Sunday, January 20, 2008

Help Wanted

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
January 20, 2008

Help Wanted
Romans 12:9-21
Luke 10:25-37

Who doesn’t remember the story
of the good Samaritan
from Sunday School?
It’s a dramatic story:
A man journeys from Jerusalem to Jericho;
It’s not far, less than 20 miles.
In Jesus’ time, that was day’s walk.
We can picture him,
walking along the dusty road
minding his own business,
when he’s set upon and attacked by robbers.
He’s beaten and whatever he has is taken from him;
The robbers leave him for dead,
lying by the side of the road.

The story focuses on the man from Samaria
who stopped and tended the man,
binding up his wounds,
and then taking him to a nearby inn
where he looked after him.
When the Samaritan left the man in the care of the innkeeper,
he promised to repay the innkeeper
for any additional charges he might incur
in looking after the injured man.

Jesus told the parable in response to the question,
“who is my neighbor?”
Jesus teaches us, of course,
that our neighbors include everyone:
strangers, immigrants,
people who look different,
act differently,
speak in different languages, or
come from different cultures.
In Jesus’ time, the Samaritans and the Jews
lived in proximity to one another
but they certainly didn’t look on one another as neighbors.
They saw one another as different,
and viewed one another with suspicion and hostility.

What gets overlooked in the story
are the two men who pass by the injured man.
The first was a clergyman, a priest, a man of God.
He “passed by on the other side”,
apparently trying his best to avoid the injured man.
The second man was a Levite,
a member of the priestly class,
a man who might have worked at the Temple.
He was probably even more learned,
and in theory, even more a man of God,
than the local priest,
but he too “passed by on the other side”.
Neither wanted to get involved.
Both of them probably were afraid,
each of them probably rationalized to themselves
that the injured man was none of their concern.
Surely someone else would soon stop to help;
They both probably considered themselves
busy men who had things to do,
places to get to,
and so had to be on their way.

Harry Emerson Fosdick accused these two men of a terrible sin.
Not the sin of neglect;
Nor the sin of failing to love his neighbor.
In Fosdick’s eyes, the sin was worse:
Fosdick accused them of the sin of uselessness.

In his classic book “The Meaning of Service”,
Fosdick wrote that we find ourselves in one of three pools:
The first is when we work defiantly against the will of God
and find ourselves in the pool of sin and evil.
The third is the pool of complete commitment
where we work selflessly and joyfully
serving the Lord God as disciples of Jesus Christ.
As much as we’d like to think that it is in that pool
where we’d find ourselves,
Fosdick argues that we spend most of our time in the second,
the pool that is between the other two,
the pool he labels “uselessness”.

It is a harsh term,
and sounds judgmental,
but Fosdick was a man of great faith and wisdom
so let’s see where he’s going with this.

Fosdick wrote,
“[Jesus] knew well that the majority of folk
are not so much tempted to fall away
from positive service into positive destructiveness,
as they are tempted to fall between the two
into…uselessness.”
(Meaning of Service, 26)

Read through the gospels and we find many parables
and teachings in which Jesus doesn’t condemn a person
for doing wrong,
as often as he condemns a person for doing nothing.
Doing nothing.

“Above all other things,” Fosdick observed,
“[Jesus] hated uselessness:
Recall his condemnation of savorless salt,
….or candles …that burn uselessly.
The servant who failed to do anything with the talent,
the tree that failed to bear fruit.”

We are all called to serve,
we are called to serve by acting,
by doing.
By doing with complete conviction,
remembering that Jesus doesn’t want part of us,
he wants ALL of us.
Fosdick is simply doing the prophet’s job
of laying the truth before us,
even if we don’t like it.

The men and women who will be ordained and installed
today to the offices of Elder and Deacon
have responded to their call to serve,
to their call to do.
These men and women said yes to God’s call.
They had a choice, each of them;
they could have “passed by on the other side of the road”
but they didn’t.

They will join those Elders and Deacons who continue to serve,
continue to do.
They will all put in much time and effort on behalf of
this Body of Christ in the coming year.
Perhaps not as much as is sometimes thought:
You have heard me say that
Session meetings don’t go on for 4 hours each month.
In fact, Session has just 8 regular meetings each year.
and each meeting lasts about 2, perhaps 2-and-a-half hours.
Consider this:
over the course of the next year
our Elders will spend less time in Session meetings
than the average American
will spend in front of his or her television set
in just one week!
That’s not so bad.

When our Officers were gathered in Retreat last weekend,
we spent time learning what’s in our Book of Order,
our Directory of Worship
and our Book of Confessions.
We were learning about what it means to be Presbyterian,
and what it means to be
part of the Reformed Tradition.

