Welcome and Announcements
Good morning and welcome to Engadine Uniting Church, my name is Sue and I’ll be leading you in worship today. I particularly welcome you if you are a visitor among us, whether you are just having a look or are searching out for a place to worship, we’re delighted to have you with us this morning, and we hope you feel welcome. This is a place for those secure in their faith and those who wanderers, for those who have found a home and those who are spiritual refugees, to let you know you are not alone in the wilderness. We are all about hope, and here we point each other to God. No matter where you are in your journey, no matter what your story is, you are welcome here. We are listening – to God, and to those around us.
Acknowledgement of country
This Season of Lent, this call to repent: turn back from your harmful ways, turn back to God’s Holy Way.
We repent of the harm still felt by First Nations people in these lands now called Australia; where we stand, the Dharawal peoples.
Holy One, We turn to your Holy Way, your reconciling, healing way,
and we honour the land, the people, the life in all forms as we return to you, as we honour you. Amen.
Leader: During Lent, we enter the practice of lament, a vital practice in Jewish and Christian traditions, found in the Hebrew Bible, and in particular through the Psalms. With this practice, we name life’s hard experiences honestly and courageously: grief, repentance, suffering, loss, anger, and injustice. We name it in the presence of God, affirming our experience and God’s embrace of our whole being, and beginning our letting go of that which may cause harm if we hold on too tight.
During today’s service we swing between death to life, but it’s not just the death that was experienced by Lazarus or the dry bones in the valley, nor the resurrection of those people. It’s about the grief and loss we experience with stages of life, children, marriages, careers, hopes and dreams, friendships and communities – and equally about the creative resurrection of hope, dreaming, and forging the next new thing that expands God’s loving realm amongst us.
In lament, our hope endures in God’s reviving life in mysterious ways, and in the story of Jesus, he comes to the places we are entombed, bound up in death and speaks a new word: Come out! Jesus calls us out of our cultures of death and violence into something creative and life-giving. Resurrection is about liberation from the grip of death and all its metaphors – war, greed, poverty, environmental exploitation, and injustice. Jesus urges his followers to unbind Lazarus from his graveclothes. That’s what Jesus wants us to put our resurrection energies into. We are to go about unbinding and letting go. So join me on the journey as we light the candle and raise our voice in song.
Call to worship/Lighting Candle
Leader: Today we celebrate God beyond, beside and within us. We celebrate the light of the world that guides us in the way, the truth and the life We celebrate the Spirit that renews life, joy, and possibilities. We symbolise this in the lighting the candle.
Let us call on God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon us all, that we may live.
All: God brings us up from our graves, putting God’s Spirit within us so we shall live!
Know that God has spoken and will act. Amen.
Hymn/Song: O Breath of life come sweeping through us, Together in Song 409
Prayer Of Invocation/Welcome
We hear rumours of death and illness. We see valleys full of dry bones, and then we hear a surprising word: Dry bones can come back to life, the dead can emerge from tombs. Breath enters, lives are put back together, hope is restored!
Come, the God of resurrection is on the move! Come, let us reclaim our share in life!
Leader: Rather than our prayer of confession today, we choose the Lenten practice of lament, using today’s Psalm as our guide. We lament on our own and in solidarity with those with sorrows and suffering.
From the depths of sorrow, we cry to you, Holy One: hear our cry, hear our voice. All: Open your ears to the sighs of our beings.
Systems of injustice cause oppression, campaigns of war bring devastation. From the depths of sorrow, we cry to you, Holy One: hear our cry, hear our voice. Open your ears to the sighs of our beings.
Greedy overuse harms Creation; human selfishness destroys animal habitat. From the depths of sorrow, we cry to you, Holy One: hear our cry, hear our voice. Open your ears to the sighs of our beings.
Education and healthcare are available to so few; futures light up for the lucky one or two. From the depths of sorrow, we cry to you, Holy One: hear our cry, hear our voice. Open your ears to the sighs of our beings.
Relationships lie broken in pieces around us; isolation, loneliness, and conditions that plague us. From the depths of sorrow, we cry to you, Holy One: hear our cry, hear our voice. Open your ears to the sighs of our beings.
(Pause)
We wait for Holy One; we wait, and in Wisdom’s word, we hope.
We wait for Holy One even more than those who watch keenly for morning: more than we watch for the morning.
With you, Holy One, is Mercy and Love; with your presence, we can endure.
