Ash Sunday prayers of confession and forgivness

Prayers of confession based on Psalm 51

Stf 424 is God forgave my sins in Jesus name

Holy and merciful God we confess to you and to one another

That we have sinned through our own fault

We have sinned against you and others

In thought, and word and deed

In what we have done and failed to do

STF 424 Verse 1

Have mercy on me, O God,

  according to your steadfast love;

according to your abundant mercy

  blot out my transgressions.

Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity,

  and cleanse me from my sin.

STF 424 Verse 1

For I know my transgressions,

  and my sin is ever before me.

Against you, you alone, have I sinned,

  and done what is evil in your sight,

so that you are justified in your sentence

  and blameless when you pass judgement.

Prayer of forgiveness to be read responsively

I have but hope in you

You lord are my only refuge

I freely seek to live the life of forgiveness

I freely seek to live the life of love

I will freely follow the path of Christ your son

I give thanks that is your nature to shine with mercy

I give thank that you are the God of forgiveness

I stand in awe at the cost you bore to pay for my sin

I weep for the pain you bore to pay for my sin

STF 424 refrain

All of this you did so I could come to your holy mountain

All of this so you could call me child

All of this so I can stand saved

STF 424 refrain

You have forgiven me – alleluia

You have cleansed me -  alleluia

You have welcomed me – alleluia

Send me with great alleluia to spread your word 

Prayer to God

Prayers to God from Joel 2:1-17

Blow the trumpet in Zion;

call a solemn assembly;

   gather the people.

Sanctify the congregation;

   assemble the aged;

gather the children,

   even infants

For when people gather in my name I am with them

When forgiveness spring forth I am there

When people see my glory they repent

They become my children

Of them I am proud of them 

Blow the trumpet in Zion;

   sound the alarm on my holy mountain!

Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble,

   for the day of the Lord is coming, it is near—

a day of darkness and gloom,

   a day of clouds and thick darkness!

Like blackness spread upon the mountains

He has descend his holy mountain to reach his people

The Lord our God had walked the mortal life to reach us

He ascended Calvary’s hill to save us

He suffered upon the cross to show us real forgiveness

He died and rose again to call his children home

The son of man did all this so heaven and earth will shine forth his glory

Yet even now, says the Lord,

   return to me with all your heart,

with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;

   rend your hearts and not your clothing.

Return to the Lord, your God,

   for he is gracious and merciful,

slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love.

If they only we loved one another

If they we’d listen to Gods word

If only we’d gladly accept His holy sprit

If only we had eye to see and ear to hear

Between the vestibule and the altar

   let the priests, the ministers of the Lord, weep.

Let them say, ‘Spare your people, O Lord,

For God is our refuge of old

He is are hope and security

Upon him build your life

For his forgiveness is eternal

He will never forsake us

He will never abandon us

God will never forget to forgive  

He is our salvation 

Ash Sunday Oos

Order of service:

Call to worship: Romans 10: 9-13

If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you profess your faith and are saved. 11 As Scripture says, “Anyone who believes in him will never be put to shame.12 For there is no difference between Jew and Gentile—the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him, 13 for, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.

·      

   Prayers to God

Today we are marking a time of self-reflection and seeking Gods forgiveness but duering this time let us never forget the wonder and glory of God

Hymn: StF 82: How great though art (oh lord my God)

MBW P141: Para 3

MWB P142: Para 4

MWB P142 para 5 (read collectively)4

We hear are marking the decent of God from his holy mount to Calvary’s hill, never forgetting he is the rock upon which all creation relies – let us rejoice that God  love is steadfast and will hold us forever 

Hymn: Stf 645 Will your anchor hold

Prayer of adoration Companion to the lectionary 3: p64

Reading: Matthew 17: 1-9

Reading: Matthew 6 5-15 -19-21

Sermon: Down from the mountain to Calvary

This is the start of a time of penitence- a time when in the word of the 3^rd verse we realise how small the debt owed to us and how great the debt we owe to God

Hymn: Stf 423: Forgive our sins as we forgive

MWB: P146 para16

Word to be on the screen in yellow

(before the cross) I have sinned, I have come to repent and give my life back to the lord

(after the cross) I have been forgiven; God has given me life anew

MWB: P147 para17 (a)

Let us leave filled with the grace of the lord, repentant and reformed, knowing not the work of our hands has saved us but the endless grace of God

Hymn: StF 434 rock of ages

Dismal:            

Length of service

5 hymns at 5 minuets a piece = 20 min

1 sermon = 15 min

1 all age address 7 min

4 prayers - 12 min (that 3 min a prayer)

Lords prayer + Collection  2 min (depending on size)

= 56 minuets

so if you have communion you better do it quick 

Naked truth

This blog is based on  Genesis 3 – Verses 3-11: 

I was recently preaching about being children of God

I was sharing the preaching of the word with a worship leader who said, if your troubles by not feeling like a child of God talk to the lay preacher in the congregation

Or today's preacher

Me?

