Sunday Gathering - October 24

Trinity United Church
October 24, 2021
Proper 25
Worship
“Connection not Perfection”

WE GATHER

Gathering

 
Welcome 
May the peace of Christ be with you.
Welcome to Trinity United Church in Port Coquitlam, BC.
We are so grateful that you have chosen to spend some time with us, we are glad you are here. 
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Acknowledgement of Territory 
For tens of thousands of years, the lands on which we live, work and worship, have been occupied by indigenous peoples.
Much of what we know as the Northwest Coast of North America was occupied by the Coast Salish Peoples. The territory where Trinity United Church of Port Coquitlam resides is the unceded territory of the Kwikwetlem First Nations. Our acknowledgement of unceded traditional territory is a first step in reconciliation between settler cultures and indigenous peoples and the decolonization of western systems that continue to oppress and exploit indigenous peoples and land. The work of reconciliation is daunting. The work of reconciliation will not be ours to complete, but neither is it ours to abandon. 
Let us prepare our hearts and minds for worship.

Prelude/ Lighting of the Christ Candle
CLICK HERE to view “Welcome Home” video
 
Call to Worship 
We are called to worship
Not just on Sunday but everyday!
God does not demand our worship
But we worship anyway, because we are thankful!
We have gathered today for worship:
Come let us worship our God!

Prayer of Approach 
Dear God:
We come to gather today in both knowledge and mystery.
We both know your presence and also experience the unknowable.
We praise you for your amazing love.
We desire to know even more of your grace in our lives.
We confess that we often fall short of knowing your presence each day.
We ask that you transform our gathering time into an opportunity to know your more.
Amen.

Hymn: "A Song of Praise to the Maker" MV 30 CLICK HERE

WE HEAR THE WORD

Reading: Amos 5:18-27

Alas for you who desire the day of the Lord!
   Why do you want the day of the Lord?
It is darkness, not light;
   as if someone fled from a lion,
   and was met by a bear;
or went into the house and rested a hand against the wall,
   and was bitten by a snake.
Is not the day of the Lord darkness, not light,
   and gloom with no brightness in it?

I hate, I despise your festivals,
   and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt-offerings and grain-offerings,
   I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
   I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
   I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
   and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

Did you bring to me sacrifices and offerings the forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel? You shall take up Sakkuth your king, and Kaiwan your star-god, your images that you made for yourselves; therefore I will take you into exile beyond Damascus, says the Lord, whose name is the God of hosts.

Hymn:  "As a Fire is Meant for Burning" VU 578  CLICK HERE

Message 
My life situation has changed quite a bit since I was last involved at Trinity in May of 2020.  Seems like a long time ago now.  It was still in the beginning stages of the pandemic and I think we were all waiting to see when life would go back to normal.

Alas, we are now in October 2021 and we are still on this journey together.

For much of the past decade I was a theology student and candidate for ministry in the United Church.  This was part of how I came to go to China with the United Church in 2015 which was the experience I shared with you last year.  After graduation from VST I decided not to pursue ordination right away.  I still felt I had much to learn before assuming solo ministry in a congregation.  This led me to seek out new opportunities to serve outside of the church.  

Since December 2020, I have been working for a community development organization on the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver called Mission Possible (MP).  

The goal of Mission Possible is to bring dignity to DTES community members who face barriers to traditional employment by enrolling them in an employment readiness program and also providing paid work experience for up to 6 months.  I am currently the coordinator of our core maintenance department which is operated as a social enterprise called MP Maintenance.  I have a background in landscaping and so this job provides an ideal bridge between my trades work experience and my desire to recontextualize my work in the context of ministry.  

In short it has turned out to be the perfect job for me.  

A social enterprise is a for profit business owned by a nonprofit organization.  A lot of DTES nonprofits have started new social enterprises in order to not be totally reliant on donations, grants and sponsorships.  Social enterprises allow nonprofits to generate income through enterprise to sustain their work.  

A little bit of history might help to understand more about MP.  Mission Possible began as a faith based street outreach sponsored by the Vancouver Church of the Nazarene.  The Church of the Nazarene shared Methodist roots in the social gospel tradition with the United Church of Canada.  For many years the ministry operated out of a small building on Powell Street that was donated by church raised funds. Currently this building houses the Jacob’s Well drop in ministry but MP still retains ownership of it.  

In 2009 just before the Vancouver Olympics, members of Mission Possible took an opportunity to help clean up the neighbourhood before the Olympics by doing some graffiti removal.  This was the origin of our property maintenance social enterprise.  
The vast majority of our program participants, whom we call associates, are employed picking up litter and needles along the streets of Vancouver doing what the city calls “microcleaning”.  These are low barrier employment opportunities offered to individuals on 6 month contracts.  We call this group the “clean team”.  I run a separate team of mixed groups of full time staff and associates continuing the property maintenance work including exterior cleaning, graffiti removal and landscape maintenance.  These opportunities allow associates who are underchallenged doing street cleaning to gain more skills towards finding stable permanent employment.

