Introduction to read if you’re new
This introduction is here each week to welcome new people and help them get started. If you’re new, welcome home to the only church we know of that has a special ministry to those who are attracted to young(er) boys, plus their supportive young friends and older friends.
If you’re not new and have already taken part in one of our worship services, you will see that some parts here are the same and some are different. This follows the pattern used in most churches where parts of the order of service are familiar. Our suggestion is, don’t skip them, because the holy spirit and your own state of prayer make them different every time.
Please set at least 15 minutes aside. You can skim or skip the devotional if you want and come back to it later, but it would be better to include it if you can read it easily. If English is a difficult second language for you, then you could leave it for later.
If you want to take communion, don’t start this until you have some grape juice (or wine or other reddish juice) and some bread available.
Look through the service step by step and then if you feel inclined, write in or silently say a prayer or your own thoughts at the end. Non-members can post comments in the Guest Room – security problems with mechanical spam bots on the internet obliged us to close off guest posting in this forum because of its link in the top banner (long story). Don’t worry, we will see your posts there and answer you.
*********************************************
Call to Worship
This is the day the Lord has made.
Come, let us sing for joy to our God,
Let us praise God with music and song.
Opening music
The opening song is Be Still for the Presence of the Lord (D. Evans) by the Roder Jongenskoor (Boys Choir of Roden, the Netherlands). Note the lyrics about the power of the Lord.
for those who’d rather paste:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=vO2ccU1MAHM
Lyrics
Be still, for the presence of the Lord,
the holy One, is here;
come bow before him now
with reverence and fear
in him no sin is found
we stand on holy ground.
Be still, for the presence of the Lord,
the holy One, is here.
Be still, for the glory of the Lord
is shining all around;
he burns with holy fire,
with splendour he is crowned:
how awesome is the sight
our radiant king of light!
Be still, for the glory of the Lord
is shining all around.
Be still, for the power of the Lord
is moving in this place:
he comes to cleanse and heal,
to minister his grace -
no work too hard for him.
In faith receive from him.
Be still, for the power of the Lord
is moving in this place.
Prayers for people we know
Please say a prayer here for someone you know who needs praying for. If you want to write it out, please add a post at the end. Unfortunately, because spammers are currently technologically ahead of our board software, we have had to disallow posting by non-members here in this forum; but know that we share your prayers in the spirit. You may still post in our Guest Room and in our Interfaith and Community Discussion forum.
A prayer from all of us for your prayers:
Gracious God, your abundance surrounds us and sustains us. We thank you for the gift of your Son, newborn in our hearts. Also we thank you for gifts of friendship and new beginnings, for life as it unfolds and new opportunities for growth. We pray for the friends we have made here and elsewhere, friends who are no different, as people and as spirits, whether we met them through electronic media or through sound, sight and touch.
Spirit of hope, in our lives and in our world there are many troubled by concerns. Some face the uncertainty and pain of illness. Some wrestle with anxiety and fear, about work, about relationships, about addictions, about the ones they love, and about themselves. We pray that your healing love may touch these lives.
We pray for those who are threatened by the special dangers posed by their sexual orientations. We pray for those in exile and in prison, for those traveling, and for those who experience loneliness. We pray for all your children, in your many names.
Sacred reading
Quote
Acts 1:3 After his suffering, he showed himself to these men and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God. 4On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: “Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised, which you have heard me speak about. 5For John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.”
6So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
7He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
9After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
Ephesians 1:15 For this reason I too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all the saints, 16 do not cease giving thanks for you, while making mention of you in my prayers; 17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. 18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might 20 which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.
6So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
7He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
9After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
Ephesians 1:15 For this reason I too, having heard of the faith in the Lord Jesus which exists among you and your love for all the saints, 16 do not cease giving thanks for you, while making mention of you in my prayers; 17 that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you a spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of Him. 18 I pray that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened, so that you will know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the surpassing greatness of His power toward us who believe. These are in accordance with the working of the strength of His might 20 which He brought about in Christ, when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly places, 21 far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And He put all things in subjection under His feet, and gave Him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.
Devotional Message
I hope that if you read this message, the Holy Spirit will read it with you, and send God’s light out to correct my words and make these imperfect thoughts holy in the sight of the Lord.
