No Worries

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
May 25, 2008

No Worries
Psalm 131
Matthew 6:24-34

The gospel reading is probably as familiar to you
as the reading we heard last week,
the reading from Ecclesiastes:
“for everything there is a season
and a time for everything under heaven.”
Jesus is speaking;
Jesus is teaching.
His lesson is clear:
no parables to try to decipher,
no riddles, no rules, no laws.
Simply: don’t worry.
Don’t worry about anything;
trust in the Lord.
God will look after you,
and watch over you.
So do not worry.
This sounds so wonderful,
so comforting.
To know that we can go through life
without a worry.

The problem is, we don’t buy it.
We don’t buy it for a number of reasons.

First and foremost, there is something about us that makes us
quick to worry, quick to be anxious.
Go back more than 3,000 years
to the time of Moses,
the time when Moses led the children of Israel
out of Egypt, out of slavery,
away from more than 400 years of bondage,
off to freedom in the promised land.
Did the children rejoice in God’s goodness?
No: they were barely past the gates of the city
when they began to worry,
began to be concerned about their safety,
their welfare, their comfort.
Time and time again God provided for them,
but nothing seemed to chase worry from their minds,
anxious words from their lips.
They spent the next 40 years worrying their way
to the promised the land.

In book after book in the Bible
we find that Worry and Anxiety
continued to be constant companions
for virtually all God’s children.
And now, more than 3,000 year later,
we still worry, still find anxiety gnawing at us
in countless ways.

Who doesn’t worry?
I have racked up lots of worry-hours over the years.
When I was in college, I worried about my grades,
in the same way our young folks do now.
When I finally finished all my post-graduate work,
I worried about getting a job;
and once I got my first job,
I worried about whether I’d be any good at it.
And of course, I always worried about money.

But Jesus is teaching us such a wonderfully simple lesson:
If you put your trust in the Lord,
then you will have nothing to worry about.
Trust in the Lord;
Have faith in the Lord;
Do not worry;
Fear not.

We hear those words,
we know them,
and we are quick to proclaim,
“we are men and women of faith,
and we do put our trust in the Lord.”
But then we are just as quick to give words to worry
about rising gas prices, and falling home values;
the economy and jobs;
the health and wellbeing of our children;
how to look after aging parents;
whether we will have enough for retirement;
We don’t deny; we can’t deny:
We worry.

And still, Jesus responds,
“Don’t worry;
Fear not.”
We are inclined to say to Jesus,
“that’s so easy for you to say;
you didn’t have a mortgage;
you weren’t the one trying to raise a family,
or look after elderly parents,
or find a new job.”

And Jesus still says, “don’t worry;
Fear not.
God is with you.”

Jesus sounds almost naïve in saying this,
as though he did not have a clue as to how the world works.
In our Confessions, we say with confidence
that Jesus was fully human and fully divine,
but here it does seem that
the human side of him has gone soft
and failed to grasp just how stressful life can be.

But Jesus is right,
we should not worry;
we should trust in the Lord,
put our faith in God.
Where we struggle with this
is that we think a life free of worries,
means a life free of problems.
But Jesus never makes any such promise.

Life comes at us with all its ups and downs;
illness, financial concerns, marriages that fall apart;
jobs that are lost, tree limbs that fall on cars,
these things happen;
life happens.
God doesn’t make a promise
that there will be no tornadoes
nor floods,
nor earthquakes.

What God does promise is the he will be with us always,
walking with us,
in bad times as well as the good,
especially in the bad times.
That’s the very essence of the most well-known Psalm,
Psalm 23:
“even though I walk through
the Valley of the shadow of Death,
you are with me.”
The Psalmist, even in the most dire of situations
feels such a strong sense of intimacy with God,
such a powerful sense of assurance,
that he didn’t say, “God is with me,”
or “He is with me.”
No, it is so much more intimate,
so much more assured: “you are with me.”
The Psalmist was still in the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
surely a place he did not want to be in,
a place that he was eager as can be to get out of.
But he had a quiet sense of assurance
that God was with him,
even there.

