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.
We welcome all sounds and smells from the youngest to the oldest and everyone in between. For our young ones, there is a customized Children’s Bulletin and crayons for children to participate in worship as well as a designated area in the back for families of little ones who need to move around with a box of quiet crafts and manipulatives for children and their grownups to pull from. We believe that every age offers a unique perspective of the image of God. We know that the energy and spirit of children can be different than adults and we consider that reality a gift.
A couple of announcements before we begin:
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.
Advent begins next week! We’ll begin our new series: Less Is More: A Simple Advent Journey. There will be Advent Home Kits available for pick-up at worship next week and they’ll be in the office after that. If you need a kit delivered to your house, please comment on this livestream or contact the church office and we will get it to you. There are lots of ways to observe Advent with us. A calendar is set out at the entry tables, available online, and in your Advent kits.
On December 4, ACC will have a booth at Azle’s Christmas on Main Street. Sign-ups for shifts at the booth will be available starting this week—online and a physical sign-up sheet.
On Sunday, December 5, immediately following worship, we will have our annual congregational meeting to approve the budget and other decisions proposed by the Board. The meeting will be in-person and on Zoom, so please join us for this important day.
On December 6, the annual DWM Christmas Party will take place in the Fellowship Hall at 6 PM.
To keep with all the life we live together here at Azle Christian Church, make sure you follow us on Facebook and subscribe to our weekly e-blast and monthly newsletter. To sign up for the eblast and newsletter, go to our website, azlechristianchurch.org, and subscribe. There is also a live calendar on our website where you can see what we have going on each month.
In addition to Facebook, you can also find us on Instagram and TikTok, both at @azlechristianchurch.
We are nearing the end of our series: Wishin’, Hopin’, Prayin’: Longing for God in a Chaotic World. Today, we go to Egypt together.
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: You are one body and one spirit, just as God also called you in one hope.
All: There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all.
One: God gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers.
All: God’s purpose was to equip God’s people for the work of serving and building up the body of Christ.
One: The whole body grows from Christ, as it is joined and held together by all the supporting ligaments.
All: The body makes itself grow in that it builds itself up with love as each one does its part.
(Ephesians 4:4-6, 11-12, 16)
Pastoral Prayer
The Lord be with you.
(From Calling on God: Inclusive Prayers for Three Years of Sundays)
O holy Mystery, Ruler of all this complex creation,
We gather to give ourselves to you in thanks and celebration.
We come from many places,
Filled with hopes and fears,
Hungry for a quiet spot
Where we can share our load.
We know this is a place where we connect with you.
A place of Sabbath rest,
A place where love and understanding,
Healing and forgiveness
Flow like quiet streams beneath a piercing sun.
Help us follow where you lead us,
For we would be your people,
One small part of the body of the risen Christ,
Gathered here to sing and pray and celebrate
In the name of our Savior, Jesus.
We pray for wisdom and compassion
To let your love flow through us,
Bringing life and hope to those in pain and need.
We worry,
And we reach out for help,
And we regret that there is not enough time to do more.
We ache for the pain we see
In places where seems to be no healing.
Injustice where there should be justice,
Suffering where there should be peace,
Hate where there should be empathy,
Indifference where there should be love.
What can we do to help?
O God of love and hope,
Hear now our prayers for those in need,
And for ourselves, for we are needy too.
And in our hour of need, 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.
Sermon: Praying Without Words
Exodus 1:8-14; 2:23-25
1:8 Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph. 9 He said to his people, “Look, the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we. 10 Come, let us deal shrewdly with them, or they will increase and, in the event of war, join our enemies and fight against us and escape from the land.” 11 Therefore they set taskmasters over them to oppress them with forced labor. They built supply cities, Pithom and Rameses, for Pharaoh. 12 But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread, so that the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites. 13 The Egyptians became ruthless in imposing tasks on the Israelites, 14 and made their lives bitter with hard service in mortar and brick and in every kind of field labor. They were ruthless in all the tasks that they imposed on them.
2:23 After a long time the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. 24 God heard their groaning, and God remembered the covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. 25 God looked upon the Israelites, and God knew.
This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.
