Introit: God, Whose Giving Knows No Ending - 606
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.
The Seekers Sunday School class invites you to game night this Wednesday at 6:30 pm.
Sting Fling is just around the corner! On Saturday, September 10, we’ll host a booth to tell people about Azle Christian Church and what it means to us. If you’d like to volunteer for a two-hour shift, you can find a sign-up sheet at the entry tables, and I’ll be in the back with one. You can also use the sign-up in your blast.
Rick: Golf Tournament
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 a new worship series this morning: Study Hall: A Back to School Sermon Series. We’ll be learning and working together through the book of Colossians. This morning, we cover the First Day essentials.
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: God of Grace and God of Glory - 464
Litany of Faith
One: I, Wisdom, dwell with prudence; I have found knowledge and discretion.
All: I was formed in ancient times, at the beginning, before the earth was.
One: I was there when God established the heavens, when God marked out the horizon on the deep sea;
All: I was there when God thickened the clouds above, when God secured the fountains of the deep.
One: Now children, listen to me: Happy are those who keep to my ways!
All: Happy are those who listen to me, watching daily at my doors, waiting at my doorposts.
(From Proverbs 8)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Join me in prayer.
O Holy Maker of this great green earth,
Great source of all the energy of creation;
Wonderful God of fruitful orchards
And chirping choruses in the night,
We gather in your presence
To celebrate your gifts of life and community.
We come to pray and sing and celebrate,
To share our burdens and our joys.
We come because you have called us to be your people,
One small part of the Body of Christ.
You bless us with community;
You guide us into close relationships;
You tend to our wounds, you speak to us through our broken bodies;
Your mercy knows no end.
God, we give you praise and thanks,
For all the richness in this world you’ve made,
And for making room for us here in your family of faith.
Reveal yourself to us in the prayers
And the stories
And the songs we share,
For we gather in your name.
And 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.
As the Deer - Insert
Children’s Moment
Anthem: ACC Choir
Sermon
Colossians 1:1-23
Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and Timothy our brother,
2 To the saints and faithful brothers and sisters in Christ in Colossae:
Grace to you and peace from God our Father.
3 In our prayers for you we always thank God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, 4 for we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of the love that you have for all the saints, 5 because of the hope laid up for you in heaven. You have heard of this hope before in the word of the truth, the gospel 6 that has come to you. Just as it is bearing fruit and growing in the whole world, so it has been bearing fruit among yourselves from the day you heard it and truly comprehended the grace of God. 7 This you learned from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant. He is a faithful minister of Christ on our behalf, 8 and he has made known to us your love in the Spirit.
9 For this reason, since the day we heard it, we have not ceased praying for you and asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of God’s will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, 10 so that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to God, as you bear fruit in every good work and as you grow in the knowledge of God. 11 May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from God’s glorious power, so that you may have all endurance and patience, joyfully 12 giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in the light. 13 God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the beloved Son, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.
15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, 16 for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. 17 He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 He is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him God was pleased to reconcile to God’s self all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.
21 And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22 he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before God, 23 provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a minister of this gospel.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
We begin a new series today: Study Hall. Today is our First Day, so in true First Day fashion, let us take an overview of the subject, shall we?
Let’s begin with the text we’ll be using.
The letter to the Colossians is traditionally attributed to the apostle Paul when he was in prison, but scholarship tells us that it was likely a student of Paul’s who wrote it. It was customary and a sign of respect to write in the same vein as a teacher, and Colossians is likely the closest in theology and tone to Paul’s actual writing as these pseudo-Paul letters get.
And let us remember, us Biblical literature students, that Colossians is an epistle. It’s a letter from a person to a church, to a couple of churches actually. It’s not a theological treatise, it’s not a history report nor is it a prescription for Christian living. It’s somebody’s mail, just one small part of an ongoing correspondence between two parties in a time and culture and language very different than our own, which means we have questions whose answers are lost to time. There are holes and gaps in the story that we will never be able to fill.
The letter to the Colossians is an ancient text that contains a lot of puzzle pieces that may seem incomprehensible to us at times. Except it’s not puzzle pieces from the same puzzle. We have a corner piece, and then a button, and perhaps a scatter jack, and an acorn. Alongside these curious findings, there is a piece of paper with a poem scrawled on it, and a picture of someone you don’t know with no name on the back. There’s a ticket stub in a foreign language and a key and a marble.
Our assignment during this series is not to try to make all of these things make perfect and complete sense. It’s not to prescribe whatever is being said to the Colossian church to our church.
It’s simply to roll the marble around in our hands. To read the poem out loud to each other. To spin the button between our fingers. To pass the acorn around, each of us having a look at it. It’s not that we don’t know anything about the letter to the Colossians. It’s simply that we don’t know everything. And so we politely open someone else’s mail, holding our own context in our hearts, and read with some imagination.
