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 visitor cards in the pew in front of you—if you arrived during the pandemic or later, of 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 Fellowship Hall. There is also a combined children and youth class that meets in the parlor. 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 begin a new worship series today: Dear Church: A Study of Philippians.
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: You are the God in whom I take refuge; why have you cast me off? Why must I walk about mournfully because of the oppression of the enemy?
All: O send out your light and your truth; let them lead me; let them bring me to your holy hill and to your dwelling.
One: Then I will go to the altar of God, to God my exceeding joy.
All: I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God.
One: Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
All: Hope in God, for I shall again praise my help and my God.
(Psalm 43:2-5)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
We add our prayers to the family of David Woodall, who passed away this past Thursday. His visitation will be at Mt. Olivet on Monday evening from 6:30-8:30 pm. And in his service will be Tuesday morning at 9:30 AM, also at Mt. Olivet.
This morning, we give thanks for all who have acted as loving father figures in our lives and in this community. We also recognize Juneteenth, which commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans.
Join me in prayer:
Most Holy One, today, we breathe out. For the past 6 or so months, we have been breathing in, in, in, inhaling your goodness, your mercy, your love. The holy seasons have filled us up and wrung us out, and now we are laid out to dry.
We exhale. We come into Ordinary Time, a long stretch of rest and slowness. We dedicate this time ahead of us to be one of reflection, of letting what was sown in our hearts to germinate and incubate until it brings forth new life.
We are thoughtful of the convergence of these three events that we celebrate today: our movement into a slower church season, Juneteenth, and Father’s Day.
We give thanks for what Juneteenth commemorates: the freedom that came when legal slavery ended after two hundred years of European-Americans shipping and trading African peoples as if they were disposable goods. We recognize how that relationship distorted our experience of your image, both in the enslaved and in those who enslaved others. We know you are a God of liberation and justice, of freedom and mercy, and we recognize your movement in this act of liberation.
When we get tired, when our feet are aching, and our heads are heavy, may we remember that your movement is always toward the radical liberation of all, the opportunity for each and every human and created being from the smallest flower to the to the fiercest mammal, to be at rest. Your dream for humans is for each of us to sit under our own vine and fig tree and none shall make us afraid.
And is that not what a good parent strives for? For their child to be free, to live without fear of violence or danger, to be able to sleep well. We give thanks for all those who have added their own love and work to this endeavor. And we ask for your tender mercy for all those who have not experienced this in their father figures, in parents, in grown-ups in their lives.
We know, centuries after Juneteenth, that we still live in a world filled with fractures and breaches. We feel it in our families and in our communities. We feel it in the phone calls that never come, the visits never scheduled, the disappointments and heartbreaks, the fraught moments and icy conversations. We feel it in injustice and pain and suffering.
But we remember again, that your movement is always toward our liberation from the things that fracture us, that harm us, that cause us to do harm to one another. And we entrust ourselves to you, the Great Father and Mother of humanity, the Perfect and Present Parent, the tender and wise lover of us all, to teach us the ways of freedom. To live in freedom for the sake of others. To find our value not in our hustling, but in our rest.
May these next few months at a slower pace, help us to remember our belovedness, and the belovedness of others.
We ask 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.
Sermon
Philippians 1:1-11
Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus,
To all the saints in Christ Jesus who are in Philippi, with the bishops and deacons:
2 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
3 I thank my God for every remembrance of you, 4 always in every one of my prayers for all of you, praying with joy 5 for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now. 6 I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Jesus Christ. 7 It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because I hold you in my heart, for all of you are my partners in God’s grace, both in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel. 8 For God is my witness, how I long for all of you with the tender affection of Christ Jesus. 9 And this is my prayer, that your love may overflow more and more with knowledge and full insight 10 to help you to determine what really matters, so that in the day of Christ you may be pure and blameless, 11 having produced the harvest of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ for the glory and praise of God.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
The first person who referred to the different pieces of literature in scripture as the books of the Bible probably meant well. But calling them all books muddies a very important fact: the Bible contains a richly diverse body of literature. History, poetry, songs, law, gospel, ethics, oral tradition, apocalypse, prophecy, and letters make up the “books” of the Bible, and each genre needs to be read differently.
