Wishin’, Hopin’, Prayin’ - Hoping for a Song (Psalm 137)

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. 

Our adult Sunday School class began last week in the Heritage! As the Pandemic Response Committee monitors the COVID situation in our area and we await the building’s unpacking, 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 under the porticache. 

This Saturday, October 23, we will have a work day here at the church, beginning at 8 AM. If you can’t make it right at that time, come whenever you can! You may have noticed that we still have a lot of boxes to be unpacked and sorted, so this is the day we will be working together to get the church in working order. 

This Saturday is also Food Hub! There’s a sign-up sheet at the welcome table if you’d like to help pack bags and hand them out.

On 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. 

Over the next few weeks, as we move toward Covenant Sunday on November 7, we will be examining stewardship from various liturgical lenses. Today, we will think about stewardship as it intersects with the table. 

We continues new series today: Wishin’, Hopin’, Prayin’: Longing for God in a Chaotic World. Today, we explore a striking song of the Israelites.

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: I pray that the eyes of your heart will have enough light to see the hope of God’s call, 

All: The richness of God’s glorious inheritance among believers, 

One: And the overwhelming greatness of God’s power that is working for those who believe. 

All: God’s power was at work in Christ when God raised him from the dead and sat him at God’s right side in the heavens, 

One: Far above every ruler and authority and power and dominion, any power that might be named not only now but in the future. 

All: God put everything under Christ’s feet and made him head of everything in the church, which is his body, the fullness of Christ, who fills everything in every way.

(Ephesians 1:18-23)

Pastoral Prayer

The Lord be with you. 

Join me in prayer.

God of gentle rains and warm sun, God who encourages growth, we are creatures who sometimes grow quickly, and sometimes get stuck. 

God of freedom and liberation, of binding ropes being cut, we are bound in ways we don’t always understand or recognize. 

God of exodus and exile and homecoming, God who calls us to leave where we are and come home; help us to have the courage to make the journey and to trust in the path.

God of health and healing, God who wants us to be made whole, we come as a people who are wounded in body and in spirit, people who seek healing. 

God who has laid out a way for us to live, who has give us rules for living in community, we come as people who sometimes go astray, people who stretch the rules. 

God of grace, we come as people who live through that Grace. 

And we praise you for the growth,

We rejoice in being set free,

We dance along the path that leads u home,

We give thanks for the healing we have received,

We relax in the knowledge that we are forgiven

And we live as people of Grace.

Amen.

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.

Sermon

Psalm 137 

By the rivers of Babylon—

    there we sat down and there we wept

    when we remembered Zion.

2 

On the willows there

    we hung up our harps.

3 

For there our captors

    asked us for songs,

and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying,

    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

4 

How could we sing the Lord’s song

    in a foreign land?

5 

If I forget you, O Jerusalem,

    let my right hand wither!

6 

Let my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth,

    if I do not remember you,

if I do not set Jerusalem

    above my highest joy.

7 

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites

    the day of Jerusalem’s fall,

how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down!

    Down to its foundations!”

[Now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord.

Wait. That’s not what it says. What does it say—*mumble a reading*. No, that can’t be right—the Bible can’t say something like this, surely. *Look at Bible* 

Ah, no, that’s what it says. Yikes. Okay, then, let’s finish this Psalm. I suppose I should issue a content warning here: violence against children. Here we go. ]

8 

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

    Happy shall they be who pay you back

    what you have done to us!

9 

Happy shall they be who take your little ones

    and dash them against the rock!

This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Thanks be to God? Really? That’s what we’re going with? Okay, I’m just clarifying. 

I used to sing this Psalm a lot in college. I went to a Church of Christ university, so we’d sing our a cappella version: “By the rivers of Babylon…” 

And then we’d get to the crux of the psalm: “How could we sing King Alpha’s song in a strange land? So let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord…”

I used to think it was a really nice song until I stumbled across the real deal a couple of years ago. And then I was like, “Wait, what?” 

I mean, we all know that the Bible has some pretty terrible things in it, right? Anybody who says different has clearly not read Judges or Ezekiel or Habakkuk or Amos or some of Paul even? I mean, Genesis alone has a lot of shocking content, so next time someone is like, “The Bible tells us to all get along and God is love and that’s it” you can rest in your smugness knowing that they have clearly not even finished the first book. 

But this is a big yikes, right? This is liturgy. The Psalm is a song likely sung in worship. Like a collective song, like the whole assembly singing together. Like, Gini fires up the piano, Nicole steps up to lead us in, and we start singing that last line and end with “Selah.”

I’m cringing even joking about it, y’all. I thought about setting it to the tune of “Come and Find the Quiet Center,” but I was afraid that I would be smited, and I don’t even believe in smiting.

Maybe we should back up before I have a conniption. 

Psalm 137, is one of the only psalms in all 150 of them, that can be dated. The rest of them are approximations, guesses, shrugs—but this one we know was composed either during the Babylonian exile, so 587-539 BCE, or immediately after. I know that feels like a million years ago—BCE time is like the Twilight Zone in my mind, but this is a big deal. We have hard time dating dinosaurs, and here we are, giving a 60ish year window for this Psalm. If the nerdiness of this fact does not interest you, I get it, we’re moving on. But the particularity and specificity of this psalm is what we need to remember.

So if you can access the far recesses of your mind, you will remember that the story goes that Israel finally gets a king and gets to be like everyone else. They have the action figure that everyone else does in their class. We start with Saul and move from there. Some kings are good, but most of them range from “Eh” to terrible. They build a temple thanks to Solomon. Shoutout to the rich and wise king with questionable marital morality—spoiler alert, he had like a million concubines. But I digress. 

But then, big scary Babylon comes to town. And ol’ Babylon is crushing kingdoms and taking names. Jeremiah and Lamentations both detail the atrocities of what happened when Babylon arrived on Israel’s doorstep and let’s just say that the Babylonian’s actions at that time inspired the last verse of Psalm 137. 

The Israelite people were slaughtered, carried off to Babylon to be enslaved, and some very, very poor people stayed behind in the rubble, ruins that contained a toppled Temple—the site of what was the center of communal and religious meaning-making. 

And according to this psalm, the Babylonians taunted the Israelites, telling them to sing a song of Zion for their entertainment. Like slaveholders demanding dance and song from those they systematically trafficked and enslaved, like the Nazis forcing the Jewish people in concentration camps to sing the songs of their people as a cruel joke, the Babylonians demanded the suffering, grieving, traumatized Hebrew people to sing the songs that were only reserved for the holiest of days, in the holiest of places, in the most treasured times of their hearts. 

How does one sing a song like that? Of course the Israelites resented their sacred songs being treated as objects of mirth for their tormentors. These songs were not made for entertainment but for the survival of the people of God. They were formed in the crucible of suffering this people had endured in the past, having first been led out of enslavement in Egypt, across the wilderness depending only on bread from heaven, and finally into the Promised Land having lost whole generations along the way. These songs are not for taking lightly. They are not something you can just set to any old tune on the fiddle or harp at the whim of an oppressor. 

And yet. 

The history, the mythology, the very stories of identity that passed from generation to generation in the Hebrew people began as campfire stories, as camp songs. How did they pass along the promises of God as a nomadic people and then as a people weathering the tumultuous reins of kings? They had a barbecue, which is kind of accurate, and sat around the fire, and began, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now, before anything was created: God’s spirit was hovering over the waters. Boo!”

And the story charted Father Abraham’s journey from Ur across the wilderness, followed Joseph as he was betrayed by his own brothers and became a captive of Egypt. They told the stories of the military conquests of King David, leaving out the questionable decisions of Israel’s own acts of genocide and devastation. 

The theme of all these stories is God’s faithfulness to Israel. The refrain of every step of the journey is God is with us. 

So the Israelites seem to be in a predicament. On one hand, they are not going to sing the songs of Zion in God-forsaken Babylon for the entertainment of their tormentors. Obviously. End of discussion.

But. The only way to hold on to a shred of their identity as a people, to keep in tact what fragile threads of connection remain, is to sing the songs. To tell the story. That’s where hope comes from. They sing to remember how to hope.

And as painful as it is for people to remember Jerusalem at this time of acute trauma, it would be more painful for them not to remember, they say. Their hands would wither and be unable to pluck a harp or strum a lyre. Their tongues would be paralyzed so that not a note could they utter. Remembering keeps them moving, keeps them going, even as it feels like they are walking on broken glass. 

So, they sing, we’ve got a tune for you. We remember how our neighbors the Edomites not only watched as Jerusalem fell, but they cheered Babylon on. May God visit you, Babylon, they sing through clenched teeth, in the same way you have visited us. Divine retribution, diddly do. Violence against everyone you love, diddly da. Suffering and hatred and torment so that you may feel everything we feel, selah. 

