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Second Congregational Church in Newcastle, United Church of Christ, Newcastle, Maine
Fourth Sunday after Pentecost, June 20, 2021, 10:00 AM
INVITATION Welcome to Hybrid/In-Person Worship with Second Congregational Church! Whether you are joining us from our parking lot, various spaces, or different devices, we enter this sacred time together. No matter who you are or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here. We are devoted to hospitality, generosity and care of all our neighbors and each other! Gathering In-Person: If you are joining us in-person on Sundays at 10am, we will be hosting outside worship in our parking lot along the beautiful Damariscotta River. Please be prepared to:
Bring your own chair (BYOC) and to sit in your family/friend pod, 6 ft. from other family/friend pods.
Parking in the church lot is quite limited. Handicapped parking is provided on the Fellowship Hall side of the church, enter through the “Exit”. Please look for parking attendants for assistance.
Be prepared to wear a mask if asked – yes, even if we are outside!
Be prepared to listen and focus on the music, but to not sing aloud.
Be prepared to leave your offering in the boxes provided before/after worship.
Be prepared to adapt as the Spirit leads us as we attempt to accommodate all our guests to the best of our ability, with the resources we have and the mandates we are following in these new, shifting and exciting times!
Remember, we are broadcasting services by Facebook Live and Zoom! Be sure to tell your friends and family who might like to be in worship with you even from away!
We welcome your constructive feedback: email us at [email protected]. Joining us from away by device: Please be sure that your device (computer, phone or tablet) is in the mute mode to avoid feedback and background noise. Currently the chat/comment functions will not be monitored during the live service, so we invite you to submit your prayer requests prior to Sunday mornings by email at [email protected]. Before the time of the service, you may want to prepare a simple worship space. Perhaps you can light a candle, have a Bible with you, set your table with a cross, pillar candle, a plant or flower or other symbols of faith that bring you comfort. Include the photograph of someone you wish to bring into the circle of faith. Whatever it is, follow your heart.
Thank you for your preparation.
Let us now be present to the Spirit, which brings us together and loves us wherever we are! + + + + +
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WELCOME AND ANNOUNCEMENTS CENTERING MOMENT CALL TO WORSHIP: One: We look at this world, so often focusing on the pain and confusion, the fears and the hatred which seem to abound. All: For what can we hope? One: We wait breathlessly for the goodness of creation to be made manifest in all the world, for this is the promise of God. All: God is always with us, guiding, rescuing, healing, restoring us. One: Get ready, dear friends, the promises of God are true. All: Lord, quiet our spirits and open our hearts. Bring us hope and peace. Amen. OPENING HYMN “When Morning Gilds the Skies” Laudes Domini
Please sing aloud at home or follow along as you are able. Remember, it’s our spiritual intention that matters!
Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LcOVegHAabFFE1hsszyrl5SVMj7K_6l4/view?usp=sharing
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PRAYER OF INVOCATION (said aloud but muted): Gardener of the Earth, we know You have sown good seeds in us and around us. Help us to find and nurture those seeds. Help us to prune back what needs to be pruned, and to tear out what is harmful. Help us, O God, to learn and grow, to discern between what has been planted within us by Your spirit and what grows as chaff that chokes out the promise of goodness. When we learn about the things within us that cause harm to ourselves and others, may we peel off those unnecessary and dead leaves. When we witness prejudice, judgment, evil or unjust behavior, help us to tear it out at its roots. When we begin to dismantle systems and barriers of oppression that perpetuate hatred, division and sin, may we begin to build up a base of good soil for new seeds to take root. Loving Gardener, we know this is not easy, but inch by inch, row by row, work in us and through us, to grow Your beloved garden together. Amen. THE LORD’S PRAYER (said out loud but muted): 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 debts as we forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation but deliver us from Evil: for Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen.
SCRIPTURE READING: Arne Aho, Reader Matthew 13:24-30 SERMON: “Those D@&# Weeds!” Rev. Char Corbett
Prayer: Creator God, may we trust in Your goodness, may Your Holy Spirit be felt in this time of worship and may You add nourishing grace to our understanding and practice of faith this morning and always. Amen.
