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!
A couple of announcements before we begin:
Don’t forget to tuck the Table Talk insert in your bulletin away to look at over the next week and discuss with a friend or family member.
Mark your calendars for our End-of-Summer Party on Wednesday, July 28, at 6:30 pm.
We continue our summer worship series: Jesus’ Greatest Hits: A Journey through the Sermon on the Mount. Today, we are exploring the Lord’s Prayer.
Let us prepare our hearts for worship.
Litany of Faith
One: I’m grateful to God, whom I serve with a good conscience as my ancestors did. I constantly remember you in my prayers day and night.
All: When we remember your tears, we long to see you so that we can be filled with happiness.
One: I’m reminded of your authentic faith, which first lived in your grandmother Lois and your mother Eunice.
All: I’m sure that this faith is also inside you.
One: Because of this, I’m reminding you to revive God’s gift that is in you through the laying on of hands.
All: God did not give us a spirit that is timid, but one that is powerful, loving, and self-controlled.
(From 2 Timothy 1:3-7)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
**We will not end our prayer today with the Lord’s Prayer, but rather #448 in your Chalice Hymnal, so you might want to flip there now. We will say the Lord’s Prayer together during Children’s Moment and then sing it after the sermon, so we’ll get it in.
In our litany today, we read from an epistle, a letter from one Christian to another, remembering their faith, their time together, and the importance of affirming each other’s gifts, specifically through the laying on of hands. As Christians, we accompany installations, ordinations, and dedications with this practice of laying on of hands. And we also do this in goodbyes. In the book of Acts, before the church sent out Paul and Barnabas for their ministry, they gathered around the two men, laid their hands on their shoulders and prayed over them. And today, we do that for Pastor Katie.
Lila Harden is going to lead this prayer of blessing with me today, and I’ll end it with an amen and then Gini will play through #488 one time while everyone returns to their seats, and then we’ll sing it together, led by Nicole.
So I’d like to invite Katie, Lila, and the elders up for the prayer. For those in the chapel and those at home, I invite you to stretch out your hand in solidarity and in spirit for this blessing.
Let’s pray:
Ashley: Most Holy One of old, You named Yourself, “I AM WHO I AM.” You are a God who can only be known by the way You move in this world and in our lives. Because of Your dynamic nature, we confess that though we would like to hold onto You, You elude our grasp. You cannot be contained or owned or pinned down. Even Jesus told Mary as she longed for him to stay, “Don’t hold onto me,” and we have been learning ever since how to keep our hands open.
And Ever-moving God, just as we cannot hold onto You, we cannot keep our beloveds for always. We are in a perpetual state of saying goodbye and though this ritual becomes familiar over time, it does not get any easier. So we enter into the realm of the in-between, where You are pleased to dwell.
It is in this space, Beloved God and God of our beloveds, that we thank You for Katie and her faithful ministry to Azle Christian Church. We are so grateful for the gifts she has shared with the church, for the care she shown all of us, for her kind spirit, for her gentle leadership, and for all the unseen work she has given.
Lila: Holy God, we give thanks for Katie’s teaching and the advice she has given. We praise You for her mentorship, and for her humor. She has helped me learn things from a different perspective and given me a better understanding of You. I thank You that she has helped me open up and understand my situation for the better.
Ashley: We pray that you give Katie opportunities to use her gifts in fresh ways, to offer herself each day with energy and excitement. May her particular blend of wisdom, creativity, and vision be enough to satisfy whatever the day asks of her. May she breathe in the beautiful aroma of her vocation and be filled with confidence that God has called her to this work.
And as she breaks bread and pours the cup wherever she goes, may she be reminded that we are at another end of Your long, long table, raising our glasses with her, to You, our Great Host.
Lila: We pray that in the future, Katie continues her work in the hospital for the greater good. We pray that she continues in her relationship with You and that she is happy wherever she goes. We wish her all the best in the future as she moves on from Azle Christian Church.
And now we draw on a prayer of our faith ancestors for this final blessing:
May you bless Katie and keep her, may Your face shine upon her and be gracious to her, and may You give her peace.
Ashley: And God of the letting go, may we as a church regard our own grief as a receipt of the love that we have known, as proof that we have shared in Your divine communion, and may our hearts remain open to the risk of love evermore. We prayer this prayer of blessing in the name of the one whom we cannot keep but who is our eternal keeper, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Sermon
Matthew 6:7-15
7 “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
9 “Pray then in this way:
Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
10 Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And do not bring us to the time of trial,
but rescue us from the evil one.
14 For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; 15 but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
Today, we are caught in a paradox. We say goodbye to Pastor Katie as our Minister of Family Life, and at the same time that we grieve her leaving, we also rejoice in the faithful work she has done while serving Azle Christian Church.
One of the many things I have appreciated about Pastor Katie is her adaptability. She joined us at the end of 2019, and as you all know, a few months later, the world shut down. The whole church has learned to worship in different ways: at home, outside, in a tiny chapel, in an empty sanctuary, in the parking lot, and even in the car. We have embraced flexibility as a virtue and exercised our change muscles regularly.