The psalmist in our First Lesson learned the same lesson.
He had calmed and quieted himself,
and put his hope and trust in the Lord,
“from this time on and forevermore.”
Come what may.
He had no worries.

Both Psalmists understood that there is no such thing
anywhere on the earth,
anywhere in life,
that could be called a “God-forsaken place”,
for God forsakes no place and no person.

We need never worry because our trust is in the Lord,
our faith is in the Lord,
our hope is in the Lord,
Hope is the very foundation of the gospel,
the very foundation of the message
our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us.
Think of how life would be if we had no hope:
no hope.
Dante Alighieri, the great 13th century Italian poet,
imagined that the sign over the portal
that led to Hell read,
“Abandon all hope, you who enter here.”
(Inferno, Canto 3.9)
Abandon all hope
because we’d be completely severed from God.

But with God, no situation is hopeless.
Which is why we need never worry.
For God is present.
That’s not a naïve statement,
it is statement grounded in the deepest faith.

Ever since Linda Lindamood,
the director of our Early Learning Center,
announced her intention step down from her post
so that she can go back to school in the Fall
parents, teachers, the ELC Board,
the Session and I have all been worried
and anxious about finding her successor.
And why wouldn’t we be: our Early Learning Center
has been a vital ministry of this church for 40 years,
and has an excellent reputation.
We want to continue our strong ministry
to the children of Manassas.
It is so easy to say, as I have been saying,
“Let’s not worry,
God will call a new person to that position.”
But that doesn’t answer the questions any of us have
here and now:
“yes, but will God let us know before September?
What if we don’t have a director in place before school starts?
Who will do all the work that comes with a new school year?”

Responding, “don’t worry” ends up sounding
a bit too much like a platitude --
and yet that is just what Jesus would say to us:
Don’t worry.
We still have to go through all the painstaking and
time-consuming work of doing the search for the new director.
That’s the only way we will be able to discern God’s will.
The harder part of our job will be to trust God,
to work on his timetable
and not to worry.

Ten years ago I worked as a staff chaplain at a hospital
in Somerville, New Jersey.
All of us who were new to the chaplaincy program
were filled with worry as we prepared to serve
patients, families, doctors, nurses and staff.
We worried that we’d find ourselves in a traumatic situation
and not have just the right Bible verse,
the well-crafted words of prayer to soothe and comfort.
What we learned was that the ministry
we were about to embark on
was not a ministry of prayer or the Word,
as much as it was simply a ministry of presence:
just being with someone,
our very presence as chaplains
a reminder that God was with them,
even in their pain and their trauma.

Do you remember how God answered Moses’ question,
as Moses stood by the Burning Bush and asked
by what name he should refer to God?
God responded, “I am who I am”
(Exodus 3:13)
God did not say,
“I am the great and powerful Yahweh,
who shall smite those who don’t bow down before me.”
God simply said, refer to me as “I am”
for God is and always will be,
And God’s self-revelation
and self-expression of love that is Jesus Christ
reinforced this teaching.
“I am”, the present God, always present.
In all our lives, fair weather or foul.

Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of the classic book
“When Bad Things Happen to Good People”,
wrote in a later book
that as we grow and mature in faith
we learn that God is not there to protect us from pain and loss,
but to keep pain and loss from defining our lives.
(Harold Kushner, The Lord is My Shepherd, 98)

That’s a subtle lesson and it often takes a long time
in our faith journeys for us to grow to the point
where we can accept and understand that.
God is love, not protection,
and, as Paul taught us,
“love bears all things,
hopes all things,
and endures all things.”
Look closely at Paul’s life:
he traveled constantly, often at great risk to himself;
frequently had no idea where his next meal would come from
or even where he would find fresh water.
he was often arrested, thrown into jail, and beaten;
it is likely that one beating was so severe
that it left him permanently disabled.
Still, Paul persevered,
never worrying,
his faith, hope and trust in the Lord.

