Welcome/Call to Worship
Good morning! I’m Pastor Ashley Dargai. To those here in the chapel and those joining us online: we are so glad you’re here!
If you are here this morning, we realize you did not get here by accident. Getting out of your house, turning off of the main road, making your way to the back of the parking lot, and then entering not the big, obvious church building, but the little chapel off to the side was no mindless task. We acknowledge and honor the intention with which this journey has been made today.
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 will take the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of our most Gracious Host, Jesus Christ. I invite you to participate as much or as little in our prepared liturgy as your spirit is willing. The purpose of our time together each Sunday is to bring our hearts closer to the heart of God, so whatever brings your heart closer to God’s own heart, do that.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
We have included an accessible and relevant to our worship Bible study in your bulletin called Table Talk. Of course, you can move through it alone to prepare for next week’s worship, but we believe that just as writing scripture was a group project, so is reading scripture. If you don’t have a conversation partner or group with which to participate in Table Talk, Rick Seeds has volunteered to lead a group.
Mark your calendars for our End-of-Summer Party on Wednesday, July 28, at 6:30 pm.
There will be no cabinet meeting this Wednesday. Details about our upcoming cabinet retreat in August are forthcoming so be watching your email and Facebook.
We continue our summer worship series: Jesus’ Greatest Hits: A Journey through the Sermon on the Mount. Today, we are thinking together about treasures in heaven.
Let us prepare our hearts for worship.
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Concerns: Gay Dekkin, Jerry Miller
(From “Prayer of the Church” by Walter Brueggeman)
Most Holy One,
In your presence and in the company of your good saints,
We offer you our praise and thanksgiving,
For life and for calling,
For the joys of friendship,
And for the burden of faith.
As we sit in the midst of your many mercies,
We are mindful of so many of our brothers and sisters
Who dwell in places short of mercy,
Absent of justice,
Defaulted on the gifts of life.
We can recite the grocery list of needful people and violent places,
But you know them all.
As you know them and we know them,
We pledge in this company
To take these needful people in these violent places as our call from you.
We are so poorly equipped for such a call.
But you are the God who gives
Bread and wine,
Table and towel,
Book and song,
And with them courage, freedom, and energy
For the task to which we are unequal.
Catch us up this day into the reality of your good purpose,
That by the time we leave each other
We will know—
Yet again—
That your mercy and justice and compassion
Outrun all the needs of the world.
Sign us on and bless your church,
Bless all the faithful in places harder than our own,
In places of seduction like ours,
In places of temptation we know too well.
Keep us simple and on task,
And we will praise you by our glad obedience.
And we ask all of 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.
Litany of Faith
One: The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it: the world and its inhabitants too.
All: Because God is the one who established it on the seas; God set it firmly on the waters.
One: Who can ascend the hill of the Lord? Who can stand in God’s holy sanctuary?
All: Only the one with clean hands and a pure heart; the one who hasn’t made false promises,
the one who hasn’t sworn dishonestly.
One: They shall receive a blessing from the Lord, and a just reward from the God of their salvation.
All: Such is the generation of those who seek the Lord, of those who seek your face, O God of Jacob.
One: Selah.
(From Psalm 24:1-6)
Sermon
Matthew 6:16-24
16 “And whenever you fast, do not look dismal, like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces so as to show others that they are fasting. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 17 But when you fast, put oil on your head and wash your face, 18 so that your fasting may be seen not by others but by God who is in secret; and your God who sees in secret will reward you.
19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; 20 but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
22 “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body will be full of light; 23 but if your eye is unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!
24 “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and Mammon.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
Let’s play a game called: “Is this is in the Bible? I’m going to read an adage about money and you are going to decide if this phrase is in the Bible. Thumbs up if you think so, thumbs down if you think not.
First one: Money cannot buy happiness. (N)
2.) The root of evil is the love of money. (Y—1 Timothy)
3.) A fool and his money are soon parted. (N) While this sentiment is certainly expressed in Proverbs, this actual phrasing is not part of the Bible.
Next: Money is the answer for everything. (Y—Ecclesiastes, y’all!)
5.) All that glitters is not gold. (N—that’s my man, Shakespeare)
Last one: Whoever loves money never has enough. (Y—Ecclesiastes strikes again)
End of game. Tally up your points and collect your prize at the end—it’s a pat on the back. What did we learn?
