WE GATHER IN GOD’S PRESENCE:
Lighting the Candle:
Jesus said, ‘I am the light of the world.
Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness
but will have the light of life.’
Let us be mindful of each other as we engage in worship,
those who worship at home
and those who worship in the chapel:
Greeting:
The Lord be with you AND ALSO WITH YOU
We Focus on God Psalm 105
O give thanks to the Lord, call on his name,
MAKE KNOWN HIS DEEDS AMONG THE PEOPLES.
2 Sing to him, sing praises to him;
TELL OF ALL HIS WONDERFUL WORKS.
3 Glory in his holy name;
LET THE HEARTS OF THOSE WHO SEEK THE LORD REJOICE.
4 Seek the Lord and his strength;
SEEK HIS PRESENCE CONTINUALLY.
We Sing: TIS 111 PRAISE TO THE LORD, THE ALMIGHTY 5vv
Prayer
Gracious God,
we gather to worship you,
our hearts filled with gratitude
that you care enough for us
to not abandon us to our self-focused
and self-destructive ways,
enslaved by sin;
We offer praise for Jesus
with whom we are united in baptism
that having died with him,
we find ourselves alive to a newness of being;
We thank you for your Spirit
who enlivens us to serve you
to the praise and glory of your name,
as citizens of the kingdom of heaven,
therefore we pray as our Lord taught us to pray:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.
Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours
now and forever. Amen
WE LISTEN FOR A WORD FROM GOD
Scripture
ROMANS 5:18-6:14
18 Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. 19 For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. 20 But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, 21 so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
6:1 What then are we to say? Should we continue in sin in order that grace may abound? 2 By no means! How can we who died to sin go on living in it? 3 Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? 4 Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions. 13 No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness. 14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means! 16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness? 17 But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted, 18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness. 19 I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.
20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness. 21 So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death. 22 But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. 23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
In this is the Word of the Lord WE HEAR AND REJOICE, O LORD
MATTHEW 14:22-33
22 Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. 23 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24 but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. 25 And early in the morning he came walking towards them on the lake. 26 But when the disciples saw him walking on the lake, they were terrified, saying, ‘It is a ghost!’ And they cried out in fear. 27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, ‘Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.’
28 Peter answered him, ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’ 29 He said, ‘Come.’ So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came towards Jesus. 30 But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ 31 Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, ‘You of little faith, why did you doubt?’ 32 When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. 33 And those in the boat worshipped him, saying, ‘Truly you are the Son of God.’
This is the Gospel of our Lord PRAISE TO YOU LORD JESUS CHRIST
Prayer of Confession
Holy and merciful God,
we come confessing our misuse of
what Paul terms our members:
We confess that we have applied our minds
to that which distorts the truth about others
and diminishes them as people who need our help…
Lord have mercy LORD HAVE MERCY
We confess that we have applied our energy
to pursue mainly that which serves our self-interests;
ignoring the well-being of neighbour…
Christ have mercy CHRIST HAVE MERCY
We confess that we have pampered our bodies
with physical comforts and culinary delights
paying little attention to the impact we make on creation…
Lord have mercy LORD HAVE MERCY
Declaration of Reconciliation
You have been united with Christ in his death,
so you are also united with him in resurrection;
you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God,
and the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
following: so we say with joy in our hearts THANKS BE TO GOD
Passing the Peace.. as we raise our hands in blessing to those unseen…
The peace of the Risen Lord be with you all AND ALSO WITH YOU.
We Sing: TIS 375 COME, LET US WITH OUR LORD ARISE 3vv
Contemporary Word A FRESH BEGINNING
Most people do not remember their baptism;
mainly because they were baptised when infants.
I was twelve. So I do remember.
It was baptism by immersion, in the Zillmere Church of Christ.
The details remain etched in my mind,
so I can recall them at will…,
I made my way into the baptistry as the congregation sang[1]
Low in the grave He lay
Jesus my Saviour!
Waiting the coming day
Jesus my Lord!
The minister, Bob Clymer,
asked of me the question echoed in the question
put to Ian and Liz later in the service,
Louis, do you believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Saviour?
I replied, Yes I do!
Then Mr. Clymer pronounced: upon your confession of faith
I now baptise you in the name of the Father,
and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit
the baptismal formula of Matthew 28:19…
leaning back onto his arm, he lowered me so I went under the water,
and as he raised me back up
so my head broke the surface of the water
I heard the congregation sing with great gusto:
Up from the grave He arose
With a mighty triumph o’er His foes
He arose a Victor from the dark domain
And He lives forever with His saints to reign
He arose! (He arose)
He arose! (He arose)
Hallelujah! Christ arose!
Water streamed of me as I exited the baptistry,
Soaked and shivering, it was July 20th in 1958… it mattered not,
all I sensed was the new beginning,
my commencing life with a fresh start as a committed Christian.
Not that many years ago I baptized a woman of about 40,
according to the rites of the Uniting Church…
no submersion, drenching…
after I baptised her,
She beamed, her face alight with wonder,
spontaneously she expressed her sense of a new beginning
using modern imagery, this way,
now I am a member of team Jesus!