Looking back at the version I was given in college of this song, “May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O Lord,” it seems like the one who changed the lyrics did not think that the Israelites’ version was acceptable in the sight of God. 

That kind of prayer was not appropriate apparently. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I do not think that a host of mostly white, middle and upper class Protestant Americans should be singing about genocide. Not a good look, let the record show. 

But it does feel like the alternative, sanitized version of this song was a critique of a certain kind of prayer. Certain kinds of feelings. Certain ways of engaging with unutterable pain and anguish.  

And it’s not just the Church of Christ. When’s the last time you heard this complete Psalm in worship? I have never heard it read in its entirety. It’s been shut out of various lectionary rotations. 

It seems like a lot of people don’t know what to do with this kind of uncomfortable prayer, this longing for vengeance as a response to suffering and oppression. Better to shove it way down and ignore it rather than confront what is going on here in this Psalm. That’s a healthy coping mechanism, right?

But I wonder if honesty could be a synonym for holiness. 

Like if we can’t bring our truest, grossest, most horrific thoughts to God, then where do we go? What do we do? 

Because according to what we have read here today, misplaced longing can lead to hatred, violence, control, and vengeance. It doesn’t seem like bottling that stuff up is going to ferment it into fine wine, but rather it’s going to create some toxic sludge that will seep out in its own way. 

I mean, wouldn’t it be wise to invite God into our worst inclinations? Might it be an act of profound faith in Emmanual—God with us—to entrust our most precious hatreds to God, knowing they will be taken seriously. 

Now, just because the Israelites said they wanted terrible things to happen to the innocent children of Babylon does not mean God was going to do Israel’s bidding. God is not a slot machine, God is not Santa Claus—we cannot coerce or manipulate or boss God around. Jesus gave a big LOL to that notion and slipped through the angry crowds every time. 

But I wonder if this Psalm in its shocking ending gives us permission to say the unsayable to God. 

To not feel like we have to give a happy ending to every song we sing. To not feel compelled to end every prayer with, “But I trust you have a plan, God. You work everything for our good, O Lord. All shall be well, Great God of Heaven.” 

Those things may or may not be true. But God does not need the ego stroked or the bows tied to hear our prayer. 

Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, who wrote a memoir of his time in Auschwitz, said frequently that he can tolerate the memory of silence, but not the silence of memory. We can remember in silence if we need to. But we must resist efforts to silence those who remember. To silence the remembering within our own hearts, within our own community. 

Last week, we talked about how the answer to our longing is hope, and when all we see ahead is devastation and despair, that hope comes from looking back and remembering. 

If singing is how we remember our story, who we are, where we are headed, what we are even gathering for, then may we sing, even if the song is unsettling. Even if remembering means we feel pain or discomfort or grief or even shame. May our honesty become a pathway to holiness. Amen.

Sharing Our Resources

Here at Azle Christian Church, we believe that stewardship encompasses our whole lives: our time, our energy, our resources, our care. It’s more of a framework or approach to our Christian life rather than a solitary act of giving. In our text today from Psalms, we considered how the Israelites were stewards of their collective story, their sacred practices, and their people. We invite you to give in ways that honor your relationship with your resources and with God. 

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.

May we feel emboldened to bring all of our prayers to God, trusting in the Keeper of our songs to transfigure our hearts and soothe our spirits. Amen. 

Wishin', Hopin', Prayin' - The Longing of Creation (Romans 8:18-27)

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. 

Our adult Sunday School class began this morning in the Heritage! While we await guidance from the Pandemic Response Committee and the building’s unpacking, 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 under the porticache. 

Next Saturday is the Golf Tournament!

This Wednesday is our Cabinet Meeting at 7 on Zoom—if you are on cabinet this year or if you have been asked to be on cabinet next year, please make every effort to be there as we will be working on our 2022 budget for our respective ministries.

On Saturday, October 23, we will have a work day here at the church, beginning at 8 AM. If you can’t make it right at that time, come whenever you can! You may have noticed that we still have a lot of boxes to be unpacked and sorted, so this is the day we will be working together to get the church in working order. 

On 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. 

Over the next few weeks, as we move toward November 7, Covenant Sunday, the culmination of our stewardship campaign as we prepare for the 2021 budget, we will examine stewardship from various liturgical lenses. Today, we will think about stewardship in conversation with scripture. Other weeks, we will see how the table and stewardship are in dialogue, how prayer and music inform our ways of thinking stewardly, and we’ll even go back to the basics in Children’s Moment to think what being a steward means. 

We begin a new series today: Wishin’, Hopin’, Prayin’: Longing for God in a Chaotic World. How do we pray when our whole body aches for deliverance? How do we hope when tragedy strikes? How do we learn to want what God wants? In this worship series, we will examine moments of longing in scripture: from the earliest days of the Hebrew people to the last book in the Bible, we will glean wisdom and fortitude from the stories of our faith forebears on what it means to long for God in times like these. Today, we begin with the longing of creation.

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: God’s word is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword. 

All: It pierces so deeply that it divides even soul and spirit, bone and marrow. It is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. 

One: Nothing is concealed from God; all lies bare and exposed before the eyes of the One to whom we have to give an answer.

All: Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens—Jesus, the Firstborn of God—let us hold fast to our profession of faith. 

One: For we don’t have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who was tempted in every way that we are, without sin.

All: So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and favor, and find help in time of need.

(Hebrews 4:12-16)

Pastoral Prayer

The Lord be with you. 

(From Walter Brueggeman)

There is a time to be born and a time to die.

And this is a time to be born,

So we turn to you, God of our life, God of all our years, God of our beginning. 

Our times are in your hand.

Hear us as we pray:

For those of us too much into obedience,

Birth us to the freedom of the gospel.

For those of us too much into self-indulgence,

Birth us to discipleship in your ministry.

For those of us too much into cynicism,

Birth us to the innocence of the Christ child.

For those of us too much into cowardice,

Birth us to the courage to stand before principalities and powers.

For those of us too much into guilt,

Birth us into forgiveness worked in your generosity.

For those of us too much into despair,

Birth us into the promises you make to your people.

For those of us too much into control,

Birth us into the vulnerability of the cross.

For those of us too much into suffering,

Birth us into the power of Easter.

For those of us too much into fatigue,

Birth us into the energy of Pentecost. 

We dare pray that you will do for us and among us and through us 

what is needful for newness. 

Give us the power to be receptive,

To take the newness you give,

To move from womb warmth to real life.

We make this prayer not only for ourselves, but

For our congregation at the brink of birth,

For the universal church at the edge of life,

For our community waiting for newness,

For your whole creation, with which we yearn in eager longing.

There is a time to be born, and it is now.

We sense the pangs and groans of your newness.

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.

Sermon

Romans 8:18-27

18 I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. 24 For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? 25 But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

We begin a new series today: Wishin’, Hopin’, Prayin’. Each week, we’ll be settling into a place of longing in scripture: longing expressed through prayer, in a song, in an accusation, in a guttural collective cry. We will be entering Advent in a few months, and as more of our population gets vaccinated and as the building slowly gets unpacked, we hope for a sense of normalcy. Of course, we realize that the normal we knew is long gone. Even as the “pandemic normal” ebbs and flows, our worship has taken on different shapes as needed. And as some of you arrived during the pandemic, normal is a meaningless word because there are no memories of the before times at Azle Christian Church. 

We are establishing a new normal together now: a light-footed one that is able to change direction and adapt. 

But perhaps what we need is not really normalcy, but rather homeostasis: a stable equilibrium that must be maintained by interdependent processes. We’re finding our true center in this active maintenance of homeostasis at our church. 

It’s almost as if we are at sea, on a boat together, floating under the moon. We won’t find perfect stillness out here on the water, but we will get our sea legs. We’ll find a tidal rhythm, adjusting the sails as the winds blow us in unforeseen directions.

I have been sailing exactly one time. One glorious day with a friend who had been sailing his whole life and did not realize how magical it all seemed to people who had grown up fishing off a dock. As we were getting ready to head out of port, he showed me and JD the whole routine for adjusting the sails, for this was an all-hands-on-deck operation, he explained. JD and I each had a job. I don’t remember the names of anything he told us, but my job was to tie the big rope around some kind of knob to secure something in place. It was important, I promise. I know that really paints the picture for you. 

It was one of those perfect days: the weather had been touched by the Divine, the conversation was lovely. The rhythm of our collective sailing efforts required focus, but it was fun to be a part of something like that. We got out of the boat and swam for awhile and ended up sailing to the other side of the lake in order to grab dinner on the lakeside.

As the skies grew darker, I wondered how long it would take to sail back across the lake, and even though our friend was a skilled sailor, I worried about doing it in the dark. 

