Welcome to our service - 13 March
This service sheet can be used individually or with households.
We would encourage you to say (or even sing) hymns and songs out loud.
Prayers, other liturgy or readings can be said out loud or silently, corporately or individually.
If you are able, we would also like invite you to join us for our main Sunday service, 10am, in church and on Zoom. Even if you have never been to St Gabriel’s before we would love you to join you. Please get in touch with the vicar Alistair (vicar@saintgs.co.uk) and he will send you the Zoom details.
SERVICE
Opening
Praise to you, O Christ, King of eternal glory.
The Lord is a great God, O that today you would listen to his voice.
Harden not your hearts.
Praise to you, O Christ, King of eternal glory.
SING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vegvb1u5s4
Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,
the King of creation;
O my soul, praise Him,
for He is thy health and salvation;
all ye who hear,
brothers and sisters, draw near,
praise Him in glad adoration.
2. Praise to the Lord, who o'er all things
so wondrously reigneth,
shelters thee under His wings,
yea, so gently sustaineth:
hast thou not seen?
all that is needful hath been
granted in what He ordaineth.
3. Praise to the Lord, who doth
prosper thy work and defend thee!
Surely His goodness and mercy
here daily attend thee.
Ponder anew
what the Almighty can do,
who with His love doth befriend thee.
4. Praise to the Lord!
O let all that is in me adore Him!
All that hath life and breath come now
with praises before Him!
Let the amen
sound from His people again:
gladly for aye we adore Him.
Words: Joachim Neander (1650-80)
tr. Catherine Winkworth (1829-78)
Music: Stralsund Gesangbuch (1665)
CONFESSION
“Now is the healing time decreed
for sins of heart and word and deed,
when we in humble fear record
the wrong that we have done the Lord.”
(Latin, before 12th century)
Spend some time in quiet and silence asking that God’s Spirit would reveal those areas in your life where you need His forgiveness.
Compassion and forgiveness belong to the Lord our God, though we have rebelled against him. Let us then renounce our wilfulness and ask his mercy by confessing our sins in penitence and faith.
Wash away all my iniquity
and cleanse me from my sin:
(Silence)
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
Against you, you only have I sinned
and done what is evil in your sight:
(Silence)
Christ, have mercy.
Christ, have mercy.
Create in me a pure heart, O God,
and renew a steadfast spirit within me:
(Silence)
Lord, have mercy.
Lord, have mercy.
ABSOLUTION
May the father of all mercies cleanse us from our sins,
and restore us in his image
to the praise and glory of his name,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
COLLECT
Almighty God,
by the prayer and discipline of Lent
may we enter into the mystery of Christ’s sufferings,
and by following in his Way
come to share in his glory;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
SING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tPp8ov7cks
Speak, O Lord, as we come to You
to receive the food of Your holy word.
Take Your truth, plant it deep in us;
shape and fashion us in your likeness,
that the light of Christ might be seen today
in our acts of love and our deeds of faith.
Speak, O Lord, and fulfil in us
all Your purposes, for Your glory.
Teach us Lord full obedience,
holy reverence, true humility.
Test our thoughts and our attitudes
in the radiance of Your purity.
Cause our faith to rise, cause our eyes to see
Your majestic love and authority.
Words of power that can never fail;
let their truth prevail over unbelief.
Speak, O Lord, and renew our minds;
help us grasp the heights
of Your plans for us.
Truths unchanged from the dawn of time,
that will echo down through eternity.
And by grace we’ll stand on Your promises; and by faith we’ll walk as You walk with us.
Speak, O Lord, till Your church is built
and the earth is filled with Your glory.
Keith Getty & Stuart Townend ©2005 Thankyou Music
READINGS
Romans 12:3-5 New International Version - UK
For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others.
John 15:1-8 New International Version – UK
‘I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit he prunes so that it will be even more fruitful. You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, as I also remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself; it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me.
‘I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples.
This is the word of the Lord,
Thanks be to God.
Talk by David Stout
Giving Our Best to Others in the Church
Good morning, for those who might not know me, I’m Dave, hello, good to see you, and I’m one of the people who come to this church.
Today, I’m going to be doing the obvious thing and I’m going to be making some Tiffin… or as our transatlantic and antipodean cousins call it, ‘Rocky Road’… they’re basically the same thing.
