Lent 2023

Volume 14, Issue 2

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Our worship services are livestreamed on our YouTube channel: upcbgm.org/youtube

Holy Week: On the Path to Resurrection

Palm Sunday is April 2! At the beginning of Holy Week, Jesus made a triumphal entry into Jerusalem, setting off the events that led to his crucifixion. Matthew’s account of the entry includes a female donkey and her colt, cloaks and garments spread on the road, and palm branches cut and waved.

As part of our celebration, we invite you to bring coats and household linens to prepare the way. We will be giving them to those in need after our worship, so they may be gently used, but please make sure that they are clean and ready to share with others. You may put them on the steps at the front of the sanctuary when you arrive, and they will be arranged during the service as part of our preparation.

Also on Palm Sunday, the children’s “fish boxes” will be collected and we will receive the PC(USA) One Great Hour of Sharing offering. (More info about the OGHS offering is on the Our Church Family page.)

After worship, everyone is invited to go down to Fellowship Hall, to help decorate Easter eggs. The eggs will be given to our pantry clients and our guests at the community meal during the week, as a special reminder that resurrection is a promise for all people.

Maundy Thursday, April 6, at 7pm: We will gather in the sanctuary for a service of communion and candles, and the service will also be streamed on YouTube. We will retell the story of the Passion in simple language and bless each other as we go into the time of waiting for resurrection.

Easter Sunday, April 9, at 10am: We will have our regular communion service in the sanctuary, as well as streaming on YouTube.

Flowers for Easter! Do you have early flowers blooming in your garden? We would love to have you bring a bouquet on Easter to help decorate the sanctuary, and then take them back home after worship to brighten your Easter table. There will be a few from the church garden, but we love the idea of a shared flower display to celebrate the season, but no one has to find homes for afterward. Bring whatever you are able, and we will find a place for it! We have several folks who are allergic to lilies, so if you want to share lilies, please remove the stamens before you bring them.

Easter Egg Hunt! Following the worship service, children and youth are invited to participate in the Easter Egg Hunt on the front lawn (weather and COVID allowing). Young children are asked to please bring a parent or guardian to help supervise.

In this issue:

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Spring Preaching Plans — Continuing in the Gospel According to Matthew

Starting after Easter Sunday, we will pick up the story of Jesus’s earthly ministry and teaching in the gospel according to Matthew, beginning with chapter 4. After we celebrate Pentecost (on June 4), we will continue through the gospel according to Matthew for the rest of the church year, so that by Reign of Christ Sunday (November 26), we will have heard and deepened our acquaintance with the whole gospel as Matthew wrote it.

Matthew was composed in the last decades of the first century; the author seems to have been writing for a Jewish-Christian community that understood itself to be in tension with other Jewish associations and groups at the time. For the Matthean community, Jesus is both the new Law-Giver (like Moses) and the new King of Israel (like David). For Matthew, the faithfulness of God is shown in Jesus, and Jesus calls humanity to respond by living faithfully according to God’s commands.

April 23 — Jesus is Tempted in the Wilderness
Focus Text: Matthew 4:1–11

Immediately after his baptism, Jesus is led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where he remains for 40 days being “tested” or tempted by the devil. The testing comes after 40 days of fasting, and there are three tests: to turn stones into bread when he is hungry, to throw himself off of the temple so God’s power can be shown by saving him, and to compromise God’s claim on Jesus by worshiping the devil, who claims to be in charge of all of the empires of the world.

The Spirit is in charge of the process, and Jesus’s authority is shown to be complete when he banishes the devil and angels minister to him. This story is a kind of theme-setting interlude, showing the main themes that Matthew will continue to develop in the rest of the gospel. God’s claim on our lives does not come with immunity from hardship or conflict or struggle. In fact, living in this new realm brought by Jesus will bring us tests and temptations, but we know that his authority is secure and his victory is already won.

April 30 — Jesus Begins His Ministry in Galilee
Focus Text: Matthew 4:12–17

For Matthew, the arrest of John the Baptizer marks the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. Alone among the gospel writers, Matthew places the seat of Jesus’s ministry in Capernaum, a fishing village at the northern end of the Sea of Galilee (renamed Lake Tiberias under Roman occupation). He links this change in residence to a promise from Isaiah 9, but is careful to end the quotation before its promise to the nations beyond Israel. For Matthew, Jesus is a distinctly Jewish Messiah, and his promises come first to the Judaean people, even in a relatively cosmopolitan part of Galilee.

In verse 17, Matthew uses a phrase that will only occur in one other place in his telling: “From that time…” The second time will come when Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem and begins the road to the passion. Here at the beginning, Jesus repeats John’s message, “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven has come near.”