In our youth and children’s class, we’ve been looking at foundational stories of scripture. And we just concluded studies on promise and exodus: God’s promise to Abraham to make his descendants as numerous as the stars, and God’s act of deliverance for the Hebrew people out of Egypt. These are stories that some of us have seen illustrated on felt boards or in sandboxes, in Veggie Tale movies or Bible cue cards. Perhaps you recognized our anthem from the critically acclaimed retelling of the Exodus story: The Prince of Egypt.
We know these stories well—perhaps better than we know most stories in Scripture. They have action and drama, the voice of God, fantastical events and miracles. They make for great stories. It’s no wonder they were told over and over again at campfires and holy days for the Jewish people throughout scripture and even today. They are identity-shaping narratives, origin stories of a long-suffering, resilient people who have endured exile, systemic violence, ethnic cleansing, and even now are targeted for hate crimes. Just a few weeks ago, a synagogue in Austin, Texas was set on fire. These stories tell of an enduring promise, an enduring blessing that is stronger than any trauma, any tragedy, any work to eliminate or subdue them.
But these are not only stories about a people. They are also stories about God. The God of the Bible cannot be fully known apart from this exodus narrative. We’ve read a few prophet narratives over the past few months, and they all point back to this time. Remember, remember, how God heard us, how God delivered us, how God led us, how God shaped us. Remember, remember the liberation, the manna, the fire, the desert, the Red Sea. Remember, remember how we were called, how we were protected, how we were freed.
As Christians, who consider the Hebrew scriptures as part of our sacred text, we can’t know God fully without the exodus story. We can’t understand the memory of genocide evoked in Herod’s call to kill all the male infants in Jesus’ time and place without the story of it first being done in Egypt. We can’t understand how deliverance is different than conquest in the gospels without the witness of the Hebrew people walking out Egypt rather than toppling the Empire. We can’t fully understand the weeping of Jesus at Lazarus’ tomb, moved by the anguish of his people, without knowing that the anguish and crying out of God’s people always mobilizes the Holy One’s own self into saving acts.
This story may have begun for you on a felt board or on a Veggie Tale video or in children’s class, but it doesn’t stop there. It’s a story for the young because it requires so much divine imagination, and children are experts at that. But that is the planting of a seed. And we water it as we retell the story over and over again as we grow. We expand the details: the violence, the imperialism, the unfettered greed. And the seed germinates.
And we keep telling the story so that like a plant hungry for the sun, we may stretch toward God even more, even closer, as we continue to learn not only about our faith forebears and the wisdom practiced by our Jewish brothers and sisters, but also the origin of our Messiah. The one who heard this story over and over and was so profoundly shaped by his Jewish faith that some people confused him with Moses.
So let’s consider the actual portion of the text we read together today.
We are focused on the outcry of the Hebrew people. We’ve been in a series about hope and prayer, examining the longings recorded in the witness of scripture, and we’re ending the series on a longing not articulated by beautiful speeches or elaborate storytelling, but by a prayer without words to no one.
If you remember, the Hebrew people had come to Egypt because of Joseph. They came in a famine and were taken care of thanks to Joseph’s in with the palace. And they grew and multiplied in their new home. But the old pharaoh died and the new one was fearful of the booming population of this strange people who worshiped but one God. So he enslaved them in order to subdue them.
His fear is interesting because he wasn’t afraid that they might rise up against him and overthrow the government. His fear was that they would escape. That they would leave. And he would lose the forced labor practice that was an essential part of his great state building program. With his brutalizing public policy, Pharaoh’s building program was a corporate, systemic operation that had at its disposal enormous technical capacity, relying on imperial ideological authority. So he made it policy that these people were his property, they were means of production for his ego and greed.
But even as Pharaoh was ruthless in his oppression, the Hebrew people continued to grow and grow. So he worked them harder. They kept expanding. It’s almost as if the narrative is suggesting something about the power of Abraham’s blessing, the promise to be as numerous as the stars in the sky, might be stronger than empire’s crushing weight. That the undertow of this blessing can quietly carry destructive and death-dealing power out to sea, the Red Sea perhaps.
And then Pharaoh died. And a new, equally ruthless one came into power, and the second half of our text says, “The Israelites groaned under their slavery, and cried out.”
It was a collective, guttural cry to no one in particular. God doesn’t even enter the story until the cry reaches the ears of the Divine. And with four verbs—God heard, remembered, looked, and knew—we see the Holy One mobilize into the most miraculous deliverance of all time. We don’t read that part of the story today, but we know it’s coming. And it began with a prayer, expressed through an outcry, addressed to whoever was listening.
