Introit: Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence - 124
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.
Today was the last day of Sunday School of the year! Our classes will start back up again January 8th.
Our Christmas Eve service is this Saturday at 8 PM. This service has all the best things about Christmas Eve: a lively reading of the Christmas story, our favorite Christmas hymns, communion, and of course, our candlelit congregational singing of "Silent Night." The service will be 30 minutes and is open to all ages. Bring your family, come in your pjs, and be ready to sing the joy of Christ's birth.
And then a week from today, on Christmas morning, we will have a lessons and carols service at 11 AM!
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 fourth and final Sunday of Advent.
After our opening prayer, our godly play class will light our candle of love.
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.
Candle Lighting: Godly Play
This morning, we gather around the candle of love.
God’s love is like an open door.
God love is a warm bed to fall into.
God’s love is a table with room for you.
God’s love is a crackling fireplace.
God’s love is the sun that streams through the windows.
God’s love is the roof over our heads and ground beneath our feet.
God’s love is a home for you and me, for neighbors and strangers, for family and friends, for enemies and partners.
God’s love is a home for all.
Today we light the candle of love to remind us of this truth.
May it burn brightly in this space and even brighter in our hearts.
Amen.
One Candle is Lit v 4
Call to Worship: People, Look East - 142
Litany of Faith
One: With all my heart I glorify the Lord! In the depths of who I am I rejoice in God my savior.
All: You have looked with favor on the lowliness of Your servant. The Mighty One has done great things for us.
One: You show mercy to everyone, from one generation to the next, to all who honor You.
All: You have shown strength with Your arm. You have scattered those with arrogant thoughts and proud inclinations.
One: You have pulled the powerful down from their thrones and lifted up the lowly.
All: You have filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty-handed.
(From Luke 1:46-53)
Pastoral Prayer
After Prayer: I Need Thee Every Hour - 578 v 1
Children’s Moment & Anthem - ACC Children’s Choir
Sermon: Seeking Sanctuary
Luke 1:39-55
39 In those days Mary set out and went with haste to a Judean town in the hill country, 40 where she entered the house of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth. 41 When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the child leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit 42 and exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb. 43 And why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me? 44 For as soon as I heard the sound of your greeting, the child in my womb leaped for joy. 45 And blessed is she who believed that there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her by the Lord.”
46 And Mary said,
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
47 and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior,
48 for God has looked with favor on the lowliness of God’s servant.
Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed;
49 for the Mighty One has done great things for me,
and holy is your name.
50 In every age,
your compassion flows to those who reverence you.
51 But all who seek to exalt themselves in arrogance
will be leveled by power.
52 You have deposed the mighty from their seats of power,
And have raised the lowly to high places.
53 Those who suffer hunger,
You have filled with good things.
Those who are privileged,
You have turned away empty-handed.
54 You have helped your servant Israel,
in fulfillment of the promise you made to our ancestors,
55 to Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, and to their descendants forever.”
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
If you had to rank your top 5 Girl Power anthems, what would they be?
Here’s mine:
1. Wannabe by Spice Girls, obviously.
2. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper, a classic.
3. Run the World by Her Royal Highness, Beyonce.
4. I’m Every Woman by Chaka Khan, because well, that really covers things.
5. How Far I’ll Go from Disney’s Moana because I am a mom in 2022, and Disney is really putting out some bops.
We don’t have the melody for the songs we read today, but we do have the lyrics. Elizabeth’s blessing for Mary, mother of God. And Mary’s Magnificat, a song that is so powerful it has been banned many times for its revolutionary lyrics.
During the British rule of India, the Magnificat was prohibited from being sung in church. In the 1980s, Guatemala’s government banned any public recitation of Mary’s words due to the way they incited the impoverished masses. In Argentina, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, whose children all disappeared during the Dirty War, placed the words of the Magnificat on posters throughout the capital plaza, and as a result, the military junta of Argentina outlawed any public display of the song.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, theologian and resistor of the Third Reich, who was eventually executed by the Nazis, wrote that “The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is at once the most passionate, the wildest, one might even say the most revolutionary Advent hymn ever sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary whom we sometimes see in paintings…This song has none of the sweet, nostalgic, or even playful tones of some of our Christmas carols, It is instead a hard, strong, inexorable song about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind.”
