This Sunday we will celebrate Thanksgiving, Neighbors in Need Sunday, Reign of Christ Sunday and the Last Sunday after Pentecost which means the end of the church year.  It’s  a big day!  Next Sunday Advent and the new church year begin.  This week we will reflect on all the wonderful gifts of the past year in our lives and in the church (including this Saturday’s 60th Annual Wild Game Supper), and also consider the promises in scripture of far greater things to come.  We will look ahead up the path of this congregation’s aspirations, and celebrate the vision we have formed together.  The sermon title will be, “And All These Things Will Be Given to You As Well.”

The service will celebrate all this with a greatest hits of scriptures and music.  We will read two favorite passages, Psalm 95 and a section of the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:25-33, and we will sing three beloved Thanksgiving hymns, Come, Ye Thankful People Come, and We Plow the Fields and Scatter, and We Gather Together.   The choir will sing the beautiful hymn, Savior of the Nations, Come, as the Introit and the traditional Netherlands folk song, Prayer of Thanksgiving as the anthem.  Organist John Atwood will play as the prelude J. S. Bach’s Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland BWV 661, one of the Great Eighteen Chorale Preludes, a master work of the great master of church music.   It is based on the hymn the choir will sing as the Introit.  For the offertory John will play a piece based on the same hymn composed by Bach’s cousin, J. G. Walther.  The postlude will be a “Fugue in C Major” by yet another of the baroque greats, Johann Pachelbel.