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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. SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST AUGUST 31, 2008
As Christ cares, we care…
We care about
all people. ORDER OF WORSHIP-10:30 A.M. + Indicates the people standing ENTRANCE
Prelude
Voluntary
R. Scarfullery
PROCLAMATION AND RESPONSE SENDING FORTH
+Song
of Sending Forth 557
Blest Be The Tie that
Binds
Dennis
THOSE SERVING TODAY: *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 September/October 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, first in the series entitled Three Simple Rules for Living: Do No Harm, will be based on Romans 14:8-14. Please read and study this text. NEXT SUNDAY IS A FIRST SUNDAY OF THE MONTH. This means we receive non-perishable items to be donated to the hungry in the Roanoke Valley. Place your items in the wooden box by the 24th St. entrance. THE AFTERCARE SOCIAL
CLUB
will meet on Tuesday, September 2 at 6:00 p.m. at the home of Steve and
Terry Wilkinson. For more information regarding our Social Club give
bonnie dayton a call, FOR OUR WORSHIP BEGINNING KICKOFF SUNDAY, September 7 we will provide the order of worship, words for our singing, and new visual emphasis for the sermon by the use of “powerpoint” projection of words and pictures on the left wall. THE CHURCH OFFICE will be closed on Monday, September 1 for the Labor Day Holiday. THE SOUTH ROANOKE PLAYERS: Rev Bill would like to form a drama group for occasional “reader’s theater” presentations during worship and other occasions. The schedule includes two “vignettes” as a part of the sermon of September 28 and the play The Velveteen Rabbit for worship on October 26. If you are interested in drama and would like to be involved in one or more please contact him or the church office (344-4437). A GATHERING OF SINGLE YOUNG ADULTS: Rev. Bill would like to invite our single young adults to the parsonage for a time of fellowship and refreshments. If you are interested please contact him or the church office. THE ANNUAL METHODIST HOME BAZAAR will be held Thursday, October 9. Please bring yard sale type items to the church office as soon as possible to donate to this sale. Your help will be greatly appreciated. WEDNESDAY SERVICE OF PRAISE AND PRAYER 6:30 PM begins September 10 for four weeks and will be an informal time of worship in the sanctuary with contemporary music, prayer, and testimony by church members. Join us! ULTIMATE RECYCLING OPPORTUNITY: Clean out your closets, attics and basements because it’s almost time for the “Miracle of Missions” rummage sale at SRUMC. The Kisumu Sister City Committee will partner with SRUMC to raise money for missions in Kisumu, Kenya Friday and Saturday, September 19th and 20th from 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. in the fellowship hall. We will be accepting donated items from Sunday, September 14th through Wednesday, September 17th. We will not be able to accept large appliances or computers. Also, we will not accept clothing unless it is new because we don’t have enough display space for them. Any items that don’t sell will be donated to the Rescue Mission or the Cancer Society’s Discovery Shop. We can use your help if you have some free time the week of the sale. Any hours you can contribute to helping us sort and price items in the days leading up to the sale would be greatly appreciated. Also, we’ll need lots of help both days of the sale. Our goal is to raise $3,000 for the Kisumu Medical Fund and to help the KSCC bring an exchange student to Roanoke in December for a 3 month internship. The fellowship of this sale is the best blessing of all so I hope you will join us. If you have any questions about the sale, please call me at 797-9886 (cell on during the day) or 725-9886 (home on at night). I want to thank everyone at SRUMC who helped
welcome our friend Pastor Phoebe Onyango who visited Roanoke for the first
time July 23-29th. Thank you for allowing us to have a reception for
Phoebe in the fellowship hall July 26th and thanks to all who attended
that evening. Her testimony touched many hearts and your hospitality
touched hers.
Diane D’Orazio, Chairman ________________________
“Pastor’s Inquiry Class”
September 14
“What is God Like?”
