Welcome
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 an Advent coloring page and crayons for children to participate in worship as well as a designated area in the back for families of little ones who need to move around with a box of quiet toys and crafts for children and their grownups to pull from. 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.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
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.
If you did not get an Advent kit last week, be sure to grab one on your way out today. If you’re watching online and have not received one in the mail, please contact us through FB or the church office so we can get one to you.
Thanks to everybody who helped with Christmas on Main Street yesterday! From putting stickers on ornaments, assembling volunteers, and passing out ornaments, we are so appreciative!
Today, immediately following worship, we will have our annual congregational meeting to approve the budget and other decisions proposed by the Board. The meeting will be in-person and on Zoom (the Zoom information is in the comments), so please join us.
Tomorrow night, the annual DWM Christmas Party will take place in the Fellowship Hall at 6 PM.
Next Wednesday, December 15 at 7 pm in the sanctuary, we will have a special Advent service dedicated to joy, our Joy as Resistance service. Joy is a spiritual practice—it is a call for us to boldly trust in the grace all around us. So during this service, we will engage in whimsy and delight, singing the most joyful carols and using all of our senses to say yes to the grace of Christ. We invite you to join us! There will be transportation available for those who cannot drive in the dark, so if you will need a ride, please contact us and let us know.
Order forms for poinsettias are available in the church office and in your bulletin. You can purchase a poinsettia for the church sanctuary or you can do a virtual poinsettia, which means your donation goes to the general church budget. Poinsettia are traditionally purchased in memory of a loved one. They’re $10, and you can drop by the church office or call or email secretary@azlechristianchurch.org to order them remotely.
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 Advent series today: Less Is More. We will be examining peace from the prophet Malachi’s point of view.
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: You, child, will be called a prophet of the Most High, for you will go before the Lord to prepare the way.
All: You will tell God’s people how to be saved through the forgiveness of their sins.
One: Because of our God’s deep compassion, the dawn from heaven will break upon us,
All: to give light to those who are sitting in darkness and in the shadow of death, to guide us on the path of peace.”
(Luke 1:76-79)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Today, we mourn the loss of our brother in Christ, Harlan Tidwell, who passed away earlier this week. His memorial will be held on December 20 at 10 AM at Alexander’s Midway Funeral Home in Springtown. May his memory be a blessing.
We also hold in prayer Eddie Weger, who is in the hospital after a heart attack.
Join me in prayer.
(From Walter Brueggeman’s “The Grace and Impatience to Wait”)
Most Holy One,
In our secret yearnings,
We wait for your arrival,
And in our grinding despair
We doubt that you will.
And in this privileged place,
We are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we
And by those who despair more deeply than do we.
Look upon your church
In this season of hope
Which runs so quickly to fatigue
And this season of yearning,
Which becomes so easily quarrelsome.
Give us the grace and the impatience
To wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,
To the edges of our fingertips.
We do not want our several worlds to end.
Come in your power
And come in your weakness
In any case
And make all things new.
We ask it in the name of the one for which we wait, Jesus, who gave us this prayer…
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
Malachi 3:1-4
See, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple. The messenger of the covenant in whom you delight—indeed, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts.
2 But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears?
For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap; 3 he will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the descendants of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, until they present offerings to the Lord in righteousness.
4 Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
“There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” That’s the first line of the book, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
The book of Malachi is beset with questions. In just 55 verses, there are 22 questions such as: How has God loved us? Has not one God created us? Where is the God of justice? How shall we return to God?
And from today’s text, two questions: Who can endure the messenger’s coming? Who can stand when he appears?
Malachi’s a funny little book in that it’s hard to place it on a timeline. Most people believe it’s at least 100 years after the Israelites have returned from their Babylonian exile. A complacency of their fate has settled in.
The religious leaders are forgetting their responsibilities and advancing their own agendas. The powerful and privileged are using their wealth to build more and more wealth at the expense of the poor and vulnerable. Laborers are defrauded, widows and orphans are oppressed, strangers are deprived of justice, and women are the object of violence.
And it’s hard to imagine that they’d be surprised that God calls them out on all this, but they are. Welcome to the prophets.
And while all of this is true, this is not the whole story. The Israelites are back home, it’s true. Hooray. But they’re under the thumb of the Persian empire, who extracted exorbitant tributes and crushing taxes from the people. Much like Rome will do in a few hundred years.
The priests and the powerful often shortchanged God in the Temple, and the regular folks were caught between these two loyalties: God or empire. Who gets what little we have? They had to ask. How could they fulfill their responsibilities toward God and neighbor when they live in the midst of an empire that demanded total allegiance? Was it even possible for them to live in an empire and at the same time be faithful to God? And of course, these are questions that don’t have a time stamp on them—we’re still asking them today.
There are some who figure out how to love God and neighbor and also live in an empire. Jesus, for one. But he didn’t live for long in this tension.
The ambiguity of when this crisis falls in Israel’s history allows us to use some of its themes for our timeline. We know that our story is different from Malachi’s: for example, our political and sociological spheres are not equivalent to the Persian Empire, we are not a religious minority, and particularly as white Christians, we do not have the trauma of exile and slavery etched into our DNA like our black and brown siblings might.
However, the abuses Malachi is dealing with are not unique to Israel’s history, or even human history. Greed, exploitation, oppression of the most vulnerable: widows, orphans, immigrants, and women. You could put those problems in just about any time in history, including ours, and we’d be like, “Yeah, that sounds accurate.”
