Worship Preview 8.31.25 “O Prosper the Work of Our Hands.”

Community Office Hours this week! Would you like to chat with the Pastor, perhaps about this column, or share a time of prayer, but you’re not comfortable coming to the church? He totally gets it! So – Most Monday afternoons Pastor Christopher will be at a local location with open time to visit with you - h0wever, this week is Labor Day – so Community Office Hours will be Wednesday, still from 2-4pm, and he’s going to be back at FSCC, this time at the tables in the Bailey Hall / Student Support Services lounge area. Come by and say hello!

Wednesday, September 3^rd, Feeding Families in His Name: A free, no obligation meal is served “to-go” style from underneath our portico from 5:30-6:30pm each Wednesday, prepared each week by our members as well as several area churches and community groups. If you would like to support this ministry, you can make donations online at: www.firstumcfortscott.org/feedingfamiliesdonation. Thank you.

FISH FRY Next week on Sunday, September 7^th – 5:30pm  Join us for a great evening of food and fellowship at our annual fish fry. Fish, fixin’s and dessert provided – bring a friend and your appetite!

Worship This Sunday: 10:30am –  “O Prosper the Work of Our Hands.”  

Scriptures: Pslam 90, Isaiah 58:6-14, Luke 13:10-17. Rev. Christopher Eshelman preaching. Once again, we gather after tragedy. Still Rachael weeps for her children (Jeremiah 31, Matthew 2). We gather surrounded by performative cruelty and irrational hatred. A world in which, far too often, religion becomes a tool of oppression and control instead of liberation. As we navigate these days, we are not the first to have “sighs too deep for words (Romans 8:26). How do we go forward? How to we live lives of reconciliation and love in such times?

Last week we read the creation story found in Genesis 1-2:3. We heard that God saw creation, each time new ways of being were called forth, it was good. When God created humans in God’s image, God saw that it was very good. What went wrong? The next stories, of course, in Genesis 2 and 3 and on, are about what went wrong and next week we’ll pick that up again with an exploration of the story of Cain and Abel, but this week we’ll focus on Sabbath and how Jesus understands it. It can be said that we have no peace because we have forgotten the ways of Sabbath. Last week we talked about how God “lets” creation happen – it is joyful, playful, delightful. God then rests on the 7^th day from all the work – and play – of creation. God establishes sacred, renewing patterns. Day and night, morning and evening. But – as the Gospel story we will hear shows – we too often turned Sabbath into a narrow, legalistic, controlling, judgmental forbiddingness instead of a necessary balance or rhythm between work, rest, and play.

Jesus rejects the narrow legalism and calls forth delight. There is some interesting word play in the story we’ll read from Luke. When Jesus notices the woman, stooped from her ailments, he says to her “Woman, you are set free from your ailment!” The Greek word here, apoluó, means to be completely released, pardoned, set free. Her crooked body straightened and she stood up, and “began praising God,” literally “glorifying God.” She was liberated from the enslavement of her body, in a society that treated disabled people as sinful or evil. When Jesus healed her, she was, in effect, freed to an entirely new life. No longer a beggar or unwanted daughter, she could find her way anew in the world.

But the dogmatic religious leader wasn’t delighted. “You can’t do that, Jesus. The commandment to keep the sabbath forbids the work of ‘curing.’” In Greek, the word used here is therapeuó. But the story doesn’t say that Jesus cured her; she wasn’t simply relieved of a particular condition. It says that Jesus liberated her, with its use of the word, apoluó. She wasn’t just cured. She was completely, fully released from that which had bound her. Balance and delight are restored.

The religious leader criticized Jesus for “curing” the woman on the sabbath.

And, as Jesus pointed out liberation was the entire point of sabbath!The sabbath was meant to be a day of release from enslavement to worldly economic and social systems, intended to ground Israel as a community formed by the principles of God’s Kingdom. A community of Exodus. The command to keep the sabbath had been given them while their newly freed bodies were still bent by Pharaoh’s yoke. When Moses came down from the mountain with the law to keep sabbath, the people barely knew the meaning of full release.

Sabbath wasn’t just about taking time off from work and resting. Sabbath was a weekly practice of God’s economy of generosity and gratitude — and learning that sacred provision was, indeed, abundance. Sabbath is what a truly freed people should not only do — but what they should be. Jesus gets mad: “You hypocrites! You are purposely using the sabbath commandment to limit God’s own glory!” In doing so, Jesus is standing with the prophets. Sunday we’ll hear that as we open the service with the words of Isaiah 58. “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke?”

Monday is Labor Day – reflecting on all of the above, we’ll be invited to think about our work, our play, our rest. We’ll be called to think about justice and renewal. We’ll focus on head, heart, and hands and rededicate ourselves to doing what Christ’s calls us to, that which God blesses. With the Psalmist, we will lament brokenness and we will cry out: “Let your work be manifest to your servants and your glorious power to their children. Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us and prosper for us the work of our hands— O prosper the work of our hands!” And we ask this, not for our glory, but for God’s. It is a cry of alignment, a call for liberation.

If any of the above intrigues you, we invite you to explore the hope and presence of Christ together with us at 10:30am each Sunday. 301 S. National here in Fort Scott. Blessings on your journey!