Sunday, November 26, 2006

Do You Know What You Are Asking For?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
November 26, 2006
Christ the King Sunday

Do You Know What You Are Asking For?
John 18:33-37
1 Sam. 8:1-22

“We want a king! We want a king!
We want a king to govern over us.
One who will go out and lead us in battle.
We want a king so we can be like other nations!”
The people were demanding a king;
Nothing else would do.

This was not the first time
the children of Israel had demanded a king.
When Gideon judged the people,
they demanded that he rule over them,
but he replied, “I will not rule over you;
the Lord will rule over you.”
(Judges 8:23)
Gideon knew that the Lord was King.

Jump ahead a few hundred years to the time of our first lesson;
It is more than a thousand years before the birth of Jesus.
The people were filled with their desire,
even their demand,
that they have a king to rule over them,
a king so that they could be like every other nation.
Judges were not enough;
Prophets were not enough;
Only a king would do.

The prophet Samuel sighed
and realized there was nothing he could do;
Nothing he could do
other than turn the people’s demand over to God.
So he lifted up his voice in frustration.
And God responded:
“Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you;
for they have not rejected you,
but they have rejected me from being king over them.”
(1 Sam 8:7)

Hadn’t God led the children of Israel out of slavery?
Hadn’t God led them through the wilderness,
into the promised land?
Hadn’t God called the children of his Israel to be his people?
Hadn’t he looked after them, watched over them,
loved them?
Ah, but how quick humans are to forget.
How quick the children of Israel were
to overlook Moses’ teachings:
… Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God...”
(Deut. 8:11ff)
“Take care that you do not forget the one
from whom all blessings flow.”

The people wanted a king, but in the process
they seemed to have overlooked one significant fact:
they already had a king, the Lord God.
They wanted a different king,
one who would lead them in battle,
one who would make them like other nations.

Did they really know what they were asking for?
Did they understand?
As the cliché reminds us,
be careful what you wish for;
you just might get it.

God granted them their request
and led Samuel to Saul,
who became the first king of Israel.
Saul was followed by David,
and David was followed by his son Solomon.

After a rough start under Saul,
things went well under David:
the northern and southern kingdoms were unified,
and by the end of David’s life and reign,
the people lived in peace.
Solomon’s reign was also peaceful;
He was adept at creating alliances with other nations,
trading alliances, that kept countries focused on doing business
with each other rather than on fighting with one another.

It was when Solomon died and his son ascended to the throne,
that things began to slide downhill.
The son was nothing like his father:
he was vain, arrogant, petulant, petty.
It was not long before the peace and prosperity
the people knew under Solomon evaporated.
And each succeeding king was worse than the one before.
Decade after decade, century after century:
corruption, faithlessness, turmoil, war.
Invasions by one army after another:
Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes, Persians, Greeks,
and then finally the Romans.

A thousand years after they had first sought a king,
the people looked back on the days of King David
and sought the glory they once had had,
Their prayer went up again: “we need a king!”
A strong man,
an honest man
a man worthy of
sitting on the throne of King David.

And then one winter’s night
the news spread across the land:
a king had been born,
a king who would lead the people of Israel,
the children of God;
A king, born in a stable in Bethlehem.
Micah’s prophesy from centuries earlier finally had come true:
“From you, O Bethlehem,
shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel….”
(Micah 5:2)

This baby born in the cold and dark
was to be the king!
“The Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.
he will reign over the house of Jacob forever,
and of his kingdom there shall be no end.”
(Luke 1:32)
The words of the angel Gabriel to Mary.

This news was so wondrous, so astounding
that it quickly traveled
beyond the borders of Israel, to distant lands,
to the ears of wise men who came
seeking the “child who has been born king of the Jews.”
(Matthew 2:2)
Hope was born that night.

The years passed, and the people waited,
watched and waited,
waited for that day when the king would mount his steed,
sword at the ready,
and lead the people into battle,
battle to restore the people of Israel to their land,
battle to restore them as a people,
restore them to their glory.

And yet the one about whom the rumors swirled like dust
in a desert eddy did not look a like a king,
he did not act like a king.
He traveled through the countryside,
but no one ever saw him astride a mighty white stallion,
no one ever saw him with a sword at the ready,
no one ever saw him train his followers
with shields and spears.

Yes, he did ride triumphantly into Jerusalem for the Passover,
but he was on the back of a donkey,
a humble, lowly donkey,
a donkey borrowed for that one moment.
And his followers for all their enthusiasm,
didn’t carry swords or spears,
but palm branches.