At the very least, we should definitely do a sermon series or Bible study on Ecclesiastes, right? And perhaps we also learned that maybe the Bible has a lot more to say about money than we initially thought.
For the past 5 weeks, we’ve been hunkering down in the Sermon on the Mount. We’ve packed a picnic basket, applied sunscreen, laid out a blanket, and have been listening on the side of the mountain as Jesus spins a web of divine imagination.
Last week, we walked through the Lord’s Prayer, given to us by Jesus, the one we said just moments ago together in unison. We say it together each week as a way to shape our hearts to want what God wants, to see the world how God sees it, to love our neighbor and recognize our connection to each other the way God created it.
And we say this prayer together not just for ourselves, but also for one another—we’re both reminding each other of this life God offers, and reminding each other that we’re committed to it, too. I will forgive you, we’re saying. Will you forgive me? Let us forgive others and ask for forgiveness. I will keep asking for bread and not hoard it away from you. I will keep thinking about God’s reign coming if you do, too. Our Father. Your Father. My Father. His Father. Her Father. Their Father. Our Great Parent who gathers us at the family table together. I remember, I remember. Do you remember?
This reminding is what is going on between the lines, in the pauses, in our breaths as we recite it together.
And then Jesus moves on in his sermon from a prayer that changes us every day to how exactly this world he is talking about comes to be.
And this next section and today’s sermon is about money, but also it’s not about money at all. Stick around for awhile, I think you’ll see what I’m talking about.
These little vignettes Jesus moves through seem disconnected, like they’re little poems he wrote and is now reading in succession. Fasting. Treasures in heaven. Eyes and lamps. God and Mammon. They sound like a disjointed list of mediocre ideas for book titles. But might they all fit into the logos, the logic, of the gospel? Let’s think about it together for a minute.
Jesus begins by discussing fasting. At the time, there were some collective practices of fasting in Judaism, but for the most part, this practice was for things like repentance, prayer, and atonement. And while we understand the word, “hypocrite” to be a pejorative term today, meant to call out the duplicitous nature of somebody, that’s not what it means here. Hypocrite was the word for actor. It was a neutral term. So when Jesus says, don’t be like the hypocrites when they over-dramatize what it looks to be fasting—faces gaunt, doubled over, languishing—he’s talking about not putting on a show. If you’re gonna fast, fast. But do it for the right reasons—the reasons Jesus understood from his Jewish upbringing: repentance, prayer, and atonement. If we’re gonna do any spiritual discipline or pious act, let’s not do it performatively for the sake of being seen, but rather because we know it to be right.
Once at an airport for an early flight, JD and I were contemplating getting a bottle of water before we boarded, wondering if that would make us need to use the airplane bathroom and whether or not to bother with that. And I turned to him and said, “Isn’t it amazing that we are controlled by basic biological impulses?” And he shook his head and sighed, “Ashley, it’s not even 8 AM yet.”
But I mean, if fasting teaches us anything, it’s how dependent we are on quieting the hunger inside us, on filling our bladders over and over again day in and day out. The fragility of our bodies comes into full view in the practice of fasting.
And let me take just a moment to say one thing about fasting: it is but one of many spiritual practices available to us. Many religions use it as a practice, including the 3 great Abrahamic religions: Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. But it is by no means necessary for drawing your heart to God and should not be attempted by those who do not have adequate access to food and water or by those who have a history of disordered eating. Okay.
And then Jesus moves on to this talk of treasures on earth and treasures in heaven, which feels straightforward, right? Material goods don’t last forever so perhaps focus on things that will outlast them. Turn your heart to the things of God, for that is your home. Invest in that kind of life—the kind that can’t be destroyed by something as trivial as moth and rust.
And then we move to this mysterious saying: “the eye is the lamp of the body.” The ancients believed almost the reverse of what we know to be true about what happens with light and our eyes because of science. We know that in our eyes are receptors for light. So that light comes in to our eyes. However, the ancients believed that light emerges outward from within us. We project light out into the world. Hence the connection between eyes and lamps. So that whatever is inside us is projected out into how we see the world. This may not be scientifically accurate, but I don’t know, maybe the ancients were on to something.
