♬ You are invited to stand, if you are able and comfortable, for the sung portions of the service. Please wear your mask for singing.
Bold print in bulletin – congregation
GATHERING AND GREETING
Welcome & Announcements
Land Acknowledgement: As we gather, we acknowledge with respect the history, spirituality, and culture of the K’omoks First Nation and the Coast Salish peoples on whose traditional and unceded territory we meet. We also honour the heritage of all Indigenous peoples as we recognize the need to seek a new relationship between the descendants of settlers and of those who were here before colonization. As a congregation of The United Church of Canada, with them, we take responsibility both for past injustices and the need for healing and reconciliation. We love and honour this land upon which we meet and live and all whose footfall has trod and will tread upon it.
The Singing Bowl is Sounded and the Lantern is Lit
Call to Worship and Gathering Prayer:
Welcome all to the home of the Creator, Teacher, and Holy Breath by which we live. Let the Holy One enter your heart, your mind, your body.
Let Creator God be with us as we worship here today.
May we be mindful of God’s message delivered to us today.
May we, God’s beloved people, be ready to act upon God’s call to action.
As theologian Richard Rohr reminds us, let us worship together “in all the Holy Names of God.”
Hymn: MV#12, “Come Touch Our Hearts”
HEARING AND REFLECTING:
Scripture Readings:
2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
Reader: Holy Wisdom, Holy Word. Thanks be to God!
Video: Heiltsuk Nation Log Big House
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6XaV7OvkoI
Reflection: “Home is Where the Heart Is”
Recently Harvey and I watched the movie “Nomadland” that won several Academy Awards this year. It’s based on the book by the same name by Jessica Bruder, which we read before we saw the movie. If you’re not familiar with the premise, it follows a few senior citizens living in their vans or RVs in the southern USA, surviving off seasonal work in state parks, Amazon warehouses and agricultural processing plants. The story dives into the concept of home. One character quotes the English singer/songwriter Morrisey from the band The Smiths: “Home. Is it just a word? Or is it something that you carry within you?”
In this morning’s reading from 2 Samuel, we see the people of Israel and their king David thinking about the same question at a turning point in their history. After centuries of nomadic life, after a tumultuous history of ineffective leaders and frequent rebellions, they are settling into a more urban lifestyle in Jerusalem. King David has a house built of cedar, and he wants to also build a more permanent shelter for the Ark of the Covenant that has travelled with them throughout their desert wanderings. Yahweh replies, “Are you the one to build me a Temple? I have been without a Temple from the day I brought the Israelites up out of Egypt to this day. I have been moving from place to place with my tent as a dwelling place…I alone will establish your house.”
God makes it pretty clear in this passage that it’s not up to God’s people to decide where God lives. It’s up to God, and God’s home is where God’s people are – whether they are wandering in the wilderness or settled in cities.
The desire for home is a primal desire, and that desire goes far beyond the physical need for shelter, for a roof over our heads. The desire for home includes our need for security and for stability. As the story of David’s desire to build a temple illustrates, it is also expressed in our need for a place where we can feel the Spirit and connect with the divine.
I think the past year of pandemic has altered our perception of home. First, the houses where we live became places of safety, of sanctuary, from the disease roaming our world. But as time went on, those houses may have started to feel confining, places where we were forced into isolation from our families, our friends, our work and our entertainments. We began to understand that “home is where the heart is” isn’t always limited to houses. More and more, home became our relationships – with ourselves, with each other, with the sacred.
More and more, we discovered that the sacred is not confined to the buildings where we have traditionally worshipped. There’s no doubt that God is in these places, these thin places where heaven and earth have met and mingled in worship for decades. We missed places like this, as the exiled people of Israel missed Jerusalem and, like them, we rejoice at our return.
But we also learned, or learned again, that God isn’t just in these places. God is in the tents, God is in the natural world, God is in our relationships. We were given new ways to connect and the motivation to use old and new technologies to stay in touch: by phone, texts, email, facetime and Zoom. And, unlike the apostles in the story from the gospel of Mark, we were given the time and space to be quiet and listen, to encounter God in the silence of our hearts.