Is it any wonder that Pilate was incredulous when
the guards brought Jesus before him following his arrest?
To the Roman governor, with the power of the Roman army
behind him, the very idea that this Jesus
might have been a king seemed ludicrous.
But when Pilate confronted Jesus,
and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”
Jesus, responded in a way that Pilate didn’t expect,
“My kingdom is not from this world.”

Pilate had no idea what Jesus was talking about.
He must have found it all so very tiresome,
“So you are a King,” he said to Jesus.
“You say that I am a king,” came the response.
But it was clear to Pilate that Jesus was no king:
he had no power, no wealth,
no trappings, no retinue
no palace, no army.
He did not look like a king,
he did not act like a king,
he did not talk like a king.

The children of Israel thought the same thing,
that clearly this Jesus wasn’t the one they were waiting for,
and so they turned from him.

We hear this story, this story of events and people
that go back 2,000 years, …….3,000 years and more.
And yet we dare not even for a second think
that this is a story about another people
in another time in another place.
This is our story, too.
We still picture a king as a mighty warrior
a strong man girded in armor.
How can our king be humble man,
a gaunt man, with weathered skin,
burnt from the sun and the dust,
a man who was not to be found holding court in a palace,
but sitting at a table with the blind, the lame, the sick;
a man who could be found not with the wealthy,
the powerful,
the celebrities,
but with the lowly, the outcasts?

Our King calls us to a kingdom that is not of this earth,
and so it stands to reason
that our king should not be of this earth.
He will not fit our definition, our image of a king.
The British composer John Rutter reminds us
in his lovely “Christmas Lullaby” that Jesus our king
rules with “peace as his scepter
and love as his crown.”
This is the king we are called to follow.
The king who calls us through love
to follow by love,
sharing love.

The one difference we have from our ancestors in faith
is that we don’t have to watch and wait,
for our King is here now.
And the kingdom is here now.
The kingdom is not something that will happen
at some time in the future,
No, our Lord himself made clear,
“The kingdom of God is not coming
with things that can be observed…
for in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
(Luke 17:20-21)
When Jesus sent his apostles out, he did not send them out
to proclaim the coming of the kingdom,
he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom. (Luke 9:2)
And if we are not sure what we are looking for,
Paul helps us by reminding us that
“The kingdom of God is … righteousness and
peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” (Romans 14:17)

The power in this kingdom is not money,
not political power,
not military might;
it is love,
it is patience,
it is peace,
all things that endure, that don’t fade away.
The most powerful ruler,
the richest king,
the leader of the greatest army:
they are the stuff of history books
Christ our King is the stuff of life, real life,
the life that matters.

It is fitting that we end our liturgical calendar each year
with “Christ the King Sunday”
to help us to remember that we don’t have to pray for a king;
our King is with us.

Next week, we will begin a new liturgical year with Advent,
and the color of Advent is purple,
the color of royality,
a fitting reminder that Advent is a time for us
to prepare to celebrate
the birth of our Lord Christ the King,
and to anticipate that day
when Christ our King will come again,
come not to bring the Kingdom,
but to complete the kingdom,
the kingdom that is already underway,
the kingdom you and I are called to build
under the sovereign leadership
of the Lord our King,
the King whose scepter is peace,
and whose crown is love.
And “his authority shall grow continually,
and there shall be endless peace
for the throne of David and his kingdom.
He will establish and uphold it
with justice and with righteousness,
from this time onward and forever more.”
(Isaiah 9:7)
AMEN

Sunday, November 19, 2006

Haven’t You Forgotten Something?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
November 19, 2006
The 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Haven’t You Forgotten Something?
Luke 17:11-19
Deuteronomy 8:11-16

They stood there, on the side of the road,
careful to keep their distance.
The ten were feared by the villagers and all who passed by them.
Their frightening, mottled appearance
was enough to cause even the strongest to turn away,
to do anything to avoid them.

All ten were afflicted with leprosy,
a hideous disease that rotted bodies slowly, torturously, painfully.
It was considered to be highly contagious,
and so anyone who was even thought to have leprosy
was banished from their homes and villages,
forced to go live among other lepers,
in wretched places, filthy, foul, and frightening.

