8 October 202610 October 2026

Trinity 19 / Pentecost 20 Sunday, 11/10/2026

SENTENCE FROM SCRIPTURE:

Who can declare the mighty acts of the Lord? (Psalm 106)

HYMN-

GREETING

Grace and peace to you from God our Father

and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen

COLLECT FOR PURITY

Almighty God,
to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known,
and from whom no secrets are hidden:
cleanse the thoughts of our hearts
by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit,
that we may perfectly love you,
and worthily magnify your holy name;
through Christ our Lord. Amen.

SUMMARY OF THE LAW

Our Lord Jesus Christ said: The first commandment is this:

Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is the only Lord. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.”

The second is this: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” There is no other commandment greater than these. Amen. Lord, have mercy.

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CONFESSION AND ABSOLUTION

God is love and we are God’s children. There is no room for fear in love. We love because God loved us first.

Let us confess our sins in penitence and faith.

SILENCE

God our Father,
we confess to you
and to our fellow members in the Body of Christ
that we have sinned in thought, word and deed,
and in what we have failed to do.
We are truly sorry.
Forgive us our sins,
and deliver us from the power of evil,
for the sake of your Son who died for us, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

ABSOLUTION

God, who is both power and love,
forgive you and free you from your sins,
heal and strengthen you by the Holy Spirit,
and raise you to new life in Christ our Lord. Amen.

GLORIA
sung by Dougie Byers

COLLECT FOR TODAY

O Lord,

since without you we cannot please you:

let the work of your mercy in all things guide our hearts;

through Jesus Christ our Lord,

who lives and reigns with you,

in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

one God, world without end. Amen.

PROCLAIMING & RECEIVING GOD’S WORD

FIRST READING
Isaiah 25:1-9,
read by David Kerr

¹ O LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you, I will praise your name; for you have done wonderful things, plans formed of old, faithful and sure. ² For you have made the city a heap, the fortified city a ruin; the palace of aliens is a city no more, it will never be rebuilt. ³ Therefore strong peoples will glorify you; cities of ruthless nations will fear you. ⁴ For you have been a refuge to the poor, a refuge to the needy in their distress, a shelter from the rainstorm and a shade from the heat. When the blast of the ruthless was like a winter rainstorm, ⁵ the noise of aliens like heat in a dry place, you subdued the heat with the shade of clouds; the song of the ruthless was stilled. ⁶ On this mountain the LORD of hosts will make for all peoples a feast of rich food, a feast of well-matured wines, of rich food filled with marrow, of well-matured wines strained clear. ⁷ And he will destroy on this mountain the shroud that is cast over all peoples, the sheet that is spread over all nations; ⁸ he will swallow up death for ever. Then the Lord GOD will wipe away the tears from all faces, and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth, for the LORD has spoken.

⁹ It will be said on that day, Lo, this is our God; we have waited for him, so that he might save us. This is the LORD for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation.

SECOND READING
Philippians 4.1–9,
read by Mark Toner

¹ My brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved. ² I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. ³ Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life. ⁴ Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice. ⁵ Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. ⁶ Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.

⁷ And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. ⁸ Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honourable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. ⁹ Keep on doing the things that you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, and the God of peace will be with you.

SILENCE

GRADUAL HYMN

GOSPEL
Matthew 22.1–14,
read by Annette Beagrie

Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to Matthew Chapter 22, beginning at verse 1

Glory to Christ our Saviour

Once more Jesus spoke to the chief priests and Pharisees in parables, saying:

² ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son. ³ He sent his slaves to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. ⁴ Again he sent other slaves, saying, “Tell those who have been invited: Look, I have prepared my dinner, my oxen and my fat calves have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the wedding banquet.” ⁵ But they made light of it and went away, one to his farm, another to his business, ⁶ while the rest seized his slaves, maltreated them, and killed them. ⁷ The king was enraged. He sent his troops, destroyed those murderers, and burned their city. ⁸ Then he said to his slaves, “The wedding is ready, but those invited were not worthy. ⁹ Go therefore into the main streets, and invite everyone you find to the wedding banquet.” ¹⁰ Those slaves went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both good and bad; so the wedding hall was filled with guests. ¹¹ But when the king came in to see the guests, he noticed a man there who was not wearing a wedding robe, 12 and he said to him, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding robe?” And he was speechless. ¹³ Then the king said to the attendants, “Bind him hand and foot, and throw him into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
¹⁴ For many are called, but few are chosen.’

Give thanks to the Lord for his glorious Gospel

Praise to Christ our Lord.

SERMON by Rev Andrew MacKenzie

Whenever Lizanne and I go to visit family in High Wycombe, if we are there at a weekend, we sometimes worship at All Saints Parish Church – a church with a similar size of congregation to St John’s. We twigged that one of the Lay Readers, Alan, was a Scot, and one Sunday I engaged him in conversation, and asked him if he had belonged to the Scottish Episcopal Church. His answer was a surprise. ‘No’, he said. ‘I was brought up in the Church of Scotland, and then I joined the Salvation Army’. It transpired that he had, in fact, been a Salvation Army officer, and that was what had brought him to Wycombe. He had later resigned, and become an Anglican.

We got to talking about ecumenical things, including past history, and how things had ‘loosened up’ between the denominations over the years. I mentioned the subject of what is often called ‘the effortless superiority’ which Anglicans in the past displayed in their attitude to other denominations – an attitude which I am glad to say has all but disappeared. He said that he had felt this as a Salvationist, not only from Anglicans, but also Baptists, Congregationalists, and, indeed, Methodists. ‘But’, he said, and he grinned, ‘we Salvationists had one great advantage. We were saved!’

Who is saved? Who is not saved? Who’s in? Who’s out? Who is called, and who is chosen? That was the issue for Alan and his fellow Salvationists. And that is the issue in our gospel this morning.

