Introit: Seek Ye First - 354
Call to Worship
Good morning! I’m Pastor Ashley. To those here in the sanctuary and those joining us online: we are so glad you’re here!
This morning, we will sing songs of worship, pray together, hear from scripture and one another, as we move toward the pinnacle of our service: the table of our Lord, where we will take the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of our most Gracious Host, Jesus. The purpose of our time together each Sunday is to bring our hearts closer to the heart of God, so I invite you to participate in as much or as little in our prepared liturgy as your spirit is willing.
We welcome all sounds and smells from the youngest to the oldest among us. The Kids Corner is in the back for anyone who needs to move around and play to worship God this morning. There is also a nursery available. We know that the energy and spirit of children can be different than adults and we consider that a gift.
There are information cards in the pew in front of you—if you are a guest, or if you have moved and have not updated your info with the church, please fill it out and drop it in the offering plate when it goes by later in worship.
For those watching online or for those who would like to follow along, our liturgy for every service is posted on our website before the service begins.
We invite you to Sunday School at 10 AM every week. There’s classes that meet in the Seekers room and the Parlor. There is also a combined children and youth class that meets in the MUB. Godly Play meets behind the sanctuary for our younger elementary students.
Tonight is Trunk or Treat on Sunday, October 30 at 5 PM. If you’re interested in helping, please see Becky or Nancy.
We will also have our annual All Saints service this Tuesday, November 1, at 7 pm in the Heritage Building. It will not be live-streamed.
And putting this on your radar now: on November 6, we will have a Blessing of the Animals and Stuffed Animals. We will have a pancake breakfast service in the parking lot at 11 AM where you are invited to bring your pets for a blessing. It will be a very abbreviated service, so there will be no need for you to sit through long service wrangling your animals. If you animal does not play or pray well with others, or if they’re too big to transport, I invite you to bring a picture of them for the blessing. Children are invited to bring their favorite stuffed animal for a blessing. All creatures of our God and King are welcome.
Mark your calendars for November 13 for our final Bible and Beer of the year. We’ll meet at 5 PM at John and Sondra Williams’ house. You bring snacks to share, and the Piercys will bring home-brewed beer for us to sip on while we study a scripture together.
You can find all this information in your weekly eblast, on Facebook, in the insert in your bulletin, and on our calendar on our website.
If you serve in any capacity on Sunday, I want to draw your attention to the various places the serving calendar for the month is posted: inside the tech booth, on the bulletin board right outside the sanctuary, and in the work room in the office.
EMILY HARDEN INTERLUDE
We begin our stewardship series today called, A Future with Hope! Covenant Sunday is November 13. You should have received your covenant cards and letters in the mail this week and will be able to hand them on November 13 or online as we’ve done in the past few years.
Let’s pray to turn our hearts toward God for this hour.
Spirit of truth, open to us the scriptures, speaking your holy word through song, through the bread and cup, and through offering ourselves, and meet us here today in the living Christ. Amen.
Call to Worship: For the Beauty of the Earth - 56
Litany of Faith
One: Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, and whose sin is put away!
All: While I held my tongue, my bones withered away, because of my groaning all day long.
One: For your hand was heavy upon me day and night; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.
All: Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and did not conceal my guilt. You forgave me the guilt of my sin.
One: Therefore all the faithful will make their prayers to you in time of trouble.
All: You are my hiding place; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with shouts of deliverance.
(From Psalm 32)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Join me in prayer.
Holy One of old, the one who was here before the earth was formed, and the one who will remain long after we’re gone, we wonder about You. You are a scatterer, it seems. Your people have known exile, whole lives apart from their loved ones, their home, their place of worship. You seem to lead Your people into deserts, tracing patterns in the wilderness like You trace our names on the palm of Your hand. Often, this scattering seems harsh and cold. We reach out our hands for You, for one another, and grasp at air.
But Scattering God, I supposed just as You drive us out of our homes, You also seem to welcome us into yours. You scatter seed on all types of ground, unconcerned whether the rocks or the thorns will be hospitable to Your gift. The point, I suppose, is not our version of hospitality, but Yours. Just as You scatter, You gather. Perhaps we are the good soil, perhaps we are the thorns. But keep scattering, God. Keep gathering. May we receive Your gift and may we be found waiting, ready, and faithful, when You come to gather Your people.
We pray this in the name of our brother and redeemer Jesus, who taught us to pray….
Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be Thy name
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors
And lead us not into temptation
But deliver us from evil
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen.
After Prayer: You Are My All in All - Insert
Anthem: God’s Love is Like the Sunshine - ACC Children’s Choir
Sermon
Jeremiah 29:1-14
These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent from Jerusalem to the remaining elders among the exiles and to the priests, the prophets, and all the people whom Nebuchadnezzar had taken into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon. 2 This was after King Jeconiah and the queen mother, the court officials, the leaders of Judah and Jerusalem, the artisans, and the smiths had departed from Jerusalem. 3 The letter was sent by the hand of Elasah son of Shaphan and Gemariah son of Hilkiah, whom King Zedekiah of Judah sent to Babylon to King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. It said: 4 Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: 5 Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. 6 Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. 7 But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. 8 For thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and the diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to your dreams that you dream, 9 for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the Lord.
