Sunday, August 31, 2008

Birthday Texts

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
August 31, 2008

Birthday Texts
Romans 12:9-21
1 Corinthians 13:1-13

Vermont is the very definition of the word “pastoral”:
with its green mountains,
its sparkling clear rivers,
its frigid lakes and ponds.
Somehow the sky seems bluer in Vermont,
the pine trees a richer green;
even the bark on the maple trees
seems a warmer brown.
There is something extraordinary
about driving through a state
where signs along the highway
warn you to be alert for moose crossing the road.

For all its pastoral beauty and its tranquility,
Vermont is not a quiet place.
There is a cacophony that goes from sun-up to sun-down,
and then sun-down to sun-up, day in and day out,
the sounds changing, but always there:
the symphony of the birds as the sun rises in the sky;
cows bellowing to farmers to be milked and then fed;
sheep and goats bleating, it seems, just to make noise,
Vermont’s answer to New York City taxicabs.

At night, the crickets sing out their love songs,
the same melody they’ve been singing for millennia.
They sing a song composed by God, of course,
and woven into their very fabric.
I find the bullfrogs most amusing.
Listen to one bullfrog grunting by himself
and it isn’t very musical,
but put a bunch of bullfrogs together around the edge of a pond
and you get nothing less than classic 1950s do-wop.

Even the stars in the sky seem to make noise,
crackling and fizzling like sparklers on the Fourth of July.
If you can catch a glimpse of a comet,
you’re sure to hear a very audible whoosh
as it races across the sky;
it doesn’t matter how many millions of miles distant it might be.

Spend two weeks listening to the sounds of Vermont
and I think you’d have a pretty good idea
of what’s on God’s iPod.

Vacation is a time to Sabbath,
to rest, to relax,
to be renewed and refreshed.
God commands us to Sabbath,
commands us to Sabbath weekly of course,
as he calls us to honor the Lord’s Day and keep it holy.
Just as important, God calls us to rest,
to refrain from the busyness
that fills the other six days of our week.
God knows we need to rest;
God knows everything needs to rest.

We struggle with this, though.
We feel like we have too much to do,
always trying to pack 75 minutes of activity into every hour.
We chafe at speed limits of 65,
when we feel a need to go 80
in order to get to where we need to get
to do the things we need to do.

We even have a tendency to pack our vacations full of activities.
The question that always seems to follow,
“where did you go on your vacation”,
is, “what did you do on your vacation?”

We sabbathed on our vacation,
but we also did things.
We saw a wonderful play at the local Dorset Theatre.
We rode the Alpine slide down the mountain
at Bromley Ski Resort.
We swam in the local marble quarry.
We walked miles of country roads with Cole leading the way.

Of course we shopped!
What’s a vacation without shopping?
I speak rapturously of the Northshire bookstore in Manchester,
which I think is one of the best bookstores
to be found anywhere.
But I probably spent more time and money
at the many different Christmas stores
that are scattered around the Southern Vermont.
I am always fascinated by how different artists,
craftsmen and women
hear the words of Matthew and Luke,
and picture the birth of our Lord in Nativities.

I did one truly effortless thing on my vacation:
I turned the page on another year,
as I marked a birthday.
Two weeks ago I went to bed on a Friday night
a mere 53 years old,
and woke up the next morning to find a 54-year-old
looking at me in the mirror.

Birthdays tend to bring with them memories
and with every passing year
more and more nostalgia.
For some reason, a wave of nostalgia grabbed me hard
more than a month before my birthday,
and I found myself going through my CDs
and the iTunes music website
as I built a library of songs from the 1950s and early 1960s
for my iPod, music we could listen to
on the long drive to and from Vermont.

I assembled a playlist of almost 9 hours worth of oldies,
songs I knew as a youngster and teen,
songs that evoked so many different memories,
songs from artists like The Beatles, the Temptations,
the Dave Clark Five, The Supremes.
In the patter of disc jockeys from those days,
they are the “songs that are off the charts,
but still in our hearts”.

Looking back at those years
when I was a boy listening to the Beatles singing,
“She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”
and the Temptations singing, “My Girl”,
I remember being entranced by a television show called
“Burke’s Law”.
It featured Gene Barry as a captain in a police department.
Imagine that: a television show about police!
But what made this show different
was that Barry was no ordinary cop.
No, he was independently wealthy,
and rode to every crime scene
chauffeured in the back of a luxurious Rolls Royce.

There was something about that that caught me.
I wasn’t impressed by Barry’s mansion,
or his tailored suits,
and age 9 I found the endless stream of beautiful women
who surrounded Barry a nuisance.
No, it was that Rolls Royce, a 1962 Silver Cloud,
that captured my imagination.
I have no idea why, but at that age I thought
“that’s the life for me;
I’d like that some day.”