In addition to her rigorous and dangerous work as a healthcare worker during the soaring heights of the pandemic, Katie found ways to reach out, hold space, practice patience, and maintain a vision of her vocation here: to proclaim the gospel of Jesus to those in her stead. For that, we are so grateful to you, Katie.
And one of the things that Pastor Katie has taught us, surreptitiously through Little Church, is hand motions to the Lord’s Prayer, which we just did a moment ago as a congregation. She and I talked a lot when preparing for Little Church about what each line means so that we could come up with appropriate and meaningful motions.
Our first challenge was to get to the bottom of “hallowed be Thy name.” We eventually decided on cupping our hands upward, like we would if we were holding something precious.
This open-handed posture is a way to say, “We place no constraint on you, God.” God gave us God’s name in Exodus when Moses encountered the burning bush. We learned the name of God was “I am who I am” or “I will be what I will be.” The idea is that God is dynamic—God cannot be contained or constrained, and we begin our prayer recognizing that reality.
And as we continue on in the prayer outlined here in the Sermon on the Mount, given to us by Jesus, with the hope that God’s kingdom comes. And this next line is tricky, because we don’t live in a kingdom with a king—we’re a federal, representative, democratic republic. But Jesus lived in a kingdom ruled by an emperor and maintained by an army. This prayer, “Your kingdom come” was not a mere metaphor for Jesus. This phrase had a political edge for by praying, “Your kingdom come,” Jesus was saying the kingdom he was living in—one ruled by Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas, and the Roman Empire—was not God’s kingdom. This ain’t it, he was saying. And whenever we pray this prayer, we, too, recognize that any kingdom or government or nation that we live in is not in itself the realization of God’s reign.
And as we move further down this prayer, we shift our gaze from upward to outward. You’ll notice that this prayer uses plural pronouns—our, us, we. Because underlying this entire practice is that prayer is not a private event, even if we are praying alone. Prayer connects us to God and to one another—it lifts those points of connection to the surface of our consciousness and attention.
And so when we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we are asking for more than a sandwich for ourselves. If we unpack it like we might a loaf of sliced bread, we’ll find a lot of layers in this simple phrase. One, and most obvious is that if we are praying for daily bread, it means that we do not have a stockpile of bread. That we are not hoarding resources but rather trusting in the promise of enough for everyone. If saying “daily bread” makes you think of the manna in the wilderness for the Israelites, then you are thinking with a Jewish imagination, which is what Jesus is hoping for. The kingdom of God is one of sharing and trusting in God’s faithful provision .
And if we pull out another slice of bread, we’ll see another allusion to something important—this time, we’re not looking backwards, but forwards. The bread helps us look forward to the banquet for which we wait, a foretaste of glory divine. We practice this anticipation each week at the table of our Lord, and we pray for the day when everyone is gathered around it with our Gracious Host to break bread, a symbol for God’s blessing.
And finally, that last slice reminds us of Jesus’s own solidarity with the poor. He begins the Sermon on the Mount aligning himself with the poor, and as we pray together this line, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we are remembering our own abundance and the unequal distribution of resources that still exists in the kingdoms we live in, in the world we live in. And we’re praying for a different kingdom, one where everyone gets bread.
And then we keep our gaze outward as we continue to move through the prayer—this time stretching out to those who have hurt us and to those whom we have hurt. We ask for forgiveness for our debts, our trespasses, our sins—all valid translations. And sin in the context of 1st century Judaism is imagined in a number of ways: a burden, a stain, a debt, so that when we are praying for forgiveness and help to forgive, we are praying for a restoration of balance in the world.
And this is a two-part prayer because it would be hypocritical of us to say to God, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” and then not do it ourselves. Because we are God’s movement through this world. “Your will be done” means that if someone needs, another provides. If the balance has been disrupted, it is up to us to right it.
As we near the end of the prayer, we get to language about temptation, and I remember Katie explaining temptation in Little Church—that it was like an itch. And this definition is helpful because it’s rare that when we are tempted we are faced with a stark moral dilemma—one that is clear-cut and easy to see what is right or wrong. Rather, temptation is like an itch—sometimes benign, sometimes indicative of something more sinister, sometimes easily remedied, sometimes requiring more severe measures.
When we pray for help to resist evil and temptation, we’re asking that we be people whose lives are so oriented toward God’s ways that we are not tempted to use our resources only for ourselves, that we are not tempted to dominate and lord our power over others, that we not desire the riches of the world but rather attend to its needs.
And that brings us to ending of this prayer: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever,” which you may have noticed was not included in our reading—it’s part of other earlier Christian documents, but it seals the deal, if you will, on what this prayer as a whole is doing. While no one line is magic, and the words will not save us, the movement of this prayer reminds us of the world that God wants, the world that we are looking forward to, the world that is coming and is even here now. Each time we pray this together, we are orienting ourselves to the ways of God—one that recognizes God’s own freedom and one that puts our relationship to one another right in front of us.
And by engaging in this prayer, together, each week, we are shaping our vision in ways that we don’t even realize.
There was a study done in 2019 on the effect religious chanting had on the brain. Now personal prayer had been studied quite a bit—NPR had a series a few years ago called, “This Is Your Brain on Prayer,” and even more than prayer, scientists have been fascinated with what happens to our brain activity during meditation. But the field of studying religious, collective chanting is still very new.
