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!
We realize that you did not arrive here this morning on accident, that you have made you way to this place at this time purposefully. We honor the intention with which you have made the journey here whether virtually or in person.
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 will take the bread and drink the cup in remembrance of our most Gracious Host, Jesus. I invite you to participate as much or as little in our prepared liturgy as your spirit is willing.
The purpose of our time together each Sunday is to bring our hearts closer to the heart of God, so whatever brings your heart closer to God’s own heart, do that.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
We have included an accessible and relevant to our worship Bible study in your bulletin called Table Talk. Of course, you can move through it alone to prepare for next week’s worship, but we believe that just as writing scripture was a community endeavor, so is reading scripture, so we invite you to find conversation partners.
This Wednesday, on July 28, from 6:30-8:30 pm is our End-of-Summer Party. Food, games, music, and friendship to mark the symbolic end of summer.
If you missed a Sunday this sermon and want to catch up on the Sermon on the Mount, you can listen to our church’s podcast where we will share the scripture and sermon for each Sunday. Next Monday, we will release a bonus episode called Music Monday. On the first Sunday of month, you’ll hear me and our Worship Minister Nicole talk about the intersection of music and theology at Azle Christian Church. In this first episode, we talk about anthem selections for our upcoming series. If you’re subscribed to the podcast, the episode will drop right into your feed automatically. If you need help subscribing to a podcast, find one of us after service and we’ll help you! Find us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you wherever you get your podcasts.
Next Sunday, August 1, we will begin our new worship series entitled Homecoming: Stories of Return. And after worship that day in the chapel, we will do a guided prayer walk through the building as the work nears completion. I hope you’ll join us.
In the coming weeks, our building will be completed and we will have a few work days to get everything back in its place and get it prepared for reentry. Stay tuned for more information.
Mark your calendars for the last Sunday of September, September 26, we will have Dedication Sunday, where our worship service will be to dedicate our building in its new and restored iteration to the work anew.
We conclude our summer worship series: Jesus’ Greatest Hits: A Journey through the Sermon on the Mount.
Let us prepare our hearts for worship.
Litany of Faith
One: All your works praise you, O Lord. And your faithful servants bless you.
All: Your reign is an everlasting reign; your dominion endures throughout the ages.
One: The Lord upholds all those who fall and lifts up those who are bowed down.
All: The eyes of all wait upon you, O Lord, and you give them their food in due season.
One: You open wide your hand and satisfy the needs of every living creature.
All: O Lord, you are righteous in all your ways and loving in all your works.
Children’s Moment
In today’s last section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus gives us the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. He asks us think about how we want to be treated and then go ahead and do that for others. This way of thinking is something we call empathy. Raise your hand if you have heard that word before.
Empathy means sharing or understanding the feelings of others. One of the ways that we can try to understand others’ feelings and points of views is to think about our own. And remember that as much as we are thinking and feeling and experiencing the world, so others are too. You are trying your best every day, and so is everyone else, even when what people do doesn’t quite make sense to us.
I bought this book called I Am Human. It helps me think about my own experience in relationship to others so that I can better understand and empathize with others.
Read I Am Human.
Let’s pray:
Holy God, you are the ultimate empathizer! You created us and gave us Jesus, who knows exactly what it’s like to be a human. Thank you for going so far to understand and love us that you were willing to become like us. Help us become like you and go the extra mile in loving others. We love you, God. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen!
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
We celebrate with Susie and Mark Hiles for the birth of their newest granddaughter. Mom and baby are doing well.
Let’s pray.
Most Holy One whose name has been run through the mud too many times to count, God whose concern is less about altar calls and more about table invitations, Divine One whose name is more like a gasp of disbelief than an inscription on a throne, we admit that we have spent a lot of time praying. We know a lot of fancy words.
But despite Your abiding presence and our weekly attendance, You remain elusive. If only we could reach out and touch You, we think. If we only we could hear You call our name, just once, then we would not doubt. Doubting Thomas had a point, you know. At least he got to touch your wounds and examine your hands.
So we do our best to carry out Your work, to strive and struggle for the world You want, to usher in Your reign, the one of purity of heart and a unified community. We speak of welcome and mission, we pray for peace and love. We are like the widow knocking at the door, waiting for You to answer.
We know a lot of fancy words.