Imagine my surprise when our friend told us that we would just motor back to port. I mean, of course, this boat had a motor. That makes sense to me looking back. But for the entire day, I had thought it was completely up to us and the wind to move the boat. And when the motor is on, it’s not an all-hands-on-deck situation. It just requires one person, the captain. 

So as night fell, JD and I stretched out on the boat and basked in the remaining time of our perfect day, enjoying the stars and trusting in the one behind the wheel. 

On one hand, this day had required all of us to be alert and ready, to tend to the job given to us, to work together as a team. We all were aware of the wind and it how it moved us along if we could set our sails to it rightly. We were conscious of the other boats on the lake, careful not to let the wind and our enthusiasm cause us to crash into their vessels. And a couple of times, we we put our anchor down to play and eat. 

But at the end of the day, when our bodies did what bodies do: grow tired, and when our minds found what minds find: limitations, we laid down and let the one who knew what to do bring us back. There was a time that day when our only job was to gaze at the stars and let the low buzz of the motor move us along. 

Our text today is from Romans, the densest, meatiest work of Paul, a letter to the church in Rome. Paul was writing primarily to Gentile Christians who were having conflicts with Jewish communities. Both groups thought they were the true Christ-following community, but Paul was writing to tell the Gentiles that they were not replacing the Jewish communities in faith, but rather they would learn to work and worship together. And all of this in the backdrop of living in Rome, the powerful empire ready to squash anything that might disturb the peace. There was a lot of growing pains, a lot of labor pains one might say, in this community of faith.

And because of this turmoil, it’s not clear to the Gentile Christians how Christ had changed their reality at all. Their suffering continued, including weakness in the body that required the Holy Spirit’s intercessions and prayers. The overarching question of this conflict was how hope spoke to such suffering. 

Paul explains to the Roman church, “All around us we observe a pregnant creation. The difficult times of pain throughout the world are simply birth pangs,” he writes. “But these birth pangs are not only around us: they are within us. We are also feeling the birth pangs. We are yearning for full deliverance. And that is why, waiting does not diminish us any more than waiting diminishes a pregnant mother. We expand in the waiting. Of course, we cannot lay eyes on what is expanding us, but the longer we wait, the more we expand, and the more joyful our expectancy.” 

Paul seems to be saying, “That longing you’re feeling? It’s pointing toward something more, something so transformational that it naturally is taking up your emotional and relational bandwidth.” The longing is evidence that there is something more to this moment. This yearning is the labor pain between the no longer and the not yet.

For the coming reign of God is not the abolition of the present reality, but its transformation. Birth speaks new life, a brand spanking new one, and also a new life to the mother. The body and life of the one in labor will be transformed at birth, because of birth. 

And isn’t it interesting, that to Paul, creation’s longing is tied up with the children of God’s longing? Everybody is groaning with anticipation, even Christ’s Living Spirit, and it’s because we are all bound up in each other. The fate of the cosmos is tied to the faith of the children of God, to their ability to hope. 

Because what is the response to this great longing, to these labor pains, to this groaning? 

Hope. 

As we worship together in this space and think about how to return our homeostasis once again, we can feel the no-longer-but-not-yet-ness of it all. The breath-holding, the lack of fullness to this return. We’re not yet hosting fellowship meals indoors, or holding babies, or singing unmasked. Whole chapters of our church life have closed in the waiting. And our longing for church life to be bursting at the seams points to a more encompassing longing—the anticipation of the reign of God, the fullest of fullness. 

And this ache for more—it’s not a sign of weakness or lack of faith. This longing is sacred because it anticipates a future we cannot see. It’s a kind of prayer: one that says, “I know this is not all there is. I know things can be different.”

Hope walks hand in hand with our longing: it creates a sense of contrast between what we hope for and the present state of affairs. And it’s normal for this contrast to spark discontent and restlessness. The one who hopes hurts. The one who hopes wrestles with disappointment because they are constantly holding what is and what could be together. 

But the answer to the labor pains of hope is not stoicism or being an unmovable force: it’s adjusting our sails to the changing winds, trusting that we will get to shore.

And sometimes, when something that is out of our hands moves us along, say—a pandemic, a storm, an illness, a death, the motor of a boat—hope looks like stretching out where we are and learning the constellations above. 

This series on longing and prayer will take us to the end of Ordinary Time. Ordinary Time is the stretch of time on the church calendar that is relatively uneventful, though this year’s Ordinary Time has been anything but for our congregation. But the uneventfulness is the lack of High Holy Days. 

But there is a wisdom to the liturgical calendar that I want to draw attention to. For about 6 months, we will be in Holy Seasons: Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Eastertide, and Pentecost. It’s eventful, it’s contemplative, it’s celebratory. It’s as if our lungs are expanding with the breath of the Holy One, inhaling, inhaling, inhaling. 

And then, for about 6 months, in Ordinary Time, we exhale. Our lungs contract. We breathe out slowly, completely, our whole bodies relaxing into the motion. 

And as we near the end of our exhalation, in a few weeks, we will have Covenant Sunday, when we will make a financial commitment that will help our lay leadership create a budget for 2021. We’ll gather a few weeks later to look together as a congregation at this budget, a document of hopes and dreams. For a budget is not only a fiscal document, but it is also a moral and theological document. It puts pen to paper, dollars to dreams, and says, “This is what we believe matters. Here are remnants of the hope that was sown before us, and here are our hopes now. This hope has grown tall like a sunflower, and this hope has transformed like a butterfly.” 

And what this text reminds us, what our theology of stewardship tells us, is that our offering of our time, and energy, and resources, it is not just an individual commitment. Our generosity is for others. Just as the faithfulness of God’s children directly affects God’s creation, so our act of stewardship is part of a larger whole. And it’s not quite like a puzzle in that they all fit together to make a beautiful still picture, but rather it’s like a team of sailors, working together to test the wind, to determine if we throw the anchor down or adjust the sails. 

And as children of God, we are also in partnership with God. If you remember from the text, everyone is groaning—even the Holy Spirit. The work of hoping is a shared endeavor. So as we work together, tying ropes around some kind of knob to secure something, may we also rest in the knowledge that it is not only our work, but also God’s. Perhaps we can lay down and gaze at the stars, listening to the low hum of the Spirit’s shared longing. 

So, for the next couple of weeks, in our last stretch of Ordinary Time, let us breathe out in hope. Let all the air out. Empty out all that is in your proverbial lungs so that when we arrive at the beginning of Holy Season in just a few weeks, we are ready to take a big gulp of oxygen, letting it ignite and animate us, reviving us once again and preparing us for the days ahead. 

Amen.

Sharing Our Resources

This Romans text reminds us that we are in this together—our work as stewards of God’s creation is a practice of collaboration and creativity. The church itself is a steward of the investment of its people, of justice and love in the community, and of the hearts of everyone in its spheres. This church, in addition to the work of spiritual formation and relationship building for those within the congregation, provides aid and resources to those in our broader community, and relies on your faithful sharing of your resources. 

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 this morning comes from a few verses after our text, from Romans 8:

May we go out from here, convinced that nothing can separate us from God’s love in Christ Jesus our Lord: not death or life, not angels or rulers, not present things or future things, not powers  or height or depth, or any other thing that is created. May it be so. Amen.

Homecoming: Dedication Sunday

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:

Just to remind you, if you need you use the restroom, we ask that you use the ones by the kitchen. The rooms, bathrooms, and hallway behind the sanctuary are blocked off due to safety concerns that are being addressed. 

If you missed a Sunday and want to catch up on the worship series, you can listen to our church’s podcast wherever you get your podcasts. 

Next week, we will have Regional Executive Minister and Vice President, Rev. Christy Drechsel, here to preach.

As the Pandemic Response Committee continues to monitor the COVID situation in our area, most extracurricular activities are either suspended or online. On October 10, two weeks from today, a Sunday School class offering for adults will be available in the Heritage Chapel at 10 AM before service. It will explore that week’s Table Talk. There will be a children and youth offering outdoors under the porticache at the same time.

This Wednesday is our first Gospels and Groceries event at 6:30 PM. We’ll eat dinner together, provided by DMM, sing hymns, and collect food for our Little Free Pantry.  

We conclude our Homecoming series this morning as we turn to the Psalms. You may have noticed that there are slips of paper in the pews and pens in the slots. During worship, I invite you to write a word or two that you hope for the church in this new chapter as we reenter the building. We will collect them in the offering plate at the end of the service and frame them to hang as a prayer. For those watching at home, I invite you to put your word in the comments and we will transfer them onto a slip of a paper.

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.

Let us prepare our hearts for worship.

Litany of Faith

One: O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you;

All: My flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.

One: I have seen you in the sanctuary, beholding your power and glory.

