This Service was held on Zoom.  Here is a recording of that service:

Led by Ian Trimnell
Preacher: Revd Paul Le Sueur
Celebrant: Revd Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga

Welcome: We are here to Praise You

Prayer of Approach

We fix our eyes on you Jesus, our Lord, our Saviour and King.
Come fill our hearts with your endless love and send the wind of your Spirit
to blow new hope through our lives.
Come light up our souls to rise in faith, to stretch out and take in your kingdom.
Come pour out your Spirit upon us as we stand together as brothers and sisters in the Lord.
Come lift up our heads, brush away the shadows of guilt and shine your grace into our minds.

And so Lord, we come together to worship.
We shake off the shackles of a fallen world and join with heaven to sing your praise.
We will declare your goodness now and celebrate your greatness for evermore!

Amen

Hymn: Dear Lord and Father of mankind

Dear Lord and Father of mankind,
forgive our foolish ways;
re-clothe us in our rightful mind,
In purer lives thy service find,
in deeper reverence praise,
in deeper reverence praise.

In simple trust like theirs who heard,
beside the Syrian sea,
the gracious calling of the Lord,
let us like them without a word
rise up and follow thee,
rise up and follow thee.

O Sabbath rest by Galilee!
O calm of hills above,
where Jesus knelt to share with thee
the silence of eternity,
interpreted by love,
interpreted by love!

Drop thy still dews of quietness,
till all pour strivings cease;
take from our souls the strain and stress,
and let our ordered lives confess
the beauty of thy peace,
the beauty of thy peace.

Breath through the heats of our desire
thy coolness and thy balm;
let sense be dumb, let flesh retire;
speak through the earthquake, wind, and fire,
O still small voice of calm,
O still small voice of calm.

John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
CCL31580

Confession

We have not always lived in ways that reflect God’s love for all.
There are times when prejudice and ignorance have caused us to judge others as less important,
less capable, less whole than ourselves.
Gracious God release us and grant us mercy.

We have not always lived as people assured of our place in God’s heart.
There are times when despair has been our refuge and we have turned from God’s promises.
Gracious God release us and grant us hope.

We have not always lived as disciples of Jesus.
There are times when the paths to wealth and power have been more attractive
than the longer roads of justice, peace and tolerance.
Gracious God release us and grant us courage.

We have not always lived as people of the Resurrection.
There are times when we have only seen the world as a place of threat and brokenness,
forgetting God’s creative genius.
Gracious God release us and grant us wisdom.

In quietness we remember those thoughts, actions and words that have marred your image in us,
hurt others and damaged the world.

[Silence]

God has heard the confession of our hearts and minds. In Christ we are set free.
Thanks be to God.

Amen

Prayer of the Week

Eternal God, we praise and adore you for all that you are:
for being bigger than even our biggest questions;
for caring more than we can fully comprehend.
We praise and adore you for your strength and your silence;
for your power and your peace.
We praise and adore you for being in control and yet not controlling;
for being in the storms and beyond them.
We praise and adore you, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we praise you for ever.

Amen

Bible Readings

2 Corinthians 6: 1–13

Read by Ian Trimnell

¹ As God’s fellow workers we urge you not to receive God’s grace in vain. ² For he says,

‘In the time of my favour I heard you,
and in the day of salvation I helped you.’

I tell you, now is the time of God’s favour, now is the day of salvation.

Paul’s hardships

³ We put no stumbling-block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. ⁴ Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; ⁵ in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; ⁶ in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; ⁷ in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; ⁸ through glory and dishonour, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; ⁹ known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; ¹⁰ sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.

¹¹ We have spoken freely to you, Corinthians, and opened wide our hearts to you. ¹² We are not withholding our affection from you, but you are withholding yours from us. ¹³ As a fair exchange – I speak as to my children – open wide your hearts also.

NIV®

This is the word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

Mark 4: 35–41

Read by Janet Trimnell

Jesus Calms the Storm

³⁵ That day when evening came, he said to his disciples, ‘Let us go over to the other side.’ ³⁶ Leaving the crowd behind, they took him along, just as he was, in the boat. There were also other boats with him. ³⁷ A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. ³⁸ Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, ‘Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?’

³⁹ He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, ‘Quiet! Be still!’ Then the wind died down and it was completely calm.

