March 2, 2022 9:45 AM Worship at Myers Park - ASL

[Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] so [Music] well good morning friends and welcome to our 945 worship service on this the first sunday of the season of lent welcome to those of you who are joining us in the room welcome to those of you who are joining us online it's good to be together in god's house and to worship god in this way my name is james howell i'm one of the pastors here and i'm up front this morning with my friend and colleague reverend nancy watson good morning to those of you who are here and those of you who are joining us online as well we're so grateful for the technology that brings us together every sunday even though it's the beginning of lent there are still many places for you to plug in we have small groups that are running now and there is still room for you and dr howell will be doing um bible study each wednesday uh having to do with lent and we encourage you to draw to join us for that check our this week at myers park for all that is going on now let's prepare our hearts for worship [Music] foreign [Music] each week during lent we will extinguish a candle please join us in the responsive call to worship found in your bulletin all those who find their protection from god will find rest and assurance all those who love god and call upon him for help will be answered and rescued [Music] um [Music] is [Music] uh [Music] brothers and sisters both here and at home would you join me with one voice as we together proclaim our faith using the apostles creed i believe in god the father almighty maker of heaven and earth and in jesus christ his only our lord who was conceived by the holy spirit born of the virgin mary suffered under pontius pilate was crucified dead and buried the third day he arose from the dead he ascended into heaven and sitteth at the right hand of god the father almighty from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead i believe in the holy spirit the holy catholic church the communion of saints the forgiveness of sins the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting amen [Music] [Music] friends would you join me in our prayer of confession which you will find in your bulletin let us pray lord we come to you in all our brokenness sin has crept into our hearts molded our minds formed our words and separated us from you meet us in these broken places heal our wounds and grant us hope amen hear the truth jesus christ died for us while we were yet sinners that proves his love for us in the name of jesus christ you are forgiven glory to god amen [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] or [Music] please stand for the reading of the gospel the gospel reading is luke chapter 4 beginning with the first verse and jesus full of the holy spirit returned from the jordan and was led by the spirit for 40 days in the wilderness tempted by the devil and he ate nothing in those days and when they were ended he was hungry the devil said to him if you are the son of god command this stone to become bread and jesus answered him it is written man shall not live by bread alone and the devil took him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time and said to him to you i will give all this authority and their glory for it has been delivered to me and i give it to whom i will if you then will worship me it shall all be yours and jesus answered him it is written you shall worship the lord your god and him only shall you serve and he took him to jerusalem and set him on the pinnacle of the temple and said to him if you are the son of god throw yourself down from here for it is written he will give his angels charge of you to guard you and on their hands they will bear you up lest you strike your foot against the stone and jesus answered him it is said you shall not tempt the lord your god and when the devil had ended every temptation he departed from him until an opportune time this is the word of god for the people of god i should ask you to bear with me i woke up a little bit rattled i had this very vivid dream last night that the russians invaded charlotte and they came here to queens and providence and they were going to stop us from building our church building oh my goodness speaking of russia we we have an offering right now for uh ukrainian refugees uh and it's not going into some big offering i've been in conversation this week with uh bishop patrick strife this is the bishop over poland and other eastern european countries haven't been able to reach the bishop over ukraine and we set up a situation with some churches there we can help real people that we have a connection with so i know you'll want to give generously to that lent has begun i was interviewed uh the other day as part of a webinar that was offered by the upper room sort of the spiritual publishing arm of the methodist church and uh it surprised me with a question the woman said tell us your childhood recollections of lent and i said no i don't have any i had never heard of lent until i went to seminary i was a severely underchurched person but when i heard about mine i found myself really drawn to it right like a 40-day focus season that really works for me 40 days in the bible that's like a thing uh i don't know if you notice the title of evan's uh wc piece that he played before the service it's entitled went and then the subtitle has the adjective melon colic right i i'm some you know this about me i'm not a sunny disposition guy i'm drawn toward melancholy so the lint really works i was guilt motivated as a kid that's how my parents thought you get people to behave you motivate them with guilt and if any of you had that what a curse to carry throughout your life i've learned later that lent's not really about guilt but maybe appeal to me the season of focus it's a season of fasting did you hear it when dale read it jesus was in the wilderness and he did not eat anything season of fasting uh if you were here on ash wednesday you heard dr uyan kim tell a story that i remember well the game of the shivers at the time juyon told about the time i had called and had offered him a place on our staff i said yan come join us be one of the pastors at mars park church usually in such situations i would whine and dine the person i'd say let's go to a great restaurant and