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. For our young ones, there is a coloring page and crayons for children to participate in worship as well as a designated area with toys in the back for families of little ones who need to move around and play to worship God. We believe that every age offers a unique perspective of the image of God, and 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:
If you’d like to join us for Sunday School at 10 AM on Sundays, you have a couple of options. There is an adult group meeting right now in the Seekers room that is reading Max Lucado’s Anxious for Nothing. There is another adult group beginning that will meet in the Heritage Chapel that will be studying Rachel Held Evans’ book, Wholehearted Faith. There is also a combined youth and children’s class that meets in the Parlor that is studying the big stories of the Bible.
This Wednesday, we will have our Ash Wednesday service in the sanctuary at 7 pm. Pancakes will be served outside at 6 pm preceding the service.
If you haven’t already, make sure to pick up a Lent kit for home at either entry table. If you need one mailed to you, please comment on the livestream feed or contact the church office.
If you’re interested in joining a team from ACC to partner with Refugee Services of Texas, please let email the church office or let Nancy know.
To keep up with all the life we live together here at Azle Christian Church, make sure you follow us on Facebook and subscribe to our weekly e-blast and monthly newsletter. To sign up for the eblast and newsletter, go to our website, azlechristianchurch.org, and subscribe. There is also a live calendar on our website where you can see what we have going on each month. You can also find us on Instagram and TikTok, both at @azlechristianchurch.
We conclude our Epiphany series today. Transfiguration Sunday is the apex of Epiphany. For weeks, we’ve caught hints and glimpses of the holy in Jesus’ early ministry. A dove descending. Water to wine. A fishing next bursting from a miraculous catch. But today, we see Jesus in unveiled glory. We see the view from the mountaintop.
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: The LORD is Sovereign; let the people tremble; the LORD is enthroned upon the cherubim; let the earth shake.
All: The LORD is great in Zion and is high above the peoples.
One: Let them confess the name of the LORD, the Great and Awesome One. The LORD is holy.
All: O Mighty Sovereign, lover of justice, you have established equity; you have executed justice and righteousness in Israel!
One: Proclaim the greatness of the LORD our God.
All: Fall down before the footstool of the Holy One.
(From Psalm 99)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
We add our prayers to the many across the world aching for peace and justice. This morning especially, we pray for Ukraine.
This week, we have seen unthinkable, unprovoked violence spread across Ukraine at the hands of Russian forces. We have looked helplessly on as individuals and as a country, sputtering in disbelief at a violence we have not seen in decades. One journalist called the invasion “anachronistic”—a literary term meaning that something belongs in a time period different than when is being portrayed. Not only might this invasion feel far away geographically, but it also feels detached from today’s reality of warfare. On the ground occupation? Bombing civilians? An dictator invading a peaceful sovereign country to usurp power? Our minds struggle to grasp the truth of it.
In my house this week, I have processed the news with two Eastern Europeans, my husband and my mother-in-law. My husband was born in 1985, just 4 years before the Soviet Union fell in Hungary. He grew up in a country trying to rebuild its identity and reestablish democracy. My mother-in-law grew up in Soviet-occupied Hungary. She tells stories of when Russian soldiers would come to town and she would dress as a boy to protect herself. You might remember in the 1950s when Hungarian Freedom Fighters attempted to overthrow Russia’s occupation only to be squashed down swiftly and violently. My husband’s family has Freedom Fighters in it, who had to flee the country in order to save their lives. And both of my husband’s grandfathers spent time as prisoners in Siberian work camps—forever altered by the torture and inhumane treatment they endured there.
This week, Hungarian news outlets played in our house constantly. We heard from friends and family in Miskolc, my husband’s hometown, which is about an hour outside of Ukraine, who said goodbye to Ukrainian friends, colleagues, and teammates as they left Hungary for Ukraine for military service. We heard from friends who worked in hospitals preparing for the overflow of war injuries from Ukraine. We were sent videos of military helicopters flying over his cousin’s house. We processed how generational trauma—the kind that gets embedded in DNA, in fight or flight responses, and in family dynamics—might be bubbling to the surface in his family, in other Hungarian families, in Ukrainian families, in families all across Eastern Europe—all who know what it means to be occupied by the Russian military.