This is a story addressed to religious leaders, who, certainly in the past, and to some extent even today, are prone to making such judgements – who is saved and who isn’t. It is something which tends to go hand in hand with religious fundamentalism. In Jewish thought in the time of Jesus, you were indeed either ‘in’ or ‘out’ – a Jew, or a Gentile. Having said that, in the passage we heard from Isaiah, there is a glimpse there of a God who ‘will make for all peoples a feast of rich food’. Perhaps this is what Jesus had in mind when he told this story.

Well, it is a very strange story, and it does chime with last week’s gospel about the workers in the vineyard. The very idea of people refusing to come to a wedding banquet for a king’s son is very odd, for a start. However, we ought to bear in mind that wedding invitations in those days did not give a date and a time. You went when everything was ready, and that could be tricky, especially if, as in Luke’s version of this story, you had just got married yourself! But the point of the story is really quite clear. God is undiscriminating in his grace – in the end, all are welcome at the feast. Even those who never in their wildest dreams could expect such an invitation, anybody who could be found, even those were welcome. This is truly the gospel, the good news, of the Kingdom. All are welcome at the banquet.

This has a resonance for us today in our worship. In a former liturgy of the Methodist Church, we used to end the eucharist by saying together: ‘We thank you Lord that you have fed us in this sacrament, united us with Christ, and given us a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all mankind’. The good news of God’s Way is for all. Nobody needs to be excluded, unless they exclude themselves.

A former Father of the Methodist Church was the Revd. Robert Newton Flew, President of the Methodist Conference exactly 80 years ago. He was a great scholar and a great leader. He had a son, who turned his back on the faith of his father, and, as an atheist, became a notable philosopher. His name was Antony Flew. He was a controversial man, one who was in his prime when I was a student way back in the 1960s. In his old age, he made a move back towards belief in God, but not in any traditional sense. He believed in God, but not a God who intervenes in human affairs, something known as Deism. And he was quite scathing about the traditional Abrahamic religions – Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Try this for size. He wrote this: “I’m thinking of a God very different from the God of the Christian and far and away from the God of Islam, because both are depicted as (here it is) omnipotent Oriental despots, (and worse still) cosmic Saddam Husseins“. It did not endear him to traditional Christians! But did he have a point? Does not the notion of heaven and hell, for example, (‘in’ or ‘out’) smack of that kind of thought?

With the Middle East in flames, we can see the vile result of religions that have lost their way, giving credence to Antony Flew’s notion of a god who is a ‘cosmic Saddam Hussein’. This is indeed a travesty of religion, where the notion of being ‘in’ or ‘out’ brings this inevitable result. It is something which we, perhaps naively, thought was a thing of the past in its brutality and barbarism, the kind of thing that happened as far back as the Crusades and carried on as far as the Christian west was concerned until the late 1950s. I’m thinking, for example, of the brutality of Mau Mau in Kenya. But still, in 2026, we have blood on our hands. We have been prepared to bomb, and despite the efforts of politicians and generals to portray this as the best response, innocent people are killed, not by being beheaded on camera, but by being blasted out of existence by a bomb. You cannot bomb to oblivion an ideology, however horrendous that ideology might be.

Now, I know there are no easy answers to this sore dilemma. But I remember discussing it with a close friend who was a Quaker. I asked him what he thought was a way out of the mess of the Middle East. He said ‘in the end, you have to negotiate’. I think he was right. In every conflict, every struggle, be it Mau Mau in Kenya, EOKA in Cyprus, the troubles in Northern Ireland, Russia and Ukraine, Israel and Palestine, or even the desire for independence here, in the end, people have to sit down and talk. And that means that whether you think that you are right (or, in the terms of our gospel today, whether you are ‘in’), or that the other party is wrong (that is to say ‘out’) for the sake of the future, you have to put that to one side. It was Winston Churchill, was it not, who said that ‘to jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war’.

The war between Russia and Ukraine, or the conflict between Israeli and Palestinian might not seem to be a very fruitful field as far as that is concerned. But even if it is a horribly twisted perversion of the religion behind it, in the end, all concerned have to come to the table. Neither can we in Scotland distance ourselves from what happens anywhere in the world, for we are all woven into the warp and weft of our common humanity. As Christians, who worship a God who is not an oriental despot, but a God who is gracious, and to whom we owe our allegiance in Christ Jesus, we, of all people should be standing for Kingdom values, praying and working for justice and peace. We should live in the spirit of our Philippians reading for today. Let me remind you:
            “whatever is true, whatever is honourable,
            whatever is just, whatever is pure,
            whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable,
            if there is any excellence
            and if there is anything worthy of praise,
            think about these things.”

And we should never ever be deluded into thinking that violence is the answer to violence, however it is perpetrated. Something to bear in mind as we are just a month away from Remembrance Sunday.

Today’s gospel is a timely reminder that our gracious God stretches out the arms of his mercy to all, whatever their race or colour or creed. Nobody is outside the compass of this free mercy, which, to be honest, none of us deserve, for we are all flawed human beings. But here’s the thing. Whatever our condition, God treats us as if we are OK. That is love, and that is grace. But it means that we have to change our ways, to repent, for that is the only valid response. Let us remember that as we make our communion in a few moments time.

“We thank you Lord that you feed us in this sacrament, unite us with Christ, and give us a foretaste of the heavenly banquet prepared for all humanity.”

THE CREED

We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
God from God,
Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one substance with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.
With the Father and the Son,
he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

Prayer Requests – Baildon Methodist Church

PRAYERS

Loving God,
As we gather today, we thank you for your constant love; for your presence in places where we cannot see you, in moments of shared joy, and in times of sadness. For being near when we are unaware, and for standing beside us when we are most in need.