⁴⁰ He said to his disciples, ‘Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?’

⁴¹ They were terrified and asked each other, ‘Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!’

NIV®

This is the Gospel of Christ.
Praise to Christ our light.

Meditation

Panic Stations

By Revd Paul J. Le Sueur

All was peaceful on Lake Galilee some years ago when I led a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. As we walked along its shores we remembered how often it featured in the Gospels. It was on the shores of Lake Galilee where Jesus recruited Andrew and Peter, and James and John at the beginning of his ministry. It was there that he breakfasted with his disciples after the Resurrection, and in between … healing miracles and teachings which amazed many, and opened the eyes of some to a new vision of the Kingdom of God.

But this was different. ‘There was a furious squall.’ How often, all through the centuries, beautiful ships have sunk, crews and passengers have drowned and valuable cargoes have been lost. When I was a little boy, over seventy-five years ago, we were at war, and were reliant for food on ships coming from America. And those ships were in constant peril of being sunk by enemy U-boats. They were desperate times and it was no wonder that a favourite hymn in church and in school assembly was:

Eternal Father, strong to save,
whose arm doth bind the restless wave.

I particularly loved belting out the chorus,

O hear us when we cry to thee
for all in peril on the sea.

It was not only a hymn, but also a prayer.

We sang and prayed it then for our sailors. And today? Do we have the compassion to pray it today for all those refugees and asylum seekers crossing the seas in frail, overladen craft in search of sanctuary? The chorus is uncompromising; it is ‘For ALL in peril on the sea.’ ‘All’ means all: whether naïve or desperate or old hands.

Even experienced fishermen like Peter and Andrew, James and John did not expect a storm of this magnitude, or they would not have acceded to Jesus’ request.

Let us imagine the scene. A five-letter word sums up the mood: panic. Some frantically bailing out as the water came in over the gunwales. Perhaps some were swearing, some praying. Others protesting that they should never have come and all of them panicking. And when they saw that Jesus was sleeping, some felt angry. You can sense that anger in their words, and imagine how Jesus felt when the first words he heard on being woken were:

‘Don’t you care that we are drowning?’ ‘Don’t you care?’

We’ll leave it there for the moment.

In the Old Testament book of Jonah there is a story which has remarkable parallels with today’s Gospel. Jonah was running away from the mission God had given him. He got on board a ship at Joppa, sailing for Tarshish. As in the Gospel story a great storm arose and the ship looked like sinking. As in the Gospel story the main character was asleep. As in the Gospel story there was panic. As in the Gospel story there was anger and, indeed, blame directed at the main character, and as in the Gospel story the storm was quelled by the main character: in the Gospel by the command of Jesus, and in the Jonah story by Jonah agreeing to himself being thrown overboard, a pretty drastic solution by the sound of it.

Here is something strange. I wonder if you have ever noticed it?

Although Israel has a long coastline and places that would make good harbours, other stories about ships and voyages and shipwrecks are noticeably absent from the Old Testament. Apart from fishermen, the Jews were not a seafaring people; they left that to their Phoenician neighbours to the north. In fact, the sea came to symbolise for them the dark power of evil, threatening to destroy God’s good creation, God’s people, and God’s purposes.

But Christians have and had a commission from Jesus to spread the Gospel throughout the world, and for the most part the only practical mode of transport was by ship, and that was the main way St Paul traversed the Roman Empire. In our Epistle this morning we heard Paul recounting some of the trials and tribulations he had had to go through as he preached the gospel. He doesn’t mention shipwrecks there, but if we fast-forward a few chapters to 2 Corinthians 11: 25 he is again recounting the personal cost of missionary work, and in a long list he says, ‘Three times I have been shipwrecked, and for twenty-four hours I was adrift on the open sea.’ Wow! And only one of those times gets a mention in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 27), and that is pretty horrific. At one point it says, ‘For days on end there was no sign of either sun or stars, a great storm was raging, and our last hopes of coming through alive began to fade.’

Three crises. three cases of panic, and three cases when all came through safely in the end.

Now I don’t suppose it is too likely that any of us here have personally experienced a traumatic crisis on board a ship, though I was once on a cruise when a small fire broke out in the engine room. It was, however, very swiftly put out. That doesn’t count.