For the last few weeks, I’ve been sharing with you my new gardening adventures for our summer sermon series, We Grow Together. To recap, we started off with reflecting on soil and that, much like our gardens, our hearts need good soil too, like that of spiritual practice. This helps our hearts to receive and grow the good seeds of love, peace, hope and grace that God is always sowing. We’ve reflected on seeds too, garden seeds and the seeds of goodness that we are asked to sow in our own lives and in the world. God depends on us to be co-gardeners in the lush garden of life that is meant to be for all. And today we are going to spend a little time reflecting on, you guessed it, those nasty little devils, the weeds!
As a new gardener, I had no idea that I would spend quite so much time focused on weeds and weeding. I also didn’t realize the persistence, determination and brute strength it requires to deal with all the darn weeds.
I can honestly say it’s those darn weeds that have most of my attention these days! There’s grass rooting itself in my gardens! And clover! And acorn sprouts! And even poison ivy! There are nameless, skulking weeds that grow overnight, and their leaves loom larger than my hand. And those dandelions that I insisted we couldn’t pull from the front yard in the spring to help the bees and butterflies? Well, now they’ve seeded alongside the zucchini in my backyard gardens!
I’m a vigilant weeder, you should know. My eyes are scanning for those D@#& weeds constantly. My hands are gloved, and I’m ready to pull them out with just the right twist of my wrist, to get them at their roots. My back aches from the daily task, and my knees are creaking,
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my hands cramp and my muscles hurt all over. It’s a full out War of the Weeds! I tell myself that I’m doing it all for the veggies and flowers. But let’s be honest, I’ve waged this war as a matter of pride too – for my home turf as well as my own ego. No weeds will get the better of me or all that I’ve planted! I am committed to uprooting these dastardly weeds!
But, as I’ve weeded and weeded and weeded, and as I’ve read and studied this week’s scripture, I realize that I’m also learning a valuable lesson that many, many other gardeners with more experience than I have already know that gardening is an exercise in control.
Today’s gospel story goes that a man sowed plentiful good wheat seed in his field, but while he slept an enemy came and sowed bad seed among the good seed. The plants grew and the landowner’s laborers see that much of what has grown are weeds. “What happened?” they ask. “Should we pull the weeds and throw them away and be done with it?” But the landowner, says, “No. If you uproot the weeds now, you’ll uproot the wheat too. Wait until harvest time. I’ll allow the reapers to sort them then.”
Wait! What? Don’t yank the weeds? Wait until the harvest? Separate the weeds and the wheat later? That doesn’t make any sense! That’s some outrageous and unexpected gardening advice! Every gardener and farmer weeds from the very beginning of the planting season! Yet this story is instructing us to wait on the weeding until harvest time. That goes against every gardener’s desire to uproot all that we think is bad!
I wonder: is Jesus trying to make a point about control, too through the telling of this story? This story forces us to stop and think: Who or what is in control here? What needs to be controlled? Why isn’t the weeding occurring from the very beginning, when it’s easier? What does this Farmer know that every other laborer doesn’t? Weeds don’t add to the harvest, they just steal the soil’s nutrients, water and sun. Weeds are the devil’s business, man! How do we expect the workers to have self-control – they want to weed everything in sight as vigilantly as I do!
Here’s what one of my gardening blogs had to say about weeding:
Weeding is removing unwanted plants from the ones you want to be productive or ornamental in your garden. You decide what a weed is. If a tomato sprouts in the compost you spread around your roses, you will probably pull that tomato out, even though you grow tomatoes in your vegetable garden. Don't be afraid to remove a "good" plant if it's not where you want it. You want the plants that remain to attain their full growth and maturity, and weeds steal sunlight, moisture, and other resources from the plants you are intending to grow.
I think this gives us a clue as to what the Farmer is trying to get at. If the Farmer is God, the fields are the world and we’re the laborers – this story is instructing us that we humans aren’t the ones that get to decide who or what is weed and who or what is wheat in the scheme of the world its survival and its flourishing,
Our human choices about what’s good and bad, as well as our ability to see the good from the bad in anything, changes. We don’t always make the right decisions. At times they can be biased, misguided, skewed and even extremely unwise.
