Fifteen Minutes

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
July 29, 2007

Fifteen Minutes
Hosea 4:1-6
Mark 7:1-8

Don’t you love the ads that promise
that in just fifteen easy minutes a week
you can look thinner and younger
or make a fortune so you can retire at age 45?
Wear an inflatable belt around your waist
and the pounds will melt away.
Buy an exercise machine and
look like an Olympian without breaking a sweat.
Sell products through your computer
and watch the orders and the money roar in.

What these ads sell, of course, is nonsense.
Success at anything requires effort,
hard work,…diligence.
Elite athletes like Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, or David Beckham
may have a great deal of natural ability,
but that doesn’t keep them from
spending hours and hours and hours
training, practicing, exercising,
working to improve.
For every hour Tiger Woods spends on a golf course
in a tournament,
how many hours do you suppose he spends
on the practice range or the putting green?
For every hour Roger Feddick spends on a tennis court
in a competition,
how many hours do you suppose he spends
practicing his serve, his forehand, his backhand?

Success takes effort;
It takes diligence and discipline.
And the same holds true for us in our effort
to grow as disciples of Jesus Christ.
We have to work at it,
work to grow in knowledge and understanding,
even in the depths of summer’s heat and humidity.

Our work begins with the Word of the Lord, of course.
We talked last week about how awful it would be
if we did not have the Word of the Lord,
if God suddenly stopped talking,
stopped listening,
closed the door and shut the window.
Happily God hasn’t done that,
but we often do:
close the door and shut the window
when we stop working at reading, listening,
learning, discerning.

The Bible is not a rule book;
you’ve heard me say that before.
It isn’t filled with nice simple instructions for us to follow,
because life is not simple.
Life is not black and white.
Life is filled with nuance, subtlety,
shades of gray,
so that means we look to the Bible not for rules,
but for wisdom, guidance.

Take a nice simple passage from the Bible,
one that on the surface couldn’t be clearer,
one of the Commandments:
“Honor your father and your mother”.
Seems easy, doesn’t it?
But wait, what if the father is abusive,
or the mother is a violent drug addict?
What if one of the parents committed a crime?
There are few who haven’t struggled
at some time in some way
with this Commandment.

What about the Commandment, “You shall not covet”?
That’s pretty clear, isn’t it?
But if we didn’t struggle with this one,
no one would have ever coined the phrase,
“keeping up with the Joneses”.
The advertising industry, and in fact
a good portion of our economy seems to be based
on our doing just that: coveting what our neighbors have
so we will go about and buy something similar,
or even better.

It is up to each of us to work
at seeking understanding.
We do this individually,
or at least so we hope:
reading from the Bible at home,
even just a few minutes a week here and there.
And we also do this in community each Sunday morning
when we hear the Word of the Lord
read and preached.
We read texts from the Bible:
and then we interpret those texts:
that’s what a sermon is,
interpretion of the Word of the Lord,
interpreting to help us with understanding.

On a Sunday like today, we will spend about 15 minutes
in interpretation: that’s all; just fifteen minutes.
Ten years ago the standard length of a sermon
was about 25 minutes, but that time has been shrinking,
to about 15 minutes in a one-hour service.
It is hard to do justice to the word of the Lord,
to interpret adequately in that amount of time.

Let’s do a little interpreting with our gospel lesson.
The Pharisees and Jesus seem to disagree on whether
there was a need to wash hands before a meal.
The Pharisees considered themselves to be faithful
and observant followers of the Lord God,
faithful adherents to scripture,
and they had built rituals for washing.
Where did the rituals come from?
There was no direct scriptural mandate
that hands be washed before a meal,
but there were parts of the Torah
that implied that need.
So the faithful built a practice,
built a tradition, and in following the practice,
they believed they were being faithful to the Word of the Lord.
Add in concern for hygiene and it all sounds
logical, sensible.

But then along came Jesus,
an itinerant preacher,
a carpenter from Nazareth,
saying in effect, “What nonsense”.

This was neither the first nor the last time
that Jesus argued with the Pharisees and others about Scripture.
The interesting thing is that time and time again,
when Jesus found himself in a debate over Scripture,
Jesus often seemed to argue against
a literal interpretation of whatever passage or verse
they happened to be debating!

