First Person Plural

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
February 26, 2006
Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time

First Person Plural
Isaiah 55:1-9
Mark 2:13-22

I have a startling revelation to share with you this morning.
I am glad you are all sitting down because
what I learned this past week
and am about to share with you will amaze you,
astound you,
probably even shock you.
At first you may have difficulty believing it;
but once you think about it, you will know that it is true:
This church – our church –
the First Presbyterian Church of Washingtonville,
is filled with ……sinners.

Now many of you may well be thinking,
“That’s nothing new. I’ve known that for a long time.
All I have to do is look around me
and all I see are sinners.
Sinners to the right, sinners to the left,
and certainly when I look up at the chancel on Sunday
I see a sinner.”

But here’s the revelation,
the fact that is hard for us to swallow:
there is no one in this church who is not a sinner.
There has never been a worshipper at this church
who was not a sinner
and there never will be a worshipper in this church
who is not a sinner.
We are all flawed, every one of us.
And the lesson that Jesus wants us to learn is,
that is precisely why we are here:
You are here because you need to be.
I am here because I need to be.
We are all here; we are each here
because we need to be.

You would not be here if you were not sinner.
So any time you want to know what a sinner looks like,
you don’t need to look around;
all you need to do is look in a mirror.
The person looking back at you in the glass is a sinner.
And the larger lesson that Jesus wants us to learn
is that that sinner looking back at you in the mirror,
is the only one whose sinful nature you should ever think about,
ever talk about, ever worry about.
That sinner in the mirror is the only one
whose behavior you should ever try to change.

Jesus spends a great deal of time trying to teach us not to do
the one thing we seem to find so easy to do:
judge other people.
Go back and re-read the lesson where Jesus says,
“Stop thinking about the splinter in another person’s eye,
when you have a veritable two-by-four plank in your own.”
Listen for his tone;
His tone is angry! (Matthew 7:1-5)
Why? Because when we are judgmental we get in the way
of God’s work through the Holy Spirit,
especially God’s work that we are called to
through Jesus Christ: building community.
Anything we do, any judgmental comment,
any critical comment; any snide comment,
anything that does not work for reconciliation
and building community
gets in the way of God’s work through the Spirit.

Did you hear how this was happening in our gospel lesson?
The disciples of John the Baptizer, along with the Pharisees
found themselves on rare common ground:
both groups complained about Jesus and his followers,
why they weren’t given to fasting and prayer
with more conviction.
John the Baptizer was considered to be a great holy man,
a man who lived a lean, spare, ascetic life
focused on prayer, baptism, and a message of repentance.
The Pharisees were of course the leaders at the Temple;
they followed Scripture literally, every word,
and were quick to condemn anyone,
including our Lord Jesus,
who did not follow Scripture as literally as they did.

And into their lives walked a man
whom many thought to be the Messiah,
the Christ, the Savior.
Such a man should, they thought, excel in holiness,
putting all others to shame in terms of righteous behavior.
But what did he do?
He went to weddings;
he ate and drank;
he associated himself with malodorous fishermen
and lubricious tax collectors,
shadowy, shady people,
People whom John’s followers and the Pharisees
were both quick to sniff,
“they are not like us.”

And we can just hear the comments:
“He doesn’t fast enough;
He doesn’t pray the right way;
He doesn’t follow Scripture carefully enough;
He eats and drinks all the wrong things;
Can you believe the people he associates with?”
Comments coming from people
who thought of themselves as faithful children of God,
obedient and righteous.
But what do you think God thought of their gossipy comments?

What God wants us each to do is to look at ourselves:
God wants you to hold a mirror in front of yourself
and reflect on your own life, where you are now,
to look at yourself honestly.
Honestly, frankly,
knowing that you can fool yourself,
and you can fool others,
but you can never fool God.

Only if we focus on ourselves,
each of us individually,
can we hope to build a true community of Christ,
which is what Jesus calls us sinners to do.
We cannot do that if we are constantly overlooking our own faults
while we wag our tongues and fingers about someone else.

In church we are to focus on the first person plural: the “we”
rather than the first person singular: the “I”
or the second person singular: “you”

In Matthew’s version of this story Jesus says to those around him,
“Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.
For I have come to call not the righteous, but sinners.”
(Matthew 9.13)
Do you hear what Jesus wants from us: mercy,
mercy for one another,
because all those he has called: you and me, are sinners.