Bit of quick history on the whole Tiffin/Rocky Road thing… Tiffin appears to have been invented in Troon, Scotland in around 1900, erm, and that’s about it really on the history Tiffin, and to be honest that’s pretty much it on the history of Troon. A town where not a huge amount has happened. Or frankly not really anyone very famous has been born there. Andrew Cotter is probably the most famous son of Troon, you’ll have heard him commentate on the Winter Olympics if you caught any of that this year.
Rocky Road, on the other hand appears to go all the way back to 1853 in Australia where it was created, apparently, to sell confectionary that had spoiled during the long trip from Europe. These effectively inedible sweets were mixed with nuts and cheap chocolate to (and I quote) “disguise the flavour”… mmm tasty.
So for those of you unaware of the Rocky Road/Tiffin arrangement, it’s basically a fridge cake. So you don’t bake it. It’s a combination of melted chocolate, butter, syrup, various biscuits and sweet things, all jumbled up together and then left to set. A lovely tasty treat.
So you’ll see I’ve got my ingredients in front of me. We have:
• Butter
• Golden syrup
• A lot of chocolate, both milk and dark
• Some mini marshmallows (200g)
• Some raisins
• Cranberries
• Glace cherries
• Mixed peel (total of 175g of fruit)
• Maltesers
• And, some malted milk biscuits (300g between this and malteser)
So first up I’m going to make the sticky, chocolatey, messy bit and in a couple of minutes I’m going to need someone to run through to the kitchen and put this in the microwave.
So if you get a bit bored in sermons, then this is the opportunity to offer to help do that and look quite good, but also you get to duck out of the sermon, so you know, win/win.
Right, we’re going to take 175g of unsalted butter. Chop it up, put it in the bowl.
Then 5 tbsp of Golden Syrup
And then the healthy part, 650g of chocolate.
And we’ll break that all up, mind your ears everyone, smash it up on the side here.
And there we are.
Now I need that volunteer to take this to the microwave, and you’ll probably need to run it for about 2-4 minutes, depending on the microwave.
Who’d like to do this?
Please make sure you don’t burn the chocolate, so give it a good mix every 30-40 seconds or so. It doesn’t need to be completely melted but just quite liquidy.
Thank you very much, we’ll see you in a few minutes.
So whilst we wait for the melty goodness, let’s have a little look through the rest of these ingredients.
Mini marshmallows – for me, and I appreciate I’m a bit of an outlier on this, but I could leave the marshmallows out. They don’t really do it for me. They’re fine, I don’t have an issue with them, they’re just not really me. I think what it is, is that when you bite through a rocky road, everything is quite firm or crunchy and then you come across a marshmallow and it’s a totally different experience. It’s soft, it’s sticky, it gets you out of your eating groove, weirdly they put me a bit on edge. But loads of people like them, so fair enough really.
Raisins – often seen as quite dull, right. Raisins. It’s just a raisin. But really super sweet. They properly pack a punch. I think we’ve over-indulged with raisins to appreciate just how good they are to be honest. They’re in basically every festival based food stuff, hot cross buns, simnel cake, Christmas cake, mince pies, Christmas pudding… not sure there are any other festival type foods… garibaldi biscuits, they must celebrate something. No one would make them by choice. What I’m saying, is Raisins are everywhere. They’re 10 a penny.
Next up Cranberries. Basically, slightly bitter raisins. Sort of. Same sort of thing, but just a different, slightly more astringent affect. And definitely a foodstuff that’s really come of age. I don’t think I knew what a cranberry was when I was a kid, other than you had it as a sauce at Christmas. That was the only time they existed.
Next up, ah yes…. When is a fruit, not actually a fruit? When it’s a glace cherry. You take a cherry and then you basically just douse the thing for ages in sugar syrup, and then you can preserve it. That’s sort of the point. It keeps for far longer in that state. But my word they’re sweet.
Mixed Peel – love a bit of candied mixed peel. Candied mixed peel is just like a glace cherry, except you start with something inedible (the peel of lemons and oranges) then do the whole dousing thing, and you end up with some lovely. Like if you met mixed peel when it was young you wouldn’t like it, it’s horrible and bitter, but it’s grown up a bit now, it’s 0sweet, it’s lovely. A lot of time for mixed peel.
Maltesers – well then… King of the chocolate snacks? Maybe? I certainly, on any given day, would rate the Malteser definitely top 3. Absolutely love it.
And finally malted milk biscuits. Now these are often overlooked in the biscuit aisle. They’re not your glamourous biscuit with thick chocolate or layers of different flavours, and yet they’re not your common or garden type biscuit such as custard cream, or digestive. They are a solid biscuit. And yet, I would say, every time you have one, I think you’re slightly taken aback by how much they bring to the table. Very simple looking thing. Bit of weird name. Malted Milk. But yeah, it’ll absolutely do.
