Introit: O Come, O Come, Emmanuel - 119
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.
Our annual congregational meeting is next Sunday, December 4th, immediately following service. Please make every effort to attend.
Following the congregational meeting, the DWM Christmas Party will take place in the Fellowship Hall from 1-3 PM.
If you didn’t last week, be sure to pick up your Advent materials to take home that coincide with our Advent worship series, Close to Home. There is an Advent calendar, a daily devotional replete with poetry, hymns, art work, and devotional material. And there are coloring pages for grown-up that go with the artwork you see displayed on the chancel.
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.
Today is the first Sunday of Advent, which means we turn the page on another year in our church calendar. So first, happy New Year, church!
If you’re new to Advent at Azle Christian Church, you’ll find our Advent services to be robust—we have a few extra pieces to our liturgy each week include candle lighting and poetry. This week, you will be invited up to take communion by intinction (don’t worry—they are individuals cups so no spreading of germs) and to receive an ornament to place on our tree in the back as our final step in preparing the sanctuary for Advent. We will remind you of this at the time of communion, but if you are not able to come up for communion, please stay in your seat and a deacon will serve you. We will begin our service with prayer like we always do, no matter what season we’re in.
After our opening prayer, the Seekers’ Class will light our candle of hope.
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: When God Is a Child - 132
Candle Lighting: Seekers Class
We light the candle of hope because hope keeps our hearts alive as we wait.
We hope for a world where all are fed.
We hope for a world with more bridges than walls.
We hope for a world with wide open doors.
We hope for a world with contagious laughter.
We hope for a world where trees grow tall and rivers run clean.
We hope for a world where all people feel at home—in their bodies, in the church, in their physical homes.
We hope for that world.
We long for that world.
We are homesick for that world.
May this light be a reminder that the wait is always worth it.
May we carry this light of hope with us for this Advent season and always.
Amen.
Verse 1 of One Candle is Lit - 128
Litany of Faith
One: How can we thank God enough for you, for all the joy we feel before God on your account?
All: We earnestly pray night and day to be able to see you again.
One: May our loving Abba God and Jesus, our Savior, direct our steps back to you.
All: May Christ increase to overflowing our love for one another and for all people.
One: May Christ strengthen our hearts, making them blameless and holy before our Abba God.
All: May our hearts be strengthened, blameless, and holy for the coming of our Savior Jesus.
(From 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Join me in prayer.
Gracious God,
We find ourselves with two options every day—
To stay homesick for the world you had in mind, or to allow cynicism to win.
Do we hope against hope, or throw in the towel?
Do we insist on a better world, or do we assume it’s impossible?
Forgive us for the days when cynicism wins.
Forgive us for numbing our homesick hurt instead of using it to fuel a better world.
Kindle us in hope that won’t let go.
God of the weary and waiting.
Scripture tells us that where two or more are gathered, you are there.
So we trust that you are here—listening to these words, drawing us close, stirring hope awake in us.
Today, Holy God, we feel close to home, close to you, when
We enter this space and someone knows our name.
When the congregation sings.
When the candles are lit.
When we hold the bread and cup in our hands.
When we bow our heads in collective prayer.
We feel close to home when our children are curious,
When we find moments of true connection,
When we are brave enough to be who you call us to be.
However, God, even with gratitude for our close-to-home moments, we also recognize that buried deep within us we have homesick hearts.
We are homesick for a world we have not seen.
We are homesick for a world where oceans are clean, trees are green, and animals are not endangered.
We are homesick for a world where all of your beloveds no matter race, ethnicity, sexuality, or gender, are safe and loved.
We are homesick for a life where days feel expansive and Sabbath feels possible.
We are homesick for days where mental health is not stigmatized, time is not a commodity, and self-worth is not a scarcity.
God who never leaves us alone, we are carrying both hope and homesickness all at the same time. Hold these two sides of the same coin tenderly, and fan the flame of both For we realize hope is a gift and homesickness is a reminder.
We ask it in the name of the one for which we wait, Jesus, who gave us this prayer…
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.
Love Divine, All Loves Excelling - 517 v 1
Children’s Moment - Emerson Braun
Come, O Long-expected Jesus - Pete Tamez
Sermon: Homesick
Luke 21:25-36
“There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see ‘the Son of Man coming in a cloud’ with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”
Then he told them a parable: “Look at the fig tree and all the trees; as soon as they sprout leaves you can see for yourselves and know that summer is already near. So also, when you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near. Truly I tell you, this generation will not pass away until all things have taken place. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away.
“Be on guard so that your hearts are not weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and the worries of this life, and that day does not catch you unexpectedly, like a trap. For it will come upon all who live on the face of the whole earth. Be alert at all times, praying that you may have the strength to escape all these things that will take place, and to stand before the Son of Man.”
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
We begin a new series today for Advent, that will carry us through to Epiphany, called Close to Home.
When something hits close to home, it affects us deeply. During the Advent and Christmas season, we will journey through scriptures and rituals that are tender and familiar. We will carry the memories and truths of Advents past close to our hearts.
