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.
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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 The Trinity Boys Choir singing Richard H. Lloyd's setting of Thomas Campion's View Me Lord.
for those who’d rather paste:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMW2rUCLvtk
Lyrics
View me, Lord, a work of thine;
Shall I then lie drowned in night?
Might thy grace in me but shine,
I should seem made all of light.
Cleanse me, Lord, that I may kneel
At thine altar, pure and white (1);
They that once thy mercies feel,
Gaze no more on Earth’s delight.
Worldly joys, like shadows, fade
When the heavenly light appears;
But the covenants thou hast made,
Endless, know nor days nor years.
In thy word, Lord, is my trust,
To thy mercies fast I fly.
Though I am but clay and dust,
Yet thy grace can lift me high.
(1) historical artifact: not a reference to skin color, of course.
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
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Micah 7: 7 But as for me, I will watch expectantly for the Lord; I will wait for the God of my salvation. My God will hear me.
8 Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy. Though I fall I will rise; though I dwell in darkness, the Lord is a light for me.
9 I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my case and executes justice for me. He will bring me out to the light, and I will see his righteousness.
Colossians 1: 9 For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; 11 strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously 12 giving thanks to the father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.
13 For he rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
8 Do not rejoice over me, O my enemy. Though I fall I will rise; though I dwell in darkness, the Lord is a light for me.
9 I will bear the indignation of the Lord because I have sinned against him, until he pleads my case and executes justice for me. He will bring me out to the light, and I will see his righteousness.
Colossians 1: 9 For this reason also, since the day we heard of it, we have not ceased to pray for you and to ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 so that you will walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, to please him in all respects, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God; 11 strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for the attaining of all steadfastness and patience; joyously 12 giving thanks to the father, who has qualified us to share in the inheritance of the saints in light.
13 For he rescued us from the domain of darkness, and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
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.
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Have you ever been afraid of the dark? As a child, did you dread what might be out there in the gloom, even in your own darkened bedroom?
A young man who recently bid goodbye to his teen years was telling his friend the other day about his ongoing scaredness at night.
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My older side knows there’s definitely nothing there, but my little-boy imagination is too strong for me to feel safe..........even though i KNOW there's nothing there, logically, that doesn’t really help...................
Like its not so bad anymore as when i was REALLY little like where i absolutely 100% couldn’t sleep if there was no light...but i still feel like kinda uneasy....especially especially especially if, in the day, i’ve read something scary or somethin....
Like its not so bad anymore as when i was REALLY little like where i absolutely 100% couldn’t sleep if there was no light...but i still feel like kinda uneasy....especially especially especially if, in the day, i’ve read something scary or somethin....
Have you been there? I have, way back when. I also had to battle with such feelings at his age, especially since, in my time, the movie The Exorcist was relatively new and the idea was everywhere that a demon could jump into you – in the dark.
One of the cherished atheist lines about Christianity is that people adopted religion as a fiction to combat fear of the dark. This is part of the general ‘your religion is a crutch and that’s ok if you need it’ condescension that such people often embrace.
But I think that, without the Lord in your life, perhaps it’s perfectly reasonable to be afraid of the dark. The power of our beloved Joshua, the Boy of God, in combating the fear of darkness is not fictional, but legitimately earned. (For those who aren’t used to seeing Jesus’s name in its Hebrew form, yes, that’s who I mean).
We are human, and as such, we have to deal with the powers of our imaginations. Let’s use ours for a minute here.
So as you can see when you look at me here (hi! :)/> ) I have in front of me a glass of water. It’s that famous glass of water that’s proverbially half full, or half empty.
Now zoom imaginatively back from that scene, through the roof of this church, watching the land and everything on it get smaller as we soar up into the air. Now, here we are, orbiting halfway between the Earth and the moon, and we can see that the Earth is a ball exactly half covered in darkness, and half in light. And it’s rotating so that the position of the darkness, or the light, is moving along. It’s just like that glass of water, balanced halfway between increasing darkness and increasing light.
Now, as we orbit up here in our imaginations, let’s dissolve into the strange underlying physics of the universe, the realm of philosophy. Just like in the Matrix movies, we can see the floating numbers and letters that make up the background of reality:
http://thefuturebuzz.com/pics/the-matrix.jpg
As we find the location of any person there in the program, maybe one of our friends, we can see that he (or she) is also exactly balanced. There are calculations going on that decide how our friend will act or feel about things. He is programming his own responses to the complexities of social life, life with other people (and animals, and the Earth). Our friend is not exactly half full and half empty, not exactly half dark and half light. His self-made program is half turned towards love and other people, and half turned away from them and directed towards being lost in his own desires, his fantasies and his self-justifying perspectives. (Not that there’s anything wrong with desires or fantasies, or even with justifying oneself – the emphasis is on ‘lost in’). He isn’t exactly balanced ‘between good and evil,’ since those are just the extreme endpoints, but he flickers between sympathetic awareness and self-serving egocentricity.
People don’t really like to live in this abstract realm of floating green numbers, so when they think about this balance point between love and self-absorption, they tend to think that love is brilliant and self-absorption is darkness, burial in the darkness of oneself. They automatically turn to light as a metaphor for love, and dark as a metaphor for self-lostness.
If you are buried inside the darkness of yourself, you should be afraid. Very afraid. And if you’re not, but if you’re hanging in life halfway between love and darkness, where you could go either way, you still have much to fear. If you don’t feel a strong inspiration to go towards the light, maybe you should get the shivers.
