Welcome/Call to Worship
Good morning! I’m Pastor Ashley Dargai 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. 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.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
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 children and youth class that meets in the parlor.
Next week begins Holy Week. Next Sunday is Palm Sunday. Kids are invited to come at 10 AM to the sanctuary to learn a song for service. Everyone will be involved with bringing the palms in. And after service, we will have our annual Easter egg hunt! We’re looking for volunteers to bring packed eggs for the hunt.
Our Maundy Thursday event will be like last year’s—we’ll host a food drive for our Little Free Pantry, DMM will grill hot dogs, and the ukuleles will lead us in a singalong. And this year, First UMC Azle will join us. Food will be served at 6:30 in the courtyard.
And then we’ll join with First UMC of Azle down the road for Good Friday.
Two weeks from today, April 17, we’ll have our Easter sunrise service in the Narthex as well as our 11 AM service here in the sanctuary. Be sure to check your insert, your eblast, and our socials for details.
Today immediately following service, we will have a Congregational Meeting. It will be a brief meeting in-person and on Zoom for those at home.
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 worship series this morning: Full to the Brim: An Expansive Lent. This morning, we take a significant step toward the cross as we eat dinner with Jesus right outside Jerusalem.
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: Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.
All: I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
One: I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
All: The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches;
One: For I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people,
All: The people I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.
(Isaiah 43:18-21)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Because it is the first Sunday of the month, we will end our prayer by singing the Lord’s Prayer, #310 in your hymnal.
Join me in prayer.
Holy God,
There are times when we are at a loss for words. We don’t know what to pray. Even the simplest prayers of help, thanks, and wow, seem both too much and too little.
So help us to remember that sometimes, our mere waking up in the morning is a prayer.
Sometimes the songs we have stuck in our head, rumbling around on repeat, are a prayer.
The way we talk to children, the way we care for our animals, the way we water our gardens, are all prayer.
Even the way we take out our phone to get a picture of the sunset or of the people we love—that is prayer.
And other times, prayer is a moment like this—heads bowed, eyes closed, hearts quiet for just a moment.
In all of it, we trust that you hear us.
In this trust, may we find courage here today—
Courage to follow your call, courage to live into our faith.
May we find hope here—
Hope for a better world, hope that refuses to let us go.
May we find truth here—
Truth that lives in sacred community, truth that lives in ancient stories.
May we find all that we seek,
And in our seeking, may we know You more.
Gratefully, we ask it in the name of our brother and redeemer Jesus, who taught us to pray…
(Sing Lord’s Prayer)
Sermon
John 12:1-8
Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. 2 There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served, and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. 3 Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. 4 But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples (the one who was about to betray him), said, 5 “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” 6 (He said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.) 7 Jesus said, “Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial. 8 You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
I invite you to close your eyes and take a deep breath.
And consider this question: what does love smell like?
Does it smell like your mom’s famous sugar cookies? Does it smell like a mixture of tobacco and aftershave, the smell you associate with your grandfather’s embrace? Or maybe it smells like fresh crayons—the kind your second grade teacher passed out to you on the first day of school—her smile an emblem of safety in an otherwise precarious life. Maybe it’s the smell of lotion that you lovingly put on your beloved’s arms and legs in their final days, an anointing all its own. Or perhaps it’s the grubby smell of your dog’s head, always nuzzling up close to your face when you’re sad.
Does it smell like an impending thunderstorm—the air musky and charged with energy? Or does it smell like freshly mowed lawns? Or maybe the unmistakable smell of fish as you back your boat into the lake at dawn. Or maybe it’s the red poppy-scented candle you only burn when you’re praying for someone, its light clean scent like a bell that calls you to attention every time it wafts your direction.
You can open your eyes.
I don’t know what pure nard smells like, but there are perfume scents that transport me to a moment of love and belonging. I don’t know how a pound of costly perfume spilled out would fill a room, but there are aromas that can fill my lungs so deeply that they unlock memories long hidden away.
We enter into the most sensuous and visceral time of the year today. Since Ash Wednesday, we have been slowly making our way with Jesus toward Jerusalem, our foreheads marked with the reminder of our mortality and our feet just outside the city gates.
