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2330 South Jefferson Street
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2330 South Jefferson Street
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The Season After Pentecost, also called Ordinary Time, is the period which has 28 Sundays this year. The season begins with Trinity Sunday (the first Sunday after Pentecost) and continues through the day before the first Sunday of Advent. The Sundays of this season are designated as Sundays after Pentecost. TENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST JULY 20, 2008
As Christ cares, we care…
We care about
all people. ORDER OF WORSHIP-10:30 A.M. + Indicates the people standing ENTRANCE
Prelude
Fugue in G
Minor
Jean-Francois Dandrieu PROCLAMATION AND RESPONSE
Children’s Time SENDING FORTH
+Singing
405
Seek Ye
First
Seek Ye
THOSE SERVING TODAY:
The Altar Flowers Are Given *CHILDREN (AGES 3 through 1st GRADE), may meet the acolyte to recess to Children’s Church. Please ask your child to line up behind the acolyte who will lead all children out together. After the worship service, parents must pick up their child in the Children’s Department; children will not be allowed to leave the room until their parents arrive. WE WELCOME you to morning worship at South Roanoke United Methodist Church. Our hope and prayer is that all who enter here will find the welcoming fellowship of God’s people, joyous worship inspired by the presence of the Holy Spirit, the faithful preaching of God’s Word, and the challenge to go into the world as bearers of God’s grace, love, and justice. AVAILABLE IN THE NARTHEX: The July/August Upper Room, hymnals in brail, individual hearing enhancement equipment, and children’s bulletins (ages 3-12). Please ask an usher to assist you. NEXT WEEK’S SERMON, Jesus and the Venus Rosewater Dish, will be based on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52. Please read and study these texts this week. We will welcome Cheryl Harrison-Davidson as our guest minister as she and Bill exchange pulpits.
YOU CAN HELP! __________________________________
PEANUT BUTTER FROM HEAVEN! Peanut butter is so important for the 109,000 underprivileged people who are served each month by the food bank. A great source of protein, it is always a top-needed staple, especially when families cannot afford meat due to high gas and grocery prices.
Bring jars of peanut butter to church this month! Our goal is 200 jars! ___________________________________ CHURCH PICNIC -JULY 27
Our
Annual Church Picnic will be held Sunday, July 27
Chicken will be provided ___________________________________
LEMONADE ON THE LAWN
TODAY ____________________________ OUR
PRAYERS AND SYMPATHY GO OUT TO THE FOLLOWING: PAULA COKER-JONES, our youth minister, along with Don Roberts and 12 youth are at Lake Junaluska this weekend attending a youth retreat. WE NEED ALTAR FLOWERS!!! Next Sunday, July 27, is vacant on our flower calendar. If you would like to remember or honor a loved one, please sign up on the flower calendar, or call the church office as soon as possible. The cost of both arrangements is $35.00. _______________________________ I N M E M O R I A M
Jerry Paul McNeil _______________________________
July 20,
2008 10th Sunday after Pentecost
Birth Pains Children: Though many of us have seen pictures of a huge eagle's nest high in the branches of a tree or in the crag of a cliff, few of us have gotten a glimpse inside. When a mother eagle builds her nest she starts with thorns, broken branches, sharp rocks, and a number of other items that seem entirely unsuitable for the project. But then she lines the nest with a thick padding of wool, feathers, and fur from animals she has killed, making it soft and comfortable for the eggs. By the time the growing birds reach flying age, the comfort of the nest and the luxury of free meals make them quite reluctant to leave. That's when the mother eagle begins "stirring up the nest." With her strong talons she begins pulling up the thick carpet of fur and feathers, bringing the sharp rocks and branches to the surface. As more of the bedding gets plucked up, the nest becomes more uncomfortable for the young eagles. Eventually, this and other urgings prompt the growing eagles to leave their once-comfortable abode and move on to more mature behavior. Today in the Word, June 11, 1989. The mother eagle doesn’t do this because she is “mean.” She wants her baby eagles to grow and not die. Sometimes life hurts but God has a way of helping us grow through our hurts and grow up to be the people God wants us to be. Perhaps you saw it in the news as I did. Last March a Mayor in southwest France issued an edict banning death! Mayor Gerard Lalanne decreed …all persons not having a plot in the cemetery and wishing to be buried (in our village) are forbidden from dying…It is forbidden for any person not having a plot in the cemetery ... to die on the territory of the village. (Anyone to do so will face) severe punishment. You see, the town cemetery was full; there was no place to put them. The mayor, it seems had been inspired by the mayor of another French village, who had also outlawed death as a protest last year and who thus won the right to enlarge the village's cemetery. http://rawstory.com/news/afp/French_village_bans_death_03062008.html Now it would be nice to have that kind of control over life, wouldn’t it? It would be wonderful to be able to simply issue an edict and all the woes and worries and suffering of life would be banished. For example, wouldn’t it be great if we could pass a law that would just make germs go away? But do we really want that kind of power? And if we did, how would everything really turn out in the end?
