We held our service at 11am and it was well attended.
The Call to worship was Hebrews 4: 14-16
Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
Hymn – 755- When I survey the wondrous cross
Prayer of Adoration
Almighty God, you made yourself weak that we might have life. You experienced pain, humiliation and death, that we might have joy, freedom and hope. You are the majestic, unfathomable, unapproachable, mysterious and mighty Lord of the Universe – your ways are beyond all our capacities. In heavenly splendour you reign, your will is pure love, a love that is so mighty and so overwhelming that it rescues us from all that we would do to oppose you. You slay us with your love, you submerge us in your grace. You go the cross to bring us back to you. In your son Jesus Christ you have absorbed the very worst of us, and given back the very essence of you, pure and powerful love. We praise you for this wonderful and glorious gift.
Prayer of Confession
But we confess that we have not deserved this mercy and we have not been worthy of it. Each day you are crucified anew, as human cruelty, human lust for blood has its truly wicked way on your earth. Those who do such things are not so different from us, the same anger and pride lives in their hearts as is in ours. We confess that we cannot separate ourselves from those who nailed you to the cross, from those who mocked you, and from those who screamed for you to be crucified. They are in us and we are in them. Forgive us father that you came in peace and still we respond in war.
Declaration of forgiveness
And yet what is impossible for us is possible for you, and has been achieved. Your gentle humility is mightier than the pride of the whole world. In you love has conquered hatred and your take us into your kingdom – a place where your holy and perfect will is not frustrated, and no amount of sin, no amount of failure by humanity, no degree of cruelty is enough to keep you in the tomb. You rescue us from our folly, and you make us into your people, called to follow Jesus into your Kingdom. Thank you father for the powerful, permanent, and gracious forgiveness that comes to us from your son on the cross. We delight in this forgiveness, we marvel at it, and we pledge ourselves to you, cleansed, refreshed and free to take your word into our heats and into the world.
Petition for the worship
We come before you now to feel your presence in our time of worship, and that sense of connection with those sitting around us. Unite our hearts with each other and make us into the body of Christ. Take the words from our lips and make them into a hymn of praise to you and of true communion with all who call on you today. Pour out your Spirit on us as we say the words that Jesus taught us…
Our father…
Hymn -745- Were you there
Old Testament Reading: Psalm 22: 19-31
Hymn – 619 – Such Love
Message
For many years it puzzled me why Jesus said what he did before he died ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ Did he think that he had failed as he died? Was he discovering that he was mistaken to think that he was God’s son as he called for help and it didn’t come?
Many people ask why, if Jesus was what he said he was, did he allow himself to be crucified? Why didn’t he rescue himself? In fact, according to the gospels those watching him asked him exactly that question.
And if Jesus felt that it was all going wrong, and that God really had abandoned him, why did the gospel writers include these words? After all the Gospels were carefully written and we are told that there is much more that was said and done that could have been included. So why include these words on the cross?
The answer is that Jesus experienced and redeemed our total human existence and this includes the pain and fear of saying goodbye (see Mandy Thursday) and the feeling of being abandoned by God.
That bears repeating. The Son of God, who is God in Christ, fully experienced what it feels like to be abandoned by God. This means that not only is death and grief overcome in Christ, so is an accompanying loss of faith.
So when it happens to us, that we get that phone call, that bolt out of the blue with tragic news and our instant response is ‘There can be no God!’ in fact God has already experienced and overcome this on our behalf.
These moments are real in all our lives: we suffer in such a way that not only do we feel emtional misery or physical pain – we feel like we live in a universe with no God, abandoned to senseless or cruel suffering. But it is exactly at such a moment that we need to remind ourselves that Jesus chose to experience this, and ultimately to take away its power over us.
So it is not just death that is redeemed on the cross (as if that wasn’t enough!) Fear of death, the pain of saying goodbye, and the horrible, lonely feeling of abandonment that goes with it is part of Christ’s passion, so that it can be part of his victory in resurrection too.
Let us pray
Father there are times when it seems to us that you are not there
We feel abandoned, it seems that this is a senseless world full of pain and unnecessary suffering
And when tragedy strikes us we ask where you are and in our pain and our anguish we say, or we think, or we feel, that you are not there
We thank you that in your son Jesus you have felt that same abandonment, that same loneliness in suffering,
We ask that as we think of the cross, of the way of the cross, and of this the day of the cross, that it should speak to those moments in our life when we cry out ‘my God, my God, why have you abandoned me’.
When such moments come upon us, come to us quickly Lord, may we never stay angry, come quickly to us to reassure us that you are there
Help us to learn from all our experiences in life both good and bad and when we suffer help us to know that this is just our portion of that suffering that you chose on the cross,
We think of those days in which death and disaster have come upon people in this past year, in natural disasters, in war zones, in extremes of poverty
Through the pain of Good Friday may we glimpse the joy of Easter Sunday
For us in this church, for our friends and families and for all your people show us how to take up our cross, knowing that we go there with you
Be with us in our time of trial
By the power of your holy spirit
And in the name of Jesus Christ
Amen
Hymn -536 – On a hill far away
Blessing/Dismissal – Hebrews 10:19-23
Therefore, my friends, since we have confidence to enter the sanctuary by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain (that is, through his flesh), and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful
The Grace