We learned, among other things,
that our Confessions,
the 11 historical confessional statements
in our Book of Confessions
help us to understand not only who we are
and what we believe,
they also help us to understand
“what we resolve to do”
(Book of Order, G-2.0100)
What we resolve to do.

Our Deacons resolve, for example
to engage in the ministry of care and concern
looking after the sick, the lonely,
those struggling with hopelessness,
those who are most likely
to be passed by on the side of the road.
But they don’t do that ministry for us,
they lead us in that ministry,
lead us in service to which
we are all called.

Our Elders are called “lead the congregation
continually to discover what God is doing in the world,
and plan for change, renewal
and reformation under the Word of God.”
(Book of Order, G-10.0102j)
Those words come from a list of tasks
assigned to our Elders.
Even though the sentence is buried in a long list,
I think it is the most important role to which Elders are called.

And they don’t do that for us,
they do it with us,
encouraging us,
equipping us, and enabling all of us
to discover what God is doing in the world
as we minister in the name of Jesus Christ.

We learned that we are the church reformed,
yet always reforming,
every one of us called to a ministry
of transformation as we are guided
by God’s fresh breeze that is the Holy Spirit,
that breeze that blows away the stale and worn,
blows it away typically just when we are getting comfortable,
blowing in the new and the fresh,
those things that sometimes make us uncomfortable.

To help us all become more faithful and effective “do-ers”
we agreed last weekend to restore a practice
this church had not that long ago,
a practice that many churches use with great success:
We are going to designate the Second Tuesday
of each month as Ministry Team meeting night
and encourage all Ministry Teams to meet that night.
We’ll begin our evening at 7:15 with a time for devotionals,
and then at 7:30 everyone will go off to work,
to discern,
to serve --
to do.
We’ll be together, all of us,
better able to work in community
as Ministry teams.

If you are feeling the Spirit’s call to new service,
simply come on Tuesday night
and join whichever group you are feeling called to.
You don’t even need to wait for someone to call you
in response to your Time and Talent sheet.
We are hoping to get started with Ministry Team night
next month, on February 12th.

Even if you cannot serve on a Ministry Team,
you can still do by praying for
our Elders and Deacons regularly,
supporting them in their decisions.
and saying thank-you to each of them
for saying yes to God’s call to service.

In our worship service last week,
we heard the text from Paul’s letter to the church at Rome
that we heard as our First Lesson this morning.
It is a text filled with action verbs:
Paul calling the faithful,
you and me,
to action:
“be ardent, do not lag,
rejoice, love,
contribute
extend hospitality
bless, live peaceably,
feed even your enemies, quench their thirst.”

Friends, the help wanted sign is out in this Body of Christ.
It is always out, put there by our Lord Jesus Christ.
Will you respond to that sign?
Or will you walk by?

Which pool will you be in?
Our Lord Jesus Christ invites us all to service,
all to the work of ministry in his name,
all to respond as simply yet as faithfully
as the prophet Isaiah so famously did,
in six short words,
words we’ll sing in just a moment,
“Here am I, Lord. Send me.”
AMEN

Sunday, January 06, 2008

Why Do We Do It That Way?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
January 6, 2008

Why Do We Do It That Way?
Isaiah 43:1-7

Why were the pieces of bread we had
for the Lord’s Supper last month so big?
That was a question I heard a couple of days later.
You may not even remember, but in December,
when we celebrated the Lord’s Supper,
the pieces of bread on the trays
that were passed around were much bigger
than the pieces we had been used to.

It was something we talked about
in the Worship & Music Ministry Team.
The question I had asked was the opposite:
why were the pieces of bread so small?
When we celebrate the Lord’s Supper
we are remembering the Passover Supper
our Lord shared with his disciples
on the night before his crucifixion.
The shared a common loaf of bread,
ordinary bread, that would have been passed around.
Each person would have torn off a piece of bread from the loaf,
in much the same way each of us will do in a few minutes
as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper
for the first time in this New Year.
The piece of bread would not have been a small piece,
but a good sized piece.
This is a meal,
and while what we eat may not fill our bellies,
we should take something we can literally chew on
as we hear the words of our Lord,
“Do this in remembrance of me.”
as we remember his birth,
his life,
his death,
his teachings.

The question, why such a big piece, was a good question.
I encourage questions because that’s how we learn.
You may have questions:
things that lead you to ask
“Why do we do that?”
“Why do we do it that way?”
“That’s not how I remember it was done in
the church I attended before I came here.”