All: Because your loving-kindness is better than life, my lips will praise you.

One: So I will bless you as long as I live;

All: I will lift up my hands and call on your name.

(From Psalm 63)

Pastoral Prayer

The Lord be with you. 

We have gathered as a family of God to celebrate with thanksgiving the renovation of this sanctuary and to rededicate it to the glory of God. Aware of our rich heritage, we celebrate the lives of those who in times past have devoted themselves to the building up of this congregation and who now surround us as a great host of witnesses to the power of God at work in the church. Holding this heritage in sacred trust, we come now to consecrate afresh this house of God and the service of the world. Let us, then, commemorate with joy this occasion with prayer.

The prayer is an insert in your bulletin. Where it says “all,” the congregation will read. We will conclude our prayer with the Lord’s Prayer, which is printed in your bulletin.

Join me in prayer.

Ashley: God of all glory, whose habitation is the whole of creation, we rejoice that you make yourself known to us particularly in the midst of those who gather as your people in Christ’s name. May this place be a holy meeting ground between you and your people. Make yourself known afresh to us today as we dedicate anew this building and ourselves to your service. May this sanctuary ever resound to praises of your glorious name. 

Rick: We rejoice today in having completed the renovation of our place of worship. With heartfelt gratitude we now reconsecrate this sanctuary and church to the glory of God. In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ we do this.

All: We rededicate this house to the glory of God, who has called us by sheer grace; to the glory of Jesus Christ, who loves us and gave himself for us; and to the glory of the Holy Spirit, who sanctifies us. 

Lisa: We rededicate this house for the worship of God in praise and prayer; for the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ, crucified, risen, and exalted; and for the celebration of the holy sacraments of God’s grace.

All: We rededicate this house for the giving of comfort to all who mourn; of strength to all who are tempted; of light to all who seek the way.

Isabelle: We rededicate this house for the hallowing of family life; for the teaching and guiding of the young; for the building up of all who believe, and the perfecting of the saints.

All: We rededicate this house for the increase of righteousness; for the spread of the spirit of love, and for the extension of the reign of God. 

Ashley: And now, as a people within the household of God in the unity of faith; 

Rick: In the communion of the saints; 

Lisa: In love and goodwill to all; 

Isabelle: In gratitude for the gift of this house to be a dwelling place of God through the Spirit; 

All: We dedicate ourselves to the worship of God and the service of God’s reign. 

We ask all of this in the name of the Creator, the Redeemer, and the Sustainer, as we conclude with the prayer Jesus 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.

Children’s Moment

Today, we dedicate our sanctuary. To dedicate means to name something as special and set apart for a special use. In this case, we are saying this building is for the special use of worship and fellowship. Some of the building is new, some of it is the same. Maybe you remember that the paneling on the chancel used to be darker, and maybe you don’t remember what things looked like when we left! We have had a lot of changes with how we do church over the past year and half. Our building has changed, the way we worship together has changed, but one thing that has remained the same is that when we worship, God meets us where we are. When we gather together, whether online or in person or some mixture of the two, we are in the presence of God—no matter what church looks like.  

We read this book earlier this year, but I’d like to read it again, to remind us that the reason this place is holy is not because of the structure or some special God magic. It’s because we are filling it together.

Read This Is the Church 

Let’s pray:

God, we thank you that we don’t have to go far to find you. You always find us and make our hearts your home. We love you, God. Amen.

Sermon

Psalm 84 

How lovely is your dwelling place,

    O Lord of hosts!

2 My soul longs, indeed it faints

    for the courts of the Lord;

my heart and my flesh sing for joy

    to the living God.

3 Even the sparrow finds a home,

    and the swallow a nest for herself,

    where she may lay her young,

at your altars, O Lord of hosts,

    my King and my God.

4 Happy are those who live in your house,

    ever singing your praise. Selah

5 Happy are those whose strength is in you,

    in whose heart are the highways to Zion.

6 As they go through the valley of Baca

    they make it a place of springs;

    the early rain also covers it with pools.

7 They go from strength to strength;

    the God of gods will be seen in Zion.

8 O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer;

    give ear, O God of Jacob! Selah

9 Behold our shield, O God;

    look on the face of your anointed.

10 For a day in your courts is better

    than a thousand elsewhere.

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God

    than live in the tents of wickedness.

11 For the Lord God is a sun and shield;

    God bestows favor and honor.

No good thing does the Lord withhold

    from those who walk uprightly.

12 O Lord of hosts,

    happy is everyone who trusts in you.

This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

On Tuesday, February 16, 2021, late in the evening, we received a call that something had happened to our building. A person braving the historic winter storm to retrieve food from our Little Free Pantry had seen water rushing out of our kitchen door and called somebody. Late that night, a few members showed up here, feet drenched in cold water as they surveyed the extensive water damage. 

That night, the rest of us huddled in our homes, with varying levels of electricity and fresh water. Some of us took refuge at a family or friend’s house because of the lack of power and deadly cold in our own homes. Others of us endured rolling outages, wondering if the next outage would become permanent. Some of you ventured outside not to build a snowman, but to feed your livestock, to check on your neighbors, and to help others. 

We had been in our homes for awhile. Throughout the pandemic, we had learned to work from home, socialize on Zoom, and find ways to pass the time. Others of us juggled childcare and work, a relentless impossibility, all while living in the chronic and sustained crisis of a deadly, global pandemic. And we had also learned to hold church online, an often disheartening task, never quite like the real thing, missing the smells and bells of in-person gatherings. Along with many churches, we had found that the answer to the very difficult question of “Could we worship from our living rooms?” was yes.

The next day, when we sent out the word to everyone about what had happened to the church building, the messages came flooding in. What can we do? How can we help? Who can I call? The supplies are strained but I’ve got a friend who can help. The service people are booked to the brim, but let me call my buddy and see what we can do. Is there a need for a PVC pipe? A fan? Movers? Even though most church members, save the few who put on worship each week, had not been to the building in months, the love for what this building represents overflowed into acts of service, even as we all were wading through the aftermath of the storm in our homes.

The following Sunday, we weren’t quite sure what to do about worship. We couldn’t stream it from the sanctuary. There was no Wifi in the Heritage Chapel at that point. The MUB, naive to all it would hold once the renovations began, was already full of storage items. We had done church in our living rooms, but could we do it without a building?

So Nicole, our then interim worship minister, said, “Let’s do it from my kitchen.” And we figured out how to light Lenten candles in a tight 2x3 table full of sound equipment, how to move around a kitchen table without tripping over wires on a livestream, how to not get distracted by a crying baby in the other room, and somehow, we worshiped together that Sunday. After nearly a year of worshiping apart in a pandemic, trusting in the Spirit who connects us all, we challenged that trust yet again. 

We are Disciples and we leaned in hard to what we value most. We don’t need much more than communion to make it church. And it doesn’t even need to be unleavened bread and fruit of the vine to count for us. Truly, we need a mere carb and liquid, and we’re satisfied. 

And besides, we were leading worship from a table. Literally, we prayed and read scripture, at a table. In a way, it felt more like church than worship in a sanctuary. From Nicole’s home to each of your homes, we remembered Christ together. 

Could we worship from a kitchen table? We found out the answer was yes.

And then as the renovations slowly began and the weather warmed, we drew on our church’s earliest roots of worshiping outside. We outfitted the courtyard for something like a tent revival, tolerating the sounds of traffic and salivating at the smell of chips from El Paseo across the street, and we sang and smiled hard with our eyes. Each week, we pulled stuff out of the MUB, arranging flowers and plates and chairs, all to conclude service and pack it all back up again, leaving nothing but a stray communion cup as evidence of what happened there. We warned each other of ant piles, some of you got sunburned heads, and at times, we glistened, not because we were transfigured, but because spring lasts about 10 seconds in Texas. 

Could we worship from the outdoor space beside our building? We found the answer was indeed, yes.

And then, following the path of Azle Christian Church’s forebears, we moved from the outdoors to the Heritage Chapel, heeding the wood floor’s protestations and using every inch of that space to make room. We put up curtains, washed windows, hung bird feeders, and made that worship space cozy. We hosted guest preachers, guests musicians, and somehow no one injured themselves trying to maneuver in that tight space, thanks be to God. The long-standing question of could we worship online in the Heritage Chapel? Yes, we learned. Yes, we could. 

Throughout this slow transition to in-person worship, we held in our hearts that we were still not all together. Some of you worshipped and perhaps continue to worship from home. While our spaces changed and our proximity ebbed and flowed, we have practiced the reality that the table of Christ is long and transcends time and space. As we took our individual communion cups, we remembered that we ate from a common table, from a feast that was prepared by our Lord. Not even a potluck meal, the table of Christ is instead a gift from God’s own self. We don’t bring the wine or the napkins or extra ice—we just show up hungry. And that’s what we’ve been doing all this time. We’ve been showing up so hungry. We’ve longed to return. We’ve yearned for this movement back. 

