Welcome/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 reality 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.
Thank you to everyone who has already brought plants for Ordinary Time. If you haven’t yet, and you’d like to, we are inviting people to donate a plant to the church to decorate our chancel for Ordinary Time as well as populate our Narthex with plants. If you remember, we lost most of our church plants during the Great Flood of February 2021, so we’re collecting plants in the month of June!
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.
To keep up with all the life we live together here at Azle Christian Church, make sure you follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Subscribe to our weekly e-blast and monthly newsletter on our website.
We continue our new worship series today: Dear Church: A Study of Philippians. Today, we learn an old, old hymn together.
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.
Litany of Faith
One: I will exalt you, O LORD, because you have lifted me up and have not let my enemies triumph over me.
All: O LORD my God, I cried out to you, and you restored me to health.
One: You brought me up, O LORD, from the dead; you restored my life as I was going down to the grave.
All: Sing to the LORD, you faithful servants; give thanks for the remembrance of God’s holiness.
One: For God’s wrath lasts but the twinkling of an eye,
All: God’s favor endures for a lifetime.
(Psalm 30:1-5)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Since it is the first Sunday of the month, we will sing the Lord’s Prayer at the end of our prayer. It’s #310 in your Chalice Hymnal and will also be on the screen.
Join me in prayer.
(From Common Prayer)
Lord of Creation,
Create in us a new rhythm of life
Composed of hours that sustain rather than stress,
Of days that deliver rather than destroy,
Of time that tickles rather than tackles.
Lord of Liberation,
By the rhythm of your truth, set us free
From the bondage and baggage that break us,
From the Pharaohs and fellows who fail us,
From the plans and pursuits that prey upon us.
Lord of Resurrection,
May we be raised into the rhythm of your new life,
Dead to deceitful calendars,
Dead to fleeting friend requests,
Dead to the empty peace of our accomplishments.
To our packed-full planners, we bit, “Peace!”
To our over-caffeinated consciences, we say, “Cease!”
To our suffocating selves, Lord, grant release.
Drowning in a sea of deadlines and death chimes,
We rest in you, our lifeline.
By your ever-restful grace,
Allow us to enter your Sabbath rest
As your Sabbath rest enters into us.
We ask this in the name of our Creator,
Our Liberator,
And our Resurrection and life,
Jesus, who taught us to pray…
[Sing Lord’s Prayer]
Children’s Moment
What are some ways that people show you they love you?
(Examples: they say it, they give you gifts, they hold your hand, they play with you, they feed you)
(Talk about Lord’s Supper. Invite kids up to the altar and show them the pieces of communion. Give them each a cup. Talk to them about how we tell a story about how much Jesus loves us each week at the table and then eat and drink our little snack.)
Isn’t it so cool that Jesus decided to remind us that he loves by giving us snacks to eat together? It’s like he knew we liked snacks. Juice and crackers—that’s a classic snack.
He gives us the bread to remind us that we will always have what we need in God’s kingdom. And he gives us the juice to remind us that God’s love is always flowing in our direction.
When we tell the story about the night Jesus gave us this gift, we eat the bread and drink the cup together. Since y’all don’t typically get to take it with us, let’s do it right now.
This is the bread of abundance—of more than enough, of our needs being met. Eat the bread.
This is the cup of love—of God’s heart having a special place just for you! Drink the cup.
Everyone gets to come to this table. We’re not the bosses of who is invited. Who do you think the boss is? Jesus is the boss and he says everyone is invited to his party.
Let’s pray.
Jesus, thank you for the snacks. Thank you for the reminder that you love us big time and you love us for real. Help us remember this love every time we have a snack. Amen.
Sermon: It is God who is at work in you
Philippians 2:1-13
If, then, there is any comfort in Christ, any consolation from love, any partnership in the Spirit, any tender affection and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or empty conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he existed in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
Therefore God exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
There was a time when farmers in the Great Plains, at the first sign of a blizzard, would run a rope from the back door out to the barn. They all knew the stories of people who had wandered out to care for their livestock only to lose their way and freeze to death.
I recently read a novel set in Texas during the Great Depression that described a similar practice, but for Dust storms. Because of how fast the dust storms would roll in, the rope was perpetually in place. There were ropes everywhere—ones that led from the barn to the house, from the house to the outhouse, from the barn to the edge of the property.
The sudden arrival of a storm, you see, was not the time to think of how one might find their way back. It was not a time for strategizing or problem-solving. A storm requires one to act fast, to rely on the rope one set in place when the sky was peaceful and the weather was fair. Having that rope ready was life or death. It was survival.
I wonder what ropes we have ready for the storms that will roll in.
We can assess our preparedness by what ropes we had in place when COVID-19 first entered our awareness. What ropes were ready when we realized that this was not a mere two-week event but would rather sustain and abide more closely than some of our friendships?
What ropes were ready when the snowstorm last February hit? What ropes did we have in our personal lives? Or in our collective life when we got the late night phone call about the church’s flooding?
What ropes did we use to go back and forth as we moved from streaming from a kitchen table to setting up chairs in the courtyard to squeezing in in the Heritage building?