Today’s story from Mark starts with a reunion, not unlike the many formal and informal events going on this summer as people reconnect with family and friends. The apostles who were sent out in pairs to heal and tell the good news have come back together, happy to see Jesus and each other, excited to tell all the stories of what they have accomplished while they were apart. And Jesus sees their need for more than coffee and cake and happy chatter, he sees their deep, deep need for renewal. “Come away by yourselves and rest a while”, says Jesus.
But even as they hop into the boat to head for a quiet place, the crowds recognize them and rush to get to their destination ahead of them. In a way, their work follows them home. They are unable to carve out the time and space to recharge their batteries before work once again clamours for their attention. The apostles and Jesus crave solitude, but they are pulled back into the crowds and the demands of their calling. The lines between leisure and work, sanctuary and service, are blurred and even erased, as they have been recently for those who have been working from home and are now easing back into their workplaces.
The crowds can’t be ignored, so Jesus teaches them and the disciples feed them and send them home. Then once again, they climb in the boat and try to find privacy. They land at Gennesaret, in an area where numerous hot springs have attracted the sick and injured for centuries. They haven’t told anyone where they are going, but the people in desperate need of healing rush to him wherever he goes, begging for help, asking if they can just touch the fringe of his cloak.
The disciples and Jesus need to be alone and quiet together, need the space and time to reconnect with God and each other, but the world needs them more. Repeatedly, they cross the Sea of Galilee trying to find a deserted place, but over and over they are tested to the limits of their strength by the overwhelming need around them.
Jesus and the apostles have two choices: they can continue to seek the rest they need by sending the crowds away or by looking for another place secluded enough that they can’t be found. Or they can respond to the need. Jesus chooses the second path.
Mark tells us that when Jesus saw the crowd waiting for him, like sheep without a shepherd, he had compassion for them. Compassion. The word literally means “suffering with” – empathy, not sympathy. Jesus wades back into the crowd, to teach and to heal. Jesus invites the apostles, and us, to follow him there.
We have been given quite a few opportunities to suffer with others over the past few months. Here are just two examples, from quite close to home. We are called to suffer with Indigenous people as they discover the bodies of their children who never came home from the residential schools run by our churches on behalf of our government. And in Campbell River, we have been called to suffer with the family and friends of Jared Lowndes, a Wetsuwet’in man who was killed in a violent altercation with the RCMP in a Tim Hortons parking lot a week ago.
We mourn with them and we wonder how we can ever mend the damage caused by our ancestors that is still destroying lives today. How do we help to bring the children home, how do we make sure that their relatives have the safe homes and adequate resources that they need to recover and prosper on the land that is theirs? Whose home is it, and how do we share this adopted home with honour and respect? Can anyone be at home until everyone is at home?
Our world is so divided that it seems like the gaps can never be mended. But the gospel of Mark shows us some possible ways forward.
Throughout the gospel, Jesus and his disciples never really have a home base, a physical home. In fact, Jesus is completely rejected when he attempts to teach in his home town, Nazareth. Most of his ministry takes place in Galilee, where he constantly shuttles back and forth from shore to shore of the lake known in the Bible as the Sea of Galilee. These two divided shores were occupied by different peoples, the Jews and the Gentiles, so in travelling back and forth Jesus is symbolically living out a movement from division to unity.
Like Yahweh in the story from 2 Samuel, Jesus’ home is where the people need him, Jew or Gentile. His home is where his heart is, his heart full of love and compassion for all the suffering people who need his teaching and healing. And I believe that his compassion is extended to all of suffering Creation, the earth made by Creator and bequeathed to all the beings who depend on her and are called to care for her. This is God’s home, this is Jesus’ home, this is our home. When we suffer with the hurting people and the hurting world around us, when we allow our hearts to break open, we are doing the work that Jesus calls us to do.
I want to share just one example of a project where settlers on this land are doing this hard work of compassion – of sharing their adopted homes with the people who have lived forever on the land. The Treaty Land Sharing Network consists of a few families in Saskatchewan who are working with local First Nations to open their land up to traditional Indigenous uses. The movement grew out of the founders’ need to do something to counteract the growing racism in rural areas following the shooting of Colton Boushie and the acquittal of his killer by an all-white jury.
