Trinity-St. Andrew’s United Church
Order of Worship
Sunday, August 9, 2026 – 11th after Pentecost
We welcome Danah-Lee Krieger as our Guest Speaker,
and Schroeder Nordholt as our Guest Music Director.
Prelude
Words of Welcome / Land Acknowledgement
TSA acknowledges that today’s worship service is taking place on the traditional, unceded, and unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Anishinàbe People. This land has never been given up, and it continues to bear witness to the systemic marginalization of its original caretakers.
We remember that our solidarity with oppressed communities everywhere is part of our call to live justly, love mercy and walk humbly. Together, in this place, we commit to ongoing learning, truth-telling and relationship-building and trusting that through love, community and shared work, we can help create a future rooted in justice and belonging.
Announcements
Lighting the Christ Candle
As we light the Christ candle this morning, we are reminded that transformation often begins with a shift in how we see and think and also where we choose to focus. The light of Christ invites us to notice what we may’ve been missing, to challenge the thoughts that keep us stuck and to open our minds to new possibilities. As this flame shines before us, may it be a symbol of renewed minds and the courage to let God shift something within us. The light of Christ is among us. Thanks be to God.
Passing the Peace of Christ
Call to Worship
Leader: We come this morning with minds that are full.
All: Full of thoughts, worries, hopes and possibilities.
Leader: Some thoughts open us to possibility; others can narrow our vision.
All: Today, we open ourselves to a different way of seeing.
Leader: “Be transformed by the renewing of your minds.”
All: Renew our minds, shift our focus and lead us forward.
Leader: Come, let us worship God. Amen.
Hymn Worship the Lord VU 401
Refrain: Worship the Lord (worship the Lord)
worship the Father, the Spirit, the Son,
raising our hands (raising our hands)
in devotion to God who is one!
- Raising our hands as a sign of rejoicing,
and with our lips our togetherness voicing,
giving ourselves to a life of creativeness,
worship and work must be one! Refrain
- Praying and training that we be a blessing,
and by our handiwork daily confessing:
we are committed to serving humanity,
worship and work must be one! Refrain
- Called to be partners with God in creation,
honouring Christ as the Lord of the nation,
we must be ready for risk and for sacrifice,
worship and work must be one! Refrain
- Bringing the bread and the wine to the table,
asking that we may be led and enabled,
truly united to build new communities,
worship and work must be one! Refrain - Now in response to the life you are giving,
help us, O Father, to offer our living,
seeking a just and a healing society,
worship and work must be one! Refrain
Prayer of Approach
Loving God, We come as we are, with busy minds, open questions, old patterns, new hopes and everything that we are carrying deep within our hearts. Still the noise enough that we might notice what is shaping our thoughts and our lives. Help us to recognize the fears that narrow our vision, the assumptions that keep us from seeing clearly and the possibilities we may have missed. Open our minds to wisdom, our hearts to compassion and our lives to the movement of your Spirit. In this time of worship, gives us strength and helps us to shift our perspective. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.
Time for Young and Young at Heart: The Conversion Story of Saul – taken and condensed from Acts 9
Scripture Reader: Joy Curry
Joshua 1:1-5, and 1:9
Romans 12:1-2
Ephesians 4:17-32
Hymn Shadow and Substance MV 44
- Shadow and substance, wonder and mystery,
spell-binding spinner of atoms and earth;
soul of the cosmos, person and energy,
source of our being, we sing of your worth.
- We are your image, formed in community,
sisters and brothers of Adam and Eve.
You gave us colour, custom and history;
Teach us to honour what others receive.
- Naming the nameless Spirit of unity,
scanning the heavens for signs of your care;
God of the ages, give us humility;
guide us to mystical union in prayer.
Sermon: Shift Happens
Special Music: Ross McEwen
The Offering
We give thanks to everyone who continues to support TSA and our many ministries. Your gifts of support and encouragement mean a lot to us. You can get more information about making a donation by contacting the church office or by visiting our website. There are also many opportunities to volunteer in our different ministries. For all the gifts you share, for all the people you bless by your serving and giving as a disciple of Jesus, we give thanks.
Offering Song Your Work, O God, Needs Many Hands VU 537
Your work, O God, needs many hands
to help you everywhere,
and some there are who cannot serve
unless our gifts we share.
Offering Prayer
Generous God, We offer these gifts with gratitude for all that has been entrusted to us. Take what we give and use it to bring hope and love where it is needed most. May our giving be part of the transformation we seek, not only in our own lives, but in the world around us. In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.
Hymn Seek Ye First the Kingdom VU 356
- Seek ye first the kingdom of God
and God’s righteousness,
and all these things shall be added unto you.