When people think of the traditional Christian vision of hell, they routinely think of some scriptures mentioning a ‘fiery furnace.’ In fact, though, there’s a whole other vision of hell in some scriptures, a vision of an ‘outer darkness.’ The two visions, weirdly, represent exactly the same thing, as you can easily see.
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Matthew 8:12 but the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth."
Matthew 13:41 “The Son of Man will send forth his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all those who snare other people, and those who commit lawlessness, 42 and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 13:49 “So it will be at the end of the age; the angels will come forth and take out the wicked from among the righteous, 50 and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 22:13 "Then the king said to the servants, 'Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'
Matthew 13:41 “The Son of Man will send forth his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all those who snare other people, and those who commit lawlessness, 42 and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 13:49 “So it will be at the end of the age; the angels will come forth and take out the wicked from among the righteous, 50 and will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Matthew 22:13 "Then the king said to the servants, 'Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.'
This outer darkness is the end point of a life dedicated to self-absorption, to obliviousness of love, to self-serving obnoxiousness, to desertion of the human values that give other people their full due as children of the Creator. This darkness is extinction forever; metaphorically, the burning up of your spirit or soul – hence the fiery furnace – and entry into eternity as ash, as a dark clinker of burned-up coal. It means you turned away from God's creation of the universe in love, and went somewhere into your own darkness, which turned out to be nowhere. Thus you have no eternal existence. You are snuffed.
Naturally anyone hovering in the balance, half way between this end-point and the light, should be scared. But this Matrix-darkness that your friend can feel inside himself is too abstract for his imagination, so he projects his feeling about it onto the Earthly darkness, the lack of sunlight. And there, as he looks out into his very own bedroom, the idea that something terrible is lurking out there just won’t quite go away.
Yes, this is metaphorical, and yes, it’s ‘just’ his imagination that directs his fear towards the lack of light in his room. But his imagination is accurate on the Matrix level, and it is sending him a powerful message. He hasn’t completely committed himself to love. He can’t quite see how he could, or how he could justify it.
Faith is so unusual compared to most of the things we do. It seems so unjustified.
We declare the half-and-half water glass to be half full, not half empty. Forced to be positive or negative about the glass, we decide to go positive.
Jesus declares the light and dark balance of our world to be committed to the light.
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John 3: 16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish, but have eternal life. 17 “For God did not send the son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through him. 18 “He who believes in him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten son of God. 19 “This is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light, for their deeds were evil. 20 “For everyone who does evil hates the light, and does not come to the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. 21 “But he who practices the truth comes to the light, so that his deeds may be manifested as having been wrought in God.”
If we accept faith in this Son, the Boy of God, then we are no longer equally balanced in the Matrix of human responses. We are committed to love and light, and the love and light reside within us. Yes, we are not instantly perfected, and we can still make plenty of mistakes. We can fall short of perfect love, over and over. But in this Matrix of ‘what do I do now?’, we have accepted the perspective that commits us to the light. Through God’s grace, the hellishness of outer darkness has been dispelled; we need worry about it no longer.
I look out into my bedroom now, late at night, and I see the beauty of a world at rest. Out in the trees, some raccoons are having a teenage squabble; and there’s an owl out there, looking around as if night were like day. And indeed, it is.
Once you’ve reconciled yourself with the light of commitment to love, night is like day. This isn’t a crutch, but rather, your reward for avoiding being lost in your own smallness. You’re committed, as in a friendship, to the Boy of God and his love. What could be more peaceful?
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Job 5:7 For humanity is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward.
8 “But as for me, I would seek God, and I would place my cause before God;
9 Who does great and unsearchable things, wonders without number.
10 “He gives rain on the earth and sends water on the fields,
11 So that he sets on high those who are lowly, and those who mourn are lifted to safety.
12 “He frustrates the plotting of the shrewd, so that their hands cannot attain success.
13 “He captures the wise by their own shrewdness, and the advice of the cunning is quickly thwarted.
14 “By day they meet with darkness, and grope at noon as in the night.
15 “But He saves us from the sword of their mouth, and the poor from the hand of the mighty.
16 “So the helpless has hope, and unrighteousness must shut its mouth.
Isaiah 60: 1 “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
2 “For behold, darkness will cover the earth and deep darkness the peoples; but the Lord will rise upon you and his glory will appear upon you.
3 “Nations will come to your light, and great leaders to the brightness of your rising.
8 “But as for me, I would seek God, and I would place my cause before God;
9 Who does great and unsearchable things, wonders without number.
10 “He gives rain on the earth and sends water on the fields,
11 So that he sets on high those who are lowly, and those who mourn are lifted to safety.
12 “He frustrates the plotting of the shrewd, so that their hands cannot attain success.
13 “He captures the wise by their own shrewdness, and the advice of the cunning is quickly thwarted.
14 “By day they meet with darkness, and grope at noon as in the night.
15 “But He saves us from the sword of their mouth, and the poor from the hand of the mighty.
16 “So the helpless has hope, and unrighteousness must shut its mouth.
Isaiah 60: 1 “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.
2 “For behold, darkness will cover the earth and deep darkness the peoples; but the Lord will rise upon you and his glory will appear upon you.
3 “Nations will come to your light, and great leaders to the brightness of your rising.
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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!