Worship Service at Church of the Dawntreader Thursday December 27, 2012 10:00 a.m. SLT
Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®.
    Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™
    Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide.
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"New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989,
Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
Used by permission. All rights reserved." Designated by the initials, (NRSV).

Invocation:
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Love of God, and the Communion of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Amen
Confession and Absolution
We come before you, our Loving Father, Mother God, confessing most of all our need of you.
We confess that we have not always acknowledged just how much we depend on you.
We confess that we have not always loved you with all our heart, soul and mind.
We have not always loved our neighbors as ourselves.
We ask that you will forgive us and grant us your strength to conform more fully to your loving will for us.
We pray in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
Amen.
In obedience to the command of our Lord Jesus Christ, it is my privilege to declare to you and to myself, the entire
forgiveness of all our sins.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen

Prayer of the Day
Let us pray.
Shine into our hearts the light of your wisdom, O God, and open our minds to the knowledge of your word,
that in all things we may think and act according to your good will and may live continually in the light of your Son, Jesus Christ,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.
Amen

First Lesson: 1 Samuel 2:18-26 (NRSV)
18 Samuel was ministering before the Lord, a boy wearing a linen ephod.
19 His mother used to make for him a little robe and take it to him each year,
when she went up with her husband to offer the yearly sacrifice.
20 Then Eli would bless Elkanah and his wife, and say,
“May the Lord repay you with children by this woman for the gift that she made to the Lord”; and then they would return to their home.
21 And the Lord took note of Hannah; she conceived and bore three sons and two daughters.
And the boy Samuel grew up in the presence of the Lord.
22 Now Eli was very old. He heard all that his sons were doing to all Israel,
and how they lay with the women who served at the entrance to the tent of meeting.
23 He said to them, “Why do you do such things? For I hear of your evil dealings from all these people.
24 No, my sons; it is not a good report that I hear the people of the Lord spreading abroad.
25 If one person sins against another, someone can intercede for the sinner with the Lord;
but if someone sins against the Lord, who can make intercession?”
But they would not listen to the voice of their father; for it was the will of the Lord to kill them.
26 Now the boy Samuel continued to grow both in stature and in favor with the Lord and with the people.
Here ends the First Lesson

Psalm 84 (NIV)
1 How lovely is your dwelling place,
    Lord Almighty!
2 My soul yearns, even faints,
    for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
    for the living God.
3 Even the sparrow has found a home,
    and the swallow a nest for herself,
    where she may have her young—
a place near your altar,
    Lord Almighty, my King and my God.
4 Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
    they are ever praising you.
5 Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
    whose hearts are set on pilgrimage.
6 As they pass through the Valley of Baka,
    they make it a place of springs;
    the autumn rains also cover it with pools.
7 They go from strength to strength,
    till each appears before God in Zion.
8 Hear my prayer, Lord God Almighty;
    listen to me, God of Jacob.
9 Look on our shield,[e] O God;
    look with favor on your anointed one.
10 Better is one day in your courts
    than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
    than dwell in the tents of the wicked.
11 For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
    the Lord bestows favor and honor;
no good thing does he withhold
    from those whose walk is blameless.
12 Lord Almighty,
    blessed is the one who trusts in you.
Glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.

Second Lesson: 1 John 3:1-2, 21-24 (NIV)
1 See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!
And that is what we are!
The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.
2 Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known.
But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.
21 Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God
22 and receive from him anything we ask, because we keep his commands and do what pleases him.
23 And this is his command: to believe in the name of his Son, Jesus Christ, and to love one another as he commanded us.
24 The one who keeps God’s commands lives in him, and he in them.
And this is how we know that he lives in us: We know it by the Spirit he gave us.
Here ends the Second Lesson.

Gospel Lesson: Luke 2:41-52 (NRSV)
41 Now every year his parents went to Jerusalem for the festival of the Passover.
42 And when he was twelve years old, they went up as usual for the festival.
43 When the festival was ended and they started to return, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but his parents did not know it.
44 Assuming that he was in the group of travelers, they went a day’s journey.
Then they started to look for him among their relatives and friends.
45 When they did not find him, they returned to Jerusalem to search for him.
46 After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.
47 And all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers.
48 When his parents saw him they were astonished; and his mother said to him, “Child, why have you treated us like this?
Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”
49 He said to them, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
50 But they did not understand what he said to them.
51 Then he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them. His mother treasured all these things in her heart.
52 And Jesus increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favor.
Here end the Readings from Holy Scripture.

