Anything Goes

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
December 28, 2008

Anything Goes
Luke 16:10-13

It isn’t cheating if everyone else does it, right?
I mean, everyone cheats on a test from time to time,
and who doesn’t cheat in his income taxes?
What golfer hasn’t improved his lie?
What tennis player hasn’t called an opponent’s serve out
when it was probably in?
What student hasn’t lifted an idea,
or even a direct quote,
from someone else’s work
and tried to pass it off as her own?
What business man or woman
hasn’t tweaked the paperwork just a little
to make the boss happy,
and to assure the commission or the bonus?

What’s the big deal about cheating?
No one really gets hurt,
and it is not as if the cheater is robbing a bank
or engaged in some other major crime.
Cheating really shouldn’t be called a sin, should it?
It really is so insignificant.

Sadly, this has become the way we think in this country:
That cheating is no big deal.
that everyone does it.

Study after study shows that most people cheat in all kinds of ways:
more than 80% of high school students have acknowledged cheating
on exams, tests and papers.
They don’t think they are doing anything wrong.
In fact, they rationalize that since everyone else is cheating,
they have to cheat
so they aren’t at a disadvantage.

The companion to cheating is the “little white lie”,
those times when you say something that isn’t quite true,
that isn’t the complete truth,
that is stretching the truth.
Again, just a little,
no one is hurt.

My mother was an expert at the little white lie;
she honed her skill on Mothers Day each year
when she told my sisters and me
that the breakfast we’d made for her
was absolutely delicious,
even though the toast was burned,
the scrambled eggs had more shell than egg,
the orange juice was watery,
and the coffee was strong enough
to remove paint.
In her little white lies,
my mother made us feel good,
so where was the harm?

But then there’s Jesus standing in front of us
with his lesson, such a simple lesson:
“Whoever is faithful in a very little
is faithful also in much,
and whoever is dishonest in a very little
is dishonest in much.”

Perhaps we should not be surprised
that we find this saying in only one of the four gospels.
If Matthew, Mark, and John were aware of the saying,
perhaps they discarded it as being entirely too impractical?
Even two thousand years ago, people cheated,
people told little white lies.

Is there an out for us here?
Jesus says, “whoever is dishonest in a very little”.
I was trained as a lawyer,
I could easily argue the size of “very little”.
My mother’s culinary comments were such small white lies,
that they don’t even qualify as very little.
Too small, so they really ought to be okay.

Isn’t that how we look at things?
Don’t we make things relative?
Don’t we adapt the words to suit us
and our situation?
Of course, that may be how we look at things,
but that’s not how God looks at things.
The Bible is filled with lessons on honesty,
integrity and moral behavior:
Do business ethically.
Do not lie.
Do not steal.
Do not cheat.
Period.
These are absolute lessons;
There is no rationalizing them,
no putting conditions on them.
No sliding scale.
We are called to adapt ourselves to them,
not adapt the lesson to our particular circumstances.

But that’s what we do when we are confronted
with rules and teachings we don’t like:
either we bend them to suit us,
or we just ignore them.

The economic implosion our country is going through now
has been based largely on cheating and lying,
highly respectable lying and cheating, of course,
going on at the highest levels of business, finance, and law.

Investment firms assuring us that their assets are secure;
Mortgage brokers telling people,
“Of course you can afford this mortgage”;
Homeowners padding their assets
in order to qualify for a bigger mortgage
and get that bigger house.
Banks encouraging people to run up charges on their credit cards,
and then changing the interest rate
and other terms and conditions so frequently
that no one really knows what he’s paying on the card.
But the bank assures the customer,
“Just pay the minimum monthly charge,
and everything will be just fine.”

Of course, get in trouble on your payments,
and the collections agencies will be hounding you;
get in trouble on your mortgage payments and
it is out on the street you go.
Are you as outraged as I am
that there have been so many foreclosures,
people forced to move out of their homes?
Surely there must be a better way,
a way to work things out for the hapless
and helpless homeowner.

It was only a few years ago that we were witness
to the corporate scandals of Enron, Worldcom, and Tyco:
Chief executives who saw their companies
as their own personal playgrounds,
their own sandboxes.
They inflated revenues and profits
to make their business look successful, shiny and strong,
and in the process they collected tens of millions of dollars
in salaries and bonuses.
When their houses of cards collapsed,
they left others to clean up the mess.