10 For thus says the Lord: Only when Babylon’s seventy years are completed will I visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place. 11 For surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope. 12 Then when you call upon me and come and pray to me, I will hear you. 13 When you search for me, you will find me; if you seek me with all your heart, 14 I will let you find me, says the Lord, and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back to the place from which I sent you into exile.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
It’s time for another round of “Is This Is in the Bible?”
You’ll remember the rules of the game are simple: I will read an axiom, and you will give me a thumbs up if you think it’s in the Bible and a thumbs down if you think it’s not in the Bible. Now, the question is “is this exact phrase in the Bible?”—not can we find some semblance or root of it in scripture. Are we ready?
Alright, our first axiom is:
Everything happens for a reason.
—Not in the Bible!
Next up: God won’t give you more than you can handle.
—I think Job would beg to differ. Not in the Bible.
Alright, how about this one: I can do all things through Christ.
—Yes, congratulations to everyone who was paying attention in our Philippians worship series. I know who you are now.
Okay, next axiom: Do what you love and money will follow.
—Proverbs comes very close to saying something of the sort, but alas it’s not in the Bible.
Alright, let’s keep going: Every good and perfect gift is from above.
—That’s in the Bible! In the little epistle from James.
God works in mysterious ways.
—That’s not the Bible, it’s Bono! Actually it’s from a 19th century hymn written by William Cowper that Bono decided was a hit.
As iron sharpens another, one man sharpens another.
—Yep, that’s in Proverbs!
God helps those who help themselves.
—Definitely not in the Bible. Jesus helped a lot of people who couldn’t help themselves.
Guard your heart for it is the wellspring of life.
—Survey says: It’s in the Bible! Another bop from Proverbs!
Okay, how’d we do?
Today, our text has a verse that is often found on needlepoint pillows, graduation gifts, inspirational plaques, greeting cards, and at the bottom of email signatures. Most of us know Jeremiah 29:11 from the NIV translation: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.’”
Unlike some of the axioms we just reviewed, this verse is actually in the Bible—it’s just that it is gratuitously applied to contexts that it probably shouldn’t be.
Let me explain.
The prophet Jeremiah lived in a chaotic world. It was a time of political and social upheaval. The glory days of Israel’s kings were over, and the big bad Babylonians had come knocking on Jerusalem’s doors.
Not only did Babylon come to capture Jerusalem, they destroyed the Temple—the place of worship and community and meaning-making to the Hebrew people. And most of the Israelites were carried off into exile to Babylon—living as captives in a foreign land.
And Jeremiah tried to warn them. He was unflinchingly honest. Babylon was coming. You need to prepare yourselves.
You would think the Israelites would appreciate the prophet Jeremiah giving them a heads up for what was coming, but surprisingly, people don’t like to hear bad news. They didn’t want to hear that destruction was coming. They didn’t want to hear about how they had wronged the vulnerable among them. They didn’t want to hear about how life was irrevocably changing. They plugged their ears and said, “No, thank you. Unsubscribe.”
That doesn’t sound familiar at all, right?
But Jeremiah wasn’t the only prophet in town. There were others, who had easier messages to stomach. They proclaimed peace over Jerusalem, even though there was clearly no peace.
And in the chapter directly before ours, there was a prophet, Hananiah, who told the Israelites not to worry—the exile would be short. It would just be a blip on their timeline. Things would resume as normal in no time. But of course, we know that’s not what happened. And Jeremiah knew Hananiah was wrong.
Those who were supposed to be leading—the priests, the kings, the government officials—they had not shown true leadership but had instead served their own interests.
And to be honest, the average citizen wasn’t a whole lot better. Instead of giving their hearts and lives to the strange, set-apart ways of God, they had lived and died by the gods of Baal and Molech.
It might be easy to write off Baal and Molech as ancient gods that a primitive people worshiped long ago and are irrelevant to our experiences today.
But Baal was the god of life and fertility, and he was always locked in combat with the god of death and sterility, which may seem like a god we might root for. Except that Baal was not the god of life in the sense of human flourishing, but rather he was the god of exceeding our mortal limits, living in defiance of the truest thing we can know—that we die.
Baal, in big shiny letters and catchy jingles and Instagram ads and face serums and eternal productivity, proclaims that we are infinite and limitless, and that our goal is to strive for more and more, to keep growing and achieving progress forever and ever amen.
And Molech! Well, he was the god of war and child sacrifice. This seems like an easy god to refute. But the lust for power and the habit of conquest, and the willingness to give up our most beloved, our most vulnerable to the cause of plowing forward and gaining control are not that far from our Western world’s mindset.
Baal and Molech are alive and well today; they just live under aliases.
PAUSE
You know, I don’t fault people for taking this Jeremiah 29:11 verse out of context so much because in a world of suffering, it can be comforting to think that God is out there somewhere with a master plan. That God is waiting until the right moment to pull all the strings together, orchestrating events for our personal good from a personal plan for each of our lives.
