Long Green Valley Church of the Brethren
Long Green & Kanes Rds., near Glen Arm, Md.
March 27, 2014
Worship 10:00 am              Sunday School 11:10am

The Third Sunday of Lent 

  Beginning with Praise (9:50 am)                  "I hunger and I thirst"                  474
  Announcements
  Prelude                                       "Reflection"                                          Asper

  Call to Worship                         Psalm 95:1-7

*Hymn                          "Sing hallelujah, praise the Lord"                               67

*Opening Prayer

  Scripture                                   Psalm 95:8-11

  Unison Confession                                                                                    692

  Scripture                                   Exodus 17:1-7

  Sharing a joy, a concern, a word of testimony or praise
                                 (please be brief, and aware of God's listening presence)

  Prayer hymn                        (vs. 1 & 3) "Come, thou fount"                               521

  Prayer for Others

  Scripture                                  Romans 5:1-11

  For Children              "Meanie in the Quicksand"

  Hymn                                     "Man of sorrows"                                        258

  Scripture                                     John 4:5-15

  Returning our Tithes and Offerings                                    (see back of bulletin)

  Offertory                                 "Balm in Gilead"                                    Hughes
                                        (Please sign the attendance pad and pass it on)

  Scripture                                    John 4:16-42

  Message                                 "Well within" (mp3)

*Hymn                            "Lord, I am fondly, earnestly"                                514

*Benediction

*Postlude                      "Jesus, Sun and Shield Art Thou"                         Smart

*Rise in body or in spirit

#'s are from Hymnal: A Worship Book

Worship leaders - see basic guidelines

Call to Worship

1 - O come, let us sing to the Lord;

2 - let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!

1 - Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;

2 - let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!

1 - For the Lord is a great God, and a great King above all gods.

2 - In his hand are the depths of the earth;

1 - the heights of the mountains are his also.

2 - The sea is his, for he made it,

1 - and the dry land, which his hands have formed.

2 - O come, let us worship and bow down,

1 - let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker!

2 - For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.

Psalm 95:1-7 from The New Revised Standard Version,
copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the
National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
  

Opening Prayer

Rock of our salvation,
            you who are our foundation,
                        we lift up our joyful noise.
     You are both great and good,
                 ruler above all others,
                 creator of and provider to
                                all who live upon this earth.
We come this day as those who long for
            our thirst to be quenched
                        with your living water, and
            our hunger to be fed
                        by your bread of life.
      Though you have been present with us all the time,
                                 as you have promised,
                  we invite you to dwell with us this morning,
                           opening ourselves once again
                                          to your Word and your Spirit.
You, Lord God, are a treasured guest
            at the well of this worship service.
                        Welcome.
       This we pray in the name of your Son,
                                                         Jesus,
                                                   our Christ. Amen.

used again on 3/23/2014
  

Psalm 95:8-11

We continue hearing today’s Psalm, paying attention now to the second part. This scripture remembers an episode in the wilderness, when thirst led the children of Israel to quarrel with God, who had thus far faithfully provided for their daily needs all along the way. The following words are an invitation to confession, which we will enter together after we finish this Psalm. Then we’ll turn to the passage from the book of Exodus to which this scripture refers. Listen to Psalm 95:8-11.

⁸Do not harden your hearts, as at Meribah, as on the day at Massah in the wilderness, ⁹when your ancestors tested me, and put me to the proof, though they had seen my work. ¹⁰For forty years I loathed that generation and said, “They are a people whose hearts go astray, and they do not regard my ways.” ¹¹Therefore in my anger I swore, “They shall not enter my rest.”

Please now join in the Unison Confession found in the back of your hymnal, #692.

from The New Revised Standard Version,
copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the
National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
  

Unison Confession

O God,
      you rule the world from end to end
            and for all time.
You alone are God. In you alone we hope.

Forgive our sins.
Heal our diseases.
Save our lives from destruction.

We repent of our stubbornness and pride.
We desire to yield ourselves more fully to your will.

Keep us in your presence
      that we might serve and witness in the world,
      through Jesus Christ, our Lord. AMEN

Hymnal #692 - written by Ernest Fremont Tittle,
adapted from A Book of Pastoral Prayers,
Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, New York and Nashville, © 1951
    

Prayer for Others

Let us pray for all God’s children.

Within this house of prayer, loving God, where we are refreshed by the living water of your Spirit, we turn our prayers towards the hungers and thirsts of the wider world.

One:     With the fullness of Christ’s grace,
All:      flow waters, flow with healing grace.

Enter the experience of all who this day are looking for a faith which will enable them to turn around the defeat and shame of their present story.

One:     With the fullness of Christ’s grace,
All:      flow waters, flow with healing grace.

Enter the grief and misery of folk who have found that no human friend or loved one is able to reach the lonely depths of their sorrow.

One:     With the fullness of Christ’s grace,
All:      flow waters, flow with healing grace.

Enter the insecurity of those desperate seekers who rush from one religion to another, and from one counselor to another.

One:     With the fullness of Christ’s grace,
All:      flow waters, flow with healing grace.