*************
When I think of the members, friends and supporters of this church, my heart is full of awe. They’re willing to put up with my shortcomings, but that’s not the most amazing thing about them. What makes them stellar is that they tend to have a clear vision of our shared hope, which we share with Joshy himself, Jesus the Messiah. To paraphrase today’s sacred reading, most of the time, I feel that “the Creator of glory has given them a spirit of wisdom and of revelation. The eyes of their hearts have been enlightened, so that they know the hope of God’s calling; they know the riches of God’s inheritance in the saints, and the surpassing greatness of God’s power toward us who believe.”
In the middle of the week this week we had Ascension Day, the day our savior performed his final visible impossibility, ascending into the sky. That might seem to be a good illustration of ‘the greatness of God’s power,’ but I think, in this church, we can see something even more impressive.
These days, for many people, seeing “the hope of God’s calling” is like trying to see the stars on a very cloudy night. There is an amazing weight of cloud cover, or smokescreen, that stands between us today and the place where Jesus ascended. And it’s surprising how much of this obstruction relates to pedophilia, as broadly defined by the newspapers. Indeed, in the minds of many people, pedophiles and Christians are locked together in a freefall from social acceptability and integration. The mysterious collusions around altarboy groping in the Catholic church have seemed to make the whole notion of God’s calling a mask for hypocrisy and sexual avarice.
Protestantism and its conservative heterodoxies (Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witness, Adventistism, etc.) still form a strong encampment in the USA. There, the wagons are tightly circled around a particular marriage-oriented world-view that, thank God, hasn’t been conducive to the development of pedophile scandals. At the same time, related scandals are creeping in from the sides. One of the marvels of American conservative Christian fundamentalism is that, apart from its soft-spoken, ‘mainstream’ rejection of homosexual relationships, it has long given sanctuary to anti-gay fanatics who produce pseudoscience and hate literature about gays. There was a flagrant example of that early this week when Paul Cameron of the so-called Family Research Institute issued a particularly slanderous, icky retort to Barack Obama’s proclamation of support for same-sex marriage. He said:
Quote
Well, the timing is I think miserable for his re-election. I would have expected him, as you did, to wait until he was the new president and say, “Guess what? I’ve changed my mind,” or, “I’ve evolved.” But homosexuality is the one sin, or the one habit, that is 24/7. It is homosexuality all the time. And actually, while I’m not sure about the claims by the various people who have reported that Obama has at least participated at times with them in homosexual acts, this certainly lends some credence…
Mark my words clearly; the long term goal of the homosexual movement is to get every little boy to grab his ankles and every little girl to give it a try. They will not rest until every one of our children at least gets to try, has the opportunity and maybe is forced to at least once experience homosexual acts. There is no retreating from that, they made it very clear earlier on—now they don’t talk about it—but that’s what they want, they will not be happy until they get it, marriage is just a step along the way.
Mark my words clearly; the long term goal of the homosexual movement is to get every little boy to grab his ankles and every little girl to give it a try. They will not rest until every one of our children at least gets to try, has the opportunity and maybe is forced to at least once experience homosexual acts. There is no retreating from that, they made it very clear earlier on—now they don’t talk about it—but that’s what they want, they will not be happy until they get it, marriage is just a step along the way.
Here are a few more Cameron quotes assembled, by the website ‘Right Wing Watch,' with audio clips at the link.
Quote
Cameron claimed the push for LGBT equality “brings into question the civil rights mentality” because it created “special rights on the basis of certain characteristics,” calling gays and lesbians “mentally deranged” and transgender people “people that are really strange.” He went on to compare gays and lesbians to people who have a sexual attraction to “dirty socks” and said “we’re headed to a place where the weirder the people, the more rights they will obtain and the more normal the fewer rights you will have”:
Cameron told Schneider that “we almost need a second American Revolution” to defeat legislation like a bill in California that would limit ex-gay “reparative therapy,” which he warned would make the state take kids away from their parents. But he went on to say that such “reparative therapy” does not work and instead advocated that homosexuality be made “illegal” in order “to protect our children”:
Cameron: “Part of the problem with the Christian Church in the United States today is that’s it’s be psychiatricized or psychologilized [sic], we seem to think that it’s our job to be counselors or do something to help people change. The fact is that the Christian Church for 2000 years tried to and eventually got homosexuality to be made illegal, when you make it illegal a lot of people don’t get into it because it’s illegal, when you make it illegal a lot of people get out of it because it’s illegal, when you say ‘we don’t want to be unkind’—Hey, we have to protect our children! We have to have a future!