As Christians, we tend to soften and spiritualize messages like Mary’s. She doesn’t really mean turning away the rich empty-handed. She doesn’t mean literally deposing the mighty from power. That’s like a metaphor or something. She means something that takes place in our hearts.
But y’all, she means it. Mary, mother of God, she means it. And while Elizabeth doesn’t say anything too controversial in her song, the baby that leapt in her womb will say a lot of controversial things. We’ve already spent two Sundays listening to him rabble rouse.
Advent is often marketed to us as cozy vibes. Hallmark movies. Sentimentality. Heavenly peace. Cuddly baby Jesus. The Holy Family warm in their stable with farm animals singing lullabies.
But Advent is not really about that. We begin Advent every single year with the apocalypse. Just think about that. Get ready for baby Jesus by thinking about the end of the world. I personally love the drama of it. As someone with a lot of existential dread and nihilism walking side by side with my faith, I get to the first Sunday of Advent, and think, “Well, thank God we’re finally talking about it!!”
So we shouldn’t be surprised by Mary’s song or the magic that happens when these two pregnant women get together. We should definitely not underestimate them. If you want to be a lover of God, you gotta get with God’s friends. Or more specifically, his mom.
And now we are going to transition to a very exciting segment called Placenta. If me even uttering that word from the pulpit makes you squirmy, I get that. And I would apologize, but I’m not going to. If you are uncomfortable talking about the miracle of pregnancy, perhaps interrogate why that is. Disassociate for the next few minutes if you must.
But I will argue that one of the benefits to the church for having birthing people in the pulpit is that we can give firsthand accounts of the most miraculous event on the planet. We can speak to the arrival of God in the world that the other half of the population cannot. I gave birth during my second year of seminary, which means I delivered both a baby and the corresponding placenta while studying theology. I am woman, hear me roar. Mother Mary’s my girl.
So here’s some stuff you likely didn’t learn in health class.
When a person is pregnant, their uterus contains both the baby and the placenta. The placenta is an organ, and it becomes the life support system for the fetus, and it has a lot of important jobs: nourishing the fetus is number one priority. It is also responsible for swapping oxygen for carbon dioxide, eliminating waste, regulating the baby’s temperature, helping fight potential infections, and building immunity. But given its vital role, shockingly little is known about the placenta.
It is only recently that scientists realized that this organ that is both part mother, part fetus, has a microbiome of its own that affects the health of the child the fetus will become for the rest of its life. Did you get that? The placenta affects the health of a person for the rest of its life. We are all still living out the consequences of the time we spent with a placenta in our mother’s uterus.
The organ begins forming in the lining of the uterus as soon as a fertilized egg lands there, embedding itself deeply in the mother’s tissues and tapping into her arteries so aggressively that researchers liken it to cancer. Every minute, about 20 percent of the mother’s blood supply flows through the placenta. No wonder we’re so tired during pregnancy.
Trophoblasts are the generals of this placental invasion. They are a force to be reckoned with. They shove other cells out of the way and destroy them with digestive enzymes so that they can take over and start building the placenta.
Not only are they brute warriors, they’re also wicked smart. Trophoblasts do something that no other cell normally does: they start making molecules that identify themselves to the mother’s body as being a blood vessel cell rather than a placental cell. They do this so that the mother’s body does not reject the organ being formed.
The placenta does not technically belong to the mother. Our bodies create it, but it is part of the developing child, which means that 50 percent of the genetic material comes from the father—a foreign entity.
The organ, and the fetus, are both foreign to the mother’s body, yet her body tolerates them.
I mean think about that. For those of you who know about organ transplants, you’ll know that when an organ is transplanted into a human body, the patient must go through aggressive immune system suppression with drugs so that the new organ can be accepted, because our bodies’ natural response to a foreign organ is to reject it.
Yet the placenta tricks the mother’s cells into thinking it’s all her genetic material so that her body does not reject it. Scientists are now researching how the placenta works in order to better transplant other organs and prevent rejection.
This organ is the site of the first methods of communication between mother and baby. It’s the site of their first connection. And it’s also the site of their first conflict because it must negotiate how much of the nutrients to siphon off from the mother in order to give to the baby. And because the health of the placenta directly affects the development of the baby, it is a liminal space of past (mother and father), the present (the developing baby), and the future (the baby’s health outcomes throughout its life). It reaches back into the mother’s body while making future generations possible.