We have been chosen, you and I precisely because we are sinners,
precisely because we have flaws.
And as we look ahead to Wednesday and the beginning of Lent
it is the perfect time of year for us to be thinking
about ourselves, to look in the mirror
to reflect honestly and openly about ourselves as sinners.
That is hard for most of us to do;
It is so much easier to turn our gaze to someone else,
to be critical of someone else.

Most of you will recall that my
preferred symbol for Lent is the broom,
the ordinary broom,
to encourage us to do some housecleaning,
some spiritual housecleaning.
Housecleaning in our own houses.
If you are busy thinking about how dirty
someone else’s spiritual house is,
then you’ve missed the point.
Lent provides the perfect opportunity
to dig into those dark corners of your own house,
those corners you have worked so hard to look past,
to pretend don’t exist.
But they are there.
You know it,
and God knows it.

A wonderful book every disciple of Christ should read
and re-read, especially during Lent
is the book “Life Together” by the
great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Bonhoeffer did most of his writing during the 1930s
and early 1940s.
He reminds his readers that we have been called here
solely by the grace of God.
He writes, “It is easily forgotten
that the fellowship of Christian brethren
is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God
that any day may be taken from us,
…Therefore let him who…has …the privilege of
living a common Christian life with other Christians
praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart.
…It is grace, nothing but grace
that we are allowed to live in community
with Christian brethren.”
(Life Together, 20)
It is by the grace of God that we are here,
here each of us sinners.

Each of you has your ideas about what a church should be;
We each have a vision that we try to impose to create
what each of us thinks will make the perfect community.
But don’t you see that when you do that
you are not treating our community as a gift from God.
The church ends up becoming a group of competing fiefdoms,
with pods of people grouped around pet issues,
likes and dislikes.
How is that faithful?
How is that merciful?
How is that loving?
How is that Christ-like?

We begin Lent by remembering that we have each
received forgiveness through Jesus Christ
even though we have each deserved judgment.
Why would you not offer everyone else the same grace
that you have received from God,
and receive anew each day?
Didn’t Jesus say to his disciples, “this is my commandment:
that you love one another as I have loved you.”
(John 15:12)
Isn’t that Jesus’ commandment to you and to me,
to each of us, to all of us?
To love one another as Christ loved his disciples.
Only when we do that
can we hope to build a truly Christian community.

Bonhoeffer writes, “the more genuine and the deeper
our community becomes,
the more will everything else between us recede,
the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work
become the one and only thing that is vital between us.”
(Life Together, 26)

Lent reminds us that in Christ
we are always given the opportunity to begin anew:
the old ways have passed,
and a new life in Christ has begun.
That is true right here, and right now,
The gift of grace given to every one of us sinners,
even though none of us deserves it.
Get out your mirrors and have look at yourself.
Get out your broom and attack those dark corners
of your Spiritual house,
the house you know is not as bright and clean
as God wants it to be.

The more you focus on your own spiritual housekeeping,
the more you will realize that our community of faith
is never going to be your picture of the ideal community.
If you work on your own spiritual housekeeping,
you will understand that God is the one who builds this house.
Bonhoeffer helps us to understand then that
“because God has bound us together in one body
with other Christians in Jesus Christ,…
we enter into that common life
not as demanders, [not as shapers of that life,]
but simply as thankful recipients
And is not what has been given us enough:
[brothers and sisters] who will go on living with us
through sin and need,
under the blessing of God’s grace?” (Life Together,28)

The Psalmist has written, “how very good and pleasant it is
when kindred live together in unity.” (Psalm 133.1).
That does not mean that we will all think alike
and agree on everything.
But we will work together for the common good
as we talk, listen, and learn together.
We will work together for the “we” and the “us”,
understanding that the “very hour of [our] disillusionment
with [our brother or our sister] becomes incomparably salutary,
because it so thoroughly teaches us that
none of us can live by our own words and deeds,
but only the one Word and Deed that binds us together:
[our Lord, our Savior, Jesus the Christ],
the one who forgives our every sin
as he calls us to a life of mercy in community]. “ 28
(Life Together, 28)
Amen

It’s Only A Footnote

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
February 12/19, 2006
Sixth/Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

It’s Only A Footnote
2 Kings 5:1-14
Mark 1:40-45

One of the most important lessons I learned in law school was,
“read the footnotes”.
You know what footnotes are –
those sentences down at the bottom of the page of a book.
We tend to find them in legal and scholarly books;
The print is typically microscopic,
so small that they almost dare us to read them,
so we tend to skip over them.
Before I went to law school,
my rationalization had always been,
that if the information was that important
the author should have included it
in the main part of the text,
so I rarely read footnotes.
What I learned in law school, though, was
that footnotes can often contain
a treasure trove of information.

