For the week of April 27 – 2nd Sunday of Easter
Morning Prayer: Living God, long ago, faithful women proclaimed the good news of Jesus’ resurrection, and the world was changed forever. Teach us to keep faith with them, that our witness may be as bold, our love as deep, and our faith as true. Amen. (Lectionary Prayers)
Opening Hymn: #327 Crown Him With Many Crowns
- Crown Him with many crowns, the Lamb upon His throne,
Hark! how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own.
Awake, my soul, and sing of Him who died for thee,
and hail Him as thy matchless King through all eternity.
- Crown Him the Lord of life, who triumphed o'er the grave,
and rose victorious in the strife for those He came to save.
His glories now we sing, who died, and rose on high,
who died, eternal life to bring, and lives that death may die.
- Crown Him the Lord of peace, whose power a scepter sways
from pole to pole, that wars may cease, and all be prayer and praise.
His reign shall know no end, and round His pierced feet
fair flowers of paradise extend their fragrance ever sweet.
- Crown Him the Lord of love; behold His hands and side,
those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.
All hail, Redeemer, hail! For Thou hast died for me;
Thy praise and glory shall not fail throughout eternity.
Psalm 150 (CEB)
150 Praise the Lord!
Praise God in His sanctuary!
Praise God in His fortress, the sky!
2 Praise God in His mighty acts!
Praise God as suits His incredible greatness!
3 Praise God with the blast of the ram’s horn!
Praise God with lute and lyre!
4 Praise God with drum and dance!
Praise God with strings and pipe!
5 Praise God with loud cymbals!
Praise God with clashing cymbals!
6 Let every living thing praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord!
Prayers of Intercession: Thank You, Lord, for hearing our prayers for those dear to our hearts. We now pray as You have 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 sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. Lead us, not into temptation but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.
Offering spotlight: Sunday we dedicated your Lenten offerings. 30 Pieces of Silver offering symbolizes using your feelings of remorse and repentance to benefit others and extend God’s grace around the world. $1400 will be given to Withrow College and will go towards the purchase of 2 air conditioning units and a generator. Thank you for giving to the Lord.
Offering prayer: God, from You comes every bounty. Every sacrifice of life that sustains ours is the sacrifice of Your beloved. As we return a small part of the bounty You have blessed us with, we pray that it will be used to forge stronger connections among all creation until the whole world is redeemed by Your love. Amen. (Discipleship Ministries)
Hymn of Preparation: #349 Turn Your Eyes Upon Jesus
Turn your eyes upon Jesus, look full in His wonderful face,
And the things of earth will grow strangely dim
In the light of His glory and grace.
Scripture: John 20:19-31 (CEB)
19 It was still the first day of the week. That evening, while the disciples were behind closed doors because they were afraid of the Jewish authorities, Jesus came and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” 20 After He said this, He showed them His hands and His side. When the disciples saw the Lord, they were filled with joy. 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father sent Me, so I am sending you.” 22 Then He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone’s sins, they are forgiven; if you don’t forgive them, they aren’t forgiven.”
24 Thomas, the one called Didymus, one of the Twelve, wasn’t with the disciples when Jesus came. 25 The other disciples told him, “We’ve seen the Lord!”
But he replied, “Unless I see the nail marks in His hands, put my finger in the wounds left by the nails, and put my hand into His side, I won’t believe.”
26 After eight days His disciples were again in a house and Thomas was with them. Even though the doors were locked, Jesus entered and stood among them. He said, “Peace be with you.” 27 Then He said to Thomas, “Put your finger here. Look at My hands. Put your hand into My side. No more disbelief. Believe!”
28 Thomas responded to Jesus, “My Lord and my God!”
29 Jesus replied, “Do you believe because you see Me? Happy are those who don’t see and yet believe.”
30 Then Jesus did many other miraculous signs in His disciples’ presence, signs that aren’t recorded in this scroll. 31 But these things are written so that you will believe that Jesus is the Christ, God’s Son, and that believing, you will have life in His name.
Message: Pastor Becky is attending a conference this week. For home worship she has selected one of her favorites: Published by Michael K. Marsh on April 8, 2018
The Second Sunday of Easter – John 20:19-31
How many times in your life have you said something like this? “That could never happen. It’s impossible.” “Not in my wildest dreams can I imagine that ever coming true.” “I’ll never get through this. It’s over. This is all there is or ever will be.” “No way. Not now, not ever.”
I suspect we’ve all said those kinds of things in one form or another. We’ve all bumped up against the impossible in our lives. And we all live with our own version of what is and what isn’t possible. Most of the time we live our life based on what we consider to be possible. We consider the range of possibilities and then we make a decision, choose a direction for our life, take our next step, all within the boundaries of what is possible. But what if life is bigger than that? What if the impossible can be made real? What if the impossible really does happen? What if the impossible is possible?
I know that doesn’t make sense. And I can’t explain it. I don’t know how it happens. I only know that it does. I’ve seen it happen in my life and I’ll bet it’s happened in your life too.
When my first marriage ended I shut the door on my childhood dream of becoming a priest. I told myself that was now impossible. A divorced man cannot become a priest. I locked the priesthood out of my life. It was no longer a possibility for me. Then one day, almost twenty-five years ago now, my priest and I had a conversation that opened the door to the impossible, and though it took a while the impossibility of priesthood was made real in my life.