Life is filled with problems,
from the small and the petty
to the overwhelming and even-life threatening.
But God is there with us, walking with us,
nurturing us,
guiding us if we give him the chance.
The promise that we read in Deuteronomy is true:
underneath us are the everlasting arms.

I find that with every passing year I worry less.
Part of that may be due simply to growing in age:
I hope I have grown
and will continue to grow in wisdom
and not sweat the small stuff.
But I think most of it is due to my faith:
my trust in the Lord.
Yes, I still worry about things:
but I know all I need to do
whenever I get myself worked up
is close my eyes and say,
“Lord, are you with me?”
And the answer will always be,
“I am”
AMEN

The Times of Your Life

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
May 18, 2008
Confirmation Sunday

The Times of Your Life
Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
John 8:12

The reading from Ecclesiastes is one of the most familiar
passages in the Bible.
I grew up singing the words back in the 1960s,
when I was in Confirmation Class:
the folk singer Pete Seeger had set the words to music
and the rock group The Byrds made a hit out of it
with their song, “Turn, Turn, Turn”.

“For everything there is a season,
and a time for every matter under heaven.”
That’s the reality of life for all God’s children.
There is life and there is death.
There is good and there is evil.
There is peace and there is war.

The word Ecclesiastes is Latin,
a loose translation of the original Hebrew title of this book,
which was Qoheleth, or “Teacher”.
This book was a lesson from a teacher to his students,
students who were probably
about the same age as our Confirmands.
The book itself is part of the collection of books
in the Old Testament that we refer to as “wisdom literature”.
And there is a great deal of wisdom in these eight verses.

There is a time to be born
and a time to die.
That’s reality.
Each of us is born,
and each of us will in turn die:
Some from old age,
others from illness,
and still others from accidents.
The fact that our lives on this earth are finite
reminds us, even when we are young,
that each day is a gift given us by God,
a gift to be used in service to God.

There is a time to plant –
that time is right now - spring time,
the reawakening of God’s earth all around us.
And then comes the time to reap the harvest.
But I am guessing that Qoheleth, the teacher,
taught his students that
there is no such thing as instant gratification,
that reaping doesn’t follow planting
without a great deal of tending, watering,
feeding, weeding, and nurturing.
Whatever seeds we plant require patience and work
in order for there to be time of reaping.
And we are forever planting seeds:
seed of change, seeds of new ideas,
seeds of hope, seeds of peace,
seeds of love.

The next stanza is a tough one
for us as disciples of Christ:
There is a time to kill;
Of course there is a time to heal,
but a time to kill?
How do we reconcile this with the Sixth Commandment,
that we shall not kill?
And how do we reconcile this with Christ’s calling us to peace?
Perhaps the teacher was referring just to animals:
that there was a time to kill them for food, or for sacrifice.
But the reality was that war was all too common in the centuries
that led from Moses to Jesus.
Perhaps the teacher was thinking that
there was a time to kill enemies of the Lord God.
Certainly that is not what Jesus teaches us, though.
One of the most important lessons
I hope the Confirmands learned this year
is that the Bible is filled with difficult lessons
that require us to work them out.
The Bible is not a rule book with passages that we can point to
and say, “oh the meaning is clear.”
We read the Bible,
praying for guidance by the Holy Spirit,
and then we talk about it,
study it,
and try to learn from it,
because the BIble is a living book,
and it is always teaching us something new.

We’ve got a similar struggle with the next passage:
that there is a time to break down and time to build up.
Paul taught us that all things should be done to build up,
so what do we do with this verse?
I read it as reminding us that there is a time
to tear down the old, to turn from old ways,
ways that no longer work,
and think about new ways, new ideas.
We don’t like doing that:
we tend to be far more comfortable
with the ways things are, the status quo;
we don’t like change.
Of course, there are times when we are called to
build on the foundation that is already there,
but we must always remember that the Holy Spirit
is forever blowing through our lives
and the Spirit often is there
to blow away the stale and worn
and make way for the new.