What Jesus was trying to teach the Pharisees,
and what Jesus is still trying to teach us,
is that we cannot just take words
and follow them without thinking about them,
without reflecting on them, talking about them,
asking “why”, what is it that God wants us to learn?

That’s the process of discernment,
that’s growing in knowledge and understanding.
It isn’t easy,
and it certainly isn’t going to happen in fifteen minutes.

When I prepare a sermon, a fifteen-minute sermon,
I spend between 15 and 20 hours:
reading the texts, praying for understanding,
checking the translations,
looking at the passages iin the original Hebrew or Greek,
reading commentaries and other studies,
all before I write a single word.
And then once I do begin to write,
I write, I edit, move sentences around,
delete words, change words,
write some more, delete some more.
Most preachers do the same thing
as we wrestle with the text,
as we prepare to fulfill our calling
to help interpret the word of the Lord.

God expects much from those of us called to preach and teach,
which is why God was not happy with the priests
in the reading we heard from Hosea.
The priests were not helping the people grow in knowledge;
they weren’t doing that because they themselves had grown lazy
and weren’t growing in knowledge.
The priests in Hosea’s time,
and the Pharisees and the scribes in Jesus time,
were good at going through the motions,
putting on a good show,
with drama, and elaborate liturgy,
but that’s not what God cared about,
it wasn’t what God wanted.

This past week as I was part of the great horde
that was gobbling up the new Harry Potter book.
I was struck by the fact that
as Harry pursued his great quest in the book
he grumbled that his beloved teacher and mentor
Albus Dumbledore had not spelled out exactly
what he wanted Harry to do,
but instead had forced Harry to think,
to figure it out, to learn.

It is much the same for us.
God gave us voices to sing his praise,
and hearts to love him,
but God also gave us minds to know him,
to understand him,
but that does not happen without work.

Let me ask you a question:
How many of you are wearing shirts, blouses,
trousers, or dresses made of blended fabric:
something like cotton and rayon, for example?
Probably most of you?
Were you aware that in doing so you were
violating Scriptural prohibition that could not be clearer?
You shall not
“put on a garment made of two different materials”
(Leviticus 19:19)
Thus says the Lord!
Why are you so comfortable ignoring this passage,
this word of the Lord?

One of the most powerful passages in the Bible
comes from eighth chapter of the gospel according to John,
the story of the adulterous woman.
You may recall the story:
Under the Levitical law (Leviticus 20:10),
the act of adultery was a capital offense:
both man and woman were to be stoned to death.
Lest there be any doubt about the punishment,
Scripture repeated the punishment in Deuteronomy (22:22)

So when the religious leaders brought to Jesus
a woman who had been caught in the act of adultery
they should have been confident of how Jesus would respond,
as would we:
that Jesus would of course follow Scripture.
So we would expect the passage in John to conclude
in the following way:
“The law is clear;
She must be punished according to the law.”
So said Jesus.
And with that, he picked up a stone
and threw it at the woman
striking her in the head.
The scribes and the Pharisees immediately followed Jesus’ lead,
all of them throwing stones at the woman
until she was dead.
Then Jesus turned to the scribes and Pharisees and said,
“Let those who have sinned be punished,
as the Law and Scripture command.”
(adapted from “If Grace is True”
by Phillip Gulley & James Mulholland, 71)

But of course,
that’s not how the story goes, is it?
Jesus said, “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone”.
Why?
What’s the lesson here?
What is it that Jesus wants us to learn?
Guilty woman, clear Scripture,
and yet…

Do you see how difficult interpreting text,
listening for the Word of the Lord, can be?

For many, the fifteen minutes spent on Sunday
may be the only 15 minutes spent on the word of the Lord,
spent on interpreting, seeking guidance,
wisdom and understanding.
And yet, what I have found over the past year,
is that on about half the Sundays
we don’t spend even 15 minutes;
we spend 12, 10, 8, even as few as 6
because we have other things we are doing in our service:
Baptism, Communion, Commissioning services,
important things, absolutely,
but things which have often taken time away
from our interpretation of the Word of the Lord.

In the coming year, I am going to try to adjust our order of worship
so that no matter what else we have happening in the service,
we will still have fifteen minutes to wrestle with the text,
that fifteen minutes will be the norm,
rather than the exception.
Communions Sundays will probably have a shorter homily,
but most other Sundays, we will try to assure that we have
the full 15 minutes devoted to the sermon.

