Welcome/Call to Worship
Good morning! 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 visitor cards in the pew in front of you—if you arrived during the pandemic or later, of 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.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
We invite you to Sunday School at 10 AM every week. There’s classes that meet in the Seekers room and the Fellowship Hall. There is also a combined children and youth class that meets in the parlor. Godly Play meets behind the sanctuary for our younger elementary students.
This past week, you should have received an email from us to join our church directory platform called Realm.
Today, immediately following service, we will have a tutorial on how to do that and how to access the church directory and customize how you receive church announcements. Lunch will be provided. We’ll have a screen up walking you through it as well as people milling about who know what they’re doing and can help you.
Harold Williams has generously offered to set up a table in the Narthex this summer to help with any troubleshooting that may be needed in navigating the app and its settings.
A Dream Fulfilled, our campaign to finish paying off the debt on our building, in in full swing and will culminate on June 5, when you will be able to turn in your pledge cards. You will receive a physical card and letter in the mail over the next couple of weeks, and you can also fill out a card online on our website. On June 5, after service, you’re invited to enjoy cookie fellowship in the Fellowship Hall as the elders tally how much we’ve pledged and our timeline for paying off the loan.
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 continue our worship series We Call Ourselves Disciples this morning as we contemplate our baptisms with the story of Paul and Lydia.
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: Hallelujah! Praise God in the holy temple; give praise in the firmament of heaven.
All: Praise God who is mighty in deed; give praise for God’s excellent greatness.
One: Praise God with the blast of the ram’s horn; give praise with lyre and harp.
All: Praise God with timbrel and dance; give praise with strings and pipe.
One: Praise God with resounding cymbals; give praise with loud-clanging cymbals.
All: Let everything that has breath praise the Lord. Hallelujah!
(Psalm 150)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Join me in prayer.
God of hope and healing,
God of promise and blessing,
God of all who yearn for wholeness,
Our hearts are troubled by a world that is broken and in pain.
When the morning news is filled with stories of war and violence,
Of terrorists and tyrants, of corruption and bad faith,
Of racism and harassment,
Of lives destroyed by hatred and oppression;
We pray that you will remember your people,
And wipe away every tear.
When our loved ones fall ill,
When our bodies fail us,
When wildfires rage in the mountains or in our hearts,
When the pain of the world is too much for us to bear,
We cry out to you for comfort and for peace.
Holy God of all of us who feel lost, of all the world considers the least,
God of all compassion,
God of love and peace,
In words that are spoken aloud
And in the wordless silence of our hearts,
We bring our prayers for others and for ourselves to you.
We ask this is 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.
Sermon
Acts 16:9-15
9 During the night Paul had a vision: there stood a man of Macedonia pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10 When he had seen the vision, we immediately tried to cross over to Macedonia, being convinced that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.
11 We therefore set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, 12 and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days.
13 On the Sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. 14 A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul.
15 When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home.” And she prevailed upon us.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
It is said that when the father of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther, would slip into one of his darker places, he would comfort himself by saying, “Martin, be calm. You are baptized.”
I don’t think he meant it as a magic charm to chase the demons away or as an insurance for when trouble befell him. But rather, it was more likely a reminder of his identity.
At Jesus’ baptism, the gospels tell us some variation of God’s identification of Jesus either through a booming voice or a peaceful dove or some spooky wind. But the story goes that when Jesus rose out of the water, God said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” Now, it’s not that those things weren’t true before baptism—it’s just that baptism for Jesus, and consequently for us, is a naming of a reality that is already true: unending belovedness.
For the past few weeks, we have been talking about what it means to be a part of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). What does it mean that we bear the symbol of the chalice and call ourselves a Christian Church?
And for the next two weeks, we get to talk about my very favorite things: baptism and communion. They’re why I’m Disciples, but just like Remi shared last week, there are a whole host of reasons why each of you are Disciples. Maybe baptism is fine, but really, what you appreciate is the “no creed but Christ” badge. Perhaps your baptism was uneventful, but you’re just glad that women and queer people are not sidelined in Disciples spaces. And maybe your communion sensibilities are fixed—none of this bubbly juice and pastry business—but what really makes you come alive is that while we’re part of a whole, each church gets to define who it is.
Whatever reason you are here today in this church that calls itself Disciples of Christ, we’re glad for it. We’re better because of you. Because church is always happening in unexpected ways with unlikely people, like in today’s story.
In this little story in Acts, Paul has a dream. He dreams of a man in Macedonia—this detail is important for later—which is the district that contains Philippi, the site of one of Paul’s future favorite churches. And this Macedonian man pleads for help. This story is from the book of the Acts of the Apostles, which means that the Holy Spirit is responsible for the plot line, so we can assume that the Spirit inspired this dream. Sometimes she leads by divine speech and visions, and other times, she leads through closed doors and wrecked ships. And while she begins with a vision in this story, her work is not finished.
So Paul makes his journey to Macedonia, desperately searching for the man of his dreams. His pattern had been to start with the local synagogue in each town he visited, so he attempts to do that here, but he runs into a problem. While Philippi has a rich and diverse religious atmosphere, the Jewish religion is not prominent here.
Undeterred, Paul hears that there’s a place by the river outside of town where people gather to pray, so on he goes, hoping for a dream fulfilled, praying that he will be able to continue with his mission from God.
But as he comes upon the clearing and hears the rush of the river, he finds something unexpected. Not a group of Jewish men, but rather, a group of Gentile women, with their fearless leader Lydia at the helm.