The ten knew they had no choice in how they lived.
It was all spelled out right there in the Torah,
in the third book of the Bible, in the Levitical code:
“The person who has the leprous disease
shall wear torn clothes
and let the hair of his head be disheveled;
and he shall cover his upper lip and cry out,
‘Unclean! Unclean!’
He shall live alone,
his dwelling shall be outside the camp.(Lev. 13:45)

Leprosy meant certain death,
death that was slow, agonizingly slow, in coming.
Lepers could do nothing more than wait for death,
but each day they were allowed
to go out from their quarantined places
to beg a few coins,
a few scraps of food from passersby.

The lepers who approached Jesus
on that road between Samaria and Galilee came near,
but not too close, keeping the distance the law required.
In anguished hope they cried out to him from the side of the road,
“Jesus, master, have mercy on us!”
That was all they said: “have mercy on us.”
They asked for neither food nor money;
just mercy, mercy in their suffering.
Jesus’ response was simple, even curious:
“Go and show yourselves to the priests.”

And Luke tells us that “as they went, they were made clean.”
They were cured!
All signs of the disease disappeared.
Health and wholeness was restored.
Those 10 who had been living ghosts,
who had lost everything,
health, homes, …hope,
suddenly found themselves clean,
no disease, no pain, no rotting flesh.
They could return to their families,
return to their homes and their villages,
Ten men, living under a sentence of certain death,
were given life again!

Now if this had happened to you,
wouldn’t you have stopped for moment,
even in your excitement,
even in your eagerness to see your familiy,
wouldn’t you have stopped long enough to say, “Thank you”?
Thank you to the one who had healed you,
to the one who heard your cry, “have mercy”,
to the one who had showed you mercy,
showed you love.

But 9 of the 10 men didn’t say “thank you”.
Didn’t bother to come back to Jesus, to find him,
to say two simple words: “Thank you”.
Only one did.
Only one came back, Luke tells us,
offering words of praise and thanksgiving to God
for having had his life restored to him.
And he wasn’t even a Jew;
he was a Samaritan, a foreigner!
Yet, he was filled with thankfulness
to the one who had healed him.

Jesus was baffled by the absence of the others:
“Were not ten made clean?
But the other nine, where are they?
Was none of them found to return
and give praise to God except this foreigner?”
He wanted to say to the 9, “Haven’t you forgotten something?
Haven’t you overlooked someone?”

Jesus asked not because he wanted to be thanked,
not because he wanted to be praised,
No, Jesus wanted these men to thank God,
his father in heaven,
their father in heaven,
our father in heaven.
Jesus wanted those men to remember,
as the doxology reminds us,
from whom all blessings flow.

More than a thousand years earlier,
Moses anticipated our tendency to forget
from whom all our blessings flow.
He had led the children of Israel
through the wilderness to the east side of the River Jordan,
where they all looked west upon the promised land,
the land of milk and honey,
the land that God was going to give to them.
Moses knew he was not going to lead the people
into the promised land;
He knew he was going to die; God had told him.
And so in Deuteronomy he gave the children of Israel
his final instructions, ……… his final pieces of wisdom.

And in the text we heard,
he reminded the people not to overlook God:
“When you have eaten your fill
and have built fine houses and live in them,
and when your herds and flocks have multiplied,
and your silver and gold is multiplied,
and all that you have is multiplied ...
do not exalt yourselves,
… Take care that you do not forget the Lord your God...”
(Deut. 8:11ff)
“Take care that you don’t forget the one
from whom all blessings flow.”

All that we have comes from God.
It is that simple.
So it begs the question:
why is Thanksgiving just one day on the calendar?
It should be how we live our lives!
Our lives should be lived as prayers of thanksgiving,
not just on one day a year,
but every day: spring, summer, fall, and winter,

Did you ever stop to think that
the very first prayer you heard,
that you were aware of,
was probably a prayer of thanksgiving?
It was that simple prayer we call “grace”
the one we offer before a meal.

Perhaps your first memory of grace was hearing your grandfather
lead the family in grace at the table on a holiday,
Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter.
Or, perhaps you remember how
your father or mother insisted on grace before dinner,
much to your annoyance, of course,
as you sat there convinced that you were going to die of hunger
if you had to wait even another 10 seconds
before you were allowed to attack your plate.

When we say grace, we are thanking God.
In saying grace, in a such a simple way
we make sure we do not overlook God,
do not forget God.