Of course, as we grow up and mature,
things that grabbed us at one age,
as often as not lose their lustre at a later age.
Paul captured the sentiment so well
in his letter to the Corinthians when he wrote,
“When I was a child, I spoke like a child,
I thought like a child,
I reasoned like a child;
when I became an adult,
I put an end to childish ways.”
(1 Corinthians 13:11)

As we grow older, we do put away childish ways,
or at least so we hope,
as we grow in maturity and wisdom,
as we grow in faith.
And as we grow in wisdom and faith,
we understand that Paul meant
when he wrote that we see in the mirror dimly,
the glass darkened by our immaturity,
our immaturity in years,
and our immaturity in faith.
The glass darkened by the distractions that fill our lives,
by our obsessive busyness,
by our focus on things
that are not the things of God.

But as we grow in mature faith,
the glass becomes clearer and clearer.
We begin to discern those things in life that really matter.
We begin to understand why Paul wrote
that over time, it is faith, hope, and love that abide,
even as everything else fades and turns to dust.

Simply growing another year older
won’t necessarily make us another year wiser, though,
or deepen our faith.
Growing another year older won’t make the glass clearer,
if we don’t work at growing in faith.

Birthdays provide a wonderful time
to reflect on how we are doing
on our faith journeys.
The two lessons we heard make superb birthday texts,
lessons to read, to hear,
to learn from,
to help center us,
refocus,
call us back to where we should be,
remind us of the things that really matter:
remind us that as nice as a chauffeured 1962
Rolls Royce Silver Cloud might be,
that’s not something that will endure.

Frederick Buechner, the wise pastor and and prolific author,
reminds us that “We find by losing.
We hold fast by letting go.
We become something new
by ceasing to be something old.”
(“A Room Called Remember”, 130)
This is to grow in maturity in faith:
that even as we age by the calendar,
by the grace of God in Jesus Christ
we can become new each day
by ceasing to be something old.

We become new by loving one another with mutual affection,
and outdoing one another in showing honor.
The old ways we leave behind include
envy, jealousy, a sense of self-righteousness,
smugness, certainty that we possess truth,
and that others around us don’t,
unless they agree with us.
The old ways we also leave behind include denying
that we are ever envious, jealous,
self-rightous or judgmental.

We become new by persevering in prayer
constantly in conversation with God,
talking to God,
but also spending as much time, maybe even more,
listening to God, discerning God’s will for us.
The old way we leave behind is saying we
just don’t have time to squeeze in prayer in our lives.

We become new by rejoicing in hope,
trusting God,
trusting God utterly and completely with our lives.
And, as I am starting to learn now that I am in my fifties,
trusting God utterly and completely with my death,
even if my hope and prayer is that it is many years away.

We become new by contributing to the needs of the saints,
contributing freely, joyfully, eagerly,
recognizing that all we have comes from God,
and when we give time, talent, or treasure,
we are simply giving back a portion
of what’s been given to us by God,
given to us freely, joyfully and eagerly.

We become new by extending hospitality to strangers,
and there is no better place to start that practice than
here in church.
When was the last time you went up to a person in church
you didn’t know and introduced yourself?
That’s something everyone should do every Sunday.
Our favorite on our long list of excuses
for why we don’t reach out
is “what if I go up to someone only to find out that
he or she has been a member for the past 20 years?
That would be embarrassing!”
Don’t you see: that’s old thinking!
The new thinking is,
if you don’t know them, then they are strangers to you,
and you to them,
so go extend hospitality
because that’s what Jesus calls you to do.
Here’s my challenge: reach out to one new person
after worship today,
and then do it again next Sunday: everyone.
It gets easier each time you do it!

We become new by blessing those who persecute us,
those who we feel threaten us,
those we consider our enemies.
We leave the old ways behind of thinking we
can achieve peace through war,
that we can kill our way to reconciliation.
“Repay no one evil for evil”, says the Lord,
“Leave it to me”, says the Lord,
“Vengeance is mine, not yours”, says the Lord.
“Feed your enemy when he is hungry
give her something to drink when she thirsts”

As we grow in faith and wisdom,
as the glass grows clearer,
we begin to appreciate those things that really matter in life,
those things that will endure.
We may enjoy watching the Olympics,
and appreciate the hard work of the athletes,
the talent, the dedication,
but we know that gold medals do not endure.
We may be excited about the NFL season that’s
just getting started,
but we know that football teams do not endure,
winners or losers.
And as we look ahead to what promises to be
a highly contentious election season,
we know that political parties of every persuasion
do not endure.