And the study looked at a specific chant done by Buddhist monks that focused on being reborn in the new world. As you might expect, there was some crossover on the effects that prayer and meditation have: that on a physiological level, it lowers our stress levels, and on a psychological level, it alters the way we view reality. The more one prays, the more one focuses on something. And the more one focuses on something, the more that that focus becomes their reality, the more it becomes written into the neural connections of the brain. And that focus is not unique to prayer, but it is a quality of sustained prayer practice.
But the religious chanting study had some additional findings.
Religious chanting, as opposed to non-religious chanting, increased delta-band power in our brain, which makes us sleep better.
And it also has been suggested that delta-band power promotes healing from injury and pathology, and promotes neuroplasticity (the adaptability and growth of our brain cells).
In summary, religious chanting with a focus on a new world, helps one rest, promotes healing of the body from both injury and sickness, and encourages adaptability and growth in unseen, yet measurable ways.
So…in a way…one could argue that actually saying the Lord’s Prayer together is doing on a physiological level what we hope it is doing on a spiritual and societal level.
Rest is a by-product and tool of liberation. If one can get rest, it means they are free from Pharaoh’s economy, one that demands constant productivity and progress. One who demands our bodies be a sacrifice on the altar of work. If one can truly rest without fear of danger or retribution or loss of resources, that means they are free.
And healing from both injuries such as warfare and poverty as well as societal pathologies such as oppression in all its forms is what we are praying for when we talk about bread and forgiveness and debts and the kingdom of God coming.
And you know, neuroplasticity is the term for our brain to change through growth and reorganization. The promise of the reign of God is abundant and fertile life, with the hierarchies flattened, with the guest list to the table of our Lord including everybody. This growth and reorganization is moving outward, inward, upward, downward—it’s changing the ways we encounter the world.
On a micro level, what saying something religious together, reciting the Lord’s prayer in unison regularly, does to our bodies and brains, is what we are praying for on a macro level.
May everyone find a place under their own vine and fig tree, as the prophet Micah says, and no one shall make them afraid; may everyone find healing and wholeness universally and in their particularity in God’s kingdom, may what was lost be restored, and may we give ourselves over to the reordering of the reign of God, trusting that while flexibility and adaptability are not biblical virtues, per se, they are reflections of a life open to new life, to resurrection possibilities, to the turning upside down of the world in order to right it.
And that is what we pray for together each Sunday, letting our voices be for each other an anchor and a reminder, a prayer for the world God wants and is creating through the Spirit of the Living Christ in us.
Amen.
Table Meditation
You may have noticed that I skipped the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer in our analysis: “Our Father, who art in heaven.”
Mother Teresa said that those two words, “Our Father” was a complete prayer. It holds everything in it: you, me, our neighbors, our relationship to one another, and of course, the Most Holy One, the acknowledgement that we are all part of God’s family.
By saying these two words, we name that we are all tied up in one another. That in and before God, we are connected always.
This is one of the greatest promises and commitments of our faith: that we are not alone. We are not islands. Our roots run ever so deep, our branches stretch far and wide, this table is long and crowded, and you’ve gotten here right on time. And wherever you go, the table stretches to you there. And at the other end of the table is our beloveds, remembering Jesus and the way we are linked by his Living Spirit.
And we remember together today, with each of our beloveds wherever they are, that on the night he was betrayed, Jesus broke the bread and said, “This is my body, broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”
And then he took the cup also and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Drink it in remembrance of me.
For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” All are welcome at the Table of Christ.
Join in me prayer.
Gracious Host, give us this day our daily bread, available to us all generously and indiscriminately. Bless this bread, a sign of your blessing and life abundant. Bless this cup that overflows with the hope of a new covenant, the coming reign of God. May they fill us for today as we depart from this sacred moment together. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
Sharing Our Resources
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church: participating in Food Hub or service projects around the church, or filling the Little Free Pantry. You can give financially in our offering box at the door. You may also give online on our website or find us on Venmo. And today, you can also give in the offering plates.
We are going to pass the offering plates after the benediction. I’ll give the final blessing, and then we will seal the deal, so to speak by singing the Doxology together before our final song. Just like we talked about today with the Lord’s Prayer, there is power in proclaiming the gospel together each week in unison, and we do that now. So the final word is not my words alone, but our words to each other about God.
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. We may or may not be finished passing the plates by the end of the Doxology, which is totally fine because Nicole will lead us in a final song together, and we will just keep things moving.
If you’ve already put your offering in the giving box, super. If you have given online or on Venmo, great! There are cards in the back that you can put in the plate that say as much, and they also have information for Venmo and Vanco, our online giving service should you need it. The idea is that everyone has an opportunity to physically put something in the plate if they want.
Okay, I think we’ve got the plan. It’s gonna go great, and if it doesn’t, we’ll just try again next week.
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 or Pastor Katie after service.
Benediction
Please rise in body or spirit for our benediction, the Doxology, and the final song.
God bless you.
Christ love you.
The Holy Spirit fill you.
Amen.