have a big meal and a couple glasses of wine this has really worked for me in recruiting people leon said clearly to me on the phone he said i'll let you know in four days and i said why four days he said i'm gonna be fasting for four days nothing but water this made me really nervous uh and the reason is at the end of four days he said god said no i couldn't argue with him could i right he'd done this holy thing of fasting for four days lent uh a season of fasting it's not a time to go on a diet and eat the things that shouldn't be eating anyway it's more of a discipline of giving something up that's precious to you so that you might find what is more precious to you for many years i would give up chocolate for olympics i love chocolate that's an understatement and when i would give up chocolate for lent i would have bad days on bad days i would think oh i want that chocolate chip cookie poor me on my worst days i would say i am so holy i have refrained from the chocolate chip cookie on my better days i would think how superficial am i that i am undone by a simple thing like a chocolate chip cookie on my better days i would realize that the hankering deep in my soul isn't for a chocolate chip cookie which won't really give me life or hope or eternal life my real hankering that i discover only once i have the hankering denied for the chocolate chip cake my dig hankering really is for god on my good days i would think about the people that can't just snap up a chocolate chip cookie or whatever they want to consume because they don't have enough and i could be one in a brief solidarity with them there are all kinds of fasts that you could engage in during lent that might be good for you i know friends they shut down facebook for the season of lent not a bad idea i have a friend he shuts down his smartphone he only uses it as a phone think about that he'll answer the phone but he's not going to use the thing to surf the internet and so on that's a fast when is the time to expose our addictions our superficiality my daughter sarah who's a pastor texted me yesterday and said are y'all doing the thing again where you tell people to give up alcohol for lent i texted back and said well no but i should and if you were here a few years back we did this i said let's give up alcohol for lent and then my brilliant idea of driving to church the morning i was going to tell this was that we'll create a fund with the money you would have spent on alcohol we'll call it the spirit fund like i just love this and we use the money for some alcohol rehab program it was really interesting because people coming out of church that they said to me yeah i don't think i could do that and i said well that's what you need to know that's what you need to know one group of our adults that love to get together they said how will we have a party if we don't drink that's what we need to know god asked us to do hard things sometimes we think god comes to comfort us god comes to make our life easier but if you read the bible god asks us to do hard things and doing hard things not bad you you grow when you do hard things you remember when you do hard things i love the carry newcomer song you can do this hard thing god's wired us where we can do hard things god asks us to do hard things uh jesus endured a season of testing in the wilderness and we could look at this passage and say how do i overcome temptation the way that jesus did i think this is a fool's errand first of all we hardly try to overcome temptation our society says if you have a need you better satisfy that thing if you have a want you better figure out how to satisfy that we're not even trying to avoid things right and jesus peculiar chest i mean they're unusual right i mean what would you do if you were offered the power to turn rocks into bread i turned the rocks under bread in a nanosecond because there are hungry people out there and i could give them bread that would be so great if i were offered power over all of the world i'd take that i would be a benevolent dictator people would be so happy james is in charge now i thought in the methodist church we don't have a pope i thought we should have a pope if i could be the pope i'd be a benevolent pope we forget that even gandalf and the lord of the rings and frodo offers him the ring and gandalf says no tolkien understood that power correct see jesus isn't about power over jesus is about a different kind of power a humble serving under that is tender and compassionate not ruling over then the last temptation luke reports is uh the devil takes jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and says jump which would be a very bad idea except he quotes bible to him sometimes people quote bible they think they're so holy because they've done it i'm sorry the devil quotes the bible that doesn't win the day and he quotes from psalm 91 who says god will protect you god will protect you this is the devil's favorite bible verse because people buy that they think god will protect me and then when god doesn't protect me i got cancer i got cancer my husband was in a car accident god didn't protect us there must not be a god and satan says got another one with my favorite bible verse god another parenthetically to talk about the devil what are we talking about here when i was a little boy i guess if you ask me what the devil look like i'd say you know red guy horns tail pittsburgh breathing fire if you saw a red guy with a pitchfork breathing fire you would run away and you wouldn't be fooled by such a creature you'd be scared to death you see if there's a real force of evil in the world it looks really pretty doesn't it looks really attractive it looks really seductive it says man have i got a deal for you here's the moon do you want it and we say yeah i'll take the moon and we fall for it niko's cousin zacchaeus in his novel the last temptation of christ imagines jesus out there in the desert and the form the devil takes there is this bird with claws that keeps flapping up behind jesus and he plants his talons into jesus shoulders and jesus like oh leave me alone leave me alone some theologian said the devil's greatest while is to convince us that the devil doesn't exist i like thomas merton's idea better thomas merton says what the devil wants above all else is attention and credit what the devil