Only faith, hope, and love endure,
only faith hope and love abide.
They are gifts each of us receive anew not just on our birthdays,
but every day, always there,
wrapped in bright paper that radiates God’s grace.
Faith, hope, and love.
gifts given us, anew, each day,
through the grace that is Jesus Christ,
God’s way of saying, “Happy Birthday”.
AMEN

Sunday, August 10, 2008

What's That Word?

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

What’s That Word?
Genesis 17:1-8
2 Corinthians 3:1-6

It’s a word that appears more than 300 times in the Bible
in both the Old and New Testament.
It’s a word that sounds weighty,
churchy,
even a bit legalistic.
So it’s no surprise that we don’t pay much attention to it.
It’s not a fun word;
it’s a word that sounds about as exciting as the word,
“homework”.

The word is “covenant”.
Covenant.
We have all heard the word;
we know it’s a Biblical word.
It’s also a legal word, one we may see when we
take out a loan for a home, a car, or school.
But for as many times as we’ve seen the word,
do we really understand it?
Do we really know what it means,
especially as we find it in the Bible?

Look it up in the dictionary, and you’ll find it says
“binding agreement, contract.”
The word comes from a root that means, “agreement”.
Agreement: that suggests that two parties talk about something
and then they come to terms,
they agree: “If you do this, I will do that.”
That’s covenanting with each other,
mutual promises that both agree to,
promises that bind one to the other.

When you make a covenant with another person,
you each look to the other to keep the covenant,
to honor it,
to keep the promises that you made to one another,
the promises that bind you to one another.
A covenant is by its very nature
built on a person’s word, their honor,
their faithfulness, their integrity.
If one party to a covenant doesn’t live up to
his or her end of the agreement,
the covenant falls apart.
Sure, you can always sue the other person,
but the damage has been done, the covenant broken.

The word first appears in the Noah story.
After the flood waters receded
God said to Noah,
“I am establishing my covenant with you
and your descendants after you,
and with every living creature that is with you”
(Gen. 9:8)
The covenant was simple:
God would never cause another flood
to wipe out life on earth.
And God gave Noah and his family,
their descendants, and all living creatures
a sign of the covenant.
Do you remember what it was? The rainbow!

Jump ahead a few chapters in Genesis
to our First Lesson and we find the word again.
This time, God was speaking with Abram
and the covenant was not about floodwaters and rainbows.
This time, the covenant was more intimate,
a covenant that created a relationship between God and Abram:
“I will make my covenant between me and you,
and will make you exceedingly numerous….
You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations…
I will establish my covenant between me and you,
and your offspring after you throughout their generations,
for an everlasting covenant
to be God to you and to your offspring after you…”
(Gen. 17:2ff)

Like the first covenant,
there was no bargaining,
no negotiation;
this covenant was not a two-way street.
It was a promise, a simple promise
that came from God
and was extended to Abraham, and all his descendants,
down through the years,
all the way to us, here and now.
A covenant that, by the way, includes Jews and Muslims, too.
This covenant was a promise that was grounded in love,
God’s unwavering love for his children.

Circumcision was the first step toward making
the covenant a two-way street,
but it was with the Ten Commandments that God began
to create expectations for all,
men, women, and children:
“These are my laws which I expect you to obey
as my covenant children.”
The laws themselves were referred to as the Covenant,
and of course, kept in the Ark of the Covenant.

And that’s when things began to break down,
once we had some standards,
some laws, some rules:
rules we were supposed to follow but didn’t,
even though the rules were given to us
not to limit our freedom,
but to make our lives richer and fuller.
We didn’t like rules,
we didn’t like anyone telling us what to do,
even when it was good for us.
We have always wanted to do things our way,
when we felt like it.

Our selfishness and pride proved to be
very effective weapons against God’s covenant.
Read through the Bible,
as our Year of the Bible group has been doing since January,
and it’s almost embarrassing
how quick we are to turn from covenant
whenever we found it got in the way
of our own desires, our own wants.

Now we learned two weeks ago
we don’t do this because we are fundamentally bad;
we don’t do this because we cannot help it,
because Adam sinned.
No, the hard truth is that we break our promises to God
when we choose to be selfish and self-centered,
when we choose to be prideful,
and as the Proverb warns us,
what follows pride is always a fall.

The extraordinary thing is that
even in the face of our faithlessness,
our selfishness,
our constant “I want what I want” approach
God has kept his covenant with us.
And even after 2,000 years of
watching his children constantly fight against covenant living,
God renewed his covenant in Jesus Christ.

