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!
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 as much or as little in our prepared liturgy as your spirit is willing.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
There are visitor card 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.
If you are missing Sunday School while we await the final unpacking of the boxes and updated guidance from the Pandemic Response Committee, we have a Table Talk class for adults meeting at 10 AM in the Heritage. There is also a combined children’s and youth class available at the same time meeting in the Narthex.
Tomorrow night, Monday, November 1 at 7 pm, we will have our annual All Saints service in the Heritage Chapel. This service is to remember those who have died and gone before us. It’s a solemn service where we light candles, pray, sing, and take communion, trusting in the promise of the communion of saints, that the Lord’s table stretches across all thresholds, including death.
Tuesday at 6:30 is Disciples’ Men Ministry.
Next week is Covenant Sunday on November 7. You will be receiving covenant cards in the mail and you can also fill one out online on our website. We have a special stewardship video for this season you can watch on our website. Next week during our offering, we will collect the covenant cards to plan for our 2022 budget.
And then two weeks from today on November 14 at 5 pm, we will gather at John and Sondra Williams’ house on their back porch for our first meeting of Bible and Beer, where we will mull over scriptures together as we drink home-brewed beer. Bring a snack to share, and we’ll provide the beverages—both alcoholic and non-alcoholic.
We continues series today: Wishin’, Hopin’, Prayin’: Longing for God in a Chaotic World. Today, we dive into the spooky writings of the book of Revelation.
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: We are saved by God’s grace, through faith.
All: This salvation is God’s gift.
One: It’s not something we possessed. It’s not something we did that we can be proud of.
All: Instead, we are God’s accomplishment, created in Christ Jesus to do good things.
One: God planned for these good things to be the way that we live our lives.
All: We are saved by God’s grace, through faith.
(From Ephesians 2:8-10)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
Tomorrow, we will have our All Saints service, and there will be time during the service to light a candle in prayer and to mention your beloveds by name, but as we worship together this morning, we also will remember the collective cloud of witnesses. We will begin the prayer in a moment of silence, calling to our mind the faces and names of those we have lost, and then I will begin our prayer. As always, we will end it with the Lord’s Prayer.
Join me in prayer now.
Silence.
We give you thanks, O God, for all the saints who ever worshiped you
Whether in brush arbors or cathedrals,
Weathered wooden churches or crumbling cement meeting houses
Where your name was lifted and adored.
We give you thanks, O God, for hands lifted in praise:
Manicured hands and hands stained with grease or soil,
Strong hands and those gnarled with age
Holy hands
Used as wave offerings across the world.
We thank you, God, for hardworking saints;
Whether hard-hatted or steel-booted,
Head ragged or aproned,
Blue-collared or three-piece-suited
They left their mark on the earth for you, for us, for our children to come.
Thank you, God, for the tremendous foundation laid by those who have gone before us.
Bless the memories of your saints, God.
May we learn how to walk wisely from their examples of faith, dedication, worship, and love.
And so we pray together the prayer that our brother and redeemer Jesus gave to us…
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
It’s Halloween, so I’ve got my costume on. I’m an angel! Raise your hand if you have your costume planned for trick-or-treating tonight!
I say this is a costume because in our story today, there is a mighty angel. We often think angels in the Bible having wings like mine or looking like babies with wings or maybe glowing a bit. But angels were actually thought to be much spookier. They didn’t really look like people and they had lots of eyes. Which feels rights for Halloween.
And since today is Halloween, that means tomorrow is All Saints Day. And on All Saints, we remember the people have died and we celebrate that in Christ, we are still connected to them. Not quite like a ghost or an angel, but through what we call “the communion of saints.” We believe that the love of Christ that we celebrate during communion every single week keeps us connected to everyone we’ve lost, whether it’s our family member or someone we’ve never even met.
I’m gonna read a story about this connection in a book called The Invisible String.
Let’s pray: Dear God, thank you for the connection we have with people we love, no matter where we are. Help us remember that we are all always in your heart. In Jesus name, we pray, amen.
