Worship Service at Church of the Dawntreader Thursday November 14, 2013 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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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.
O God, the protector of all who trust in you,
without you nothing is strong, nothing is holy. 
Embrace us with your mercy, that with you as our ruler and guide,
we may live through what is temporary without losing what is eternal, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
Amen
First Lesson: Malachi 4:1-2 (NIV)
 1 “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace.
All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,”
says the LORD Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them.
2 But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays.
And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves.
Here ends the First Lesson
Psalm 98 (NIV) 
1 Sing to the LORD a new song,
   for he has done marvelous things;
his right hand and his holy arm
   have worked salvation for him.
2 The LORD has made his salvation known
   and revealed his righteousness to the nations.
3 He has remembered his love
   and his faithfulness to Israel;
all the ends of the earth have seen
   the salvation of our God.
 4 Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth,
   burst into jubilant song with music;
5 make music to the LORD with the harp,
   with the harp and the sound of singing,
6 with trumpets and the blast of the ram’s horn—
   shout for joy before the LORD, the King.
 7 Let the sea resound, and everything in it,
   the world, and all who live in it.
8 Let the rivers clap their hands,
   let the mountains sing together for joy;
9 let them sing before the LORD,
   for he comes to judge the earth.
He will judge the world in righteousness
   and the peoples with equity.
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: 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 (NIV)
 6 But Timothy has just now come to us from you and has brought good news about your faith and love.
He has told us that you always have pleasant memories of us and that you long to see us, just as we also long to see you.
7 Therefore, brothers and sisters, in all our distress and persecution we were encouraged about you because of your faith.
8 For now we really live, since you are standing firm in the Lord.
9 How can we thank God enough for you in return for all the joy we have in the presence of our God because of you?
10 Night and day we pray most earnestly that we may see you again and supply what is lacking in your faith.
 11 Now may our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus clear the way for us to come to you.
12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you.
13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy
in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.
Here ends the Second Lesson.

Gospel Lesson: Luke 21:5-19 (NIV)
 5 Some of his disciples were remarking about how the temple was adorned with beautiful stones
and with gifts dedicated to God. But Jesus said,
6 “As for what you see here, the time will come when not one stone will be left on another;
every one of them will be thrown down.”
 7 “Teacher,” they asked, “when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are about to take place?”
 8 He replied: “Watch out that you are not deceived. For many will come in my name, claiming,
‘I am he,’ and, ‘The time is near.’ Do not follow them.
9 When you hear of wars and uprisings, do not be frightened.
These things must happen first, but the end will not come right away.”
 10 Then he said to them: “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.
11 There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places,
and fearful events and great signs from heaven.
   12 “But before all this, they will seize you and persecute you.
They will hand you over to synagogues and put you in prison, and you will be brought before kings and governors,
and all on account of my name. 13 And so you will bear testimony to me.
14 But make up your mind not to worry beforehand how you will defend yourselves.
15 For I will give you words and wisdom that none of your adversaries will be able to resist or contradict.
16 You will be betrayed even by parents, brothers and sisters, relatives and friends,
and they will put some of you to death. 17 Everyone will hate you because of me.
18 But not a hair of your head will perish. 19 Stand firm, and you will win life.
Here end the Readings from Holy Scripture.

 - Sermon -
In our lessons for this week, once again we are dealing with questions about the end of time
and how we cope - or do not cope - when we think we are living in the end times.
There are people who become obsessed with the idea of the end of the world.
It can seem like a perfect escape from hard times.
There are others who want to believe that things as they are can go on forever.
But it seems to me that living with the world as it is forever
would be a good definition of hell,
since we are in such need of redemption.
In our Gospel lesson Jesus gives warning of the signs of the end, and a careful reading - or listening -
will teach us that the signs of the end are followed by the words, "... the end will not come right away."
In other places in the Bible, Jesus clearly tells us that no one knows when the end will be.
A healthy sense of our own mortality is what we need
to give us a sense of our limitations.
Our own time sees plenty of wars and uprisings,
and many of those are based on religious differences.
In our time, as in no other time in the long history of human beings treating each other badly,
we are in a position where it would actually be possible for us to destroy ourselves.
We walk on a tightrope between being too agressive on one hand
and too undefended on the other.
But because so many conflicts are religiously based,
it is important for all believers to understand clearly that everything they believe is wrong.
Yes, my dear friends in Christ, I'm talking about you and me as well as all other religious people.
You see, our beliefs are based on false conceptions about exactly what we can and cannot know of spiritual truth.
