You are invited to the in-person Worship Service on Oct. 15 at 10 am. The bulletin for this Sunday is available for viewing HERE.
You can worship live on ZOOM by clicking the link below:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/9658816441 or Meeting ID: 965 881 6441
You can also watch Sunday services at your convenience by going to our website “watsonville1stumc.org” and click YouTube or Facebook. Each Sunday worship will be uploaded on Sunday afternoon for your viewing.
Kingdomtide
Sunday, October 15, 2023, 10 am
Isaiah 11:6
The wolf shall live with the lamb;
the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
the calf and the lion will feed together,
and a little child shall lead them.
Children’s Time “I Come with Peace” Pastor John
Choir Anthem Hymn Of Promise
Words & Music by Nathalie Sleeth
Message A Moment of Moral Clarity: Rev. John Song
“Trying to Make a Sense of the War in the Middle East”
I woke up last Saturday with shock and horror at the news of Hamas, a militant group in Gaza, committing an unspeakable massacre of innocent civilians in Israel. The conflict in the Middle East is one of the most vexing and intractable problems facing geopolitics and humanity.
I find that wars are to a significant degree an outer expression of unmet needs. When our fundamental needs are not being met, the frustration can easily boil over into violence. The collective energy of these deep, unmet needs can break out in the form of war, like what’s happening now between Israel and Palestine.
This is a time as Rudyard Kipling wrote in his opening line of “If”, “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs…” This is a moment of moral clarity of knowing what is at stake here and how we proceed from here. I hope to shed light into this darkness that the world is in danger of plunging into.
“The chief source of man’s inhumanity to man seems to be the tribal limits of his sense of obligation to the other man.”
~ Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics, 1932
“Violence begets violence; hate begets hate… It is all a descending spiral, and the end is destruction — for everybody. Along the way of life, someone must have enough sense and morality to cut off the chain of hate.”
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
“Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
~ Martin Luther King Jr.
“Motive is love and instrument is justice.”
~ Reinhold Niebuhr
Psalm 34:14
“Turn from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”
