Sunday Service - 14 November

Welcome to our online service - 14 November

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, live on Zoom and in the church. Even if you have never been to St Gabriel’s before we would love you to join us. Please get in touch with the vicar Alistair (vicar@saintgs.co.uk) and he will send you the Zoom details.

Please join us for public worship in the church building this Sunday at 11:30am.

SERVICE

We meet in the presence of God.

We commit ourselves to work

in penitence and faith for reconciliation between the nations, that all people may, together, live in freedom, justice and peace.

We pray for all who in bereavement, disability and pain continue to suffer the consequences of fighting and terror.

We remember with thanksgiving and sorrow those whose lives, in world wars and conflicts past and present, have been given and taken away.

SING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfv9OI59_7o

O Lord, the clouds are gathering,

the fire of judgement burns.

How we have fallen!

O Lord, You stand appalled to see

Your laws of love so scorned

and lives so broken.

Men: Have mercy, Lord,

Women: have mercy, Lord.

Men: Forgive us, Lord,

Women: forgive us, Lord

All: Restore us, Lord;

revive Your church again.

Men: Let justice flow,

Women: Let justice flow,

Men: like rivers,

Women: like rivers;

All: and righteousness

like a never-failing stream.

2. O Lord, over the nations now,

where is the dove of peace?

Her wings are broken,

O Lord, while precious children starve,

the tools of war increase,

their bread is stolen.

Have mercy, Lord...

3. O Lord, dark powers are poised

to flood our streets with hate and fear.

We must awaken!

O Lord, let love reclaim the lives

that sin would sweep away,

and let Your kingdom come!

Have mercy, Lord...

4. Yet, O Lord, Your glorious cross

shall tower triumphant in this land,

evil confounding;

through the fire, Your suffering church

display the glories of her Christ,

praises resounding.

Have mercy, Lord...

CONFESSION

Let us confess to God the sins and shortcomings of the world; its pride, its selfishness, its greed, its evil divisions and hatreds. Let us confess our share in what is wrong, and our failure to seek and establish that peace which God wills for his children:

Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned in thought, word, and deed. We have not loved you with our whole heart. We have not loved our neighbours as ourselves. In your mercy forgive what we have been, help us to amend what we are, and direct what we shall be; that we may do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with you; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

ABSOLUTION

Almighty God, have mercy upon us, pardon and deliver us from all our sins, confirm and strengthen us in all goodness, and keep us in life eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

COLLECT

Almighty Father, whose will is to restore all things in your beloved Son, the King of all: govern the hearts and minds of those in authority, and bring the families of the nations, divided and torn apart by the ravages of sin, to be subject to his just and gentle rule; who is alive and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Amen

ACT OF REMEMBRANCE

Let us remember before God, and commend to his sure keeping those who have died for their country in war; those whom we knew, and whose memory we treasure; and all who have lived and died in the service of mankind.

SILENCE

Almighty and eternal God, from whose love in Christ we cannot be parted, either by death or life: hear our prayers and thanksgivings for all whom we remember this day; fulfil in them the purpose of your love; and bring us all, with them, to your eternal joy; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen

ACT OF COMMITMENT

Let us pledge ourselves anew to the service of God and our fellow men and women: that we may help, encourage and comfort others, and support those working for the relief of the needy and for the peace and welfare of the nations.

Lord God our Father, we pledge ourselves to serve you and all mankind, in the cause of peace, for the relief of want and suffering, and for the praise of your name.

Guide us by your Spirit; give us courage; give us hope; and keep us faithful now and always. Amen.

SING: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihhvm6eLWZI

Make me a channel of Your peace.

Where there is hatred

let me bring Your love;

where there is injury,

Your pardon, Lord;

and where there's doubt,

true faith in You.

Oh, Master,

grant that I may never seek

so much to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved, as to love with all my soul.

2 Make me a channel of Your peace.

Where there's despair in life

let me bring hope;

where there is darkness, only light;

and where there's sadness, ever joy.

Oh, Master....

3 Make me a channel of Your peace.

It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

in giving to all men that we receive;

and in dying

that we're born to eternal life.

READINGS

Hebrews 10:11-25 New International Version - UK

Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, and since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool. For by one sacrifice he has made perfect for ever those who are being made holy.

The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:

‘This is the covenant I will make with them

after that time, says the Lord.

I will put my laws in their hearts,

and I will write them on their minds.’

Then he adds:

‘Their sins and lawless acts

I will remember no more.’

And where these have been forgiven, sacrifice for sin is no longer necessary.

Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful. And let us consider how we may spur one another on towards love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another – and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

Mark 13:1-8 New International Version - UK

As Jesus was leaving the temple, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Look, Teacher! What massive stones! What magnificent buildings!’

‘Do you see all these great buildings?’ replied Jesus. ‘Not one stone here will be left on another; every one will be thrown down.’