You don’t have to wait for Sunday, of course,
to spend fifteen minutes with the Word of the Lord.
Do your reading each day.
A copy of “The Year of the Bible” will in one year
give you the entire Bible in just fifteen minutes a day.

Come to a Bible Study group when they resume in September,
or participate in an Adult Education class.
Find a way to read, to work at understanding.

Your fifteen minutes won’t make you thinner,
or younger,
or make your bank account grow.
But those fifteen minutes will enrich your life
in ways you never imagined.
Enrich you as you grow in knowledge,
wisdom,
discernment,
and understanding.
Enrich you as you grow in faith.
Enrich you as you follow the living Word,
our Lord Jesus Christ.

AMEN

The Word of the Lord

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
July 22, 2007

The Word of the Lord
Amos 8:1-12
Luke 10:38-42

Did you hear what God was threatening
as he spoke through the prophet Amos?
He was not threatening another flood,
he was not threatening a consuming fire,
or lightning bolts from the heavens.
He was not threatening pestilence,
disease, or invading armies.
No, what God was threatening was worse,
worse than any of those calamities,
worse than all of them combined.

God was threatening his people with silence.
Not their silence; his silence:
“a famine on the land,
not a famine of bread, or a thirst for water,
but of hearing the words of the Lord.
[You] shall wander from sea to sea,
and from north to east;
[you] shall run to and fro,
seeking the word of the Lord
but [you] shall not find it.”
(Amos 8:11-12) (emp. added)

Could there be a worse punishment?
That they would no longer have the word of the Lord,
that try as they might to hear it,
to listen for it,
it would no longer be there,
not in prayer, not in worship,
not in music,
not in the voice of the preacher,
or friend or stranger,
not in the wind or waves.
Nothing.
Silence.

No longer would they have the comforting word of God,
the affirming word of God,
the encouraging word of God;
the teaching word,
the healing word,
the forgiving word,
the merciful word,
the soothing word,
the loving word of God.

Silence,
Nothing but silence.
The chatter of their own voices,
the birds still singing, dogs still barking,
wind blowing through the trees,
waves crashing on the shore,
thunder booming in the heavens:
Those sounds would still be all around them,
but devoid of life.
The symphony composed by God,
turned to cacophony
thrown together by all God’s creatures.
as loud and as lifeless
as a traffic jam in the heart of New York City.

Why would God do such a thing?
Something so drastic?
Because his children were not listening.
It was as simple as that.
His children had stopped paying attention to his word.
They were saying they were listening;
but God saw that their actions spoke
much louder than their words.

It isn’t hard to imagine what God must have been thinking.
“Okay, if you are not interested in listening to me;
if, when I speak,
you won’t pay attention;
if you are too busy to hear,
or if you are going to take my simple words
and make them complicated,
interpreting in ways that suit your life
rather in the ways I intended,
then let’s just stop this little game,
end this charade here and now.

I didn’t covenant to be your God,
and I assume you didn’t covenant to be my people
so we could play a game called ‘religion’.
You won’t listen,
so there’s no need for me to talk.
Let’s stop wasting each other's time.
Go do what you want to do:
Chase rainbows,
accumulate money and power,
go off to war whenever you want.

The Sabbath is now your day to do as you please,
to do business, or anything else you feel like doing.
The Commandments are nothing more than a list
hanging on the wall of a building:
lie when it profits you,
covet, steal,
live for pleasure,
live for yourself, for the moment.
As you say, as long as no one’s hurt,
what’s the harm?

Words like “righteousness”, “mercy”,
“forgiveness”, “peace”, “justice”:
you can define them anyway you want,
bend them to fit your life, your political outlook;
you can even eliminate them from your vocabulary.

I will not speak,
so you don’t need to listen.
You don’t need to learn,
You don’t need to think about growing in faith.
If you think you are fine as you are,
then live your life just that way.

Of course, I will not listen, either.
(Isaiah 1:15)
So don’t bother with prayer,
not that you spent much time in that anyway.
“I will hide my eyes from you”
(Isaiah 1:15)
and look away,
the door between us will be closed,
the window shut.

