Holy Cross Lutheran ChurchMay 17, 2020 Sixth Sunday of Easter

WORSHIP AT HOME: Jesus does not abandon his followers. Through the Holy Spirit, Jesus comes to abide with his disciples of every generation. As Pentecost draws near, we are reminded that the risen Christ dwells in us as the Spirit of truth. We receive this Spirit in baptism and pray that in our gathering around the Lord’s table the Spirit will transform us to be the body of the risen Christ in the world. WELCOMEGATHERING SONG Love Divine, All Loves Excelling

God of all mercy and consolation, come to the help of your people, turning us from our sin to live for you alone. Give us the power of your Holy Spirit that we may confess our sin, receive your forgiveness, and grow into the fullness of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. AmenGracious God, Have mercy on us. We Confess that we have turned from you and given ourselves into the power of sin. We are truly sorry and humbly repent. In your compassion forgive us our sins, known and unknown, things we have done and things we have failed to do. Turn us again to you, and uphold us by your Spirit, so that we may live and serve you in newness of life through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord. Amen

PRAYER OF THE DAY: Almighty and ever-living God, you hold together all things in heaven and on earth. In your great mercy receive the prayers of all your children, and give to all the world the Spirit of your truth and peace, through Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

THE FIRST READING Acts 7:55-60Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said,

‘For we too are his offspring.’Since we are God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals. While God has overlooked the times of human ignorance, now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in

righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

THE WORD OF THE LORDTHANKS BE TO GOD

THE PSALM Psalm 66:8-20Bless our God, O peoples, let the sound of his praise be heard,who has kept us among the living, and has not let our feet slip.For you, O God, have tested us; you have tried us as silver is tried.You brought us into the net; you laid burdens on our backs;you let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and through water;yet you have brought us out to a spacious place.

I will come into your house with burnt offerings; I will pay you my vows,those that my lips uttered and my mouth promised when I was in trouble.I will offer to you burnt offerings of fatlings, with the smoke of the sacrifice of rams;I will make an offering of bulls and goats.Selah

Come and hear, all you who fear God, and I will tell what he has done for me.I cried aloud to him, and he was extolled with my tongue.If I had cherished iniquity in my heart, the Lord would not have listened.But truly God has listened; he has given heed to the words of my prayer.

Blessed be God, because he has not rejected my prayer or removed his steadfast love from me.

THE SECOND READING 1 Peter 3:13-22

Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

THE WORD OF THE LORDTHANKS BE TO GOD

GOSPEL ACCLAMATIONAlleluia. Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them. Alleluia.

THE HOLY GOSPEL ACCORDING TO JOHN 14:15-21“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, because he abides with you, and he will be in you.“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.

On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”SERMON Rev. Jim Berggren

EASTER 6: JOHN 14:15-21. SPIRIT OF TRUTH.

The material world is a very complex kind of place in which we live and have our being. We talk about “out there” as if it were composed of a rock solid absolute, easily delineated otherness from our self. For me, this gives rise to the question, “Okay, so then, where do ‘I’ end and where does ‘out there’ begin?” It seems kind of simple to arbitrarily draw the boundary line at our skin. CoVid awareness starts at 6 feet away from your skin and extends outward in both space and time from the location of your skin. After all, that is primarily, a semipermeable membrane, regulating constant flux between the realms of out there and in here. Nevertheless, I persistently identify my self with my skin, and its ever-exchanging contents, with occasional subject/object confusion about which side of my skin is really me. In that flow, the only absolutes that I can really know are Resurrection, Grace and Sanctification. Forget the statistics. Jesus said, “Because I live you will live also.” That’s the truth.

It is a simplification to say that there is even an “independent” world out there. All of our world views are reflections of our individual sensory apparatuses that register them. The human nervous system takes in only the tiniest percentage, less than one part per billion, of the total energy vibrating in any given environment. Put a bat or a whale, a cephalopod or a dog, in the same space and they perceive a completely different cosmos made up of panoramic sonic landscapes, towering eight-octave glissandos of tactility, and earth-shaking avalanches of technicolor aroma. What is both “out there,” and “in here,” is raw data waiting for an interpreter. We take a radically amorphous flowing quantum soup and use our senses to congeal it into a solid three or four-dimensional world. It would seem that being blueprinted and crafted by God in His image, we do a little bit of what he does constantly: Confronting chaos with the creative Word. Living

through the fallen disorder, to the Easter universe. The Spirit of Truth is simple. Because he lives we live also, in wondrous variety.

As we cope with chaos, the world, and the law, we grow and learn. One way to double your practical intelligence and awareness of detail is to try to receive as many signals as possible from other people and sources, however wrong-headed or strange we may think their reality map is. I have learned better olfaction and gained an enhanced sense of smell by carefully observing what receives my dog’s attention as she navigates her unique cosmos at the cusp of downwind blankness and upwind extravagant sensation.. Some of the things that she does make better sense to me now. Our usual habit of screening out all human signals not immediately compatible with our own favorite worldview is the mechanism which keeps us all far less informed than we could be. The person on the debate squad that wins the debate is the one that has both sides of the question down cold. Instead of making judgments about the issue that shut off informational input, that person will learn it all and trust the debate judge to determine the outcome.