Last week we talked about the need to break down
the barriers of sexism, and racism.
We need to break down the barriers of homophobia
and xenophobia, the fear of foreigners and foreign things.
We are called to break down barriers that trap people in poverty,
or in hunger, or in joblessness, or hopelessness.
We are called by Jesus to break down any barriers
that get in the way of our building up God’s Kingdom.

I have found that with age,
I have come more and more to appreciate the importance
of the lesson that there is a time to weep:
There is a time for feeling deep emotions.
We Presbyterians, especially those of us,
with Scottish heritage, struggle with this,
as though we are proud of the moniker,
“God’s frozen chosen”.
But there is a time to weep:
to weep for a loss, yes,
but there is also a time to weep for beauty,
for joy,
for love,
for the sound of a baby crying.

In the same way there is a time to mourn
when we suffer any loss,
not just when a loved one dies,
but when a friend moves away,
when a relationship ends,
when a job is lost.
Over time the Spirit helps us to pick ourselves up
and carry on with life.
We go on, filled with cherished memories,
and eventually find ourselves
once again ready and able to dance.

How should we read the next stanza:
“There is a time to throw away stones,
and a time to gather stones together”?
This is more than reminding us that there is a time
for clearing a field of stones
so we can plant it,
and other times to gather stones to build a building,
a wall, or a well.
I read in this passage a reminder of our responsibility
as stewards of God’s creation that there is nothing wasted
in God’s earth,
and that we are to use wisely
all that God has entrusted to us –
and that nothing should be wasted.

There is a time to embrace
and time to refrain from embracing.
In our multi-cultural society,
I think there is a powerful lesson here
of the need for us to learn about other people and their cultures,
to learn that in some cultures an embrace or a hug
might be welcome,
while in others an embrace is not welcome,
a handshake is not welcome,
even looking at someone in the eye is not welcome.
We are called not to impose our own cultures on other people
and other societies,
but to learn about other traditions
and respect them, so we will know when to embrace,
and when not to embrace.

The next two passages work together:
A time to seek, and a time to lose;
A time to keep
and a time to throw away;
There is a time to seek new things and new ideas
but then there is a time to let go of things,
ideas, sometimes even people
if they are not helping you grow in faith.

There is a time to keep silent
and time to speak.
We talked this year about how we sin not only
in the things we say and do,
but also in the things we fail to say
or fail to do.
When we stand idly by without taking action
and without speaking out
when there is wrong right before us,
we are committing the sin of cowardice, of weakness.
We have a responsibility to speak up and speak out,
even if we what we say is unpopular,
even if we find ourselves in a minority,
even if bullies try to snuff our words and actions.
History is filled with too many stories of
hideous wrongs done as people stood silent,
whispering, “someone should say something,
or do something.”

And of course there is a time to love,
that is the life Jesus calls us to:
loving God with all our hearts and souls,
and loving our neighbors as ourselves.
But is there a time for hate?
Jesus certainly does not teach this.
But perhaps there is, if it is a hatred of things
that get in the way of God’s love, God’s mercy,
God’s righteousness,
Christ’s grace.
There may be times when we need to feel hate,
and outrage to help us summon up the courage
not to stand by silently in the face of an obvious wrong.

And, unhappily there are times for war,
It is fitting, however, that the Teacher ends with peace
for that is God’s hope for us,
and the life Christ calls us to.
It is the life our Confirmands have chosen
in professing their faith in Jesus Christ:
It is the life each of us has chosen
in our own professions of faith in Jesus Christ.