So when I see a footnote in the Bible,
I look immediately to see what it is all about.
If you read along with me in the pew Bible as I read our texts,
did you notice whether there were any footnotes in either lesson?
In fact, there were seven in our Old Testament lesson,
and six in our New Testament lesson.
The footnotes in our Old Testament text
are all pretty straightforward.
The most significant tells us that we are not certain
what the Hebrew word we translate as “leprosy” really meant
three thousand years ago.
It probably meant a number of different skin diseases.

It’s a footnote in our New Testament lesson though
that I want us to look at.
It is the note that is attached to the second verse, verse 41.
You heard me read that Jesus was, “Moved with pity….”
by the sight of the leper.
The footnote reads,
“Other ancient authorities read, ‘Moved with anger’.”
What the note is telling us is that
there is an alternate reading to this verse,
that it might also read,
“Moved with anger, Jesus stretched out his hand,
and touched him,
and said to him, ‘I do choose. Be made clean!’”

One footnote, one word change,
but it changes the tone of the lesson considerably.
Was Jesus moved with pity or with anger?
Those are two very different emotions.
So let’s do a little exegesis – do you remember the term?
Let’s do a little exegesis together.

The note says “other ancient authorities” --
what does that mean? “Other ancient authorities”?
It is a reminder that when we read the Bible,
we are reading translations of copies of manuscripts.
First, we are reading a translation, words that were written --
in the case of the New Testament --
two thousand years ago in Greek.
which have been translated from Greek into English.


Now with translations come problems.
If you know another language, you know that
it can be very hard to translate some phrases
from one language into another.
Years ago, when Coca Cola’s advertising slogan was
“Coke Adds Life”,
the company wanted to begin selling it products in China.
So they tried to translate “Coke Adds Life” into Chinese.
Advertisements on billboards and magazines
and newspapers went up throughout the country
and millions of Chinese wondered about
the fizzy beverage with the slogan that said,
“Coke brings you back from the dead”.

Complicating matters further,
we are dealing not with contemporary Greek,
we are dealing with ancient Greek,
the dialect that was written and spoken two thousand years ago.
Think about how much the English language has changed
in the centuries since William Shakespeare wrote his plays
and imagine how much a language might change
over 2000 years.

But here is the biggest problem.
The text that we read from in our New Revised Standard Bible
or any other Bible is not a direct translation
from the original Gospel of Mark, the one written by Mark
or his scribe about 20 years
after the crucifixion of our Lord.
Our translation comes from a copy of the Book,
or more likely, a copy of a copy.
The Gospel of Mark was written out by hand,
and then copies were made, each one by hand.
And every time a copy was made, inevitably
changes worked their way into the text.
So even among the most ancient scrolls
we have, no two are exactly alike.
And the oldest existing texts that we currently have
are copies that date to the third century.

Scribes who copied things made errors;
It was very exacting work.
The ancient Greek language did not make it easy:
there were no punctuation marks, no commas,
no periods, no quotes, no question marks, no exclamation points.
All the words ran on together.
The copyist had to determine where one word ended
and another began,
where one sentence ended and another began,
where one paragraph ended and another began,
where one chapter ended and another began.
Biblical Scholar Bart Ehrman points out the difficulty
with the phrase that looks like “God is Now Here”.
The phrase could also be read as “God is No Where”.
Two very different meanings!
(Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 48)

Some copyists felt free to make editorial changes in the text.
There is a copy of an old manuscript
of the book of Hebrews in the Vatican
where one word appears,
was subsequently changed by a second copyist
and then changed back to the first meaning by a third copyist,
who added a little note in the margin
to any subsequent copyist:
“Fool and knave, leave the old reading, don’t change it!”,
(Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, 56)

All of this underscores why we Presbyterians
do not look at the Bible
as the literal, inerrant word of God,
Instead we look at the Bible as the inspired word of God.
Words written by men – and probably women –
inspired by God through the Holy Spirit.
It is why we look to the Holy Spirit when we read
to help us understand what is it that God wants us
to learn from a particular passage.
It is why we should not say, “The Bible says…”
What we are always working on through discernment is what God says;
what God is saying to us through the written word
that is the Bible,
and even more important, what God is saying to us
through the Living Word
that is our Lord Jesus Christ.
And we know that our Lord himself
was not a literalist.

So we are back to the footnote
and a passage that if we read one manuscript
has Jesus filled with pity for the leper,
and if we read from another manuscript
has Jesus filled with anger as he heals the man.
What is it that God wants us to learn from this footnote?