Take the dandelion for example. This once-prized plant, which gardeners used to exhibit at county fairs, was as comparative in beauty as a rose and painted by world-famous artists now holds the title of Public Lawn Enemy No. 1. One dandelion in our yards incites levels of disgust on par with those directed at mice, politicians and people who remove their
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shoes and socks on airplanes. It’s a reputation, driven by ill-informed public opinion that scientists say is undeserved and ultimately harmful to the planet. The destruction of the dandelion, by uprooting it and using chemical weed killers to destroy it in pursuit of “the perfect lawn” has dramatically harmed the soil and our planet’s much needed pollinators: the bees and butterflies.
The Farmer, God, understands that our perspectives and attitudes change; that changing times change our needs and knowledge, that our human eyes don’t always see things clearly or that the human mind can discern matters wisely. It’s time and experience that tell us more than any of our own opinions can know.
Want proof? Well, the acceptance of this Weeds and Wheat tale ends at my garden. Those darn weeds are coming out! Yet, when we all look upon the variety of plant and wildlife that the planet is filled with by following God’s gardening advice to wait for the right time. God’s weedy approach may not satisfy our household gardens and flower beds or gain traction for single crop production, like corn for gasoline or pristine grass for lawns, but it ultimately has sustained life for multi-millennia and beyond.
Rev. Nancy Rockwell, a challenging and beloved pastor of the United Church of Christ, once preached on this text and invites us to see things a different way: It’s one thing to apply this weeding method to our home gardening experience, but she says, “in the garden of Ideas I take the Mad Farmer’s advice a little more seriously, but not more easily. There are pernicious weeds in the common garden of public thought.” Isn’t that so true?
The news is burgeoning these days with cultural weeding and separation in the garden of public thought. Consider these weedsome highlights:
The unimaginable but very real and too long Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli government changes this week are being hailed by some countries as progress, but others fear will bring little prospect of ending the violence between the peoples.
President Biden’s 8-day visit to Europe, with an agenda that discussed everything from the international economic and health disparities of Covid at the G7 summit; the key issues around global climate change and military alignments at the NATO Summit; and the Switzerland meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin to address the genuinely concerning political challenges and threats that are growing between our two countries.
While we’ve also: o Remembered the anniversary of the Pulse Massacre and other tragedies aimed
at the GLBTQ+ community during Pride month; o grieved the deaths and harm of more innocent children and adults who have died
unjustly to gun violence in our cities; o Recalled the end of slavery with the establishment of Juneteenth as a Federal
Holiday yet our states wrangle, politicize and neglect the establishment of fair voting rights and policies for all people;
o witnessed this week’s decision by the Supreme Court in the Fulton vs. Philadelphia case, to uphold Philadelphia’s Catholic Social Services contractual agreement and claimed religious right to screen potential GLBTQ+ foster and adoptive parents from the city’s fostering system;
o and now learned of the US Catholic Bishops’ move to bar President Biden from receiving Holy Communion over the religious and political matter of abortion.
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Are these things what we are to wait on? Do we not make decisions on them? Or how do we? It’s hard work. Yet, it’s also important to note that this parable does not urge passivity. The harvest will come, and the weeds and the wheat will be separated in the end. The tending of the gardens has been human work since the Garden of Eden. Our global societal garden is very much a part of that command to work towards sustaining and tending to life. Waiting is always an act of discernment. And discernment requires a delicate approach when it comes to weeding.
Wait until the harvest, the Farmer says, meaning wait until the right time. Is it now? Is it later? When? Well, the Landowner says we’ll know when the right time is. It’s all in God’s time, when the harvest is ready to reap. The work of caring for one another is never over. These conversations about who controls who, what is right and wrong and all the ways we prepare for the harvest of God’s kin-dom, which sustains life for all, has so many different approaches and outcomes. Who are we to think we know what and who belongs in God’s kin-dom garden and what and who doesn’t? That’s God’s work, to separate the good from the bad, not ours. We’re simply invited to be present, to do what’s required of us and to share in the harvest.