In an article I read the other day, a Methodist pastor,
Kelly Lyn Logue, put together another pairing
that should be a part of the times of our lives.
She says that as we go though life
we should have times that are “results-oriented”
where our goal is to accomplish something:
to feed the hungry, to pray, to teach, to sing.
But there should be others times that she says should be
“transformation oriented”,
when we quiet ourselves
and open ourselves more completely and thoroughly
to the Light of the world,
so that we might never walk in darkness.
(Christian Century, April 22, 2008, p. 19)

Let us welcome our newest members
as they join this community of faith
in this joyous time of their lives.
Let us welcome our newest brothers and sisters
with a warm embrace.
Let us welcome them with words of encouragement and love:
In the words Paul spoke to the Philippians:
“Rejoice in the Lord always; again, I say Rejoice....
And may the peace of God,
the peace which surpasses all understanding
guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus
this very special day, and always.”
Amen

Deborah? Phoebe?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
May 11, 2008
Pentecost and Mothers Day

Deborah? Phoebe?
Judges 4:1-10
Romans 16:1-2

A woman as judge and prophet in the nation of Israel?
Who had ever heard of such a thing?
Who was this Deborah,
and how in the world had she become a leader
in ancient Israel?

This was more than 3,000 years ago,
back when men ruled.
Men were supposed to be judges, not women.
The structure of ruling patriarchs began with Moses,
and then the 70 Elders who ruled with him.
Before Moses died, he anointed Joshua to succeed him.
The Book of Judges begins with men –
men, not women.
Wasn’t a woman’s job to look after the home,
prepare the meals,
and raise the children?
“Be fruitful and multiply”:
that was a woman’s job, wasn’t it?
Surely it was a man’s job to judge,
a man’s job to rule,
a man’s job to lead?

But, wait….. let’s think about this for a moment:
It is true that Moses anointed Joshua to succeed him,
but who picked Joshua to succeed Moses?
Moses? The Seventy Elders?
No: it was God who picked Moses,
and God who picked Joshua.
It was God who raised up each judge,
and it was God who called Deborah,
who picked Deborah to serve as judge
and prophet to Israel.

And why not?
After all, doesn’t the Bible begin with:
“God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them,
male and female he created them,
And God blessed them… (Gen. 1:27)

Did you forget that there are two different
creation stories in Genesis?
That one is the first one,
the one we learn before we get to the more familiar story
of Adam and his rib.

God selected Deborah to judge and to serve as his prophet.
Indeed, Deborah was as much God’s choice and selection
as Barak was God’s selection
to serve as the military leader of Israel.

Among a people where faith comes first,
the gender of a ruler should not matter,
because among a people where faith comes first,
everyone knows that it is God who gives each person
unique skills and characteristics,
and God who calls each person to use those skills --
use those skills to do God’s work.
Gender should not matter.
If God calls a woman to judge, why not?
If God chose, as he did, to lead Sisera,
the leader of the opposing army,
to death at the hand of woman,
isn’t that within God’s power?
Of course it is.

Gender should not matter to us,
because gender does not matter to God.
God is neither male nor female,
and yet God is both male and female:
our loving Father in heaven,
and yet also one who will,
as God says through the prophet Isaiah,
comfort us as a “mother comforts her child”.
(Isaiah 66:13)
Christ himself speaks of his desire to gather the children of Israel
“as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”
(Matthew 23:37)

If we look closely, we can find countless examples of women
serving in leadership roles throughout the Bible.
The stories are often fleeting and short,
but they are there,
if we just look hard enough.
Could the reference to Phoebe
in our second lesson be any shorter?
Two sentences at the end of Paul’s letter to the church at Rome.
We don’t know any more about Phoebe
than we know about Lydia,
the seller of purple who helped establish the Church in Philippi.
But even in those two short sentences we learn that
Phoebe was a leader of the church.