When Mary says, “from now on all generations will call me blessed,” she might as well have been singing, “I’m every woman. It’s all in me.”
It is not just that Jesus was named the Son of God that makes Jesus who he is. It is also because he is the Son of Mary.
On a cellular level, Mary and Jesus are communicating in this moment of the Magnificat.
Mary was a poor Jewish girl in Rome. When she thought about deposing the mighty in power, she meant literally. When she talked about the hungry being fed and the privileged sent away empty-handed, she meant literally. And so did Jesus.
These are not songs to make polite people, compliant children, dutiful citizens. They are radicalizing anthems for an oppressed people. They have been banned by authoritarian governments, for God’s sake.
We might feel like we don’t have to take it seriously because it’s a young woman saying it or it’s a pregnant lady saying it, or it’s just a proud mama bragging on her baby. But we would do well to remember the words of Mary when she says, “all who seek to exalt themselves in arrogance will be leveled by power.” In other words, be humble, because the overturning of the world is coming for us all.
Like the placenta, Mary’s prophetic word is like a chameleon. Her growing belly tricks us into thinking Jesus is exactly like us. Jesus is of our genetic material. His ways are our ways. He will go about things the way we expect him to.
But do not be deceived—it’s a trick. Because his ways are very different. How we encounter Jesus is the site of connection, between us and God. And it is also the site of conflict. It is where our fears and insecurities and greed rub up against the Holy One’s desire for the world.
The reign of God means systems gets turned upside down. Literally. A leveling. Mary and Elizabeth will deliver their babies and return to their lives forever changed, and the world will be forever changed because of their bodies. In the words of the prophet Beyonce, “strong enough to bear the children and then get back to business.”
So what do we do with their songs? If they’re not mere sentimentality, if we’re supposed to take them literally, what are we supposed to do? We, a mostly white, middle-class Western congregation in North Texas?
Perhaps we can start with the things in our collectives lives that we tend to discount. Consider that God’s arrival came with morning sickness. The incarnation of the Most Holy One likely brought on varicose veins. But hidden in this uncomfortable experience, in a growing belly and the waddle of a tiny woman, was the Divine.
So we must ask ourselves
Where do we disqualify sites of the Divine? Where do we just assume that God is not working because it’s not how we’ve seen it before?
At what manifestations of community and justice do we roll our eyes?
Where do we sigh in exasperation at the young, the different, and the skeptics and say, “When will you get in line?”
Where are we missing God by dismissing others for their age, their class, the way they inhabit their body?
Some of you in this room have been walking with God for a long time. You’ve seen a lot. You may think you know a lot. And you probably do. But let this be a reminder that there is so much you don’t know. There is so much that you cannot know on your own and must learn from others unlike you. Younger than you. Different than you. Wilier than you. With values and goals that diverge from yours.
It’s never too late to become like a little baby again. It’s never too late to let ourselves be nourished and formed by a force so formidable and so clever, yet so tender as to give itself up when it is time for us to be born.
Because here’s one more thing about placenta. It gives itself over to death when it has finished its job. The placenta does not survive outside the womb, apart from the baby and the mother. It serves a purpose, a worthy, inimitable purpose, and then it gives itself over to the natural process of life and death.
As we come to the end of Advent and prepare to welcome baby Jesus, the incarnation of God’s Own Self into the world, we are called to consider not just the beginning, but also the end. Our beginning, and our end.
The beginning of Advent tells us to pay attention. To keep watch. To stay alert. Don’t let the lullabies of Christmas lull you into thinking all is well.
Because the end of Advent tells us that Mary means business. The powers she is talking about will try to kill her baby and will one day succeed.
So that in the story of Advent, death and birth are companions.
When Christ is born, what must die?
When Christ is born, what powers must be deposed?
When Christ is born, what privilege must be sent away empty?
When Christ is born, to whom we will give our attention?
Because the answers to these questions will determine our lives.
Amen.
After Sermon: May You Find a Light - Insert
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.
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 Mary’s song and Elizabeth’s faith,
And the lives of their babies,
Give us courage to embrace the world you are making.
Help us recognize the unlikely places you appear,
In those we are often quick to dismiss,
Ignore, forget, or turn away.
Amen.
Benediction: O Day of Peace - Insert
Doxology