The Angle of the Mirror

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
February 24, 2008
Third Sunday in Lent

The Angle of the Mirror
Ephesians 2:1-10
Matthew 7:13-14

Hold a mirror straight in front of you,
arm’s length away,
and what do you see?
A reflection of yourself, of course.
Now turn the mirror forty-five degrees to the left or
forty-five degrees to the right,
and what happens?
Your reflection disappears from view
and in its place what do you see?
You see the reflection of the person
standing nearest you.

In this Lenten season
we are called to turn the reflection of the mirror
back on ourselves,
away from the angle we prefer,
the angle that reflects away from ourselves,
the angle that catches the reflection of others around us.

We are so quick to spot flaws and faults in others,
quick to judge others,
quick to condemn and criticize others.
We are so quick to do these things
even though our Lord teaches us not to,
even though Paul goes on at length
in letter after letter not to do such things.

Our focus is wrong, and Lent calls us to recognize it,
so we can repent,
repent,
and that means we must turn the mirror
away from the angle we’ve set it at,
the angle we find so comfortable,
and turn it back on ourselves:
turn it back on ourselves
so that we can do that healthy deep introspection,
that healthy deep spiritual housecleaning
we’ve been talking about the past few weeks.

In looking full view we are called to look at ourselves honestly,
remembering what scripture teaches us,
“if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves…”
(1 John 1:8)

In looking full view in this Lenten season
you should see a child of God
created in God’s image
and loved unconditionally by God;
but you should also see a child of God
who has strayed from the path
who is not all that God created you to be,
all that God wants you to be.

Only when we look full view
can we begin the healthy process of repentance
so that we can feel ourselves more fully children of God.

But oh, to turn the mirror on ourselves:
how difficult that is,
even painful.
When we look at the reflection of another
we find it so easy to chatter on about all his faults,
all her shortcomings;
but when we look our own reflection
we go silent.

For some, there may even be a powerful negative feeling,
that you don’t like what you see.
That should not be how you should ever feel about yourself,
because when God looks at you,
God not only likes what he sees,
he loves what he sees: unconditionally.
There is nothing you can ever do, or ever say,
that will cause God not to love you, not to like you.
The lesson of the prodigal son teaches us that.
Yes, we may do things that disappoint God
dismay God, or distress God
sometimes truly awful things,
but God’s love through Jesus Christ is unwavering.

We struggle because we find discipleship difficult;
we find walking the path that Jesus calls us to follow
harder than we expected it be,
harder than we’d like it to be.
Life is hard enough and complicated enough;
who wouldn’t want his or her faith life to be easy?
Who wouldn’t want a church where the focus
was always on making you feel good?
There are churches that do just that.

Yet Jesus never made any promise
that following him would be easy.
On the contrary he reminds us again and again,
that faithful discipleship is difficult.
Our second lesson is only one of a number of lessons
in which Jesus reinforces this message:
“Enter through the narrow gate;
for the gate is wide and the road is easy
that leads to destruction,
and there are many who take it.
For the gate is narrow,
and the road is hard that leads to life,
and there are few who find it.”
(Matthew 7:13-14)

“The road is hard that leads to life…”
Could Jesus be any clearer?
Discipleship is hard work.
Is it any wonder that we turn away?
Is it any wonder that our gaze
is so easily distracted by other things,
other people:
bright lights, fun, easy living?

And yet, this is Lent,
our season of atonement,
when we are called to turn our focus on ourselves
so that we can see where we have turned from God,
turned from Christ,
turned from the difficult road,
in favor of the easy path.

As Jesus traveled teaching, preaching, and healing
what one word did he speak more than any other?
Repent.
Repent.
How do we begin Lent each year?
By hearing John the Baptist call us to repent.
Turn from the life you are living,
and turn back to the life God calls you to live.
Turn from the life that is empty and ultimately destructive
and turn back to the life that is life.

Turning the mirror on yourself,
acknowledging where you have strayed
is not an exercise to make you feel bad about yourself.
On the contrary, it is an exercise
to help you know God’s love more completely,
God’s goodness more completely,
God’s mercy and God’s peace more completely.