With you, Holy One, is Mercy and Love; in you, Oh Wisdom, we have hope. Amen.
PRAYER OF ADORATION AND THANKSGIVING
Leader: Loving God, Source of Life, we thank you for hearing our cries and the witness this is to your glory and love.
All: You call us out of tombs and raise us back to life, guiding us, animating us, and drawing us into depths of peace, freedom, and wholeness.
What joy and what honour it is that the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in us. We give you thanks and praise, for you are the resurrection and the life. Because of you, we can live without the fear of death.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymn: Now the green blade rises, Together in Song 382 (Tune: Noel Nouvelet)
Now the green blade rises from the buried grain
Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain
Love lives again that with the dead has been
Chorus: Love is come again, like wheat that springs green
In the grave they laid Him, Love whom men had slain
Thinking that never He would wake again
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen, Chorus.
Forth He came at Easter like the risen grain
He that for three days in the grave had lain
Quick from the dead my risen Lord is seen, Chorus.
When our hearts are wintry grieving or in pain
Thy touch can call us back to life again
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been. Chorus.
CCLI Song # 4755944 John Macleod Campbell Crum. © Words: 1928 Oxford University Press. Music: Public Domain. For use solely with the SongSelect® Terms of Use. All rights reserved. www.ccli.com CCLI Licence # 31951
HEARING THE WORD
Readings
Let us pray: God, please open our ears and minds and hearts so that as we hear the words of the Bible, you will speak to us and bring us new life.
Ezekiel 37:1-14 (NIV)
The hand of the LORD came upon me, and brought me out by the spirit of the LORD and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. God led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.
God said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord GOD, you know.” Then God said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. Thus says the Lord GOD to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live; and you shall know that I am the LORD.”
So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them; but there was no breath in them.
Then God said to me, “Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord GOD: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.”
I prophesied as God commanded me, and the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude. Then God said to me, “Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’
Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, have spoken and will act,” says the LORD.
Romans 8:6-11 (Common English Version)
The attitude that comes from selfishness leads to death, but the attitude that comes from the Spirit leads to life and peace. So the attitude that comes from selfishness is hostile to God. It doesn’t submit to God’s Law, because it can’t. People who are self-centered aren’t able to please God.
But you aren’t self-centered. Instead you are in the Spirit, if in fact God’s Spirit lives in you. If anyone doesn’t have the Spirit of Christ, they don’t belong to him. If Christ is in you, the Spirit is your life because of God’s righteousness, but the body is dead because of sin. If the Spirit of the one who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, the one who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your human bodies also, through his Spirit that lives in you.
Reader: Through these readings we hear God speak.
All: Thank you, God, for your words of life.
Item Slide show: artworks of Lazarus rising from 1100 to 2010, and what we can learn from the artist’s perspective.
Sermon/Reflection Rev Tom Stuart of Charlestown Uniting, via Project Reconnect here (8min 43sec).
RESPONDING TO THE WORD
Discussion: How does your faith help you live life more fully? Share one thing you’ve learned when grieving the loss of people, places, projects or groups.
Offeratory Prayer
Let us participate in something creative and life-giving by offering our gifts.
Let us pray: We give because you give: you give the very life we live, and in our gratitude we share, so that life may be revived in places near and far. May our gifts play some part in bringing new life and freedom. Amen.
Prayers of the people Kathy, followed by the Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father and Mother who is in us here on earth, holy is your name in the hungry who share their bread and their song. Your Kingdom come, which is a generous land flowing with milk and honey.
Let us do your will, standing up when all are sitting down, and raising our voice when all are silent. You are giving us our daily bread in the song of the bird and the miracle of the corn.
Forgive us for keeping silent in the face of injustice, and for burying our dreams; for not sharing bread and wine, love and the land, among us, now. Don’t let us fall into the temptation of shutting the door through fear, of resigning ourselves to hunger and injustice, of taking up the same arms as the enemy. But deliver us from evil.
Give us the perseverance and the solidarity to look for love, even if the path has not yet been trodden, even if we fail; so we shall have known your Kingdom which is being built forever and ever. Amen.
Hymn/Song: Together in Song 420: Holy Spirit go before us
Benediction
Go from here to walk in the light, in the gift, the hope of Jesus, present in the fulness of life, Creator inspiring the renewal of life, Spirit reviving the breath of life.
May we emerge from our places of death into the fullness of resurrection peace, and may we welcome God’s reign of life breaking forth in each and every one of us. Amen
Music.
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