Paul used the term, “deacon”,
which meant a “leader in the church”,
as it does today.
Some scholars suggest in Paul's day there might have
even been a ministerial element to the position.
It was Phoebe who carried the letter
that Paul wrote to the Romans.
She was with him in Corinth, where he wrote the letter,
and from there she went to Rome,
while Paul went south to Jerusalem.

Phoebe and Deborah were women of faith,
the seed of faith planted firmly in their hearts
by God through the Holy Spirit.
And they responded to their faith;
responded to God’s call to serve.
It didn’t matter to God that they were women.
for they had been created in God’s image
in exactly the same way every man had.

Do you remember the story of Jesus and the Woman of Samaria?
That’s in the fourth chapter of the gospel according to John.
Our Year of the Bible group read the story this past week.
Jesus stopped by a well;
it was hot, he was tired and thirsty and wanted a drink of water.
His disciples had gone off to town to find some food,
and while Jesus waited by the well for their return
a Samaritan woman came to draw water.
Jesus spoke to her, which at first may not seem unusual.
But the Samaritans and the Jews
looked upon one another with contempt,
viewing one another as enemies.
When the disciples returned from town with their food,
they were horrified and amazed by what they saw.
But it is fascinating to read what John recorded
as the greater concern for the disciples:
not that their Master was speaking to a Samaritan;
but rather, “they were astonished
that Jesus was speaking with a woman.”
(John 4:27)

Why were they astonished that Jesus was speaking with a woman?
Wasn’t she a child of God, created in God’s image,
just as they were?
The reaction of the disciples reflected the culture
in which they lived, the prevailing way of thinking.
Jesus, of course, didn’t pay any attention
to society’s artificial rules;
what mattered to him
was doing God’s will and following God’s law.

When Jesus stopped to rest at the home of Mary and Martha,
Martha tended to her chores in the kitchen,
while Mary sat at Jesus’ feet to learn.
Jesus did not shoo away Mary
telling her to go help her sister in the kitchen,
No, just the opposite: he chided Martha
for being too concerned with domestic chores
to focus on God’s will and God’s way.
“There is need of only one thing.
Mary has chosen the better part.”
(Luke 10:42)

Men are not from Mars any more than women are from Venus.
Yes, we are different in many ways.
Just watch reruns of Home Improvement, with Tim Allen,
and you’ll see the colorful differences laid out
not only in comical ways, but thoughtful ways.
I will say, I have never been able to explain adequately
to my sisters or my wife why men find so much pleasure
in the Tool department of Sears.

But for us as children of God and disciples of Christ,
what we know is that men and women are equally equipped
for the tasks to which God calls us
including, as in Deborah and Phoebe’s cases, leadership.
We should never be surprised when a woman rises up to become
a principal in a school,
editor of a newspaper,
or head of a company.
It is our society that has put restrictions on women;
not God, not Jesus.
The few passages in the Bible that seem demeaning to women
reflect the time in which they were written,
the social constructs and mores.

Back in 1995, before I entered seminary,
when I worked at The Economist in New York City
as editor and head of their management
and finance publications group
we produced a study on leadership.
Our focus was on the business world
and we wanted to look at various styles of leadership,
and dig into the question, were leaders born or made.
If leaders were made,
we wanted to learn what businesses
were doing or could do
to train and develop more effective leaders.
Back in the late 1980s and early 90s leadership
was the hot topic for business writers and consultants.

One academic study was being talked about
more than any other study, book or article.
It was entitled simply “Ways Women Lead”.
A professor named Judith Rosener,
who taught at the University of California,
had done an exhaustive study
comparing the natural tendencies of men and women
as they exercised leadership.
What she found was that women were more inclined
to exercise “interactive leadership”:
to work actively “to make their interactions
with their subordinates positive for everyone involved”
(Ways Women Lead, Harvard Business Rev. Nov. 1990)

Put another way, Rosener found that women more than men
encouraged participative management,
rather than trying to emulate men’s preferred style
of command and control.
Women were more adept than men at
leading by example,
leading by involvement,
and leading with encouragement.

