The Hardest Lesson in the Bible

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
The First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
September 25, 2005

The Hardest Lesson in the Bible
Mark 11:27-33
Philippians 2:1-13

Don’t you love watching our children head off to school in the fall?
Some struggle under backpacks bigger than they are,
as they run to catch buses, calling to friends.
At the start of a new school year
you can almost feel the children’s excitement.
Here within our church family, we’ve got dozens of children
who have headed back to classrooms.
Some are off to school for the first time;
watching them climb those steep steps up onto buses
is such a wonderful lesson in confidence: I CAN do this!
We’ve got children who have made the leap to Middle School,
that difficult transition from neighborhood school
to teeming, frenetic central school.
Still others have left the Middle School for high school:
tentative 9th graders, at once young men and women,
and still child-like in so many ways.

Every child is different, even those in the same classroom,
but they are all doing the same thing,
in first grade, fifth grade, 10th grade:
they are all learning: learning facts and figures;
learning about themselves and others;
and learning how to learn,
what goes into learning.

Some come to class with minimal interest;
Sitting still in a classroom is just one step short of agony.
Others quickly figure out what needs to be done
to get an acceptable grade.
For these children, it isn’t about learning,
it is about a grade.
But there are a small number in every school, every classroom
who love to learn,
who want to know,
who learn for the joy and love of learning.
It is that sense that we try to awaken in our Sunday School.
We want our children to want to learn about God
about Jesus, about the Bible, about their faith.

In Sunday School there are no tests, no quizzes, no final exams.
Our children don’t have to worry about grades,
don’t have to worry about whether they will pass,
whether they will move on to the next grade.
God wants us to come to him by our own choice,
because we want to,
in response to his love for us.
That’s what we try to teach our children,
what we try to help our children learn.
We will all graduate – our salvation comes to us
by the grace of God in Jesus Christ,
not by our performance on a test.
We don’t even need a number two pencil.

The dilemma is that it is easy for us to get lazy,
easy for us to forget that we are still called to learn,
called to learn not just in our years in Sunday School,
but every year, year after year.

We are called to learn
to learn about our faith, ourselves,
our relationship with Jesus Christ.
Only then can we grow in faith,
grow in discipleship.
As disciples of Jesus Christ,
we are on a journey from baptism to the end of our mortal days,
a journey that involves learning and growing.
We learn in church as we worship together.
We learn as we work together on committees
or in other groups around the church.
We learn through our reading the Bible.
We learn as we gather around the dinner table
and share our faith, as well as a meal.

We are all called to learn, but we tend to learn
only those things we want to learn,
and learn only in ways we want to learn.
God has always tried to make things easy for us,
but still we look to cut corners.
When he gave Moses the Ten Commandments,
he gave us ten simple lessons,
lessons to help us live our lives
lessons to help us know God’s love for us.
But what do we do with them?
We become like the students who try to figure out
what they need to do to get a grade that is acceptable.

Look at what we do with the Fourth Commandment:
God makes the lesson about observing the Sabbath quite clear
through words we first hear in Sunday School,
“Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
Six days shall you labor and do all you work.
But the seventh is a Sabbath to the Lord your God.
You shall not do any work.
The Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.”
(Ex. 20:8ff)

Seems pretty straightforward, an easy lesson to grasp.
But what do we do?
We think we are doing well if we observe the Sabbath
60 to 70 percent of the time.
That’s the passing grade we give to ourselves.
We are called to honor our mother and fathers;
So, as long as we are good and obedient 75, 80,
perhaps 85 percent of the time,
we give ourselves a passing grade.
If we don’t envy and covet what others have most of the time,
then we can envy and covet what others have some of the time.
If we aren’t filled with lust most of the time,
then we can be filled with lust some of the time.
And of course, if we don’t steal and if we don’t kill,
we can use those perfect scores to pull up our average!

Don’t you see, though: that approach is like studying for the test,
learning what we need to know to get an acceptable grade on the test.
It is not truly learning what God wants us to learn.

Learning why God considers the Sabbath so important;
learning why the Sabbath is as much for us,
as it is for God,
learning why observing the Sabbath as God intended us to
is important to our faith.

