Sunday Prayers will be live-streamed to our Facebook page. There will be music beforehand, and the service will begin at 9:30. You can find the order of service here. (You can still watch the service even if you don’t have a Facebook account!)
Through the season of Lent this year, we hear covenant stories each week. Two weeks ago we heard the story of Noah; last week, we heard Abraham and Sarah. This Sunday we’ll hear about the giving of the law to the Israelites (Exodus 20), and the gospel passage is the story of Jesus driving the merchants out of the outer court of the temple (John 2.13 and following).
We often use images that have been shared under a Creative Commons License as the cover for our order of services when we’re able to gather in person. Here’s an image from the Jesus MAFA project, entitled Jesus drives out the merchants.
JESUS MAFA. Jesus drives out the merchants, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=48271 [retrieved March 2, 2021]. Original source: http://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr (contact page: https://www.librairie-emmanuel.fr/contact). Used under the Creative Commons NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.
Here’s what Sundays and Seasons offers as an introduction to this week’s readings:
The third covenant in this year’s Lenten readings is the central one of Israel’s history: the gift of the law to those God freed from slavery. The commandments begin with the statement that because God alone has freed us from the powers that oppressed us, we are to let nothing else claim first place in our lives. When Jesus throws the merchants out of the temple, he is defending the worship of God alone and rejecting the ways commerce and profit-making can become our gods. The Ten Commandments are essential to our baptismal call: centered first in God’s liberating love, we strive to live out justice and mercy in our communities and the world.