For example, we sometimes talk about what is true and what is factual. What is true and what is measurable. Just because something is not provable or factual or measurable by modern-day scientific or professional standards, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not true.
Poetry is true in a way that an eyewitness account is not, and vice versa. Metaphor contains truth that rings differently than a conclusion arrived at by the scientific method.
As an English teacher, I would teach my students how to analyze a poem. How to find the subject and the speaker, how to identify different pieces of figurative language and discern what they were doing in the poem. Sometimes it felt like a science, but it was always very different than what was going on in their Physics class. Not that Physics doesn’t require an artist’s finesse occasionally because science can be an art, too.
But just like the laws of Physics, the poetry put forth by people like William Shakespeare and Mary Oliver stand the test of time. We just approach them differently. Perhaps with the same passion and respect, but using different methods, understanding how language is used in its context.
And that’s what we’re doing with book of Philippians.
We begin a new series today. Dear Church. It’s a study of the letter to the Christians in Philippi from the apostle Paul.
This book, also known as an epistle, is first and foremost a letter. It is a letter, from Paul, to a church. These are vital details for us to remember over the next few weeks.
We know that Philippians is not a gospel because it doesn’t contain a series of saying and events of the life of Jesus with the writer and readers hardly visible. Neither is it a collection of proverbs because if it were, they would be equally true everywhere to anyone. And it is not apocalypse because though it does talk about the day of Christ, it does not offer dramatic sights and sounds that reveal the final outcome toward which God is moving history.
It is a letter that written to be read in a worship assembly. Because of this, Paul’s epistles contain confessions, hymns, doxologies, and benedictions. The reading of a letter was a catechizing event. Paul wrote for the ear—knowing that most people would hear it rather than read it.
It is a specific letter from a person to a group of people in a fixed time and place in history, with specific problems, highly contextual dreams and dynamics. Paul doesn’t write letters to Christians in General. He writes to the saints in Christ Jesus in Philippi. To the church of the Thessalonians in God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. To the church of God in Corinth. To all in Rome who are loved by God.
Paul’s ministry was to particular groups to live out the gospel in concrete ways that made sense for their churches. As such, each church is different. That was true then and is true now. Some struggled with how to be a faithful and unified community of different socio-economic classes. Some struggled to discern how to integrate Gentile Christians into their group. Some were persecuted by the state and others wanted to endear themselves to the state for protection and status.
Today, our churches have different focuses. Some are focused on food insecurity in their community. Others are centered on young families. Others minister to college students. Those on the southern border concern themselves with all the theological and physical realities of immigration and identity.
The epistles remind us that we have distinct identities as churches in a specific time and place and culture. We are a church in an era—the era of COVID-19 and how it has altered our world. The era of racial justice and social change and revelation of how tenuous our social contract is. The era of rapid expansion of technology. The era of the acceleration of climate change through natural disasters. For us to ignore these eras is our demise—for we are not outside our context. We are always within.
But God is here, too. Our job is the same as the saints in Christ Jesus in Philippi. To recognize God’s movement in a specific context.
That’s not to say Philippians has nothing to say to us. It just means that we do some contextual work to find what it is saying to us. We work as an interpretative community in order to see what God is saying through Paul to the Philippians and then to us.
So who is this church in Philippi? And who is Paul? These are important people to know as we read the book of Philippians together this summer.
This is a letter “to all the saints in Christ Jesus in Philippi.”
Let’s start with the place. Philippi was near the port of Neapolis, which means it was bustling with the traffic of commerce, culture, and religion between the East and the West. It was built by the father of Alexander the Great and flourished originally because of gold mines.