wants above all else is attention and credit god wants us to think the the sound system we had to crackle that was the devil a demon possessed sound system there was right the devil wants to see the devil like behind every rock i got i got an email from a pastor friend of mine in the ed said do we have a study for youth on the devil i said you know thomas merton said it's actually a bad idea to focus so much on the devil what he said is instead we could should focus on the beauty we should focus on the wonder that is jesus and if we could be attentive to the beauty and the wonder that is jesus we would not notice what is the demonic all around us maybe for us it primarily takes the form of voices in your head do you hear voices in your head if you never do report to me after church talk about this we hear voices chatter going on in your head it afflicts me mostly i can stay busy during the day it afflicts me when i wake up in the middle of the night what kind of voices what the voices say in your head do they say you're not enough you don't have enough you didn't lose the game you're a loser you're too fat you're too tall you're too old you're too fill in the blank you don't have enough or they're the voices and it's really the good life in america that beckons in the head if you just buy this if you just own this you deserve oh if you just go there if you just fill in the blank if you just enter the voices that are in our head and i wonder if the season of lent let's think about it this way the season of when is a time to sort out the voices in our head instead of hearing those voices that are you aren't enough or if you only just buy this shiny thing instead we could hear the voice of jesus it's like at least not flew to arizona this week i wish i had brought my noise canceling earphones they are a wonder indeed you put on the noise canceling earphones you can't hear anything else except the music or whatever that you choose to hear like maybe god wants us to have like that we beg we hear jesus voice and not all the other voices my dream about the russians coming wanting to stop us from building the church that's one of the devil's voices let's just stop church the devil loved the pandemic right some people said to me during the pandemic i got out of the habit of coming to church and the devil's like got another one got another one d kirkpatrick is a local guy i read a newspaper article about him he pulled off what lisa and i have been working on lisa's been researching her ancestors and which among them were slave owners and we hope one day to meet a descendant of one of her ancestors slaves d kirkpatrick pulled this off he went to high school with a jimmy kirkpatrick who is descendant of the slave that his great great great whatever grandfather anyway d kirkpatrick is a forensic psychologist so he decided to write a book on that experience but also what was it that enabled slave owners to own other people and treat them brutally like what enables you to do that in your head so i picked up the book i haven't read it yet he's going to do a podcast with me but i surveyed the table of contents and here's what i found right is is that slave owners were psychological acrobats and they're really good at denial delusion and rationalization when i saw that i said that's all of us we are all of us psychological acrobats we all of us engage in denial we all of us engage in rationalization don't we maybe lent us the season you stop the denial you don't need to you don't need to just deal with reality look at the truth when this is the season or i don't rationalize any longer like make good decisions for god lent to season not to be a psychological acrobat but a focused follower of jesus it's interesting that uh in luke's version of this just as he names jesus going into the wilderness to deal with the devil he names the political powers of the day and the implication is that they're part of the demonic in the world names the emperor tiberius the governor pilot judean king herod people in those days would have said they are the pawns of the devil and what does that translate to today if i say are there political leaders who are the pawns of the devil if i say to you the name vladimir putin you're like yeah that's evil incarnate in the world if i say to you the name joe biden half of america will say yeah that's evil incarnate in the world and if i say to you the name donald trump the other half of people will say yeah that's evil incarnate in the world do you see how that works we think the powers of the world are like they're the ones that are in charge they're the ones that have to deliver the goods they're the ones that we go to if we got the wrong ones though we complain but but in but instead right what's this about i interviewed the other day recorded it's going to be on the wednesday bible study not then swinsey but the next gary mason who's an irish pastor who's traveled the world doing peacemaking with palestinians and israelis and folks in northern ireland he's amazing one of the things he talked about is how christians engage in the real issues of the world to make a difference and he said but also christians are the ones who never invest much trust at all in the temporal instead they invest their energy in the eternal you see otherwise we do that all the time we invest our hopes and our dreams in the temporal but actually it's only the eternal that we're called to invest our hopes in and to work for not the temporal but the eternal the temporal can't carry the weight oojan in his uh wonderful homily on ash wednesday quoted thomas merton who told the truth merton said the source of all sorrow is the illusion that of ourselves we are anything but dust god is all our joy and in him our dust becomes splendor i love that you are dust but don't hang your head in shame it's so good you are the dust into which god breathed the breath of life all that we have all that we are we're totally dependent upon god he is our life he is our hope he is the eternal one there's a season of that how did he put on this noise cancelling is there a vision cancelling glasses to see jesus how do we make this the season that we can shut out those other voices and we focus on the voice of jesus how do we all those shiny things that allure us and seduce us and said we would just look at the face