In 2004 the respected business magazine The Economist
noted that business people were held in lower regard
than even politicians.
“Corporate leaders are regarded with
cynicism and mistrust everywhere.
In America, the bosses of big companies command
only slightly more respect in public opinion polls
than used-car salesmen.”
I’d hate to think how poll numbers would look now.

We’ve gone from bad to worse.
We seem to live in a world where truly “Anything Goes”
as long as we can make a buck.
Thomas Friedman, the eminent columnist for The New York Times
found himself at a conference in Hong Kong recently
when a person came up to him and asked him quite seriously,
“So, just how corrupt is America?”
(New York Times, Dec. 17, 2008)
and the questioner was not just referring to governors
trying to cash in on selling a Senate seat.

We have always made an idol of money;
that’s nothing new.
Go back 2700 years and read through the book
of the prophet Amos
and you’ll think the book could have been written
just last week.
But it seems that in the last ten years
we’ve have created a tableau of idolatry,
where we envy the wealthy, long to be like them,
want to live the lifestyles of the rich and famous.
and will do anything to get there.
Character is out; celebrity is in.
Honor is out; “how much” is in;
Morals are out; money is in.
serving wealth is so much more exciting
than serving God.

As we look to a new year in which much of our economy
and indeed much of our society is going to have to be rebuilt,
it is the ideal time for us
to re-commit ourselves to a new standard
of Christian behavior:
beyond merely ethical, beyond merely moral,
beyond lives of mere integrity:
to truly the lives that Christ calls us to.
For if we are not faithful and honest in matters of very little,
we have no hope for the larger matters in life.

It all begins with you and me.
living by the standards Christ sets for us.
You and me, living as Jesus calls us to live.
Not, by the way, telling others how to live,
not judging and pointing our fingers,
but looking at our own selves, our own lives.
The standards that Jesus sets are high standards, absolutely,
not easy to live up to;
but then again, Christ never said they would be.
There are no “ifs”, “ands”, or “buts”.

In this simple passage, what Jesus is doing, of course,
is teaching us to turn our focus
from the material world, the consumer world,
to the kingdom of God.
What Christ is doing is calling us away from the idolatry
of worldly goods,
the idolatry of malls, and cars, and things,
that captures us much too easily,
the idolatry of anything goes
as long as you have a credit card.

Now, all this sounds fine in theory,
fine on Sunday morning as we sit here in church,
but tomorrow when we are back in our jobs,
back at school,
back in our Monday through Friday world,
putting theory into practice can be appear all but impossible.
Just as one example, those students who cheat because
they feel they have no choice have my sympathy.
I understand the pressure they feel to get top grades.
When I was in college, I gunned for top grades
because I had my sights set on law school.
I was aiming for Harvard or Yale.
I thought I had the numbers to get in,
even with the fierce competition,
but when those depressingly thin envelopes
arrived from each school,
I was bitterly disappointed.
It is likely that five one hundredths of a point
on my grade point average might have
made the difference.
And the competition for schools has only grown more intense
over the past 25 years.

This is where faith comes in.
My disappointment was real, but it was also short-lived
because I believed that where I went,
Cornell Law School,
was where God wanted me to go.
Of course my ego wanted Yale or Harvard,
but as Jesus teaches us,
it is God’s will that matters, not our own.

The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr observed
that our faith is fragmentary,
bits and pieces that we work on throughout our lives,
stitching together into a more seamless
and more mature faith.
That’s our life’s work: not the accumulation of money
and things.
The more fragmented and fragmentary our faith is,
the more likely we are to rationalize,
and compromise.
As we grow in faith, mature faith,
we understand the standards Jesus calls us to,
and we undestand why Niebuhr wrote,
“faith in God does not involve compromise”.
(Christ and Culture)

The very wise preacher Fred Craddock reminds us
that most of us will not see our names in the newspaper,
most of us will not win Nobel or Pulitzer prizes,
most of us won’t live in 15,000 square foot homes,
with indoor pools and 8-car garages.
Most of us will go about our days in the vocations that God calls us to,
and we’ll be offered countless opportunities
to live our faith in simple acts:
offering someone a seat on a bus,
writing someone a note,
visiting someone at a hospital or nursing home,
delivering a meal to someone who’s homebound,
contributing to a charity,
working on a Habitat project,
dropping clothes off at the Salvation Army,
fixing a meal on Sunday night at SERVE.

To live a life of absolute faith,
faith without compromise,
faith that is not based on “anything goes”
is not to live a strident, angry, judgmental faith;
It is simply to live as Christ teaches us,
the absolute of obedience to Christ
which means living in the absolute of love.

