoe. And no matter what, you’ll never need to worry that you’ll be alone, or without love, as long as you follow the Spirit, because God’s already got you covered. In the second chunk of this morning’s story, Jesus and his disciples are walking around outside. And one of the disciples, seeing Mary and the children she had after Jesus, points in the crowd and says, “hey Jesus–isn’t that your family?” And Jesus says, “Well no, anyone who follows God is my family.” I have to feel bad for Mary in that interaction, that’s a little brash to say right in front of your own mom. But Jesus intended Good News for all of us when he said that. You will never find yourself in some dark corner of life where no one loves you. Even when the road ahead of you gets impossibly rough, Jesus is standing in front of you holding your hand, shining a flashlight on ahead. And if you focus your eyes on that path, the one the Spirit leads you on, you will always inevitably find the people of God along the way. And people are so complicated, but they’re good, and they’ll help you.
This blessing is what Jeremiah Rankin had in mind when he penned the hymn we’ll end our service with–”God be with you till we meet again”. You guys know that hymn as the refrain we sing at the end of every service during Lent. I know that hymn as the one we ended every service with all year long at a tiny country church I served in my 20s called Benton. Singing that was, and has always been, a light filled moment for me. Over the years I’ve memorized the lyrics, and they’re the parting spiritual words of my heart.
God be with you. Next week, when Bob Long leads worship, or next month, when you’re saying hello to Pastor Katelyn, or six months from now, when you’re making a complicated decision, or ten years from now, when life may take you many miles from this reality. Every day that you walk this mortal coil, as long as I do also, I’ll hold on to God’s right hand, and you’ll be holding the left. And we may be in vastly different places, but we’ll never stop being connected.
Amen.
*Hymn In the Garden #314
Offering
Offertory
*Doxology #94
*Prayer of dedication
Pastoral Prayer and Lord’s Prayer
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.
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.
*Hymn God Be with You till We Meet Again #672
Benediction
Postlude
Staff
Natalie Bowerman Pastor
Betsy Lehmann Music Director
Joe White Custodian
Cassandra Brown Nursery Attendant
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