The Eighth
Sunday of Pentecost
**Please note this service is based on the format of the Anglican Church of Canada. Unless otherwise indicated, all prayers come from the Book of Alternative Services (BAS) and the hymns from the Book of Common Praise (BCP). Other hymns and prayers have been sourced to give appropriate credit.
**Music selected by the team effort of Jeanne Kaye and Reverend Theo.
**NRSV translation used for the readings, unless otherwise stated.
**This is for personal use at home as the church is unable to gather in our houses of worship but together we can worship in our own homes.
Opening Prayer
Let us pray.
Seed-planting,
fish-netting, bread-breaking, pearl-hunting God, you shape us into living
parables. Pray with your Spirit in us so that we may understand our experiences
as healing metaphors, and become creative and abundant stewards of the environment
you entrusted to our love. Amen. (Revised Common Lectionary Prayers)
Opening Hymn – Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee (BCP #425 / ELW #836)
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.
And also with you.
Collect for Purity
The Gloria
Collect of the Day
Let us pray.
O God, the
protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is
holy, increase and multiply upon us your mercy, that with you as our ruler and
guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things
eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the
Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.
The Readings
A reading from
the Book of Genesis 29:15-28
Then
Laban said to Jacob, “Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me
for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?” Now Laban had two daughters;
the name of the elder was Leah, and the name of the younger was Rachel. Leah’s
eyes were lovely, and Rachel was graceful and beautiful. Jacob loved Rachel; so
he said, “I will serve you seven years for your younger daughter Rachel.” Laban
said, “It is better that I give her to you than that I should give her to any
other man; stay with me.” So Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they
seemed to him but a few days because of the love he had for her.
Then
Jacob said to Laban, “Give me my wife that I may go in to her, for my time is
completed.” So Laban gathered together all the people of the place, and made a
feast. But in the evening he took his daughter Leah and brought her to Jacob;
and he went in to her. (Laban gave his maid Zilpah to his daughter Leah to be
her maid.) When morning came, it was Leah! And Jacob said to Laban, “What is
this you have done to me? Did I not serve with you for Rachel? Why then have
you deceived me?” Laban said, “This is not done in our country—giving the
younger before the firstborn. Complete the week of this one, and we will give
you the other also in return for serving me another seven years.” Jacob did so,
and completed her week; then Laban gave him his daughter Rachel as a wife.
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be the God.
Psalm 105:1-11
O give thanks
to the Lord, call on his name,
make known his deeds among the peoples.
Sing to him, sing praises to him;
tell of all his
wonderful works.
Glory in his
holy name;
let the hearts of those who seek the Lord
rejoice.
Seek the Lord and his strength;
seek his presence
continually.
Remember the
wonderful works he has done,
his miracles, and the judgments he has
uttered,
O offspring of his servant Abraham,
children of
Jacob, his chosen ones.
He is the Lord
our God;
his
judgments are in all the earth.
He is mindful of his covenant forever,
of the word that
he commanded, for a thousand generations,
the covenant
that he made with Abraham,
his sworn promise to Isaac,
which he confirmed to Jacob as a statute,
to Israel as an everlasting covenant,
saying, “To
you I will give the land of Canaan
as your portion for an inheritance.”
A reading from
the Letter of Paul to the Romans 8:26-39
Likewise
the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we
ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God,
who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the
Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
We
know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are
called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined
to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the
firstborn within a large family. And those whom he predestined he also called;
and those whom he called he also justified; and those whom he justified he also
glorified.
What
then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He
who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not
with him also give us everything else? Who will bring any charge against God’s
elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who
died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who indeed
intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship,
or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it
is written,
“For
your sake we are being killed all day long;
we are accounted as sheep to be
slaughtered.”
No,
in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I
am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things
present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything
else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord.
The word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.
Gradual Hymn – Jesu, Jesu, Fill Us with Your Love (BCP #504 / ELW #708)
The Lord be with you.
And also with you.
The Holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew. 13:31-33, 44-52
Glory to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
He
put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed
that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds,
but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that
the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
He
told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman
took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
“The
kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and
hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
“Again,
the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding
one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
“Again,
the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught
fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put
the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the
age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and
throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing
of teeth.
“Have
you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore
every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master
of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
The Gospel of Christ.
Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
Sermon
Over the last few weeks, we have been
hearing the story of Jacob, a trickster, a manipulator, a self-serving, lying
for his own gain type of person who is more concerned with personal security
and preservation than about family traditions and cultural values.
He used Esau to be pulled out his mother’s
womb.
He then bamboozled his brother out of his
firstborn birthright by trading it for a bowl of "red stuff," as Esau
named the soup.