So perhaps instead of seeing Malachi as a blueprint, we might look at it like a stencil. We can trace its movements onto a drawing of our context, and perhaps we will find similar curves and lines that give us an idea of what Christ coming into the world means to us today.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer. I wonder which one the coming year will be. Will it be a year that asks questions or a year that answers?
We began the new liturgical year last week with hope. Hope, our first tool for preparing for Advent, is a muscle we must flex and exercise, especially in a world caught in a cycle of despair and destruction. However seriously we must take what is happening in the world and what the headlines reflect, hope tells us that it is never the full story of our time. It’s not the last word on us or God’s movement in the world.
What we call “the news” is necessarily focused, utterly and completely, on what is catastrophic, corrupt, and failing. And in our faithfulness to God’s reign being realized, we are called to bear witness to what is wrong and what needs healing and repair and our attention.
And we do this while also holding onto hope, with the practice of keeping our hearts and our imagination and our energy oriented toward what God is building, what God is creating, what we are walking towards.
For hope is an orientation toward the long view of things. It’s not zeroed in on just a moment in history, or a person, or a place, or an event, or a memory. Hope sees not only what was and what is, but also what can be, what is yet to be.
And today, we add peace to our preparations for Christ.
And like the surprising turn of hope being communicated through the apocalyptic, peace is communicated through a refining fire and harsh soap.
I’d like for peace to come in the form of a benevolent yet authoritative figure, like Tom Hanks or somebody, getting up in front of all of us and saying something like, “If everyone can be cool for like 10 minutes, I think war will be over and oppression will cease. Thank you for your cooperation.”
Or it’d be great if peace would come through an erasure of everything bad that has happened. Like the memory wiper from Men in Black, except for the whole world. Wipe the slate clean, return our memories to a state of oblivious bliss, and let us start over. We could be cool for like 10 minutes, right?
Or what if peace could be taken like a pill a la The Matrix. We gulp it down with some water, take a nap, and wake to find that everyone is suddenly cool with each other. And we walk around a little zombie-like, sure, but war would be over and oppression would cease to exist.
Unfortunately, peace doesn’t seem to be so easy. Peace involves some extensive preparation.
And, if like Malachi says, the messenger is preparing the way through a refining fire and a launderer’s soap, then that means the messenger is not starting over from scratch. He’s not throwing out the impure and dirty, but rather working to cleanse them. It seems he is reckoning with what is before him instead of hoping for the best.
And Malachi has these questions for us today: Who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears?
I wonder if the good news, the gospel, is coming to us today in the form of questions.
What if the peace of Christ is not an answer given to a world in conflict, but is a question asked of us?
Are we ready to receive this peace?
Are we prepared for what the leveling of mountains and raising of valleys will mean? That will be, after all, Mary’s song, her theological understanding of what her baby boy will do to us.
Are we really hoping that the first will be last and the last will be first? That the powerful will be brought low, the rich will be sent away empty, and the proud scattered? Can we endure it? Can we stand to see it?
Perhaps a better question would be how we respond to it happening today? When those things are true in microform, in small places, how do we receive that news? When these micro works of justice and love and peace are wrought, and it calls us to give up a piece of our comfort, our wealth, our privilege, what is our reply?
If in hope, we are orienting toward the long view of time, then in the name of peace, how are we orienting ourselves toward a more just and inclusive view of the world?
Sometimes good news asks difficult questions of us so that welcome answers can be given to others. This is what it means for the mountain tops and valley lows to meet.
And if we are truly people who are preparing the way for the gospel, for the good news of Jesus to come into this world again and again, news of great import of hope, peace, joy, and love, then that necessarily means our worlds will be rocked and reckoned with. We heard that in the text from last week: everything will change, Jesus says.
There are years that ask questions and years that answer.
What if peace is asking us the questionS, “Can you endure it? Can you stand it? Are you sure?”
And perhaps instead of being quick to answer, an action the gospels illustrate repeatedly as a foolish one, we might live the question posed to us.
In a very biblical way, we might count the cost of peace and make sure we fully understand it. We might keep watch, as our text last week encouraged us, paying attention to the signs and taking the long view of things. Yes, we want to be people of peace, instruments of peace. Yes, yes, Lord.
But are we? Can we be? Can we endure it? Can we stand it?
If we answer too quickly, we might not be able to live with our answer.
But if we are patient with these questions, leaving them unresolved for a time, perhaps we might learn to love them. We might come to see them as locked rooms or books written in a foreign language, begging to be discerned carefully and tenderly.
And maybe, someday, in the future, we will gradually live our way into the answer.
By letting ourselves be refined and washed, held by flames and suds, we might reflect the peace of Christ. We might find ourselves participating in the building of the world his mother sings about: valleys raised and mountains brought low.
There’s an interesting piece of trivia about the purification of metals. The refining process is not only for removing impurities, which is the point we usually take from texts like these.
When silver is refined, it is treated with carbon and charcoal, which prevents the absorption of oxygen, which results in a sheen. A skilled silversmith knows that the refining process is complete only when she observes her own image reflected in the mirror-like surface of the metal.
When we finally are reflecting the image of the Divine back, perhaps the question of peace might finally find an answer. Amen.
Stewardship Moment
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church: Venmo, giving online, giving box, offering plate.
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 to me after service or sometime this week.
Benediction:
Please rise in body or spirit for our benediction, the final song, and the Doxology.
Return now to the places of work and leisure,
Of tension and release,
Of demand and achievement.
We will return, glorifying and praising God
For all that we have heard and seen.
God’s peace and goodwill go with us all.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.