Our time together over the next few weeks will acknowledge the “already but not yet” tension of our faith: Emmanuel is with us, and yet, God’s promised day–our everlasting home–is not fully realized. As we rehearse the welcome of Jesus into the world, we feel the groans of creation, laboring for deliverance.
I wonder how you feel the groans of creation right now. Perhaps you feel it in strained relationships with loved ones. Maybe you feel the pinch in your pocketbook as inflation takes hold of our grocery and energy bills. Or maybe it’s a quiet desperation of dreams unfulfilled, of a disappointing inventory of your life, or of a loneliness that has grown bigger and deeper through the years.
This week I felt it in the helplessness of hearing my daughter cough persistently in one ear and in the other ear, the doctor’s office saying, “I’m sorry, we don’t have any appointments today in any of our facilities. We are overwhelmed with RSV, flu, and COVID patients.”
And it is in this desperation, whether it’s an acute pain or a gnawing sense of disquiet, that we come to this season of Advent.
Though Advent is a beginning, it always starts at the end. Each year, we begin the new church year talking about the end of the world. And we always begin the retelling of Jesus’ birth story with his teaching before he was crucified.
I don’t know about you, but when I get to this first Sunday of Advent, I’m so sure I’m ready for baby Jesus. The hubris is amazing, really. I just know that some cooing of a cuddly God baby will take the edge off and help me find peace, or at the very least, some relief.
But there is great wisdom in how Advent is structured. The origins of Advent date back to the 5th century, but no one knows who came up with it. It just started appearing in historical accounts in the 400s. It looked a lot different back then than it does now, having evolved over the millennia to find its stride in the church calendar.
There used to be a strict fast a la Lent, which thankfully they did away with by the 13th century. And then the spirit of Advent changed from a Lenten-like Christmas to a season of hope in the 1960s.
I don’t know, there’s something about the fact that Advent has been honed over the centuries to become what it is now that is comforting to me. Like this spirit of expectation and hope is not some steady piece of knowledge that we just have to learn how to tap in to like all of the other Christians in history to achieve enlightenment or nirvana.
But rather, hope seems to be always adapting for our circumstances, for our changing world—watching the tides of time and listening for the groans of creation here and now, every day.
Like if it’s taken thousands of Christians over a thousand years to shape Advent, perhaps I don’t have to beat myself up so much when I find it hard to hope or expect God to show up.
Maybe that’s why Advent always starts at the end. It shows us where we’re going. To the return of Christ, to the world turned upside down to turn all things right, to the day where God gets everything God wants.
In this wild text from Luke, we get validation that the world is unwell, that the anguish and desperation we feel is not all in our heads.
Essentially, the first Sunday of Advent confirms our suspicions that something’s not right.
We’ll get to sweet baby Jesus soon enough, but for now, we need apocalyptic Jesus. We need to hear him out before we move on to the farm animals and swaddling clothes.
So, let’s locate ourselves, shall we?
We are at the final straw in the testimony of Luke about Jesus. Jesus has been talking about some really controversial things with his disciples in others’ earshot. The Very Religious People, the VRPs we’ll call them, tend to be the subject of his ire: those that would confuse loyalties to God and loyalties to state, those for whom religious details are more important than caring for the poor and vulnerable, those who would maintain the status quo at any cost, those who would oppress in the name of God.
Now we want to be careful when talking about run-ins with the VRPs in the gospels. The VRPs for Jesus happen to be Jewish. We should be very careful not to apply Jesus’ criticisms to all Jewish people, or all Jewish people from that time.
Anti-semitism is never okay, generalizations about other religions is never okay, and only listening to critics of those religions is never okay. Jesus was Jewish when he was born, and he was Jewish when he died. I repeat, Jesus was not a Christian. The first people of the church were not considered Christians until later. They thought of themselves as an off-shoot of Judaism.
I say this explicitly because the gospels have been used as weapons against Jewish people now and Jewish people then. Martin Luther, our Protestant Church founder, read the New Testament in the 1500s and mistakenly equated the criticisms in the gospels with the legalism and exploitation he saw in the medieval Catholic Church, which has contributed to a lot of anti-semitic and anti-Jewish sentiment over the centuries.
The issues of the Medieval church are not the same as the issues Jesus is talking about here. Let the reader understand. It is irresponsible for us as readers to conflate the two.
So how do we read Jesus’ criticisms of the Very Religious People? What we take away as 21st century readers of the gospels? For today, we can see that criticism Jesus has for the VRPs in his world can be transposed in a way onto our Western Christian context.
Very Religious Christians, the VRCs, have also been known to confuse loyalties to God and loyalties to state. They have been known to care more about religious details than caring for the poor and vulnerable. They typically maintain the status quo at any cost. They oppress in the name of God.
I’m sure we don’t know anyone like that. I’m sure we have never been someone like that.
