Welcome/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 reality 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.
We invite you to Sunday School at 10 AM every week. There’s classes that meet in the Seekers room and the Parlor. There is also a combined children and youth class that meets in the MUB. Godly Play meets behind the sanctuary for our younger elementary students.
On August 14, during our Sunday School hour, we will have a Back-to-school Brunch in the Fellowship Hall. We’ll eat donuts, write cards to our students, and enjoy each other’s company before the school year begins. Emily Harden is heading it up. If you would like to help, please talk to Emily.
Your pastor is going on vacation, thanks be to God! My family and I will not only be out of town, but we’ll be out of the country starting tomorrow until August 18. You have three stupendous elders on call should you have any emergency. Their information is listed in your insert, will be on my out-of-office email response, and is in Realm.
To keep up with all the life we live together here at Azle Christian Church, make sure you follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Subscribe to our weekly e-blast and monthly newsletter on our website.
We begin our new worship series this morning—a tiny late summer series called One Thing to Tell You. Over the next three weeks, you’ll hear from me and two incredibly gifted guest preachers on the one thing we want to tell Azle Christian Church. On the fourth and final Sunday, August 21, we will do a lectio divina practice together, focusing on the question, “What is the one thing God wants to tell me?” I invite you to let that last question, “What is the one thing God wants to tell me?” to inform your listening over this entire series. Today, we dream a little bit together with one of our faith forebears, Jacob.
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: Give thanks to the LORD, who is good, whose mercy endures forever.
All: Let the redeemed of the LORD proclaim that they have been redeemed from trouble.
One: God gathered them out of the lands; from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south.
All: Let them give thanks for the mercy of God, for the wonders the LORD does for all people.
One: For God satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things.
All: Whoever is wise will ponder these things, and consider well the mercies of the LORD.
(From Psalm 107)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
During our prayer this morning, we will pray a prayer of blessing for Kilian McDonald-Boyer, who will return to college soon in _____. I invite Kilian and the elders and anyone else who would like to to come up for the laying on of hands for this blessing. We will conclude our prayer with the Lord’s Prayer as we always do.
Join me in prayer.
Most Holy One, you have called us into being through love. You have joined us to one another in love, and we experience and love you best when we are in community together.
And even so, we are always saying goodbye to our beloveds. For everything there is a season, the writer of Ecclesiastes tells us. A time to welcome in and a time to send out. And though this ritual of goodbye becomes familiar, it does not get easier.
Holy One, we give thanks for Kilian and the gifts she offers the Body of Christ in this specific iteration at Azle Christian Church. We thank you for all that we have done and learned and shared together, for the way that we have been changed by her presence among us.
You have now called Kilian to another place, another community, another task. We are sad to let go so soon, but we recognize that just as she has been your gift to us, so now she goes as a gift to another community.
We pray for Kilian as she explores and clarifies the call that takes her onward from here and back to college. May she grow in your grace and in the knowledge of your love, so that she may be a blessing to many.
Grant Kilian the strength to carry your blessing from this place to the next. May she be at home in any place, for all the earth is yours. And may she remember always that we are here rooting her on, holding her up in love, and ready to welcome her home.
Grant Kilian a deeper fullness of being and spirit, by carrying our memory with her in this next chapter of her life.
We pray for the community to which she goes, that they will value her, support her, learn from her, and encourage her. We pray for ourselves as we stay, that you will keep us faithful to the vision we have shared.
As we part, we reaffirm that it has been your Spirit who brought us together in the first place, your Spirit who has enlivened our fellowship; your Spirit who goes with Kilian and your Spirit who stays with us; Your Spirit who keeps us all together somehow in the worldwide family of your church. Thanks be to God.
We pray this blessing in the name of the one whom we cannot keep but who is our eternal keeper, our brother and redeemer Jesus, who 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
Genesis 28:10-19
Jacob left Beer-sheba and went toward Haran. He came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place.
And he dreamed that there was a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven; and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” And he was afraid, and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
So Jacob rose early in the morning, and he took the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured oil on the top of it. He called that place Bethel, which means House of God.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
We begin a new series today: One Thing to Tell You.
The guiding question for this series is “What is the one thing you want to tell Azle Christian Church?”
This is a difficult question for me because I have lots of things to tell you. And since I’m going out of town tomorrow, I feel like I should cover my bases and tell you everything. Everything you need to know, everything I’ve been wanting to say in the past 4 years that I’ve known you.
But I have to remind myself that there will be time for that. There is no need to rush.