Start there in the New Year,
start small, very small,
and take small steps forward to build
a grace-filled, grace-full life
serving one master, and only one master:
Our Lord Jesus Christ.
AMEN

The Mystery of Faith

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
December 14, 2008: The Third Sunday of Advent

The Mystery of Faith
Psalm 89
Luke 1:26-38

We cannot see it;
it has no fixed form or shape.
It doesn’t come in a box,
doesn’t look like a book or a picture or a coat.
We cannot buy it in a store,
not the big-box stores like Wal-Mart or Costco,
or even the expensive specialty stores along Wisconsin Avenue.
We cannot taste it,
smell it,
touch it,
hear it.

Faith is something we have been trying to understand,
trying to comprehend, since long before the birth of Christ.
We struggle even to define it.
Only one writer in the Bible was bold enough
to try his hand at a definition:
the writer of the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament.
He called faith,
“the assurance of things hoped for,
the conviction of things not seen.”
(Hebrews 11:1)

If you’ve ever watched the holiday movie,
“Miracle on 34th Street”,
you’ve heard Maureen O’Hara define faith as
“believing in things when common sense
tells you not to.”

Faith is believing, believing in something.
But that begs the question,
what does it mean to believe in something or someone?
Turn to the dictionary and we learn that to believe means,
“to have confidence in something or someone,
to trust in something or someone.”
(Am. Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed)

Every election season politicians ask us to believe in them,
to put our trust in them, our confidence in them.
Business people ask us to believe in them,
believe in their products,
believe in the shares of their company.
Is it any wonder that given the past few months
cynicism overshadows faith?

It is a good time for us to step back,
take a deep breath,
and revisit what it means to have faith.
And the season points us to two models of faith
in Joseph and Mary.

Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels tell us two very different stories
of the birth of Jesus.
We tend to blend them together,
forgetting that Matthew is the one
who tells us of the wise men,
but makes no mention of stable or manger,
or shepherds abiding in the fields,
or angels trumpeting glory to God,
while Luke gives us the manger,
along with shepherds and angels,
but says nothing of a star in the east,
or wise men or
gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.

Matthew focused on Joseph,
telling us that an angel, an unnamed angel,
spoke to Joseph in a dream
and told Joseph of the son who would be born to him.
Luke focused on Mary.
As we heard in our lesson, the angel visited Mary,
the angel Gabriel,
and told Mary of God’s plans for her,
told Mary she would have a child and name him Jesus.

The stories may be different,
but both Joseph and Mary responded to God’s will obediently,
their obedience grounded in faith.

Not to take anything at all away from the example
that Joseph provides us with his faith,
but I think Mary’s story is the more compelling.
Think about it: there she was, an unmarried young woman,
hardly more than a girl, really: 13, 14, maybe 15,
about the same age as the students
in our Confirmation Class,
and an angel visits her to tell her
that she is going to give birth to the Son of God.

For Joseph, the angel came in a dream,
but for Mary, the visit was face-to-face,
right there, an angel standing before her.
How do you suppose you would have reacted
if someone stood in front of you
and said, “I am an angel sent from God”?
Most of us would probably not believe it;
our first thought would probably be,
that someone was trying to play a trick on us;
or perhaps we’re on some reality television show,
with a camera and microphone hidden somewhere.

But Mary’s reaction was so calm,
so poised.
She was not awestruck;
she was “perplexed” by Gabriel’s words,
Perplexed by his words, his greeting;
not by his presence.
After all, Gabriel told her such incredible news:
she would conceive, even before she was married!
She would conceive by the power of the Holy Spirit.
She would give birth to a boy who would be holy,
and even more,
he would be called the Son of God.

Her only response was to raise the question
about how she could possibly conceive
when she was not yet married.
She accepted what was going to happen,
wondering only about the how.
Her faith was so quiet, so simple, and yet so profound,
“Here am I, the servant of the Lord;
let it be with me according to your word.”
“Let it be with me according to your word.”

Last October our Wednesday morning Bible Study class
went to the National Gallery of Art
to take a tour of paintings from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries
that captured stories from the Bible.
At the end of our tour, our guide asked us which paintings we liked best,
and it seemed that everyone had a different favorite.
Mine was a painting done in the 15th century,
almost 600 years ago,
by the Flemish artist Jan Van Eyck,
a painting for an altarpiece
called simply “The Annunciation”.
There are dozens, probably hundreds,
of paintings with that title,
that have tried to capture the verses we heard from Luke’s gospel
as Mary learned from Gabriel
that she was to become the mother of God.