A prayer of thanksgiving is easy:
it does not need to be long or elaborate;
it doesn’t need to be a lyrical poem in highly stylized English.
It simply needs to come from the heart.

How often have you heard a child pray,
“God is great, God is good,
Let us thank him for our food. Amen”
The sentiment could not be more heartfelt!
It is a perfect prayer of thanksgiving.
The reformer Martin Luther provided us with another short,
but elegant prayer:
“Come Lord Jesus and be our guest,
And may our meal by you be blest.”

A traditional prayer that is offered at many tables is,
“Bless this food and make us thankful for it.”
It is one our family used on holidays.
Let me ask you a question, about this one, though.
Think about the phrase that we are lifting up to God,
“make us thankful for it.”
Isn’t that what Jesus was trying to get at,
and Moses, too?
We should not need God to make us thankful,
we should simply be thankful,
thankful for all we have,
thankful for every day,
thankful for food, for families,
for homes, for clothing, for vocations,
for health, for blessings small and large.

The theme of our Stewardship campaign has focused
on our being thankful, on saying thank you to God.
In making our pledges to our Stewardship Campaign,
we are saying thank you:
thank you to God for this church,
this Body of Christ that has been here for 139 years,
this Body of Christ where so many faithful saints
have been serving so faithfully for so many years,
including the saints we will honor later today,

In making your pledge you are saying
thank you that God has called you here
to a place where you are welcomed,
where you are cared for,
where your faith is nurtured,
where you can grow as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

Have you thought about the different ministries of this church
that you are thankful for?
We have a wonderful Christian Education program
that provides literally everyone in this congregation
with the opportunity to grow in faith and discipleship:
our children, our young people, and every adult.
I love stopping by classes on Sunday morning
to watch as we learn together,
student learning from teacher,
and teacher learning from student.

Have you thought about how thankful you are
for the extraordinary music ministry
we have here under Deborah’s leadership?
Five different vocal choirs,
Two handbell choirs,
a handchime choir,
recitals, soloists,
music that enriches our worship service each Sunday,
music that helps us to praise God, pray to God,
and yes, music that helps us thank God.

Have you thought about how thankful you are for the mission work
we carry on through our church?
Through our Mission ministry team we follow our Lord’s teaching
to look after the poor, the sick,
the homeless, those who are without hope, those who are lonely.
The list of mission ministries we support is long,
but for all we do, there is always so much more we could be doing.
Did you see the article in the Washington Post the other day?
Here in our own country, the richest country in the world,
35 million Americans struggle to put enough food on the table:
35 million!
What would Jesus say about that, that we allow such suffering?
Doesn’t Jesus teach us that even one hungry person
is one too many?

If you have not returned your pledge card,
please do so within the next week.
Say thank you to God for this church, this Body of Christ,
this ministry and fill out your card
so that we can be sure that next year,
our 140th year of ministry in the name of Jesus Christ
will be our strongest year ever,
our most faithful year, ever,
our most grateful year ever.

“Praise God from whom all blessings flow
Praise God all creatures here below.”

Praise God, and offer thanks,
offer thanks for blessings small and large.
Live your very life as a prayer of thanksgiving,
lest someday you hear a voice
speaking to you from the wind asking,
“Haven’t you forgotten something?”

AMEN

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Yes, But Do I have to Like Them?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
November 5, 2006
The 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Yes, But Do I have to Like Them?
Mark 12:28-34
Ruth 1:1-18

How many times have you heard the gospel text?
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
It is lesson we all have heard numerous times,
a passage that we are all familiar with.
It is a lesson that comes up so frequently that
by its very familiarity we risk overlooking
how radical the teaching is,
and how much it demands of us.

Did you hear the word that Jesus used with this lesson?
It is a “commandment”.
Do you remember how we talked about commandments
not that long ago?
Commandments are not suggestions,
not things put before us for our consideration,
for us to ponder, to think about.
No, a commandment means that Jesus expects us to do it,
to write the lesson on our hearts,
to live by it.

So this is a commandment:
You shall love your neighbor as yourself.
Full stop.
No conditions.
Jesus doesn’t teach that you are to love your neighbor
as long as he’s a good person,
as long as she doesn’t have loud parties,
as long as he supports your team,
as long as she votes for your political party and candidate.

No: it is simple:
you must love your neighbor as yourself.
Period.