We are covenant people, you and I,
called to live in covenant with God through Jesus Christ,
and called to live in covenant with one another
as disciples of Christ in this church and in the world.
The very nature of what we do as the Body of Christ
is to live in covenant with one another
and build new covenants as we follow Christ.

We just made covenant a few minutes ago:
a covenant with Braven and Joshua.
You made a covenant with each of them
when Jeff asked the question we always ask
each time we baptize:
“Do you, as members of the church of Jesus Christ,
promise to guide and nurture Braven and Joshua
by word and deed, with love and prayer,
encouraging them to know and follow Christ
and to be faithful members of his church?”

That is a covenant –
a covenant each of you made,
to each boy: more than two hundred covenants created,
times two, of course,
in just a few seconds.

Do you remember what you covenanted?
Do you remember your promises?
First, you promised to honor the covenant by how you live your life:
You covenanted with each boy to model Christian behavior
through your words and deeds,
and by your example teach the boys.

Next you covenanted to support them in prayer and with love.
And third, you covenanted to encourage them to know and follow Jesus.

You each made those promises to each boy!
Now here’s the question:
Will you do it?
Will you live up to your part of the covenant?
What will you do today?
What will you do tomorrow?
What will you do to live up to your covenant
to every other child in this church,
to whom you made the same promise,
with whom you have the same covenant?
It was only two weeks ago that you made the same
covenant with Rachel!

The easy path is not to do anything,
to assume that others will look after the boys
in the nursery,
and later in Sunday School,
and Youth Groups
as they get older.
But taking that approach,
is breaking covenant,
not living up to the promises you just made
before one another,
and before God.

When we live in covenant,
we accept responsibility,
take on responsibility,
even when it requires effort,
when it means doing something
we really don’t feel like doing,
when we are pushed out of our comfort zone.
But of course, living faithful lives,
truly faithful lives is not about comfort, is it?
It is about self-giving, serving,
and at times even sacrifice
as we follow the one who modeled
self-giving,
service
and sacrifice for each of us.

Covenant living is “to become new”,
new in Christ,
new in the Spirit,
leaving the old ways behind.
(Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words, 69)

To become new in covenant living
is to understand what Paul was saying is his letter to the Corinthians,
that we are not just called to be people of the covenant,
we are called to be ministers of the covenant:
to witness to covenant living,
to testify to covenant life.

Paul reminds us that Jesus sets the bar high for us:
that living in the covenant is not living in accordance
with the letter of the law;
It is living in accordance with the Spirit,
the Spirit of Christ himself,
for it is the Spirit that makes us,
“competent to be ministers
of the new covenant.”

When we become part of this church
we sign no contract,
no document that spells out the letter of the law
that church and member agree to;
some churches do that: require each new member
to sign a covenant.
We don’t; we come together in covenant community,
each of us taking on responsibility of covenant life,
which is the new life in and through Jesus Christ.

Paul concludes his letter to the Corinthians
with the words,
“if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation,
everything old has passed away;
see, everything has become new.”
That is the promise God makes with each of us
in the covenant that is Jesus Christ.

As you look ahead to September, and the Fall,
a time of year when we start anew,
when the autumn breezes blow through our lives
clearing away the stale and making room for the fresh,
it is the ideal time to reflect on how you live in covenant
with God, with Christ,
with family, with friends,
with one another here in church.
It is the ideal time to renew your own commitment
to be a minister of the covenant,
a covenant that is grace and love,
given you in grace and love through Jesus Christ,
by our loving Father in Heaven.
AMEN

Sunday, August 03, 2008

Jesus Wants You to Have That Mercedes!

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

Jesus Wants You to Have That Mercedes!
Deuteronomy 8:11-20
Luke 8:4-8

Jesus wants you to have a Mercedes.
Yes, that’s right:
Jesus wants you to have a Mercedes.
Jesus wants you to have money in the bank:
money in your checking account,
money in your savings account;
money in your pocket,
plenty of money --
enough so you can do all the things you want to do,
enough so you can buy all the things you want to buy.

Jesus wants you to be prosperous,
More than that: Jesus wants you to be wealthy!

This is what’s being preached from many pulpits these days.
It has a name: “the prosperity gospel”,
and it is VERY popular!
Pews full, attentive listeners,
with pencils and notebooks at the ready,
eager to learn the secrets of how
their faith can lead them to greater wealth and success.

One of the many preachers who is known
for his fondness for sharing the prosperity gospel
will help you find the riches Jesus wants you to have
and you don’t even have to set foot in his church.
Just go to his website,
as I did a few years ago,
and request a small bottle
of his “miracle water”.
There was no charge for this miraculous water,
but there was a suggestion for a “love offering”,
which seemed more than fair
in return for having the preacher unlock the door
to what Jesus had in store for me.

