Proper 24 Yr B
True Greatness

For families: Study guide and activities (another guide), group activity; snack; kid video.

For children: See family guide/activities (another activity); bulletin; craft

For middlers: See family guide/activities (another activity); bulletin; craft

For youth: In just a few weeks, we will celebrate All Saints. Here's a website where you can learn about a number of saints. Take a look. There's a delightful song in Nunsense that begins "It's not that hard to be a saint, all you have to do is pick a saint to emulate who most embodies you." So which of these saints resonate with you? Don't forget you are a saint too! Feel free to comment.

Coloring page (all ages): This week the focus is on Psalm 22. Another coloring page for Psalm 22, 2 parts: a and b.

The liturgy today centers on two themes of the Christian message about Jesus. Both are found in today’s Gospel: Jesus’ messiahship is revealed not in his power but in his life of serving others and his suffering and death, and he calls us to a like ministry of self-giving love.

Using Job: The Old Testament reading is again from Job. Last week we heard this innocent sufferer complaining that he cannot face God and seek an answer to his suffering. Suddenly God speaks, but God is the questioner. Who are you to question the source of the entire universe? God will explain his actions and plan only if Job can explain God, clearly an impossible task.

Using Isaiah: The Old Testament reading is one of Isaiah’s poems of the suffering servant of God. In this passage, from about the sixth century B.C., the growing understanding of suffering as redemptive—implied by the Hebrew Scriptures in the stories of Moses and David, among others—is given its fullest expression. God is intimately involved in the suffering of his faithful servants and gives that suffering redemptive value when it is offered in obedience for the redemption of God’s people. This passage, of course, was understood by the earliest Christians as foretelling Jesus’ death and resurrection.

Today’s passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews expresses the redemptive suffering of Christ as his eternal priestly sacrifice, which replaces the sacrifices of the temple. We are assured that our own suffering and our own self-giving ministry receive redemptive value by virtue of our baptismal union with Jesus’ own sacrifice.

We, the people of God, gather to celebrate the Eucharist, which is one aspect of our work. In song, story, Word, and Sacrament, the dying and rising of Jesus and his ministry to us are revealed and made present. We become sharers in his life by our participation, and are prepared and enabled to carry out the other aspect of our work in sacrificial, servant ministry to others.