Welcome ! We meet at 11:00 and have tea of coffee after the service.
Services
28 October 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…?
–
Order of Service
Call to Worship
Hymn 484 Great God, your love has called us here
Prayer and Children’s Talk
Hymn 659 Put peace into one another’s hands
Reading: Colossians 3: 1-4 and 4:2-18 (The Message)
Colossians 3:1-4
So if you’re serious about living this new resurrection life with Christ, act like it. Pursue the things over which Christ presides. Don’t shuffle along, eyes to the ground, absorbed with the things right in front of you. Look up, and be alert to what is going on around Christ—that’s where the action is. See things from his perspective. Your old life is dead. Your new life, which is your real life—even though invisible to spectators—is with Christ in God. He is your life. When Christ (your real life, remember) shows up again on this earth, you’ll show up, too—the real you, the glorious you. Meanwhile, be content with obscurity, like Christ.
Colossians 4:2-18
My good friend Tychicus will tell you all about me. He’s a trusted minister and companion in the service of the Master. I’ve sent him to you so that you would know how things are with us, and so he could encourage you in your faith. And I’ve sent Onesimus with him. Onesimus is one of you, and has become such a trusted and dear brother! Together they’ll bring you up-to-date on everything that has been going on here.
The Offering
Prayers of thanksgiving and intercession
Hymn 684 The Lord created families
Benediction
Ubi caritas OR Threefold Amen
Ubi caritas et amor
Ubi caritas Deus ibi est
où est l’amour - et charité
où est l’amour - Dieu lui-même est là
Where there is love, selfless love
where there is love, there is God our Lord
–
"How big is your church?" What an unimportant and uncomprehending question. Size is not important in and of itself. I’m not proud that I’m 6'4' and weigh 220 pounds. I should weigh 190 pounds. I’m oversized and need to downsize If the church is an organism not an organization, any organism can be oversized as well as undersized. Truth is in the telling of the stories, not the statistics. #NarrativesOverNumbers
–
Although the world is full of suffering, it is full also of the overcoming of it.
HELEN KELLER
–
Antony of Egypt (251-356), the founder of monasticism, explained how he lived each day for 105 years: Each morning he would say, "Today I begin." Then throughout the day it was this: "Let Christ be the air I breathe." What a mantra for life, no matter how long that life may be: "Let Christ be the air you breathe."
–
A quote about the varieties of silence by the author Paul Goodman:
“Not speaking and speaking are both human ways of being in the world, and there are kinds and grades of each. There is the dumb silence of slumber or apathy; the sober silence that goes with a solemn animal face; the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul, whence emerge new thoughts; the alive silence of alert perception, ready to say, “This… this…”; the musical silence that accompanies absorbed activity; the silence of listening to another speak, catching the drift and helping him be clear; the noisy silence of resentment and self-recrimination, loud and subvocal speech but sullen to say it; baffled silence; the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos.”
–
"What is the use of praying if at the very moment of prayer, we have so little confidence in God that we are busy planning our own kind of answer to our prayer?"
—Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude (1958)
“Faith in God, then, is not at all the same as the kind of logical certainty that we attain in Euclidean geometry. God is not the conclusion to a process of reasoning, the solution to a mathematical problem. To believe in God is not to accept the possibility of his existence because it has been “proved” to us by some theoretical argument, but it is to put our trust in One whom we know and love. Faith is not the supposition that something might be true, but the assurance that someone is there.”
― Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Way (1979)
"You will never find interior solitude unless you make some conscious effort to deliver yourself from the desires and the cares and the attachments of an existence in time and in the world." ~ Thomas Merton
Suffering
Wounded Healers
A Reflection by Richard Rohr
Only people who have suffered in some way can usually save anybody else—exactly as the Twelve-Step program illustrates. They alone have the space and the capacity for the other. Deep communion and compassion are formed much more by shared pain than by shared pleasure. Jesus told Peter, “You must be ground like wheat, and once you have recovered, then you can turn and help the brothers” (see Luke 22:31-32). In general, you can lead people on the spiritual journey as far as you have gone. Transformed people transform people. When you can be healed yourself and not just talk about healing, you are, as Henri Nouwen said, a “wounded healer”—which is probably the only kind of healer!
James Finley shares insights drawn from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ work with the dying:
Those who come to acceptance in death don’t look up at you from their deathbeds to say how happy they are in the ways we typically speak of happiness. For those who come to acceptance in death pass beyond the dualism of happiness and sadness as emotional states that depend on conditions that are conducive to happiness. Those who come to acceptance in death have about them a certain transparent childlike quality, an uncanny peace. It's a peace not of this world. For in accepting their seemingly unacceptable situation, they are transformed in ways that leave us feeling strangely touched and privileged to be in their presence. Being in their presence can open up in us a deep sense of how invincibly precious we are in the midst of our fragility.
This experience of being with those who have come to an acceptance in death can help us renew our ongoing efforts to learn from God how to die to the last traces of clinging to anything less or other than God’s sustaining love. For insofar as we learn from God how to die to all that is less than or other than God’s love as our sole security and identity, it just might be possible that when the moment of our death finally comes, nothing will happen. For in some deep, unexplainable way we will have already crossed over into the deathless love of God. [1]
We can see Etty Hillesum’s work to find this kind of acceptance in letters she wrote from the Westerbork transit camp:
This is something people refuse to admit to themselves: at a given point you can no longer do, but can only be and accept. [2]
Such peace allowed Hillesum to serve and love her fellow humans, even when, as she wrote, they “don’t give you much occasion to love them.” She discovered “there is no causal connection between people’s behavior and the love you feel for them. Love for one’s fellow man is like an elemental glow that sustains you.”
Finally, on a card that she threw out of the train on her way to Auschwitz, Etty wrote: In the end, the departure came without warning. On sudden special orders from The Hague. We left the camp singing, Father and Mother firmly and calmly, Mischa, too. We shall be traveling for three days. Thank you for all your kindness and care.
Hard to believe these could be her last written words. Where does such generosity of spirit come from? From God, only from an Infinite God and an Infinite Source of Love.
Intimations
Jan and Linda will be away on holiday for November. Rev James Patrick will be the locum for November and Rev Jim Sharp from Geneva will lead the service on Sunday 2 December. 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. 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.
On Sale for Church Funds:
"The Tartan Pimpernel" by the Rev Donald Caskie
Scots Kirk tea towels & notelets
and the Scots Kirk Recipe Book.
Contact
17 rue Bayard, Paris 75006
Minister: Rev Jan Steyn
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
–
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