So we now have our chocolatey melty yumminess, and we mix it all together. A load of broken up biscuits, maltesers, marshmallows, an array of different fruits, all encompassed in this frankly glorious chocolatey goo.
I’ll pour that all into this dish, and then I need this to be taken back to the fridge. Lovely, thank you. Rocky Road. Give it a bit of time to set and that is a gorgeous, sweet treat.
Each of these ingredients are great. I would happily eat any of this neat, on its own. Not too much of the butter, or the golden syrup, but I would. They’re all individually great bits of food. It’s mainly all quite sweet, but in differing levels and in different ways.
If you were to just have one of them, on its own, as the only sweet thing you ever ate from now on forever, you’d very quickly get bored of that flavour. Eventually you may even become quite sick of it. You’d certainly have had enough of it after a little while.
So maybe you need a bit more variation, maybe you need to be able to eat all of these ingredients individually whenever you want.
But even then, you’ll still be missing out. One day you eat raisins, the next day you eat marshmallows, the next day you have some chocolate.
See all of these ingredients are great, but when you mix them up together, they really shine. When you melt the chocolate and syrup, with the butter, that creaminess from the butter just knocks the edge off the syrup and chocolate. You know that harsh sweetness you get from processed sugar is just mellowed by that wonderful dairy, creaminess of butter. But if you just had a big block of that it would get so cloying in your mouth it would just be too much. So that’s where the fruit comes in, to break up and add in some fruity bitterness to proceedings. Then the biscuits and maltesers, they’re bringing crunch to the party. And even marshmallows, that I’m not even a fan of, but here they do make sense, because they’re light, they add like breath into the experience.
Now some of you will have seen where this has been going for a very long time, and others you might be like “erm, has Dave gone wrong, do we need to reboot him or something, what is he talking about”.
Rocky Road is good because when you bring all these ingredients together, they all shine. It becomes more than the sum of its parts.
This is what the church should be like. A place where all people can come and play their part. Be the person who God has called you to be. Where people of all backgrounds, races, ages, skillsets, whatever it might be, whatever difference it is, the church should be a place where all can come and be welcome. And in doing so, in coming together we share in one anothers qualities and characteristics and all are made more Christlike in that process. That sharing of our diversity, that giving of ourselves to this community, by coming and sharing together, is a foretaste of the New Heaven and New Earth and the culmination of God’s Kingdom come.
Now I look around and it’s clear that we are not as diverse as we should be. A church should be the product of its neighbourhood. This neighbourhood is more diverse than this church represents. And I’m not just talking about race here, just to make that clear, although very obviously we are not very racially diverse, that’s something that should be raising questions about our ministry. We are quite age diverse. We have people worshipping in this church from every age category. And that sharing, that giving of ourselves to form that diverse age profile, is a real joy to many if not all of us in the church. In being able to worship with people of all ages, we are drawn closer to each other and to God.
So where do we go from here… well let’s make some good Rocky Road.
I mean it. And that means letting everyone shine with the qualities and characteristics that are given to each one of us by God. Helping everyone feel welcome for who they are in this place.
Being thankful, and thanking one another for what we all bring to this church. And not just the ones who are very obviously “doing things” but to all of us. We are the church. We come together to be us.
For me, that means valuing and loving the Marshmallow people of the church. The people who I just don’t really get.
Maybe for you, someone is a bit of a Glace Cherry. They’re a bit much, a bit intense, you sort of wish they’d tone it down. But maybe you’re the chocolatey, syrupy, buttery loveliness that can envelope them, helping them come closer to others in the church.
Remember, sometimes we need a bit of crunch in the church. A person who’s a bit, “oooo, they shake things up a bit”.
I could take this analogy far too far. But you get the drift right?
And the best way, to help people feel welcome and comfortable, is to be generous in our thankfulness. So that’s my challenge to you today, 1 – make some rocky road, either churchy and or actual, or both frankly. And 2, who are you going to thank for being part of this church community.
That’s it, no major life decision, just simply saying to one person (or more) something like “thank you for being part of this church, I really like that you’re here. The fact that you’re here, makes it feel more like church to me.”
THE APOSTLES’ CREED
I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator of heaven and earth
I believe in Jesus Christ,
his only Son, our Lord,
who was conceived by the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried;
he descended to the dead.