Hallelu, hallelujah.
- Ask and it shall be given unto you;
seek and you shall find;
knock and the door shall be opened unto you.
Hallelu, hallelujah.
- We do not live by bread alone,
but by every word
that proceeds from the mouth of God.
Hallelu, hallelujah.
Pastoral Prayer
Loving and Compassionate God, There is a lot going on inside our heads. Thoughts we chose. Thoughts we didn’t choose. Memories that suddenly return. Worries that get louder than they deserve to be. Stories we have repeated about ourselves so many times that we have started to believe they must be true. So today, we bring all of that to You. We think of those whose minds are occupied by medical appointments, test results, bills, family struggles, difficult decisions or an uncertain future. We remember those who are grieving, lonely and those whose lives have changed in ways they never expected. We hold before You a world where fear can spread quickly, where people are often reduced to labels and where it can be easier to assume the worst than to remain curious, compassionate and open. Interrupt us when our thinking becomes too small. Challenge the assumptions we have stopped questioning. Help us notice when fear is doing the talking. Remind us that changing our minds is not weakness and that learning something new isn’t failure. Give us eyes to notice what is good and the courage to face what is difficult. And when life shifts beneath our feet, help us trust that we are not travelling alone. All this we pray in Jesus’ Name who taught us to say and pray together*
The Lord’s Prayer
Hymn I have Called You by Your Name MV 161
- I have called you by your name, you are mine;
I have gifted you and ask you now to shine.
I will not abandon you;
all my promises are true.
You are gifted, called, and chosen;
you are mine.
- I will help you learn my name as you go;
read it written in my people, help them grow.
Pour the water in my name,
speak the word your soul can claim,
offer Jesus’ body given long ago.
- I know you will need my touch as you go;
feel it pulsing in creation’s ebb and flow.
Like the woman reaching out,
choosing faith in spite of doubt,
hold the hem of Jesus’ robe,
then let it go.
- I have given you a name, it is mine;
I have given you my Spirit as a sign.
With my wonder in your soul,
make my wounded children whole;
go and tell my precious people
they are mine.
Benediction
As we leave this final Sunday of Vacation Bible School for Adults, may we carry the journey with us. May we ask for help. May we give thanks. May we stand in wonder. May we choose kindness. May we trust that we are not alone. And when it is time to shift, may we allow God to renew our minds and lead us forward. And may the grace of Christ, the love of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit be with you now and always. Go now in peace friends, Amen.
Choral Amen Go, Make a Diff’rence MV 209 Refrain Only, sung twice
Go make a diff’rence.
We can make a diff’rence.
Go make a diff’rence in the world. (2x)
Shift Happens
Danah-Lee Krieger, Sunday, August 9, 2026
It’s great to be back this morning. I want to start by telling you something that might give you a little smile this morning. I came across this funny little story about a woman who had just finished choir practice and was feeling so inspired that she slapped a bumper sticker on her car that said, “Honk if you love Jesus.” A few minutes later, she was sitting at a red light, digging around in her purse, and didn’t notice when the light turned green. Suddenly, the guy behind her started honking. She thought, “Well, isn’t that wonderful! He loves Jesus too!” So, she rolled down her window, leaned out, gave him a big wave, and shouted, “I love Jesus too!” Then more people started honking. She said, “I couldn’t believe it. Apparently, everybody at that intersection loved Jesus!” One guy was so enthusiastic he even rolled down his window and yelled, “Jesus Christ!” She said, “After we shared all the excitement and community love, I was the only one to make it through the green light”.
Would you bow your heads and pray with me?
Loving God, May the words of my mouth, the meditations of our hearts and indeed the actions of our lives always be acceptable to you, our Rock and our Redeemer. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
Well… we made it. This is our final Sunday of Vacation Bible School for Adults. If you’ve been here for some of it… or even all of it… you might remember that in our 1st week, we explored Help, Thanks, Wow and 3 simple ways to pray. In our 2nd week, we talked about kindness and the reminder that, in a world where you can be anything… be kind.
Last week, we explored what happens when life does a “Job” on you and wrestled with that age old question of why do bad things happen to good people… and staying rooted and knowing that we can wrestle with God… but knowing that ultimately in this life and beyond that we are not alone. But today, the title of our message is Shift Happens. Shift Happens. And I say that very intentionally. Although… we could take the F out of Shift, and it would likely still make sense for many of us… but I have deliberately decided to keep it in for this morning.
