Welcome
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you. And also with you.
We continue to pray for the loved ones of the over 300,000 people who have died due to COVID, for those who are sick now, and for the people who are caring for them. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.
If you have concerns you would like shared with our prayer ministry, please reach out to us through Facebook or email.
Join me in prayer:
O Divine One, your name of Yahweh is more like a gasp for air than it is a moniker. Your self-title of “I am who I am” is more of a movement than it is an identifier. Our scripture today says you are like a refiner’s fire or a cleaner’s soap. And it seems like if you could tell us who You are rather than what You are like, we could feel a bit more secure. If we could put some bones to You or look You straight in the eye, we might be able to relax.
But it seems as though we can’t look at You except for peripherally, and we can’t know You except for through metaphor. Even You—creator and energizer of the cosmos, we only know You through descriptions wrought by our ancestors in faith when they said you were “like a monarch, and a shepherd, and also a Lamb, and a parent, and a mother hen, but also a tabernacle, and a person, and a presence.”
Our language seems to be at once too much and not enough to describe You. And we can only get at You sideways, so to speak. We can only hover around like a moth to a flame when attempting to describe You, O Indescribable God, because You haunt us like a call in the middle of the night that we’re not quite sure we heard but we can’t get any sleep until we find out.
We’d like for you to sit still, but You are always on the move. You are Shepherd-Monarch-Parent God. But sometimes You are a Lamb-Servant-Baby God. And sometimes You are dead, while also being the God of the living, and no wonder Your Yahweh name is like a breath because sometimes it’s more like a gasp of exasperation.
Or perhaps, it is like getting to the end of our strength, our understanding, our grip, the far edges of our knowability, and it is like a gasp of surrender. That we have come to the end of ourselves. John of the Cross called you Nada for this reason—not that You are nil, but that You begin where everything we know and understand ends.
So Moving, Gasp of a God, help us language-oriented beings know You and be known by You as we enter the New Year. May our collective resolution be that we welcome the ways You come to us peripherally, the ways You reveal Yourself at a slant. May we heed this great call of discipleship, “to come and see.”
And so Holy One, we pray softly the prayer together that Jesus, our brother and redeemer, gave us to hold onto:
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
Some Things Never Change
Malachi 3:1-6
Some of you have had the pleasure of meeting my 6-year-old daughter Avery. I figure I only have a few years left of getting away with using her as sermon illustrations before she starts to tell me I am embarrassing her, so I try and take advantage of every opportunity. One of our favorite things to do together is have dance parties in the car. Our dances usually are brought to us by the music of Taylor Swift, the soundtrack from the Trolls movies, energizers she has learned from Family Camp at Disciples Crossing (or that I have taught her), and of course anything from Frozen. Our dance parties in the car almost always include her saying, “Mommy, put your hands on the wheel.” I may get a little too much into our parties, but I promise I am always safe. Just the other day we were running errands when a dance party broke out. As she laughed and danced in the backseat, I said a little prayer of gratitude and a wish for these moments to never change.
One of my favorite songs from Frozen II is “Some Things Never Change” which is sung by all the major characters in the movie. No, I am not going to sing it for you now, I will leave the singing up to Nicole. For those of you who have not seen Frozen II a dozen or two times, the song is about how some things change like relationships, seasons, and getting older but the love that is present will never change. The first chorus goes like this, “Yes, some things never change; Like the feel of your hand in mine; Some things stay the same; Like how we get along just fine.” They repeat the refrain, “I’m holding on tight to you” throughout the song.
I am enough of a realist to know there will be a season when my dance parties with Avery will change, but just like her friends in the fictional land of Arendelle teach us... some things never change and that brings me comfort. (Bonus points if you started signing in your head when you read my sermon title or as I was preaching.)
We find ourselves in the middle of this searching for comfort in the midst of change again. We are dealing with quite a bit more change right now. We are used to the calendar rolling over. The weather getting colder. Some of us may even celebrate these “normal” changes. But after the year we just had and the effects of COVID-19 still carrying over, I think some of us would like to just scream from the tops of our lungs, “Ok... we’ve dealt with enough change already!”