Finally, Jacob, with the careful connivance
of his mother Rebekah, tricks his dying blind father, Isaac, out of the
patriarchal blessing, first given to Abram so long before.
So with birthright and blessing in hand,
Jacob runs for his life from the justifiable rage of his brother.
In today’s reading, he is out to find
himself a wife from the family of his crafty Uncle Laban, his Mother’s brother.
But before we talk about that, I want to give you a brief overview of what
happened in the first half of Genesis 29, which we didn’t have the luxury of
hearing but is an important piece to today’s story.
Spurred on by his "ladder dream,"
Jacob makes his way through the desert. Exhausted, hot, thirsty, and surely
near the end of his rope, he comes upon a well. There are three flocks of sheep
lying around the well; and on the top of it, there was a large stone. The
custom of the people of the area was, that when all the flocks from the area
got to the well, the shepherds would roll away the stone from the top of the
well, they would water their sheep, and then they would put the stone back on
the top of the well. This would all be done as a team.
After speaking with the shepherds, Jacob
discovers that he has arrived in Haran and he is excited! Haran is the land of
his mother’s family!
Jacob begins to ask the shepherds about his
uncle and family, but in the middle of the conversation, Laban's daughter,
Rachel appears in on the horizon - and with her is a huge flock of sheep. (A
huge flock of sheep means Uncle Laban is rich!) And since Jacob’s 'MO' is
security, he quickly hatches a plan to be alone with Rachel. He figures, charm the daughter, and get an
easy "in" with Uncle Laban.
As Rachel gets closer, however, Jacob's
motivation to 'just get an easy "in"' with Uncle Laban fades. Rachel is so beautiful that Jacob is knocked
over… Rachel isn't just a rich girl, she's a pretty rich girl, and that’s about
all Jacob needed to know. It’s love at
first sight!
Jacob shows himself off by lifting the
stone from the well - you know that one that usually takes all the shepherds to
move? – and waters Rachel’s sheep. And then, like a gallant knight in shining
armor, he takes Rachel’s hand and gently kisses it…
Laban is soon told of the appearance of
this son of his sister, Rebekah, and he runs out to meet Jacob. Over the next
while, Jacob tells his Uncle Laban the whole story… even how he swindled his
brother out of his birthright for soup, and how he tricked his old Dad Isaac
with the goatskin to get a blessing! Laban, the king of manipulators himself,
slaps his nephew on the back shouts a telling phrase: "You are surely my
bone and my flesh!" He means more than they are just related; they are in
fact two peas in a tricky pod, one trying to best the other the very minute
they meet!
Laban invites Jacob to stay for a month in
his house. At the end of that month, he asks Jacob “Tell me what you’re doing
here, what you really want?” And so Jacob tells him that he wants Rachel as his
wife.
And now we get back to today’s reading
where the trickery awaits.
Laban tells Jacob that just because he’s
family doesn’t mean he shouldn’t be paid for his work with the flocks and
herds. Jacob offers 7 years of employment in exchange for Rachel’s hand in
marriage.
Laban agrees to exchange Rachel for 7 years
of labour. When the 7 years are up, Jacob goes to collect his pay. A great
marriage feast is arranged at the end of which a veiled woman is thrust into
Jacob’s tent.
Maybe he was drunk, maybe she was heavily
veiled, maybe it was really dark, but somehow Jacob didn’t realize until the
next morning that he had in fact married the wrong woman.
He went storming off to Laban to demand an
answer. It was then that Laban revealed the custom of the eldest marrying first
which is why Jacob found Leah in his bed.
Isn’t it ironic that birthright is the
reason for the switch? By the way, the custom of taking the older daughter
before the younger was the same for Jacob's people, but we know that honoring
tradition was not at the top of Jacob’s priority list…
But crafty Uncle Laban doesn’t stop
there. He provides yet another deal to
the younger, less sophisticated manipulator... “Stay with Leah through the week
… and then you get Rachel at the end...
And I can do this for the low, low price of… another seven years.”
Because his love for Rachel was so strong,
Jacob really had no choice but to agree or he would have had to give her up
forever.
It’s hard to find a moral to this story.
Laban’s trickery won out, unloading both daughters onto Jacob and getting free
labour out of it. A tough topic especially if you take into consideration
women’s rights and equality. And Jacob was the victim of “what goes around
comes around” karma.
But if we look deeper into Jacob’s part in
this story, there is a glimmer of a silver lining. Jacob gets swept away when
he sees something he wants and he works hard for it. But after working so hard,
he didn’t get quite what he was expecting.
Isn’t that the way sometimes? We get our
hopes up high for something and in the end, the grass only appeared greener on
the other side?
But maybe we need to follow Laban’s advice
– “wait a week, and you’ll get Rachel too”.