I don’t know if you’ve accumulated plants over the pandemic like me, but I’ve got quite the menagerie in my kitchen. Some are needy and require my concern regularly, putting out a pitiful yellow leaf to get attention. Some like to be in the sun, and others don’t. Surprisingly, one of the plants has thrived in a dark corner. It’s a moody one, I suppose. I have an ivy that was repotted and rehabilitated by Scottie in February 2020, and I brought it home with me shortly after. It has grown long and has strong opinions about its care, but it has served as a marker of the length of the pandemic for me. We’ve been in this thing for this ivy long. This many leaves long. I have saved it from Annie’s leaf pilfering, a nosy dog, and a tumble to the floor. It’s spent time in a couple rooms in my house, but likes the window sill best, where it can wrap it’s tendril around other plants, as if to say, “Hello, my friend. We’re here together again. What beautiful sunlight we have today.”
The plants in my office also want my attention. I’ve been battling a gnat invasion in my office over the past few weeks. They were obsessed with a dying plant on my filing cabinet, so I removed the plant, but they have hovered still around my bamboo plant. This plant has grown quite tall since I first brought it with me on my first day working at Azle in August 2019, and it’s since tripled in size. I’ve repotted it once and will probably need to do it again soon. It’s been the easiest plant to care for to date. The bamboo in my office can go a few weeks without water, which I only know by accident.
But now it is the focus of gnats, and that has caused me lots of consternation. I’ve swatted gnats compulsively while on Zoom calls. I’ve inhaled one. They’re everywhere.
And I’ve been thinking about this text all week. Even though the portion we read does not mention the coming plagues, I can’t help but think that this gnat invasion is a portent. If you recall, gnats were one of the actual plagues. I’m not very superstitious, but I am dramatic, and I love a solid omen.
Of course, I don’t think these gnats are a message from God. At least not a message so direct that it has one interpretation.
But perhaps it is an opportunity to reflect, to pause. Mary Oliver wrote, “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” and I like to think that paying attention to stuff like this is a form of devotion to the Divine.
So I wonder what this small-scale plague of gnats could have to say to me.
What might it be asking me to let go?
How might my hands soften from a seizure of control?
How might my heart resist a hardening borne out of fear?
What is seeking to be delivered and liberated in the name of God in my life?
This of course puts me in the role of Pharaoh in the structure of our story.
And our focus is on the guttural cry, the outpouring of grief and rage from the Hebrew people to no one.
But isn’t interesting that in this story we know so well, that we’ve seen in every cartoon form imaginable, that the gnats come after the cry? That the dismissal of the suffering does not make the suffering go away. It’s the ear that does not listen to the grief that brings more of it in their lives. So that the suffering invades private spaces, sacred spaces, it touches every part of life, and echoes throughout Pharaoh’s empire, impacting generations to come.
And I wonder that if the God of the Bible cannot be fully known without the exodus story, then the story of our lives, the one we tell in our Christian spaces, cannot be fully realized without listening to the cry, without emitting the cry ourselves.
It is wearisome to grieve. Whether we are talking about us as individuals or as a collective people—whether we are talking about our private mourning for things in our own lives or we are talking about injustice prevailing again and again. It is exhausting to give ourselves over to that which wounds us.
But it is far more devastating to ignore it.
However frightening it may seem to give ear to anguish, to give voice to suffering, it is far more catastrophic to dismiss it.
It is perhaps, even sinful, to do as Pharaoh did and pile on more work, more labor, and more activity in order to silence the cry.
Because that cry from the Hebrew people, though it seemed like it was evaporating into the air, that it was useless, was heard by God. God heard, God remembered, God looked, and God knew.
And the Holy One was mobilized into a powerful act of deliverance and formation of a people.
A people that our Messiah came from. Our Messiah whom we will welcome again in the next few weeks during Advent.
A Messiah who will be born with a cry on his lips, his first prayer, moments after being delivered.
So that it seems that deliverance is correlated with expressions of our most honest pain.
But the silencing, the dismissing, the ignoring of our pain, of others’ pain, leads to gnats. Or something like that.
Amen.
Stewardship Moment
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.