And yet, even as we move back into this space, the only movement we are capable of, is forward. 

Not only are we individually different, each of us changed by all that has transpired since we gathered last, but we are also collectively different—the dynamic of this congregation has changed. We gather today without some of our beloveds. And we gather with new beloveds. Some of you have grown and all of us have grown older. Some of you have become parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, or in-laws for the first time. Some of you retired or went back to work or changed jobs. 

The Body of Christ in its place here, this “local outpost of the kingdom,” as Thomas Campbell of our Stone-Campbell tradition, would say, is a dynamic entity, not a static one. The new floors, the fresh coats of paint, the different colored cabinets—they remind us that time has not stood still. The world did not pause in March 2020. The building in many ways reflects how we all have changed. It’s apropos for things to look different because we are different. 

And today we ask, can we worship in this new space? Yes.

Because we have found over and over again during this sojourn the Eternal Yes, the Affirmation of All That Is Good: God. We have found the Most Holy One in our living rooms, our cars, at kitchen tables, in courtyards, in creaky old buildings, and now here again, we find God. 

We sing with the Psalmist, “How lovely is your dwelling place, O God! Everyone comes from their homes and finds a home here, even the sparrows. Hear our prayers, hear our songs, receive our tears, which have baptized the driest places and given them new life. It is good for us to be here. We have longed for this moment.” 

Amen and amen.

Sharing Our Resources

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. 

This is also the time to drop your slip of paper with a word of hope or prayer for the building in the plate.

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:

We are going to remain sitting for our benediction and the final song as the ukuleles will lead us. Nicole will remind us after to stand for the Doxology to conclude this service. Receive this benediction:

Peace be to this house, and all who worship here.

Peace be to those who enter, and to those who go out.

Peace be to those who love this house,

And who love the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Homecoming: Fix You - Genesis 32 & 33

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!

And welcome back to this place.

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:

Logistical concerns: how we worship in here will be like how we worshiped in the Heritage Chapel. Masks, communion, offerings—it will all be the same. If you need you use the restroom, we ask that you use the ones by the kitchen. The rooms, bathrooms, and hallway behind the sanctuary are blocked off due to safety concerns that are being addressed.

If you missed a Sunday and want to catch up on the worship series, you can listen to our church’s podcast wherever you get your podcasts. A new episode of Music Monday dropped this week, an extra to our worship series where we talk about the intersection of music and theology at Azle Christian Church.

Next week on the last Sunday of September, we will have Dedication Sunday for our building.

This coming Saturday is Food Hub! You can sign-up to serve at Food Hub on the entry table or online.

September 29 is our first Gospels and Groceries event. We’ll host an outdoors hymn sing and collect food for our Little Free pantry. DMM is making food.

We continue our new series this morning: Homecoming: Stories of Return. Today, we return home with Jacob after a tumultuous journey.

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.

Let us prepare our hearts for worship.

Litany of Faith

One: When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream.

All: Our mouths were suddenly filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.

One: Then it was said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.”

All: Yes, the Lord has done great things for us, and we are glad indeed.

One: Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like dry streams in the desert waste!

All: Let those who plant with tears reap the harvest with songs of joy.

One: Let those who go out, crying and carrying their seed, come home.

All: Come home with joyful shouts, carrying bales of grain.

(Psalm 126)

Pastoral Prayer

The Lord be with you.

We grieve together the death passing of Dannie Davis, who was laid to rest yesterday.

Today, I would like to read a prayer written by Chris Piercy, prayed on the occasion of our prayer walk through the building a few weeks ago. I’ve changed a word or two for the sake of today, but otherwise, these are his words, to God, on behalf of all of us. Join me in prayer:

Holy One, as we see parts of our building still in disarray, we can empathize.

Over this past year, we have been broken. We have been in disarray, too.

But we feel your Spirit with us, even in our brokenness, even in this church that has suffered.

Thank you for the homeless man who notified the city that water was flowing out of the church, flooding the building.

Thank you for the construction workers, diligently working to make all the repairs to our church.

Thank you, God, for our church members for continuing to be the rock, stable and loyal to the work of this church.

We have looked forward, O God, to the time that we can gather again in this sanctuary together. And today is that day!

While the church isn’t exactly the same as it was before, neither are we. We are changed.

Too much has happened to us all to not be changed.

But we are together, and You, O God, are with us still.

And so, together, in this place, we return to the prayer Jesus gave 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

Genesis 32:3-12; 33:1-12

3 Jacob sent messengers before him to his brother Esau in the land of Seir, the country of Edom, 4 instructing them, “Thus you shall say to my lord Esau: Thus says your servant Jacob, ‘I have lived with Laban, and stayed until now; 5 and I have oxen, donkeys, flocks, male and female slaves; and I have sent to tell my lord, in order that I may find favor in your sight.’”

6 The messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We came to your brother Esau, and he is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him.” 7 Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed; and he divided the people that were with him, and the flocks and herds and camels, into two companies, 8 thinking, “If Esau comes to the one company and destroys it, then the company that is left will escape.”

9 And Jacob said, “O God of my father Abraham and God of my father Isaac, O Lord who said to me, ‘Return to your country and to your kindred, and I will do you good,’ 10 I am not worthy of the least of all the steadfast love and all the faithfulness that you have shown to your servant, for with only my staff I crossed this Jordan; and now I have become two companies. 11 Deliver me, please, from the hand of my brother, from the hand of Esau, for I am afraid of him; he may come and kill us all, the mothers with the children. 12 Yet you have said, ‘I will surely do you good, and make your offspring as the sand of the sea, which cannot be counted because of their number.’”

Now Jacob looked up and saw Esau coming, and four hundred men with him. So he divided the children among Leah and Rachel and the two maids. 2 He put the maids with their children in front, then Leah with her children, and Rachel and Joseph last of all. 3 He himself went on ahead of them, bowing himself to the ground seven times, until he came near his brother.

4 But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept. 5 When Esau looked up and saw the women and children, he said, “Who are these with you?” Jacob said, “The children whom God has graciously given your servant.” 6 Then the maids drew near, they and their children, and bowed down; 7 Leah likewise and her children drew near and bowed down; and finally Joseph and Rachel drew near, and they bowed down. 8 Esau said, “What do you mean by all this company that I met?” Jacob answered, “To find favor with my lord.”

9 But Esau said, “I have enough, my brother; keep what you have for yourself.” 10 Jacob said, “No, please; if I find favor with you, then accept my present from my hand; for truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God—since you have received me with such favor. 11 Please accept my gift that is brought to you, because God has dealt graciously with me, and because I have everything I want.” So he urged him, and he took it.

12 Then Esau said, “Let us journey on our way, and I will go alongside you.”

This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

What does God look like?

I asked this question on Facebook this week, and man, oh man, the responses were incredible.

Some people see God as portrayed by authoritative actors: Morgan Freeman of Bruce Almighty. Octavia Spencer in The Shack. James Earl Jones in general. Perhaps Tefiti from Moana.

Others see God as a person, a parental figure: a mother who feeds us and gathers us under her wing, a father who holds our hand and pulls up out of the dirt. Someone with kind eyes and soft voice. A friend, the face of understanding.

Others gave the Sunday School answer: Jesus. I mean, they’re not wrong, I suppose.

Others looked to scripture for help: fire, the least of these, brilliant colors from depictions in Revelation.

Many said something along the lines of you and me. Us. When we’re at our best. In our diversity. Creation as a whole. When people learn to be more themselves, they give us a gift by showing us some more of what God is like.

Others drew on metaphors: a broken mirror that reflects us all and when put together, a more complete picture of God; water—a prolific element that takes on many forms and of which we are made; energy—the animating force of life; or sunlight—a powerful and energizing and also terrifying life force, not needing to be seen or felt to know that it is there making our world go round. A circle—never ending, utterly connected.

Others quoted artistic musings on the Divine, like the quote from Les Mis: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” Or the 90s song: “What if God were one of us? Just a slob like one of us?”

And aside from really meaningful ways of thinking God, what I appreciated about people’s answers is that they gave me insight into the responders. Some people see God as someone, a person who holds their hand. Has a face. Can give a hug.

And others see God as the underpinnings of creation, a more metaphysical and abstract idea, something that is not a person, but is at the same time, somehow, personal.

Others find it helpful to use metaphors of stories. God is like this…God is like that… To have a point of reference or an image that you know is not God but makes you think of God.

That’s not to say that every rendering of God is equally valid. We will not be covering millennia of theology in the next few minutes—don’t worry.