Because ancient texts were not always ancient. That may seem obvious, but it’s worth remembering. This letter to the community in Colossae was once a piece of contemporary correspondence to a particular community in a particular place and time.
So let’s consider what we know of our subject.
Colossae was a town in what is now modern-day Turkey. It was a cosmopolitan city where diverse cultural and religious elements mingled. It was part of the mighty Roman empire, where Pax Romana ruled. The concept of peace will become important throughout this letter, so let us remember what Pax Romana meant.
It meant that people lived without constant warfare. If you lived in the Roman Empire, you did not live under the threat of sudden attack and pillaging. You were protected from that instability, and you were reminded of this peace everywhere: on the gates to the cities, in your temples, in the victory parades that accompanied imperial worship, and on the coins you used to pay at the market.
These coins are an interesting piece of history because on one side, there was Pax, the goddess of peace. And on the other side, there was weapons. So that we always remember that this peace was achieved by the blood of the sword.
This peace was good for some. But it was also bad for others, and a marker of this peace was how it divided. It made the wealthy even wealthier and it made the peasants, the vast majority of the population, hopeless and impoverished.
The concept of peace seems trifling in a way because who threatens an empire known for its peace by proclaiming peace? But we will see over the next few weeks that peace is not trifling. Not at all.
The Roman empire was an empire. It ruled supreme. And empires maintain their sovereignty by not only by establishing a monopoly of markets and political structures and military might, but also by monopolizing the imagination of its subjects.
Imperial mythology is strong and seductive. Putting all one’s hope in a person, in a party, in a policy—it’s not something that just originated in the last few years or the last 200 years.
Trusting in the story empire tells about itself, which always posits the empire as the hero and the protagonist—this is not something that is unique to America or the Western world.
Worshiping military might or the economic system of empire—these are things that have been around for a long time.
And it’s easy to get sucked in because like I said before, the mythology is everywhere. On the money, on the city structures, in places of worship. It was a compelling and relatively peaceful way to live.
But there were other compelling ways of life available to the Colossians. The writer of this letter will speak about false teachers proposing different religious rules and esoteric knowledge available only to those in that particular strain of religious groups.
Being the ones who are right, who can talk the loudest or the longest, the ones who have access to God because they have removed themselves from participation in the world, that also was an attractive option in the marketplace of meaning.
Maybe you were fed up with the worship of the state because you saw how it abused its citizens and created and perpetuated oppression. Instead of living into the larger-than-life story of Rome, you could live the life of an ascete—like a monk philosopher, charmed by a group that might have had its own Netflix cult documentary about it if it existed today.
Even as the faithful Colossian church followed the lead of Judaism in resisting the emperor cult by observing alternative feasts and festivals, questions about how to live in this world together, spurred by the stories of Christ plagued them.
Should they free their slaves?
Should they be selling their goods to imperial high priests?
Should they give back the farms that became theirs because peasant owners could not pay their debts?
What does it mean for them to use their wealth for the pride of the city and the empire now that they no longer honored the emperor?
These are some of our learning objectives during this series.
The letter begins how most letters begin: with greetings and salutations. The writer applauds the church for their faith, for the way it has born fruit that feeds not only their life but even beyond their city limits. Sh or he subtly hints at the issue of these false teachers by praying for wisdom and knowledge and understanding, a nice little wink wink at these deceitful philosophies the letter will get at. There’s talk of kingdom and the world and powers of darkness. In this intro, we see some of these big questions the letter will address start to bubble up.
But our writer will not present a detailed argument for why Jesus is the best. They won’t give a syllabus of assigned reading or lead an impassioned debate about why Christianity is right and everyone else is wrong.
No, instead they quote poetry. A move I admire.
Just as Jesus would answer legal questions with stories and parables, which I’m sure was maddening, the writer to the Colossians answers real life issues with a poem. And even in translation, this poem cuts to our heart.
Christ is the image of the invisible God.
Christ was the firstborn of all creation.
For him, in him, through him, everything was created. Everything you can see and everything you can’t.
Christ is before all things.
In Christ, all things hold together.
He is the head of the church, he is the beginning.
The fullness of God dwelt in him. God was pleased to work through Christ to reconcile all creation to God’s self.
Some of this poem may sound familiar to you—to something we all said together earlier this morning. Our litany of faith is from Proverbs 8, where Lady Wisdom, known as Sophia in tradition, was with God in the beginning.
So that this poem is subtly drawing on ancient stories, and playing with beautiful philosophy with the flick of a verse. It’s playing on a whole repertoire of narrative and belief that is underlying the church.
Take it from this former English teacher, poetry can bring down kingdoms, y’all.
This poem, much like Jesus’ parables, is not a sidestep of the big questions. It’s not an evasion of the hard issues.
And I don’t think this is a simple “Jesus is the answer to your problems” response either.
