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