But the point about diversity was apt. That if we are all made in the image of God, then somehow, the images we reflect, in their diversity and vastness, give the world a different way of thinking about God.

We began this Homecoming series with the parable of the Prodigal Son. The son had left home and found himself in dire straits, and so he decided to return home to his father. And while he was still a long way off, his father ran to him and embraced him and kissed him and threw him a party. We considered how even though most of us knew this story of the prodigal son, that this was actually the story about a man who had two sons. And this story about a man who had two sons had been played out many times in scripture: Papa Adam with his sons, Cain and Abel; Father Abraham, with his sons, Isaac and Ishmael; and dear old dad, Isaac, with his two sons, Jacob and Esau. But in the story of the prodigal son, in that particular story of a man who had two sons, the broken story was mended. The father finally got it right. The family reunited. It wasn’t a perfect or easy fix, but the healing got to begin, thanks be to God.

And while that reunion was about a man who had two sons, today’s reunion is not about the father at all, but rather the sons. The reunion we read of today has very similar language of the prodigal son reunion: running, hugging, kissing. What Jacob thought might end in bloodshed, ended instead, in an embrace.

But before we get to the reunion, we should go over the part of the story that we skipped in our reading today. Though it doesn’t involve Esau, it’s essential to what happens with Esau. In between hearing that Esau was coming with 400 men—yikes by the way—and Esau actually arriving, Jacob spends a night alone under the stars. And while he is sleeping, someone attacks him and begins a wrestling match. It is never truly clear who it is—a person, a messenger, an angel, God’s own self. We’ll never know. In response to the question, “What does God look like?” Jacob might have written “surprise midnight attacker.”

They wrestle all night, even though the one who initiated the struggle asks to be let go. But Jacob is a relentless opportunist when it comes to blessings, and this is quite possibly the most frightening night of his life, so he says, “Not until you bless me.” So the person asks his name, and then gives him a new name: Israel, for he wrestled with God and came out on the other side of it. And Jacob, injured from the fight, walked with a limp for the rest of his life. And he names the place of struggle Peniel, which means the face of God, for he believed at that place, in the struggle, he saw the face of God.

This is one of the most mysterious stories in the Bible, but it is only a part of our story today.

Because today’s story is about Jacob and Esau.

If you remember, Jacob and Esau were twins, but Esau was the older one, so he was the one in line to receive the big inheritance, the blessing, from his father. But Jacob, taking advantage of Esau one day, swindled him out of his blessing, tricking Esau in a way only Jacob knows how to. And then as their father Isaac was nearing death, Jacob conspired with his mom to dress up like Esau, and trick his father into giving him what was not his.

When he had received the blessing meant for his brother, Jacob ran. Esau was murderous with rage toward Jacob. And he was also distraught at being robbed of his future, of the gift his father had always intended for him.

For a blessing was not simply a wish for well-being or a nice prayer—blessings had material, tangible, life-altering consequences. With the blessing, came money, property, authority. And now Esau had none of that. He would have to build his life differently, his sense of place in the family and community irrevocably changed.

In a heartbreaking scene, Esau begs his father: “Is there any blessing left for me?”

Jacob had pulled the rug out from underneath him, destabilizing his life and leaving him to bury first his father and then his mother, alone.

And while Jacob had been on the run for the past 20 years, he had not learned his lesson in honesty. We read that he was leaving his Uncle Laban’s place, and the reason he was leaving was that he had swindled Laban out of goods. Now, Laban was a trickster himself, so perhaps it was not all Jacob’s fault, but nevertheless, he cannot stay and so he hits the road. We learn in his prayer to God that God had told him to return, that good would come from it.

Jacob is dubious about this call from God, but he does head home. And he’s right to be afraid to return home. He is right to fight back when someone attacks him in the middle of the night for it could be any number of people taking their chance at revenge. It could be Laban or Esau or some other wronged party for all he knows.

But after his encounter with the person in the middle of the night, after hearing that his brother was on the way with an army, Jacob arranges his family for safety and gets boat load of gifts ready to go. He is prepared to trade his livelihood for his life.

But there’s no need. Before Jacob can squeak out an “I’m sorry,” he’s engulfed in a bear hug, his shoulder soaked by his brother’s tears. Jacob offers him his gifts, Esau waves them off. And Jacob says, “Seeing your face is like seeing the face of God.” And the end of our text is a benediction of sorts: “Then Esau said, “Let us journey on our way, and I will go alongside you.” It’s as if the song Nicole just sang was written for this moment: “Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones. And I will try to fix you.”

Jacob and Esau reconcile, in a beautiful turn of events. Jacob, not having changed much since their last encounter, finds Esau transformed, that Esau extends mercy in a way that God only can. They presumably share a meal together, swapping stories, catching up on all that has transpired.

Later on in their story, they will part ways due to a difference of opinion, but this time, on good terms. Reconciliation does not always mean a close relationship, but it does mean mended relationships, repair, confronting the rupture instead of ignoring it. Perhaps for Jacob, healing was in the return, not in not getting lost in the first place.

And I wonder, if to Jacob, God looked like a ruddy, hairy, burly man who was generous with his feelings and smelled like the sun. A few hours before, God had looked like a surprise midnight attacker, but now? God looks like Jacob’s brother.

And we realize in this story of return that the life Jacob lived with God and the life Jacob lived with his brother were two sides of the same coin.

And as we return today, to our building, to this sanctuary, to a place that is at once the same and different than when we last gathered here together, perhaps there is apprehension. Maybe we are not sure what we are returning to. We are filled with hopes. With fears. With doubt that we heard God’s call right. With sleepless nights. With loneliness. With apprehension. We’re tired of constantly pivoting and being in flux.

And yet. What we find in this moment is that God does not seem to discriminate. The face of God finds us in the midnight attack and in the embrace of our brother, and often those two occurrences are wrapped up in each other.

There may be things that we are not expecting as we reenter this place. There may be unresolved pain. There may be things we have done or left undone. There may be people who did not make it to this moment of return. But what we can expect as we come home, is that we will see the face of God. And we need only to turn to the person next to us, across from us, to see what God looks like.

Amen.

Table Meditation

I invite you to turn to #355 in your hymnals. Don’t worry, I will not be leading us in song.

When Jacob returned home, I imagine that alongside Esau, a flood of memories met him. Reminders of who he was. And not just who he had become, but who he was all those years ago when he ran away. Who he was when he and Esau played as young boys. And while those times were gone, and he was changed, and Esau had changed, he was still returning to who he was, to his identity as brother, as sibling, as part of a family.

And so we, too, return to our preamble, an affirmation of our identity as Azle Christian Church, a Disciples of Christ congregation. We are not the same people we were when we last left this sanctuary, and we’re certainly not the same people we were when we entered it for the very first time. So much has changed. But we can return to these affirmations of what we hold dearest, things that have remained steadfast over the decades: of who we are, together.

You can follow along with me as I read it. (Read Disciples Affirmation)

I’m going to pray for the bread and cup now so that we may eat them together during the Words of Institution.

Join me in prayer:

Gracious and Generous Host, Jesus. We give thanks for this table, for the ritual of bread and cup, for the words of our faith forebears: the ones we find in scripture, the ones we find in this hymnal, the ones we pass along to each other in the hallway. We trust that in each other, in this bread, and in this cup, we encounter you, someway, somehow. In Christ’s name we ask it, amen.

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.

Sharing Our Resources

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.

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 this morning comes from the letter to the Ephesians:

May Christ’s living spirit, whose light guides us and ignites our bones, whose great love brings us home, help us to remember that even we’re lost, we can still be found, for we are children of God, whose own heart is our home.

Amen.

Homecoming: Wherever is Your Heart - 1 Samuel 1

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:

If you missed a Sunday and want to catch up on the worship series, you can listen to our church’s podcast wherever you get your podcasts. A new episode of Music Monday dropped this week, an extra to our worship series where we talk about the intersection of music and theology at Azle Christian Church.

Many, many thanks to those who helped with Sting Fling yesterday! From those who put stickers on water bottles to those who passed out goods, we are so grateful for you! We passed out 1000 water bottles and 500 fans like this one yesterday to citizens of Azle. 

This Saturday, from 9-12, is our cabinet retreat. Due to COVID-19 concerns, we have decided to make it online only. Like our retreat in January, it will be on Zoom. Your cabinet agenda and Zoom information will be emailed to you this week. 

Next Sunday, September 19, will be our first Sunday back in the sanctuary! As we have been doing here, we will continue to serve individual communion cups and masks will be required in all parts of the building. The sanctuary doors will open at 10:50, ten minutes before worship begins, and they will close 10 minutes after service ends to minimize risk. This is a slow open, so right now, we are only resuming worship. The Pandemic Response Committee continues to monitor the situation in our area to determine how to safely resume more activities and they continue to encourage getting fully vaccinated and wearing a mask in public places. 