What will our hearts grow? What will this church grow? What will this country grow? In the end, what will the world grow? Can our minds ever be changed? What about our hearts? Ours eyes? Can our vision ever shift? Is it possible to follow the Ultimate Gardener’s advice to wait, to love, to care, to do good, to forgive until God’s kin-dome arrives?
Matthew tells us that at God’s harvest time, the righteous will shine like the sun in the kin-dom of God. And God the Farmer, who loves all things that grow, whether wild or neglected, wanted or unwanted, beautiful or ugly, will name all that is growing as very good. In fact, it’s already been done! God’s good Word is applied to all that lives, and it has been since Creation began. Let us pray for that shining, that right time, God’s time, when
we are all thriving and at home and rooted in the garden together. For together, we grow. Amen.
+ + + + + ANTHEM: ”Morning Hymn” Arlen Clarke
Please sing aloud at home or follow along as you are able. Remember, it’s our spiritual intention that matters!
Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1VaMfD5nmHZfqIMG2UdxHq1zmpo_pY9zU/view?usp=sharing
New every morning is the love our wak’ning and uprising prove; Through sleep and darkness safely brought, restored to lie and pow’r and thought.
New mercies each returning day, hover around us while we pray, New perils past, new sins forgiv’n, new thoughts of God, new hopes of heav’n.
If on our daily course, our mind, be set to hallow all we find, New treasures still, of countless price, God will provide for sacrifice.
Only, O God, in thy dear love fit us for perfect rest above And help us this and very day to live more nearly as we pray.
St. James Press, publisher. Used by permission. (1942)
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SILENT PRAYERS AND PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE
A MOMENT OF REMEMBERING AND GIVING THANKS Lord, we remember the many blessings that You have poured int our lives. We recall the blessings that others have shared with us. Make us people who are unafraid to proclaim your goodness and share your mercy. Bless the gifts we bring before You in gratitude. May they too bring comfort and peace to all those in need. Amen. DOXOLOGY: Praise God, from whom all blessings flow; Praise God, all creatures here below; Praise God, for all that love has done; Creator, Christ and Spirit, One. Amen.
Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zf9vXKaxxAb6dJhE3Z67dIc0oJK5rC3W/view?usp=sharing
CLOSING HYMN “Lord, Make US Servants of Your Peace”
Please sing aloud at home or follow along as you are able. Remember, it’s our spiritual intention that matters!
Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YczO9IONPtI_GisjUh0rCWyqXQHP_VKf/view?usp=sharing
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BENEDICTION Serve God with patience and passion. Be deliberate in enacting your faith. Be steadfast in celebrating the Spirit’s power. And may peace be your way in the world. Amen.
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Today’s Worship has been prepared, sent out, offered and led by:
Arne Aho, Scripture Reader Bill Bausch, Communications & Technology Support; Snippets Meister Rev. Char Corbett, Pastor Jim Corbett, Videographer and Technical Support Chancel Choir, Song Leaders Jane Wilmot, Minister of Music, Keyboard, organ and piano Brenda Woodcock: Flowers Outside Support Ministers:
Greeters: Jack Banta and Eric Sroka Worship Set-Up Team: Bill Bausch, Jim Corbett, David Gay, Rick Hagen, David
O’Brien, Ed Smith and George Wilmot
Unless otherwise noted, permission to reprint, podcast, and / or stream the music in this service obtained from ONE LICENSE with license #A-725951. All rights reserved. Liturgical resources for today’s service, unless otherwise noted, are written by Rev. Char Corbett.
Have a question about Second Church or today’s service? A concern or a joy to share? A prayer request? We’re here to listen and respond! Contact our Pastor, Deacons or Pastoral Relations Committee:
Lonnie Andersen, Deacon/Spirit Team Chairperson: [email protected] Bill Bausch, Pastoral Relations Committee: [email protected] Kristin Brown, Deacon: [email protected] Rev. Char Corbett, Pastor: [email protected] Rick Hagen, Deacon/Pastoral Relations Committee: [email protected] Judy Jones, Deacon: [email protected] David Lawrence, Pastoral Relations Committee: [email protected] Carl Nord, Moderator: [email protected] Rev. Ann Roundy, Pastoral Relations Committee: [email protected]