But what we see in the context of Jeremiah is that the future is less like a plan and more like a partnership. There is a pragmatic dimension to the direction God gives to the people through Jeremiah. Those who live in Babylon can find their possibilities for life only if Babylon is a viable place to live. So seeking the welfare and peace of Babylon is not a truly altruistic endeavor. It’s a savvy move. They are helping to make the place they live a good place to live.
In the same way, true shalom is shaped by humans acting in faith that God will meet them there—right where they are. Their future deliverance is shaped by humans acting in faith that God will meet them there—right where they will be.
So for us, perhaps how we move forward from such a devastating past few years, is we bloom where we’re planted, which is a phrase not found in the Bible if you’re keeping score.
But perhaps our move right now is to invest in the moment that we are in, at this very moment. We can’t invest in the past, in what was lost, in what was destroyed through the flood, through COVID, through the death of beloveds in our community, through everything that has transpired since the world shut down—that moment has passed. It is no longer in our possession.
But we can seek the welfare of this moment, trusting that we are planting the seeds for what may grow a whole generation after us. This idea of 70 years in our text today is a unit of time that meant a lifetime. A whole lifetime will pass, according to Jeremiah. It’s his way of saying, “Take the long view of time. This is not a blip in your timeline. It is much weightier than that.”
There’s a sociologist, Elise Boulding, who writes of the “200 year present.” She says to think of time as the “long now.” The 200-year present, she says, began 100 years ago with the year of birth of the people who reach their hundredth birthday today. The other boundary is 100 years from now, on the hundredth birthday of the babies born today.
She says you can also think of it this way: think of the oldest person you knew as a young child. For me, that was my great-grandma, Jessie Lee Greer McDonald. Their birth is the first boundary. And then think of the last baby you will hold in your lifetime. Hopefully that hasn’t happened for any of us yet. Their death is the second boundary.
When we think of time like that, we realize how long change takes. We often think of ourselves as living either at the beginning or the end of an era. But this 200-year-present places us right in the middle of an era. This 200-year-present is the space in which we should be thinking, planning, making judgments, evaluating, hoping, and dreaming.
Within the range of 200 years, empires rise and fall, courageous leaders rise up, inventors improve the lives of millions, what seemed liked utter despair can turn into something more like hope.
That hope may feel slow in coming, and the story will need to be told and passed down in the span of a 200-year-present, or in the 70-year lifetime that Jeremiah describes. But it will come.
One day…following this faithfulness in a place we would not have chosen for ourselves, God will keep that promise. Jeremiah trusted that.
Though he had been beaten up and ostracized and imprisoned and eventually carried off to Babylon himself, he was a prophet of the God of Israel. The God who had led them out of Egypt, provided for them in the wilderness, and led them to the place of milk and honey. A God who made a way out of no way, a people out of no people.
That trust traveled with the Israelites as they left their city and were taken into captivity. They did a lot of soul-searching in Babylon. They wrote the first five books of the Bible, cataloging the ways God had instructed them to love their neighbors, to be a covenant community whose life ethic is for the good of the other, of the many. They held on to their religious identity for dear life, yet transforming it for a different world, hoping to be better stewards of the gift God had given them.
Their heartbreak and grief led them to reexamine their identity and their story. They were utterly changed. Scarred, for sure. But they also understood that though they wished for the time of the Temple, who they were and how God was faithful to them was not trapped in the past. God was working with them in the present for the future.
During this stewardship season, we are considering how to invest in this community, in Azle Christian Church as it is. Some of you have a whole catalog of memories of this place, etched into your hearts and bodies. And some of you have just gotten here, with your strongest memories being online church, or the Heritage building, or courtyard worship.
We are asking what it means for all of us to come together to be shaped by what has happened—all the heartbreak and grief, all the innovation and joy, all the ordinary and spectacular—and move forward in hope. To invest in a future with hope. To trust in a God who makes a way out of no way, who creates newness again and again, who defies the categories of what is possible with daily desert manna and absurd prophetic hope and a baby Messiah.
When we invest in the community where we are, as it is, we are planting seeds of hope, we are cultivating a place where people can flourish and belong. And not in a naive way that forgets what has happened or attempts to bypass the reckoning that follows suffering, but by rooting down, watering what grows, and nurturing every little bloom, even when it blooms in unexpected places.
As we find ourselves returning, may we also seek to build a community of return, a community of hope. One that lives as the promises of God are true, and in doing so, making them true. Amen.
After Sermon: I Have this Hope - Insert
Sharing Our Resources: Chris Piercy
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church. You can give online on our website, on Venmo, or in the offering plate as the deacons come by during our final song.
Invitation
If you’d like to become a member of this faith community, or if you’d like to become a disciple of Jesus, please talk with me after service or sometime this week.
Benediction:
Please rise in body or spirit for our benediction, the final song, and the Doxology.
Receive this blessing….
The time for sending is here, for separation, for dispersal, for exile.
It will not last forever; to return is our destiny.
We will be together again, and the question then ill be:
What did you do with your time when we were apart?
May the God who is the home of the exile,
Jesus, who was and is an exile himself,
And the Spirit, who goes with us as we love and serve,
Be with you until we meet again.
Amen.
Benediction: Because He Lives - 562 v 1
Doxology