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