But God whom we thought was behind the door, we see now that You are the widow knocking. We see now that it is not only our work to bang on the door of justice, but it is also our work to open its door. To give You a fair hearing. To give You what you have been asking for, what You have been begging for right before our eyes.
We gasp Your name, Yahweh, in disbelief.
We know a lot of fancy words. We lay those aside today, and we pray the prayer our brother and redeemer Jesus taught us 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
Matthew 7:7-27
7 “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 9 Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? 10 Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask!
12 “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.
13 “Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. 14 For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.
15 “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. 16 You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? 17 In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. 19 Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 20 Thus you will know them by their fruits.
21 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. 22 On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many deeds of power in your name?’ 23 Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; go away from me, you evildoers.’
24 “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. 25 The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock. 26 And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. 27 The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its fall!”
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
Today, we conclude our journey through the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus’ Greatest Hits as we’ve been calling it. We’ve sung the songs of the beatitudes, walked down the Lord’s Prayer line by line, thought about how uber specific cultural examples Jesus uses speak to us now in our 21st century western world. And we finish with Jesus landing the plane of his sermon, and it’s a bit of a bumpy ride!
If we lean into the metaphor of songs that we’ve used for this series, we can look at this last stretch of the Sermon as a thematic album. It’s not quite the same song over and over, but there are common threads that run through it and ground it. Like take Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison album. For this album, he recorded his concert at Folsom Prison, and you can hear the inmates cheering and laughing in the background, booing the warden, you can hear an inmate being called to reception. It’s an imperfect recording but in the best way. And while he sings songs about prisoners, he also sings songs about love and dogs, making jokes right beside his more solemn songs so that while there’s not a single through line through the album, there’s a cohesion.
In the same way, this section of the Sermon on the Mount functions kind of like a live album. Let’s look at our set list:
Ask and You’ll Receive.
The Golden Rule.
The Narrow Gate.
Wolves and Fruit.
Lord, Lord.
House on a Rock.
This sounds like a Johnny Cash record. We just need “A Boy Named Sue” and “Man in Black” and we’ve got a complete album. So let’s take a listen this final album of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount collection.
In the first section, we read a text we are probably all familiar with. It’s even become a secular saying, “Ask and you shall receive.” Ask, knock, seek—all of these are prayer words in the Jewish imagination, so when we get to the part about our Father in heaven giving us good things, we see that this section is at least in part about prayer.
But we know from other parts of this sermon that we are the hands and feet of Jesus, that we are the ones who help bring about God’s will here on earth as it is in heaven. So that the prayer is not just a private moment between us and God, but it is an active, public endeavor as well. We pray and then we open ourselves up to the possibility that we might be the answer to the prayer. And we are called in this text to act boldly and persistently. To the share the needs we have and don’t stop until we find what we’re looking for. There’s an etiquette to this, right? Like we don’t barge in—we knock. We don’t demand, we ask. But we do this in anticipation of being answered and being given what we need.
And then we get to the Golden Rule. This rule is not unique to scripture—it appears in various iterations across religious texts from that time. But the way it is phrased in our religious text, in Matthew, is interesting because it doesn’t call for retaliation: it doesn’t say, “do unto others as they do to you.” And neither does it not call for reciprocity: “do unto others because they do to you.” Rather, its calls for us to take the initiative and do the good we hope will be done to us—it’s an acknowledgment of the mutual network of care that is the hallmark of the early church and the world God is making today.
In the songs about the narrow gate, the false prophets, and the tree bearing fruit, we hear similar refrains of admonishment. To stay sharp and attentive, to not assume that we are the ones who have got it right, to walk the line, if you will. Particularly when Jesus says that not everyone who says, “Lord, Lord” will get it, he is talking to the Very Religious People, those who feel like they are the faithful ones, the righteous ones, the right ones. It seems like he’s saying, “Beware. Because you might be missing it completely.”
And in this way, Jesus is inviting his listeners into mystery. There’s a sense in this passage that ultimately, everything will shake out in the end. Jesus’ answer to the question, “Who gets it?” is “Look at the fruit.” Look at the birds, look at the lilies, look at the fruit. Pay attention, Jesus likes to sing.
And we take heed of this final song in the Sermon, this warning of constructing our house on a rock rather on sand. It calls the listener to consider: what is it that will outlast? What is it that we put our hope in? What is it we think is God’s truth? And we hear this rock and sand discourse in light of the songs that came before it about it wide gates, bad fruit, and false prophets, knowing that many who think they’ve found a rock on which to construct their house are actually building on sand.