of jesus i think about the beauty of jesus ferris lord jesus we sang that last sunday beautiful savior think of jesus out there in the wilderness he is desperately hungry and the devil offers him so much and jesus responses no you know i'm all about god i want to do god's will i humbly submit myself to do whatever god is asking of me i'm here on a mission from god and that's what i'm going to do i'm not going to be sidetracked into anything else so much beauty jesus he touched the people that nobody else would touch jesus loved the people that nobody else cared for that were despised jesus healed people who had no other hope at all jesus gave his life for us he is our savior he does what we cannot do for ourselves jesus was raised from the dead how beautiful was his face when he emerged from that tomb did he see his mother he saw the disciples and jesus is here with us now and he is so beautiful his words are so true and so full of life my friends this went let's recall that we are dust beautiful dust splendid dust let us turn our eyes always upon jesus so much beauty so much grace so much wonder thanks be to god let us prepare our hearts for prayer let us pray loving god as we move through lent help us to draw near to you in praise stripping away all that distracts us from worshiping you forgive us for our apathy for our lack of courage to speak out forgive us when we walk past those who are in need and don't offer help forgive us when we get it wrong may we be a liberating presence and offer love compassion and whatever is needed to act justly love mercy and walk humbly with our god lord in your mercy o god of grace and love let us serve you in our world we ask that you would lead us into action give us strength to be a voice crying for justice and peace pour on your people such love and kindness that we cannot remain silent we cannot tolerate injustice or poverty as your grace fills our hearts may we be stirred into action to demonstrate your compassion for all your people lord in your mercy god of grace give us hearts hungry to serve you and those who need what we have to give we pray today for countries where justice seems far away where human rights are ignored let us remind those in power that prisoners are not forgotten we pray that the dignity of life is respected and remember those who have lost that dignity through war through aging or neglect lord in your mercy we pray for the power to be gentle we pray for the strength to be forgiving we pray for the patients to be understanding all of this we pray in your son's name praying as he taught us saying 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 trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us and lead us not to temptation but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever amen we're so grateful for your support of this church and the many ministries of that this morning we have shelley abel from the music department to tell you a little bit about what this ministry that you support has meant to her good morning when my family moved to charlotte in 2013 we visited lots of lovely churches but my heart kept calling me back to mars park methodist for the wonderful folks that i met and the wonderful preaching of course too but in many ways for the wonderful music hoping to find a place to plug in at a large church i started showing up at the hambell choir as a substitute ringer and soon had a regular spot almost 10 years later it's still the way i stay plugged in to my church family it's the 90 minutes each week where i get to take off all my other hats take off mama and wife attorney and co-worker and i just get to be a child of god making a joyful noise unto the lord when a group of people come together in a music ensemble and make music together it can be a really transcendent experience as they move together and breathe as one it can transform your experience and worship each week especially now that we get to be together as a live congregation in recent years my children have joined in as they played charms and handbells with tinker bells junior bells and youth bells and some with children's choir and youth choir and as an adult volunteer i've gotten to have a front row seat to their development as musicians and as christians we are so blessed to have exceptionally gifted professional musicians on staff jennifer brian sue evan and our new director hugh floyd i encourage you to seek out any of them to find out how you might find a spot in our music ministry to make your own joyful noise unto the lord thank you and thank you thank you shelley and it is your generosity that makes this and so many ministries here in this church possible thank you in advance of your giving today oh is [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] is [Music] yes [Music] more is [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] is [Music] [Music] [Music] um [Music] [Applause] [Music] o creator god lord of all that is accept our gifts and our lives that the world and all people may know your love and compassion for it's in your son's name that we pray amen [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] it occurs to me as we close a couple things uh from the pandemic when the sanctuary were empty i would look into a camera and try to imagine you being out there one of the things that i've tried to say across the space i want to say in this space and to those of you that are still out there i love you we love you you are loved you matter here in this church family and the second thing is that we're glad more folks are coming back in person but we know that during the pandemic we picked up folks who will never be here in person some may be in a nursing home but some live in other cities other states other countries you are part of our church family now and we cherish that and we love you and this is going to be church going forward it's a beautiful thing god is good and does so much for us so friends may the grace of our lord and savior jesus christ the love of god the father and the fellowship of the holy spirit be with each one of us both now and forevermore [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Myers Park United Methodist Church

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Length: 59min 7sec (3547 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 06 2022