Sermon
Our scripture for today is from Revelation 5. It is best to read Revelation as one entity, from beginning to end, in one sitting. Maybe one church service we’ll do that, but not today. But this text is unlike most texts we read together so I want to say a few things before we read it.
First, it is an apocalyptic text, which means it’s dramatic with its symbolic imagery, and it’s from a book that has been wildly misinterpreted by many. We don’t read a lot of apocalyptic literature together. Advent always begins with an apocalyptic text from a gospel, but otherwise, we mostly stay clear of books like Daniel or Ezekiel or Revelation in part because our strain of Protestantism doesn’t like to tread much into the radical duality of the apocalyptic. It feels dangerous and spooky. But on a day like today, perhaps, a little spooky is what we need. Halloween feels like a good day for goosebumps.
Second, Revelation is not only apocalyptic literature, but it’s also a letter, and it’s not a letter to us. Just like 1 Corinthians is not a letter to us, but a letter from the apostle Paul to the church in Corinth, Revelation is a letter to Christians in Rome from what has been traditionally attributed to John. Of course, 1 Corinthians does still mediate the word of God to us, but not in the way it did to the original readers. And so with Revelation—it’s not for us, but as Christians, we can experience God through this mysterious text. And I take comfort in the fact that those Roman Christians probably didn’t find Revelation to be any more coherent than we will. However, they were a lot more open to the wily genre of the apocalyptic. They didn’t need a one-for-one literalism or a decoder ring—they knew that God could be experienced just as readily in the form of a seven-eyed Lamb dripping with blood or a bowl filled with the prayers of dead people as in a quaint story about Jesus feeding people on a hillside.
Third, John follows in the tradition of the biblical prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. Culturally, we tend to think of prophecy as predicting the future, a supernatural gift of the occult. But that’s not how prophecy functions in the Bible. Prophecy is about interpreting one’s present in light of the movement of God. So for example, the events of history can be interpreted with this-worldly explanations. The wind that drove back the marshy waters of the Red Sea could be seen as a lucky break for the Israelites in the form of extreme weather. But it was the prophet Moses who interpreted the event as the mighty act of God that delivered Israel from Egypt and made them into God’s people.
And likewise, here, the images we will read together are not meant to predict the future but rather to provoke, to invoke, to evoke, to vocare is the Latin root, which means to call out to the unsettled in our hearts, in our culture, in our church. The images do not lay things plain nearly as often as they stirs things up. And all apocalyptic literature operates from a framework of duality, of a black or white, yes or no, this or that view of the world. Obviously, we know that there are many shades of gray in the world and in our lives, and it’s that knowledge that helps us lament the polarization of our culture. Rarely are things clear-cut. However, the drama of the duality is not meant to be a documentary-esque commentary on our lives, but instead to plunge us into a magical, often terrifying world—think Alice in Wonderland—to see our world with renewed imagination. The apocalyptic gives our imagination new vocabulary.
Okay, caveats made . The text is on the back of your bulletin if you’d like to follow along.
Revelation 5
Then I saw in the right hand of the one seated on the throne a scroll written on the inside and on the back, sealed with seven seals; 2 and I saw a mighty angel proclaiming with a loud voice, “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?” 3 And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able to open the scroll or to look into it. 4 And I began to weep bitterly because no one was found worthy to open the scroll or to look into it. 5 Then one of the elders said to me, “Do not weep. See, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals.”
6 Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth. 7 He went and took the scroll from the right hand of the one who was seated on the throne. 8 When he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. 9 They sing a new song:
“You are worthy to take the scroll
and to open its seals,
for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God
saints from every tribe and language and people and nation;
10 you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God,
and they will reign on earth.”
11 Then I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels surrounding the throne and the living creatures and the elders; they numbered myriads of myriads and thousands of thousands, 12 singing with full voice,
“Worthy is the Lamb that was slaughtered
to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might
and honor and glory and blessing!”
13 Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing,
“To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb
be blessing and honor and glory and might
forever and ever!”
