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!
We realize that you did not arrive here this morning on accident, that you have made you way to this place at this time with intention. 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. If you don’t have a conversation partner or group with which to participate in Table Talk, Rick Seeds has volunteered to lead a group.
A week from Wednesday, on July 28, from 6:30-8:30 pm is our End-of-Summer Party. Food, games, music, and friendship to make the symbolic end of summer.
On 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.
And what may feel like far off into the future, but is not too far away, on 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 continue our summer worship series: Jesus’ Greatest Hits: A Journey through the Sermon on the Mount. Today, we consider the birds of the air and the lilies of the field with Jesus.
Let us prepare our hearts for worship.
Litany of Faith
One: Out of the depths I cry out to you, O Lord; let your ears pay close attention to my request for mercy!
All: If you kept track of sins, Lord, who could stand a chance?
One: But there is forgiveness with you; therefore you shall be honored.
All: I wait for you, O Lord; my soul waits for you; in your word is my hope.
One: My whole being waits for the Lord—more than the night watch waits for morning.
All: Yes, more than the night watch waits for morning.
(From Psalm 130)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
(From Walter Brueggeman’s “On Theodicy”)
Most Holy One,
We gladly confess the words of the Psalmist:
“The eye of all look to you,
And you give them their food in due season.
You open your hand,
Satisfying the desire of every living thing.”
That we gladly and confidently confess—
And yet, we notice your creatures not well fed
But mired in hunger, poverty, and despair.
And yet, we notice the power of evil
That stalks the best of us:
The power of cancer,
The dread of war,
Sadness of death—be it “good death” or cruel death.
And so we pray confidently toward you,
But with footnotes that qualify.
We pray confidently, but we will not deny in your presence
The negatives that make us wonder.
We pray amid our honest reservations,
Give us patience to wait,
Impatience to care,
Sadness held honestly,
Surrounded by joy over your coming kingdom—
And peace while we wait—
And peace at the last,
That we may be peacemakers and so your children.
And we ask all of this in the name of 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.
Children’s Moment
In today’s scripture, Jesus talks about worrying. And he tells his disciples that instead of worrying, we should look at the birds and the flowers and how they aren’t concerned about the future or worrying about what they’re gonna wear or have for lunch, but instead, they live their lives trusting that God knows what they need and cares for them. Jesus is definitely not the only one who points us to nature when things get scary or life feels too big for us to handle. One of my favorite writers wrote a poem about what a grasshopper taught her. A grasshopper of all things.
*Show pic*
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean -
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver holds a grasshopper and pays attention it and it gets her thinking about how precious her life is. And how she should spend it not worrying or working but paying attention and being blessed.
So I am not one to catch grasshoppers. But I do like to look at the birds like Jesus tells us to do. So I thought it might be fun to make a bird feeder out of things that you might have at your house.
Cheerios—my daughter’s favorite snack.
A pipe cleaner or some kind of bendable stick. Even a few twisty ties strung together will work!
And I already started mine and put it in the shape of a heart to remind me that God loves the birds and God loves me.
And I put this ribbon on it so that I can hang it up in a tree like an ornament to feed the birds. Because that’s part of why Jesus tells us to look at the birds—to trust that God cares for us because it’s our job to care for each other and be God’s care while we are living our one wild and precious life.
If you’d like to make a bird feeder, there are cheerios and pipe cleaners in the back for you to make one after service. You don’t have to be a kid to do it! I’d actually love for us to have a couple for the trees outside our chapel windows.
Let’s pray!
God of the birds and the lilies, God of the grasshopper, God who loves us, God of our one wild and precious life, help us to trust that You care for us. Help us to care for others. And when we worry, because we do do that sometimes, help us remember that you care for our worries, too. We love you. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
Sermon
25 “Therefore, I say to you, don’t worry about your life, what you’ll eat or what you’ll drink, or about your body, what you’ll wear. Isn’t life more than food and the body more than clothes? 26 Look at the birds in the sky. They don’t sow seed or harvest grain or gather crops into barns. Yet our God in heaven feeds them. Aren’t you worth much more than they are? 27 Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life?
28 And why do you worry about clothes? Notice how the lilies in the field grow. They don’t wear themselves out with work, and they don’t spin cloth. 29 But I say to you that even Solomon in all of his splendor wasn’t dressed like one of these. 30 If God can clothe in such splendor the grasses of the field, which bloom today and are thrown on the fire tomorrow, won’t God do so much more for you—you who have so little faith?