May 7 — Jesus Calls the First Disciples
Focus Text: Matthew 4:18–22

Matthew puts the calling of these first disciples at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, without any particular context for why he has called them or why they follow. He is emphasizing the regal authority of Jesus, who first establishes the seat of his ministry, and then summons his court. He reverses the usual custom of the time, when students would seek out a teacher to follow and learn from.

Jesus summons four fishermen with irresistible authority, in Matthew’s telling, and the four named disciples respond with radical obedience. They seem to stand for all future believers who will hear the call; not everyone will leave professions and possessions behind, but all will leave their familiar world behind and enter the new world that Jesus invites them into.

May 14 — Jesus the Teacher and Healer
Focus Text: Matthew 4:23–25

Establishing himself as a teacher and a healer, Jesus travels around Galilee, teaching in synagogues and announcing that the kingdom of heaven has come near. His teaching was reinforced by the healings he performed, and Matthew lists particular ailments that Jesus cured. Matthew’s geography seems a bit uncertain, but he wants us to understand that Jewish people from all across the region were hearing and being drawn to Jesus’s message, as far south as the province of Judea, and as far north as the province of Syria. This is not a universal message yet, but it is a gathering of the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” as Matthew says in chapter 10. Jesus’s new kingdom is to be gathered from the margins, and found in the crowds of ordinary people at the edges of the empire.

May 21 — Jesus the Law-Giver
Focus Text: Matthew 5:1–20

When Jesus sees the crowds who are coming together, he goes up on a mountain and begins to offer a new constitution for living in the kingdom of heaven. He begins with the Beatitudes, which are perhaps the best-known verses of Matthew’s gospel. There are other examples of beatitudes in apocalyptic literature of the time; they describe oppressive conditions that will be corrected by God’s future transformation of the world.

There are two groups of four beatitudes. The first four describe those who are crushed by the conditions of the empire, ending with those who “hunger and thirst for righteousness (or justice)”. The remaining four describe the human actors that will bring about the transformation through their actions. The last one is expanded to elaborate on the persecutions that followers of Jesus will experience, and reminds the listeners that they are not alone and they join with earlier witnesses in suffering to bring about God’s justice.

In Matthew’s telling, Jesus then moves to very specific challenges to his followers. We are to shine with God’s justice, living according to God’s law and by our faithfulness in doing more than the law requires, showing the kingdom even as it is being created.

May 28 — Heavenly Living in Earthly Conditions
Focus Text: Matthew 5:18–48

This part of the Sermon on the Mount offers six examples of Jesus’s teaching. It is structured in a style that would have been familiar to those who listened to rabbinic teaching. Each teaching opens with a verse from scripture “You have heard that it is said…” and then follows with commentary, “but (or and) I say…” Traditionally, these have been called the “antitheses”, and have been presented as if they are replacing the commands of the Torah with new understandings that “fulfill” the Torah. As Christian scholars have become more familiar with the Mishnah, Jewish writings from about the same time, the traditional understanding has been challenged. The examples here are consistent with other teachings in style and in the challenge that they bring to the hearer. They are a curious mix of how believers are supposed to treat each other in the community and of how believers are supposed to respond to oppressive behaviors by the Roman occupiers. He closes the section by showing that the goal for believers is to imitate God in wholeness of heart, offering love even to enemies because it aligns believers with God’s nature, bringing the kingdom of heaven close to earth.

June 4 — Pentecost
Focus Text: Acts 2

This year, we are celebrating Pentecost on June 4, a week later than most of western Christendom, so that we can celebrate our 10th anniversary together at the same time! (Pastor Kimberly started working at UPC on June 4, 2013.) The Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity follows a different calendar that the Western tradition, so we will be celebrating with our Eastern siblings in the faith.

The writer of Luke-Acts gives us a glorious spectacle for the coming of the Holy Spirit, with people from many nations able to hear the disciples telling God’s good news in their own languages, and walls disappearing as tongues “as of fire” appear among the gathered saints. Peter preaches a sermon that so moves and convicts the hearers that “about 3,000” were added to the community of faith. He finishes off the story with a quick portrait of the gathered believers living together, holding everything in common, and “having the good will of all the people”.

It seems likely that the spectacle composed by the author of Luke-Acts drew heavily on metaphor and hyperbole. But as we reflect on ten years of ministry together, how shall we tell the story of our origins and of our present witness? What is the story that we want to carry with us into the future?

Our mission is to follow Jesus Christ by doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly with God.

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