This little group invites Paul to speak, and he shares the gospel because that is what he came to do after all, and Lydia responds, “Sounds good to me. Let’s get baptized. There’s a river here. No need to wait. How about it, girls?”
And after they are baptized, in true church lady fashion, the text says Lydia “prevailed upon them,” which means she wouldn’t let Paul leave without feeding him.
Now this story almost didn’t happen. Think of all the contingencies of history, the long list of improbable events that led to Lydia’s encounter with Paul. Consider how the early church fought about preaching to the Gentiles. Recall how Paul had to be nudged and shipwrecked and blocked and redirected until he finally got to that river bank. It’s a miracle, really, that Paul and Lydia ever met.
But underlying this improbability is a faithfulness. Paul was committed to the mission God had given him—it didn’t matter how the shape of it constantly shifted with the changing landscapes. The bones were there. Preach the gospel to whoever would listen. And baptize them. As long as Paul kept showing up, the Holy Spirit did too.
And Lydia, though she did not yet know the Jesus Paul preached, held her river meeting on the Sabbath every week, open to whoever joined them. She gathered her gang of gals to pray and open themselves up to God’s voice, and then one day, everything changed.
This story is one part faithfulness, one part Holy Spirit spontaneity.
And out of this miracle moment teed up by faithfulness, this river gang will go on to found the church in Philippi, to whom Paul writes a letter and gives us a glimpse into one of their beloved hymns that goes:
Though [Jesus] existed in the form of God,
He did not regard equality with God
as something to be grasped,
7 but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
assuming human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a human,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.
9 Therefore God exalted him even more highly
and gave him the name
that is above every other name,
10 so that at the name given to Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
This hymn is important because it is what our baptism mimics. A death and a resurrection. A dip below and a miraculous rising.
It’s the impossibility around which every other impossibility of the Christian faith orbits. Baptism reminds us that there is no ladder to holiness, no self-improvement plan to follow. It’s just death and resurrection, over and over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead, rends our pride, our apathy, our fear, our hate, our despair, our anger, and our pain.
And we can say to ourselves in the deep down, soul-scorching moments, “Be calm. You are baptized. You are beloved. You are God’s own. This has always been and will always be true.”
But I have a question for you. What do we make of this Macedonian dreamboat? Paul never found him. He went to Macedonia post haste because of his vision of a Macedonian man pleading for help, but Paul ended up cofounding a church with Lydia instead. He went looking for a synagogue and found an outdoor revival. He thought he’d be going over the fine points of Hebrew scripture, but instead he was up to his waist in river water. He figured he’d be eating kosher, but instead got a casserole.
What are we to make of this vision and how things turned actually out?
Maybe thinking about our Disciple’s practice of believer’s baptism might help.
Our founders squabbled over baptism for a long time, but they eventually landed on a believers baptism by immersion, thanks to their Baptist roots. As Disciples, we accept all baptisms. We trust that no matter what we believed the moment the water touched us either through sprinkle or dunking, the work of baptism is God’s alone. God’s abundant and indiscriminate grace cloaks us in belovedness, and it doesn’t matter one bit if we’ve changed our mind 10 times in 10 years, or 10 times in the past 10 minutes. Grace is grace.
And besides, believer’s baptism is a bit of a misnomer. The phrase suggests that we have a lot more agency in the matter than most of us have. Whether we meet the water as a baby or as an adult, we do it in the hands of those who are welcoming us to a life of faith, all the people who have or will introduce us to Jesus. Baptism is done to us, for us. We can’t baptize ourselves—we are baptized, we are recipients of baptism, just as we are recipients of grace.
Baptism is, after all, an adoption, not an interview.
And so perhaps, our baptism is like the Macedonian man. We say yes, and as our journey of faith unfolds, things turn out very different than we expected. The world changes around us, sometimes aggravatingly slow, and other times, faster than we can keep up. And thus, what we consider church changes. How we practice community evolves. How we see God’s movement shifts.
Because our baptism calls us to die and be reborn not once, but again and again. We contemplate our baptism regularly to remember this. To remember that despite the constant movement around us, the one thing that never changes is that we are God’s beloved. We—all of us together—are God’s beloveds.
And just like Paul and Lydia, each in their own ways, we come ready to share and receive good news day in and day out, showing up faithfully, returning to the promise of our baptism, and trusting that the Spirit will show up. We trust the Spirit will lead us into new ways of being, new understandings of God’s family, new ways of encountering God.
We may begin thinking we are headed one direction and find ourselves in a completely different place. And what the story of Paul and Lydia can tell us is that Jesus goes ahead of us no matter where we begin or where we end up.
So if we find ourselves in tumultuous waters, may we let the water lap onto our skin and may we say to ourselves, “Be calm. You are baptized.”
If we find ourselves in a dark place, may we trust that the darkness is a watery womb from which we will emerge, and may we say to ourselves, “Be calm. You are baptized.”
And if we find ourselves flooded and saturated to the bone with all that the flood waters of life have carried to us, may we trust that in this, we die and are reborn again and again. And may we say to ourselves, “Be calm. You are baptized.”
So I say to you, and you say to me, all of us say together to one another, say it with me: “Be calm. You are baptized.”
Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
One of the ways we practice living into the coming-and-already-present reign of God is through our practice of stewardship. In this practice, we devote our time and resources to the community of Christ in its specific iteration here at Azle Christian Church, trusting that what we give away is ultimately not ours to give but is God’s.
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.
Gracious God,
through a vision you sent forth Paul to preach the gospel
and called the women to the place of prayer on the Sabbath.
Grant that we may be like Paul
and be found like Lydia,
our hearts responsive to your word
and open to go where you lead us. Amen.