Now I knew there had to be something to the miracle water:
the preacher himself was testimony to its power:
he drove a Porsche, lived in a large house,
and drew a high six-figure salary from his church.
So I got a bottle of miracle water,
and I read the instructions
and followed them precisely.
And I waited, confident that prosperity
would soon be knocking at my door.

Nothing happened.
My bank account retained its emaciated look,
my pension gave me no hope of
of an early retirement, and
my five-year old Mazda kept needing repairs.

I checked back on the website,
and I learned that there was nothing wrong at all
with my miracle water -- It was indeed miraculous --
after all, the preacher said so!
The problem lay with my own faith,
which clearly must have been very weak,
otherwise, the miracle water would have turned into
a shower of riches.
Financial security done in by weak faith.

Now we all chase after money;
we all want more,
we want greater success,
we want security, comfort,
even prosperity and wealth.
The reality is that Jesus makes no promise
that following him
will lead to comfort and economic security,
even if we have “miracle water”.

Read through the gospels and you’ll find that
Jesus devoted a great deal of his ministry
to talking about money.
About half his teachings touch somehow on money.
He never said money was bad,
nor did he say success was bad.
What he did say again and again,
was that money has the potential to trip us up,
to lead us down the wrong path,
to cause us to lose our focus
and have the wrong priorities.

The parable of the sower teaches this lesson so simply
and so elegantly
We all want to think that we are the good soil
that Jesus speaks of,
but if we are honest with ourselves,
most of us, including ministers,
would have to admit that
the thornpatch is where we spend most of our lives,
that place where Jesus reminds us
the “cares and riches
and pleasures of life
….choke off the word of the Lord”
(Luke 8:14)

“The cares and riches and pleasures of life”:
the things that occupy most of our day.
Jesus was simply building on Moses’ warning
to the children of Israel
from more than a thousand years earlier:
“when you have eaten your fill
and have built fine houses
and live in them,
[and you grow prosperous,
you are far more likely to forget the Lord God]
(Deuteronomy 8:12)

Moses was warning the children of Israel
of the dangers of the thornpatch,
and Jesus reinforced that warning
time and time again.

Too much time in the thornpatch
can lead to a dangerous disease,
one that most of us suffer from,
the disease of “affluenza”.
Affluenza: an obsession with consumption
and affluence.

We have become a ferociously consumer culture
over the past 40 years.
We measure ourselves and one another
by what we buy,
what we drive,
where we live,
what we wear,
and what we have.
We all suffer from “affluenza” in some way.
Americans make up about 5% of the world’s population,
yet we consume about a third,
that’s one-third!
of all the world’s resources.

In our never-ending chase to consume things,
to buy things, to have things,
we end up setting God aside,
overlook Jesus,
and turn away from the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
We get caught in the thornpatch.
We ignore Moses’ warnings.

Here’s the irony, though.
We can achieve financial independence
by following Jesus Christ.
Yes, we can achieve financial independence.
All we have to do is change our definition
of what we mean
by the term “financial independence”.
If we think of the term as having enough money
to be able to live the way we want to live,
buy the things we want to buy
and do what we want to do,
then we should turn to Suze Orman.

The financial independence Jesus offers us is different:
it provides us with freedom from “affluenza”,
from obsession with money and things,
from worrying about whether we’ve got enough.

When we achieve financial independence
through Jesus we understand
what the writer of the Proverb meant
when he realized that he could have a full stomach
and still feel hungry.
“Don’t give me riches, Lord”,
the writer of the proverb says,
but “feed me with the food I need.”
Proverbs 30:8

Jesus is right when he teaches us that
we cannot serve God and mammon;
one ends up first, the other second.
The question for each of us is,
which is first,
really first,
in our lives, your life?
It is easy to say God is first,
but how do you live your life?
Focused more on mammon or
focused more on God?

We do not have give up everything;
we simply have to look to Jesus
to cure us of our “affluenza”,
Then we can be financially independent,
our lives overflowing with the riches of
peace,
mercy,
righteousness, goodness,
hope and love.

So come to this table as the first step out of the thornpatch,
the first step to being healed of affluenza.
Come to this table to
renew your commitment to serving the Lord God,
rather than the god of mammon,
the god of consumption,
the god of mastercard and visa.

Come to this table to be nurtured and fed
in a way that even a meal
in the finest, most expensive restaurant cannot.

Come to this table and then go out,
filled with the currency of Christ himself
and then you will know what it means,
perhaps for the first time,
to live a truly rich life.
AMEN