We struggle with this though.
We all would rather hear the message,
“I’m okay, you’re okay.”
But that’s not faithful, or real.
The reality of our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ
was put more accurately by the wag who said,
“I’m not okay, and you’re not okay,
but that’s okay.”
It is okay, because none of us is perfect;
God knows that.

But God wants you to embrace the life he has called you to,
called each of us to through Jesus Christ,
and he wants us to turn from those things
that distract us from that life.

We cannot do that, none of us,
until we stop, take stock of ourselves
and acknowledge those things in our own lives
that do distract us.
That’s where we start our journey of Lenten renewal,
our journey that is ultimately a life-long journey,
that is transformational,
changing us over a lifetime
to what God created each of us to be.

The abundant life is yours to embrace,
mine to embrace,
each of us, ours, to embrace.
But there is work to be done,
a cost to all this.

The letter to the Ephesians reminds us
that we have received the gift of God’s grace
through Jesus Christ,
a gift that is ours,
given to us.
But it is a gift that has a cost.
There is no path to cheap grace.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer says it simply and rightly:
“cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without repentance.”
(Cost of Discipleship, 44)
If we want forgiveness,
we’d better expect to repent,
to leave the old ways behind
and embrace new life in Christ.
Cheap grace is not to look deep within,
not to work on repentance.

The Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall
has observed that
“To begin to move toward real life means,
for us, to come face-to-face
with that within and around us
which bars us from life.”
(Hall, God & Human Suffering, 128)
It means we need to look squarely at the reflection
that we see of ourselves in that mirror
so we miss nothing.
so we see all those things in our lives
that burden us,
that clutter and junk up our lives,
that are distractions.
that get in the way of real life,
the life to which Jesus calls us.

What are some of those distractions?
Who doesn’t worry about money?
Or popularity?
You may have a little too strong a focus
on pleasures from shopping, or gambling,
cigarettes, alcohol, sex.
It could be anger that smolders within you,
or resentment that eats away at you,
a sense of loss that still looms large,
a sense of hopelessness that you just cannot shake.

Once you identify those things,
you can begin your spiritual housecleaning,
and sweep away the clutter, the junk,
remove the distractions.
Only then will you be able to fit through that narrow gate.
that gate that none of us can squeeze through
if we try to take all baggage we carry with us,
all that baggage that’s so visible
if we would just look long enough, hard enough,
and honestly enough in that mirror.

Once you are through the gate, then what?
Wouldn’t it be terrific if Jesus was waiting there
holding open the back door of an SUV
inviting you to get in for the journey,
with your choice of DVDs to watch along the way?

But of course that’s not what Jesus does.
No, he tells us that even once we through the gate
the road will be hard.

But he does give us each an invitation.
The invitation to take on his yoke.
Now that doesn’t sound like much of an invitation,
but do you remember what a yoke looked like,
the kind that Jesus was referring to?
It was to yoke two oxen together.
And two is the critical number here.

Who is on the other side of the yoke,
in the opening next to you?
Christ, of course,
Take on his yoke and you are paired with him.
When the road gets difficult,
he will be there to help you on the way,
to keep you from stumbling,
to refresh you when you get tired,
to assure that you remain on the right path.
What could be a better invitation?

“We are being given the grace to become
the creatures that we are;
to trust the Lord and Giver of life
in place of a futile attempt to possess life.
Through [grace we’ve been given the] courage to become.”
(Hall,132)

The courage to become what we God created us to be,
not to chase after the image that we want to project,
the image we think society demands from us,
an image that we at times don’t recognize ourselves,
The “glittering image”,
as novelist Susan Howatch has called it.

“Grace is costly because it costs [us our lives],
and it is grace because it gives [us] the only true life.
It is costly because it condemns sin,
and grace because it justifies the sinner.”
(Bonhoeffer, 45)

What are you afraid of finding when you look in that mirror?
What is holding you back from embracing the grace
that is yours, mine, ours in Jesus Christ?

Look deep within,
see where you need to repent.
For you do need to repent.
We all need to repent,
We know that not because I say so,
but because our Lord Jesus Christ has said so,
and says so still.