Because I don’t think Jesus is the answer. Is that bad to say?
Perhaps, by alighting our imaginations with this poem, our writer is reminding us of Christ’s function not as a piece of the cosmos, but as the very fabric of it.
Christ precedes and creates the very world we live in. Christ is the medium of life, the milieu of meaning.
So that with everything the Colossians have going on, Christ is a field of exploration. Christ is not the door to Narnia, Christ is Narnia, so to speak.
Jesus is not the answer, no. Jesus is the question.
Jesus cannot be an object of conquest or the warrior king. He laid his life down. He said no to violence as a path to peace.
He is not a body of knowledge or the best and final explanation.
Christ is the open-ended question that we live into, every day, individually and with others, within a worldly kingdom, and somehow transcending it.
He provokes and pokes, he startles and offends, he lifts our awareness to something we didn’t notice, he speaks what we could not put into words.
And I wonder what it means for us that Christ is an open-ended question.
For we, too, live in a competitive marketplace of meaning and relevance. Empire worship is real in our context, but it’s certainly not the only offering of meaning. The worship of youthfulness, the obsession with positive thinking and progress, the allegiance to the status quo, the markets, the politicians, the ideologies, the intersecting pieces of oppressive structures in racism, classism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, etc.—these are all marked on our money and in our structures, and in our celebrations.
Is Christ just another piece of this world that we live in?
Or is he the animating force of all that is? Is his love the current, the breath, the beating heart of what it means to live with one another?
And how does that change how we live together in community? How do we engage the world at large and also in front of our faces day in and day out?
I don’t have the answer.
I only have the question.
Amen.
In Remembrance of Me - 403
Table Meditation
I invite you to prepare your elements for when we take them together in just a moment.
My family and I spent the first 2.5 weeks of August in Hungary, my spouse’s country of origin. It was Annie’s first time to set foot in a place that runs in her blood. It had been 4 years since JD was last there, 7 for me.
It’s funny when you arrive at a place you know. I kept wondering when we were actually in Hungary. Was it when we entered Hungarian air space? Or when our plane landed? Was it when we emerged into fresh air as we left the airport?
Or was it when drove into JD’s hometown and our eyes filled with familiar sights? Or was it in the embrace of his mother? Was it when we woke up to roosters crowing and young Hungarian mothers chiding their children to the bus stop?
Our first breakfast in Hungary was oatmeal for me and JD, a nutella sandwich for Annie. We sipped our first of a hundred espressos bleary-eyed as Annie tittered away her observations of everything she could see.
But as the first week wore on, we started eating. A lot. We ate pan-fried peppers, tomatoes, and onions so limp that they were practically noodles, dripping with butter and salt, yearning to be layered onto dry crumbly bread. We slurped cold fruit soup that blended cream and berries so magnificently that we thought we had ascended to the third heaven.
We ate pizza slice after pizza slice because you know that the closer you get to Italy, the better the pizza is. And we realized with every lick and lap of raspberry chocolate fagyi, or a scoop of nutella cookie fagyi, or a precariously layered cone filled with scoops of pistachio, sour cherry, and blackberry walnut fagyi, that being a Hungarian means being made up of at least 10% ice cream.
We celebrated our 12th wedding anniversary in Hungary, and as we stuffed our bellies to their breaking point with mountain food consisting of wild mushroom soup, duck confit and dreamily creamy potatoes, we inexplicably said yes, we would like to see a dessert menu. JD transcended and floated above his bodily form as he ate the famous Hungarian chestnut pudding buried under a mountain of hand-whipped cream, and I became a convert to a new religion led by the one and only nutella-filled crepe sprinkled liberally with powdered sugar and washed down with another espresso.
That was the moment that I thought, “Ah, yes. We have finally arrived in Hungary.”
I joke that I dream about the food at a little place called Rossita’s and I lament that I can never get my chicken paprikash to taste like my sister-in-laws not because my god is my belly as we hear in one of Paul’s letters, but because food is an identity maker, a home locator.
My daughter was ingesting her identity one ice cream scoop at a time. JD was reacquainting himself with his identity as he ate his mother’s cooking and visited his favorite spots. I participated in the lifelong practice of learning who my husband and daughter are with every bowl of soup I cradled.
In a similar way, when we come to this table, we are returning home. We are remembering who we are. We are smelling it and tasting it and slurping it. We are ingesting our identity in Christ with every nibble of the bread and every sip of the juice. We are closing our eyes and looking forward to the day when we say, “Ah, yes. We have finally arrived.”
Words of Institution:
It is with this hope that we tell the story each week 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, we give thanks that part of our worship each week is to remember that we are bodies. That you had a body. That our bodies are conduits for knowing you. Bless this bread and wine as we take it together. 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.
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.
Pass it On - 477 (v. 1&3)
Doxology