Van Eyck’s painting is extraordinarily detailed:
The setting is not first century Judea,
but clearly 15th century Europe:
Mary is sitting alone in a cloistered setting,
a church-like room, reading a book,
the Bible.
The Holy Spirit descends on Mary in the form of a dove,
reminiscent of what happened to Jesus
as he was baptized by John in the Jordan.
Mary is regal in a royal blue robe,
painted so exquisitely you can almost feel the softness
of the velvet and silk in the folds.
Gabriel stand before her in an extraordinary embroidered robe,
his angel’s wings reflecting every color of the rainbow.
Look carefully at Gabriel’s face and it could just as easily
be a female face as a male.
Mary is calm, composed,
accepting.
The painting captures Mary’s deep, unquestioning faith.
Look at the painting and you can almost hear her say,
“Let it be with me according to your word.”

Every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper,
you hear me say the words,
“Great is the mystery of faith”.
The words are part of the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving,
the Eucharistic prayer I offer
as we prepare to come to the Lord’s Table.
When I say those words,
do you remember what words come next?
You all respond,
“Christ has died,…Christ is risen,
…Christ will come again.”
This is the mystery of faith,
the mystery that is Advent,
that the Christ who was born
is the Christ who will come again,
come again in glory and come again in joy.

When we say these words,
we may not fully understand them,
but we take them on faith,
trusting God, trusting Christ.

Mary understood the mystery of faith.
She understood it as she looked at Gabriel
and listened to his words.
She understood it nine months later
on that first Christmas night
as she sang a lullaby to her newborn son,
the son conceived by the Holy Spirit,
the Son of God.
And she understood it as she stood at the foot of the cross
a little more than thirty years later
and looked into her son’s eyes
as he hung like a common criminal,
the life draining from him.
“Let it be with me according to your word.”

Many of the Psalms speak to the mystery of faith.
Psalm 89 starts out so confidently
speaking of the psalmist’s trust in the Lord:
“I will sing of your steadfast love,
I will proclaim your faithfulness
which is as firm as the heavens”.
But then it turns 180 degrees,
the psalmist feeling alone and abandoned by God:
“you have exalted the right hand of [my] foes
you have turned your back on me.
How long will you hide yourself from me?”
And yet the psalmist ends on a positive note,
a note of confidence,
a note of faith:
“Blessed be the Lord forever. Amen and Amen”
Great, indeed, is the mystery of faith.

It was by faith that Mary delivered Christ to the world.
Who among us would have had such faith?
And yet you and I are called to do the same thing:
deliver Christ to the world.
Half of you, the male half, may be wondering,
wait a minute, how can we deliver Christ to the world
as Mary did?
Well don’t forget Gabriel’s response to Mary,
“Nothing will be impossible with God”!

But don’t you see: we are all called to deliver the
living Christ to the world
through our lives, through our words, our actions,
as we live our faith,
as we live in the love given us by God through Christ,
as we share the grace we have been given by God through Christ.

We are called to deliver Christ in good times,
and even more so in difficult times like these,
times of turmoil, of uncertainty
of people losing jobs and hope.
We are called to deliver Christ’s love and mercy,
called to deliver Christ’s teachings to reach out
and work for peace,
to feed the hungry,
and look after those who are struggling.
We are all called to deliver Christ to the world,
not just in December, but all year round.

If our morning prayer each day begins with
“let it be with me according to your word”,
then our daily song can be “Joy to the World”.
This is the mystery of faith.
This is the promise of faith.
The promise given us in Jesus Christ.
AMEN

Silent No More

The Rev. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
December 7, 2008: Second Sunday of Advent

Silent No More
Isaiah 40:1-11
Mark 1:1-8

Silence.
Not a sound.
Not a word.
Nothing. Emptiness.
A void.

I am speaking of the Bible.
There is a void,
a curious void where silence reigns.
It is as though there had been a writers’s strike.
For some two hundred years,
no one willing to pick up a stylus
and scratch some letters across a tablet,
words inspired by God that would fill the pages
of the book we call the Bible.