_____________________ I N M E M O R I A M
Anne
Jackson __________________
August 31, 2008 16th Sunday after Pentecost Finding
the Center What does it take to live the Christian life today? The Apostle Paul exhorts the people of the church at Rome and he encourages you and me to live the Christian life. And if they or you were wondering just what Christian behavior looks like, this is what Paul says about it:
Have genuine love, not just a fleeting feeling, but real love; That’s what Paul says about it. You want to live the Christian life? You want to behave as one who follows Jesus Christ? That’s what it looks like. Practice deeds of love and mercy. Now, do you show genuine love in your life or is it more a matter of how you feel at the moment? When was the last time you were really patient in suffering or repaid the evil someone did to you with good? Do you and I really give ourselves fully to live in harmony and in peace with everybody? That’s what it takes. That’s what it takes to live the Christian life today. The Apostle Paul, in proclaiming these attributes of true Christian behavior, knows what it takes. He knows what it takes because he knows the meaning of the words of Jesus: …those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. Matthew 16:25 You must lose yourself in it. You must find the center. That is true of anything in life that’s worth pursuing, isn’t it? Anything worth doing or having in life requires your ultimate attention. You have to lose yourself in it. You must find the center. ….Fritz Kreisler, the famous violinist, …said, "Narrow is the road that leads to the life of a violinist. Hour after hour, day after day and week after week, for years, I lived with my violin. There were so many things that I wanted to do that I had to leave undone; there were so many places I wanted to go that I had to miss if I was to master the violin. The road that I traveled was a narrow road and the way was hard." "When I was a boy, my father, a baker, introduced me to the wonders of song," tenor Luciano Pavarotti relates. "He urged me to work very hard to develop my voice. … a professional tenor in my hometown … took me as a pupil. I also enrolled in a teachers college. On graduating, I asked my father, 'Shall I be a teacher or a singer?' "'Luciano,' my father replied, 'if you try to sit on two chairs, you will fall between them. For life, you must choose one chair.' "I chose one. It took seven years of study and frustration before I made my first professional appearance. It took another seven to reach the Metropolitan Opera. And now I think whether it's laying bricks, writing a book--whatever we choose--we should give ourselves to it. Commitment, that's the key. Choose one chair." Guideposts. www.sermonillustrations.com “Motivation” Now we always lose ourselves in something. We all center ourselves around something. Unfortunately it is not usually something so lofty as these two great musicians illustrate. There are other things in the world that we so much more easily give ourselves to. There are other things in this culture that we center on quite spontaneously without seemingly much effort on our part at all. A little boy told a salesclerk he was shopping for a birthday gift for his mother and asked to see some cookie jars. At a counter displaying a large selection of them, the youngster carefully lifted and replaced each lid. His face fell as he came to the last one. "Aren't there any covers that don't make any noise?" he asked. Source Unknown, www.sermonillustrations.com “Motivation”
The teenager lost a contact lens while playing basketball in his driveway. After a fruitless search, he told his mother the lens was nowhere to be found. Undaunted, she went outside and in a few minutes returned with the lens in her hand. "I really looked hard for that, Mom," said the youth. "How'd you manage to find it?" "We weren't looking for the same thing," she replied. "You were looking for a small piece of plastic. I was looking for $150." Source Unknown, www.sermonillustrations.com “Motivation” That little boy was thinking of his mother, wasn’t he, when he was picking out a cookie jar for her birthday? That mother really was concerned about her teenager’s eyesight while looking for that contact lens, wasn’t she? But somehow, sneeking into the purest of our motivations, we find ourselves sometimes a bit off-center in our sentiments; we kind of lose ourselves quite spontaneously even before we know it. So when Jesus says that you have to lose your life to find it he is not suggesting to us something that we don’t already know how to do. He is not asking us to change our natural inclinations, because we always lose ourselves in something; we always center our lives on one thing or another. If you don’t choose something lofty and fulfilling to center your life on you will quite naturally, quite spontaneously lose yourself in low, unfulfilling things. That’s just the way we are. What Jesus is saying is this: “You are always losing yourself in something anyway, so why not lose yourself in me.” And the Apostle Paul says one of the very best ways to lose yourself in Jesus is to practice these deeds of love and mercy. This is the way to grow in life. This is the way to find your life. It all depends on how you receive these instructions. Most of you know my son is a soldier in the United States Army. As his father, through the experiences of my son I have come to appreciate more and more how soldiers mucst forma a community, depend on one another, center on the task assigned them, and literally lose themselves in their mission. (In late) October (of 1944) when an officer commanding a platoon of American soldiers received a call from headquarters. Over the radio, this captain learned his unit was being ordered to recapture a small French city from the Nazis -- and he learned something else from headquarters as well. For weeks, French resistance fighters had risked their lives to gather information about the German fortifications in that city, and they had smuggled this information out to the Allies. The French Underground's efforts had provided the Americans with something worth its weight in gold: a detailed map of the city. It wasn't just a map with the names of major streets and landmarks; it showed specific details of the enemy's defensive positions. Indeed, the map even identified shops and buildings where German soldiers bunked or where a machine-gun nest or a sniper had been stationed. Block by block, the Frenchmen gave an accounting of the German units and the gun emplacements they manned. For a captain who was already concerned about mounting (casualties), receiving such information was an answer to prayer. Although the outcome of the war wouldn't depend on this one skirmish, to him it meant that he wouldn't have to write as many letters (home to) parents or wives telling them their loved one had been cut down in battle. Before the soldiers moved out to take their objective, the Captain gave each man a chance to study the map. And wanting to make sure his men read it carefully, he hurriedly gave them a test covering the major landmarks and enemy strongholds. Just before his platoon moved out, the officer graded the test, and with minor exceptions every man earned a perfect score. As a direct result of having that map to follow, (they) captured the city with little loss of American lives. (Many) years after this military operation took place, an army researcher (who) heard the story …decided to base a study on it. The project began in France, where instead of a platoon of soldiers, he arranged for a group of American tourists to help him with his research. For several hours, the men and women were allowed to study the same map the soldiers had, and then they were given the same test. You can guess the results. Most of the tourists failed miserably. The reason for the difference between these two groups was obvious -- Gary Smalley & John Trent, Ph.D., The Gift of Honor, pp. 1-2. www.sermonillustrations.com “Motivation” The soldiers knew their very lives were on the line. The tourists, at best, had a novel but passing interest. What does it take to live the Christian life today? Well, do you show genuine love in your life or is it more a matter of how you feel at the moment? When was the last time you were really patient in suffering or repaid the evil someone did to you with good? Do you and I really give ourselves fully to live in harmony and in peace with everybody? That’s what it takes. The Apostle Paul gives us a kind of map to the Christian life. If we memorize it, if we follow it, if we live it, if we receive it as if our very lives depended on it, we’ll find it. You have to lose yourself in it. You must find the center. But if we simply take it with the casual interest of a novel observer, we will lose it for sure. The question is: when it comes to life, are you a soldier or just a tourist? William G. Davidson
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