See where you’ve strayed from the path.
See where you found the path difficult and opted to choose
what looked to be an easier path, an easier road.
Then turn and get back on the road
that Christ as called you to to follow.

Work on that the next few months
and then take another look in the mirror,
perhaps around Pentecost,
and don’t be surprised if you see
a very different reflection.
A more radiant you,
you glowing from within,
the fire of faith burning brighter, stronger
even on the narrow, difficult road.

And, should you choose to angle the mirror
45 degrees to the left,
or 45 degrees to the right,
the reflection you will see
will be the same either way,
for you will see your partner,
your Lord, Jesus Christ;
Christ beside you,
on the road together, every step
in this life
and in the life to come.
When you see that reflection
you’ll know as you never did before
the grace of God that is ours through Jesus Christ.
AMEN

Crunchy Faith

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
February 17, 2008
Second Sunday in Lent

Crunchy Faith
Genesis 12:1-4
Mark 8:31-33

The sun was just beginning to peek over the horizon,
its rays reaching out over the land
to wake the livestock
and chase away the chill of the night air.
Abram was up early, as he always was.
He may have been 75,
but he was still a man of vigor and energy
even if from time to time his joints
could be heard complaining.

He had gone outside, just down the hill
to oversee the shearing of the sheep.
His flock was among the largest in the region,
and the shearing went on for days.
The workers were already corralling the animals,
and the din of the bleating swallowed Sarai’s voice
as she called from the top of the hill.

But then Abram heard it:
“There’s a call for you.”
He went back up the hill
to answer the call.
Sarai heard her husband’s clipped responses,
“Where is that?
Sounds like quite a journey.
Yes, of course we’ll go.
No, I don’t need to write it down;
I’ll remember.
No, I don’t have any questions.
I will do just as you ask.
I’ll get started right now.”

Abram turned to his wife and said,
“We’re moving.”
She was incredulous:
“Moving? Where?
Who were you talking to?
What did he want?
Why do we need to move?”

Abram looked into his wife’s eyes,
“I was speaking with the Lord God,
and he is calling us to move from here
to a land called Canaan.
We are to leave immediately.”

Sarai had heard of lots of different gods,
gods by the dozens.
It seemed that every worker they added to their staff
brought with him or her at least two or three new gods:
gods of the harvest, gods of the rain,
gods of wine, god of the night, gods of day.
But the Lord God: that was a new one for her.
“Canaan – where is that?” she asked.

Abram responded,
“A long way from here,
more than 600 miles to the south.”
Sarai was stunned,
“600 miles! Does this Lord God have any idea
what it would take for us to move all our possessions,
all our livestock,
everything 600 miles?
Why on earth does he want us to move there?”

Abram paused for a moment before he answered,
“I don’t know.
All I know is that we are going.
I know the journey will be very difficult
and will take us the better part of a year.
I don’t have any idea what we’ll find when we get there.
But the Lord God has told us to go,
and what he has asked of us
we will do.”

And Abram and Sarai did just that:
they left behind their own country,
and headed south to the strange land.
And after months of a difficult journey
they came to Canaan,
a land where they were aliens, strangers,
a land inhabited by people who looked different from them,
spoke different languages,
and worshiped different gods.
But there they settled,
as they Lord had commanded them.

But that wasn’t to be the end of it.
Abram stayed on the move for years,
first down to Egypt when famine plagued Canaan,
then back up to Canaan,
moving, always moving,
a massive enterprise for him and Sarai,
his joints protesting loudly with every move.

But Abram did as the Lord asked.
No questions,
no hesitation,
no second thoughts.
The Lord spoke, the Lord called,
and nothing distracted Abram from obeying.

Abraham’s story is one of profound faith.
Faith so strong that some 4,000 years later,
we still look to him as the very example
of what it means to have faith:
“Oh, to have the faith of Abraham!”

No one else seems to come close,
not even the men who followed Jesus as his disciples.
They were men who had faith, absolutely;
But they were also men who were easily distracted,
whose faith was strong one minute,
gone with the wind the next.