It is easy for us to imagine Jesus filled with pity for the man.
Pity for the leper and his miserable condition;
Pity for his pain, pity for his hopelessness,
pity for his loneliness.
We hear the story and we too are filled with pity for the man.

But it is also easy for to imagine Jesus as angry.
Angry not at the leper for approaching him
and asking to be healed.
Rather angry that the leper should have been forced
to live so miserably
forced out of society, forced to live on the fringes,
forced to beg for a few scraps of food
forced to become invisible by the callous cruelty
of the society in which he lived,
a people who claimed to be the children of God.

If Jesus was angry, his anger would have been grounded in
righteous indignation at the way society treated
not just this man,
but all of the sick,
as well as the poor, the elderly, the homeless, the orphans,
all those on the fringes; all those who were different.
all those forced to become invisible.

How different are things today?
If Jesus were to respond to a diseased person here and now,
how do you suppose he would feel?
He would be filled with pity, most certainly;
but I suspect that he would still be angry,
angry that in our society we still render
the poor, the sick, the elderly all but invisible,
as though they are a blot, a stain on our society,
a society in which we worship success, power,
money, and celebrity.
What if Jesus knew that as a society
we have allowed one million men, women and children
to drop into poverty
each year for the past five years;
Five million added to more than 30 million just since the year 2000.
Don’t you suppose Jesus would be angry?
Angry that our response is to render them invisible,
to say, “who cares”, “they are not our responsibility”.

Now, let me ask you:
As spiritual people, people filled with the Spirit of God,
people led by the Spirit of God,
people who strive to live by the Spirit
and not by the flesh,
to do what God wills and not what we want,
how should we react?
Is pity enough? Pity for the poor? Pity for the sick?
Or should we too be angry?

That footnote says to me that God wants us to be angry, too,
in the same way his Son was.
Because it is only when we become angry at situations before us
that we will move to action;
From saying, “Oh that poor man”, or “oh, that’s a shame”,
to saying, “we cannot allow this to happen;
we must do something, this is intolerable and unacceptable.”
And isn’t that what the Spirit calls us to do
as disciples of Jesus Christ?

Professor Darrell Guder of Princeton Theological Seminary
has focused much of his work on churches
that have made the jump from compassion to action,
from words to deeds,
where genuine empathy moves to anger
that stirs action.
These are “missional churches”, according to Guder.
Not “missionary” churches: churches that support
the work of missionaries sent out throughout the world.
That is something we already do through the
Presbyterian Church (USA).
Here the word is “missional”;
A missional church is a church filled with the power of the Spirit,
where every member is Spirit filled, Spirit led, Spirit guided.
In a missional church, every member
would understand Jesus’ anger;
every member would feel anger with our Lord.
“[M]issional communities are called to represent the compassion,
justice and peace of the reign of God” through Jesus Christ.
(Guder, 142)

Missional churches, missional communities reach out
to bring the outcasts back in,
Missional churches don’t just comfort the sick,
they work to provide better health care and find cures.
Missional churches don’t just feed the hungry,
they work to eliminate hunger and poverty.
Missional churches work to change society,
to change priorities.

All this from a footnote!
One tiny letter next to a text,
And yet the footnote opens our eyes to a whole new meaning,
a whole new level of discipleship.

Next time you open your Bible to read,
don’t skip over the footnotes.
The Spirit may well be planning to open your eyes
in a whole new way.
The Spirit may be calling you to a new level of Spiritual growth
as a missional disciple in a missional church.

This is the mysterious,
but loving power of God our Father
who graces us with faith through the power of the Holy Spirit
to follow his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
To the Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
be honor and glory!
Amen.

Do We Really Understand?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
First Presbyterian Church
Washingtonville, New York
February 5, 2006
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Do We Really Understand?
Isaiah 40:21-31
Mark 1:29-39

Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
Have you not understood?
Have you not understood?

Have you not understood what it means
to be a child of God?
Have you not understood what it means
to be a follower of Jesus Christ?
Have you not understood what it means
to be a disciple,
a disciple of our Lord Jesus Christ?

The word disciple means comes from the Latin meaning “to learn”.
The very nature of discipleship means
we should always be learning.
The moment you think you have the answer
not only have you stopped learning,
you have stopped being a disciple.
It is why we have been talking the past few weeks about
the importance of learning, if you hope to grow spiritually.
You begin to grow spiritually by learning.

Becoming spiritual requires that we make the effort to seek God.
We seek God by learning, learning about God,
learning by reading through the Bible
learning by studying, by asking questions,
learning on our own,
and even more important,
learning with one another in community.