But I wonder? I wonder if you can recall an event or a time in your life when you experienced panic. A time perhaps when you felt yourself trapped in a situation and couldn’t see a sensible way forward and you were afraid everything would end badly. Think about it; discuss it with someone. How was it resolved? Did your faith help you or not? What lesson was there to be learnt? How has it changed you?

Most of us will have had some experience where we felt trapped and panicked or were tempted to panic. Yet here you are today. Here we are today. God in his great mercy has brought us through, and hopefully we are stronger for it, and our faith has grown. The disciples of Jesus on that boat may have panicked, but later on, when they became apostles, they faced great crises, even martyrdom with amazing fortitude.

One further thought. The Jews may have regarded the seas as governed by evil forces, but as Christians we do not have to do the same. Everything in creation is part of God’s Creation. The power of oceans must be respected, but as part of nature also recognised as a source of blessing. Remember the disciples’ angry question: ‘Lord, don’t you care that we are drowning?’

Let our response be, in the words of that old hymn/prayer.

Wide, wide as the ocean,
high as the heavens above:
deep, deep as the deepest sea
is my Saviour’s love.

I, though so unworthy,
still am a child of his care,
for his word teaches me that
his love reaches me everywhere.

Amen

Musical Response: Wide, wide as the ocean

Wide, wide as the ocean, high as the heaven above;
deep, deep as the deepest sea is my Saviour’s love.
I, though so unworthy, still am a child of his care;
for his Word teaches me that his love reaches me everywhere.

An Affirmation of Faith

We believe in the Creator:
the maker of all things.

We believe in the Son:
the redeemer of our broken world.

We believe in the Spirit:
The sacred wind that binds all things together in the family of God.

Creator Father, beloved Son and living Spirit.

Amen

Prayers and Intercessions

Led by Cheryl Montgomery

Good morning, God! We’re here again settling into prayer.
When Jesus laid down in that boat, he trusted you that everything would be OK.
We place our thanks and thoughts before you now in the certainty that you are listening
and all will be well.

Thank you, Lord, for our Cornerstone Community in all its diversity and glorious variety,
drawn from all the corners of the earth.
We have received your precious gift of grace to treasure and freely pass round –
although poor ourselves, may we bring your wealth to many; though penniless we own the world.
May we grow closer to each other in faith, in fellowship, in forgiveness and joy,
to live with unaffected love.
How good and how pleasant it is to live together in unity.

Heavenly Father:
hear our prayer.

We thank you Lord for the gift of all the dads in this life –
for young fathers newly embracing their vocation;
for dads of young adults, shaping futures, sharing the pains of adolescence;
for dads now grand, who carry the memories and stories of life and family to future generations;
for dads who are absolutely no kin at all, who help make our communities a home fit for habitation.
Fill them all with your gifts of compassion, conviction and boldness; fill their lives with great joy!

Heavenly Father:
hear our prayer.

In these days of worldwide illness, we pray that today will be the beginning of deliverance.
Give us courage to continue pressing the rich to share vaccine and its secrets
with countries and peoples still without.
Help us give the means of making as well as the means of delivery.
Give us energy to safely return to our life of service here in central Milton Keynes –
to become the unknown people who everyone knows, the point of deliverance.
Help us live with patience and cautious hope that our community, our country,
can return to a place of confidence, to a place of singing.

Heavenly Father:
hear our prayer.

Lord we lift to you the people who live on a storm-tossed sea:
the people in hunger whose wage is too thin,
the people in turmoil who seek out our Chapel for respite,
the people struggling with sickness and disease who are not allowed in touching range,
the people in terror of the life ahead they see.

Pour your healing on them, visit them with your peace, open their eyes to your fatherly care,
make today the beginning of their deliverance. Bless them with your navigation deep within.

May joy always be found in sorrow.

Heavenly Father:
hear our prayer.

Amen

The Peace

Jesus says:
Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you.
Do not let your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.

The peace of the Lord
be always with you.

Holy Communion

Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation.
Through your goodness we have this bread to offer,
which earth has given and human hands have made.
It will become for us the bread of life.

Blessed be God for ever.

Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation.
Through your goodness we have this wine to offer,
fruit of the vine and work of human hands.
It will become our spiritual drink.

Blessed be God for ever.

The Lord be with you
and also with you.