What rope did we hold on to as we moved back here, a place as changed as we were?
What connections kept us from getting lost, from dying, from filling up with dust?
In the passage we read today, Paul has moved into the meat of his letter, having gotten through his greetings and personal updates, and he now turns his attention toward the community of the church in Philippi. As I mentioned before, the culture of Philippi was a highly stratified culture. Each person knew their place and sought to climb higher on the social ladder, always pushing down others to do so. What others thought, how the public perceived them were of great concern to the typical Philippian.
And Paul speaks to this phenomenon by encouraging the church to regard others as better than themselves, speaking most pointedly to the higher members of the community. Of course, it doesn’t make sense for Paul to give that instruction to the lowly members of the movement for those who followed Jesus already sought to empower the empire’s excluded and oppressed. But for those who have status, forget it, Paul says. Better yet, use your status to subvert the system.
The system works by climbing upward and pushing others down. But if everyone is working on moving down and pushing others up, then the system no longer functions the way it was intended. It subverts the cultural norm.
And it is with this subversion in mind that Paul starts singing. Well, it’s a letter, so he doesn’t sing, but I’m sure he hummed this little tune as he wrote out what was likely a hymn used in worship in Gentile churches.
Hymns, doxologies, confessions—these worship components were meant for more than plugging in to weekly liturgy. They were educational. They were catechizing, which is a nice, juicy Catholic word that means to instruct someone in the principles of Christian religion, usually by a back-and-forth conversation.
And so Paul’s inclusion of this hymn is more than just passing on a nice song to the church in Philippi. He’s doing something with it, he’s making a point about humility in the way of Christ by including this hymn.
According to the hymn, Christ had divine status. The highest of the high status. But in a context where ambition abounds and people kill for that kind of power and wealth, Christ disregarded it. He instead, emptied himself, took the form of the most oppressed population—those with no agency or say over their lives—and humbled himself all the way down the social ladder. And then he died.
As we consider this first half of the hymn and what Jesus did, we realize that he died without any promise of reward or redemption or resurrection. Remember that Jesus died asking where God was.
The extraordinary fact of this act by Christ is that it was essentially the end. The future was closed.
For Christ, the grave was a cave, not a tunnel. He acted on our behalf with no hope for personal gain or preservation. He gave his life not out as an exchange or transaction, but out of love, assuming that was the end of it.
This kind of cave faith is what God then exalted.
I think it’s easy on this side of resurrection history to move quickly past the cross. To stand on our tippy toes to try to get a glimpse of Easter. Or we get overly sentimental about the old rugged cross, decorating our walls with them and wearing them on our necks, forgetting that we are wearing is a state instrument of torture and death. It would be like wearing an electric chair around our neck, or decorating our walls with lynching trees.
For Jesus’ first followers, the cross had no religious meaning. No veneer of holiness, no gloss of redemption, no connection to God. Their houses were not filled with little crosses everywhere.
And that’s why this hymn that describes how Jesus willingly submitted himself to this instrument of shame and torture and violence, was radical and defiant. It was seditious, even.
Rather than pulling down all the crosses and doing away with the violence in a revolution, Jesus exposed the violence and injustice of the system by submitting to it. It’s an act that Martin Luther King, Jr. And his nonviolent resistance coalition drew on as they endured the beatings and the assaults from white police officers during the Civil Rights Movement.
In the most radical act of humility, refusing to meet violence with violence, Jesus’ death on a cross held up a mirror to the state and said, “Do you see yourself? Do you see what you’re doing?” There’s a famous sign that black men would hold up at Civil Rights protests that said, “I am a man.” It was an attempt to pierce the armor of empire and say, “Do you see?” It met humanity with humanity with no promise that it would work.
Paul relays this hymn in relation to how the Philippians should consider their own participation in empire from his own imprisonment, which brings us to another great Catholic: cruciform. It means “in the way of the cross.”
Paul invites the church in Philippi into cruciform living. To lay it all down, to humble themselves all the way down, to hop off the ladder and take the chute instead. For this is the way of Christ. There are no promises of it working. Of its effectiveness. Of its success. But the cross of Christ is not concerned with those things. Cruciform living does not use success as a measure, but rather love.
If you’ve been wondering how to be a Christian in these trying times, how a Christian should act, how we might proceed in the constant storms we find ourselves in: this is it.
This is the rope that leads us back home.
This rope was secured in place long before we got here, in fairer weather, in anticipation of big scary clouds that might roll in. It has led many people back home before. And now, we say to ourselves, to each other over the gusts of wind, “This is the way, this is the way.”
This hymn we have because of Paul is a reminder that our best ropes take us to just one place. To Christ. This rope reminds us the way home is the way of the cross. To move down, down, down the ladder, to go concern ourselves not with success, but with love; not even with preservation, but with Christ only.
So you grab this end of the rope. I’ll grab the other end. It’s secure. Hold tight. We will keep reminding ourselves of where it goes, where it leads, so that when the storm comes again, we can make it home.
Amen.
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.
Our benediction for this series comes from the first chapter of Philippians. Receive this benediction:
This is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight to help you to determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God. Amen.