Ah, but you protest now, do you?
You say, ‘Lord, we have been listening!
Don’t we offer our sacrifices,
and bring our gifts to your holy house?'
Okay, let’s take a look.
What have I said to you?
‘Cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.’ (Isaiah 1:16)

Let us reason this out:
how well have you done?
I know, I know: you’ve been busy,
so many other things to do,
you intended to do better,
when life wasn’t so busy.
So you say.

Haven’t I called you to feed the hungry?
so why do the number of hungry people
increase in your own community with every year?
Haven’t I told you to look after the sick?
So why have you simply dismissed them;
waving them off,
saying, ‘oh they have plenty of options for care’?
Haven’t I told you not to oppress the aliens
who live among you,
for you were once aliens…[yourselves]? (Exodus 23:9)

How many times have I told you
that I long for the day when you will live in peace,
and yet you march off to war,
thinking that through war
you will make your lives more secure.
Have you not seen?
Have you not heard?
I am your security!

But you don’t listen;
You don’t listen.
You ‘…do not understand’
(Isaiah 1:3)
and so I shall be silent.
I shall speak no more.”

The good news for us is that God,
in his infinite love for his children,
did not remain silent,
could not remain silent.
God's harshness melted away,
and in his infinite patience with us
God looked for new ways to share his word,
ways that might capture our attention,
culminating, of course, in God giving us
the Living Word of the Lord
in his Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

And did we get any better at listening?
The story of Mary and Martha provides us with our answer:
Mary listened, but
Martha was busy with too many other things.
And as much as any of us wants to think,
“Oh, I am not like Martha at all;
I am much more like Mary”,
God puts the question squarely before us:
“Really? Do you really think that?”
Remember the story Jesus told
of the Pharisee who prayed,
“God, I thank you that I am not like other people…”
(Luke 18:11)

God doesn’t question us to make us feel bad;
God puts the question before us to help us to realize
that for as much as we think we do,
there is more we can do,
more we ought to be doing.

God’s word is comforting, soothing,
forgiving, and merciful – yes, absolutely.
But God’s word is also prodding,
pushing, pulling, calling.
As Gene reminded us last week,
God’s word challenges us,
it disrupts us to keep us from growing complacent.

Do we dare take the Word of the Lord
for granted?
Do we dare compartmentalize it?
Do we dare reinterpret it,
Taking bits and pieces of it selectively
to suit our lives?

Do we dare risk the sound of silence?
A famine of the Word of the Lord?
AMEN

Not Just A Minute – Now!

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
July 1, 2007

Not Just A Minute – Now!
Galatians 5:16-26
Luke 9:57-62

Most children have chores to do around the house;
certainly my three sisters and I did.
We each had our lists of things
we were expected to do throughout the week.
At dinnertime we had our assigned tasks:
my youngest sister set the table,
my middle sister helped serve,
and my oldest sister cleared the table
and helped Mom with the dishes.
My job came after dinner: it was to take out the trash.
I didn’t mind the job;
The garbage cans were just in the garage,
and they were steel cans,
the kind that made a wonderful racket
every time I took off a lid
and threw it on the concrete floor.

Taking out the trash was always the last thing to be done,
after the dishes were washed and the kitchen cleaned up,
so I usually went off to do something else right after dinner;
I’d go downstairs to the playroom in the basement,
or head outside, or go upstairs to my room.

Inevitably, though, the call would come,
finding me wherever I was, the words carried
down the hall, up the stairs, around corners,
outdoors front or back:
“Would you please take out the garbage?”

My reply was always the same:
“Just a minute!”
My mother’s response was unvarying,
unwavering, unyielding, firm,
filling every corner of the house,
reaching to the farthest edges of the yard:
“Not just a minute – Now!”

Her response never seemed reasonable to me.
She knew I would do it: I always did.
Still, she wanted it done then and there.
What I might have been doing at that point in time
was of no concern to her.
The garbage was to be emptied.
Now.
Not in just a minute.

The phrase was a regular part of my mother’s lexicon.
I suspect it is part of every mother’s, every parent’s.
The call to come for dinner,
the call to get ready for bed,
the call to take a bath.
The child answers,
“Just a minute”;
and the parent responds,
“Not just a minute, now!”

We don’t like being told what to do,
or when to do it.
We want to do things our own way,
on our own schedule.
Stubbornness seems to be woven into the fabric of free will.