Of course all of Lent is an embodied journey. We are dealing with the human Jesus. The first Sunday of Lent forced us to reckon with hunger and fatigue as we encountered Jesus in the desert. We then imagined Jesus as a mother hen, aching to gather her little chicks under her wing. And then we felt dirt under our fingernails as we argued about what to do with a fruitless fig tree, ultimately deciding to wait and see. And last week, we felt the embrace of the man with two sons and heard the music pulsing out of the house in celebration.
But today, things get particularly fleshy. This story of a dinnertime interruption is hands to feet, hair to skin, soaked fingers to soaked toes. This morning, our holy sacraments are skin, salt, sweat, and tears. The instruments of worship are perfumed feet and unbound hair. This is not a story of abstract piety of the mind, the kind of religion that demands stoicism and unflappability. No, this is a deeply embodied faith, a deeply emotional faith. We are incarnation people, after all.
This story appears in all the gospels, but John places it here—right before the entry into Jerusalem. Jesus and his friends have gathered at the house of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. It is likely a momentous night—perhaps the first dinner they’ve shared since Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead. What a tender meal this is. The barbecue where your loved one comes home from the hospital. The potluck after the final surgery. The first dinner with friends after being apart for so long.
And while that miracle stirred up belief among his followers, it also riled up the local authorities. Ironically, the resuscitation of Lazarus triggered deadly opposition—raising people from the dead is the kind of thing that can get you killed. In a stunning turn of events—a pattern we will see played out over and over again not just in scripture, but also in our Christian life—is that life necessarily involves death. They are not polarized forces, repelled by one another, but rather, they are dance partners—ever interlocked in a passionate embrace.
So both joy and dread hang heavy over the night. Jesus has set his face like a flint toward his fate in Jerusalem. He doesn’t know exactly what awaits him there, but he gets the gist of it. And the disciples likely feel the electricity in the air, too.
And as they break bread and fill their cups to the brim, in comes Mary not with more hummus, but with a jar of perfume, the jar of perfume. She gets on her knees and pours it out on Jesus’ feet, the entire pound, and washes his feet with her unbound hair. The room fills with the fragrance of death, a fragrance that was likely still lingering from when the sisters had anointed their brother’s body for burial.
Judas, likely the most practical one in the room, is mortified and for lots of good reasons. First of all, we are eating dinner, ma’am. This is not the time. The time for foot washing was when everyone arrived, and that was the servant’s job.
Second, are you out of your mind? What if the neighbors look in the window? Jesus is already drawing too much negative attention—we don’t not want people thinking this is some kind of death cult.
And finally, Jesus is not dead, okay?? He’s very much alive and we’d like to keep it that way! Why are you anointing him with the spices of burial? This thing is just getting started—what are you doing? You must be out of your mind.
Now, according to John, Judas’s concern for the funds for the poor is not as altruistic as he would have us believe. But this concern that if we were just going to waste this bottle of perfume, we might as well have sold it to help the poor is not that misguided. He’s got a great point. He has been paying attention to Jesus’ teachings.
This story raises a lot of thorny issues. Like Jesus quoting Deuteronomy to Judas: “The poor will always be with you.” The rest of that scripture says, “Therefore I command you to be openhanded.” Jesus assures Judas that his inclination is right—we must always be openhanded to the poor. The call to care for the poor never ceases.
And yet, Jesus also says the hard thing: Mary has kept this anointing perfume for his burial. She sees what the disciples either miss or refuse to see: that even as they are preparing for his triumphant entry into Jerusalem, he is also preparing for his death. It’s inevitable, we know. But I wonder about the impact this statement had at dinner that night. The weight of the evening hanging thick.
I wonder if in dinners that would follow Jesus’ death, if the disciples would think back to this one. I wonder if their muscles would tense, their hearts would race, their stomachs turn, with their bodies holding a painful memory, the most painful. I wonder if their stress cortisol levels shot through the roof, trying to shoot so high to heaven in an attempt to rewrite history. I wonder if the smell of perfume made them paralyzed.