Revealed truth especially is beyond our comprehension.
We do experience mysteries, and that is common to all people.
Even in human relationships, friendship, love, caring there is more than we can describe in a few words.
We are faced with the inadequacies of our own minds
to grasp and explain many of the things that happen to us in life.
Birth and death are among the greatest mysteries,
and they are the events that mark the beginning and end, the limits of our sojourn on earth.
We develop religious doctrines that attempt to describe those experiences
and our experiences of many other mysteries.
But those attempts to describe are feeble at best,
and they always fall far short of the reality we are trying to talk about.
Sometimes the experience itself is limited by the terms of the doctrines, and that is truly tragic.
Doctrines are at their worst
when we insist that they are uniquely correct,
that our own formulation is the only true one.
We try to define the mysteries in terms of our religious beliefs
when the mysteries of life - especially the life of the spirit 
are so much greater and larger than the terms we use to try to describe them.
According to the New Testament, there are three enduring realities of spiritual life:
faith, hope, and love.
These are all important as we think of the great mysteries of life, and they intermingle and deeply relate to each other.
Each has its opposite, too, and we need to be careful of those as the opposites of faith, hope and love
are deadly to our spiritual well being.
Faith is the struggle to understand the mysteries of life:
What do birth and death really mean?
Where do we come from, and where are we going?
Doubt is strong evidence that we are in the midst of the struggle to understand;
doubt is not the opposite of faith.
The opposite of faith is belief.
Please don't misunderstand:
Believing (as a verb) is not the opposite of faith.
Believing is as much a part of faith as doubting, and the two are closely related
as we are in the process of faith.
But when our believing is crystallized into belief, and worse, into enforceable doctrine,
the struggle to understand can cease,
and the end of the struggle is deadly to faith.
You see, as long as we are in this world,
we do not have any final answers.
At best we are in the midst of experiences we cannot fully understand.
We hope that in the end it all comes to mean something,
but we have to live without certainty.
When we think that we have certainty, we are suffering from an illusion,
for no certainties that we can hold onto now are permanent.
Hope depends on our looking for something better tomorrow,
if not in this life, then in the life to come hereafter.
Hope looks forward with a feeling that there is more to life than we can see at the moment,
and that something more, which we cannot yet see, is good.
We would love to have certainty,
and so we are often taken in by empty promises of certainty.
We want to know for sure that good things are coming,
but we cannot know that.
If we cling to a single idea of good things to come,
we can be disappointed when those good things fail to materialize.
The disappointment of failed certainty can be deadly to hope,
and the loss of hope is among the most devastating experiences we can have in this life.
The illusion of certainty about the end of time diminishes our experience of hope
and it diminishes concern for our own well being and the well being of others here and now.
Finally, the concern for our own well being and the well being of others
is a way of describing love.
If we care, we love.
The opposite of love is not hate,
for both love and hate are forms of caring, the positive and negative forms, if you will.
The true opposite of love is fear,
since fear is overwhelming in its power to disable everything else.
Fear is an ancient instinct that releases massive doses of adrenaline
to enable fight or flight in the face of danger.
In those moments of necessity, fear is a great blessing.
The rest of the time, it is disabling because it takes over the entire mind and body.
We want to protect those we love, and in the moments of actual danger, fear may enable us to do so.
If we continue to cling to fear in times that danger is not upon us,
even the feelings that accompany love in our hearts
are disabled by the power of fear to take over everything.
Fear numbs us.
Fear causes us to act irrationally.
Fear can be a powerful tool of irresponsible religion and politics,
since fear can cause people to follow the guidance of a religious or political demagogue.
As we think about the end - the end of our own lives in death or the end of the world as we know it -
we can focus on fear or we can focus on love.
We cannot do both.
If we focus on fear, we will act irresponsibly and irrationally.
If we focus on love, we will act in a manner that shows our caring concern for ourselves and for others.
To call our hearts and minds to focus on love, we hear beautiful promises in our lessons for this week.
The prophet Malachi tells us that "the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its rays.
And you will go out and frolic like well-fed calves."
If we think about it, that really is a lovely image.
And the Lord Jesus promises us that
"Not a hair of your head will perish."
If we give our attention to the love of God for us,
the love that is the source of those great promises,
then even thoughts about our own death and the end of the world
hold no fear for us.
We can believe that life is good even when some of our beliefs are challenged or proven wrong.
We can hope for a better day in the midst of the uncertainties of our lives.
We can love one another instead of being afraid of or for each other
because we ourselves have known love, and we have been loved.
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 +