The Christian Church until just recently, just the last few years of time, said we must prevent homosexuality from corrupting our society, corrupting our kids, and so that’s the area where I think we ought to go. If you stake your efforts on trying to convert people who are into drinking heavily or drugging heavily or homosexuality you are going to fail by far most of the time. Some of them will come over but there is no known technique to take someone who is in a besetting sin like this and free them.
Cameron told Schneider that “we almost need a second American Revolution” to defeat legislation like a bill in California that would limit ex-gay “reparative therapy,” which he warned would make the state take kids away from their parents. But he went on to say that such “reparative therapy” does not work and instead advocated that homosexuality be made “illegal” in order “to protect our children”:
Cameron: “Part of the problem with the Christian Church in the United States today is that’s it’s be psychiatricized or psychologilized [sic], we seem to think that it’s our job to be counselors or do something to help people change. The fact is that the Christian Church for 2000 years tried to and eventually got homosexuality to be made illegal, when you make it illegal a lot of people don’t get into it because it’s illegal, when you make it illegal a lot of people get out of it because it’s illegal, when you say ‘we don’t want to be unkind’—Hey, we have to protect our children! We have to have a future!
The Christian Church until just recently, just the last few years of time, said we must prevent homosexuality from corrupting our society, corrupting our kids, and so that’s the area where I think we ought to go. If you stake your efforts on trying to convert people who are into drinking heavily or drugging heavily or homosexuality you are going to fail by far most of the time. Some of them will come over but there is no known technique to take someone who is in a besetting sin like this and free them.
So, here, Cameron brings up the homophobic equivalent of the medieval ‘the Jews want to steal our Christian babies,’ the idea that gays want to recruit or corrupt all children. Gays themselves, of course, mostly agree that they are a minority group and that the majority of people are heterosexual. Cameron doesn’t buy this. Yet, while overriding any acceptance of defined sexual orientations when he says ‘they’re after all children,’ he then, on the flipside of his rhetoric, calls gays unchangeable. In other words, he accepts unchanging sexual orientation when it suits him, and rejects it when it’s convenient to do so, in order to maximize the fear and hate. Then he coyly threatens violence (“a new American revolution”) and threatens to lock up millions of innocent, loving people as criminals.
When Protestantism nurtures this sort of hatemongering in its midst, that is also a profound cloud obscuring the love of God. And there, again, as a big part of that cloud, is the specter of childhood sex, the profound paranoia of our time.
This week, Paul Cameron suddenly linked his gay bogeyman scenarios to pedophilia in a big way.
According to rawstory.com, (www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/05/16/paul-cameron-i-acquired-homosexual-feelings-as-a-3-year-old/)
Quote
Dr. Paul Cameron revealed Wednesday on The David Pakman Show that he became attracted to men after being raped as a child, but said he eventually overcame his homosexual feelings.
…
Near the end of his interview, Pakman asked Cameron whether being gay was a choice. Cameron said young and adolescent boys could in fact choose who they were attracted to, but older adults were more inflexible in their sexual preferences.
“What age were you when you decided, ‘I’m going to evaluate men and evaluate women, and I’m going to choose for the rest of my life I will be attracted to women?’” Pakman asked.
“I didn’t do that so much consciously,” Cameron said. “I reacted to my environment. As you’re probably aware, I was seduced, or raped, as a child. I was about three. I was raped homosexually and had that continued, I don’t know where I would’ve ended up.”
“But I do know that the culture, which was directed toward heterosexuality, overcame whatever feelings I had, and I had some, that I acquired as a 3-year-old, and by the time I was 8, 9 or 10, I was thoroughly interested in girls.”
…
Near the end of his interview, Pakman asked Cameron whether being gay was a choice. Cameron said young and adolescent boys could in fact choose who they were attracted to, but older adults were more inflexible in their sexual preferences.
“What age were you when you decided, ‘I’m going to evaluate men and evaluate women, and I’m going to choose for the rest of my life I will be attracted to women?’” Pakman asked.
“I didn’t do that so much consciously,” Cameron said. “I reacted to my environment. As you’re probably aware, I was seduced, or raped, as a child. I was about three. I was raped homosexually and had that continued, I don’t know where I would’ve ended up.”