These families have listened to First Nations leaders, hosted teaching events on the land, and are preparing to put up signs welcoming Indigenous users. In a quietly unassuming way, they are bridging the divide and counteracting the growing rural mindset that a landowner has the right to kill to protect their property. They are respectfully welcoming their Indigenous neighbours back onto the land and they are prepared to deal with the opposition that will probably result. They are committed to creating a new kind of shared home on the land.
The homes that we create through efforts like this will not look like our old homes. As Steven A. Peay puts it, “Our plan for home and God’s plan are quite different…God does not want a house, but a heart…When the heart and actions are aligned, then they find their fit, and one is, finally, at home.”
So yes, home is something that we carry within us – our longing for security and stability, for community, and for the Divine. We may find that home in a physical place, but more likely we will find that home in our relationships and we may even discover that we are helping to build the kin-dom of God.
All my relations. So might it be.
Let us pray: Holy Mystery, you are the home where we live and move and have our being. We ask that you make your home in our hearts, and that through you we will find the courage to let our hearts break open to make room for everyone. Amen.
Questions for reflection:
How has the pandemic changed your understanding of home?
Where do you feel at home with the Divine?
How do you balance your need for quiet solitude with the needs of the world around you?
WE RESPOND IN PRAYER AND ACTION
A Shared Time for Reflection, Prayer and Offering
Video: There is Your Heart, Linnea Good: As we listen, you are invited to use the quiet to reflect on the readings and ideas shared today, to light a candle or place a stone or shell as an expression of your intention or prayer, and/or to place an offering in the basket. If you get up to move about, please maintain safe physical distancing.
Offertory Prayer:
These are our gifts, O God.
With them come our hours of work, our years of service, and the love of our hearts.
Bless them in the work of this congregation
and in the compassion they can offer in the world. Amen.
Prayers of the People
We saw them in the boat, Jesus and his friends.
We saw them in the boat, lifted the skirts of our rags and ran,
Ran ahead, ran to that deserted place where his boat would come.
He had compassion for us.
Compassion for us, his parish of pariahs,
For we, who once had land have had the land stolen from us
For we, who once had plenty now have nothing
For we, who had once had work now have nothing
For we, who once were free now sell our selves.
And he has compassion for us –
And so we run here, risking faith, daring hope.
We who are empty know miracles need hope.
We who have nothing turn to the one who turns to us.
We turn to the one who turns to us, and we pray:
We pray for the hungry and the overfed, may we have enough.
For the mourners and the mockers, may we laugh together.
For the victims and the oppressors, may we share power wisely,
For the peacemakers and the warmongers, may clear truth and stern love lead us to harmony,
For the unemployed and the overworked, may our mark on this earth be kindly and creative,
For the troubled and the secure, may we live together as wounded healers,
For the homeless and the pampered, may our home be simple, warm and welcoming,
For the vibrant and the dying, may we all live to love.
We thank you, God, that you do hear our prayers. Grant us the grace to be part of your answer in the world, as we pray as Jesus taught us,
The Prayer of Jesus (an adaptation by Parker Palmer):
Heavenly Mother, heavenly Father,
Holy and blessed is your true name.
We pray for your reign of peace to come,
We pray that your good will be done,
Let heaven and earth become one.
Give us this day the bread we need,
Give it to those who have none.
Let forgiveness flow like a river through us,
From each one to each one to each one.
Lead us to holy innocence
Beyond the evil of our days,
Come swiftly Mother, Father, come!
For yours is the power and the glory and the mercy—
Forever your name is All in One.
Hymn: MV#150, “Spirit God, Be Our Breath”
Commissioning and Blessing:
God be in your lives as you travel on and at your homecoming.
God be with you always, constant companion, guardian, friend and guide.
ALL: May God’s blessing be ours on our pilgrim way, all the nights and days of our journey home. Amen.
Song: “We are all just walking each other home.”
Call to Worship by Kathleen Whyte, used with permission from “Gathering: Pentecost 1 2021”. Offertory Prayer by Kate Gregory, adapted and used with permission from “Gathering: Pentecost 1 2018”. Prayers of the People adapted from “43rd General Council Opening Worship: Risking Faith, Daring Hope: We Are Not Alone” c. 2018 The United Church of Canada. Commissioning and Blessing from the Iona Worship Book.