In other words, stick around for a while
longer - trust that it was God who has led you here, trust that God knows what
God is doing, be faithful to where God has led you, to what you have been
called to do.
Did you know that Jacob was to have 12
sons? And Rachel gave birth to only 2 of them. Imagine the richness of life
lost, (not to mention our loss of heritage) had Jacob walked away from Leah in
a huff!
Sometimes in the process of facing the
morning after, you realize that “Rachel'- or the ideal - comes as a result of
working things through and not leaving the table when you get disappointed, or
when things aren't turning out as you expected. It takes patience and trust
that the struggles, the disappointments, and all of the ugly are part of God’s
plan for your life and that sticking with it will eventually put you exactly
where you are meant to be.
God’s new reality is closer than you think,
already seeping into your life even though you can’t always feel it. No matter
what it may look like, God’s kingdom will prevail. And so in the face of war,
we claim God’s peace. When confronted with illness, we look to God’s eternal
healing. When faced with hate, we proclaim love. Why? Because the kingdom is
coming and before you know it will transform everything.
But first we must have patience and trust.
God’s disruptive, life changing, and ultimately life-giving kingdom is coming.
It will take some patience, trust, and perseverance to await it, and when it
comes it will likely not be what we expect and perhaps not what we even wanted.
But to those who recognize there is something more out there than the world has
offered, to those who are willing to acknowledge the deep ache in their hearts
for a sense of true if also illusive joy, then it will come as more than we
could have imagined and will invade, take over, and transform our lives.
Jacob’s story teaches us that while we may
not always get what we expected, we should trust that this place that we are in
right now could be exactly where God wants us, or has been leading us all
along; trust that God is working right here, to bring about things we don’t
even know about that are yet to come!
Perseverance, patience, and trust.
Get through the morning after… Stay the week… You’ll get Rachel in the end…
Affirmation of Faith
Let us confess
the faith of our baptism, as we say the Apostles’ Creed:
The Prayers of the People
Many people’s needs press upon our daily lives and fill our daily news. That we may respond as neighbours, let us ask the Lord for help, saying: Lord, in your mercy, hear our prayer.
Help us to be
neighbours to strangers, to people of every land and tongue and culture. Lord,
in your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
Help us to be neighbours to all who suffer, the lonely, the sick, and the sorrowing. We take time now to name those known to us, those whom we keep in the deep recesses of our hearts, and those know only to you, God. Lord, in your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
Help us to be neighbours to people of every creed, to Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, Buddhists and atheists. Lord, in your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
Help us to be neighbours to the enemy, the alien, the despised, those with whom we disagree. Lord, in your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
Help us to be neighbours to everyone we pass on the road, to salespeople, co-workers, family, and passers-by. Lord, in your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
Help us to be neighbours to one another, and thus to share our lives as we share your word and your supper. Lord, in your mercy,
Hear our prayer.
Please take time to offer your own intercessions or to pray in silence.
Lord God, you formed us in love; you command us to live in your love. Hear the prayers we make in the name of the Son you sent to dwell among us, the neighbour who is attentive to all our needs, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (Intercessions for the Christian People)
Gathering our prayers together, let us pray as Christ has taught us,
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.
Save us from the time of trial,
And deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
The power, and the glory,
For ever and ever. Amen.
Confession and
Absolution
Dear friends
in Christ,
God is steadfast
in love and infinite in mercy; God welcomes sinners and invites them to the
table. Let us confess our sins, confident in God’s forgiveness.
(Silence)
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against
you in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done and by what we have left
undone. We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our
neighbour as ourselves. We are truly sorry and we humbly repent. For the sake
of your son Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and forgive us, that we might
delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your name. Amen.
Almighty God, have mercy upon you, pardon and deliver you from all your sins, confirm and strengthen you in all goodness, and keep you in eternal life; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
The peace of the Lord be always with you.
And also with you.
Prayer over the Gifts
**Although not physically at our church buildings to share
our offering together I would encourage you to set your offering of money aside
so that it can be dropped off or placed in the church once services resume, to
mail your offering to the church, or to make donations online. Please remember
ministry is still taking place.
Let us pray.
God of grace,
accept all we offer you this day, as we look toward the glory you have
promised. This we ask in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
Doxology
Glory to God,
Whose power, working in us, can do infinitely more than we
can ask or imagine. Glory to God from generation to generation, in the Church
and in Christ Jesus, for ever and ever. Amen.
Blessing
The blessing
of almighty God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, be upon you now and always. Amen.
Closing Hymn – Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven (BCP #381 / ELW #865)
Dismissal
Go forth into the world, rejoicing in the
power of the Spirit.
Thanks be to God.