Judgments do not alter anything or anyone in the universe. Just because we are annoyed with someone or react negatively toward something does not change the person or situation that we are judging. When we judge another we do not define that person, just ourselves.

For example, when someone acts in a way that we find disagreeable, understand that our hurt, anger or fear is how we have chosen to process that person’s behavior. If we are unable or unwilling to notice that emotion and subsequently deal with it and move forward, then it is our self that is in need of attention. That person’s behavior has collided with some unfinished task, or unacknowledged fear in our life. Distress at someone else’s behavior is one way of avoiding something inside.

To forgive . . . you must have blamed. You must have felt hurt and hunted for a cause.

The belief that others should not have treated us the way that they did is absurdity. It already happened, ok? Apparently, they did what they knew how to do, given the conditions of their lives at the

time. The rest of the stuff that we carry around is ours. God with his Spirit of Truth, will make it all work, if we are able to give it over to him. Now I know, as you think about this, that you can think of numerous examples of injustice, evil, viciousness, cruelty, and hopelessness that are just flat wrong, and that I shouldn’t be so cavalier about terrible things in a terrible world that should be avenged. You are right. It is easy to say but Good Friday to live through. I can think of one. Dying on a cross, unable to get it all over with sooner, tortured and naked. Somehow, Jesus gave it over to God, in trust. The chaos didn’t change, but the Spirit of Truth invaded it and we, who observe and interact in the chaos, change.

The attitude of knowing that everything happens as it is supposed to, that there are no accidents, and that we are precisely where we are supposed to be, doing what we are supposed to be doing, takes a tremendous amount of pressure off, and it eliminates our need to be judgmental. The caveat that comes with that kind of total freedom is that it can’t happen without complete responsibility. Own it. Check your expectations at the door and you won’t be disappointed. Because he lives, we live in an Easter universe that is working perfectly, and yet giving us the opportunity to make choices within it. We are at once the protagonists in our own lives and the extras in a much larger drama with unpredictable plot twists. Easter proclaims that a free will within a completed universe is not a paradox. It is the norm. We battle through a thousand Good Fridays and lose. At the for-sure, no- doubt-about-it dead point, God is there raising us in Christ, through a thousand Easter mornings. Because he lives, we also live!

With all of that going on, just the fact that we can live in human community and Christian fellowship is a miracle of the highest order. Ah, the Body of Christ….we are members all. The Sacrament of Holy Communion…we ingest the Creator and his creation. Exhale….Good Friday annihilation. Inhale…. eternal Easter Universe with the Spirit of Truth. Amen.

HYMN OF THE DAY

THE OFFERINGYour regular contributions during the Lenten services and the Sundays that we will be missing in corporate worship, will certainly be appreciated. As you can see through this weekly worship aid, we are not suspending operations. We are simply adapting to novel circumstances. Thank you for your service, your prayers and your faithful donations!!

APOSTLES CREEDI believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of Heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived

by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead.

On the third day he rose again; he ascended into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come to judge the living and the dead.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. AmenPRAYER OF THE CHURCH:

Uplifted by the promised hope of healing and resurrection, we join the people of God in all times and places in praying for the church, the world, and all who are in need.Abiding God, you have revealed yourself to us in the form of your Son, Jesus Christ. Embolden your church, as your followers, to reveal your love to everyone in our speaking and in our living. Lord, in your mercy . . . Hear our prayer. You are the creator of heaven and earth. Revitalize the health of oceans, rivers, lakes, springs, glaciers, and other bodies of water that give life to your creatures. Lord, in your mercy . . . Hear our prayer. You call all people of the world your children. Judge the nations justly, show mercy to the oppressed, and speak truth to power through your prophets. Lord, in your mercy . . . Hear our prayer. You come near to us when we are lost, and you hear our distress. We pray for those who suffer in any way. Lord, in your mercy . . . Hear our prayer. Your commands are good and merciful. Give us courage to take hold of our baptismal promises to work for justice, advocate for the voiceless, and free the oppressed and imprisoned in body, mind, or spirit. Lord, in your mercy . . . Hear our prayer. You remain with us always, O God, and your kingdom has no end. We remember the saints who have gone before us. Unite us forever in your final victory over death. Lord, in your mercy . . . Hear our prayer. With bold confidence in your love, almighty God, we place all for whom we pray into your eternal care; through Christ our Lord. Amen

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 trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever and ever. Amen

HYMN

GO IN PEACE, SHARE THE GOOD NEWS. THANKS BE TO GOD !

Prayers of the Church for:

Shelby BockelohHarold Braun

Jay Byerly Verlene FurleyFred Gardner

Jim HaleyNorma Hines

Nanette LukerLouise McDonnold

Kim RoseBilly Sosa

Dustin ToddNancy Walton

Julie Yantaand

Victims of CoVid 19