I venture to suggest that Paul never forgot his baptism,
as it occurred in rather dramatic circumstances: (Acts 9)
17 So Ananias went and entered the house.
He laid his hands on Saul[Paul] and said,
‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight
and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’
18 And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes,
and his sight was restored.
Then he got up and was baptized…
His fresh beginning,
his fresh way of being,
his fresh way of acknowledging Jesus
his fresh way of understanding the way of God,
his fresh way of looking at life,
his fresh commission as an apostle to the Gentiles,
all these, had started!
He redefined who he was,
explaining to the Roman Christians his fresh way of self-understanding:
Paul, a slave/servantof Jesus Christ,
called to be an apostle,
set apart for the gospel of God…
The gospel of God invaded Paul’s life
and changed his way of seeing reality so powerfully that, in a way,
he is telling his own story whenever he preaches the gospel of God.[2]
His calling, sealed with his baptism,
now defines him.
This new self-awareness is not simply
a fresh awareness of who he is,
so much as the awareness of whose he is…
a slave/servant of Jesus Christ,
an apostle for the Gospel of God…
It does not matter if we remember anything about our baptism!
What matters, is to understand what our baptism means!
Its meaning remains constant regardless of any memory of it!
Worth a moment to reflect on:
How do I understand my baptism?
what does my baptism mean?
what significance has my baptism?
We have been claimed and welcomed by God,
Paul informs us, as we learned from Romans chapter 5.
Through the faithfulness of Jesus
who counters the faithlessness of Adam,
we find ourselves transferred
from the domain of disobedience and its wage, death,
to the grace filled domain of God, and its gift of life!
He elaborates on this as follows in this morning’s text:
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
4 Therefore we have been buried with him
by baptism into death,
so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead
by the glory of the Father,
so we too might walk in newness of life.
going on to say:
present yourselves to God
as those who have been brought from death to life,
and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.
We need to remind ourselves that Christ and Jesus
are not interchangeable names…
not like when I was school, and the teacher could call out,
‘Louis, pay attention!’ or ‘van Laar, where is your homework!’
Christ in Greek Christos; in early Christianity was a title,
and only gradually became an alternative proper name for Jesus. [3]
The Greek translated the Hebrew, Messiah…
the Anointed one,
the much anticipated deliverer of God’s people.
So Paul is saying ‘Messiah Jesus’ …
and “just as the Messiah was raised from the dead…”
Paul believes that Jesus was and is the Messiah;
the logic of what he is saying works on the assumption that, as Messiah,
he is not just a private individual, Jesus of Nazareth;
he is the ‘anointed one’, who sums up his people in himself!
Mind you, also as the resurrected and ascended Jesus Messiah
he experiences what his people experience!
As Paul discovered for himself(Acts 9:5)
He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’
The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
Here we meet, for the first time in Romans,
one of Paul’s central beliefs:
that since the Messiah, the Christ, represents his people,
what is true of him is true of them.
That is why he speaks of people coming ‘into the Messiah’,
or being ‘in the Messiah’,
or of things happening to them ‘with the Messiah’. [4]
I realise we are more familiar with the ín Christ’, or ínto Christ’,
but the meaning in scripture is Messiah.
Following on from his earlier discussion
of sin bringing death into human existence,
Paul wants us to understand that through our baptism
we have joined Christ in his death!
We have already gone through death,
and as Christ was resurrected,
so we have come out at the other end,
resurrected to a new life!
For if we have been united with him in a death like his,
we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
6 We know that our old self was crucified with him
so that the body of sin might be destroyed,
and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.
7 For whoever has died is freed from sin.
8 But if we have died with Christ,
we believe that we will also live with him.
9 We know that Christ, being raised from the dead,
will never die again;
death no longer has dominion over him.
10 The death he died, he died to sin, once for all;
but the life he lives, he lives to God.
11 So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin
and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
The promised Messiah, the great deliverer,
greater than Moses,
has freed us from sin’s hold over us
because Christ has conquered death!
Through baptism we participated in that death,
it cannot harm us, it does not have the last word!
We are alive to God… for as Jesus had said,
God is the God of the living, God is the God of life!
Henceforth we face constant challenges…
because we now have options,
rather than simply succumb to sin,
we are called
to remember our baptism,
to recall whose we are!
In the light of our baptism, we are urged to offer ourselves
in the service of righteousness, rather than wickedness.
To live the Godly life, rather than the sinful life!
This is not startlingly new,
most of us strive to live decent lives,
to do the right thing by God and neighbour.
Here, however Paul introduces a positive aspect
to what we might have thought of
as a rather dismal perspective on human nature
in his writing till now!
Sin, and its virus like influence has an antidote…
Our baptism, if you like!
Remembering our baptism!
Our death to sin, and being alive to God!
Actually focusing on being alive to God
is sufficient to deprive sin of any power over us;
as we offer who we are to God,
and what makes us, our passions (epithumia, or desire).
In and of themselves desires are not the problem.
We could hardly stay alive without the body’s impulses
to do certain things.
