You are invited to the in-person Worship Service on Oct. 22 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.
Blessing of the Animals Sunday
Sunday, October 22, 2023, 10 am
Come one come all! We invite all animals, whether furry, scaled, or feathered to be blessed during the worship service. If you don’t have pets, you can bring your beloved stuffed animals. Please bring your pets so we can bless them in worship!
Children’s Time “Why Do You Love Your Pets?” Pastor John
Special Music I Dreamed of Rain By Jan Garrett Brandon & Trisha Kett
Trisha and I often play music with friends in Aptos and one of our band mates recently played for us this song “I Dreamed of Rain” which was written by her friend, Jan Garrett. We took a liking to the song for its calm expression. It ends each verse with “and peace spread over the land.”
Message A Moment of Moral Clarity: Part 2) “Dare to Ask ‘What Is God’s Vision for the Israelis & the Palestinians?’” Rev. John Song
Genesis 21:8-10, 14-27
Hagar and Ishmael Are Cast Out
“8The child grew and was weaned, and Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned. 9 But Sarah saw the son of Hagar the Egyptian, whom she had borne to Abraham, playing with her son Isaac. 10 So she said to Abraham, “Cast out this slave woman with her son, for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac.” 14 So Abraham rose early in the morning and took bread and a skin of water and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. 15 When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. 16 Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot, for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. 17 And God heard the voice of the boy, and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. 18 Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” 19 Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water. She went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.”
My heart has been heavy lately watching in horror the specter of widening conflict in the Middle East. I grieve over the ongoing lives lost and the trauma experienced by both the Israelis & the Palestinians. As people of faith, we dare to ask, ‘What Is God’s Vision for the Israelis & the Palestinians?” What is the moral clarity of this moment? What is the path forward for the Israelis & the Palestinians?
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. 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…” 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.
Palestinian home is bulldozed in the West Bank by the Israeli military, Dec. 28, 2021. It’s been the Israel policy to destroy homes as a deterrent if family members were engaged in militant activities.