And this is a difficult task also because you hear from me every week. You hear my one thing week in and week out, some messages more urgent than the others. What makes this week any different? What makes it distinct? Special, even?
I’m not sure myself, except I think you’ll know it when you see it. So pay attention, but don’t worry.
We pick up in an in-between space today. We’ve read the story before together, and I’m sure you’ve seen it illustrated on a felt board at one point. It’s a familiar one, this dream of Jacob’s.
To set the scene—Jacob had just stolen his brother’s birthright. He was his mother Rebekah’s favorite, and his twin brother Esau was his father Isaac’s favorite. One afternoon, the firstborn Esau came in from hunting and was greeted with a whiff of Jacob’s famous lentil stew. He would do anything for a helping of that stew. But there was one catch: Jacob wanted his birthright, their father’s blessing.
This blessing was not a mere sentimental moment between father and son—it would come with land and wealth and property.
The time for blessings seemed far off, so Esau shrugged his shoulders, and said, “Yeah, yeah, you can have it, little brother. Take whatever you want! Just give me some soup. I’m starving!”
And then a little later in the story, when their father was aging and nearing death, Jacob meant to make good on the deal he had struck with Esau, so he dressed up as his brother to deceive his blind father in order to receive the firstborn blessing. He had swindled it from Esau and he had tricked his father. Jacob was born a hustler and he died a hustler.
But when Esau found out what had happened, he was murderous with rage. He was distraught with grief over what he had lost. So Jacob ran. He began a fugitive journey that would last for a long time. His parents would die before he would return home.
So, as the sun began to set, after a day of fleeing for his life, Jacob decided to set himself down and go to sleep.
He was so tired that day. He had been running, crying, scheming. His mind raced—was it worth it, stealing Esau’s birthright? Would he ever see his family again? Was Esau still after him? Would the God of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, the God of Isaac and Rebekah and Ishmael, be the God of Jacob, too, in the end?
His chest heaved up and down, as he cleared a spot to sleep. He was so weary.
He pulled a rock up underneath his head, having brought nothing with him for his journey. The sun was setting and darkness was being pulled over the land like a blanket, nestling in those who were exhausted for a night of rest.
Jacob’s REM cycle commenced—his breathing deep, his body completely still save for the flickering behind his eyelids. The worries of the day had disappeared somewhere, tucked in tightly for the night like good children.
And like a magnificent bedtime story, a long time ago in a faraway land, the grandson of a wandering Aramean dreamt about big promises—promises of belonging to a durable family and people, and promises of the tender and tenacious care of the Most High. The dream shimmered with the promise of God’s presence solid as the rock his head rested upon. There was a ladder that stretched to the heavens, and angels climbed up and down, going about their divine business.
In his dream, our faith ancestor Jacob watched the movement on the ladder from afar, counting angels as if they were sheep, as God whispered those big promises next to him, promises of provision that would overflow to all around him, promises of “Abundance. Enough for all.” Jacob had just stolen what was not his in an economy that was not fair, and here was God, whispering God’s own lullabies of a different kind of world.
And as the rising sun warmed Jacob, he stirred from slumber, from a dream he would remember forever.
All that running, all that hustling, and God found him in his sleep.
He did not expect to find mercy there on the run; he did not expect to find God in someplace as ordinary as sleep. And he didn’t. God found him.
Jacob stretched his arms, wiped the sleep from his eyes, and whispered a morning salutation, “Surely the Lord was in this place, and I did not know it.”
He turned his pillow into a pillar, his bed into an altar, his escape from real life into a meeting place for God.
He named it: Beth-El, the House of God, a place realer and truer than the ground underneath Jacob’s feet, yet as invisible and elusive as a dream.
The House of God was not a pipe dream, you see, but it was a dream, God’s dream. But somehow it became Jacob’s dream, which tells me it’s not only a dream. As fear and dread sung him a haunting lullaby, God was building a ladder not for Jacob to climb up to safety and ethereal escape, but for God to come down and be with Jacob.
Beth-El, the House of God was a place, a real spot on the map. There’s a rock with oil on it to prove it. But in this story, we learn the House of God is also a place we can only find, or rather, let find us, when we close our eyes, when we take a deep breath, when we come to the end of our energy, when we have gone as far as we can go, when we have taken all we can take.
Is this making sense? Don’t try too hard to understand because you get to the House of God not through will-power and hard work, but through releasing and exhaling. If you are clutching too tightly or focusing too intently, you’ll breeze right by it. You can’t wrangle it in, but you can relax your body as if you were floating in the water and see where the tide takes you. You can’t find your way to shore, but if you relinquish hope you’ll ever find it, you might fall in love with the night sky.