Lift up your hearts.
We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
It is right to give thanks and praise.

Father, you made the world and love your creation.
You gave your Son Jesus Christ to be our Saviour.
His dying and rising have set us free from sin and death.
By your Holy Spirit you make us your friends.
And so we gladly thank you,
with saints and angels praising you and saying:

Holy, holy, holy Lord,
God of power and might,
heaven and earth are full of your glory.
Hosanna in the highest.

We praise and bless you, loving Father,
through Jesus Christ, our Lord;
and as we obey his command,
send your Holy Spirit on us and on these gifts
that broken bread and wine out-poured,
may be for us the body and blood of your Dear Son.

On the night before he died he had supper with his friends
and taking bread, he praised you.
He broke the bread, shared it with them and said,
‘Take, eat; this is my body, which is given for you.
Do this in remembrance of me.’

When supper was ended he took a cup of wine.
Again he gave you thanks, shared it and said,
‘Drink this, all of you, this is my blood of the new covenant,
which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.
Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.’

So, Father, as we remember all that Jesus did,
we plead with confidence his sacrifice made once for all upon the cross.
We proclaim his death and resurrection until he comes in glory.

Great is the mystery of faith:

Christ has died.
Christ is risen.
Christ will come again.

Lord of all life, help us to work together for that day
when your kingdom comes and justice and mercy will be seen in all the earth.
Look with favour on your people; gather us in your loving arms
and bring us with all the saints to feast at your table in heaven,
through Christ, and with Christ, and in Christ,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honour and glory are yours,
O loving Father, for ever and ever.

Amen

The Lord’s Prayer

As our Saviour taught us, so we pray:

Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
as we forgive those who sin against us.
Lead us not into temptation
but deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power,
and the glory are yours
now and for ever.

Amen

Breaking of the Bread

We break this bread to share in the body of Christ.

Though we are many, we are one body,
because we all share in one bread.

Take this bread:

Share this wine.

In these Christ comes to us with love from God.
The gifts of God for the people of God.

Amen

After Communion

Holy One, in your grace you brought us to your table to share this meal of hospitality.

May the love we find at this table
be reflected in our lives.

May the power we received at this table
make us peacemakers and healers.

May the Spirit who fills us again at this table be the compass of our journey, our stories and our lives.

Amen

 

Notices

Sunday, 27 June 2021

Next Sunday (27 June 2021) there will be Services of the Word at 10.00 am, both in the Worship Area at Cornerstone, led by Revd George Mwaura, and on line by Zoom, led by Revd Ernesto Lozada-Uzuriaga. The preacher at both services will be Revd George Mwaura.

Offering Envelopes 2021

If you have requested offering envelopes for 2021 these are now ready for collection.
Now that the Cornerstone building is open, they can be collected when you come to the church,
so please contact Janet Trimnell, mailto:steward.cccmk@gmail.com
beforehand to arrange for your envelopes to be sent to the church.
Thank you.

Offering

Thank you
to everyone who has continued giving through our regular schemes during these past months.
Your generosity has been amazing and much appreciated.
We couldn’t have carried on without you.

We have various ways in which you can continue to give your offering in support of the Church.

For details please contact the Stewardship Secretary, Janet Trimnell, at steward.cccmk@gmail.com

Full details are also available on our website at: www.cornerstonemk.co.uk/giving.

Final Prayer

Almighty Father,
who in your great mercy gladdened the disciples with the sight of the risen Lord:
give us such knowledge of his presence with us,
that we may be strengthened and sustained by his risen life
and serve you continually in righteousness and truth;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen

 

Hymn: Father, hear the prayer we offer

Father, hear the prayer we offer:
not for ease that prayer shall be,
but for strength that we may ever
live our lives courageously.

Not for ever in green pastures
do we ask our way to be;
but the steep and rugged pathway
may we tread rejoicingly.

Not for ever by still waters
would we idly rest and stay;
but would smite the living fountains
from the rocks along our way.

Be our strength in hours of weakness,
in our wanderings be our guide;
through endeavour, failure, danger,
Father, be thou at our side.

Love Maria Willis (1824–1908)
CCL31580

The Grace

May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
and the love of God,
and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit
be with us all, now and evermore.

Amen

 

Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.
Thanks be to God.