Rosener was probably not aware of it,
but what she found was that
women were modeling how Jesus led,
how Jesus leads us,
and how Jesus calls us to lead:
By example, by involvement,
by encouraging.
Teaching us, then sending us out,
confident in the knowledge that the Spirit will guide us
and lead us further.

God created each one of us in his image,
God blessed each of us with different gifts and skills:
and calls us to use our gifts to bring honor and glory to him.
When any of us stands in the way of someone else for any reason,
we are standing in God’s way,
blocking God’s work, and God’s will.

There is no place in God’s world for sexism, or racism
or any kind of ‘ism” that creates barriers,
that stands in God’s way.
Three thousand years ago Barak didn’t say to Deborah,
“I am off to battle,
And since war is a man’s job,
you just stay here under your palm tree.”
He knew that Deborah had been called by God
and so he listened to her,
and followed her directions.
He went so far as to say that
he would only go out to battle if she went too.

Count the women who fill the pages
of both Old and New Testament
in addition to Deborah, Phoebe, Lydia, Mary, Martha --
all there if we only look closely enough.
Each a child of God,
each created in the image of God,
each called to serve God.
Every woman in this church has been created the same way:
every woman called to serve,
and called to lead in ways both small and large.

It seems to me that one of the best gifts
we can give to every mother today
is to remove barriers:
barriers that may have impeded her,
barriers that might impede her daughters
or her granddaughters;
Barriers that get in the way of their responding
to God’s call,
and God’s will.

It is a gift that will cost us no money,
But it will be a gift from the heart,
a gift given in love,
and a gift given in faith.
It would be a gift given from one child of God to another,
a gift that would delight the one we call our Father in heaven,
who is just as much our Mother in heaven,
the One who shelters us
as a hen shelters her brood under her wings.
And it would be a gift that would make clear
that we have heard and followed the words of our Lord:
“There is need of only one thing.
[and we are called to choose] the better part.”
AMEN

Proclaiming Death?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
May 4, 2008

Proclaiming Death?
Isaiah 29:13-14
1 Corinthians 11:26

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup,
you proclaim the Lord’s death,
until he comes.”
That’s what Paul said as he was teaching the Corinthians,
teaching them in particular about the Lord’s Supper.
If the words sound familiar, they should.
You hear me say those words
at the very end of the liturgy we use in the Lord’s Supper,
before we come to the table.

“For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup,
you proclaim the Lord’s death,
until he comes.”
“Proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.”
What is Paul talking about?
Why does he say those words?
What does he mean?
The words sound terribly dark,
especially right before we are about to share
a communal meal.

Didn’t Jesus teach us that when we take the bread
and the cup we are do so simply in remembrance of him?
Why does Paul turn from remembering
to proclaiming,
from Jesus gathered with friends around a table,
to Jesus’ death,
that notorious death on the cross?

If we turn to the very beginning of Paul’s letter,
we find a cryptic clue to Paul’s thinking.
He wrote, “When I came to you brother and sisters,
I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you
in lofty words or wisdom.
For I decided to know nothing among you
except Jesus Christ,
and him crucified.” (1 Cor. 2:1-2)
or as he put it in another part of the letter,
Paul came “to proclaim Christ crucified”.

But what does that mean,
to proclaim Christ crucified?
Especially for us in the Reformed tradition
where we don’t think about preaching the crucified Christ
as much as we think about preaching the
resurrected Christ.
After all, that’s an empty Cross behind me,
not a Cross with Christ’s lifeless body hanging from it.

If we think about preaching the crucified Christ,
isn’t that something we should limit
to Maundy Thursday and Good Friday?
Perhaps Paul was feeling particularly maudlin and morose
when he wrote to the Corinthians.
Paul knew all too well that they were a wild and unruly lot.
Cole Porter’s song “Anything Goes”,
would have been an apt theme
for the people of Corinth.