In the time of Paul’s writing, it was a Roman colony, and its inhabitants enjoyed Roman citizenship. The culture supported and reinforced social hierarchies and operated on a system of upward mobility. A person was encouraged to strive to climb the social ladder, which was very neatly defined and enforced.
But in the world of Roman rule, bettering oneself always came at the cost of someone else’s degradation. There was not enough room for everyone to flourish. In order to get ahead, you had to put someone behind you. You can imagine how social relationships and community care might strain under this set-up. Perhaps it might even sound similar to a culture familiar to you.
If you remember, Paul first came to Philippi because he had a dream about a Macedonian man needing help. But when he arrived in Philippi, he couldn’t for the life of him find a group of Jewish men to make a synagogue, so he went to the river, where he had heard there was a place of prayer. And who did he find, but Lydia and her girl gang, having a good ol’ fashioned church service by the water. They all got baptized and ate together, and boom, a church was made.
Because of this and later mentions of some conflict between two church leaders who are women, we can assume that this church was at least in the beginning, a church primarily led by women.
And they faced persecution and struggled with shame in this highly honor/shame-based culture on account of their faith in Jesus.
Well, Paul is no stranger to persecution and shame.
He mentions right off the bat that he had been imprisoned for his work for the gospel because the gospel was and continues to be radical, contrary to empire, and thus a threat to the state. So in a filthy and foul smelling place in a Roman prison, chained to two guards as stipulated by military custody rules, Paul begins his letter to the church in Philippi, a group of women striving to live this radical, anti-imperial faith.
And Paul must minister by mail, as was his primary way to minister. I sometimes hear lament about how social media is not real communication or doesn’t foster real, meaningful relationships. But is it really all that different from letters? I’ve watched TikTok videos of pastors encouraging and teaching people. I’ve read Facebook posts outlining a theological argument for a social or cultural issue. I’ve swiped through Instagram stories that taught me about trinitarian theology, prison reform, and strategies to tackle homelessness in the name of Jesus. The medium may be different, but the ministry isn’t. And honestly, the medium is not that different.
Anyway.
This greeting from Paul tells us that he clearly has great affection for the church in Philippi. He loves them a lot.
And he comments on how important their partnership in the gospel is. Sometimes this word for partnership, koinonia, is translated as fellowship. But I think that word has become watered down. When we think of fellowship, we might think of a party. No serious business or work or worship. Just enjoying each other’s company. And that’s part of fellowship. But koinonia means sharing money, suffering, work, grace. It is the tangible cooperation and financial contribution in aid of the gospel.
What makes their connection so strong is not that they merely eat together or have movie nights. It’s that they do serious work for the gospel together. They have shared in each other’s suffering. They have shown up on the hardest days. They have shared grace back and forth as easily as they pass around casserole dishes.
And even though Paul is literally in prison and the Philippians are enduring their own suffering, this koinonia, this fellowship, this partnership, is a source of joy, a word that will be used 16 times in this letter. It is as if this koinonia is the fertilized ground from which joy sprouts.
In v. 8, Paul says that he longs for the Philippians. He loves them so much. The literal translation of this word is “craving in the gut.” In this time period, the Greek term for “gut” indicated the place where people love. It is a privileged place of vulnerability. It could also be considered the womb. Feelings of maternal affection are located in the gut.
So that this love is not, “I like your worship style or you seem like nice people.” This is a deep, “we are joined together in the most tender places of our souls. If you ache, I ache. If you cry, I cry. If you laugh, I rejoice. We’re in it until the end.” That’s intense. But God, it’s also refreshing in a world where church can sometimes be thought of as a good place for social networking or finding like-minded friends.
According to Paul, church is so much more than that.
And because of this love, what we might call a covenant community today, the work Paul and the Philippians are doing is vital and important. But it’s not the be-all, end-all. It is not a work that rests solely on their shoulders. It is not a work that lives and dies with them.
This love, Paul says, helps us determine what really matters.
In verse 6, Paul says something really interesting that we’re gonna nestle into for the rest of our time today.
