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!
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 will be another adult group beginning on February 13 that will be studying Rachel Held Evans’ book, Wholehearted Faith. There is also a combine youth and children’s class that meets in the Parlor that is studying the big stories of the Bible.
Many thanks to our Cabinet! We had a wonderful Cabinet Retreat yesterday!
On February 6th, we will have Community Care Sunday. One simple way to care for the transient neighbors who knock on our door is through small care packages that contain toiletries and snacks. On Community Care Sunday, we will assemble these care packs immediately following service to be available for distribution as needed. We invite you to bring travel size toiletries in the coming weeks leading up to that Sunday. A collection point is set-up by the sanctuary.
On February 13th, we will have a Super Bowl party—a Soup-er Bowl party. Come watch the game and bring a can of soup either to church or the game for our Little Free Pantry. Location TBD.
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 continue our Epiphany series today: Holy, Wholly, Holey, as we conclude our time with Jesus in his hometown synagogue.
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: In you, O Lord, I take refuge; let me never be put to shame. In your righteousness deliver me and rescue me; incline your ear to me and save me.
All: Be to me a rock of refuge, a strong fortress to save me, for you are my rock and my fortress.
One: Rescue me, O my God, from the hand of the wicked, from the grasp of the unjust and cruel.
All: For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth.
(From Psalm 71:1-5)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
(From Calling on God)
O holy nurturing Dawn of life,
The quiet epiphanies of late winter are all around us,
And we respond with gratitude and thanks.
Hear now the prayers we bring,
The words we share and the images that blossom in our hearts.
When all the world seems cold and foreboding,
It’s somehow easier to find the places where there doesn’t seem to be love enough to go around.
The holidays are long behind us now,
And we seem to miss their tinsel distractions
As we step out in the cold.
We watch as little signs of hope are tossed aside,
Like Jesus in his own hometown,
A voice for change and healing,
Rejected because it came from someone too familiar.
We want to hear that voice of Christ today,
Those promises that prophecy will be fulfilled,
But somehow it is often easier for us
To see the problem, rather than the Gospel.
Frozen hearts are everywhere,
And miracles are hard to see,
And harder to believe.
But hopeful, invigorating Messenger of spring,
We bring our prayers for those in pain,
For those whose burdens keep them in the cold,
For those who sorrows flows like winter rain.
Hear now our prayers for faith, and hope, and love.
We lift our prayers as part of your body
Incarnate in this time and place,
The body of Christ, Emmanuel,
God among 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 4:21-30 (CEB)
21 He began to explain to them, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled just as you heard it.”
22 Everyone was raving about Jesus, so impressed were they by the gracious words flowing from his lips. They said, “This is Joseph’s son, isn’t it?”
23 Then Jesus said to them, “Undoubtedly, you will quote this saying to me: ‘Doctor, heal yourself. Do here in your hometown what we’ve heard you did in Capernaum.’” 24 He said, “I assure you that no prophet is welcome in the prophet’s hometown. 25 And I can assure you that there were many widows in Israel during Elijah’s time, when it didn’t rain for three and a half years and there was a great food shortage in the land. 26 Yet Elijah was sent to none of them but only to a widow in the city of Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 There were also many persons with skin diseases in Israel during the time of the prophet Elisha, but none of them were cleansed. Instead, Naaman the Syrian was cleansed.”
28 When they heard this, everyone in the synagogue was filled with anger. 29 They rose up and ran him out of town. They led him to the crest of the hill on which their town had been built so that they could throw him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the crowd and went on his way.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
I said last week that the text we read was only half the story. And today, we finish the story. So…
Previously, on Days of our Epiphany…
Long-lost beloved, Jesus, returns home after making a name for himself out on the open road. Was this the Jesus they remembered? Or had he become an enigma, a miracle worker and prophetic teacher? After a dramatic reading in the synagogue, he had the whole room captivated. Could the town be revived again with the hometown hero’s return? Or are things not as they seem? Will his return be full of emotional twists and turns, severing familial ties and resulting in his death? Will this story end on a cliffhanger? Find out on today’s episode of Days of Our Epiphany.
We pick up where we left off last week. Jesus has read the scroll of Isaiah: the Spirit of the Lord is upon him. His work is to preach good news to the poor, free the captives and the oppressed, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, which invokes the ancient concept of Jubilee, a blanket debt forgiveness and emancipation of the enslaved, essentially resetting society. He rolls the scroll up, hands it over, and sits down. And then, just as everyone thinks the Jesus they know and love is finished, Jesus pipes up, “Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled.” So far, so good. Sounds great. Looks like it will be a lovely Saturday morning at synagogue with this sweet reunion. The crowd beams with pride. They receive his words with graciousness. They whisper among themselves, “What a fine young man. Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” Think about Jesus’ origin story for a second here.
If Jesus would have just kept his mouth shut from this point forward, maybe this story, maybe his life story, would have ended differently.
If only.
This next scene is often seen as the synagogue taking an abrupt change of tone. That somehow, their unbelief, their lack of buy-in to Jesus’ mission, is what makes them rage with murderous intent.
But if we’re paying attention, it’s Jesus who changes the tone. Perhaps provoked by these whispers of claiming him as one of their own, of possessing him as any group does of the ones who grow up among them, Jesus turns around and confronts them. He anticipates their next step, of expecting him to perform the same miracles in his hometown that he did out on the road. If he will do it for all those on the outside, then surely, he will do it for the place from which he came.
He assures them that this will not be the case. That never is a prophet welcome in their hometown. Just as Elijah reached outside of his group to feed a widow, and just as Elisha reached outside of his group to heal a Syrian man, so, too, will Jesus reach outside for his mission.