31 Therefore, don’t worry and say, ‘What are we going to eat?’ or ‘What are we going to drink?’ or ‘What are we going to wear?’ 32 Those without faith are always running after these things. God knows everything you need. 33 Instead, desire first and foremost God’s kingdom and God’s righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. 34 Therefore, stop worrying about tomorrow, because tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
“Don’t judge, so that you won’t be judged. 2 You’ll receive the same judgment you give. Whatever you deal out will be dealt out to you. 3 Why do you see the splinter that’s in your brother’s or sister’s eye, but don’t notice the log in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother or sister, “Let me take the splinter out of your eye,” when there’s a log in your eye? 5 You deceive yourself! First take the log out of your eye, and then you’ll see clearly to take the splinter out of your brother’s or sister’s eye. 6 Don’t give holy things to dogs, and don’t throw your pearls in front of pigs. They will stomp on the pearls, then turn around and attack you.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
We begin our sermon today with the heartwarming story of Job in the Bible.
(And I have a note here to make a joke about how no one reads their Bible if no one laughs, so good job, y’all.)
In the book about his experience, the main character, Job, loses everything except his wife and friends. His children are dead. His health is in the toilet. His livestock—his livelihood, everything gone. And he is utterly devastated.
And this all happens quickly as you read the book. It’s a fairly long text, so you’d think that we might build up to this tragedy with some back story, but we don’t, and it hits you in the first chapter. This is the premise of Job’s story. Boom: utter devastation.
And his poor ife, equally and utterly devastated, in her grief, having lost her children and any hope for the future, tells Job to just curse God and die. She often gets painted as a faithless person, especially in comparison to Job, but I understand her reaction better than Job’s stoicism. In my own experience of grief, I have cursed God. It’s a normal reaction, to be upset and to point fingers and let your animal brain call the shots for a minute. I don’t begrudge anyone who has some choice 4-letter words for the one who is supposed to feed the birds and clothe the lilies and take care of us similarly, and has seemingly failed to do so. So justice for Job’s wife and all those like her.
And then most of the book is a series of monologues from Job’s friends. They rally around him, and they attempt to care for their friend in his time of need in the best way they know how, not with casseroles, but with theological explanations for why this happened to him.
One friend says, you know, Job. You must have done something terrible. You must have sinned greatly or are harboring secret sin your heart right now. And now God is punishing you. You’re just experiencing the consequences of your actions. Here for you, buddy.
And then another friend of Job’s says to him, “God is testing you, bro.” God is testing your faith, but God never really forsakes us. So God is here with you, but definitely testing you. Your children’s deaths and the loss of your livelihood and savings and your chronic pain and suffering—those are all part of an elaborate test of your faith. Because naturally, God’s world must revolve around you and whether or not you can pass a litmus test. Love you, man.
And then we have the last of the three stooges, and his explanation is depersonalized, which is a little better, I guess. But he says that this just God’s will. Job, it has nothing to do with you at all. God doesn’t give a flying flip about your deal because God has got a master plan for the world and this is just part of it. So, there, there, pal.
I mean, you really get the sense that these guys think they’re doing the Lord’s work.
I realize I’m being very judgy after reading a scripture about not judging. But let me tell you about the log in my eye that I am well aware of. These guys grate on my nerves so much because, to be honest, I have said all of these things and more to people. I cringe remembering the simplistic explanations for why bad things happen to people that I have repeated over the years.
And I have done this, and probably still do it, because somewhere in the recesses of my mind, where I rarely go because I am so very scared, I am desperately fishing for a reason for why this bad thing that happened to you won’t happen to me.
If I can be a good enough person, a good enough Christian, if I can summon enough faith, or eat enough kale, or save enough money, then this utter devastation won’t touch me. I’ll be safe.
If I can come up with a reason for why this happened to you and why it won’t happen to me, then maybe, the worry that burns day and night inside me and is fed by witnessing the random suffering of others, will quiet down for a minute.
But while I see myself and wish I didn’t in Job’s friends, while I empathize with Job’s wife, while I’m terrified to be Job, the person I am most upset with in Job’s story is God. Not because I think that God actually entered into a deal with the devil, using Job’s life as collateral damage. But because when God finally does say something in this story told by humans about God, God’s response is not why this happened. Which would be helpful information to have for those of us who want to make sure that doesn’t happen to us.
But instead, God goes on and on about the cosmos. God asks Job where he was when the Maker of the Universe flung the stars in the sky and filled the earth with water. Like that’s God response after a painful silence and the dronings of Job’s amigos.
