What Have You Learned?

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
June 8, 2008

What Have You Learned?
Ezekiel 2:1-3:3
Luke 12:49-53

It’s hot, it’s muggy,
it’s the beginning of summer,
the time of year when we want to slow things down.
So I think it is the perfect time to… take a quiz!
Find a pencil and take your bulletin:
did you notice the extra space we provided
for you to write down your answers?

Ready? Here we go with the first question:
Why are we called Presbyterians?
What’s the meaning of the word?
Does it have to do with our theology and what we believe?

Second question:
How many sacraments do we have in the Presbyterian Church?
What are they?
Can you name something that is not a sacrament for us,
but is in the Roman Catholic Church?

Here’s the third question:
How many books are there in the Bible?
How many in the Old Testament?
How many in the New Testament?
If you attended a service in Roman Catholic Church,
would their pew Bible be the same as ours?
Would it have the same number of books in it,
or would you find a different number?

Question four:
We speak of the Old Testament as the Hebrew Bible.
If you went to a Jewish synagogue and looked at their Scriptures
would you find the same books that we have in our Old Testament?
Would the order be the same?

Five: We have two books that together make up
the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA),
the church of which we are a part.
Can you name each Book?

The sixth question is easy!
In the story of Noah and the Flood,
what was the name of Noah’s wife?

Question seven:
In which gospels can we find stories of Jesus’ birth,
the Christmas stories?
Are the stories all the same?
Do the shepherds and the three kings appear in all the stories?

Question eight:
Dance has been part of how we worship and praise God
since the days of King David more than 3,000 years ago.
In fact King David himself once led the nation in dancing with joy.
What was his reason for dancing with such enthusiasm?

Nine:
How many Psalms are there in the Book of Psalms?

Here’s your last question:
Here’s a verse from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians,
"Women should be silent in the churches.
For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate,
as the law also says.
If there is anything they desire to know,
let them ask their husbands at home.
For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”
(1 Cor. 14:34ff)
Do we read this verse, as well as the rest of the Bible,
as the literal word of the Lord?
Or is this another word we use rather than “literal”?

We Presbyterians have a history of being people of the book.
people who study so we can learn and grow in faith.
Learning has been so important to us that
historically the pastor in a Presbyterian Church
has been referred to as the Teaching Elder,
a term that had fallen out of use,
but appears to be coming back into favor.

Jesus was often called Rabbi,
a Hebrew word that means “teacher”.
I teach because Jesus taught,
and teaches us still.
I also teach because there is no better way to learn.

I teach when I preach each Sunday.
A sermon is the interpreted word of the Lord.
When a minister prepares a sermon,
he begins by learning what the biblical text
he is preaching on is all about.
This is called “exegesis”
which means analyzing the text,
studying it, and learning.
We read the text, along with the passages
that appear right before and right after,
to learn about the context.
We check other translations to see if there are differences;
we often will go back to the original Greek or Hebrew
to see how it was originally written.
Presbyterian ministers have to show a working knowledge
of ancient Hebrew and Greek in order to be ordained.
We will read commentaries from scholars
and dig into the history and the culture at that time and place.
And of course, we look to God to guide us
by the Holy Spirit as we are doing our work.
A standard rule of thumb for most ministers is that
we should expect to put in an hour of learning and preparation
for each minute we expect to preach.

We do all this to help us all understand the word as it comes to us
through the mouths and pens of prophets and apostles,
through the recorded history,
through poetry and song.
We do all this because the Bible demands it.

My teaching isn’t limited to Sunday mornings
in the pulpit, of course.
I also teach in other settings throughout the year.
Two Bible study groups,
the Confirmation Class,
and other occasional classes throughout the year.
Add it all up, and I spend about 30 hours every week
teaching, learning, and preparing to teach.

Learning has been woven into the fabric of the Presbyterian Church
throughout its history.
The very notion of Sunday School developed
within the Presbyterian church
and it was a Presbyterian who established
the American Sunday School Union
in the early part of the 19th century.
Presbyterians have established dozens of colleges
over the centuries;
Princeton University began its storied history
as a small Presbyterian school called
the College of New Jersey back in 1746.
In 1812 it split off its divinity school
as Princeton Theological Seminary,
which will celebrate its 200th anniversary in 4 years.

Here in our church, we take teaching and learning seriously,
from our Sunday School offerings,
through our Adult Education classes.
One of the areas where we hope to have an Associate Pastor
devote a portion of his or her time,
in addition to working with our Youth,
would be to help develop and lead
more Adult Education offerings.