He says, “I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Jesus Christ.”
Paul says, I’m sure of this one thing. That the one who began a good work in you at the river that Sabbath day. That one will carry the work out to completion. You will not carry it out. This church will not carry it out. God will.
Paul says in another letter to the church in Corinth that we plant seeds and water them, but it’s God who makes the plant grow.
That should make us humble. Our work is important, yes. But we are not the messiahs here.
It should also make us a breathe a sigh of relief. That even if our efforts fail. Even if we fall short. Even if we die. It doesn’t depend on us anyway. God’s purposes extend beyond our groups, our programs, our ministries.
It’s almost as if Paul is saying to this church who is struggling and wondering what to do: hold tight to each other. But also, let go. Hold your hands open. Hold everything else lightly and loosely, but keep a fierce grip on each other. God will finish what God started, even if we don’t see that finish. Even if we would do it differently.
There’s this beautiful prayer by the late Cardinal Dearden. Father John Dearden was a Catholic priest and later became a cardinal in the 1970s. He pastored in Detroit and was known for his work for racial justice and equal opportunity. He later pushed for ordination of women and openness to LGBTQ+ persons in the church, which got him labeled a heretic by many. Still, Pope Paul VI appointed him as a Cardinal. Father Dearden died in 1988, with very little of what he fought for accomplished.
Considering, the issues he fought for in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, are still raging not only in the Catholic Church but in Protestant Churches as well, I bet Cardinal Dearden knows what it means to struggle for God’s liberating ends without seeing the end result.
When he was Cardinal in 1979, he delivered a prayer, which Pope Francis would reprise 36 years later. I shared a piece of this prayer in our board meeting this past Wednesday, but I share it in its entirety now:
“It helps, now and then, to step back and take a long view.
The kingdom is not only beyond our efforts, it is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of the magnificent
enterprise that is God's work. Nothing we do is complete, which is a way of
saying that the Kingdom always lies beyond us.
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith.
No confession brings perfection.
No pastoral visit brings wholeness.
No program accomplishes the Church's mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything.
This is what we are about.
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces far beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something, and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an
opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.
We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs.
We are prophets of a future not our own.”
Because Paul was frequently dodging the Roman authorities, sometimes unsuccessfully, while he ministered to many churches by mail and occasional visits, he had to depend on God carrying out the work he started, even if he never got to see it. He was a prophet of a future not his own. And you know what, we are still reading his mail today.
And perhaps we can glean from this brief introduction of a letter not to us, truths that we hold separately and yet together:
We are beloved. To God. To one another.
Yet we are not messiahs. We begin the work, but are not the ones who complete it. We cannot do everything, but we can do something.
And that something grows out of a deep, gut-level love for one another. The kind forged in fire and flood, plague and pestilence, change and upheaval. We don’t walk out when things get hard. But we do know all things come to an end, even ourselves. It’s a paradox of living made possible only in Christ, the one who binds us together, and the one who unbinds us from the values of empire, the one who unfurls our hands from the grip we have on the work we do, and clasps those hands to another’s. Hold onto each other, and also let go.
You might have noticed in your bulletin a card with a few questions on it. During this series, there will be a different set of questions each week that we invite you to answer. These different prompts will help construct a letter from Azle Christian Church to itself that we will read together on the last Sunday of our series.
In just a moment, Gini will play a few bars for us while we write. You can write your name on the slip of paper or leave it anonymous. There are pens in the pews. When the offering plate goes by, please place that slip of paper in the offering plate. If you need more time, you can always bring it by the church office or turn it in next week.
Take a moment to hold ACC in your heart, and then write what comes up.
Sharing Our Resources
One of the ways we practice living into the coming-and-already-present reign of God is through our practice of stewardship. In this practice, we devote our time and resources to the community of Christ in its specific iteration here at Azle Christian Church, trusting that what we give away is ultimately not ours to give but is God’s.
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 this mornings comes from our reading of Philippians this morning. 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.