As Jesus was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter, James, John and Andrew asked him privately, ‘Tell us, when will these things happen? And what will be the sign that they are all about to be fulfilled?’

Jesus said to them: ‘Watch out that no one deceives you. Many will come in my name, claiming, “I am he,” and will deceive many. When you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be earthquakes in various places, and famines. These are the beginning of birth-pains.

This is the word of the Lord, thanks be to God

TALK by Malcolm Chamberlain

At 5:00am on the 11th November 1918, the armistice with Germany was signed in a railroad carriage, signalling the end of the Great War. During the following 6 hours opposing armies on the Western Front began to withdraw from their positions, and the formal ceasefire came into effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, a moment we continue to mark to this very day 103 years later.

The end of the Great War, the so called ‘war to end all wars’ but, of course, we tend to know it by a different name: The First World War. A telling renaming, indicating that the Great War did not put an end to global conflict after all – not even close. Despite the harrowing estimated death toll of some nine million soldiers and seven million civilians over the four years and four months of the conflict, UK troops continued to be engaged in several battles for two years following the signing of the armistice; and another global conflict was only just over 20 years away, to be followed by countless more wars across the world in the years since.

It seems that conflict is a sad fact of human existence, and so, when we mark Remembrance Sunday, as we do each year, we must never do so out of some misguided triumphalism or nationalism; we must never fall into the trap of glorifying war, for it is never anything but an evil, even if sometimes arguably a necessary one.

In our Gospel reading this morning Jesus warned of wars and rumours of wars, where nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; saying that such conflicts, along with other causes of suffering, are birth pangs that shouldn’t alarm us. For there is an assurance, beyond our present suffering, of Jesus’ return with the arrival of the new heaven and new earth where there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, as we read in the book of Revelation. And so, in Jesus’ warning of suffering, there is a looking forward to that which lies beyond, a hope picked up by the writer to the Hebrews who urges us to “consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, … encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.”

I wonder if a anyone remembers this noise?

Oh what memories! Waiting for that magical moment when the modem finally makes the connection and you’re free to go surfing on the Internet. Well, when I say ‘free to go’, I mean free to type in a web address, put the kettle on, make a cuppa and return to your computer just as the webpage finishes downloading! Still, we all thought it was amazing at the time, didn’t we?! But if we had to go back to dial-up internet, I can’t imagine many of us being that happy, and certainly not our teenagers! We just don’t like waiting, do we? Self-serve tills at the supermarket are designed to cut down waiting times; next-day postal delivery is almost seen as a right so long as we put the correct stamp on; there are fast-track queuing systems in already fast-food restaurants; and football managers get the sack only ten games into a season because they haven’t yet managed to have the league title all sown up.

And yet waiting is central to the Biblical story – indeed Jesus arrived into a context of waiting centred around the other thing that connects our two readings – the Temple. Ever since the exile of Israel and Judah in the sixth century BC, when Jerusalem was captured by Babylon, the city and Temple destroyed and the inhabitants carried off into captivity, the Jewish people were waiting for God to return as King and re-establish his just rule over Israel. The Temple was, of course, hugely significant – it was regarded as the place where heaven and earth came together, where the living God could be encountered. And so, it’s destruction in 586BC was understood by the Jews to be a clear indication that God had left his people, and their subsequent exile was simply proof of this.

The Old Testament prophets, such as Jeremiah and Isaiah, had warned in advance of this consequence, making themselves very unpopular in the process. But during Israel’s’ exile, they, along with the other prophets of that period, began to tell of how God would return and re-establish his reign, even extending his kingship and inaugurating a new covenant with his people. And so, the Jewish people waited in hope and expectation.

The Temple was rebuilt by the first Jews who returned to Jerusalem after the exile, but it didn’t have the necessary splendour for the people to believe that God had truly returned as King. And when that temple was eventually refurbished and extended into a grand building that even surpassed Solomon’s original, it was during the reign of Herod the Great, the Roman-appointed King of Judea, an occupying sovereign. How could the Jewish people believe that God had returned as King when the Romans continued to rule the Holy Land?

Jesus was born into this sense of unmet expectation, and our gospel writers are in no doubt that in Jesus God finally returned as King. The accounts of Jesus’ birth – the heralding angels, the travelling magi, the deeply unsettled Herod, the fulfilment of numerous Old Testament prophecies, place Jesus right at the heart of Jewish expectation. As we revisit these stories in the coming weeks through Advent and Christmas, listen out for those themes.