But I go to great lengths to draw a distinction between Jewish people and the VRPs Jesus is addressing because as Christians, we would do well to remember that we come to over half of our scripture very late compared to our Jewish siblings. Over half our Bible is borrowed.
And we can only understand Jesus by having profound respect and humility toward our Jewish siblings and their practice of faith, including evaluating our own assumptions about who Jesus is talking to and what he’s talking about. There are VRPs in a lot of faiths, especially ones that proclaim to know something about the beginning of the world and the end of it.
And so we arrive at the end, according to Jesus. There will be signs, he says. Pay attention to them. Keep watch. Stay awake. The whole cosmic order will tremble: terrors on land and sea as foretold by the prophets, whom Jesus points out earlier, were ignored or killed for saying stuff like this. Of course we know he will meet a similar fate.
But Jesus is not telling his disciples about the end in order to call them to arms or prepare a bunker. He’s not giving them a 3-step prayer to heaven to escape from the world on fire.
His instruction is to watch. To pay attention. To bear witness.
Do you see the signs of the moon? He asks.
Do you see the roaring of the waves?
Do you see the fig tree sprouting in late summer?
Now do you see what I’m talking about, he asks? It’s okay if you’re still scratching your head.
This text is apocalyptic—my favorite genre of scripture because it is so arresting. It grabs your face with two hands and yells, “Wake up!”
And the word apocalypse is interesting. The popular meaning of the word is a cataclysmic event or a belief in the imminent end of the present world. But that’s not its original meaning.
Actually, the word apocalypse means “revelation.”
When apocalyptic imagery shows up in scripture, the kind that shifts the ground beneath us and shakes the heavens, we are called to see what is being uncovered. What is being revealed? What is it that we’re supposed to see?
What do you see?
Grown-up, apocalyptic Jesus is speaking to a world in turmoil, suffering from disasters both natural and human-made. He’s speaking to the realities and injustices of a chaotic world. And in our Advent timeline, he is preparing to enter into this world, offering not words of foreboding, but words of hope to a homesick people. To a people who feel far from God, who long to be close to kin in the middle of a crisis.
He says, “When you see these things, when you feel the chaos, when you feel the ache, when your desperation overwhelms you, stand up. Raise your heads. Because your redemption is near. When you see these things taking place, you know that the kingdom of God is near.”
There’s a theologian named Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, who coined the word, “kin-dom” rather than kingdom. She sees the people of God not as subjects in a royal hierarchy, but as family, as partners. She describes kin-dom as the “interconnected community, seeing God’s movement emerge from la familia, the family God makes.”
In the kin-dom of God, the liberation is coming here and now. It’s not a far-off promise of another world that we only get to by suffering in this one. It’s not an afterlife promise, except, for us today, it kind of is.
Because in many ways, we are already living in the afterlife. We talk of the before-times, our shorthand for life before the pandemic, good or bad.
And we are living in the after-times, so that the life we are in now, is a sort of afterlife.
And if that is so, perhaps we can ask ourselves some apocalypse questions:
What has been revealed? About our world? Our society? The Big-C Church? This church? Our own hearts?
What little apocalypses have we borne witness to?
Maybe that’s why we need the first Sunday of Advent. To let the waves wash over us, to let the darkness roll us up like a little baby, to let the shaking jostle us into attention. Because Advent is about waiting, sure. But this year, it’s about bearing witness.
And this text from Luke begins our Advent journey by reminding us that the cosmic order is disrupted by the coming of Jesus.
This is not a man who taught us to be nicer people and raise obedient children. Silent night, meek and mild, heavenly peace—those are not the messages for today.
No, the message for today is that a chain of transformative events was launched at the announcement of the coming of God-incarnate, and its strangeness and peculiarity, can only be proclaimed with frightening apocalyptic imagery.
The mountains crash into the sea, the valleys rise up in the rumbling of the spheres, the sun and moon will send signs. I don’t know how to make this any clearer, Jesus seems to be saying.
Everything—everything—will be different. Don’t you see?
The ground is shifting under your feet. Do you feel it? Pay attention to it.
Because perhaps, in our homesick hearts, in the groans of creation, in our sense that all is unwell, this is the word of good news we need today.
Everything—everything—will be different. The entire landscape will change. The atmosphere will change. Don’t hide your eyes. Don’t pretend it’s not happening or that you know how it ends. Look and see the coming of the Lord.
Amen.
Song: Open Wide Your Heavens!
http://www.carolynshymns.com/open_wide_your_heavens.html
Sharing Our Resources
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. Don’t forget to drop your notification survey in the plate.
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….
May we carry this truth us as we return to our homes:
The earth might fade, but God’s love will last.
Our memories might blur, but God’s promises will be fulfilled.
The grass will wither, but God’s mercy will endure.
The sky could go dark, but God’s presence will remain.
So as we return home, may we hold onto the hope that is eternal.
May we hold onto the Holy One who holds on to us.
Amen.
Song: O Day of Peace
https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/joshgarrels/odayofpeace.html
Doxology