Order of Worship
- Prelude: Bell choir, “Entrada” by Taylor
- Announcements
- Music: Bell choir, “Exuberance” by Taylor
- Prayer Concerns
- Pastoral Prayer
- Message: Faith in Times of Uncertainty
- Scripture: Leviticus 23:39-43
- Open Worship
- Benediction
Flowers provided by Dorothy McKay, technology by Michael Barrett & Michelle Barrett, and pastoral leadership by Catherine Griffith.
Prelude: Bell choir
Good morning! Welcome!
Thank you to Dorothy McKay for the flowers and to Dawn Blue and the bell choir for the music. Thank you to Michael and Michelle for facilitating the technology. Thanks to Erin DeGroot for tech support too. Joe Dawley for sound and logistics.
Announcements
- We are 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.
- Among church activities this week
- Today
- The Listening Group led by Dawn Blue and Sarah Wine will meet today in the Fellowship Hall and via Zoom.
- The 205 Sunday School class meets at 3:00 via Zoom.
- The Transition Team meets tomorrow morning.
- The Book Club continues its discussion of Thomas Kelly’s Testament of Devotion Tuesday evening at 6:30 in the church library.
- Wednesday, October 14, we have
- Nominating Committee at 5:30
- Bell Choir rehearsal at 6:30
- The Listening Group led by Kim Edgington-Keehn and Molly Loesch at 7:00
- Today
- Thursday, October 15
- Finance Committee at 1:30
- Ministry and Counsel at 6:30
- Next Sunday, we will be reopening for worship in the meeting room under strict guidelines. See The Light This Week for details, and here’s a word to the wise: if you’re imagining worship as it was last October, you will be disappointed. What’s going to be different? Shorter meditative music, less music overall, a children’s moment, a shorter message, no passing of offering plates, no Sunday School, no lingering in the aisles or the foyer, plus masks and distancing
- Also next Sunday, we will have Monthly Meeting for worship with a concern for business at 1:00 p.m., in the Fellowship Hall with a Zoom option.
- Any other announcements?
Music: Bell choir
Prayer concerns
- Lynn Hankins is recovering from a bout with abnormal heart functioning. The doctor has her homebound for 90 days. She is wearing a defibrillator vest and taking medications for a heart virus, and she is doing pretty well.
- Our church during this time of transition – May we find clarity and energy for the tasks at hand and the decisions we will need to make as we find our way forward. May we find ways to use our assets wisely and well. May we discover ways we are to be a beacon of love in our world. May we be looking for the doors you are opening, and may we have the courage to walk through them. May we see what you are doing in our world and join you in it.
- Any other prayer concerns?
Pastoral Prayer
God of all the earth with its changing seasons
“Blessed are you…,” by Rev. Anna Blaedel
Message: Faith in Times of Uncertainty
Scripture: Leviticus 23:39-43
My friend Emily is a youngish adult Friend who travels in ministry for Friends United Meeting. As you may imagine, the pandemic has thrown a wrench in the works of her traveling ministry. For several months, from the beginning of the pandemic, she was sheltering at Powell House, the conference and retreat center of New York Yearly Meeting. Every day, she would post on Facebook about the adventures of the plush toy tiger, Little Guy, including a toy version of the Olympic games.
These days, Emily is house- and cat-sitting in her hometown, New York City. This month, she’s counting down to her birthday with a favorite musical every day (the other day was “The King and I”; today is “Miss Saigon”), with accompanying photos out and about in the city. I like Emily.
This was one of her Facebook posts from this past week:
First, the cat got her claw stuck in my flash port. After some ado, we got it out. She was not gracious about it. She also left a tiny shard of claw behind in the flash port, which I spent ten minutes getting out with a needle.
Later, three separate Orthodox Jewish men stopped me on the sidewalk at three different times and in three different places to ask, “Excuse me, are you Jewish?”
How was your day?
In response to one of the comments on her post, Emily elaborated:
I’m not exactly sure what the deal was [with the Orthodox Jewish men], but I think it had to do with a holiday. The last guy was holding a tree branch.
So why would Orthodox Jewish men be walking around with tree branches? This past week was sukkot, also known as the feast of tabernacles or the feast of booths. I’ll come back to that.
My Old Testament Survey book describes three annual Jewish feasts that were held in the Jerusalem temple back in the day. Here’s a bit from the book:
Annual feasts lasted for several days and drew to Jerusalem pilgrims from throughout the land: Unleavened Bread and Passover, a combined feast in early spring…: Weeks (a harvest festival in late spring, called Pentecost in the New Testament…); [and] Tabernacles in early fall (also called Booths or Ingathering…. Tabernacles [was for] celebrating completion of the summer harvest as well as recalling Israel’s wilderness days… (Old Testament Survey, LaSor et al., p. 524).
So there were three annual feasts: Passover in early spring; Pentecost in late spring; and Tabernacles (Sukkot) in early fall.
Leviticus, not one of the more exciting books of the Bible, sets out this calendar of annual feasts, and here’s what Leviticus 23 says about the feast of sukkot, beginning with verse 39, from The Message:
39-43 “… On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, after you have brought your crops in from your fields, celebrate the Feast of God for seven days. The first day is a complete rest and the eighth day is a complete rest. On the first day, pick the best fruit from the best trees; take fronds of palm trees and branches of leafy trees and from willows by the brook and celebrate in the presence of your God for seven days—yes, for seven full days celebrate it as a festival to God. Every year from now on, celebrate it in the seventh month. Live in booths for seven days—every son and daughter of Israel is to move into booths so that your descendants will know that I made the People of Israel live in booths when I brought them out of the land of Egypt. I am God, your God.”
This year, 2020, the seven days of this harvest festival were October 2-9. So when my friend Emily saw an Orthodox Jewish man with a tree branch, that’s what it was about.
Traditionally, Jewish people who observe this festival use the palm fronds and tree branches to build booth, a kind of hut or shed, to remember “the forty-year period during which the children of Israel were wandering in the desert, living in temporary shelters” (https://www.jewfaq.org/holiday5.htm).
One rabbi, Dr. Jonathan Sacks, wrote this reflection on Sukkot in 2001, just weeks after 9/11:
If I were to summarise the message of Sukkot I’d say it’s a tutorial in how to live with insecurity and still celebrate life.
And living with insecurity is where we’re at right now. In these uncertain days, people have been cancelling flights, delaying holidays, deciding not to go to theatres and public places. [Sound familiar?] The physical damage of September 11th may be over; but the emotional damage will continue for months, maybe years, to come.
9/11 changed our world almost 20 years ago. The pandemic is changing our world now. That’s reality.
Rabbi Sacks continues:
Yesterday a newspaper columnist wrote that looking back, future historians will call ours “the age of anxiety.” How do you live with the fear terror creates?
For our family, it’s brought back memories of just over ten years ago. We’d gone to live in Israel for a while …, to breathe in the inspiration of the holy land and find peace. Instead we found ourselves in the middle of the Gulf War.
Thirty-nine times we had to put on our gas masks and take shelter in a sealed room as SCUD missiles rained down. And as the sirens sounded we never knew whether the next missile would contain chemical or biological warheads or whether it would hit us.
It should have been a terrifying time, and it was. But my goodness, it taught me something. I never knew before just how much I loved my wife, and our children. I stopped living for the future and started thanking God for each day.
And that’s when I learned the meaning of Tabernacles and its message for our time. Life can be full of risk and yet still be a blessing.
Faith doesn’t mean living with certainty. Faith is the courage to live with uncertainty, knowing that God is with us on that tough but necessary journey to a world that honours life and treasures peace. (https://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/judaism/holydays/sukkot_1.shtml)
Sukkot is a reminder that we can live with insecurity and still celebrate life. It calls us to be grateful to God for each day. It teaches us that faith is the courage to live with uncertainty, knowing that God is with us.
Today, we are not living in a hut or shed made of palm fronds and tree branches, but we are worshiping outside. It has been months since this many of us have gathered together for worship, because of the pandemic – we have been faced with clear and uncertain danger. Next week, we plan to gather inside, and it is still not entirely safe.
Life is uncertain because of the pandemic. Our church life is uncertain because, besides the pandemic, we are going through transition. We might think of ourselves as living in temporary shelters. We have separated from Mid-America Yearly Meeting. We have agreed to restructuring committees, and the end product of that restructuring isn’t yet clear. Ten years ago, we might have been able to say something true about University Friends, but who are we now? Who are we going to be in five years? That’s not exactly clear, and the journey is full of risk.
Rabbi Sacks said, “Life can be full of risk and yet still be a blessing.” What blessings have you learned to cherish more during this time of pandemic? What blessings have you come to cherish during this time of transition?
What uncertainties bother you the most? What word of faith might God be speaking to you this morning?
Open Worship
Please join me in a time of open worship, communion after the manner of Friends.
Benediction: May you have the faith, the courage, to live with uncertainty, knowing that God is with you. May we have the faith, the courage, to live with uncertainty, knowing that God is with us.
We are meeting in person and also streaming our sermons on Facebook at 10:00 AM CST. Watch live:
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