I cannot help but think of Job’s story when I read Jesus talking about the birds and the lilies. And, you know, it’s not good pastoral care to say to someone who is worried if they will be able to pay their bills or feed the kids or endure cancer treatment to just be like a bird and not worry. Or think about flowers and stop thinking about money problems.
Now of course, this is an extended sermon from Jesus, right? This is not a moment of crisis with one of his disciples, so perhaps it’s not fair to say, “That’s bad pastoral care, Jesus.”
And perhaps I’m kind of worked up because personally, I want to like this text. I love nature and poetry and trying to pull 10,000 feet up when I’m stuck in the mire of things. We just read a Mary Oliver poem for goodness sake.
But you know what, droughts happen. Flowers die. The forests burns, the ocean burns. Even more so now in the acute climate crisis we’re in. Birds starve. They freeze to death in February in Texas in a freak winter storm. And dear God, where are the bees?! But even more climate change, life was not guaranteed to all creatures great and small.
While some of our worries are new, worrying is not new. While the top layer reasons for our existential dread may be different than the dread when Jesus spoke to his disciples, the underlying reasons: fear of death and starvation and providing for families and belonging—those remain the same.
I asked on Facebook this week what people worried about. What kept them up at night? Where did their mind go in the middle of a workday? No worry was too big or too small to list. And this is what people said:
If the random pain is another blood clot
Am I messing up my kids?
How to make peace with the life I have not being the life I always wanted
Whether or not this pregnancy will stick
Losing my parents
Finances
Climate change
COVID
A justice system that isn’t just
Growing old alone
That my husband will die
That I’ll lose my healthcare
Being able to provide for all the needs of my family
Being forgotten
What other people think of me
That my mental illness makes me less available to my kids
My children, my grandchildren
Helping my daughter with disabilities
Loneliness
This list takes my breath away.
The throughline of this litany of worries seems to be precarity. How precarious our life is. How very close to the edge we all are at any given moment. The edge of poverty, the edge of a life-altering phone call, the edge of our lives as we know them unraveling, the edge of the random chance of tragedy.
When I was lamenting on Twitter this whole conversation about why bad things happen hovering over this otherwise beautiful text from Jesus, a Jewish rabbi friend of mine, said, “Why they happen is not the question. What to do when they happen is the capital-Q question. Trust your rabbi.”
And I’m betting Jesus knew that birds and flowers sometimes die. That even in his 1st century experience with creation, that all was not right with the earth, with the world. This is a man whose culture depended on the weather for their crops, whose occupying empire held worship for their rain god because they, too, understood how precarious life is.
And I wonder if what Jesus is saying here, perhaps what God was trying to say to Job, was that he realizes life is precarious. That birds live from one day to the next. That in similar ways we do.
And yet.
All of life is lived in the care of God. That there is no threshold we cross as humans, as created beings, where we are not in the care of God, the Maker of the Universe, the Author of Creation.
Because as we’re reminded in some of the foolishness of the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, the ones that tell us to turn the other cheek or that the poor in spirit will inherit the kingdom of heaven is that these are not mere teachings to make us nicer, more generous people. They’re not meant to be marketed as a TED talk or a self-help seminar, and Jesus is certainly not a life coach.
Jesus is always looking forward to the coming reign of God. To the very real and tangible movement of an upside down kingdom, where the mountains are brought down low and the valleys rise up, where the first are last and the last are first, where everyone is taken care of, a kingdom that we pray for in the words of Jesus, knowing that we are now the hands and feet of Jesus.
And that when Jesus says, “Do not worry,” that maybe he’s not chastising us for being human, which is apparently a chronic condition, and no one has found a cure for it.
But rather he’s inviting us to live into the precarity. To learn to love it because as Jesus says later in Matthew, those who lose their life will find it and those who try to keep their life will lose it. Perhaps Jesus is inviting us to imagine a life beyond our day-to-day experience and remember that we are part of an intricate ecosystem of care.
And maybe, just maybe, by leaning into the precarity, we will find a solid ground that transcends all thresholds, we will find a rooting that connects us to one another.
We are resurrection people, after all. Our whole thing is that something as decided and as daunting as a sealed tomb is not the last word.
Mary Oliver in her poem said she doesn’t know what a prayer is, but she does know how to pay attention. We may not know how not to worry. How not to be scared that utter devastation might visit us and our household because it might. But we do know how to look at the birds. We do know how to admire the flowers. And that’s not a bad first step toward the reign of God.
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 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 from the book of Ephesians:
May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith.
May you, who are being rooted and established in love, have power,
together with all the saints,
to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ.
And may you know this love that surpasses knowledge—
that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.