Of course, we humans are always looking for ways
to circumvent the absolutes that God imposes upon us.
So we try to define “neighbor” narrowly:
those who live near us,
those with whom we are in regular contact.
those with whom we have something in common.
We tend not to think that our neighbors are those people
who live in other parts of town,
who speak other languages,
or who look differently from you and me.

But of course Jesus won’t let us define the word so narrowly.
Our neighbors are all God’s children,
our neighbor is everyone:
yes, that’s convoluted English,
but still, our neighbor is everyone.
In this highly charged political season,
the neighbor of the most partisan Republican is a Democrat;
and the neighbor of the most partisan Democrat is a Republican.

Think about it: we are called to love,
and doesn’t love mean acceptance?
Doesn’t love mean tolerance?
Doesn’t love mean looking for commonality?
Doesn’t love mean that we should be working actively
to build bridges,
to build relationships,
to build community,
to look for those things we can like about another person,
those things that ARE there, if only we would look for them.

If we live according to the commandment,
how can we in good faith criticize another person?
Snipe or gossip about another?
Talk down, or be dismissive,
condescending, patronizing?
How can we say things that polarize?
That divide?

Living according to the commandment means
that we are called to look for the positive,
those things that are there inside every person,
every child of God.
They are there because God put them there,
put them there through the Holy Spirit,
and we are called to open our eyes to them.

When Jesus told the scribe that we are to love
our neighbors as ourselves,
he was quoting a law that was first given by God
through Moses more than a thousand years earlier.
God gave his children this law to help build community
to help strengthen the ties among his children,
ties that we always seem more eager to cut
than we are to strengthen.

The final verses of our lesson from the book of Ruth
are often used in weddings.
They make a very appropriate reading
as a man and a woman make their vows to one another
and become one.
But the book of Ruth is about friendship,
about commonality, about community.
Indeed the root of the word “Ruth” comes from
the Hebrew for “friend”.
Naomi and her husband Elimelech were Israelites
who left their land in Judah
and re-settled in Moab, a foreign land,
a land where they were the strangers, the outsiders,
the immigrants.
Ruth was a Moabite, a native;
She was not a follower of the Lord God.
Naomi was an Israelite, a foreigner,
and a follower of the Lord God.
Right there we have a huge gap
that in these divisive times
would lead both to retreat behind brick walls,
each calling the other an assortment of
nasty names.
Add in the fact that they were not blood relatives,
but mother-in-law and daughter-in-law,
and they had lost the one who brought them together,
Naomi’s son, Ruth’s husband,
and we have absolutely nothing to bind
these two women together.

But Ruth loved Naomi as she loved herself;
and Naomi loved Ruth as herself.
They loved each other, and liked each other
and built a bond that is still an extraordinary example to us,
some 3,000 years later.

Martin Luther King, Jr. once observed that
humanity is often like a disconnected, fractured family.
We feel safe retreating to our own communities,
our own groups, our own silos.
King wondered what we do if we learned that
we had collectively inherited a house.
He surmised that we would probably each say,
“there is no way I can live with those other people.
Let’s sell the house and divide the money
and then we can each live the way
we each want to.”
What Jesus teaches us, though, is that
we are already living in the house with one another
and selling it is not an option.
We cannot retreat behind brick walls,
retreat to our silos.
Jesus calls us to break down walls,
eliminate those forces that polarize and divide
as we build community;
build community as we live
the commandment of loving and liking our neighbor.

How much richer we are for having one another!
How much stronger we are for having one another!
How much more faithful we are for having one another,
in all our distinctions,
all our differences,
all our diversity.

As you come to this table,
I invite you to think about one neighbor,
just one neighbor,
a neighbor you know,
a neighbor you cannot honestly say you love.
It might be a colleague at work,
someone who lives on your street;
it could even be person in this church.
Make a commitment as you come to this table,
to work on learning to love that person,
learning to like that person.
Make a commit to building a relationship with that person
so that you can love him or her
as you love yourself.

For we come to this table, all of us, each of us
as brothers and sisters,
brothers and sisters in Christ,
and children of God.
We come to this table all of us equally,
all of us accepted, forgiven,
and loved.

Our Lord Jesus Christ invites us all to this table.
invites you to come share this meal
that he has prepared for us.
There are no seats of honor, seats for the preferred,
for we are all one in Jesus Christ.
Come to this table and commune with your neighbor.
and then renewed, refreshed,
strengthened by this meal
go out and live by our Lord’s teaching.
No: live by our Lord’s commandment.
AMEN