In the Hebrew scriptures we read that God
is also frequently identified
as the one who ultimately grants the fulfillment
of the desires of God’s creatures, human and non-human,
a theme particularly pronounced in the Psalms
(e.g., 145:15–16, “You open your hand,
satisfying the desire of every living thing”).
Especially typical here is the notion that God grants the desires
of those God finds favourable (e.g., Ps 10:17; 21:2; 37:4; 145:19)
while frustrating the desires of the wicked
(e.g., Ps 112:10; compare Ps 23:2–5; 140:8).
Thus anyone who “desires life and covets many days to enjoy good”
are counselled to “depart from evil and do good”
and to “fear the Lord” (Ps 34:11–14).[5]
Sin’s insidious dominion over those bodily desires, though,
makes us strife only to satisfy them
turning them into insatiable masters…
instead of servants designed for our beneficial use.
To modern ears, Paul’s words about desire (or passion)
may sound like a caution about sex.
To the ears of the original recipients of the letter, though
(and to many theologians of the past),
these words meant much more,
especially to those familiar, like Paul, with the Hebrew scriptures…
Epithumia could include desire for many pleasurable
and also acceptable things, including food and comfort.
The control of desire was an important topic of reflection
in the ancient world that resulted over time
in identifying many types of passions that could get out of control[6]
For example, anger should be kept from becoming explosive rage.
Fear should not become disabling.
Paul makes the point that we should remind ourselves
that our baptism speaks to us
how we have been freed from sin’s influence over these passions.
With us, these have died to sin’s power.
Our citizenship is transferred out of the domain of sin,
having been kidnapped, and kept captive by sin;
we have been rescued and brought back where we belong,
we live now within God’s domain, the kingdom of grace;
Paul does not countenance dual citizenship!
He concludes with the triumphant:[7] (6:22,23)
you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God,
the advantage you get is sanctification.
The end is eternal life.
For the wages of sin is death,
but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD
We Sing: TIS 385 NOW IS ETERNAL LIFE 3vv
We Bring Our offering to God
setting aside our gifts to support the local and wider work of the church
and bless our gifts in an act of praise…
We Share Our Community Life
Pastoral Concerns and Notices
We remind all that it is vital we maintain the safe practices
to contain the virus in our community.
When we gather washing of hands before and after,
and social distancing.
Continue to be prayerful for those of our congregation
who are unwell, also keep in touch with each other!
Prayers of the People
Eternal God,
we praise you for all that is good in our lives,
family and friends, our local community,
our congregation.
Grant all your Spirit of unity in these difficult times
Lord hear us LORD HEAR OUR PRAYER
We praise you for the wonder of your creation,
so many programs on TV now show us
how wonderfully made your creation is,
how delicately balanced all of life is,
including human life…
Grant all your Spirit of humility in these difficult times.
Lord hear us LORD HEAR OUR PRAYER
We praise you for the courage and strength
shown by so many people
including people near and dear to us
who struggle with day to day debilitating ill health.
Grant all your Spirit of compassion in these difficult times.
Lord hear us LORD HEAR OUR PRAYER
We praise you for the selfless giving of time and resources
by so many in our communities
to affirm and assist in practical ways people isolated in their home,
and fearful of going out.
Grant all your Spirit of community in these difficult times.
Lord hear us LORD HEAR OUR PRAYER
We pray in the name of Jesus Christ
who walks through the storms of life with us,
AMEN
WE GO OUT TO SERVE GOD
We Sing: TIS 460 THE CALL OF GOD RESOUNDING 4vv
Sending Out
Go as a people freed
from the slavery of sin
which led to death,
to live as slaves of God
enjoying now the salvation life
in anticipation of the fulness of life eternal.
Blessing
The blessing of God,
the Creator who formed and sustains the deep,
the Christ who treads the waves
and calms the wind,
the Spirit who as Comforter
reaches out to take us by the hand,
strengthen and guide us
through the turbulence of life
so that peace calms our hearts and minds.
AMEN AMEN AMEN
[1] Words and Music: Robert Lowry (1826-99)
[2]Grieb, A. Katherine. The Story of Romans (xix) . Presbyterian Publishing Corporation. Kindle Edition.
[3] Wright, T. (2004). Paul for Everyone: Romans Part 1: Chapters 1-8 (p. 171). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
[4] Wright, T. (2004). Paul for Everyone: Romans Part 1: Chapters 1-8 (p. 101). London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
[5] Jackson-Mccabe, M. (2006–2009). Desire. In K. D. Sakenfeld (Ed.), The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (Vol. 2, p. 103). Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press.
[6] Lancaster, S. H. (2015). Romans. (A. P. Pauw & W. C. Placher, Eds.) (First edition, pp. 109–110). Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press.
[7] we will look at Romans 7 next week, and reinterpret vv14ff…
Service for Sunday 4th October 2020, – Rev Louis van Laar 
Service for Sunday 15th November 2020, – Rev Louis van Laar 
Service for Sunday 6th March 2022, the first Sunday in Lent, including the Sacrament of Holy Communion, conducted by Mr GeoffreyWebber 
Service for Sunday 3rd September which included Communion, and was conducted by Mr Geoffrey Webber. 