ME!

What do I know about this – I don’t feel like a child of God I merely preaching about it

I did not pick the topic it was simply there in the chosen readings

I just speak on a given topic. I have no special knowledge or insight

I suddenly felt ashamed

I felt naked

I wanted to hide

So who are we to answer these questions – to not only eat but serve the fruit of knowledge?

In the passage we’ve heard God forbids the eating of the fruit of knowledge

But why?

Well God knew the fruit of knowledge was dangerous – once you know about your place in creation you cannot simple exist within it

The fruit make give you knowledge of good and evil (like God) but does not make you a fit judge

Once you have judged you are good you will judge others as evil

Once you know about the world that separates you from the innocent

Once Adman and Eve had eaten the fruit they were as distant from Eden as an adult is distance to a baby.

Separated not geographically but by knowledge – the knowledge of there dominion, the knowledge of good and evil and the knowledge that they were not innocent.

So is this the answer to reject knowledge?

To be a Christ said like little children

Well no of course not

The fruit has been eaten – the great fall has been endured

We are no longer innocents, frolicking in the Garden of Eden

So what can we do?

We could hide like Adman and eve but what good will we do?

People will seek us out, they will find us. Preacher our pretty easy to spot

We could answer with the theological answers that come almost off the shelf 

Though we would simply be hiding our nakedness because we were ashamed of it

We would simply be separating ourselves once more – leaving the asker to wonder alone

Or we could like Adman and Eve and answer honestly, come what may

If we do not know then we do not know

We should be unashamed of our intellectual nakedness

If we are troubled by something then let us be troubled

If we are puzzled then we are puzzled

If we do not accept the store brought theology, why will the seeker accept are repetitions of it?

No we must accept that though we eat the fruit we are not equal with God

We are intellectually and emotionally naked and only he can cloth us

We seek absolutes and reassurance – when absolutes bring only temporary reassurance  

We are merely people called by God

We do not know Gods meaning or purpose

 Only God can provide that

We are allowed to wonder and search and doubt and not know

We are called to be honest to people, so they may know what truth looks like

we are simply asked to be tellers of truth

Rejoice in our nakedness for this is God work 

Dedications for LPG

Matthew 5: 27-30

27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’[e] 28 But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart. 29 If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell. 30 And if your right hand causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to go into hell.
As many of you know I have been preparing a sermon on Sex. I am not sure if I will ever find either the courage or opportunity to actually give it but I thought I would give you a flavour.
The reading is one considered but rejected for this sermon, so when I accidently volunteered for the dedications to start this evening I thought I could share some thoughts on it.
So who is up for a little show!

You have preaching at you, right now, the closest thing you get now a day to an insane, Old Testament style prophet any church can find. I am sure I could get my hands on a fairly good knife and I am sure some good reverent or other would be okay to bless the fire.

Come on Brothers and sisters roll up, one quick cut and redemption and salvation can be yours, simple and quick and actually entertaining. What’s this, this passage is not supposed to be taken literally; it is a metaphor for the power of Christ. It means the old self will die and be burned and the new self will be better for it.
I have my doubt this passage is quite that tame but let us play the timid game, and ask ourselves one simple question. If we believe this is a metaphor why do we seek people actually do it. On not with actually factual knives and real flesh but something more precious than simple flesh, their souls, their very nature, their own selfhood?

I should know, in my foolishness as a young man I took the template of the perfect Christian and cut myself to fit. Anything that was unworthy of this template was cut off. Of course that which was most offensive to the church (well to be fair the one I saw on the telly) was anything sexual so that had to go, that had to be scourged.

I am not alone, what do you think those who don’t fit the template we have set do? They either mutilate themselves or leave. Homosexuals in the US seek a cure!  Prolife Christians perish rather than commit murder, peace loving Christians join the army to defend the faith, the week parade as the strong and the merciful ape the sometimes merciless church.

I promised this address would be short and so short it will be. We must be faithful to the scripture but we must not confuse the ideals set forth in divine revelation as anything other than an ideal to reach for. They depict the perfected end project set forth by God and only realizable when we ascend into God kingdom
On this earth the church has a different calling, the call of Christ. We must not shame, or exile those who fall short of God ideals for that is humanity, for they are the people Christ came to call. He came for the sinners; he came for the prostitutes, the forgotten, the dirty and the broken.