 - Sermon -

Appropriately enough in the middle of the Christmas Season,
our lessons for this week are about dysfunctional families.
Sadly, many people experience the ways their families fail to work and play together
around the holidays and the Holy Days.
Disappointment with the people we love the most
is one major cause of holiday depression.
As with everything surrounding the celebrations of our faith,
my recommendation is to place more emphasis in our hearts and minds
on the birth of our Lord than any of the other experiences of the season.
Life is full of changes,
but the celebration of the birth of Christ is a dependable source of peace and joy for us.
Even more than this,
the very stories of our Lord and His Holy Family
help us to live with our own very human families and all their foibles and weaknesses.
Things did not go easily or comfortably for them in their family life,
from the beginning
and all the way through.
When Christ was born,
they were not at home.
They had to travel just at the crucial time
when Mary was about to give birth.
There was not even a place for them to stay in an inn.
The Son of God came into our world in a stable, a cave where animals took shelter.
His cradle was a manger where cattle would feed.
How strange it must have felt.
That stable, that cave, and that manger
are precious to us
because of the gift God gave to us all then and there.
It probably became precious for Mary and Joseph as they looked back on it,
but at the time it must have felt very strange.
"What does God want from us?" they must have asked themselves.
Then, after the shepherds with their strange stories of angels' songs
and the wise men from the east offering their gifts,
they were forced to become refugees,
fleeing the king who wanted to kill the newborn King in His infancy.
The holy family is seen so often on the road
in a time when travel was difficult and dangerous.
Yet all of these experiences had to have been among the things that Mary, the Mother of our Lord kept and treasured in her heart.
If we sometimes feel that our families have a hard time in life,
reflecting on the Holy Family of our Lord
will give us at least a sense of solidarity:
We are not the only ones who struggle with the circumstances of life.
Sometimes we also struggle with each other.
Parents and children have different priorities and expectations,
and we will inevitably disappoint each other.
Accepting that reality from the beginning
and loving each other anyway
is a way we can learn to live at peace with each other,
mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters,
and all our extended families: cousins, aunts and uncles, in-laws and outlaws.
Giving each other a hard time seems to be part of what families do,
sometimes even with the best of intentions.
Our Gospel lesson for this week tells us about one of those hard times
that Jesus and His parents caused for each other.
Jesus was twelve years old.
They had gone to Jerusalem for the Passover,
a privilege of the Jews who live in the Holy Land over the centuries,
and a hope, a dream and a prayer of Jews scattered all over the world, as they say, "Next year in Jerusalem!"
When it came time to return home to Nazareth,
the Holy Family was not all together.
Mary and Joseph thought Jesus was with the caravan,
and it was only after a day's journey that they realized He had been left behind.
Mary and Joseph hurried back to Jerusalem, where they searched for Him for three days.
By the time they found Him in the Temple,
they must have been frantic.
As frantic mother's have done from time immemorial,
Mary scolded her Son:
“Child, why have you treated us like this?
Look, your father and I have been searching for you in great anxiety.”
She gave Him a hard time for disappearing like that.
He responded as adolescent boys almost always respond,
with some expression of independence:
“Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”
Here we have a normal family quarrel in the Holy Family.
If we follow the Christian tradition closely,
both sides of that quarrel, Mother and Son,
were without sin.
Even though neither of them was in the wrong,
they were arguing.
I think we sinners can take hope from this situation.
We also argue with our families,
but that does not mean that we do not love each other.
With the best of intentions,
we sometimes give each other a hard time.
It just seems to be part of the human condition.
People are different from each other,
and those differences sometimes lead to conflicts,
especially with the people we love the most.
All our families are holy.
We don't always live fully in that holiness,
and our disagreements are not signs that we are not living in the holiness of our families.
If it happened to the Holy Family, too,
we need not be so surprised that it happens to us.
Learning to celebrate our differences and accepting each others' limitations
can go a long way toward living in unconditional love
as God's love calls us to do.
Not expecting too much from each other can save us from being terribly disappointed.
At the same time,
we are grateful for our families,
even though they are not perfect.
At least they are ours.
Best of all, with His eternal Christmas gift to us all,
God has given us His Son to be our Brother.
Through Him we are all restored to our own Holy Family,
where God is our Father and Christ is our Brother
and so we are sisters and brothers to each other, here and now.
Learning to live in the joy and peace of our Holy Family in this world
prepares us, heart, mind and body
to live in that Holy Family
with all those we love
in our Father's House forever.
Amen.

Prayer of the People
Please type your spontaneous petitions in chat.
Each prepared petition is intended to remind us of the things we need to pray about,
so a brief pause will be provided for us to pray our own petitions,
either sharing them in the chat window
or praying them in our own hearts.

Loving God, we pray for each other, for those who depend upon us for prayer, and for all people according to their needs.
We ask that your healing power may prevail in our lives.
We pray that those in positions of public trust may be worthy of that trust as they act as stewards of power and wealth
for the benefit of all.
We pray that conflicts may be resolved in the context of relationships,
so that violence of thought word and deed may be diminished all through our world.
We ask your blessing for all who bear witness to the Gospel, so that relationships with you may be deepened for all people.
All these things, and whatever else you see that we need, we ask that you will grant for the sake of your Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ, in Whose name we pray.
Amen.
Our Lord's Prayer
Our Father 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 sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the Kingdom, and the power and the glory, forever and ever,
Amen.
Benediction
May the Lord bless us and keep us.
May the Lord make His face to shine upon us and be gracious to us.
May the Lord lift up His countenance upon us, and give us peace.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,
Amen +