Next week we will change our worship schedule for the summer.
I have to be honest here: I don’t like the idea
of changing times for worship in the summer.
Sunday is the Sabbath, the Lord’s Day,
52 Sundays a year,
and we should honor that
with a consistent time for worship.
Adapting God to fit our schedules
so we can get on with other activities
just doesn’t seem to be the right or faithful thing to do.
But beyond that, moving the worship time from 11 to 10
squeezes out the education hour for the summer,
squeezes out an important time for us to keep learning,
especially for Adult Education offerings.

We learn so we can understand,
and in understanding,
as you hear me often pray,
grow in faith, obedience and love.
We learn so we can understand even the more difficult
passages we hear in the Bible.

The second lesson, the passage we heard from Luke.
is a terribly difficult passage.
Last week we learned how Jesus calls us
to love even our enemies,
and now this week we hear him saying,
“I came to bring fire to the earth,
and how I wish it were already kindled!...
Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth?
No I tell you, but rather, division!”
In Matthew’s version of this story,
Jesus says he has come not to bring peace,
but the sword!

What are we to do with this?
How can Jesus say in one place,
“blessed are the peacemakers
for they will be called children of God”
(Matthew 5:9)
and then in another say he’s come to wreak havoc?

Let’s start with Jesus’ talk about fire.
What is the purpose of the fire?
Is it to bring destruction?
Is there a violent intent to it?
Go back the beginning of Luke’s gospel
back to when John the Baptizer
was telling the children of Israel
that while he baptized with water,
another greater than he was coming,
one who would baptize with
“the Holy Spirit and fire”
Luke 3:16
The fire is a not a destructive fire;
it is the refiner’s fire
designed to purify,
to burn out the ungodly parts of a person
so that the good and the godly can radiate through.

In our Bible Study groups we have from time to time
read from texts outside the Bible
including apocryphal gospels,
The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas
records Jesus as saying,
“Whoever is near me is near fire.”
(Gospel of Thomas, 82)
near the refiner’s fire,
and not a destructive fire.

Now, what do we do with Jesus’ words about division?
Again, how do we reconcile this
with his teaching that we are to love our neighbors as ourselves?
Is he trying to break up our homes?
No, of course not!
He is reminding us is that following him
requires commitment,
such a strong commitment that if others in our family
get in the way,
we may need to turn away from them
so that we can turn fully to Christ,
Following Jesus comes before everything else.

How many different ways does Jesus say this:
"Let the dead bury their own dead," (Matt. 8:22)
"Sell all your possession and give your money to the poor”
(Mark 10:21)
"No, you cannot go back to say goodbye to your family
before you follow me." (Luke 9:62)
In each instance, Jesus uses hyperbole,
exaggerated teaching, to make his point so clear
that we cannot help but understand.

Following Jesus is not easy, it is hard work.
It isn’t a pleasant walk down a country road on a 70 degree day,
a soft breeze blowing at our backs.
Eugene Peterson paraphrases Jesus’ teaching perfectly:
“Do you think I came to smooth things over
and make everything nice?
Not so!
I’ve come to disrupt and confront.
I have come to change everything.”
(The Message, Luke 12)
“If you don’t go all the way with me,
through thick and thin,
you don’t deserve me.”
(The Message, Matthew 10)

You are probably familiar with the list of
the Seven Deadly Sins.
If I asked you where in the Bible we can find the list
would you know where to look?
The answer is that there is no list in the Bible.
It was Gregory the Great, a sixth century pope,
who devised the list,
which was later immortalized in Dante’s Divine Comedy.
One of the sins was sloth.
Now sloth is thought of as laziness,
the feeling that overwhelms us when
both the temperature and humidity race past 90.
But the word as it was used by Gregory
referred to spiritual apathy, spiritual indifference,
an unwillingness to do what was needed
to follow faithfully our Lord Jesus Christ.

Jesus’ difficult teachings were aimed at this spiritual sloth,
spiritual apathy,
spiritual summer vacations.
Jesus reminds us again and again
that with him it is all or nothing.

Summer is here and with it comes a tendency to let things go.
But don’t let your learning take a holiday.
Don’t become slothful in your spiritual journey.
The question really is not “what have you learned?”
The question is rightly,
“what are you learning?”
Work on your learning throughout the summer.
If you’d like help or suggestions, just ask.
Here’s a first step:
I won’t give you the answers to the quiz.
Instead, make time this week to find the answers.
We will print them in next Sunday’s bulletin.

Keep learning, keep growing.
Start with the Bible;
You don’t have to take in the words
the way Ezekiel did: that was a metaphor.
But when you read, you will find them “sweet as honey”.

What God wants us to do is learn.
Learn of me, says our Lord.
Learn with me;
Learn from me;
Learn: Fall,
Winter,
Spring,
and yes, Summer, too.
AMEN