Enter the strength of self-made people who privately are driven by an un-nameable discontent which makes them irritable and hard to live or work with.

One:     With the fullness of Christ’s grace,
All:      flow waters, flow with healing grace.

Enter the bitterness of citizens whose lives have been devastated by the bad decisions of leaders in business, government or court.

One:     With the fullness of Christ’s grace,
All:      flow waters, flow with healing grace.

Enter the despair of all whose land or jobs, homes or health, freedom or reputation, have been taken from them.

One:     With the fullness of Christ’s grace,
All:      flow waters, flow with healing grace.

slightly adapted from a prayer written by Bruce Prewer,
of the Uniting Church in Australia.
  

For Children
"Meanie in the Quicksand"

            Adapting a wonderful children's story by Ruth Gilmore, from Saving the Ants (©2001, Augsburg Fortress, Minneapolis, pp. 48-49). It's based on Romans 5:8, and involves a sturdy rope and the thought of pulling an enemy out of some quicksand, pondering how that is - in fact - what God has done with all of us. Should be fun to imagine, perhaps even pretending one of the children is the one stuck in the sand, and the others must decide whether to toss the rope in and, if so, then do so and pull.
  

John 4:5-15

1 - ⁵So he came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. ⁶Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon. ⁷A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” ⁸(His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.)

2 -  ⁹The Samaritan woman said to him, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.)

1 -  ¹⁰Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water.”

2 -  ¹¹The woman said to him, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? ¹²Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?”

1 -  ¹³Jesus said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, ¹⁴but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

from The New Revised Standard Version,
copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the
National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
  

Returning our Tithes and Offerings

One:     Jesus crossed the taboos of his time as he sat at Jacob's well with the Samaritan woman. He refused to see her in the smallness of his society, but rather from the wideness of God's love. Water became his image for telling her she was thinking too small. Choose the water that lives!

All:       The biblical images of water sweep us up in their swell:
                     the waters of creation,
                                water that shelters Moses,
                     the parting waters leading to liberation,
                                water from rock in a parched land,
                     the mighty waters of justice flowing down,
                                waters of baptism,
                     the water of new birth,
                                water in the cup of hospitality,
                     the healing waters for the nations,
                                water that flows from Christ to all.

One:     Our giving flows
                     the gratitude of our hearts into the world.
            Our freedom in giving names
                     the abundance we live within.
            Our passion in giving
                     proclaims our refusal to live small.

All:       Give us this day, this water. Amen.

by Glenn Mitchell, Spring Mills, Pennsylvania
Church of the Brethren Living Word Bulletin
Anchor/Wallace, Sleepy Eye MN 56085, "The Living Word Series"
  

John 4:16-42

1 - ¹⁶Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, “Go, call your husband, and come back.”

2 - ¹⁷The woman answered him, “I have no husband.”

1 - Jesus said to her, “You are right in saying, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!”

2 - ¹⁹The woman said to him, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet. ²⁰Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”

1 - ²¹Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²²You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. ²³But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. ²⁴God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

2 - ²⁵The woman said to him, “I know that Messiah is coming” (who is called Christ). “When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us.”

1 - ²⁶Jesus said to her, “I am he, the one who is speaking to you.”

3 - ²⁷Just then his disciples came. They were astonished that he was speaking with a woman, but no one said, “What do you want?” or, “Why are you speaking with her?”

2 - ²⁸Then the woman left her water jar and went back to the city. She said to the people, ²⁹“Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?” ³⁰They left the city and were on their way to him.

3 - ³¹Meanwhile the disciples were urging him, “Rabbi, eat something.” ³²But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³So the disciples said to one another, “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?”

1 - ³⁴Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work. ³⁵Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. ³⁶The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. ³⁷For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.”

3 - ³⁹Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” ⁴⁰So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. ⁴¹And many more believed because of his word. ⁴²They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

from The New Revised Standard Version,
copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the
National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.
  

Benediction

(at the end of the sermon:)

All too easily, we take water for granted. Consider, however, the abundance and the scarcity of water. An earthquake in Japan recently revealed the destructive power of too much water, which was followed by an inadequate supply of safe, drinkable water. Our morning’s Bible stories speak out of a dry and dusty land, where wells are few and far between. Again, we take water for granted.

As we sing our final hymn, I have asked the ushers to distribute a cup of water to each of you. I trust juggling hymnal and cup will not be too difficult. If some gets spilt, it is – after all – only water… “Only water” - something we too easily take for granted. Please refrain from drinking until we have finished singing, when we will do so together. Turn now to #514 in your hymnal, stand in body or spirit, and let us once more make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

"Lord, I am fondly, earnestly"

You hold in your hand a simple cup of water. Don’t take it for granted. Before you drink, think one more time of the Samaritan woman of whom Jesus asked some water from the well. It doesn’t say in scripture whether she actually gave him a drink. Remember, again, what he said.

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.”

We have been offered living water. May it flow from within you this week. Simply share it with those whom you encounter along the way. Shall we drink together?

Amen? Amen.