I share all of this with my husband’s permission to say that the war unfolding may feel far away in a lot of ways, but it’s not. Even if my husband were from Detroit or Phoenix, what is happening over there is pertinent to us right here. Because we are people of the table of Christ. An essential belief of our entire faith is that there is no us and them. There is only us—we are all together. We are inextricably connected. Our fates are bound up in each other. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” The Ukrainian people, the Russian people—we are all at the table together.
And in addition to the unthinkable violence, we have also seen incredible courage rise up in the Ukrainian people and leaders. We have a seen an unflinching resolve in the face of a brutal dictator. We have seen unwavering commitment—the kind that later generations will read about it history books.
And we pray for courage of the same stuff so that we may live into our calling to be people of both justice and peace, of solidarity with the suffering, of lovers of what is good.
One of the most powerful disciplines we are called to as Christians is to bear witness. To not look away. To keep watch and to listen. To remember what we have seen and heard in front of God.
There have been a lot of meaningful prayers written for Ukraine this week.
But today, for our prayer together, I want to return to scripture. The Chief Rabbi of Ukraine has invited Christians and Jews alike to pray together Psalm 31.
I had initially planned a prayer from Howard Thurman, a black liberation theologian from the 20th century. I will begin with a few lines from that prayer because it is incredibly appropriate for this time. And then we will go on to pray parts of Psalm 31, knowing we add our prayers to Christians and Jewish people alike. And then we will end with the Lord’s Prayer, like we always do.
Join me in prayer.
“Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Thy altar!
War and the threat of war has covered us with heavy shadows,
Making the days big with forebodings—
The nights crowded with frenzied dreams and restless churning.
We do not know how to do what we know to do.
We do not know how to be what we know to be.
Our little lives, our big problems—these we place upon Thy altar!” (from Howard Thurman)
From Psalm 31, we pray on behalf of the Ukrainian people:
In you, Lord, we have taken refuge;
let us never be put to shame;
deliver us in your righteousness.
2 Turn your ear to us,
come quickly to our rescue;
be our rock of refuge,
a strong fortress to save us.
3 Since you are our rock and our fortress,
for the sake of your name lead and guide us.
4 Keep us free from the trap that is set for us,
for you are our refuge.
5 Into your hands we commit our spirit;
deliver us, Lord, faithful God.
6 We hate those who cling to worthless idols;
as for us, we trust in the Lord.
7 We will be glad and rejoice in your love,
for you saw our affliction
and knew the anguish of our soul.
8 You have not given us into the hands of the enemy
but have set our feet in a spacious place.
9 Be merciful to us, Lord, for we are in distress;
our eyes grow weak with sorrow,
our soul and body with grief.
10 Our life is consumed by anguish
and our years by groaning;
our strength fails because of our affliction,
and our bones grow weak.
11 Because of all our enemies,
We are the utter contempt of our neighbors
and an object of dread to our closest friends—
those who see us on the street flee from us.
12 We are forgotten as though we were dead;
we have become like broken pottery.
13 For we hear many whispering,
“Terror on every side!”
They conspire against us
and plot to take our life.
14 But we trust in you, Lord;
we say, “You are our God.”
15 Our times are in your hands;
deliver us from the hands of our enemies,
from those who pursue us.
We ask it in the name of our brother and redeemer Jesus, who taught 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
Luke 9:28-36
28 Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. 29 And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. 30 Suddenly they saw two men, Moses and Elijah, talking to him. 31 They appeared in glory and were speaking of his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.
32 Now Peter and his companions were weighed down with sleep; but since they had stayed awake, they saw his glory and the two men who stood with him. 33 Just as they were leaving him, Peter said to Jesus, “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah”—not knowing what he said. 34 While he was saying this, a cloud came and overshadowed them; and they were terrified as they entered the cloud. 35 Then from the cloud came a voice that said, “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to him!”
36 When the voice had spoken, Jesus was found alone. And they kept silent and in those days told no one any of the things they had seen.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
There’s always more than one side to a story, or so the saying goes. Like the many sides of a mountain, with its curves and clefts, make up just one mountain, the many sides of a story, though different in its curves and secret places, make up just one story in the end. Maybe we should hear some of the sides out, for the sake of perspective.