Peter, the strong, swarthy fisherman,
proved himself in the end
with the help, of course, of the Holy Spirit,
but while he walked with Jesus,
he often tried Jesus’ patience.
Our gospel lesson was not the only time
Jesus lost his temper with poor Peter.

Remember the story of Jesus’ transfiguration
from a couple of weeks ago,
when Peter was with Jesus on the mountain top?
He witnessed the glory of God through Jesus Christ,
and yet by the time he got back down the mountain
the lesson seemed to have been lost on him.
What about the time when the disciples
were crossing the Sea of Galilee
and Jesus came to them walking on the water?
Jesus encouraged Peter to come out of the boat.
Peter did have the faith
to take that step over the gunwale,
a step that perhaps none of the disciples
might have been willing even to try.
But barely a second on the water
and his faith evaporated and down he went,
prompting our Lord to respond,
“You of little faith,
why do you doubt?”

In our lesson, Jesus told his disciples that he must suffer,
be rejected, and die, before rising again.
Jesus knew his Father’s will and obeyed it.
Peter heard him and immediately rebuked Jesus,
causing Jesus to respond angrily to Peter’s criticism
with those words we know well:
“Get behind me Satan.”
Get behind me, because your weak faith
is getting in the way of God’s will.

We have to remember that the word “satan”
was a Hebrew word that meant
not someone or something that was evil,
but rather someone or something that got in the way,
that was an obstacle.
The second sentence helps us to understand
why Jesus saw Peter as an obstacle,
as someone who was getting in the way of God’s will:
“For you are setting your mind not on divine things,
but on human things.”

In the words we used last week,
Peter had lost his focus on the will of God
and was distracted,
distracted perhaps for what he thought was a good reason:
the very idea that Jesus might be killed
was one he didn’t even want to think about.
But still, he was distracted by his own will,
rather than God’s.

Now in this Lenten Season,
as you are going about the work of spiritual housecleaning,
is your faith more like that of Peter
or more like that of Abraham?
Most of us,
probably all of us,
would say that we are closer to Peter.

A healthy, vibrant, vital faith –
the faith of Abraham -
doesn’t just happen.
It takes work, hard work;
It requires constant attention.
God may plant the seed of faith in our hearts,
but it’s up to each of us to water it,
feed it,
nurture and nourish it.

Before I went to seminary, I worked for
the British magazine The Economist,
where I was the editor of management and finance publications
for the company’s research arm.
An Englishman named Nico Colchester was my boss.
He was a good man, and wonderful writer,
witty and wise.
In one of his editorials he had written
of the importance in life of keeping things “crunchy”:
“A crunchy [path] is not necessarily right,” he wrote,
“only more certain than a soggy one
to deliver the results it deserves.
Run your country, or your company, or your life as you think fit.
But whatever you decide, keep things crunchy.”

I’ve always thought that Nico’s lesson
can apply to our faith lives as well.
We need to work at keeping our faith crunchy;
otherwise it will become soggy.
Abraham kept his faith crunchy;
Peter, on the other hand,
struggled with sogginess,
and not just when he tried to walk on water!

What are some of the things that will help you
to have faith that is crunchy?
First, of course, is coming to worship each Sunday.
Worship is a central part of our faith lives.
But a word of caution:
just coming doesn’t assure you of crunchy faith.
You cannot just show up and take a seat.
You need to participate in worship:
Pray the prayer of preparation;
sing the hymns with enthusiasm,
pay attention to the words you are singing;
reflect on the words we are saying
as we pray together;
listen to the texts from the Bible;
take notes as you listen to the sermon;
put your offering in the plate with words
of thanksgiving to God.
And don’t just stop there:
Volunteer to help lead worship as a liturgist,
or take a bold step over the gunwale
and offer to do the Time with Children.

What else can you do?
Read the Bible.
Yes, read the Bible.
Don’t just wait till Sunday to hear it read.
Read it.
Do this on your own, or with family or friends.
Come to Bible Study --
we’ve got plenty of room in both groups.
If you want help in picking a Bible,
or as you read it, just ask!
But read the Bible!