In two weeks, on the last Sunday of September, we will have Dedication Sunday for our building. 

September 29 is our first Gospels and Groceries event. We’ll host an outdoors hymn sing and collect food for our Little Free pantry. DMM is making food. 

We continue our new series this morning: Homecoming: Stories of Return. Today, we return to worship with Hannah and Samuel.

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.

Let us prepare our hearts for worship.

Litany of Faith

One: If the Lord had not been on our side, let Israel now say;

All: If the Lord had not been on our side, when enemies rose up against us;

One: They would have swallowed us up alive; the flood would have swept us away,

All: The water would have drowned us, the raging torrent would have engulfed us!

One: Blessed be the Lord, who has not given us over to be a prey for their teeth.

All: Our help is in the name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.

(From Psalm 124)

Pastoral Prayer

The Lord be with you. 

We don’t often recognize state holidays and anniversaries in worship. Our service is oriented toward God, and we are wary of the way state and religion have interacted in the past, dating all the way back to Jesus. And when these days do come up in worship, it’s done with great trepidation and care, albeit imperfect. I want to acknowledge that because of the prayer I’m about to pray. I do think that a lot of us are carrying the burden of the war we have just exited that began because of September 11, whose 20th anniversary was yesterday. 

The violence done that day on September 11th, the violence that ensued afterward, and the recent tumultuous exit out of Afghanistan have profoundly affected all of our lives. War does that. It affects our moral imagination, it creates spiritual crises, and so in this case, it is relevant for us to think about these events together before God. 

So join me in prayer.

Most Holy One, our hope and our refuge, we welcome to you today.

The shock and horror of that tragic day, of September 11th, have subsided, replaced now with an emptiness, a longing for an innocence lost. We are mindful of the public servants who demonstrated the greatest love of all by laying down their lives for their friends that day. And we commit their souls to your eternal care. 

O God, tragedies like this present us with so many questions, but the primary one we grapple with on the 20th anniversary of such a terrifying day is simple: who shall we become because of this? We know that suffering can make us hard, bitter, vengeful, and cruel. But we pray that instead, this moment remembered makes us vulnerable, generous, kind, and hospitable. Instead of being against each other, may we remember that we belong to each other.

We sing a song together sometimes: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” And for the peace of the world, we pray to you, O God. For our enemies and those who wish us harm, we pray for them, because you asked us to, because we know how complex the idea of enemy is, how very nuanced and multi-faceted are the reasons people participate in violence against one another.

We recognize and repent for how religion is weaponized in both our own Christian faith and in the faith of our sister Abrahamic religion of Islam, how those saying the name of God whether by the moniker Yahweh or Allah, use it in vain when religion is married to violence, to a campaign of hate, to destructive and death-dealing ways. 

We pray for the forgiveness of the sins. For the way our own country has contributed to the violence of the world. For how thought the trauma of that day brought out some good and heroic behavior, that it also brought out the worst of some of us, fostering fear, racism, and Islamophobia. And we give thanks for those who have actively waged peace and understanding ever since, for those who have sought to draw out the very best of humanity in the midst of it all. 

For all those whose spirit has been broken and whose lives have been irrevocably disrupted by the violence of September 11th and its aftermath, we offer our prayers. May our memories be a call to remember that each one of us can work for peace. May our memories move our hearts and hands to heal. 

We pray for those too young to remember that day but whose lives have been utterly shaped by the war that followed, by the narrative of terror and security, by the suspicion and fear that engulfed those around them.

And we remember the closest thing to us today of September 11th: the heartbreaking stories of a war finally ended in Afghanistan. We pray for the people left behind. We pray for those who must now make a home in a place not their home. We pray for the soldiers in anguish over their Afghan friends’ fate. We pray for the Afghan and American families and all those in the crossfire who will not get their loved ones back. We pray for the healing of the moral injury of war and all it demands of humans. We pray for help in our disillusionment, our jadedness, our numbness. 

We don’t know everything, God. We don’t have all the right words to pray in this moment. Our hope is mixed with anguish, our prayers marred with exhaustion from a very long war. 

So we entrust the rest of this prayer to Your Spirit, who groans with us, praying on our behalf. 

And we return to the prayer Jesus gave 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

1 Samuel 1

There was a certain man of Ramathaim, a Zuphite from the hill country of Ephraim, whose name was Elkanah son of Jeroham son of Elihu son of Tohu son of Zuph, an Ephraimite. 2 He had two wives; the name of the one was Hannah, and the name of the other Peninnah. Peninnah had children, but Hannah had no children.

3 Now this man used to go up year by year from his town to worship and to sacrifice to the Lord of hosts at Shiloh, where the two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were priests of the Lord. 4 On the day when Elkanah sacrificed, he would give portions to his wife Peninnah and to all her sons and daughters; 5 but to Hannah he gave a double portion, because he loved her, though the Lord had closed her womb. 6 Her rival used to provoke her severely, to irritate her, because the Lord had closed her womb. 7 So it went on year by year; as often as she went up to the house of the Lord, she used to provoke her. Therefore Hannah wept and would not eat. 8 Her husband Elkanah said to her, “Hannah, why do you weep? Why do you not eat? Why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?”

9 After they had eaten and drunk at Shiloh, Hannah rose and presented herself before the Lord. Now Eli the priest was sitting on the seat beside the doorpost of the temple of the Lord. 10 She was deeply distressed and prayed to the Lord, and wept bitterly. 11 She made this vow: “O Lord of hosts, if only you will look on the misery of your servant, and remember me, and not forget your servant, but will give to your servant a male child, then I will set him before you as a nazirite until the day of his death. He shall drink neither wine nor intoxicants, and no razor shall touch his head.”

12 As she continued praying before the Lord, Eli observed her mouth. 13 Hannah was praying silently; only her lips moved, but her voice was not heard; therefore Eli thought she was drunk. 14 So Eli said to her, “How long will you make a drunken spectacle of yourself? Put away your wine.” 15 But Hannah answered, “No, my lord, I am a woman deeply troubled; I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but I have been pouring out my soul before the Lord. 16 Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.” 17 Then Eli answered, “Go in peace; the God of Israel grant the petition you have made.” 18 And she said, “Let your servant find favor in your sight.” Then the woman went to her quarters, ate and drank with her husband, and her countenance was sad no longer.

19 They rose early in the morning and worshiped before the Lord; then they went back to their house at Ramah. Elkanah knew his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered her. 20 In due time Hannah conceived and bore a son. She named him Samuel, for she said, “I have asked him of the Lord.”

21 The man Elkanah and all his household went up to offer to the Lord the yearly sacrifice, and to pay his vow. 22 But Hannah did not go up, for she said to her husband, “As soon as the child is weaned, I will bring him, that he may appear in the presence of the Lord, and remain there forever; I will offer him as a nazirite for all time.” 23 Her husband Elkanah said to her, “Do what seems best to you, wait until you have weaned him; only—may the Lord establish his word.” 

So the woman remained and nursed her son, until she weaned him. 24 When she had weaned him, she took him up with her, along with a three-year-old bull, an ephah of flour, and a skin of wine. She brought him to the house of the Lord at Shiloh; and the child was young. 25 Then they slaughtered the bull, and they brought the child to Eli. 26 And she said, “Oh, my lord! As you live, my lord, I am the woman who was standing here in your presence, praying to the Lord. 27 For this child I prayed; and the Lord has granted me the petition that I made to him. 28 Therefore I have lent him to the Lord; as long as he lives, he is given to the Lord.”

She left him there for the Lord.

This is the word of God for the people of God. Thanks be to God.

Throughout the pandemic, I have watched a lot of television. Like a lot. I might have finished Netflix.

And one of the shows I have become obsessed with is The Crown, the fictionalized, sensationalized story of the British monarchy, beginning with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. Now I realize that in many ways, the monarchy has no bearing on our lives because we Americans did away with our ties to the crown about 245 years ago. We dumped the monarchy’s property—proper-tea, if you catch my drift—into the harbor and won the Revolutionary War, and that was that. The world turned upside down, as we sing in Hamilton.  

But the interest in what goes on in Buckinham Palace has waxed and waned over the years, most recently when an American became part of the family a few years ago. And what made this all even more compelling was that not only was it an American—but it was a black American woman who found herself beside a prince at the altar in Westminster Abbey.

 Not everyone may be as tuned in as I have been at how the royal family has unraveled since that beautiful wedding where Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, a black American Episcopal priest, preached a beautiful wedding sermon and won all of our non-Episcopal hearts. But let me catch you up. 

Meghan Markle—a B-list actress from LA—married Prince Harry, becoming the Duchess of Sussex. She’s a feminist, she’s been outspoken against racial injustice, and she’s divorced, which is a big deal in the royal family. 