The Apostle
Paul speaks to the people of the church at Rome who find themselves, as do
all we Christians, living in two worlds at the same time. Paul says we
are citizens of the kingdom of God, indeed God’s adopted children, yet we
find ourselves in a world so alien, so estranged from the life God
originally created. He refers to these two worlds in which we find
ourselves with the terms “flesh” (or “body”) and “spirit.” He says, What do people do, Paul asks, who know they are not to live in the flesh and try their very best to commit themselves to the life of the Spirit but find the way so difficult, the path so treacherous, and life so tragic? This passage in the Letter to the Romans is one of the premiere statements of the Christian faith on the issue of suffering. And unlike so much of the philosophy of the time that considered suffering the inevitable nihilistic experience of fate, Paul here boldly declares the central Christian belief that suffering is ultimately redemptive. You see, when Paul considers the dilemma of our lives, the reality of our living in two worlds at the same time, he is not describing life as a kind of tennis match between good and evil where we are the tennis ball, no matter how often it may feel just that way to us! No, Paul has a much deeper understanding of this mystery than that. Paul says that, by the grace of God, the things that just don’t make sense in life can never just leave us futile victims of our pain. By the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ all suffering is transformed and even death itself is defeated—“banned” forever. Now it must be said that there has always been something to life that somehow makes suffering more than simply terrible and tragic. There is a sense in which true strength of character is only built through suffering, isn’t there? It seems to be of the very nature of life that it is only by straining against the tide that you ever develop a solid and resilient spirit at all. It is only by struggling forward through the sometimes gale-force winds of life that you can ever grow the disposition and moral fiber that is so necessary for true integrity. So life needs that stress. Now we should not set out looking for trouble, but neither should we necessarily shy away from it when it inevitably comes our way. A recent study published last May reported a pretty remarkable thing. It seems that bacteria, the stuff that causes so much infection, have played a vital and essential role in our evolution as human beings. Two separate teams of researchers reported on the bacteria living in and on the bodies of humans and other animals, and found they are surprisingly well-adapted to their hosts -- so well that they may have helped different species evolve…Animals, and especially mammals, make use of bacteria to help digest their food. “We have evolved together with our bacteria," Dr. Julie Segre of the National Human Genome Research Institute…(Her) team at The Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland found … that the number of bacteria in the human (digestive tract) outnumber the cells in our bodies, and proposed that many be classified as true symbionts with Homo sapiens."I think we do really need to change the language about thinking about bacteria as pathogenic," Segre said. "We should appreciate bacteria as helping our health." Studies show germs help species evolve Thu May 22, 2008 6:23pm EDT By Maggie Fox, Health and Science EditorIn other words, the very things we wish we could pass a law to eliminate, well, it turns out we need those pesky germs! Somerset Maugham, the English writer,… wrote a story about a janitor at St Peter's Church in London. One day a young vicar discovered that the janitor was illiterate and fired him. Jobless, the man invested his meager savings in a tiny tobacco shop, where he prospered, bought another, expanded, and ended up with a chain of tobacco stores worth several hundred thousand dollars. One day the man's banker said, "You've done well for an illiterate, but (just imagine) where would you be if you could read and write?" "Well," replied the man, "I'd be janitor of St. Peter's Church in Neville Square." Bits and Pieces, June 24, 1993, p. 23. Anyone who’s ever seen a Momma bird push her own baby birds out of the nest high up in the air to get them to fly, like that Momma eagle, knows something of this truth of nature. You may remember the illustration of the trees that were planted in the experimental biosphere in Arizona a number of years ago. The biosphere was built to test the ability of humans to survive on another planet. The environment was established, the participants entered and the dome was sealed to replicate the self-sustaining conditions required for survival in the vacuum of space. After awhile they began to notice that the trees they planted there began to loose their leaves. After much study they finally realized a great difference in the artificial atmosphere of the biosphere—there was no wind. Without the experience of resistance to the wind the conditions for the natural development of strength in leaf stems is absent.
So
it is true that the experience of suffering builds character. We need to
be challenged, we need to press against the edges of life in order to have
much of a life at all. But this does not yet fully express the truth of
the Christian understanding of suffering that Paul first states in the
Letter to the Romans. Paul says that suffering not only builds
character…….suffering is ultimately redemptive. Paul says, Just think about it. Tim Hansel, in his book You Gotta Keep Dancin’ Tim Hansel, You Gotta Keep Dancin', David C. Cook, 1985, p. 87. reminds us that Most of the Psalms were born in difficulty. Most of the Epistles were written in prisons. Most of the greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers of all time had to pass through the fire. Bunyan wrote Pilgrim's Progress from jail. Florence Nightingale, too ill to move from her bed, reorganized the hospitals of England. Sometimes it seems that when God is about to make preeminent use (somebody), (God) puts him(or her) through the fire. That is the only thing that makes any sense at all of the suffering and death of the Son of God. In Jesus Christ God took on all the suffering, all the pain, everything that would work against the promise, and all that killed him. But in his resurrection from the dead that apparent final victory of evil is turned upside down, defeating evil forever. So that, in a sense, makes all this suffering and all this pain we experience in the world right now nothing but the final, desperate, dying throes of an enemy that has already been defeated.
What Paul says makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Humanity, all creation,
through the experience of suffering and pain is just groaning, longing,
waiting for the redemption that God is surely working out even in the
midst of the mess you and I have made of life. Until that day we people
of God are called to strain against the tide, struggle forward through the
gale because we are really not people who are just waiting around for our
ship to come in. We are a people who refuse to look to the horizon for a
ship that has already docked.
N.
T. Wright, New Interpreter’s Bible, X:598
We stand confident in life
knowing that in every circumstance, in every experience, in every moment,
what the Psalmist says is still true: where an irrigation pump had broken down. The season was unusually dry and some of the trees were beginning to die for lack of water. The man giving the tour then took Bailey to his own orchard where irrigation was used sparingly. "These trees could go without rain for another 2 weeks," he said. "You see, when they were young, I frequently kept water from them. This hardship caused them to send their roots deeper into the soil in search of moisture. Now mine are the deepest-rooted trees in the area. While others are being scorched by the sun, these are finding moisture at a greater depth."Our Daily Bread.
The
Apostle Paul says all this suffering and all this pain that makes life so
difficult today are like the struggle and experience of a mother giving
birth, birth pains of the
kingdom
of God.
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