According to Jesus, an unhealthy eye, then, would transmit not light, but rather, darkness. The evil eye, which is an image from Jewish literature Jesus would be drawing on, meant to have an outlook on life that was envious, stingy, and grudging. So this truism of “the eye is the lamp of the body” and how it functions in this text means that just as the world a person without sight encounters is darkened by an eye malfunction, so the life of one with an unhealthy eye is darkened by a failure to deal generously with others.
And then Jesus ends this section with a line we have probably heard many times: you cannot serve both God and Mammon. Mammon. It sounds like a Marvel movie villain.
But Mammon was not a villain or even a god. Mammon is just the word for property. It’s a neutral word that signified a thing of value. But the capitalization of it is noteworthy—it has the same effect as if we capitalized “The Almighty Dollar.” It becomes personified—it’s not that property or owning property in general was wrong, but rather what happens when it becomes like a person, a life, a framework, a kingdom, a king.
Jesus gets at this a little when he talks about why we can’t love both. He says we’ll hate one and love the other. And this language of love and hate is not about feelings, but would have been understood to be about choice. By saying yes to one, we must necessarily say no to the other. This is just how being a mortal works.
Every time we say yes to something, we have to say no to something else. We’re stuck in a linear time model, and unless we find a parallel universe that we can live in simultaneously with this one, this is a crucial aspect of being human. We have to choose.
Each of these vignettes seem to be dealing with the human condition: our dependence on heeding biological impulses, how we and what we treasure have a time limit, how the way we look at the world comes from inside, and how we are finite creatures.
And if we were looking for mere observations about our condition, we could stop there. We could nod our head in recognition and commit to making the most of the moment and treasuring those we love.
But the gospel, the God-spell, the good news, what God is spelling out for us, must put us in a predicament if it is to be news. It must necessitate a response from a sense of urgency. It does not always or even often soothe. Good news can be God loves us, but sometimes it feels like bad news when that means God loves this person or that person, too. Good news can be God’s reign is coming right now! But it can feel like bad news if means the displacement of the reign we are familiar with, where we have found a way to live and maybe even thrive.
I don’t think today is a good-news-that-feels-like-bad-news-for-some-people kind of day. But I do think these little pockets of contemplation Jesus offers are not for mere contemplation, but actually put us in a predicament.
I’m not so sure about this “treasures in heaven” thing. I don’t think it means we are just transporting our mansion here to a a mansion over the hilltop with streets of gold. I’m not convinced that heaven is as straightforward as walking through a door marked, “Pearly Gates.” No one has ever come back from the dead to tell us what it’s like, so…
But I do know about treasures on earth. Maybe in ways that even Jesus himself didn’t know. I mean, when Jesus, in his local carpenter experience, spoke about not storing for ourselves things that might wear and tear and be damaged by moths and rust, he could not have imagined mass production on the scale we see today. He could not have predicted how global commerce would explode into modern-day proportions, especially considering he only covered a couple of dozen miles in his entire life.
And sure, Jesus was right, material goods don’t last forever. But these days, they do last a very long time. Plastic outlives us all. That little toy my daughter gets in a happy meal will survive her 5 times over. Material goods don’t last forever, but they do create monuments in landfills, they litter the oceans and fill the bellies of aquatic life, and they run through the hands of severely underpaid workers in horrible conditions.
Because you see, material goods don’t last forever, but they promise us that we will.
If something breaks, within seconds, we can have it en route to our house, dropped in a brown box by a blue van marked Amazon. We never have to see another human to make that happen. We can walk into a grocery store with shelves of different kinds of cereal and dozens of brands of shoes, enough food to last us years.
Of course, this promise of immortality flickered a couple of times over the past year when we arrived at the grocery store to find toilet paper shelves empty at the beginning of the pandemic or when we wondered when clean water would flow out of our faucets again in February during the winter storm. These were aberrations in the narrative that unlimited production sells us and they were unsettling because they reminded us that this promise of limitless when it pertains to anything but God is a lie.
Maybe it’s not that Jesus is saying we shouldn’t love things because they don’t last forever, but because we don’t.
We are finite creatures with a time limit, living in a world that promises infinite goods and services.
And it’s not that we should resist mindless consumption and accumulation of goods because that stuff is worthless anyway. But perhaps Jesus is saying we should resist it because our earth, the lives of our neighbors, and how those two impact our souls are worth so very much. They are immeasurably valuable.
