Introit: We, Your People, God, Confessing - 356
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.
Thanks to everyone who helped make Sting Fling happen yesterday! If you handed out water bottles, helped set-up or tear down, helped paint a lattice or cut a card, thank you! Sting Fling is our biggest evangelism event, and we handed out nearly 800 fans yesterday and answered the question, “Where are y’all” with “off of Main Street behind El Paseo” many, many times.
Children’s Choir is next week! If you’re a kid or you’re a grown-up bringing a kid, all the kiddos will meet Nicole, Becky, and Emerson in the sanctuary at 10 AM for practice next week.
And mark your calendars for our final Gospels and Groceries of the year on Wednesday, September 28. We’ll bring food for the Little Free Pantry and have a hymn sing.
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. Make sure you’re downloaded the Realm app to stay up to date!
We continue our back-to-school worship series this morning: Study Hall: A Series on the Letter to the Colossians.
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.
Call to Worship: Gather Your People - Insert
Litany of Faith
One: Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy, blot out my transgressions.
All: Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin. For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.
One: Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.
All: Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.
One: Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and sustain in me a willing spirit.
All: The sacrifice acceptable to God is a troubled spirit; a broken a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
(From Psalm 51)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Join me in prayer.
(From Calling on God)
Most Holy One,
Faithful Creator of all that we know,
Holy Healer of the sin of humankind,
We come together on this day of rest
To worship with each other in your presence.
We bring our weariness,
Our longing for peace and justice,
Our hunger for a good night’s sleep
Free from pain, or worry, or work.
We come because you have called us to be your people.
May we share the words of peace that you have spoken to us,
The signs that your salvation is at hand,
The promises that your glory dwells within each and every person.
Hear our cries, O God of healing love,
Our prayers for those in pain and in need,
Our prayer for healing and reconciliation.
Carry us into your love, O Giver of Life,
For we gather as one small band of pilgrims
On the way as part of the Body of Christ.
So we pray the prayer together that Jesus, our brother and redeemer, gave us to hold onto:
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.
After Prayer: Be Still, My Soul - 566 (v 1 & 2)
Children’s Moment
Anthem: These Bodies - Nicole Hendley
Sermon
Colossians 2:6-23
6 As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to walk in him, 7 rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.
8 Watch out that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental principles of the world, and not according to Christ. 9 For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10 and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. 11 In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by the removal of the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; 12 when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And when you were dead in trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses, 14 erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands. He set this aside, nailing it to the cross. 15 He disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.
16 Therefore, do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food or drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or Sabbaths. 17 These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the body belongs to Christ. 18 Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, initiatory visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, 19 and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and tendons, grows with a growth that is from God.
20 If with Christ you died to the elemental principles of the world, why do you live as if you still belonged to the world? Why do you submit to regulations, 21 “Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!”? 22 All these regulations refer to things that perish with use; they are simply human commands and teachings. 23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-imposed piety, humility, and severe treatment of the body, but they are of no value in checking self-indulgence.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
We’re settling in to the letter to the Colossians, written by a student of Paul’s to a diverse community in what is now modern-day Turkey. We’ve covered the greetings, the opening poem, and a key element of Pauline epistles: the inclusion of the Gentiles, thanks be to God.
And in today’s text, the writer finally gets to the meat of the issue: these false teachers that are attempting to lure the Colossians away from the gospel.
We get a few clues to what these teachers were preaching, but all the religious sects and off-shoots that scholars know about from this time and place don’t quite add up to what the writer is talking about. This is one of those things lost to time. However, the things we do know are interesting.
We know that this group emphasizes the gospel + something else. Visions, special experiences, abstaining from different foods, focusing on other spiritual powers, and special secret knowledge. It’s not only Christ; it’s Christ + something else.
We also know this group’s teaching produces elite groups within the church that is hurting the whole body of believers. It’s creating factions and elevating certain people.
And finally, this group preaches a dualistic view that the body and material reality are inferior or even evil compared to the intellect or the soul. They say that the only that matters is the heart and some heavenly realm—that life on earth, the real bodily and social needs of humans, is subordinate and disconnected from the soul.
And to the Colossians, who have on some level found these teaching compelling, the writer reminds them of their baptism. She or he says to remember how you were once rooted and built up and established. Remember the cool water that washed over you, as you were buried in Christ, and remember the rush of air that swept over your face as you were raised in Christ’s likeness.
Before the writer even gets to all the details of what these teachers are proclaiming, she hums a familiar tune, one we’ve already heard in this letter. She repeats a line: “For in Christ, the fullness of deity dwells bodily.” Do you remember the song, the poem, that the writer begins in the letter with? “For in Christ, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.”
This may seem like small potatoes to you. Yeah, yeah, God dwelled in Jesus. What’s the big deal?
Well, these teachers seem to think bodies don’t have anything to say about the Divine. That you need all this extra stuff to access God.
It may feel to us modern readers that these teachers are so obviously wrong. We are people of the table, after all. We remember Christ’s body and blood every single week when we take communion.
