October 24, 2021 

Prelude:  Rosemary Nettrouer

Announcements

Thank you, Rosemary, for the music.  Thanks for technical support by Michael Barrett, Joe Dawley, and Erin DeGroot, with music coordination by Dawn Blue.   

• Thank you for wearing your mask to help protect the unvaccinated among us.  – We are monitoring the current situation and believe the safety measures we have in place are good enough. 
• Offering plates are near the front and the back of the meeting room.  Thank you!  
• We are worshiping in person and live streaming on Facebook and the church website (wichitaquakers.org).  
  • Please feel free to share our worship with your Facebook friends by posting a link.   
  • Please also feel free to comment on the Facebook page with prayer concerns, announcements, or words of ministry.  
  • And if you worship with us online only and would like to be more connected, please leave a message on the Facebook page or the church website.  

Church Activities This Week

• Sunday, October 24, 11:00 am, Monthly Meeting
• Tuesday, October 26, 7:00 pm, Good Times Squares Dance
• Wednesday, October 27, 6:30 pm, Bell Choir practice

Various church members will be staffing the office for the foreseeable future, and we are working out church office hours.  Please call to confirm that someone is in the office before coming.

Welcome & Greeting

Music: May Jesus Christ be Praised #60

Call to worship:  

Thus says the God who created you:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
    I have called you by name, you are mine.
² When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
    and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
    and the flame shall not consume you.
³ For I am your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior. (Isaiah 43:1-3)

Centering Meditation

Music: Pass Me Not #310

Prayer concerns:

• Art Binford:  a good report on biopsies that were taken this week, as well as for his recuperation from the tests that have left him weak 
• Our church as it faces the future prayerfully and with indelible hope
• Joan Smith’s sister, Karen Tombaugh, recently diagnosed with breast cancer 
• Joan Smith coping with the discomfort and limitations resulting from two falls on Sunday
• Catherine Griffith as she explores what’s next for her, more waiting after a good meet and greet with Klamath Falls Friends last weekend 
• Alfred Lugalia’s mother, Rose Lisamadi, ill in Kenya and Alfred as he hopes to visit her in early November 
• Greg and Rhonda Newby’s neighbor, Jeff Martin, was lost and then found in a rehab facility with multiple fractures due to a misstep off a curb.
• Susan Strong, who worships with us regularly from Laramie, Wyoming, fell and hurt her back.  No bones broken, but she is in a lot of pain.  
• Jesse Watts and family 

Pastoral prayer 

Life-giving God, we open our hearts to you.  Fill us with your spirit, your light, and your love.  Bring us healing and comfort where we are hurting.  

Hear our prayers, God,
that we may love you with our whole being
and share your love with our neighbors. Amen.

Message:  What Would Jesus Do?  

Scripture:  Luke 4:14-21

This week I came across a Facebook post that quoted comedian Stephen Colbert as saying,  

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it. 

It reminded me of that thing that was really big a while back, WWJD – what would Jesus do?  It was all over the place for a while.   

Then, because my brain works this way, I remembered a take-off from “what would Jesus do?” that came out when I was in graduate school.   “What would Jesus drive?”  

“What would Jesus drive?” was an advertising campaign sponsored by the Evangelical Environmental Network.  At the time, this campaign caught my attention because I was teaching a seminar on religion and environmental ethics, and the Evangelical Environmental Network was one of the Christian perspectives we were looking at.   

The Evangelical Environmental Network describes itself as “a ministry that educates, inspires, and mobilizes Christians in their effort to care for God’s creation” (https://creationcare.org/) 

The organization these days is urging people to contact their elected representatives to vote for Biden’s infrastructure plan because “clean infrastructure is a matter of life.”  In that way, it aims to broaden the typical pro-life stance of evangelical Christians to include care for the environment.  We have to have clean air and water in order to live. 

Back in the early 2000s, though, the Network was asking people to give some thought to the cars they drive.   A news article from 2002 said, 

The midwestern United States, equally devout in its worship of God as in its worship of gas-guzzling four-wheel-drive vehicles, is about to be asked to choose between the two.

“What Would Jesus Drive?” is the slogan dominating a television advertising campaign about to blanket cities in Iowa, Indiana and Missouri, along with the southern state of North Carolina.

The question presumably did not arise in first-century Galilee, but the Christian group behind the ads believes the answer would not include sports utility vehicles, the fuel-inefficient, environmentally unfriendly monsters that rule America’s roads.