The disciples who followed our Lord Jesus kept hearing
and they certainly should have known,
but they kept missing this point;
they did not understand.
Look at what they did in our lesson from Mark.
Jesus knew the importance of constantly seeking God,
the importance of working constantly
on his spiritual connection with God.
Listen again to verse 35: “In the morning
while it was still very dark,
he got up and went out to a deserted place,
and there he prayed.”
Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God.
had spiritual discipline, worked at his spiritual discipline.
In the early morning hours, he sought God in prayer,
sought God through spiritual discipline.
He had heard and he knew, but he also sought to understand.
Only after he sought God did he go about his work
preaching, teaching, and healing.

Now look at his disciples. What did they do when the sun
rose above the horizon and they opened their eyes to a new day?
They went looking for Jesus:
“Everyone is searching for you.”
In other words, “what are you doing?
why did you run off like that?”
They did not understand.

Is it any wonder that God asks through the prophet Isaiah,
Have you not known? Have you not heard?
Have you not understood?
These are the same questions God asks countless times
throughout the Bible.
And time after time we answer,
of course we understand.
But do we?
Do you?
We answer yes we understand
because we are good at going through the motions.
But the question is before every one of us:
are you really living the spiritual life
that you were called to in your baptism?

Meister Eckhart was a German theologian
who lived in the late 13th and early 14th century.
His writings are still quite popular today
because they are filled with simple,
yet profound spiritual teachings.
As faithful as we might think we are,
as spiritual as we might think we are,
Eckhart challenges us to go deeper
to a place where we see God in all things and all places.
Where you see the image of God in all men and women
throughout the world;
Where you see God’s hand in the beauty of the natural world
all around you;
where God is present in everyone and in everyplace
at every time.

Meister Eckhart tells us that we
“ought to lay hold of God in everything,
and we should train our minds to have God
ever present in our thoughts,
our intentions, and our affections.
This real God-getting is a mental process,
an inner turning of the mind and will toward God”
(Solitude and God Getting, 17)
But to do that we have to let go of our petty concerns.
And so many of things we get worked up about are petty.
We latch on to things that we consider important
and then we lose sight of God.
And when you do that it means that you are not learning,
learning to turn from the small things of this world,
to the world of God.
That means you do not understand.

Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
Have you not understood?

Paul’s most eloquent and deeply theological letter is
his longest, the one he wrote to the church at Rome.
In chapter 12 he writes of the “new life in Christ”
that we have all been called to:
“Do not be conformed to this world,
but be transformed by the renewing of your minds,
so you may discern what is the will of God.” (Romans 12:2)
That is what we should be striving for in everything we do: discernment;
but discernment can only come through transformation
and transformation can only come from consistently – consistently
working at learning, working at renewing our minds,
working at growing,
working at becoming spiritual.
Discernment is hard work, but the tools we need are simple:
“questions, silence, reason, dreams, and images.
These enable the will of God to surface into conscious
or be discovered right before our very eyes.”
(Charles Olsen,Transforming Boards, 89)
With a full spiritual life, you will never grow weary;
you will feel God’s wind beneath your wings,
You will know that God is yet with you to
help you in even the most difficult times.

Have you not known?
Have you not heard?
Have you not understood?
This is God’s world,
a world God created,
a world God entrusted to our care.
God has called us to him, called us to him in love and in Spirit
called us to him to worship him.
We began our service this morning with an Affirmation of Faith,
a statement of what we believe.
In the Presbyterian Church, we have a Book of Confessions,
the book is part of our Church’s constitution.
Have you ever read through any of it?
In the Larger Catechism of the Westminster Confession,
the very first question puts things in perspective:
“What is the chief and highest end of man?
Man’s chief and highest end is to glorify God,
and fully to enjoy him forever.”
(Larger Catechism, 7.111)

That is what we are called to do: to live lives of the spirit
to glorify God in our every word, our every deed.
Eckhart writes, “We must train ourselves not to seek or strive
for our own interests in anything – anything – we do
but rather to find and grasp God in all things. …
All the gifts which God has ever granted us in heaven or on earth
were made solely in order to be able to give us the one gift,
which is himself.” (The Talks of Instruction, 40)

Come now to this table to be renewed in Spirit
and let this Holy meal be a new beginning for you;
the start of a new journey as a true disciple of Jesus Christ,
learning, discerning, growing in spirit and faith
so on that day when you stand before our Lord
you will be ready to answer his questions:
Did you not know?
Did you not hear?
Did you not understand?
Amen