But there are “rulers and authorities” that compete for our imagination, too. Our imaginations often fall captive to things like the logic of the economy, as though the world were governed not by Christ, but by the market’s invisible hand. This magical, ethereal, unexplainable power that makes nations bend over backwards to appease it.
Or perhaps we fall captive to the principles of law and order, convinced that in order to sustain our well-being and security, we must be firm in our devotion to a code of laws and punishments. We live afraid to violate the logic of retribution, as though an eye an eye were the basic order of the cosmos.
But this writer reminds the Colossians that it is significant that Christ came in a body. The incarnation was not some inconsequential detail of the story of Jesus. It is the story. The fullness of God lived in a human body that had aches and pains, that made embarrassing noises, that smelled bad after a hard day’s work. His body was like my body and like your body. He bled and bruised. He, like us one day, heaved a last breath.
And in that body, the fullness of God dwelled. Which must mean that the human body, that Christ’s body, that your body, might have something to say about God. We live in bodies, we are bodies. God was pleased to dwell in a body. And in this deeply spiritual and theological embodiment, we encounter the Divine.
Now if you are like me, your body has not always cooperated the way you want it to. Perhaps your eyes are cloudier than they once were. Maybe the hip or the knee that once brought you places gracefully now has something to say with every step.
I want to invite you now to draw your hand to the place on your body that hurts. Maybe it’s your spine with a slipped disc, or arthritis in your hands or knees. Maybe your head is pounding, or your neck is so tight it could crack a walnut. Maybe there’s a stiffness in your shoulder, or your deltoid, or your chest. Perhaps your digestive system conspires against you. I invite you to place your hand softly, tenderly on that spot where it hurts for no other reason than to give some tenderness to our bodies where Christ now dwells, a body that God was pleased as punch to make.
Because to know our bodies, to consider each twinge and crack, is spiritual care. They are not divorced one from the other.
You can rest your hands back in their place now.
There’s a reason that our spiritual practices are so embodied. That it’s not a mere intellectual pursuit, but that we eat and we drink. We take big breaths and sing out and some of us even sway to the music. There’s a reason we associate prayer and penance with postures. It’s because our bodies are messengers of the Divine, even in their brokenness, particularly in their brokenness. Our tendons and our ligaments. Our aorta and our sinuses. Our vagus nerve and our colon. They’ve all got stories.
And the fact that God cares deeply about our bodies and speaks through the tangible, material reality of our lives, means that our faith is necessarily wrapped up in tangible, material reality of our lives. It means the bodily needs of others are of the utmost importance to God.
It means our faith must deal with people’s hunger. It must reckon with the absolute human need for access to clean water. It must recognizing people’s need for healthcare and shelter.
It means we have to pay attention to how these things are not given to people in the world. For how there is an ongoing famine in Yemen and an imminent famine in parts of Africa because of the war in Ukraine. For how a third of Pakistan is underwater. For how there is not clean water coming anytime soon to Jackson, Mississippi. For how there are many people in our country who do not have the healthcare they need to take care of their bodies. For how the maternal mortality rate, particularly of black women, in Tarrant county is one of the worst in the country. For how there are kids sleeping on the streets or dying by their own hands because of the way their loved ones have rejected their queer identities.
All of these things have something to do with this ancient letter, with this tiny hymn tucked away in Colossians. It has something to do with our faith. Arguably, everything to do with our faith.
A Christian spirituality that does not contend with the agony, the glory, the healing, and the restoration of the body is a tragedy, and it is false teaching, Colossians tells us.
For Christ is the one, as the writer tells us, “from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and tendons, grows with a growth that is from God.”
Cole Arthur Riley, the brilliant person behind Black Liturgies, a social media liturgical movement, wrote this: “I don’t think it’s an accident that we are made to remember God through an act that nourishes us in our own bodies. You want to tell me to love God? Ask me when I’ve last eaten. Come now, you want me to tell you a prayer? You’ll find it in the blood beating from my heart to head to toe and home again. Don’t ask me of salvation. Listen to the hum of my chest as I now fall asleep. I cannot see the face of God by rejecting my own.”
You are baptized, the writer tells the Colossians. You are baptized, I say to you now.
So when your imagination is captive to a disembodied power, remember your baptism. You are fleshy and human, and you are the image of the divine.
Baptism signifies how we “come to fullness” in Christ, that we remember this incarnate miracle.
Remember your baptism because it calls you back to the One who preoccupied himself with making sure people were eating, who contended with their bodily illnesses and ailments, who held the fullness of God as his disgusting feet were cleaned by Mary.
Remember your baptism because it reminds you that we are all mortal, and we are all beloved. And those things matter. They are divine matters. No matter what any powers and principalities have to say about it.
Amen.
After Sermon: Wash, O God, Your Sons and Daughters - 365
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.
Our benediction for this series is from Colossians 3:
May the word of Christ live in us richly.
And whatever we do,
Whether in speech or in action,
May we do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus,
Giving thanks to God.
Amen.
Benediction Hymn: They’ll Know We Are Christians - 494 (v 1 & 4)
Doxology