I don’t know about you, but I certainly do not like for people to yell at me from a place of assumption out of seemingly nowhere, and this crowd of synagogue-attendees did not like it either. In fact, so the story goes, they ran Jesus out of town, to the edge of a cliff, so that the story does end on a cliffhanger of sorts. But Jesus somehow gets away.
It’s like watching a scary movie, and in the beginning the family is so happy, and they have a trusty dog and plans for the future. And you just keep hoping that they will decide to not go into that abandoned building after all. Or their dog will not investigate that weird sound out in the woods. If they just minded their business, maybe they could continue living happily ever after, a nice normal family life in a cabin in Pennsylvania with their dog who will not become a conduit or target of whatever evil might be lurking out there.
But alas, the family goes into the building. The dog investigates the sound. Jesus opens his mouth.
We know of course that this is an intra-Jewish conflict, and we are not Jewish. We’re Christians in the 21st century trying to make sense of an argument that Jesus was having with the synagogue, that the writer of Luke was having with his fellow Jewish siblings at the time of writing. So we tread lightly, knowing the assumptions we bring are tainted by time, Western culture, and our native tongue of Christianity. We try hard to avoid stepping onto anti-Jewish sentiment as we wade through this story, because our beloved Savior was a Jew. His followers were Jews. The early church was Jewish.
It seems strange to me that this story is split like it is in the lectionary. The first half that we read last week seems so hopeful. But the second half seems to steal all the sweetness away.
Reverend Barbara Brown Taylor tells of a time when she was at a retreat and the beginning exercise was to share about an experience when someone was Christ to them. Perhaps you have a story that comes to mind. People told stories of a friend being there in time of need. A stranger helping them in the middle of the night. A community surrounding them when they lost everything. The stories were ones of comfort and rescue. But then they got to the last person in the circle, who had a weird look on her face.
And she said, “Well, if I’m thinking of someone who was Christ to me, then I’m wondering who has told me the truth in such a way that I wanted to throw them off a cliff.”
Images of Jesus are all over this church. There are the figurines—his face indiscernible except for the recognizable contours of a nose or eyebrows. There’s the surplus of pictures in children’s books. There’s sweet baby Jesus in his mother’s arms in the painting in the hallway. There are a few historically inaccurate representations of Jesus with blue eyes, porcelain skin, and a 1970s mullet, that I like to call Disco Jesus. And then there’s a painting somewhere in this church, and I will not tell you which one, that I call the “I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed” Jesus.
Obviously, all our renderings of Jesus either on a canvas or in our imaginations are inadequate. Jesus, the Cosmic Christ, who reigns with God and was with God in the beginning of time, transcends our best conjurings of him. Even if we were to make a mosaic with all of our individual understandings, we’d still not get him right because he has a way of slipping through our hands, slipping through the crowds, slipping out of our possession of him.
And perhaps stories like today’s help give a more defined shape to the Jesus we know. He is not a mere gentle shepherd, who welcomes children and likes to go fishing with his friends. He is not just the devout boy who likes to spend all day studying the scriptures and being in the temple.
He is also someone who cuts to the heart of our most protected assumptions of him. The disconcerting truth about this second part of the story is that we are likely the modern day equivalent of Jesus’ ancient townspeople. We’re the ones who think we know Jesus best.
But what if this week’s gospel, the good news, is a call to disillusionment? What if it were a call to drop the scales from our eyes, to eat a meal with a familiar stranger, to open our door to a knock in the middle of the night, and suddenly see Jesus in a new light?
If we hear that knock in the middle of the night, the one in our hearts calling us to come and investigate what is out there, we might find that we are entertaining angels. Or, we might find that it’s a thief in the night.
But Jesus, the Good Shepherd, the Son of God and Most Human One, is also known as a thief in the night. He’s wily and slippery—always evading our attempts to pin him down and domesticate him for our purposes.
And I wonder if that’s what Jesus was getting at it with his abrupt change of attitude in the synagogue that morning. That in a way, he’s preemptively preparing them for what is to come. He is not Joseph’s son—it was a whole thing 30 something years before. He is God’s Son, and he has been anointed by the Spirit to effectively turn things upside down. And in the process of turning, everything gets jumbled up and dislodged and messy and out of place.
And he’s saying, this is the way to God getting everything God wants! I promise this is good news! It just may feel like getting hit by something or losing the stability you had taken for granted or seeing the world in a different, frightening light. This good news might make you so mad that you want to chase me off a cliff!
I’d like to think that at hearing the words of Jesus: “Spirit of the Lord, good news, year of the Lord’s favor, etc.” that I would nod our head enthusiastically and say, “Sign me up, Jesus!”
But in this presentation of a slippery, not-playing-it-safe Jesus, I’m afraid I’m more likely to be the one trying to grasp onto my previous iterations of him, of life before this upheaval. That I would demand constancy over curiosity, monotony over mystery, certainty over surrender. That I would even fail to recognize that it’s Jesus at all who is calling us out of our silos and our routines and our well-worn paths of faith. That suddenly, with my extinguished hopes, my suspicions, my fears, I might find the first cliff to shove them over in an attempt to ensure my own safety and survival.
But the good news is that always, always, Jesus will slip through our resistance, our facades, our denial, beckoning us toward the world-altering, soul-blooming, cosmos-expanding truth that will finally bring all of God’s children peace, comfort, and hope.
May we pause when we feel ourselves hurtling toward the cliff. May we allow ourselves to be disillusioned with our tightly held images of Jesus so that we might see the Son of God right before us, in our midst, saying, “Today, the good news is true!.” 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.
Holy God, you gather the whole universe
into your radiant presence
and continually reveal your Son as our Savior.
Bring healing to all wounds,
make whole all that is broken,
speak truth to all illusion,
and shed light in every darkness,
that all creation will see your glory and know your Christ. Amen.