Let’s start with the mountain. It was an ordinary day for the mountain that transfiguring day. Now, mountains don’t experience days the ways humans do. Time moves much more slowly for them. They learn to wait for what they need. That’s not to say they’re unchanging—it’s just that change takes thousands, hundreds of thousands of years to really display a discernible difference. Mountains don’t do anything in a hurry.
And mountains communicate in a nonverbal, sensuous way. They may not shiver under a human’s touch, but they do register our steps, our stakes in the ground, our borrowing and stealing of its foliage. They may not speak words, but they do communicate. They may not have ears to hear, but they do know how to bear witness. The edges of their ridges, the grooves of their sides: they tell a story if we only learn to read it.
And the mountain had seen a lot in its time: wildfires, thunderstorms, devoted pilgrims and wily bandits. It had snuggled under a blanket of snow and been encased in a tomb of ice. It had soaked in the brilliant rays of the sun and withstood the unpredictable winds of high elevation.
I give you the scope of the mountain’s experience because that day when four men trekked up it was not initially a day to remember.
The mountain does not remember their names not because they were not memorable, but because mountains don’t identify humans by names, but by imprints.
The leader, who we know by the name of Jesus, tread reverently up the path, as if his feet were kissing the ground in salutations.
The other three men, who we know by the names of Peter, James, and John, stomped up the mountain heavy-footed. Some mountains might feel like this heavy-footedness was disrespectful, but not this mountain. She thought the heavy-footedness communicated heavy-heartedness, a gait of someone carrying a difficult burden.
When they arrived at the top, tickling the head of the mountain with their toes, she remembers their knees pressing into the soil. The mountain had always thought it was strange that humans differentiate communication with the Creator from the other parts of their lives. She simply was, and thus was in communion with the Great Holy Mountain. But humans seemed to have a more complicated relationship to the Great Holy Mountain. She had spent centuries, millennia even, trying to understand if this was the Great Holy Mountain’s doing or the humans’ doing. She is still contemplating it today.
Now she can’t fully explain what happened next. Suddenly, there were more feet on the ground than before. A cloud presided over the space. And then the mountain heard the voice of the Great Holy Mountain. It was unlike any way she had heard it before, except for that one time many years ago with the man we know as Moses, but she knew that resonance anywhere.
A shift occurred in the world of humans soon after. The mountain has been paved in places since, has weathered countless more storms, and seen its landscape change in beautiful and terrifying ways. But that time during her life was distinct. She thinks about it often.
But what about those humans?
John’s version of the story is a little different than the mountain’s. He had been traveling with Jesus for awhile. He had recently seen Jesus feed five thousand people with just a few loaves of bread and a few fish. John had been sent out to drive out demons, heal the sick, and tell of the coming reign of God.
Recently, Jesus had asked them what people were saying about him, which was surprising since Jesus didn’t really seem to care at all what people thought of him. But then he followed it up with a question that pierced John’s heart: who do you say that I am? Peter, ever the one to speak first, answered, “God’s Messiah.” And that was that.
John had stayed up late at night thinking about that. Messiah? I mean, he guessed he had been thinking along those lines, but if felt different to say the word out loud.
And then about a week before, Jesus had started talking about his impending death.
This was perplexing to John. Things had just gotten started. It felt like Jesus was finally getting some traction. But then.
Jesus kept going and started talking about their death. Not just that he would die. But they would too.
He wasn’t musing about the inevitability of mortality that falls on all, but rather, he was speaking of death as a way of life. That in order to save their life, they must lose it, whatever that means.
So needless to say, when Jesus invited a few of them to hike up the mountain with him, John agreed immediately. He planned to ask Jesus some follow-up questions on those Messiah and death conversations. That is, if he could get a word in around Peter.
But it turned out that John would have more obstacles to asking Jesus his questions than Peter’s relentlessness.
Because just as they started to pray, Jesus’ face changed. It was like he was glowing from the inside out—the likes he had only heard about around the dinner table when his grandfather started talking about Moses. And almost as if John’s brain had manifested it, there was Moses standing in front of him! And the prophet Elijah, too! Surely he must be dreaming, he had thought in his grogginess. The men were standing with Jesus talking about an exodus, but not the one Moses was associated with. A new one.