When I think of Christ, I think of him upon the cross and I remember once a preaching talking of the image of Christ on the cross and he said “this is not an image of man killing God, it is one of God unlimited forgiveness, look Christ arms are open to embrace the world who is rejecting him, look again Christ is forgiving those who are killing him”.

So let us end with scripture, and to Hosea Hosea 6 6
6 For I desire mercy, not sacrifice,
    and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.

Let us not make sacrifices of the faithful anymore, let us not make the ideals of scriptures moral measurements, so we the fallen, feel safe to judge others against them. Let us instead like Christ embrace a fallen world and embrace and redeem those who fall short of God’s ideal. And be lifted together to the kingdom to be one of the body eternal.


Prayer based on Hosea 6 1-3
 “Come, let us return to the LORD.
We have torn ourselves to pieces
    but he will heal us;
We have injured ourselves
    but he will bind up our wounds.
We have murdered ourselves
2 After two days he will revive us;
    on the third day he will restore us,
    that we may live in his presence.
3 Let us acknowledge the LORD;
    let us press on to acknowledge him.
As surely as the sun rises,
    he will appear;
he will come to us like the winter rains,
    like the spring rains that water the earth.”
We shall walk with him as his children
To sacrifice, to kill, to injure no more
And there will be no more weeping or mourning
For the old order has passed away
For God’s kingdom has come

Sermon on sex

1 Corinthians 7-9
Romans 13:8-14
Matthew 15 8-20

Brothers and sisters todays sermon is going to be difficult and uncomfortable for many of us – you have heard the readings and can probably guess the subject matter; love and sex. It has been God will that I give sermons on the day to day issues Christians face and which cause us to struggle and there is not greater issue of contention then sex and sexuality. So today we walk with God into this troubled land, hopefully to walk out whole again. 
This sermon will explore the bible teaching, church practice and modern approaches to sex concluding as always in the promise of forgiveness. 

As I hope you gained from the bible passages, the bible does talk of sexual relations, Paul especially. It is at the first reading 1st Corinthians 7-9 where we start, with the ideal. Chastity! It is almost laughably out of touch, but we should not be so quick to dismiss it, it was so central to the early church that it joined people in chased marriages (people of the same sex and not). So why is an idea so at odd with human nature the ideal? 
I think it is twofold. It is twofold; firstly it is the life Christ led. Christ represented and hopefully still represents the ideal human life for all God’s children therefore anything he did we should aspire to. Secondly it epitomizes the command to love one another without reward. If we love everyone equally, marriage is an exclusive type of love which leads to unequal love (you love your wife and children far more than your neighbor . So when the disciples ask Jesus who he favors  you could see it as who he loved more but Christ refused this debate by reaming chased.  In short Christ led a life of love without sex and this is the ideal to which the early church clung and to which we are still called. 

I stand before you as a virgin and I tell your brothers and sisters love without sex is not that hard, do we not have such relationships with are relatives and are friends, are we not called to give without receiving? It may seem very distant and alien but a live of love is a reward in itself.

I am not so foolish and inhuman to suggest this is for all. Even Paul concedes that God formed the institution of marriage. It is marriage to which  most Christians aspire and believe is the ideal. It is in the familiar passages in Matthew 19-6 which itself an echo is of is an echo of genesis 2-12 where we find marriage expounded most fully and I say fully half sarcastically. There is no great explanation here. Apart from god made man and women and they need, I assume. To become one in the flesh and once they are joined together (an act pre-ordained by God) no one can tear them asunder. 

Paul may have been idealistic about the sexual part of human nature but God was not, he understood that part of being male or female was a need to procreate and join with another. He knew also that this life was hard and had its troubles and beyond physical sustenance we would also need emotional sustenance. In order to fulfil human need scripture tell us that God created a partner for each of us and sealed us together in a bond that cannot be broken. 

Some may think it is to ignore reality to speak like this but in this sermon I am talking often of the ideal. We live in a time where some people seem to practice easy marriage but we Christians cling to the ideal of marriage. That God made for each of us a partner for life and joined us until death parted us. God knew in order to trust someone enough to join wholly with them that union must be irrevocable. The gospels are quite strict on what can dissolve this union, some say nothing and some say adultery but the point is we still believe I hope in the ideal, that when we marry we marry for life. 

I do not mean to argue that divorce is some terrible sin, though myself I am cautious in rejoicing in it. I am merely saying that marriage is ordained by God and the ideal (there is that word again) is a full marriage not one only about sex but one that fulfills the needs we have both emotional and physical. If a marriage fails, this need does not end so people must once more join but  simply because we accept that human reality often falls short of the ideals God sets before us does not mean we should indulge in hasty marriage or marriages of convince. The end of a marriage is to be lamented and the pain and the hurt cared for pastorally but the ideal is a worthy one ordained by God for us.  

