Call to Worship
Good morning! I’m Pastor Ashley. 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. There is also a nursery available. We know that the energy and spirit of children can be different than adults and we consider that a gift.
There are information cards in the pew in front of you—if you are a guest, or 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.
For those watching online or for those who would like to follow along, our liturgy for every service is posted on our website before the service begins.
Sunday School is at 10 AM each week. We have two adult classes—one in the parlor, and one in the seekers’ room. We have an older kids class that meets in the MUB, and a younger elementary class that meets behind the sanctuary.
Immediately following service, DWM and all those interested in joining the Disciples Women Ministry here at Azle are invited to the fellowship hall for a brief meeting about this year’s activities.
Board Meeting is this Wednesday at 7 PM on Zoom.
There is a congregational meeting immediately following service next Sunday. It will be very brief, but your presence is requested for a vote concerning some property the church owns.
Food Hub starts back up again this month. If you’d like to help pass out groceries, you can join a group from church in the Fellowship Hall on Saturday, January 28.
You can find all this information in your weekly eblast, on Facebook, in the insert in your bulletin, and on our calendar on our website.
This past Tuesday marked my second year anniversary here as your Senior Pastor. This past year has been marked by finding our new normal. We reestablished things that had been done prior to COVID like sending kids to camp and partnering with the Methodist church for Holy Week. And we also established new traditions like our Bible and Beer Bible Study and Animal Blessing. Thank you for serving in ministry alongside me for another year.
Today, we begin a new series: Leaving Nazareth: An Epiphany Series on Encountering the Unfamiliar.
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: I waited patiently upon you, O Lord; you stooped to me and heard my cry.
All: You lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay. You set my feet upon a rock and made my footing sure.
One: You put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God; many shall see and stand in awe and put their trust in the LORD.
All: O LORD my God, you have multiplied your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you.
One: I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart.
All: I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation.
(From Psalm 40)
Children’s Moment
Read Storybook Bible version of baptism.
Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Does anyone know who that is? He was a Civil Rights Leader and pastor who spent his life fighting for equal rights, which means that everyone—black people, white people, brown people, indigenous people—everyone has the same freedoms and protections.
We know that everyone having freedom and protection is a dream of God’s—it’s something that gets talked about all throughout the Bible. It’s part of the promise of the baptism: that all of our beautiful differences—our skin color, our language, our interests, our skillsets, our religions, the color of our eyes and hair—are equally valued. So today we’re going to read a book called God’s Dream by a man named Desmond Tutu, who also for everyone to have the same freedom and protection all the way in South Africa.
Read God’s Dream.
Let’s pray:
God, help us to be people who are not afraid to do the work for your dream to unfold—help us to recognize our differences as holy and beloved and part of the complete image of You in humanity. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Sermon
Matthew 3:13-17
13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him. 14 John would have prevented him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” 15 But Jesus answered him, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he consented. 16 And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw God’s Spirit descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from the heavens said, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
Today we begin a new worship series called Leaving Nazareth. Next week, we will read the text when Jesus does indeed leave Nazareth to prepare for his ministry, but today, we read the text that prepares him to leave his hometown.
In the season after Epiphany, we walk alongside Jesus, observing his ministry, and we learn who he is beyond the baby in the manger and the man on the cross. The Epiphany, the day we celebrated last week with the gifts of the Magi, is the surprise that Jesus is for everyone. But the surprises don’t end there.
Just as Jesus leaves his hometown, he calls his disciples and invites them to leave the familiar, the place they know as home, and they embark on an adventure that we are still talking about after all these years. He preaches incredible things, he performs miracles, and before we know it, he is at the top of a mountain hearing from God.
As we journey together out of Nazareth, onto paths unfamiliar, we must ask ourselves: what can we learn about taking a step into the unknown in these stories and teachings of Jesus? Are we brave enough to take that first step? And then another? And then another?
In today’s story, we witness Jesus’ baptism. This story is told differently depending on the gospel, but here in Matthew, our text for this lectionary cycle, we get a curious and troubling encounter between Jesus and John.
If you remember, the text that precedes this one is where John calls the religious leaders a “brood of vipers.” He is inviting people to come and be baptized and when the religious leaders line up, too, he is incensed. Who warned them of the coming wrath? He calls for their repentance. He says that they do not get to move forward without repairing what has been done before.