A third thing to help you have crunchy faith:
Pray.
An active prayer life is one of the surest ways
of keeping your faith crunchy.
Or, put another way, the less you pray,
the more likely you are to find your faith soggy.
Prayer is conversation,
lifting up your concerns to God in your own voice.
Just as important, prayer is listening.
God hears all prayers:
and God answers all prayers,
but God does not always answer
your prayer on your time schedule
or in the way you hope he will.
God answers prayer in his time
and in his way.
If you are distracted by soggy faith,
you may well miss his answer.

These are three simple steps to crunchier faith,
three very appropriate things to work on during Lent,
and build on long after the last alleluias of Easter fade.

There are other things you should do too, of course:
In this Lenten season, work on forgiveness:
forgive as you have been forgiven.
Take out that junk drawer that holds grudges –
that drawer we talked about last week –
and dump out the contents and sweep them away.

Love:
work on love,
love NOT on your terms,
but love that is giving, stretching,
moving you from comfort.
Remember, Jesus is not impressed
when we love those we like.
We are called to reach out in love and reconciliation
even to our enemies.
Jesus never said this would be easy.

We are already at the Second Sunday in Lent.
Did you begin your spiritual housecleaning this past week?
Did you begin working on your deep spiritual introspection?
Did you begin working on ways that will help you
see where your faith is soggy?
Or were you distracted by other things this past week?

Use this week to put away distractions.
Focus, looking to Abraham as your model.
Get out your brooms
and use this Lenten season to clean house.
Get to work now,
and by Easter,
which is not that far away,
you could find yourself at a whole new level of faith --
faith that is wonderfully crunchy.
AMEN

Distractions

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
February 10, 2008

Distractions
Genesis 2:15-17, 3:1-7
Matthew 4:1-11

What do you suppose was God’s first reaction
when he learned that Adam and Eve
had taken fruit from the Tree and eaten it?
What do you suppose his thoughts were
before he confronted the pair,
and sent them out from the Garden?

I’ve always imagined that God was wistful,
somber, even sad,
thinking to himself:

I’d thought I had been so clear with them,
“You may eat freely of every tree in the garden,
but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
you shall not eat,
for in the day that you eat of it, you shall die.”

And what did they do?
They took and they ate.
The woman tried to blame the serpent,
and the man tried to blame the woman.
But the fact is:
they each disobeyed me.

They had no reason to disobey me:
I had given them everything they needed:
A beautiful garden in which to live;
plenty of food,
all the animals and creatures of this earth;
I’d given them each other;
Most important, I’d given them myself
my presence in their lives;
I’d given them my love.

What was it that compelled the woman to reach out to the tree?
What was it that compelled the man to take the fruit?
What was it that compelled them both to eat?
Why didn’t they listen to me?”

I don’t think God was angry as much as he was
disappointed and distraught.

We have loaded this story with mythology over the centuries.
We’ve turned the fruit into an apple,
even though the Hebrew word specifies only “fruit”,
and even though apples were not common
in that part of the world.
We’ve made Eve the principal villain,
and Adam the unwitting victim of her lies and seduction,
even though the text makes clear
that he was standing with Eve the whole time,
and Eve handed him the fruit
without saying a word.

We’ve put the devil into the serpent,
even though the ancient Hebrew texts never referred to any
sinister being named the devil,
and the text pointedly refers to the snake
as a “crafty animal” which God duly punishes.
Strip away the mythology and what do we have?
A story of temptation and seduction?
The devil pulling the hapless Eve and Adam into darkness?

No, not at all.
This is story of disobedience,
of bad choices.
The two were faced with a choice:
a choice to listen to God and obey him,
or a choice not to listen to God,
and in the process disobey God.
Adam and Eve made a choice;
They made a bad choice.

They certainly could not complain that they were confused,
or they did not understand.
God could not have been clearer:
“Do you see that tree? Don’t touch it;
don’t eat the fruit from the tree.
Anything else you want is yours,
just stay away from that tree.”