But today I want to talk to you about our minds and our thoughts. And maybe for some of you, this morning’s message might come across sounding very much like quantum mysticism or pseudoscience… or even modern-day psychology. I get that. Upon researching for this message, I was listening to a teaching about how we have around 30000 thoughts a day. And that sort of blew my socks off because ultimately, the way we think determines the path for each one of our lives. So, without a doubt, how we think is remarkably important. It also made me think about my time in the church and how as a Christian, I rarely heard anyone talk about thought patterns and paying attention to our thoughts. If you are like me, you’ve heard the passage from Paul in Romans many times in your life, “be transformed by the renewing of your minds”. But where do we go from there? Especially with 30000 thoughts a day. Personally, I have many windows open in my mind at the same time. If you picture a computer browser with dozens of open tabs at the top of the screen… that’s basically introspective into my brain at all times. So, reining it in can be challenging. But there is also no shortage of other biblical passages telling us about our thinking and our minds. So there really must be something to this…
Examples…
Colossians 3:2 “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things”. 2 Corinthians 10:5: We capture every thought and make it surrender and obey Christ.
1 Peter 1:13: Prepare your minds for action and exercise self-control. Proverbs 4:23: Be careful what you think, because your thoughts run your life Philippians 4:8 “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things”.
So today, I want you… and me… to consider what we’ve been thinking about. Where is your focus? What beast are you feeding in your mind because the mind is incredibly powerful. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the timeless quote from Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right”.
But here are a few precursors to this morning’s message. Firstly, modern day psychology and science tell us that we are wired to always expect the worst-case scenario because of our primal instinct to survive. This is part of our human condition. This ancient brain wiring automatically scans for threats and prepares for disasters just to protect us from danger. As Dr. Robyne Hanley-Dafoe said in Psychology Today, “The human brain is wired with a negativity bias, meaning that it scans for potential threats faster and more intensely than it registers neutral or positive information”. So right off the bat, we are already at a disadvantage in our own thinking because we are hardwired to expect threats or worst-case scenarios. We get it honestly.
And that part of our human nature offers each and every one of us the ability to have something that my mom used to call “stinking thinking”. And here’s the thing: no matter how old, smart, beautiful, educated or uneducated you might be, we all battle within our minds. So, if you’ve been a Christian for 60 years and you feel like you still have trouble with your thinking… This is something that will never go away. When we give the power over to the stinking thinking… and we don’t resist negative thoughts that are coming in to our minds… that’s where the trouble starts.
If you’re old enough to remember classic cartoons like I grew up watching from the 60’s through the 80’s, you might remember certain characters trying to make a decision. And there would be a little angel perched on one shoulder and a little devil on the other. One whispers, “Do the right thing,” while the other says, “Go ahead. You know you want to!” It was a funny cartoon image, but it captured something profoundly human. Our capacity to choose good and evil. There is a constant struggle that starts in the mind. Growing up evangelical, we often blamed that struggle on the devil. Some people still understand Satan as a very real spiritual being. Others see Satan more symbolically, as a way of naming the darker parts of human nature, our fear, selfishness, temptation and destructive thinking. But whether you understand this concept literally or figuratively, the struggle is still real. And so often, it begins in the mind.
And maybe that’s why the Christian life is so hard, because it’s counterintuitive to our human nature. We are wired for survival, self-protection and preservation and even negativity. We tend to notice what is wrong, fear there isn’t enough and look out for number 1. But the Gospel keeps inviting us into a different way of thinking… and its opposite to these carnal desires… It’s trust instead of fear, abundance instead of scarcity and love instead of self-protection. Maybe that’s what Paul means by being transformed through the renewing of our minds. So… how do we do this 180-degree about-face… and shift our minds? Before we get into that, I want to do a little experiment this morning. What would Vacation Bible School be without a little TV action?
I’m going to play you a video, ok? And your only job is to watch this video… and to count how many times the basketball goes back and forth between the people with the white shirts on. Now… I know online… you won’t be able to see the video… but I will explain after. Here we go…
So… how many of you were shocked to find out that a gorilla walked through the middle of the circle? Raise your hands. I remember my first time watching this video and I was dumbfounded that I had completely missed that a gorilla walked through the centre of this circle. And I saw this at a conference on a massive screen. This reminds me of that old saying, “Energy flows where attention goes”. You were told to focus on the white shirts… and most of us completely missed the gorilla.
And for those of you joining us online who can’t see the video, here are the Coles Notes: a group of people are passing basketballs back and forth, and you’re asked to count the passes made by the people wearing white. While you’re busy counting, someone dressed in a gorilla suit walks right through the middle of them, stops, beats their chest and walks off. And amazingly, most people never see the gorilla at all because they’re so focused on counting the passes.
This video was created by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris and it is called a selective attention test. Along with the video they wrote a book called The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us. And this is what they say, “We pay attention to what we are told to attend to, or what we’re looking for, or what we already know… what we see is amazingly limited.” — Daniel Simons
We think we see ourselves and the world as they really are, but we’re actually missing a whole lot. So… I’ll ask again… Where is your focus?