14 And the four living creatures said, “Amen!” And the elders fell down and worshiped.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
I grew up in a world obsessed with the end times. Very soon, maybe this very minute, Jesus would come collect his people and the world would have a few Christian-less years left and then burn up into oblivion. Who cares about the earth because Christians would be riding first-class in the Jesus-mobile. But as a kid not yet given the gift of skepticism, I worried that Jesus would come back while I slept and my parents would disappear in the middle of the night and I’d be left behind. I was afraid to go to sleep lest I wake to find that I was in fact not a real Christian and now left to fend for myself until the end of the world. It was an effective narrative for scaring some into the ranks of “true Christians.”
But the fire and brimstone urgency and the call to trust in Jesus because the world was coming to an end, unintentionally gave way to a lack of urgency in the tangible ways the world was actually ending.
The rapid extinction of species, the filling of oceans with trash and oil, the warming of the climate, the melting ice caps, the starving polar bears, the unchecked deterioration of hope in progress along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Those problems rode in the backseat of the message of Jesus. Sometimes they didn’t even get to ride in the backseat— they had to ride in the trunk or the trailer or the car behind it and sometimes they even had to catch a bus on their own tab.
But what we know clearly today, what our world leaders are discussing right now, is that our world is warming at an alarming rate, and those at the bottom of our economic ladder suffer the most and quickest. And I don’t know about you, but some days it feels a little silly to be singing about hope. You know, these days, I still stay up at night thinking about the world ending but in a different way now, and I know I’m not alone.
John Green, a popular writer and devout Episcopalian, shares my generation’s despair about climate change, and he wrote in his most recent book, “Part of our fears about the world ending must stem from the strange reality that for each of us our world will end, and soon.” He jokes maybe it’s just our narcissism as a species, and maybe he’s right.
But in our valid angst about the world ending, we are also confronting the reality that the world has always been ending. We die, our beloveds die, our home gets sold to the highest bidder, our traditions fade away, a pandemic steals precious time away from us. The world as we know it is always ending faster than we can keep up.
And compounding our anxiety about mortality is our American culture. Our particular brand of modernity is always telling us that infinity is around the corner, it’s at the bottom of our inbox or the stack of self-help books or the recesses of our Roth IRA account. It whispers the spells of “Productivity, efficiency, progress, the gospel of good better best.” We’re offered elixirs and potions that promise us we can be young forever, successful forever, agents of our perfectibility and stability.
So it’s even harder to deal with catastrophic ending head-on, be it climate change or death, because we’re always being sold the idea that we will never die, that there is more than enough for everyone’s greed, even as the collateral damage of that narrative piles higher and higher every day.
The prophetic voices of scripture were speaking to people living in the Iron Age who were used to burying beloveds far more frequently than we do, so perhaps they still offer us something of real value. And so apocalyptic literature like the one we read today gives us a way to come at a few of these tender things sideways, if you will. We can look at some things peripherally before we face them head-on. As if we were scooting into the conversation.
So let’s step into this apocalyptic vision now. Don’t worry, we’ll go together and we won’t stay long.
There are a few mystical creatures in our text today. Our mighty angel probably did not have dainty wings like the ones I wore earlier. There are undescribed creatures, so it’s up to your imagination what they are. But most affronting is the Lamb with seven eyes and seven horns, dripping with blood as if it had been slaughtered. It’s like a horror movie.
And the Lamb enters the story because the mighty angel is looking around because the one on the throne with a scroll in his hand is wondering if there is someone worthy to open it. This is a question that’s been asked in scripture before: Is there anyone worthy? In this case, no, there isn’t. John weeps at this fact.
We won’t get into what the scroll says because that’s outside of our purview this morning, but it’s end of the world stuff for a people in crisis. Not just anybody can read it.
No one is worthy, that is, until the Lamb enters.
But the Alice in Wonderland twist is that it’s not a Lamb that we are looking for. Because the elders have said, “Behold, the Lion of Judah! The Conqueror!” So when we turn our heads with John in this vision, looking for the King of the Pridelands, the mighty predator of the plains, we are shocked to see instead, a lowly prey who looks as if it’s been hunted by our expected predator. And this is the one who is worthy to open the scroll.