But what Paul was doing was reminding the Corinthians and us
that there is no Easter without Good Friday.
He was reminding the Corinthians and us
that even as we think of ourselves
as children of the Resurrection, as Easter people,
the resurrection had its beginning in the crucifixion --
in death, an agonizing death.
Christ was hung from the highly effective killing machine
that those two pieces of timber were.
This is the scandal of the cross.

But the crucifixion was the door that led to the resurrection.
The crucifixion and resurrection were of one piece
in God’s astonishing plan,
Did you hear God’s words through the prophet Isaiah,
“I will do amazing things with this people,
shocking and amazing.
The wisdom of the wise shall perish,
and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden.”
(Isaiah 29:14)
Another translation speaks of God doing “astounding things,
with wonder upon wonder”.

God did something truly shocking, amazing and astounding in
Christ’s crucifixion and Resurrection,
for God turned the world upside down;
he completely and utterly transformed the world.
It was such an astonishing act that
we really should mark time not beginning
with Christ’s birth,
but from the moment darkness fell
on that Friday afternoon,
for at that very moment the world was changed forever.
Time all but stopped for those three days
and started when the the world was born anew,
humanity born anew,
on that first Easter.
Death was dead
and we were born to new life.

In proclaiming Christ’s death,
we proclaim death to the old life
so we can more completely embrace the new life in Christ,
the new life with Christ,
and the new life through Christ.
We can more completely embrace the life that
Paul calls the life of the Spirit,
the life to which we have been born
through water and the Spirit.

When we proclaim Christ’s death
we proclaim what Christ died for
and what God raised him for:
for hope for all God’s children,
for mercy, for peace,
for justice, and for righteousness.
In proclaiming Christ’s death,
we proclaim God’s unconditional love for us,
God’s extraordinary gift of grace to us.

In proclaiming Christ’s death,
we remember that Christ calls us to die,
to die to the old ways, and be reborn to new life
to stop chasing the shadows that we think are so important,
shadows that lead to death,
and instead simply follow our Lord in obedience,
on the path to life.

We proclaim Christ’s death as we come to this table,
which is so fitting, for when we come to this table,
we come as we should in God’s new world:
in community, each of us equal before God,
each of us reconciled with one another,
differences and divisions set aside as dead –
or at least so they should be --
enemy not just eating with enemy,
but enemy serving and feeding enemy.
No one with a seat of honor,
rich and poor, young and old,
man and woman, immigrant and native born:
all together, in communion
filled with the Spirit.

Come to this table,
and proclaim Christ’s death.
Come to this table and proclaim Christ’s death
to help you die to the old ways
and embrace more completely
the new life offered you in the resurrection.
Come to this table and proclaim Christ’s death,
remembering that Christ died to put to death
all those things we do that cause death,
all those things we say that cause death:
war and violence, words of hatred or quarreling,
tearing down, withholding love.
And we cause death just as often by things
we fail to say and do.

Professor Luke Powery of Princeton Seminary
has written “The cross that inaugurates the turn of the ages
calls [us] to turn toward God’s ways of being in the world,
…as the future new creation
begins to manifest itself in the present.”
(Luke Powery, “Death Threat”,
Princeton Seminary Bulletin, November 2007, 248.
note: Powery’s sermon inspired this sermon)

God’s astonishing, shocking, and awesome act
in the crucifixion and resurrection
started a new age, a new era,
and we are called to respond.
This is the era when we should beat sword into plowshares
and believe that the wolf will live with lamb,
and the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord.

Come to this table:
For even in the shadow of the Cross,
a new era, a new creation
began to bud, blossom, and bloom
in wonder upon wonder.
“Every time we eat this bread and drink this cup,
we proclaim the saving death of our Risen Lord,
the reconciling death of our Risen Lord,
the life-giving death of our Risen Lord,
until he comes.
AMEN