Every denomination, every church,
takes its own unique approach to worship,
to theology, to biblical interpretation.
The Presbyterian tradition is built on learning,
built on what is the working definition of theology,
which is “faith seeking understanding”.
We work on our faith by seeking understanding
through learning and growing in wisdom.

Our primary resources are the Bible,
along with our Book of Confessions,
and our Book of Order.
We start of course, with the Bible,
the written Word of God,
the inspired word.
In the pages of the Bible God reveals himself to us,
in relationship with us.
John Calvin observed that in the Bible we find God
“not.. as he is in himself,
but as he is toward us.”
(Institutes, 1.10.2)

This make the Bible not “his story”
but our story.
When we read through the pages of the Bible
we are reading our own story of our relationship with God.
We are in the story of the children of Israel following Moses
through the wilderness;
we are there in the pages of the prophets Amos, Jeremiah
Ezekiel, and even the lesser known prophets
like Malachi and Obadiah.
We are in the parables of Jesus.
It is to us that Paul wrote his letters.
It is our book, alive and full of life.

It is why we don’t refer to the Bible as the
literal and inerrant word,
as some other denominations do.
We refer to the Bible as the inspired word,
kept current and fresh by the power
of God through his Holy Spirit.

Our Book of Confessions helps us to read with understanding
words that were written 2,000, even 3,000 years ago.
In our Confession of 1967 we read,
“The Bible is to be interpreted
in the light of its witness to God’s work
of reconciliation in Jesus Christ.
The Scriptures, given under the guidance of the Holy Spirit,
are nevertheless the words of men,
conditioned by the language, thought forms,
and literary fashions
of the places and times at which they were written.
They reflect views of life, history, and the cosmos
which were then current.
The church, therefore, has an obligation to approach the Scriptures
with literary and historical understanding.
As God has spoken his word in diverse cultural situations,
the church is confident that he will continue to speak through
the Scriptures in a changing world
and in every form of human culture." (9.29)

So, when we get to a passage that reads,
“Slaves, obey your earthly masters with fear and trembling,
in singleness of heart, as you obey Christ.”
(Ephesians 6:5)
we understand that that sentiment,
which we would now consider abhorhent
reflected a different time, a different culture.

In the same way, when we read
in Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth,
“women should be silent in the churches.
For they are not permitted to speak,
but should be subordinate”
(1 Corinthians 14:34)
we understand that Paul
wrote in patriarchal times.
He probably wasn’t a sexist, a chauvinist,
as the words might suggest,
but more a product of his time and culture,
the society in which he lived.
Imagine if we read those words literally:
we’d have a very empty church!

Our Confession teaches us to ask questions
as we read Scripture.
We always begin, of course, by seeking God’s
guidance through the Holy Spirit.
Then, as we read a passage, we are to interpret it
in a way that witnesses and testifies
to God’s work of reconciliation
in and through Jesus Christ.

Let's go back to the text from Isaiah that we heard.
We read it with our hearts and minds illumined by the Spirit;
We read it through the lens that is
the Living Word, our Lord Jesus Christ.
So what is the lesson?
We heard, among other promises in the passage,
“when you walk through fire you shall not be burned”
Is the lesson that we can walk through a burning building
and escaped unscathed?

It is possible, as we were reminded of last week:
with God and through God all things are possible.
And there is precedent:
you remember from Sunday School
the story of Daniel and the fiery furnace.
(Daniel 3:19ff)

But, do you remember how our Lord responded
when he was tempted by Satan
to throw himself from the pinnacle of the temple
to prove the scripture taken from the Psalms:
(Psalm 91:11-12)
“He will command his angels concerning you”
and “on their hands they will bear you up.”
(Matthew 4:5)
“Do not put the Lord God to the test,”
is how our Lord responded.

So we take the text and learn that
we are God’s beloved children,
precious in God’s sight, each of us,
every one of us.
We are loved,
even though we often do and say things
that lead us from God.
And God is with us, present with us
in every moment of our lives,
even in the valley of the shadow of death.

What better place to start this New Year,
grounded in love,
grounded in acceptance,
confident of God’s presence,
through his epiphany, our Lord Jesus Christ.

As you go through the year, keep reading,
keep learning,
keep asking questions.
Remember: there are no dumb questions!
Grow in faith, obedience, and understanding.

Take your first step by coming to the Lord’s Table
to be fed,
to be nourished.
Come to the Lord’s Table with your brothers and sisters,
with all God’s beloved in this church
and in churches of other denominations,
where things might be done differently
but where those gathered
gather in the name of Jesus Christ.

Come to this table
to share in this meal prepared by the Living Word,
our Lord Jesus Christ.
And when you take a piece of bread from the loaf,
tear off a big piece.
Amen.