Worship at Home Sunday 28thJune 2026

Welcome 

by John Hinton

Welcome: Welcome is our theme and we start with a welcome to worship at home which we begin with a gathering prayer:Living God, we thank you for your love offered unconditionally to us. Give us grateful hearts, and direct us in ways we can share your love with one another & with your world.

Lord’s Prayer

StF  449: Lord of creation 

Message:

The gospel account for today comes at the end of Jesus’ instructions for mission, which he gave to his disciples. He says that, if they are welcomed, it is the equivalent of welcoming God. The same is true for us. When we welcome others into our midst we are welcoming God, whose image we can see in everyone we meet. It doesn’t have to be an elaborate welcome. Something as simple as providing someone with basic needs is a demonstration of love and respect. ‘These little ones’ that Jesus mentions doesn’t just mean the children, but the marginalised, the elderly, or those from minority groups – anyone, in fact, whom Roman or Jewish society did not rate highly in his day…. or any that that our society marginalises today! Let’s hear it now:

Matthew 10:40-42

This reading causes real anxiety to some folk. Why? Because it links behaviour with reward: whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple - truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward

What’s the problem with that? Well, there is a central theological theme that argues that the Grace of God is freely offered to all and is not earned. Our opening prayer started “Living God, we thank you for your love offered unconditionally to us” The sequence is this:

• God offers us his love, his grace, freely ----and as a result we behave in ways that reflect that gift. This is captured in the phrase “We love because God first loved us”
• But in this reading the words that the Gospel writer attribute to Jesus suggest the opposite. That “God will love us because we first loved others” Those who give the water will get the reward.

It is not the only time that Jesus seems to suggest such a thing… think again on some very familiar words, interestingly also recorded by Matthew, when he tells the parable of the sheep & the goats.

The reward (or punishment) is offered becauseof the people’s behaviour.

What this apparent discrepancy does is to warn us against adopting a strident and simplistic approach. Scripture is so important to guide our lives, but it is not always clear and it is sometimes contradictory.

Yes, the doctrine of grace is so important – that the love of God is freely given (amazing Grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me!). To me the most powerful image of Christ on the Cross is that his arms were so wide that they symbolised the limitless breadth of his love for us, all of us… even those of us who put him there! “Father, forgive them! He said “They know not what they do!”

But at other times scripture reminds us that our choices and decisions do matter ….a lot …….and that they carry real consequences, for others and for ourselves.  

StF 440: Amazing Grace

Prayer of Concerns

Let us pray for the world:

Your world, brought into being with a word of acceptance: ‘be’, designed with room for each and every being to find their place, intended with food and sustenance for all, pronounced ‘good’ in every way.

Let us pray for the world:

Our world, where the vulnerable long for acceptance, where the needy struggle with the effects of greed, where refugees are desperate to find a welcome, and goodness competes with that which is wrong.

Let us pray for the world:

Your world and our world, where societies make peace and work for the greater good, where differences between communities are celebrated, where individuals reach out to those around them, and goodness prevails.  

Let us pray for the world. Amen.

StF 611: Brother, sister, let me serve you