And we know that media is brutal and the paparazzi are relentless in England. We saw how they hunted Princess Diana until the tragic denouement of her death.

But the papps have never had a black member of the royal family before, and the UK is not doing much better than we are when it comes to avoiding racist stereotypes and bias. So the press on Meghan has been awful. She shared in an interview with Oprah that was it so terrible at one point that she wanted to end her life. She pointed out deftly that the British Commonwealth—the holdover of Britain’s imperialist policies and colonies around the globe—looked a lot more like her than they did the queen. 

So, placing his wife and child first, Prince Harry decides to step back from his royal duties, his brother having produced the obligatory heirs to the crown anyway, and in a shocking letter, the couple leave their post as extensions of the crown. Lots of family drama ensues and the public only gets snippets of it because the royal family is a vault. And now the Sussexes live in the U.S. without any royal duties.

And all of this drama has revived a conversation that has been happening in the British imagination for almost a century: monarchy or no monarchy? In a world of democracies, is the monarchy relevant anymore?  

This conversation of monarchal relevance has been going on for a lot of Queen Elizabeth’s tenure. In the 60s, a monarchy dissenter was eventually hired by the palace to help modernize the monarchy. Each generation has had someone to engage the public once again. Princess Diana won our hearts but her tragic love story set the public against the once and future king, Prince Charles. And now Meghan’s saga has done it for new generations.

But this monarchy debate has been around for a lot longer than the British monarchy. The books in the Bible categorized as “history,” and I use quotation marks on purpose, in the Bible take sides when it comes to the monarchy of Israel. Some are pro-king, some are anti-king.

1 Samuel wrestles with this debate, but painstakingly makes the argument that this monarchy was birthed out of prayer and miraculous visions and the hand of God. It blesses the crown and tries to endear the man after God’s own heart, King David, to us, despite many, many shortcomings as a man and leader. Give the crown a chance, 1 Samuel says.

The Israelites, according to the histories, really want a king. All the nations have one, God. We want one, too.

And maybe they need one. Their nation under a set of judges doesn’t seem to be going well anyway. The last chapter of Judges details horrific violence, ethnic genocide, and ends with these lines: “In those days there was no king in Israel; each person did what they thought to be right.” 

Now, you have to be reading scripture carefully sometimes to catch the shade thrown around, but this is major shade. The writer of Judges, setting the stage for pro-monarchy writings, essentially says, “These people have run amok. It’s like Lord of the flies out there. Somebody please come rein them in.”

And it is with this backdrop of internal conflict and societal upheaval, that we finally arrive at our story about a family today.

We meet the family of Elkanah, whose biblical marriages entails having two wives: Penninah and Hannah. Penninah has kids from Elkanah—she has produced the heirs, so his lineage will be fine, thanks to her. Hannah, however, has no children—a source of shame in a culture that demands offspring as a sign of favor from God. Without heirs, Hannah could very well be on the streets when Elkanah dies. 

Elkanah loves Hannah, and he tells her it doesn’t matter if she has children or not, which sounds nice, but he is clearly not appreciating the precarious state her life would be in when he’s gone, and he’s also resting in the fact that he’s set for life with the aforementioned heirs from Penninah. But aside from this obtuseness, we do get that he cares for Hannah. She is not a mere baby-making conduit to him. 

But he doesn’t share that affection for Penninah, and so she bullies Hannah. And to be fair, Penninah had done everything right in her culture’s eyes—she is the one with children, and yet she is unfavored and unloved. 

So we arrive at the scene in Shiloh, the place where the ark of the covenant was, and Hannah is alone weeping, begging for a child. The priest, Eli, thinks this is a case of feminine hysteria, that she must be drunk or something because she’s….crying? Praying? A woman? It’s unclear.

But they talk and he predicts Hannah will indeed have a child, a male child, and she will dedicate to him the Lord, giving him back to God when he is weaned, to be a part of the religious order known as the Nazirites. And she does. She has the child she has prayed for, she is set for life, and she hands him back to God to be a prophet. He will be the prophet who tries to help King David through his many foibles, and he will be the voice of reason for Israel’s first stint of monarchy. 

Which is a good ending, right? So why does this story have a tinge of sadness to it?

Perhaps it is because she is caught up in her culture’s narrative that says she has to have a child to complete her. That a male child will solve her problems. She buys in because it’s true in the way their society is structured, the way most ancient societies were structured. And like a lot of the testimony of scripture, which is human testimony and witness of the Divine, so we are reading an interpretation of what people think God is doing—the narrative of 1 Samuel 1 was that God was the orchestrator of childbearing. And Hannah attributes her barrenness and then her fruitfulness to God’s hand. And it’s easy to look back and say, “Oh, Hannah. You should know better. You are more than your womb.” But we still struggle with this truth in 2021. 

And it’s worth mentioning that Hannah is not the first or last woman in scripture to long and pray for a child, and then get one. But the many biblical accounts of miraculous pregnancies do not conform to the lived experiences of most people. This room is probably full of stories of failed pregnancies, years of trying, and heartbreak. So it’s helpful in this particular context of pregnancy, of monarchy, of marriage, of faith even, to affirm that these stories we read are not prescriptive. They do not lay out a path to follow uncritically. And they do not promise that with a little faith, and little Jesus, that things will work out. 

Hannah’s culture, like many ancient and modern cultures alike, believe pregnancy resulting in the birth of child to be the be-all, end-all of womanhood, to be signs of favor and faithfulness to people who have a womb. But there are many valid ways to be a woman, to be a mother, to be a family, and some of those include no children, whether by chance or choice, and some of those include children who do not come from our womb at all. The many incredible women and families in this community of faith represent the varying ways to be a woman, to be a mother or mothering presence, to be a family. And we give thanks for each one.

And it may seem extra to pause and say all that, but I take the time because this story and others like it, have been weaponized and hurtful to me as someone who had a painful journey to motherhood, and I know that statistically, I’m in good company and the company is vast. These are the kinds of pauses one gets when one has a woman in the pulpit, thanks be to God. 

So, caveat made. I began the sermon talking about monarchy. And yet our story is about a family. And not even the royal family of 1 Samuel, but a person who seems to be a peripheral presence in the kingdom. It’s as we have asked about what’s going on with Israel, and the writers respond, “Let me tell you a story about a family,” which feels like a familiar move for those of us who hang around Jesus. 

While this story does give us an origin story of the prophet with miracles and promises and conflict, the first half of the chapter is about the anguish of two women. 

And I wonder if the tinge of sadness to this story also stems from the fact that in Hannah’s return, there is also a goodbye. In her joy, there is also grief. We can safely assume that Hannah did not look at her precious baby boy as a mere retirement plan. That she loved him. And wanted to be with him. But she had to leave him a priest who did not have a good track record raising children—we don’t have time for that part of the story, so you’ll have to trust me on this one.

So that even her story is commandeered by something bigger. 

And if we assume that Hannah’s return to Shiloh with baby Samuel is not just another mollifying assurance that God answers prayers, then what is her return about? 

For us, I mean. 

Perhaps her return is about the hope of the future of Israel. Perhaps, this story is saying that if we just start things off on the right foot—with clean hands and a pure heart—we might get it right. Maybe?

Spoiler alert: the kingdom of Israel is a mixed bag at best. And I’m being generous. People are messy. Governing is hard. Even Israel had issues with nationalist movements and neglect of its most vulnerable populations. I mean, God essentially says over and over again in the prophets: “Geez, treat the people inside and outside your borders better. Do better. For the love of Me.”

So with our millennia of hindsight, and the rest of the Bible, we know that good intentions and noble beginnings will not a nation keep. 

But there’s something here for us, I just know it. I believe that the Bible is meaningful and relevant to us, even the sticky parts. 

So of course, God does not give us everything we long for. We know that. 

But I recognize something in Hannah’s longing for a child. In Israel’s longing for a king. A longing for the world to be made right. Hannah’s return to Shiloh held such metaphorical and actual hope for the shifting sands and turning tides of a people. And in her story, we can trust in ours, that something is being birthed to guide us as a people of God in a rapidly changing world. 

And perhaps what is being birthed is not what we bring with us in our own return, but rather our own devotion, our own trust that God is touched by the tears of those who are longing. 

Perhaps what we are bringing with us is a stubborn belief that one day God will get everything God wants, and we may not see it all happen, but we know that our hope will be rewarded, not with how we excel in the ways of our culture, but with how attentive we are to what God is doing in our small story. 

Sharing Our Resources

There are many ways to support and resource the ministries of Azle Christian Church: Venmo, giving online, giving box, offering plate.

I’m going to pass these plates 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. 

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 this morning comes from the letter to the Ephesians:

May Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. May you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Amen.