“But I do know that the culture, which was directed toward heterosexuality, overcame whatever feelings I had, and I had some, that I acquired as a 3-year-old, and by the time I was 8, 9 or 10, I was thoroughly interested in girls.”
So even the source of Cameron’s hate speech is now linked to a tragic misinterpretation of a childhood rape experience – one that he seems to feel gave him a taste of same-sex desire.
How much of the more extremist protestant reaction against same-sex relationships is based on such experiences? Cameron is by no means the first public gay-hater to admit, finally, that he was raped as a child and has misinterpreted his rape as representing all homosexuality. Those in the know are aware that not only is it a mistake to blame all gays for such events, it’s also a mistake to blame all pedophiles, since the great majority of pedophiles are conscientious, thoughtful people who would never commit an act of rape. But how many members of the newspaper-informed public are able to understand all this, amidst all the noise and scandal-mongering that takes place as people rush around, broadcasting their fears and touting their gut-reaction control strategies around childhood sex events?
And more poignantly, how many people, seeing all this pedosexual trauma and misdirected gaybashing come up whenever Christianity is mentioned, can look through it all and see the true love and the valid hope of God?
The answer is, some can. Our members and friends, and some others, maybe you. Incredible people, or lucky people, or both. People who have made an outreach to grace and have been touched by it.
The true power of God is not that he can raise Jesus up into the heavens. His true power is that his inspired, perfect love is still perfectly visible to those who look, despite all the pollution our world throws up between us and him. We really can take inspiration from that example. We can bring Joshy, our savior into our hearts, and become healing, loving people. Even those who are pedophiles can be exactly at the opposite end of the human spectrum from all the child rapists and manipulators, and from all those who use the specter of childhood sex to fuel their hatreds.
People are sometimes offended that God doesn’t do more in the physical realm – doesn’t stop earthquakes, untwist tornadoes, handcuff Hitler and blow up terrorists with their own bombs. The idea that we were put into the cosmos as free creatures in a free world is offensive to them, even if, once in awhile, some miracles of love are attested. God may seem completely powerless to them, or at least, completely negligent.
But if they can look into the wellspring of his love, his caring, his consideration, and his rectitude and justice, then they will know, in their awe, where the power is concentrated. And this miracle of inspiration is available to all of us. It is always there. "24/7," as Paul Cameron would say.
If this is all new to you, don’t let all the pedophile cloud-cover and social pollution keep your heart from being lifted up into the heavens, directly into God’s power, God’s love.
You can have love, and have it more abundantly.
Even if you are a pedophile yourself.
*************
Confession and prayer of reconciliation
For those whose conscience is troubled by something – which includes me – you too? :(/> :blink:/> :unsure:/>
Prayer of Reconciliation
Jesus showed us a way to a new relationship with God, freeing us from whatever binds us, reconciling us with God, with each other, and with ourselves.
And so we pray:
God, we recognize those times when we have separated ourselves from you and each other. We have not always cared for, respected and loved our world, our neighbour, or ourselves.
We have sinned by things we have done, and by things we have left undone.
We open our hearts again to the renewal, the forgiveness and the freedom you offer through your Holy Spirit and the love of your sweet Boy, Joshua the Messiah, Jesus Christ.
Affirmation of Freedom
Hear the good news, God saying to us, “Behold, I make all things new!” In every moment, you are loved, and so you are forgiven, free in the name of God who created you, who dwells within you, and who goes with you always. Amen.
Celebration of Holy Communion
On the night you were betrayed, you took the bread,
After giving thanks you broke it and said,
"This is my body, broken for you,
And as you do this, remember me."
We celebrate an open Communion, everyone is welcome to partake. You need not feel that you are a good Christian or that you totally understand this act of going beyond yourself. Let the communion explain itself to you as you do it. We recommend non-alcoholic juice and some bread, or if you have them, wheat wafers. Dip the bread or wafer into the juice, place it in your mouth and say a prayer of your own or read and accept this blessing: Faithful God, with these gifts you offer us communion in the spirit of your beloved son, and the body of your beloved Boy, newborn in me today, Yeshua Messiah, Jesus Christ.
Let us now proclaim the Joy of our Faith, which is one message for all Christians and the world. Say it out loud or silently:
Christ is born!
Christ has died!
Christ is risen!
Christ will come again!