And then Peter, of course spoke up, and offered to build dwellings for all three of them. John rolled his eyes and tried to shush him, but secretly, John was just mad he didn’t think of it first.
But in the end, no one even acknowledged Peter. A cloud had come over them and John could have sworn he had heard someone speak from them. He couldn’t make out what was being said, but he knew it was about Jesus. And then when he turned his attention back to the ground, Moses and Elijah were gone. It was just Jesus there.
Was this what always happened on mountain weekends with Jesus? Did mysterious, fantastical events always occur? Did one’s brain always get jumbled up in confusion only to find at the end Jesus standing there alone?
John had spent a lot of time thinking about that day. Peter had offered to build those tents, but that clearly wasn’t the appropriate response for the moment. But why not?
Were mountaintop experiences for validation or for clarification? Were they supposed to soothe the disciples’ concerns or challenge their notions about who Jesus was? John couldn’t figure it out.
He hadn’t told anyone about it. He hadn’t even talked with Peter and James about it. He could scarcely believe it himself.
The prophet Elijah remembers the day differently.
He had felt the cosmic rumbling of Jesus’ incarnation deep in his being, so it felt right that he would find Jesus and Moses on the mountain. Elijah remembered the stories his parents told around the dinner table about Moses and the deliverance from Egypt. How out in the wilderness, on the precipice of life anew for the Hebrew people, Moses had gone up a mountain himself, received a word from God and came down with his face aglow.
Elijah wondered if the disciples remembered that story when they saw Jesus’ face aglow, too, up on that mountain. He hoped so. He really was rooting for them.
Now Elijah had interacted with all sorts of people during his life—the widow from Zarephath, who had needed help for her and her son to survive. King Ahab’s people—yeesh—with whom he had gotten in a Whose-God-Is-Bigger match on Mt. Carmel,. This wasn’t his first rodeo on a mountain.
But he had always felt a special connection with Moses and now Jesus. Maybe it was because he knew, in the way that time in God’s hands is both pinched and stretched out, that it was because they all had mysterious departures from earth.
Moses, who died before entering the Promised Land, had the most normal death of them all, but no one could ever find his bones. Where had they gone? Where had he gone?
And Jesus would go on to be crucified, a most heinous way to die, but then he would rise from the dead and ascend to the heavens.
And of course, his own departure. In a fiery chariot into the sky, or so the story goes. He’ll never tell what really happened.
He remembers that transfiguring day fondly, excitedly chatting with the others about the exodus—what the disciples would know as the coming reign of God. He wished he could have stayed a little longer to dream with Moses and Jesus. Based on Peter’s offer to build them all tents, the disciples wanted that, too. But he sensed as the clouds rolled in and he heard the Holy One’s voice that his time was up.
He really had hoped the three disciples with Jesus that day would understand what was happening, the weight of glory in that moment. But he knew from what came after that they didn’t, at least not until it was too late. Peter denied Jesus. They all abandoned him at the cross and kept trying to make the kingdom a usurping militaristic government, which is never the way of God. None of them would talk about that mountain day again. Though the mountaintop experience is often glorified in faith, it didn’t seem to change any of them in the long run.
And look, Elijah knows that seeing as how the details of his departure from earth are fuzzy at best, he understands he is not the best candidate to lecture others about the way of dying. He knew that the descent down the mountain was a fateful one for Jesus. Jesus would head to Jerusalem to face his death, and just a week or so after talking to the disciples about losing their lives to find them.
How Elijah had wished that the men could see that unveiled faces and hear creation’s groaning—all of the things present in that moment on the mountain—were lights along the way into the valley of death. Lanterns they could carry. They were a vision of what was to come, of what was already becoming.
He wished they could see that true faithfulness, the kind Jesus was trying to get at with his talk about death, was not freezing a moment or seeking to stay on the mountain forever away from real life. But it was carrying with them what they found on that mountain with Jesus as they go into the valley.
It is time now for us to descend. We turn our faces toward Jerusalem this week, carrying what we have witnessed as a hope for what is to come.
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.
May we receive this gift of astonishment anew each day,
Trusting that the God who surprises us is the God who will sustain us.
May our wonder turn into worship, and may our worship lead us down the mountain with Jesus, ready to continue his work here and now.
Amen.