What if the moth and rust destruction Jesus was talking about is not so much about these goods eventually disintegrating, but rather about the way the system of insatiable and competitive consumerism disintegrates our souls? What if he’s talking about how trusting in the promise of immortality by way of consumption frays our connection to the earth? What if he’s warning us that leaning on the everlasting arms of “more” fractures our relationship to one another?
If the eye is the lamp of the body, perhaps this is the darkness of an unhealthy eye: the obscuring of the truest thing we know about ourselves: our finiteness. Our mortality. The fact that we come to an end. And we are utterly dependent on one another.
Life is good and finite, my favorite pastor used to say. And it is so good in part because it is finite.
What if we could look at the world not with shrewdness, but with generosity? Not because we’ll live forever, but precisely because we won’t? At least, not in the way we live and move and have our being now.
What if this is the work of treasures in heaven?
Hear me when I say: I am not trying to talk about heaven or what happens when we die. I’m trying to say that anyone who promises forever, other than the Most Holy One, is selling something, and we are not for sale. We do not parcel our souls and our neighbors and the earth out for cheap promises of forever and infinity. No smoothie, no medication, no gadget, no deal, no investment will keep us from death. We wipe our foreheads with ash each year acknowledging that fact.
So how do we live in light of that reality? By trying to get what’s ours until the very end?
No, Jesus says. We entrust ourselves to the daily bread, the forgiveness of others, the elusive reign of God that whispers to us in the quiet.
If we try to serve Mammon, or the Almighty Dollar, or self-interested economics, or our consumerist inclinations, or unfettered corporate greed, or second yacht money wealth, or whatever you want to call it—we will have to say no to God. Jesus, with his own eye lamp, is not making this choice up, but rather shining a light on this reality. We have to choose. This is our predicament: one we find ourselves in each day. Not only as individuals, but also as an institution, as a people.
Given that we are beings controlled by biological processes yet living in the hope of the coming reign of God, a reign we have just prayed for, and are the vehicles for its realization on earth as it in heaven, how now will we live? How will we tell the truth about ourselves? About this world?
What light do we have inside to shine forth into the world? How has this light been cultivated in our practices with one another? With our community? With the poor and disenfranchised? With our dealings in business and relationships? How does our life together in worship and in service and in fellowship shape our love for the world God wants? How does it recalibrate what has been shifted in the world of capital-M Mammon?
This is why fasting was and remains a spiritual practice—because it calls attention to the true thing: we are ever so dependent on our bodies and each other. Fasting is just a representation of spiritual practices, ways that we disrupt the narrative we live in and swim in like fish in water. The point is not the practice—that’s why we don’t do performative spiritual practices, but rather the point is what the practice does to our hearts. It turns on the light inside us, it adds oil to the lamp, and fans the flame.
Perhaps our treasures in heaven, the very good news for the people of God, is these treasures are us. What we’re investing in is the treasure of God: God’s own people.
And we are not for sale. You are not for sale. Our neighbors are not for sale. We will not be peddled lies about forever because our hearts reside in God, who is the Creator and Sustainer of forever. We have chosen God, and we keep choosing God. And we choose God by choosing our neighbor, by choosing creation who also is our neighbor and the world our bodies live in, and by choosing the world God still loves over and over and over again.
Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church: participating in Food Hub or service projects around the church, or filling the Little Free Pantry. You can give financially in our offering box at the door. You may also give online on our website or find us on Venmo. And today, you can also give in the offering plates.
We are going to pass the offering plates after the benediction. I’ll give the final blessing, and then we will seal the deal by singing the Doxology together before our final song.
I’m going to give these plates to the front pews and they just need to make their way back, facilitated by you all, and a deacon will collect it at the back.
If you’ve already put your offering in the giving box, super. If you have given online or on Venmo, great! There are cards in the back that you can put in the plate that say as much, and they also have information for Venmo and Vanco, our online giving service should you need it. The idea is that everyone has an opportunity to physically put something in the plate if they want.
Benediction
Please rise in body or spirit for our benediction, the Doxology, and the final song.
Repeat after me:
Go out as people of God
Forgiven, blessed, and filled
Share all that you have
Return no one evil for evil
Be the hands and feet of Jesus
In a world that needs what we’ve got.
Amen.