I think we make too much of the word “temptation”.
It is a word that seems to suggest something akin
to Sirens singing their irresistible song,
leading to sin and disaster
for the otherwise unwitting, innocent victim.

I prefer the word “distractions.”
Our lives are filled with distractions,
things that can call our attention away from our
lives as disciples of Jesus Christ,
if we let them,
if we lose our focus on Christ.

Adam and Eve were distracted:
they saw that “the tree was good for food,
and that it was a delight to the eyes,
and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise…”
The distraction was there before them,
and they chose to focus on the distraction,
rather than keeping their focus on being obedient to God.

And then they took a bad situation and made it worse:
In all too human fashion, they immediately
tried to shift the blame,
the woman blaming the serpent
and the man not content with blaming the woman,
felt perfectly justified in blaming God himself,
“it was the woman who did this to me,
and you gave her to me…”

Why is it that we are so unwilling
to take responsibility for our actions?
Why is it that we are so quick to paint ourselves as victims
when something goes wrong?
Why is it that we seem to put more time, energy and effort
into excuses, than into truth, honesty, and faithfulness?
Why is that we are so resistant to understanding
that excuses always sound like excuses,
lame, weak,…
disingenuous,… dishonest?

We cannot hope to know forgiveness until
we first accept responsibility for our own actions.
The first step to knowing the grace,
the amazing grace,
that comes with forgiveness
is to say clearly and boldly,
“I have done wrong.”

Ponder with me for just a moment,
about how differently things might have turned out
had Adam and Eve acknowledged their sin to God,
rather than trying to avoid responsibility.
What if they had said,
“God, we disobeyed you. We know it,
It wasn’t the serpent’s fault.
It was no one’s fault by our own.
We know it;
We acknowledge it,
We confess it,
and we seek your forgiveness.”

If the story of Adam and Eve teaches us what not to do
the story of Jesus in the wilderness teaches us
what we should do,
Here in this story, the negative turns to the positive.
There is Jesus hungry and tired,
the devil trying to distract Jesus from obedience,
even tempt him with food, riches, and power.

But Jesus of course keeps his focus,
not distracted, not tempted,
and remains obedient to God.

Mark understood that this was a story of distraction
and almost treats the story as a distraction,
condensing it to just two verses in his gospel,
without any of the detail or drama
that both Matthew and Luke give us.
It is Matthew that gives the best,
and I think most appropriate,
ending to the story, though.
Did you hear it?
There is no power struggle,
nothing that is suggestive of the mythological battles
between light and dark that we find in many
books that were not included in the Bible.

No, Jesus simply bats the distractor away
as though he was nothing more than a pesky fly.
“Away with you Satan, for it is written
worship the Lord your God
and serve only him.”
The Greek can be translated even more simply,
“Go away,”
Go away.
Pest, distraction.

What could be simpler:
When we face things that distract us
from being obedient children of God,
we don’t need to lash ourselves to the mast
as Odysseus did to survive the seduction of the Sirens,
We simply just need to say,
“Away with you!
Go away!
“Begone!
I will not let you distract me
from worshiping the Lord and serving him.”

Lent provides us with the ideal time to
reflect on all the distractions that fill our lives:
to name them and own them,
so we can begin to work on batting them away,
“begone, away with you.”

This is not as easy as it sounds,
for we need to begin by acknowledging
our own readiness, even eagerness
to turn to whatever it is that is distracting us.
We need to acknowledge that we rather like
the distractions that fill our lives.

We need to acknowledge
how hard it is to take responsibility for our own actions,
We need to acknowledge
that we regularly make bad choices.
We need to acknowledge
that none of us is a victim of some slippery seduction.
We need to acknowledge
how hard it is to say,
“I have disobeyed.”

But these are the first steps to dealing with distractions,
the first steps to learning how to deal
with the distractions that will come tomorrow
and the next day and the next day.
The first steps toward learning how to bat them away,
sweep them away.

I have for quite some time thought
that the most powerful symbol for Lent is the broom,
the ordinary broom.
Lent is the time we should do some spiritual housecleaning,
to take out the broom and sweep away
all those things that clutter up our lives
that distract us from the lives of faithfulness,
and discipleship to which we are called.