So far it has been very rewarding but challenging work.  At Mission Possible our core values are tenacious, empowering, compassionate, humble, and supportive.  I am finding tenacity to be the hardest to develop in people.  This is challenging in all aspects of ministry I find.  Social justice is easy to engage superficially but to create lasting change means not giving up when the goings gets tougher.  

I selected today’s passage from Amos because when I was in VST Amos was the foundational text for our social justice course.  Amos 5 is probably the most well known passage from Amos: to “let justice run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.”  

Amos’ oracles were not kind to the political leadership of his time.  Amos believed that God had a just anger towards those who created injustice for others.  In school we learned that Amos is probably a composite of several different prophetic voices over many years.  The earliest collection of prophecies did not leave much hope for the future.  Amos simply pronounces judgement against those causing injustice and declares that they have sinned against God.  Later prophecies like this one leave the fate of those causing injustice more open ended with the call to return to creating justice.

To allow justice to flow like running water means that there is to be no stoppage in right living.  This leads back to developing tenacity in ministry.  I feel that we often attempt to create justice in spurts with possible long periods in between initiatives.  This is often due to logistics in sustaining a particular ministry but often its root cause is that people get tired and move on to other things.  

Amos 5 presents a pointed challenge to those in religious authority.  

Like in Jesus’ time as well the religious leaders are corrupt and hypocritical.  They perform ceremony over substance and create rituals and not justice.  This has been challenging to me personally in my own involvement and experience in the United Church.  When I joined the United Church I was very proud of myself for finding and joining a church focused on justice.  I loved finding a church that was serious about welcoming and providing a safe place for all.  Over time I started to realize that while the church was doing all these things, my personal participation in creating justice was pretty limited.  I was essentially creating justice by association only.  

The church was engaged in creating justice and I felt included in that through membership but I wasn’t doing much on my own.  

For many years, social justice and evangelism were struggles for me as a church member.  I enjoyed the worship and social aspects of congregational life but I would often back away from getting involved in mission or outreach activities.  I felt I didn’t have anything to offer and so I backed away and let others take the lead.  Even when offered a job at Mission Possible I was nervous.  I had never worked in a social justice context before.  I feared encountering situations where I would not know what to do.  

Now that I have been working at Mission Possible for almost a year now I have had to rethink my struggles in the past.  Much of ministry is simply making yourself available to help out.  Also, it's important to never be in a situation where you are tasked with creating justice alone.  We need to work together when helping out.  I often wondered if it was simply better to stay home and donate money to help organizations instead of getting personally involved.  I have learned that for each person the call will be different but a both/and approach is possible.  We need the help of the Spirit to determine where we are best used in each situation.  We may be called to entrust our resources to someone else to do their work or we may be called to work hands on ourselves.

The reality is that both often happens at the same time.

Weekly worship is a great opportunity to work towards justice flowing like a river.  A weekly reminder to stay on track is a way to reflect regularly on how our lives and our church is creating justice.  The challenge is that while it is fun to sing about justice, it is hard work to create justice.  The song of justice must flow from the living stream of justice and it is possible to sing about a stream that dried up a long time ago…

Special Music: Pepper Choplin’s "For the Beauty of the Earth", performed by David Rogers. CLICK HERE

WE RESPOND

Offering 
Your offering: your financial gifts, your gifts of time and skill are what make our ministry possible. If you are not already on Pre-Authorized Remittance, we invite you to participate in our ministry by making a financial gift, either by sending a cheque to the church office, or by going to our website and clicking on the donate now button. 
We have been blessed, not only by the generosity of our membership and adherents, but also by the courage of our leadership to learn and navigate in a very different world than the one we knew a year ago. Let us give thanks.
Great Mystery, 
accept and bless our gifts of money, time, skill and praise.
We trust you to use them for the work 
of your great and wondrous creation, 
turning things upside down 
to bring peace and justice to all things. Amen.

Prayers of Thanksgiving and intercession 
Holy God,
Thank you for the call to justice.
Thank you for all those who respond to that call and serve those who have no voice, no food, no safe place to live and no one to care for them.  

We pray for all those who have been affected by this pandemic.
We pray for all those who are unwell and suffering, physically, mentally or spiritually.
We pray for your healing presence to be with them.
We pray for all those who are grieving a loss.  Comfort them and assure them that they are not alone.

Thank you for this congregation of Trinity United.
Thank you for their faithful service in this community.
Loving God, I pray for the future of this community of faith as they look to the future.  Guide them to know the way forward to continue to follow the call to serve in this community.

We continue together in prayer with the words that Jesus taught us:

The Disciples’ Prayer “Our Father” VU 960  CLICK HERE

WE GO FORTH

Hymn:  "God of Grace and Glory" VU 686  CLICK HERE

Commissioning and Benediction