Mark begins his Gospel at the start of Jesus’ public ministry when, following his baptism and temptations, Jesus arrived in Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

To a waiting people, these words would have been world-shattering. Jesus was declaring that God had finally returned to his people as King to establish his reign amongst them. Just as the Temple was seen to be the place where heaven and earth came together, so Jesus the Messiah, the Incarnate Word of God, is now the person in whom heaven and earth have come together – fully divine and fully human. The writer of Hebrews explains how in the Temple “every priest stands day after day at [God’s] service, offering again and again the same sacrifices that can never take away sins…” but “we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus…” In the coming of Jesus, the Jerusalem Temple, Herod’s great vanity project, along with its sacrificial code, was rendered obsolete. Jesus’ prediction about the Temple came true in AD70, when Herod’s Temple was destroyed by the Romans. Since then, no Temple sacrifices have been offered. In Jesus, God has done a new thing fulfilling and far surpassing Jewish expectation; where all people, Jew and Gentile alike, are included in God’s reign, and the Law of love is written on our hearts.

We so often miss this central gospel theme of God’s Kingdom because we have privatised Christian faith to simply being about a personal relationship with Jesus, the forgiveness of our sins and our hope of going to heaven. Of course, the gospel is those things, with one important correction – we don’t go to heaven; heaven comes to earth – but that’s another sermon. The message that Jesus proclaimed and the apostles spread is indeed a call to personal faith, but it is so much more. All too easily we jump from the birth of Jesus to the death of Jesus, almost ignoring most of the material from the four gospels. Even our Creeds, essentially written to correct early heresies about Jesus, move from “born of the Virgin Mary…” straight to “crucified under Pontius Pilate…”

Christmas to Easter, but Jesus spent three years in public ministry between those two significant events; three years of ministry recorded for us by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. And the essence of that ministry was this: “the kingdom of God is at hand” – the reign of God is here just as the prophets foretold. And throughout his public ministry, Jesus demonstrated that this kingdom is of a completely different order to that of other reigns. It’s a Kingdom that protects not the rich and powerful, but the poor and marginalised. It’s a Kingdom that doesn’t exclude people on the basis of them not matching up to unachievable demands, but one where all are included by the grace of God. It’s a Kingdom won not through military conquest, but through sacrifice. It’s a kingdom not defended by soldiers and fear, but one spread in love by those who have entered into God’s reign and live by his values.

In Jesus, heaven and earth have come together in a new way, establishing God’s reign of love, justice and peace. And so why wars and rumours of wars? What about now? What about us? The kingdom of God is at hand – it has arrived and God really is King. But we still await the final and full completion of God’s Kingdom, and as we do we are aware of other forces at work, other Kingdoms, some of which align with God’s reign and some of which are opposed. We continue to experience injustice, hatred, conflict, suffering, the destruction of God’s creation, and more besides. But friends, as followers of Jesus, living post-Pentecost we are now the people in whom heaven and earth come together, as we are filled with the Holy Spirit. We are not only citizens of God’s Kingdom; we are Kingdom-bearers, bringing God’s reign in and through our lives even as we pray “your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.”

This is why our unity as followers of Jesus is so important; it’s why our acts of love and compassion are so transformative; it’s why it matters that we lobby our leaders to address the climate emergency and take action to care for God’s creation ourselves; it’s why our speaking up for the powerless and marginalised, challenging injustice, is a necessary outworking of faith; it’s why our bold proclamation of the good news of God, telling others about what Jesus has done for us and for them, is a demonstration of our Kingdom-bearing identify; it’s why we are to be lights for Christ in our daily lives, Sunday through to Saturday. For all of this and more powerfully demonstrates the coming together of heaven and earth, the fact that God truly is King, his Kingdom has arrived in Jesus, and all are invited to belong.

And so, in the words of the writer to Hebrews, “Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” Amen.

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.

PRAYERS - written by

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=-MmRGSEG2LM

Light of the world
You stepped down into darkness.
Opened my eyes, let me see.
Beauty that made this heart adore You
Hope of a life spent with You

Here I am to worship,
Here I am to bow down,
Here I am to say that You're my God
You're altogether lovely
Altogether worthy,
Altogether wonderful to me

2. King of all days
Oh, so highly exalted
Glorious in heaven above
Humbly You came
To the earth You created

All for love's sake became poor

Here I am to worship…

I'll never know how much it cost
To see my sin upon that cross (rep.)

Here I am to worship…

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=1g4p3v06lhk

Restore, O Lord,

the honour of Your name!

In works of sovereign power

come shake the earth again,

that men may see,

and come with reverent fear

to the Living God,

whose Kingdom shall outlast the years.

2. Restore, O Lord,

in all the earth Your fame,

and in our time revive

the Church that bears Your name,

and in Your anger,

Lord, remember mercy,

O Living God,

whose mercy shall outlast the years.

3. Bend us, O Lord,

where we are hard and cold,

in Your refiners fire;

come purify the gold:

though suffering comes,

and evil crouches near,

still our Living God is reigning,

He is reigning here.

FINAL BLESSING:

God grant to the living grace, to the departed rest, to the Church, the Queen, the Commonwealth and all people, unity, peace and concord, and to us and all God’s servants, life everlasting.

And the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son and Holy Spirit be with you all and remain with you always.

Amen

Welcome to our online service - 14 November

Videos of the hymns and songs can be wanted below: