Welcome !Here is the Order of Service for this Sunday.
Services
Sunday service - 11h00 in Rue Bayard
IF YOU PLAN TO COME ON SUNDAY:
WE HAVE A PICNIC JUST ACCROSS ROND POINT
AFTER THE SERVICE. IF YOU CAN, BRING YOU OWN PICNIC BLANKET AND FAVOURITE SNACKS. YOU ARE INVITED.
16 September 2018 - 11:00
Welcome to the Scots Kirk in Paris.
If you are only visiting this once, know that you are welcome and please take the greetings of the Scots Kirk Paris back home. If you are settling in Paris, may you find a home here. Please sign the “visitor’s book” on the entrance table and join us for refreshments after the service. Mobile phone switched off…?
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Order of Service
Call to Worship
Children’s songs and talk
Hymn 564 Jesus loves me! This I know
Reading: Mat 22:34-40
When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they met together in the same place. One of them, an expert in the Law, tested him by asking, "Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?" Jesus told him, "'You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the greatest and most important commandment. The second is exactly like it: 'You must love your neighbour as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commandments."
Songs for Worship
Hymn 96: You are before me, God, you are behind. (From Psalm 139)
Hymn 115 Love is the touch of intangible joy
Prayer
Hymn 189 Be still for the presence of the Lord
Reading: John 15:9-17 NIV
“As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you keep my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you. This is my command: Love each other.
Sermon
“Reframing love”
The Offering
Prayers of thanksgiving and intercession
Hymn 519 Love divine, all loves excelling
Benediction
Ubi caritas
Ubi caritas et amor
Ubi caritas Deus ibi est
où est l’amour - et charité
où est l’amour - Dieu lui-même est lá
Where there is love, selfless love
where there is love, there is God our Lord
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Picnic after the service today – after our coffee upstairs we will walk to the park on the other side of the Rond Point.
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Early Christianity
A Changing Religion
A Reflection by Richard Rohr
Much of what Jesus taught seems to have been followed closely during the first several hundred years after his death and resurrection. As long as Jesus’ followers were on the bottom and the edge of empire, as long as they shared the rejected and betrayed status of Jesus, they could grasp his teaching more readily. Values like nonparticipation in war, simple living, inclusivity, and love of enemies could be more easily understood when Christians were gathering secretly in the catacombs, when their faith was untouched by empire, rationalization, and compromise.
Several writings illustrate this early commitment to Jesus’ teachings on simplicity and generosity. For example, the Didache, compiled around 90 CE, says: “Share all things with your brother, and do not say that they are your own. For if you are sharers in what is imperishable, how much more in things which perish!” [1]
The last great formal persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire ended in 311 CE. In 313, Constantine (c. 272-337) legalized Christianity. It became the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380. After this structural change, Christianity increasingly accepted, and even defended, the dominant social order, especially concerning money and war. Morality became individualized and largely focused on sexuality. The church slowly lost its free and alternative vantage point. Texts written in the hundred years preceding 313 show it was unthinkable that a Christian would fight in the army, as the army was killing Christians. By the year 400, the entire army had become Christian, and they were now killing the “pagans.”
Before 313, the church was on the bottom of society, which is the privileged vantage point for understanding the liberating power of Gospel for both the individual and for society. Within the space of a few decades, the church moved from the bottom to the top, literally from the catacombs to the basilicas. The Roman basilicas were large buildings for court and other public assembly, and they became Christian worship spaces.
When the Christian church became the established religion of the empire, it started reading the Gospel from the position of maintaining power and social order instead of experiencing the profound power of powerlessness that Jesus revealed. In a sense, Christianity almost became a different religion!
The failing Roman Empire needed an emperor, and Jesus was used to fill the power gap. In effect, we Christians took Jesus out of the Trinity and made him into God on a throne. An imperial system needs law and order and clear belonging systems more than it wants mercy, meekness, or transformation. Much of Jesus’ teaching about simple living, nonviolence, inclusivity, and love of enemies became incomprehensible. Relationship—the shape of God as Trinity—was no longer as important. Christianity’s view of God changed: the Father became angry and distant, Jesus was reduced to an organizing principle, and for all practical and dynamic purposes, the Holy Spirit was forgotten.
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Precious Thoughts – Thomas Merton
… my own feeling is that Christian thought is largely hampered by fear, and does not dear to do what we, in the Holy Spirit, ought to be most ready to do: to realise our immediate union with God in order of grace… We have not known and tasted the things that have been given to us in Christ. Instead we have built around ourselves wall and offices and cells and chambers of all sorts, and filled them full of bureaucratic litter, and buried ourselves in dust and documents, and now we wonder why we cannot see God, or leap do His will…
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Rota for Sunday 23 September
Welcoming:
Helping to set up:
Handing out orders of service:
Reading: Marion Boyd
Refreshments before/after service:
Taking up the Offering:
Counting the Offering:
Intimations
Gifts for the homeless men: please see the list of items on the wall above the basket and bring what you can to help the homeless men in Paris through the work of the Missionnaires de la Charité. Our Summer BBQ will be held on Sunday 7th October. All info about Amis is on the church webpage. The Church and hall are open on Wednesdays from 12.00 - 14.00 for time of reflection and coffee. Or just time to talk… you are welcome! Do you have any skills or talent you would like to offer … tell someone! Prayer cards for intercession are available at the church entrance. Please take and fill in as needed.
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Contact
17 rue Bayard, Paris 75006
Minister: Rev Jan Steyn
Contact: Tel. 01 48 78 47 94
Session clerk: Dorothy Mure
Pianist: Mr Paul Snelgrove
e-mail: scotskirkparis@orange.fr
Web-site: www.scotskirkparis.com
Facebook page: ScotsKirkParis
Amis: https://amisskp.wixsite.com/amisskp
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Announcements
A warm welcome to visitors worshipping with us today.
We will be pleased if you can join us upstairs for some tea or coffee after the Service. We ask you to take the greetings of the Scots Kirk back home with you to your own Church.
Each week we collect items for the Missionnaires de la Charité who work with homeless men in Paris. There is a list of items required throughout the year above the basket in the hallway.
FOR SALE for Church funds: “The Tartan Pimpernel” by the Rev Donald Caskie, former Minister of the Scots Kirk:
and Scots Kirk tea-towels, postcards, and notelets.
Contact: Tel: 0148784794 E-mail: scotskirkparis AT orange.fr
We will be pleased if you can join us upstairs for some tea or coffee after the Service. We ask you to take the greetings of the Scots Kirk back home with you to your own Church.
Each week we collect items for the Missionnaires de la Charité who work with homeless men in Paris. There is a list of items required throughout the year above the basket in the hallway.
FOR SALE for Church funds: “The Tartan Pimpernel” by the Rev Donald Caskie, former Minister of the Scots Kirk:
and Scots Kirk tea-towels, postcards, and notelets.
Contact: Tel: 0148784794 E-mail: scotskirkparis AT orange.fr