When has something like that happened in your life? What did you consider an impossibility that was one day realized, an impossibility that happened? Maybe your heart melted with your first child and you thought you could never have more love than you did in that moment. Then your second child was born and the impossibility of more love became a reality. Or maybe it was just the opposite. Your heart was broken, shattered, and you knew you would never love again. Maybe you said that no one else could compare to that earlier love and you didn’t want anyone else. Or maybe it was just too painful and you vowed to never risk being hurt like that again. Either way you had closed the door on love and intimacy until he or she opened it in ways you never imagined possible. Have you ever had one of those times in life you thought you would never get through? You limped through life going through the motions. It felt as if you had lost everything. Your grief and loss had locked out the possibility of a new life but one day something happened. Something changed. The world looked different. You felt different. A door opened and what you once thought was impossible was your new reality.
We all have stories like that. We could each tell about a time in our lives when the impossible was made real.
What if every impossibility of our life that is realized is an experience of resurrection? What if each one is a time when Jesus stepped through the locked door of our life? Isn’t that what happened in today’s gospel (John 20:19-31)?
It’s the evening of Easter. The disciples are gathered in a room. The doors are locked. It’s impossible for someone to get in. They’ve made sure of that. They are scared. Then the impossible happened. Jesus showed up. He’s not dead. He’s alive. He’s not in the tomb. He “came and stood among them” (John 20:19, 26). He breathed peace upon them. That didn’t happen just once. It happened twice. Twice Jesus stepped into that room of frightened disciples hiding behind their locked doors of impossibility. Have you ever considered that that kind of thing is happening all the time? And that it is as much a part of our lives as was the disciples’?
The possibility of the impossible isn’t just the story of Easter. It’s the story of Jesus. Jesus is always stepping through our locked doors of impossibility. That’s the good news of His gospel.
Think about all the stories of impossibilities that became real.
- God became human in Jesus. Or as St. John puts it, “The Word became flesh and lived among us” (John 1:14). There’s a reason St. John says, “Yet, the world did not know Him…. His own people did not accept Him” (John 1:10-11). It’s impossible. Who would believe that God would become one of us?
- A virgin gives birth to a child. “How can this be” (Luke 1:34)? That’s not only Mary’s question. It’s ours too. That kind of thing is impossible.
- Water is turned into wine (John 2:1-11). Don’t we wish?!
- Five thousand are fed with two fish and five loaves of bread (John 6:1:13). Until it happened Philip would never have thought it possible. “Six months wages would not buy enough bread for each to get a little,” he says (John 6:7).
- Martha knows the impossibility of her brother, Lazarus, coming out of the tomb. “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days” (John 11:39). And then the dead man walks out, the door of death has been unlocked and opened.
- And then there’s Jesus’ own resurrection. The women’s good news of the empty tomb seemed to the men “an idle tale, and they did not believe them” (Luke 24:11). After all, dead men can’t live. It’s impossible. And the tomb could never be the womb of new life, could it?
None of that was possible until it happened. And I can’t tell you how any of it happened. I just don’t know. I don’t know how it has happened in my life. I don’t know how it has happened in your life. I have no explanation. But that doesn’t mean it cannot or did not happen. We know better. We are “witnesses to these things” (Luke 24:48).
Unexplainable and impossible are not the same thing. That’s the paradox. “The impossible becomes possible without becoming understandable” (Richard Kearney and Jens Zimmerman, eds, Reimagining the Sacred, p. 184). And when it does doors are flung open and a whole new field of possibilities lies before us. That’s what has brought me to this moment. A door of impossibility opened nearly twenty-five years ago. And here I stand before you. Never in my wildest dreams could I have imagined that back then.
So what about you? What are the doors of impossibility for you today? What possibilities have you locked out of your life?
We all have our locked doors of impossibility. I wonder what is being unlocked and opened for you and me today.
We’ll never know unless we consider the impossible possible. So what if, instead of starting with what we consider possible, reasonable, realizable, we began with the impossible. Let’s not get trapped by what we think is possible. Let’s go to the place of impossibility in our life. That is where Jesus is showing up. That’s where He is breathing peace. That is where doors are being opened. That is where new life is beginning. And that’s where I want to be, don’t you?
What if the impossible isn’t really impossible? What if what we see as impossible is really just us catching up to Jesus?
Closing Hymn: #261 Lord of the Dance
And I danced in the moon and the stars and the sun,
And I came down from heaven and I danced on the earth. At Bethlehem I had My birth.
Refrain: Dance, then, wherever you may be; I am the Lord of the Dance, said He.
And I’ll lead you all wherever you may be, and I’ll lead you all in the dance, said He.
- I danced for the scribe and the Pharisee,
but they would not dance and they would not follow Me;
I danced for the fishermen, for James and John;
they came to Me and the dance went on.
- I danced on the Sabbath when I cured the lame,
the holy people said it was a shame;
They whipped and they stripped and they hung Me high;
and they left Me there on a cross to die.
- I danced on a Friday and the sky turned black;
it’s hard to dance with the devil on your back;
They buried My body and they thought I’d gone,
but I am the dance and I still go on.
- They cut Me down and I leapt up high, I am the life that’ll never, never die;
I’ll live in you if you’ll live in Me; I am the Lord of the Dance, said He.
The blessing: May the Lord bless you and keep you and make His face shine upon you this week.