And I wonder if Jesus might be calling his listeners—the ones then, the ones who read this Sermon in Matthew, the ones listening today—to see not how we are different than those who construct their houses on sand, but rather how we are similar. Perhaps we are called to see our similarities with those who bear bad fruit and take the wide acceptable road and who say “Lord, Lord, look at all my flashy, fancy gifts,” so that we might continue the work of clearing away the chaff, of making the path clearer for the beloveds of God, and finding our way to the trees with good fruit.
“Consider the lilies,” we read last week. They don’t seek to dominate the field of flowers or aim to have the prettiest or brightest bloom. They just grow and find ways for life to persist. They reach for the sun and allow themselves to be pollinated by the bees that come by—allowing themselves to be changed by their interactions with creation for the purpose of growing.
And how do we do that? Today, as Azle Christian Church?
On our very first Sunday of this series, we read how the crowds had been following Jesus because of his healing miracles. They followed him up the mountain and settled in because they were hoping to get a miracle for themselves. In the 1st century version of healthcare, this was not a bad strategy. But instead of healing, they received an invitation.
In v. 24, as Jesus ends his sermon, he says that anyone who hears these words and acts on them will be like a man who builds his house on a rock. And this word, “act,” sometimes translated as, “do.” Comes from the Greek work, “poeia, “ which is where we get our word for poet.
So we can think of this last song as “Whoever hears these words, and “poets” them will be like the man who builds his house on a rock. The floods come, and the storms rage, but the house stands firm.”
And perhaps it stands firm because whoever poets the words of Jesus, whoever takes part in creating and bringing about the reign of God, has metabolized the words of Jesus. They have made his work their own, they have inhabited it as an artist does to create something particular for their time and place.
Because a poet is a person who takes words and does something with them. They make something personal and original out of words that we’ve heard a thousand times. So, in a way, Jesus is calling us to be poets. To make something out of these words he’s spoken.
The final song of the Johnny Cash album from Folsom Prison is a song written by one of the prisoners. It’s called “Greystone Chapel” and it’s about his freedom in God despite being a prisoner. He describes his own context: a small chapel in the prison where he has found the movement of God.
Jesus has given us a lot of poetry and stories. And now it’s our turn.
If we think about the history of Azle Christian Church as an album, we can assume that it won’t be the same song over and over again. But it is definitely thematic. And maybe there’s not one single through line but there is the cohesion because each song is in some way about following the Spirit’s movement.
What song will we write today? What poetry will we pen with our lives as a community of faith? What will we make with the words he has given us?
Oh, I hope our record is epic. I hope it is well-worn and beloved. But mostly, I hope it is a good representation of a collective of people who said yes to God over and over again. Who made something beautiful with what they were given. Who found ways for life to grow and persist in their corner of the reign of God. Who let themselves be changed, be baptized, be transfigured, be resurrected over and over again.
Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church. One way is through sharing your financial resources. There are many ways to do this: Venmo, giving online, giving box, offering plate.
We are going to pass the offering plates after the benediction. I’ll give the final blessing, and then we will seal the deal by singing the Doxology together before our final song.
I’m going to give these plates to the front pews and they just need to make their way back, facilitated by you all, and a deacon will collect it at the back. If they’re not all the way to the back by the end of the Doxology, just keep passing them as we sing 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 to me after service or sometime this week.
Benediction
Please rise in body or spirit for our benediction, the Doxology, and the final song.
Receive this benediction:
God of the mountain, when people ask us, “What’s the reign of God like?”
May we be able to answer:
It’s like a blessing, it’s a responsibility. It’s both the work of God and the work of us. It’s as gentle as a prayer and as mighty as the phrase, “Your kingdom come.” It’s like salt in food and a city on a hill. It’s like turning the cheek and reclaiming dignity. It’s like standing naked in a courtroom to expose injustice. It’s like the birds and the lilies.
It’s like a door that needs to be opened. It’s like a father giving his children a gift. It’s like a narrow gate that needs to be entered. It’s like a tree bearing good fruit. It’s like being known by God when everything is else stripped away. It’s like building your house on a rock and withstanding a storm. It’s like making beauty for a God who is beautiful. It’s like poetry. Amen.