We see it in the reaction Jesus got
from his three would-be followers.
The first was none too sure about the accommodations.
Luke records no verbal response,
but I have to believe
that the man’s body language said very clearly,
“Just a minute; let me think about this”.
The other two were more direct with their
“just a minute”,
one to go and bury his father,
and the other to say goodbye to his family.

Now those don’t sound at all like unreasonable requests,
yet Jesus responded the same way to each:
saying to them in effect, “not just a minute, now!”

Why does Jesus seem to be so unreasonable?
Not to let a man go back to arrange a burial,
not to let another simply say goodbye?

Jesus is making a point with these three,
a point to them, a point to his followers,
a point to us.
He’s telling us to get our priorities straight.
He’s telling us God comes first,
first before anything else,
before everything else.
He’s telling us following him means following him
all the way, every minute, everywhere, every place.
He’s telling us the same thing
Elijah told the children of Israel
more than 800 years earlier:
If we’re going to follow God, then follow him,
with heart, soul, mind, body, and strength.
No half measures;
You are either in or you are out,
no waffling, no limping.

In an consumerist world, filled with must-haves,
Jesus wants us to say that our must-have
is not an iPhone,
not a Wii video game,
not a BMW or Lexus,
Our must-have is God,
as we follow his Son.
as we truly commit ourselves…
completely commit ourselves.

Here in this passage,
and in many other passages scattered throughout the gospels,
Jesus makes a strong statement to make his point;
he wants us to get it.
He understands how easy it is
for us to say we are committed Christians;
words come easily to us.

Jesus isn’t saying to us
“turn away from your family.”
He is saying,
“where is your focus?”
“what is your priority?”
He challenges us to understand the depth and breath
of our commitment as he challenges us,
“if you had to choose between following me,
and being comfortable, what would you do?
If you had to choose between family,
and following me, what would you do?”
He never said this was going to be easy.

Following Christ is much more than just tagging along.
It means changing our lives,
changing ourselves as we work to become more like him
with each passing day.
Henri Nouwen reminds us that Jesus
“became like us so that we might become like him.”
become like him in our homes, our workplaces,
when we are out shopping, even behind the wheel of the car.
But that won’t happen unless we work at making it happen.

The Galatians were not trying to become more like Christ.
They had their focus, their priorities all mixed up.
They thought they were on the right path.
They thought that if they adopted symbols,
and followed the law, that would be enough.
They weren’t working to change their lives.
They weren’t completely committed;
they were skimming along the surface.

If the Galatians had been more focused
on becoming more Christ-like
do you think Paul would have had to rebuke them,
rebuke them not only for things like
idolatry, licentiousness, and sorcery,
but for things like
dissension, factions, envy,
jealousy, anger, quarrels.
Are we all that different?

This theme of “commitment” is a thread
that has run through the lessons the Lectionary has assigned
the past couple of weeks,
a thread that will continue to run through our lessons
in the weeks ahead.

This focus runs through the Bible because
commitment is not something that is done;
it isn’t something we do when we profess our faith,
or join a church.
Commitment is something we learn to do over a lifetime;
it is something we work on over a lifetime.
It is something we work on by working intentionally
to change ourselves: not to change one another,
but to transform ourselves each day
to become more Christ-like.

It seems fitting that Jesus puts this challenge before us
on this first Sunday in July.
It is this time of year when our attention is most easily
diverted from church,
from following, from transformation,
as we turn our attention to vacations,
gardens, golf, barbecues, relaxation,
all the things that come with summer.
It is the time of year
when we are most likely to respond to Jesus,
“just a minute”.
“I will get to it after my vacation;
or better yet, let me put it on the calendar
for September.”
Let me ask you a question:
why do churches, including this one,
plan activities based on the school-year calendar?

When you come to the table in a few minutes,
in response to our Lord’s invitation
to come share in the meal
that he has prepared for you, for me,
for each of us,
come and renew your commitment to him,
even as summer begins, as vacation beckons,
as heat and humidity drain energy.

Come to this table
and say,
“Lord, I come to your table to be fed.
I come to your table to be nourished
mind, body, and spirit.
I come to this table
to renew my commitment to follow,
follow you,
to follow you not in just a minute,
but now.
AMEN