I am sure there are still some out there who think of me as you must of Paul, out of touch, overly judgmental preacher who knows nothing about sexual lust and real human experience. Well there is truth in that but I am not without use quite yet. 

I know that a great many people today will not marry as virgins and they are not ashamed of this. They see sex as both recreation and a tool for deepening human relationships; sex is in this view the key to creating a solid framework on which a marriage can stand. I call this view sex within a loving relationship. 

Again we have move from the ideal, first from love without sex, then to love and sex within marriage and now to love and sex. I am not here to alter the law (as Christ said), you have heard the scriptures and you know the law but I am not here to condemn either. If we seek marriage to be a true union of people then maybe we will have to learn to live with sex within a loving relationship. 

As we move from an age where people looked to the church for the framing of their life, to one where they look all over, we can either accept that some don’t feel the need for a formal union but still “burn with passion” in the words of Paul or alienate more and more people. As I have said this is not the ideal but what I found great comfort in, is the second reading Romans 13:8-14, which reminds us that are first duty is to love on another and love does not do harm and I can think of little good in lecturing good Christians that their lives are commend or un-saveable due to sexual sin. 

As I showed the children we cannot love someone and child them at the same time. I am not asking us to abandon are ideals but to accept that there is a gulf between them and human reality and it the command of God to fill this gulf with mercy and acceptance, hoping that God will lead them from sin to full reconciliation with him. 
There is one change in the accepted views on sex, however, brothers and sisters that I wish warn against and this is sex only as entertainment. Our final reading Matthew 15 8-20 warns against the corrupting nature of sexual sin, it remains us that a corrupt heart is the result and will be the cause of such actions. Sex is not a toy; yes it may be enjoyable but its purpose is emotional as much as it is physical. If you run around sleeping with anyone, merely for the joy of it how are you living for the life immortal? What are you putting away in the kingdom to enjoy when you are called? God gave us scripture to improve us, he sent Christ to lift us, he set the ideal to aspire. See how far you have fallen from the ideal – love without sex and now sex without love! This is too far, this is too much.

Those who live like this pursue only the now; they have no sight on the eternal. Now often they believe they can only get emotional succor by trading sexual favor and that is partly are fault. They have found that others only want sex of them and act accordingly. They have no seen or felt close to the high ideals we preach about so often. Well we must show them, we must if we are in a relationship with them make a commitment, break the cycle and we must return to the very ideal we must show them love without sex is possible and is available here and now. 

On that final point I would equally like to rebuke the church. The church has far too often remained silent on the reality of sex and human relationships. On sexual sins it has created inhumane “human laws” which have been sauce of much misery and suffering. The church has treated sexual sin as unforgivable an equally scriptural indefinable position as sex without love. It has not preached as it should or acted in a loving way. Just as sex without love is indefensible so is rebuking without compassion. 

When I think of struggling single parent, divorce, overly burdened families all whom we have let down. We have set the ideal set forth in scripture as icons and sacrificed these people to them. When they need aid and forgiveness, we gave them dogma and judgment. We have confused the ideal way of life with the only way of life acceptable to god and we have punished continually those who have not lived up to it. 
Paul reminds us that love does no harm so why we must ask has the churches often unhealthy obsession with sex been so harmful. Often because it has been based on human morality, on wanting to control people rather than save and heal them. We have a chance to get ahead of the game as they say and be the church God calls us to be a church for sinners, for the single parent, for the sexually overly active for those made ill through sexual illness and the church for the prostitute. It is not random chance that these are exactly the people Christ eat with for he knew it was the people seen as unforgivable that needed God the most.

So where are we now, we have the ideal, we have “church life” and we have “Human life” which goes all the way to the ideal to the none ideal, in short we have gulfs. Gulfs between what people think is ideal, is okay, is acceptable, gulfs between the church and people and gulfs between the ideal and us. So what is the correct reaction? Is it to entrance and section of these gulfs; is it to turn these gulfs into moats?  Or is it to bridge these gulfs, to fill them with mercy and acceptance? I think we should think of what God did; God saw the gulf between him and his creation, he tried filling it with mercy and forgiveness but still the gulf existed. So he brigaded it, not with words but with deeds, not with an single outstretched finger but with two outstretched arms on the cross, that is the sort of bridged we need. 

This to me seems the obvious conclusion that the church and Christian approach to sex should neither be permissive (merely tolerating or glorifying whatever society thinks is okay) nor should it be lawful, moralistic and unrealistic. In the end we cannot reconcile with one another while we try and tell them off (chastise them), in the end we must tell people the good news. That God walks with us, that God understand the messy complex lives we lead and that his ideals are to lift us up not to keep us down.