And then in today’s text, we see that Jesus also joins this line of those who want to be baptized, and John is taken aback, but for a different reason. He recognizes who Jesus is, having leapt in his own mother’s womb all those years ago, and said, “No, no, no. You’ve got it all wrong, Jesus. You don’t need to be baptized. I need to be baptized by you!”
But Jesus stops him and says, “Let it be so.” He utters the same words his mother did when the angel told her she was to carry the Son of God in her womb: “let it be so.” A holy consent that changed the world once, does so again.
John baptizes Jesus and the Spirit of God descends on him like a dove, like a peace offering, like a sign of hope to Noah on the ark, and says, “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” It’s like divine approval, like a coronation of sorts, and also, a foreshadowing of what is to come.
In this dramatic denouement, the scene closes. The story feels complete. A divine baby grown to be a man, baptized in the river and confirmed by God’s own self.
But as many of you know, baptism is not the end of the story. In fact, it is only the beginning. In Matthew’s gospel, the baptism of Jesus begins his ministry.
To be sure, it names his ministry, and that is a crucial piece in identifying who Jesus is, but we know as people who have lived long lives, that identity is never static. One’s identity grows and deepens as the years go on. This immersion into the river is just the beginning of a continual, persistent plunge into deeper and deeper waters throughout his life, just as it is in ours.
Many very smart people have wondered why Jesus was baptized. Why would Mathew name it as God’s will that Jesus be baptized to fulfill righteousness? If he truly was the Son of God, the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, what need does he have of repentance? Of forgiveness? John the Baptizer has got a point—we shouldn’t be baptizing Jesus, he should be baptizing us!
On August 16, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered a speech at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. It would be the last time he would address the SCLC before his death.
King was unpopular during his life, despite retroactive claims of support by many today. Earlier that year, he had delivered his famous speech at Riverside Church in New York City, condemning the Vietnam War, declaring it a war on America’s poor as they were most often the ones sent to fight and die, noting the hypocrisy of the powerful in America siding with the wealthy and powerful in Vietnam in the name of freedom.
He was unpopular for his racial justice work, and he was despised for his economic stances, yet he continued to speak boldly until his assassination.
In this speech to the SCLC, to a room full of religious leaders, he said, “…All of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power. There is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly. You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love….
What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”
You see, King was clear that those with power must join with love to implement justice, and that love must use its power to correct everything that stands in the way of beloved community.
Love is not a passive bystander phenomenon of sentimentality—it’s a radical movement of putting every resource in place to ensure that justice and flourishing are brought to all peoples, particularly those who have been marginalized, exploited, and harmed.
King goes on to say in this speech to a bunch of Christian leaders who I am sure were shifting uncomfortably in their seats, “This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action….Without realizing this, we will end up with solutions that don’t solve, answers that don’t answer, and explanations that don’t explain.”
Dr. King contends that mere talk of love means nothing—it’s just hot air being blown into the room. Action is needed to actually make real change. He says, “In other words, ‘Your whole structure must be changed.’ A nation that will keep people in slavery for 244 years will ‘thingify’ them and make them things. And therefore, they will exploit them and disempower people generally economically. And a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and it will have to use its military might to protect those investments. All of these problems are tied together.”
All of these problems are tied together.
One of my favorite quotes from King comes from his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” where he says, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”
Well-versed in Biblical and Christian tradition being a pastor himself, Dr. King knew that our fates are all tied up together. He knew that the white person’s soul was tied up in the treatment of black bodies. He warned that oppression was not a neutral act of any party, but that the oppressor is harmed just as the oppressed is harmed.
And because of this, those who oppress, those who look like the oppressors, those who benefit from centuries of oppression, must do active work to repair the harm not only for the sake of the freedom and flourishing and restoration of the black, brown, and indigenous folks in the Unites States, but also for the state of our own souls as white folks.
Dr. King never had any illusions about the difficult and challenging work justice and love are. He saw it clearly.And so, though this speech was given near the end of his life, we know that his work was a beginning for many, and he says to the room of well-meaning, love-bound, justice-seeking Christians:
“I must confess, my friends, that the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will still be rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. And there will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair.
Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. We may again, with tear-drenched eyes, have to stand before the bier of some courageous civil rights worker whose life will be snuffed out by the dastardly acts of bloodthirsty mobs. But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.”
He tells this room of Christians, “Let us realize that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it ends toward justice.”
When I studied not only Dr. King’s work, but also his sermons, in seminary, I was struck by what I perceived as his fatalism. This belief that he would die prematurely, that this work of justice would continue to be hindered by hate and violence and power without love.
And how could he not believe that? He had buried so many of his friends and coworkers in the cause. He read the death threats. He shielded his family from bullets and bombs and fiery crosses.
And he spoke often of not the words of his enemies, but the silence of his friends. His white, moderate friends who wanted to play the center, the middle, in an attempt to not the rock the boat or draw attention. But he warned them that this lukewarm approach would only aid those who wished to oppress and control. Neutrality is never neutral, but it swings power over to those who already powerful.
And King was clear-eyed about the bitter hard work that lay ahead, that still lays ahead before us, that is still ours to do as Christians, as white Christians who claim to love justice and advocate for true peace.
And I think perhaps King’s difficult words and warnings give us an insight into why Jesus insisted on his own baptism.
He was the Man of Sorrows and the Friend of Sinners. His joining the line of those who wished to be baptized, who knew of their need to repent and be forgiven, was a signal of solidarity with the sinners. With the poor. With the oppressed.
In Jesus, God’s own self comes alongside us, even to the point of joining us in this rite of repentance. Which means that all who follow Jesus are setting out on a journey of humility and solidarity, of confession and grace, the way of love and justice.
He signals that those who follow him receive the call as leaders, as shepherds, to be the first in line to repent, to confess, to repair.
So often, we hedge and fudge and make excuses for wrongs done. We have perfectly good reasons for why we did the wrong thing. We say, that wasn’t our intent, that wasn’t how I meant it.
But if we are being honest followers of the baptized Jesus, we should be quick to say, “I was wrong. This is what I did. I own the harm I caused. And now my priority is the well-being of those I have hurt, not my own image or my feelings or my privilege. But you, the one whom I have harmed.”
We should be the first ones to confess our wrongs, to own up to the ways we have fallen short, to be direct and specific, to join in this pattern of humility and integrity.
As Christians, as leaders in our community, we should be first in line to seek repair, to listen to the reparations asked for by those who have been harmed by us. This means in the context of interpersonal harm between two people.
This also means in the context of institutional and corporate harm such as the violence done to LGBTQ+ people by the church and Christians historically.
This means in the context of societal harm such as the historical and modern-day oppression and violence of black and brown people by primarily white people and systems created by white people.
Our baptism reminds us, just as King does, that we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in single garment of destiny. Our fates, our lives, our relationships with the Divine, are all caught up in one another.
The way we interact, the way we love and hate, the way we harm and heal, the way we wound and repair, all directly affect our own relationships with the Most Holy One.
Baptism reminds us that our initiation into a community that transcends time and space plunges us into deep waters. It is not something that we can merely dip our toes into. No, we must take a deep breath and immerse our whole selves in this work of repentance and repair.
Baptism promises us new life. But it always drowns us before it resurrects. Repentance and repair must comes before forgiveness and reconciliation.
Our work as followers of Jesus is solidarity, our work is joining the power we have with the love we have on behalf of the least powerful. Our work is to get in that line, to be the first in line to confess, to follow in the uncomfortable yet worthy way of our brother and redeemer, Christ Jesus.
Let it be so.
Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church. You can give online on our website, on Venmo, or in the offering plate as the deacons come by during our final song.
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.
Receive this blessing….
Lord God,
You revealed your Son in the waters of the Jordan
And anointed him with then power of the Holy Spirit
To proclaim good news to all people.
Sanctify us by the same Spirit,
That we may proclaim the healing power of the gospel
By acts of love and justice in your name.
Amen.
Podcast Blurb
We follow in Jesus’ footsteps in baptism. John the Baptist baptizes Jesus, and we, too, join in this community of faith through our own baptism. But baptism is not the end of a journey, but the beginning, and often, that journey is long and difficult. May we have the courage to be the first in line for repentance and confession, just as Jesus, who stood in solidarity with sinners, joined the line of those who wished to repent and confess and be baptized.