But I have some good news for you. How many of you know that if you stick with anything long enough… you can get really good at it? Raise your hands. You CAN actually think things on purpose. In Christianity, we call that meditation. We think things over and over on purpose. In psychology, one technique for doing this is sometimes called a pattern interrupt. And modern-day science tells us that when we begin to recognize our own patterns and interrupt them in the moment, we can actually change the way our brains respond. Instead of automatically following the same old behaviour, we create space to choose something different. And the more we do this… the stronger our new patterns can become. For many years, scientists believed that once we reached adulthood, the brain was basically finished developing and how our brains were wired was essentially permanent. But actually… over the last several decades… research has shown that the brain continues to change throughout our lives. It can adapt, reorganize and form new connections. It turns out, you can teach an old dog new tricks. Every time we repeat a thought, we strengthen certain connections in the brain. You might picture it like creating a path through a field or in the bush. The first time you walk through, the path is barely noticeable. But the more often you trample down the same route, the easier that path becomes. I see this often in music lessons with muscle memory.
Our thoughts can work the same way. The more we think about something, the more familiar that mental path becomes. We can train the brain. Eventually, we can begin travelling down it almost automatically. This morning, one of our readings brings us to another moment when shift happens. The Israelites had been enslaved in Egypt, and Moses had led them out and through the wilderness toward the Promised Land. But if you know that story, you know there was plenty of complaining along the way. “Why did you bring us out here? We had it better in Egypt… blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And after years of wandering, it would have been pretty easy to start doubting whether they were ever actually going to get there. But now we come to Joshua 1. Moses has died, Joshua is taking over and the people are finally standing on the edge of the Promised Land. Talk about a shift.
And what does God say to Joshua? “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged.” After everything they had been through, they were finally there. But they still had to find the courage to stop looking backward and move forward into what was next. I’ve heard it said once, “Look back… but don’t stare”.
And then we come to our other story this morning, the conversion of Saul. One that many of us have heard growing up in church. But Saul had some deeply ingrained patterns and ways of thinking. He didn’t just disagree with the followers of Jesus. He was convinced they were dangerous and were a threat to everything he stood for… he believed that stopping them was somehow doing God’s work. Acts tells us that Saul was “breathing threats and murder” against the followers of Jesus. He had watched as Stephen was killed, and now he was on his way to Damascus with authority to arrest more of them and drag them back to Jerusalem.
Saul had built a whole worldview around who was right, who was wrong, who belonged and who didn’t. And if we’re honest, we’re pretty good at doing that stuff too. We create categories. Sometimes preconceived. Us and them. Good people and bad people. Right people and wrong people. Conservative and liberal. Religious and irreligious. Straight and gay. Citizen and immigrant. Sometimes we become so certain of our own righteousness that we stop seeing the humanity of others standing in front of us. Saul was absolutely convinced that he could see clearly. And then, on the road to Damascus, God interrupted the pattern. Quite literally, Saul was knocked off the path he was travelling and forced to stop. Everything he thought he knew was suddenly called into question. And Saul, who thought he could see so clearly, became blind. Talk about a shift. Sometimes before we can see differently, we have to be willing to admit that maybe we haven’t been seeing clearly at all. Just like with the example of the basketball and the gorilla this morning.
One of the best ways to challenge wrong thoughts is to say something different out loud. Maybe it’s Scripture, maybe it’s a promise of God, maybe it’s simply reminding yourself of what is true. Because sometimes we have to interrupt the thought before the thought takes over. Thoughts are powerful. But here’s the good news… maybe what Paul means when he talks about being transformed by the renewing of our minds is simply catching ourselves in an old way of thinking and choosing not to keep going down that same road.
The Israelites had to stop looking backward. Saul definitely had to do it. And I think all of us have to do it from time to time. We have to ask ourselves… Is this thought helping me? Is it true? Is it loving? Is it leading me where I actually want to go? What am I focusing on? I remember wayyy back in driver’s ed… being taught that your car will go in the same direction as your eyes. If you look right… it will pull and veer to the right… or left. And that is very similar to our thoughts. We can’t always control what pops into our minds. But we can pay attention to what we keep giving our attention to and intentionally create the shift. And that’s where transformation starts. So, friends… to close… I want to encourage you to pay attention to what you’re thinking… especially the thoughts that are on repeat. Do they line up with God’s promises? What are the stories you are telling yourself? I want to leave you with this quote by Lao Tzu, “Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.” You CAN indeed build new thought paths… because … as they say… SHIFT HAPPENS. Amen.