On the third day he rose again;
he ascended into heaven,
he is seated at the right hand
of the Father,
and he will come to judge the living 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
O LORD, HEAR MY PRAYER,
O Lord, hear my prayer:
When I call answer me.
O Lord, hear my prayer,
O Lord, hear my prayer:
Come and listen to me.
Jacques Berthier/Taizé.
Copyright © 1982 Ateliers et Presses de Taize (France).
PRAYERS - written by Christine Carney
Heavenly Father, we confess our pride in thinking of ourselves and our opinions more highly than we ought. Help us to think of ourselves ‘with sober judgement’, as Paul says in Romans. Help us to see ourselves as a small part of the body of Christ in Greystones; help us to value one another and care for one another. Help us to focus on you, Lord Jesus, read your word, and trust in you through all the difficulties of daily life.
Loving Father, we cry out to you for the Ukrainians. Thank you for their courage and their determination to stop the Russian advance. We pray for your protection on President Zelensky, on the Ukrainian soldiers and the civilians being trained to defend their homeland. We pray for wisdom for world leaders and we pray for an end to the conflict. We pray for protection on the civilians who are trapped in basements and for safety for those who are trying to flee to the border including children, the disabled and the elderly. Thank you for the kindness of those near the Polish border in taking in so many refugees. We pray that all these people will find a safe place to live and we pray for healing from the trauma. We pray that those seeking to come to the UK will find a more compassionate welcome.
Father, we continue to remember in prayer the other areas of conflict and suffering in the world: Syria, Afghanistan, West Africa, the famine in Ethiopia and the drought in Somalia.
Loving Father, we pray for healing for those who are ill or in need at this time… We pray for healing for those who have Long COVID and for those who are depressed and have problems with mental health. We continue to pray that vaccines will be shared more equally with poorer countries and we pray for your provision for those who have lost livelihoods.
Many people will be feeling afraid and anxious at this time because of coronavirus, climate change and what they see happening in Ukraine. God of peace, please fill each one of us with your peace which passes understanding and empower us to reach out to neighbours, friends and those we meet each day.
Heavenly Father, we pray that you will be powerfully at work in people’s lives in Greystones.
I would like to invite you to select one of the following areas and, in a minute’s silence, to pray for these people or places: Greystones School, the medical centre, the pub, the café, the local shops, families with children, marriage relationships, those who live alone, the elderly…
(1 minute’s silence.)
We pray in the name of Jesus.
Amen
LORD’S PRAYER
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your Kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those
who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours
now and for ever. Amen
SING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74kyfROS4q8
I heard the voice of Jesus say,
‘Come unto me and rest;
lay down, thou weary one, lay down
thy head upon my breast’:
I came to Jesus as I was,
weary, and worn, and sad;
I found in Him a resting-place,
and He has made me glad.
2. I heard the voice of Jesus say,
‘Behold I freely give
the living water; thirsty one,
stoop down and drink, and live’:
I came to Jesus, and I drank
of that life-giving stream;
my thirst was quenched,
my soul revived,
and now I live in Him.
3. I heard the voice of Jesus say,
‘I am this dark world’s light;
look unto me, thy morn shall rise,
and all thy day be bright’:
I looked to Jesus and I found
in Him my star, my sun;
and in that light of life I’ll walk
till travelling days are done.
Horatius Bonar (1808-89)
OFFERTORY - Take a moment to consider how you are going to continue to give to the life of the church and support other aid agencies and mission organisations.
Yours, Lord, is the greatness, the power,
the glory, the splendour, and the majesty;
for everything in heaven and on earth is yours.
All things come from you, and of your own do we give you.
SING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvLxZEU02uI
My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus blood and righteousness
I dare not trust the sweetest frame
But wholly trust in Jesus name
Christ alone; cornerstone
Weak made strong; in the Saviour's love
Through the storm, He is Lord
Lord of all
2. When Darkness seems to hide His face
I rest on His unchanging grace
In every high and stormy gale
My anchor holds within the veil
My anchor holds within the veil
Christ alone…
3. When He shall come with trumpet sound,
Oh, may I then in Him be found;
Dressed in His righteousness alone,
Faultless I stand before the throne.
Christ alone…
©2011 Hillsong Music Publishing
FINAL BLESSING:
May God the Father,
who does not despise the broken spirit,
give to you a contrite heart.
Amen.
May Christ,
who bore our sins in his body on the tree,
heal you by his wounds.
Amen.
May the Holy Spirit,
who leads us into all truth,
speak to you words of pardon and peace.
Amen.
and the blessing of God almighty, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, be among you and remain with you always.
Amen