The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, a theorist who created doctrines about the constant change and flux in life, has been credited with giving us the now famous quote... “change is the only constant in life”. He wrote from Ephesus, the same place Paul wrote to, but he wrote some 500 years before Paul wrote. His words ring truer to me today. The only thing I could count on this past year is that I knew my tomorrow could change quicker than it ever had in the past. I wait for the email from Avery’s school to tell me there was a positive case in her classroom which would require me to be a first-grade teacher from home. (Thanks be to God that email has not come yet.) That change is minor in comparison to the deaths and lives changed during this pandemic.
But change is a constant for us, isn’t it? You all here at Azle Christian Church knew a major change was on the horizon. You had done the work to prepare yourselves for that change, made announcements, adjusted job titles, and in 2020 fashion that timeline accelerated and you found yourselves needing to make more changes. You all have stepped up and met the change with grace.
Thanks be to God we have scriptures to turn toward in these times. Because I don’t think where we are as a society, where you are as church, is too far off from where the people of Malachi’s day found themselves. Sidenote... I would be surprised if any of you thought you would hear sermons from Nehemiah and Malachi when you heard Andy Mangum and I were coming to preach. To be honest, I thought I was going to be way out in left field when I told him I was using this text and then he came back and said he was thinking Nehemiah. I guess that is God at work.
Back to the text. Andy gave you a great look into where the people found themselves in 5th century BCE. This was after the Hebrew exiles had been allowed to return home from captivity in Babylon, and about a generation or so after the temple had been rebuilt in Jerusalem. It is actually possible that Malachi knew Nehemiah and/or Ezra because he lived in Jerusalem during the same period they did. One Aramaic translation of the book of Malachi even suggests that Ezra could have been the anonymous author of this book of prophesy.
Because of this, chronologically speaking, Malachi should be much earlier in the Hebrew Bible. But our Old Testament is organized by literary style, and so Malachi is grouped with the books of “Minor Prophets” that finish out the Hebrew Bible. This is actually the last book in the Old Testament. Many Christians believe that is fitting because of Malachi’s prophecy around the “preparing of the way”. If you were reading the Bible from cover to cover you would read the last of Malachi’s 4th chapter and then turn the page to Matthew’s account of why Jesus is the Messiah because of his genealogy. There is danger in that though. As my New Testament professor would regularly remind us in class, we need to be careful not to put on our Jesus goggles when we read the Hebrew texts. They spoke of a coming Messiah; they did not speak of Jesus.
No matter where Malachi is placed in our Bible, it is clear he was writing during a time of great change. Worship had become casual. People were distracted by other things so they did not give their best to God. And yet, God still kept God’s promise. “For I the Lord do not change;” Malachi 3:6 tells us. The God that was present in the lives of Malachi’s day, is the same God that was present in the late 1800s when this church was founded, is the same God that will lead Rev. Dargai, and is the same God that will keep the promise of the future.
Or as Billy Graham said it, “We need to realize that one thing will never change, and that is God. God is the same today as God was ten million years ago, and God will be the same ten million years from today. We are like grasshoppers; we appear and hop around a bit on the earth, and then we are gone.”
As followers of Christ, we are told to change. Christ said we must become like little children. A child is trusting. We must trust God no matter our changing circumstances. We are told to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. This means we learn the truths of God and then live and think accordingly. Our actions are a result of our thinking. We all will be faced with changes as we live and grow. We may not have control of circumstances, but we do have control of our attitude. We might grumble and complain our way through change, or better yet we will find comfort and joy in knowing that we serve a loving God who never changes. And because of that, we will rejoice in new beginnings and opportunities to serve.
Sharing Our Resources
This week, your generosity through the minister’s benevolent fund helped pay for a much-needed prescription and fill up the gas tanks of a couple of people down on their luck in our community.
I’ve been in awe of the faithfulness and thoughtfulness of this church during the pandemic, continuing to give even when we cannot meet in person, trusting in the behind-the-scenes work of God and keeping your neighbors in mind, be they part of our church, the city of Azle, or the broader world.
There are many ways to give—on Venmo, on our website, through text-to-give, or through analog ways such as a check. Every bit makes a difference in the lives of God’s beloveds.
Finally, if you or someone you know is in need of help, please get in touch with us so we can help.
Benediction
May the God who never changes
Anchor you, guide you, sustain you,
Protect you, comfort you,
And even transform you
Throughout the ever-changing changes of your life.