Which feels in contradiction to how we sometimes think about the end of the world. Right? It’s certainly different than the end times theology I grew up with. We might have assumed that in the case of which comes first, the lion or the lamb? The lamb would come first. Love would be a provisional strategy of the earthly Jesus to accomplish God’s purposes. But eventually, when everyone had had their chance and love had not worked, the transcendent, eschatological violence of the Lion would replace it and take care of God’s business.
But that’s not what the vision implies. The Lamb does not accomplish God’s purposes by killing others, but by being killed by them. This goes against all respectable virtues and understandings of how the world works.
And if John had any question about what he was seeing, this image of the slain Lamb is affirmed by 4 creatures, 24 elders who are holding in their hands bowls of incense which are the prayers of the saints so they’ve got the backing of every single person who has died, and then more creatures and more elders and more angels that numbered myriads and myriads and thousands and thousands singing, “Worthy is the Lamb who was slaughtered. To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and power, etc.”
We want to be careful not to attempt to solve this vision like a puzzle, but our minds are meant to be puzzled, to search for God in the fog of it.
And just as the original receivers of Revelation could encounter God in the jarring and mysterious language of the apocalyptic, so can we.
Tomorrow we will celebrate All Saints Day together. We will light candles, and take communion with a special eye on the aspect of the table that extends across the threshold of death. We will use rituals and ceremony to remember the ones we can’t forget anyway. We will proclaim our faith that death, what feels like the ultimate separation, what feels like a fearsome Lion waiting to pounce, is actually, somehow, a revealer of life and love.
That something as affronting and absurd as a slain Lamb is somehow a harbinger of hope.
I loved Jenna’s sermon last week—there were all these nuggets of beauty, and if you missed it, I encourage you to go back and listen on the podcast, but one thing she said was that in the beginning, when it was just the Trinity, we were made in love, for love, by love, with love. Love was the beginning of us all.
And here, eons later, on an earth that groans with warning signs and last ditch efforts to save itself, even here, in our moments of despair whether they be our own end, the end of our loved ones, or the end of our world, well, there is love still. We are in fact bookended by love. It hems us in in front and from behind. It tucks us in tightly the way I tuck my own daughter in at night. It is as sealed as the scroll the one on the throne holds and is opened up to us all by the only one worthy of it.
The prayers of the saints waft over us, reminding us of the absurdity of this love, of a love that transcends death, that knows no ending, whose resilience is paradoxically predicated on our own fragility. Our own delicate tethers to one another and to life. This love is strong because it is so very tender. It knows no end because it has truly known ending. It is not scared of what we are scared of because it has already faced the scariest thing of all.
May we catch a whiff of the prayers of the saints, the saints we will remember tomorrow, that tell us that the end looks like love. Amen.
Sharing Our Resources
This past week, Scottie, our church historian, found quite a few documents and ledgers. And she found this ledger from 1946, a time when Azle Christian Church was in dire financial straits. And the note reads: *Read note*
No matter what life has looked like here at Azle in its long history, the focus of this church has always been outward in the name of Jesus. That is a legacy that we continue to live into no matter the state of our building or the state of our public health. During this pandemic, emails have flown back and forth about how much to donate to Southwest Good Samaritan because they’re in need, too, and who is going to construct a ramp for so-and-so, and how many grocery bags should we pick up for Food Hub or the Little Pantry.
We believe that stewardship is a spiritual practice that relinquishes us from Pharaoh’s economy, from an economy that says we must hoard and hide and store up for ourselves. Stewardship allows us to affirm again and again that it is not our money, it’s God’s money. We do this as a church whether we are mailing eggs to an orphanage or buying a refrigerator for our friends at the border or giving a gas card to a transient neighbor. And we do this individually when we give our offerings in worship.
There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church: Venmo, giving online, giving box, offering plate.
The deacons are going to hand these plates over during our final song, starting at the front row and they just to need make their way to the back where a deacon will collect them. You can drop your offering, an “I gave online card,” or an information card.
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 final song, and the Doxology.
Our benediction comes from the book of Hebrews:
Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses,
Let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely,
And let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us,
Looking to Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith.
Amen.