This fleshy, visceral time in the church year, though painful and awkward, especially in our Western etiquettes of touch and personal space, is a gift. It reminds us that we are not mere souls in a body. We are bodies. Our bodies are us. Our entire experience of the Divine is through our bodies. Through our senses, our brain chemistry, the lobes of our brain dedicated to memory and emotion and instinct. We smell love and feel safety through our bodies.
And what we have learned through psychology and neuroscience, particularly related to trauma, in the past few decades is that our bodies remember things in a way our minds don’t. It operates outside of logical and rational thinking. It’s why when we hear a loud sound, we may realize it’s just a truck but our heart and our endocrine system that makes us sweat and emit stress hormones takes a little longer to settle.
It’s why war veterans grapple with PTSD—their whole bodies responding to stimuli, real or imagined, as if they were still in the war zone.
It’s why black Americans have higher rates of heart disease and cancer—because of the daily stress of living with systemic racism.
I wonder if Judas’s response that night was body memory. Perhaps he had had encounters with the Roman police or the religious leaders frightened by the oppressive government that made him shake at the sight of Mary’s offering.
But…our bodies do not only hold trauma. They also hold wisdom—a wisdom that stands outside of our rational minds and ardent piety.
Consider your body’s response when you take a walk outside or simply sit on a boat or in a garden. How your heart rate slows. How you feel more peaceful. I wonder what your body might be telling you in those moments.
And there is also the way things like illness, ailments, and birth can reveal wisdom in ways that cannot be learned in Sunday School or in book studies.
Consider Paul’s thorn in his flesh! This bodily experience taught him something about grace that none of his rabbinical studies could.
Our bodies are sending messages all the time if we would only pay attention.
Our culture has often been suspicious of the wisdom bodies have to offer, considering it the whim of women and the disabled and people of color. But the table we gather around each week is the table of a broken body and poured out blood. Our savior came from the womb of a lowly woman. It was women who would be carrying spices to care for his body that would discover and spread the news of his resurrection.
And it is a woman who anoints Jesus in this story, and anoints him specifically for a death he has not yet endured. What can we learn from this embodied moment? What is the sensuous wisdom of this event? A wisdom that transcends the most practical and logical arguments of the day?
Mary pours out this perfume, essentially wastes it. It’s as if the message that registers in the nostrils of those there is this: Do you not understand? I am offering to God and that means it is going to cease to be useful for the rest of us. This gift I offer Christ is now Christ’s. It will not save him. It will not go to our benevolence fund or pay our water bill. But it is beautiful and it is poured out now.
What we will see over the next two weeks is that our life is a pouring out. It’s a gift given to God. Our primary function in life is not to be useful or productive or efficient, though those are not inherently bad things to be.
Our primary role in life is to be a fragrant reminder of Christ’s all-consuming, literally life-giving love. A love that is not afraid of death. A love that is not embarrassed. A love that is for you and is as real as the flesh on your bones and the blood pumping through your veins.
It is a love that does not fully register on a cognitive level, but in our bellies, in the flush of our cheeks, in the taste of potluck dinners and the embrace of a beloved. And it’s a love that abides unto death.
It’s a love that kisses broken bodies, sick bodies, oozing bodies. It’s a love that wipes the forehead of the paranoid minds, the despairing minds, the forgetting minds.
It’s a love that speaks to our hunger deep in our bodies, cradles us like babies under her wings, is not afraid to get in the manure and muck of our lives to help us live, and it’s a love that is always scanning the horizon for us, waiting to cloak us in mercy.
The Gospel of Jesus changes all of our senses.
May we receive this love with all our heart, soul, body and mind. Amen.
Stewardship Moment
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church: Venmo, giving online, or the offering plate. I also invite you to bring nonperishable items for our Little Free Pantry. The collection shelves for the pantry are in the Fellowship Hall right outside the kitchen.
The deacons are going to hand these plates over during our final song, starting at the front row and they just to need make their way to the back where a deacon will collect them. You can drop your offering, an “I gave online card,” or an information card.
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 morning comes from St. Teresa of Avila:
“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks with compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which Christ walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which Christ blesses all the world. Yours are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ has no body now on earth but yours.” Amen.