“We have confessed Christ to be our saviour and Lord, and for us, that includes our transportation choices,” the Rev Jim Ball, of the Washington-based Evangelical Environmental Network, said. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/nov/14/usa.oliverburkeman) 

When I told one of my friends about the campaign, he thought that the answer is obvious – Jesus wouldn’t drive anything.  He would ride a motorcycle.  

Of course, the “What would Jesus drive?” campaign spawned lots of jokes.   Here are some of them: 

One theory is that Jesus would tool around in an old Plymouth because “the Bible says God drove Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden in a Fury.” 

But in Psalm 83, the Almighty clearly owns a Pontiac and a Geo. The passage urges the Lord to “pursue your enemies with your Tempest and terrify them with your Storm.” 

Perhaps God favors Dodge pickup trucks, because Moses’ followers are warned not to go up a mountain “until the Ram’s horn sounds a long blast.” … 

Meanwhile, Moses rode an old British motorcycle, as evidenced by a Bible passage declaring, “the roar of Moses’ Triumph is heard in the hills.” 

Joshua drove a Triumph sports car with a hole in its muffler: “Joshua’s Triumph was heard throughout the land.” 

And … the Apostles car-pooled in a Honda: “The Apostles were in one Accord.” (https://www.pleacher.com/mp/puzzles/miscpuz/wwjd.pdf) 

In all seriousness, Christian faith does support care for the earth, and I could talk at length about the perspectives of the Evangelical Environmental Network, the National Council of Churches’ promotion of ecojustice, about Creation Spirituality or Christian ecofeminism.   

But that’s not what I want to talk about today.  Today, I want to talk about something that’s more straightforward: What would Jesus do?  We might not have any clear idea about what Jesus would drive, but he said what he would do.   It’s most clear, I think, in Luke 4.  I am reading from The Message, beginning with verse 14.

Jesus returned to Galilee powerful in the Spirit. News that he was back spread through the countryside. He taught in their meeting places to everyone’s acclaim and pleasure.

He came to Nazareth where he had been raised. As he always did on the Sabbath, he went to the meeting place. When he stood up to read, he was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it was written,

God’s Spirit is on me;
    [God has] chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and
    recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free,
    to announce, “This is God’s time to shine!”

[Jesus] rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the assistant, and sat down. Every eye in the place was on him, intent. Then he started in, “You’ve just heard Scripture make history. It came true just now in this place.”

In the Gospel of Luke, this account comes right at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry.  Luke chapter 1 sets up the birth of John the Baptist and the birth of Jesus. Chapter 2 describes the birth of Jesus and his visit to the Jerusalem temple when he was 12.  Chapter 3 tells about the beginning of the ministry of John the Baptist and gives us Luke’s version of Jesus’s genealogy.  Chapter 4 begins with the temptation of Jesus in the desert, and then we have Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, in the synagogue in Nazareth. 

So, Jesus’ reading from Isaiah in Nazareth sets the agenda for what comes next, the unfolding of his ministry.  

The New Revised Standard Version of what Jesus read that day goes like this: 

“The Spirit of [God] is upon me,
    because [God] has anointed me
        to bring good news to the poor.
[God] has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to let the oppressed go free,
¹⁹ to proclaim the year of [God’s] favor.”

What would Jesus do?  Jesus would minister to homeless people, jobless people, people who work hard at jobs that don’t pay enough to live on, people in jail, refugees, detained immigrants, disabled people, people who are discriminated against because of the color of their skin or because of their religion or because of their sexual identity or for any number of unjust reasons – those are the people Jesus came to minister to. 

With Jesus’s words in mind, let us listen again to Stephen Colbert: 

If this is going to be a Christian nation that doesn’t help the poor, either we have to pretend that Jesus was just as selfish as we are, or we’ve got to acknowledge that He commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition and then admit that we just don’t want to do it. 

If this is going to be a Christian church, if we are going to be Christians, then we have to acknowledge that Jesus commanded us to love the poor and serve the needy without condition.  That’s a significant piece of what it means to let God’s light shine into the world. 

We are called to give our lives away, to be agents of reconciliation and healing, especially to those who need it most.  

What would that look like for you?  What would that look like for this church? 

 Open Worship:

                  Enjoy the quiet as a respite from life’s busyness.

                  Connect with God and with one another in prayer.

                  Open yourself to the healing Light of God’s Spirit.

                  Find grounding in love and gratitude.

                  Share vocal ministry as God leads.

  Benediction

  Postlude: Rosemary Nettrouer