We are called to learn what God wants from us
in the commandment not to bear false witness:
that that commandment is not just about lying about a person,
it goes beyond that: it is about anything we say about a person
that is negative, disrespectful, that tears down,
rather than builds up.

You and I are called to work toward having the mind of Christ.
We cannot hope to do that if we don’t learn.
And learning Christ’s mind will take a lifetime.
There is no advanced placement, no accelerated courses.

What is it that Jesus wanted the leaders of the Temple to learn?
They thought they had all the answers.
They thought they had learned all they needed to know.
They were smart men,
all of them the products of many years in school.
But Jesus teaches them a new lesson:
that they don’t have all the answers.
That they had been focused on learning the wrong things.
They could not answer his simple question.
Jesus teaches the experts that they had more to learn.

Paul provides us with a tough lesson,
in fact one of the toughest lessons we can possibly tackle.
Is there anything more difficult to do
than think of others consistently?
We live in a “me first” society.
But Paul does not mince words in what we are to learn:
“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit,
but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.
Let each of you look not to your own interests,
but to the interests of others.” (2.3-4)
Now we hear that and we agree, yes, that sounds good.
But how well do we do with that?
We give ourselves a passing grade if we follow Paul’s teaching,
follow his lesson maybe…. half the time.
We are better when we are around the church,
worse when we are behind the wheel of a car and in a hurry.

What Paul is calling the followers of Jesus Christ to do
is learn to live together in communion, in community.
We can only do that when we live for each other,
when we don’t put ourselves and our own motivations first,

Next Saturday I will host the new members
of this year’s Confirmation Class.
We’ve got seven bright, energetic kids I will work with
over the next 8 months as they prepare
to profess their faith publicly.
This will be the sixth time I have had the Opening Retreat
up at the Manse.
Now we are dealing with teenagers,
so food is central to our time together!
At lunchtime, Pat lays out turkey, ham, roast beef, cheeses,
different kinds of breads, and other goodies
for the students to make sandwiches.
But no matter how ravenous any of them might be
they cannot simply attack the table.
No, each student has a lunch partner,
names drawn from a hat,
and the partners have to make lunch for each other.
Each student has to ask his or her lunch partner
what that person wants, and then make it for them.
They have to ask questions, listen to answers,
learn what the other person likes,
what the other person wants,
even learn that there may be things
the other person cannot eat.
They have to set aside their own interests
and listen to the other,
serve the other,
take care of the other.

Yesterday when the Session was gathered,
we talked about our leadership responsibilities as Elders.
What makes us faithful Elders both collectively
and individually is when we think about others,
not ourselves, when we learn about all the different
boys and girls, men and women who depend on the
many different ministries of this church.
Our job is to learn about them,
and then serve them by providing them with what they need:
encouragement, resources, tools,
genuine interest in their growth and their wellbeing,
whether we are dealing with our own children
or an outside group that uses the building.
As faithful Elders, we know that have been called by God not to manage,
but to lead,
and we lead by serving,
and we serve most faithfully by learning
as we put the needs of other first.

Some time over the past few months,
it is likely that we have sung a hymn that you did not care for;
in fact you might have even said something to someone else.
What Paul hopes we will learn through his words is to
think about the possibility that the hymn that you did not care for,
might just be a favorite of someone just two pews away.
In fact, it may be a hymn that evokes a special feeling
in another person: brings out a strong feeling of faith,
or calls up a special memory.

One of the hardest lessons in the Bible to learn is
is that we are to put the needs of others first.
We are to think of others, learn of their needs
their concerns, their desires, their wants.
As Paul says, we are to “do nothing from selfish ambition
but in humility, regard others as better than ourselves.”

But that is not the hardest lesson in the Bible.
No the hardest lesson in the Bible for us to learn
is that God calls us to learn, learn constantly
Not to work for the passing grade,
but to go beyond that, to learn what God wants for us
and hopes for us.
As we learn, we grow in understanding,
and as we grow in understanding, we grow in faith.
And as we grow in faith, we grow more like our Lord,
our minds more like his mind.
That’s the today’s lesson;
that’s tomorrow’s lesson;
that is the lesson God hopes we will learn every day.
AMEN