The clutter that distracts each of us
is different from person to person,
but we’ve all got it, and we all need to clean it out.
Think of the junk drawers you have in your life,
junk drawers not in your kitchen,
but in your life:
Drawers that contain things that you should have
got rid of long ago, but which you have hung onto.
We have each have drawers that hold grudges,
drawers where we keep prejudices,
drawers that hold our judgments that we have made.

Open up the drawers and acknowledge what is in them.
They distract you from your role as a faithful disciple of Christ.
Dump the contents on the floor,
and sweep them all out,
out into the sunlight,
where they’ll be blown away
by the cleansing wind that is the Spirit of God.

Lent is not a time to take on empty rituals.
It should be a time of deep, spiritual introspection.
“Mortification not of the flesh,
but of your inner self”,
so you can see and acknowledge where you have become
complacent,
where the foundation of your faith is weak
and need shoring up so you are better able
to deal with distractions.

“The purpose of Lent is to arouse,”
writes Edna Hong (Bread and Wine),
“arouse our sense of sin”
to arouse so we can then acknowledge it
acknowledge how we allow ourselves to be distracted,
how we choose distractions over Christ.

Only when we have a sense of our sin,
can we truly begin to understand
what grace is all about,
the amazing grace given to us,
by God through Jesus Christ.

Today is the First Sunday in Lent.
We have but 40 days till Easter; that’s not that much time.
Don’t let anything distract you from the task before you:
acknowledge where you have turned from God,
acknowledge where you have embraced and pursued distractions,
acknowledge where and when you have made bad choices,
acknowledge where you have clutter and junk
that distracts you and weakens the foundation of your faith.

Use these 40 days to do some deep introspection;
some deep cleaning,
and then rebuilding.
God will grace you through his Holy Spirit
with all the strength and energy
you will need to do the work you know you need to do.
God will guide you and help you,
so that in the future you’ll be able to deal with
distractions that come with life,
saying confidently
as our Lord Jesus Christ did,
“Away with you,
for I shall worship the Lord God
and serve only him.”
AMEN

Begotten?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
February 3, 2008

Begotten?
Exodus 24:12-18
Matthew 17:1-9

Begotten.
It is not a word we use in regular conversation.
It’s one of those old-fashioned words that
has slipped into history,
along with words like gainsay,
or vouchsafe.
or perforce,
or forsooth.

Begotten --
from the word “beget”.
One of those uniquely “biblical” words.
Begotten: a word that sounds awkward,
and yet, there it is, at the very heart of the Nicene Creed
the affirmation of faith we used
to begin our service.
The Affirmation that is the very first
in our church’s Book of Confessions.

Using the words of the Creed
we say what we believe:
that Jesus was “eternally begotten from the Father…
begotten, not made.”

Sounds deceptively simple.
After all, we take on faith our understanding of the Trinity:
God in three persons:
God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit;
God the Creator, God the Redeemer, God the Sustainer.

Yet what we take on faith,
words that we say almost by rote,
without even thinking about them,
were written only after centuries of debate and argument.
The very word “begotten” is a word that
carries with it a great deal of baggage
from the early years of the church.

Go back to the days of Jesus’ ministry
when he walked with his disciples.
Did any of them really understand who we was?
Even Peter, who had the opportunity to see the glory of God
in Jesus on that mountain top
in the story of the Transfiguration,
still denied knowing Jesus following his arrest,
and then hid with the rest of the disciples
following Jesus’ crucifixion.
They struggled to try to figure out how the man Jesus
could also be something more than a man,
the Son of God,
divine!
The question would have confounded any of us
had we seen him, heard him,
even walked with him:
how could Jesus, who was so clearly a man,
be divine as well?
And if he was divine,
did that mean there were now two gods to worship,
rather than one?

The debate grew in the years following the crucifixion
as the followers of Jesus Christ grew in number and spirit
even in the face of persecution, arrest,
and the threat of death.
The turning point came in the early years of the fourth century
when the emperor Constantine was baptized as a Christian.
He brought Christianity out of the shadows,
into the open.
But with the new openness came a torrent of questions,
which had gone for centuries
without satisfactory answers or resolutions.