I guess what I’m trying to say is the House of God is less about becoming an angel climbing up a ladder to heaven and more about turning and being surprised by the Holy One standing next to you. The House of God is not a laundry list of things you can do for the High King of Heaven, but instead an overflowing laundry basket of promises from a Mother Hen God.
The promises are like the ripples of a pond after a rock, a pillow-turned-pillar, has plopped in the middle—for you, for me, but not just for you and me, for us, for the world, for all. As if the promises were the air in our bellies expanding and expanding, shooting straight down our windpipe for the purpose of filling up, for creating more space.
The thing about the House of God is that it is ordinary, as ordinary as the four walls that surround you now, as familiar as the home you will return to in just a minutes. Even boring. It’s as regular as a bedtime routine. It is as mundane as watering plants in a garden. And we can only see it when we close our eyes, but not because it’s not real but because it’s not on the same wavelength as our running and hustling and scheming.
Perhaps you misunderstand me—we will not go through a wardrobe and find Narnia or be transported to Middle Earth or wake up in Utopia. But when we take a deep breath, when we close our eyes for some rest, when we surrender to something as simple as sleep, we might wake up and find that everything is transformed. A rock-become-pillow became an altar. A desert became a temple. A thief became God’s dwelling.
A candle becomes the light of Christ. A morning cup of coffee becomes the blessed cup of covenant. A good night’s rest becomes a gateway to the Holy One. A REM cycle becomes a vision of the coming reign of God. A deep breath becomes a prayer. A person becomes the House of the Most High.
Jacob’s descendants will later record a commandment just for this kind of divine meeting, one about keeping Sabbath, one that reminds us to step away from the work, from the computer, from the dishes, from the striving and running and spending, and to relax into the love of God.
Because even when we don’t know how, even when we cannot see it, even when we are afraid or alone, God is as close to us as the very thought in our head, as nestled deeply into our lives as a lost dream. The Holy One, our Creator and Keeper, is not confined to a geographical spot or a particular people, but seeps into our psyche and calls out to us in our timid hope. It’s in our longing that we know there is something, Someone, just below the surface.
So I guess the one thing I want to tell you, beloved, is to rest. To close your eyes. To find a pillow. This is not a quaint suggestion for when you have time, but a commandment. Something right up there with “do not steal, do not kill.”
Jacob had been hustling and scheming and running, and he would continue to do so, to his detriment, time and again. But in this moment, his yielding became a salvation.
Later on in scripture, we will get the most famous Psalm: Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. We often read this scripture at funerals because of the line: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.”
Do you remember what it says right before that? “He makes me lie down in green pastures.”
What a peculiar answer to the valley of the shadow of death. We might have expected God’s response to be to have have people rise up, to empower them to fight. Do not go gentle into that good night!
But God’s answer is unapologetic care for the body. An abdication of control.
It seems that rest is not a reward for salvation or liberation, but rather the path that delivers us there.
The author Cole Arthur Riley, the creator of Black Liturgies, writes this about rest:
“Remember. You were never meant to prove your dignity. You, whose flesh contains more bodies than your own. You don’t belong in the catacombs of restlessness, wandering from death to death. Lie down with me in the pasture, where life is alive and growing with the unapologetic slowness of a blade of grass.”
Perhaps if we close our eyes for a bit, metaphorically, yes, but also literally, we might remember the long, long story we’re a part of. The one that begins with “a wandering Aramean was my ancestor…” The one that reminds us that the table is so very long that we cannot see the end of it. The one where our baptism is not a fixed moment in time, but a way of life: death and resurrection, death and resurrection, death and resurrection. What part of the story will come to you when you are sleeping? When you lie down in the soft grass and let your mind and body relax?
Who knows what God will say to you? Only you will know. Only in your dreams.
So close your eyes, right now, in this moment, with one hand on your chest, the other on your belly, and inhale, filling your belly until it cannot expand any more. And then exhale slowly, one sheep, two sheep, one angel, two angel. This sermon is almost over. Let the worries tuck themselves in for a change. Inhale, exhale. Rest. God will meet you here.
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.
a blessing from author Kate Bowler.
“Blessed are we, at the point of utter stillness,
that becomes an empty space for that voice to echo and build and resound
until it becomes a place to rest and receive and be made whole.
and O how blessed are we who are astonished
to find that God’s strength begins at the very point
when ours stops.”
Amen.