Was Jesus human?
Was he human in part,
or all of him?
Was he divine?
Was he divine in part, or all of him?
Was he human for a while,
and then divine at some point in time?
If Jesus was divine
was there a danger of slipping back to polytheism,
worshiping more than one God?
Hadn’t the Lord God made clear in the Commandments,
that we were to have no other gods before him?

Constantine stepped into this fray in the year 325
when he summoned the church leaders from throughout
the Mediterranean basin to come to Nicaea,
a town in what is now Turkey.
Constantine paid the travel expenses
of more than 300 bishops and other church leaders
to come from Asia, Northern Africa,
Greece, Romae and Judah to gather
in what became known as the Council at Nicaea.

The august body of spiritual, faithful, church leaders
gathered and began their conversation and debate.
They argued: they argued loudly, vigorously, and
often with more than little anger.
But the end result was the Creed that we call
the Nicene Creed.
In the Creed, the Council agreed that Jesus and God
were one and the same, of one substance,
that Jesus was begotten,
not made, not created,
but co-eternal with God.

The Council and the Creed did not bring an end to the arguing.
Even as they agreed on God and Jesus as being
of the same substance, one substance,
church leaders and theologians still struggled
with many other issues, including
trying to figure out how to understand
the humanity and the divinity of Christ.

The transfiguration story is one of those texts
that muddles things more than it clarifies:
Did Jesus go up the mountain fully human
and come down fully divine?
The word that we translate as “transfiguration”
comes from the Greek word “metamorphosis”,
a word that suggests
a complete and total change,
from one state to another.
So that would seem to be a logical conclusion
from the Transfiguration story:
that it was at that moment,
on that mountain top,
that Jesus went from being
human to being divine.

This puzzled and baffled the best and the brightest
theologians in the second, third, fourth centuries:
“how can the immutable, eternal God
be joined to a mutable, historical man”?
(Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity, 252)

The issue wasn’t resolved until half-way through
the fifth century, the year 451,
126 years after Nicaea
when yet another council of church leaders convened,
this time at Chalcedon.
At the meeting’s end they declared that Jesus was both
fully human and fully divine:
“”Our Lord Jesus Christ is one and the same God,
perfect in divinity,
and perfect in humanity,
true God and true human…
of one substance with the Father in his divinity…”

No explanation, simply a statement of faith,
“this we believe”,
this we take on faith.

The very nature of faith means that there are some things
that we will simply not fully comprehend
We take things on faith, not on proof.
That’s sometimes hard to do,
but as we will say in a few minutes
in our Great Prayer of Thanksgiving
in the liturgy for the Lord’s Supper,
“great is the mystery of faith.”

What exactly happened to Jesus on that mountaintop?
We may never fully understand.
Was it the same thing as Moses’ mountain-top
experience more than a thousand years earlier?
Do you remember that when he came down from the
mountain the first time
with the Ten Commandments cradled in his arms,
his face was flush with rage
when he found the Israelites worshiping the golden idol.
He then went back up the mountain a second time
and came down with another set of Tablets
and this time, when he came back down
his face radiated with the glory of God.

We will experience a transfiguration, a transformation
in just a moment
when we gather at the Lord’s Table.
Ordinary bread and ordinary grape juice will be
transformed, transfigured,
by the power of the Holy Spirit.
The bread and the juice will look the same;
they’ll taste the same,
and yet they will not be the same.
The bread and the juice will become by the power of God
and in way known only to God,
a meal that will nourish us spiritually,
filling us in a way a table groaning with food never could.
Great is the mystery of faith!

So come to this table.
Come to this table in faith.
Come to this able in awe,
Come to this table in response to the invitation
of our Lord Jesus Christ,
our Lord begotten, not made,
the one who is the Word made flesh
the grace of God,
the one who is God, our Emmanuel.
Come to this table in the company of brothers and sisters,
in the company of all the saints,
and in the company of
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Yes, great is the mystery of faith!
AMEN