The newest book in the Old Testament is the Book of Daniel,
written more than 160 years before the first Christmas.
The first writings of the New Testament date from around 50 years
after Christ’s birth.
There are no writings at all in the Bible
from 150 years before the birth of Christ,
125 years before,
80 years before,
30 years before, 10;
5 years after, 10, 20…
Why this gap?
Why this void?
Why this silence?
It was not for lack of things happening.
This was a a ferociously active time
in the life of the children of God.

The history of the children of Israel for the 700 years
leading up to Christ’s birth was tumultuous;
instability was the common thread,
as one nation after another invaded Judah,
plundering the nation and subduing the people.

First came the yoke of the Assyrians,
then the yoke of the Babylonians,
then came the Medians,
who were followed by the Persians,
who were followed by the Greeks,
who were followed by the Romans.

Which god or gods to worship:
Baal? Marduk?
Zeus? Jupiter?
Did the children of Israel have a choice?
Was the Lord God still present in the land, in their lives?
Still with them?
or had he been pushed out by other gods?

Perhaps he had turned away on his own,
tired of his children’s faithlessness.

In the two centuries preceding Christ’s birth,
the people felt that God had gone silent,
that God might have abandoned them.
God’s Holy Spirit was nowhere to be found
no prophets speaking the word of the Lord,
no Isaiah, Jeremiah or Amos,
not even a Joel or an Obadiah.

Still, a small but faithful few held firmly to their belief.
In the decades leading up to Christ’s birth
they believed things were about to change,
about to change radically
That God was going to come back into their lives,
back to his people, in a dramatic, powerful way.

Onto this stage stepped John the Baptizer
in all his wild wooliness:
his eyes ablaze,
not really speaking to people
as much as hurling words at them.
He stood there in the water, the mud really,
on the banks of the Jordan,
ranting fiercely,
and yet people flocked to him,
so desperate were they
for the word of the Lord,
for a word of hope.

But John gave them no gentle “comfort, o comfort my people”.
No speaking tenderly to them.
He shouted out angry words:
“Repent! Repent!
Prepare yourself for the one who is coming!”

John proclaimed the coming of the Lord,
the coming of the Messiah,
the one the children of Israel
were looking for with an “aching intensity”.

But John knew that the children of Israel
were not ready for the Messiah’s coming;
they would not know him or recognize him,
even if he stood directly in front of them.
They needed to prepare themselves.
More than a thousand years earlier,
when the children of Israel were to meet the Lord God for the first time
at the base of Mount Sinai,
Moses told them they too needed first to prepare themselves,
to wash themselves clean of their sinfulness.

And so John did the same thing:
“Repent”
“Wash yourself clean of your sins,
Turn from your selfish life, your self-centered ways
and turn back to God.
Wake up and get ready;
get ready by acknowledging your sinfulness.
Stop living in denial,
stop justifying your behavior,
stop rationalizing your every act.
God doesn’t care if you’re not as bad
as the person standing next to you.
All God cares about is,
are you as good and as faithful
as God created you to be?
Are you as good and as faithful
as God expects you to be?”

“You are too busy blaming others,
Everyone pointing fingers at everyone else,
No one remembering that when you point your finger
at someone else,
three fingers are pointing back at you.”
(P. Wright)

“Repent!
Repent and get ready.
Because if you’re not ready,
you won’t know,
you’ll miss God when he comes.
The Messiah will come
and will pass you by and you won’t even know it!

“Straighten out your highway to God;
get rid of your own detours,
the things that clog the way of the Lord.
Make the way straight for the Lord
to enter your heart, to enter your life.”

John the Baptizer is Advent,
calling us even now to prepare ourselves,
to ready ourselves not to celebrate Christ’s birth,
as much as we want to,
but to ready ourselves for that day
when Christ will come again,
come again in glory.

John’s message is Advent;
It sounds harsh and judgmental,
but it is good news,
for John herald the coming of the Messiah,
the one through whom we are born anew,
born to new life,
the old ways, our old lives, gone,
so we can live new lives in the presence of God
a straight road linking us and God.

John’s voice cries out, proclaims;
it is a voice that makes us uncomfortable,
for he shows us for what we really are,
and yet in acknowledging our sin
acknowledging our need for repentance,
we can stand reborn and renewed.
in Christ, and through Christ, and with Christ.

John’s is a voice we need to hear,
a voice we need to heed,
to pay attention to,
to learn from even in the midst
our busyness as we get ready for the birthday.
for he comes even now,
“before the Lord
to prepare his ways,
to give knowledge of salvation to his people
for the forgiveness of sins.”
(Luke 1:76)

As you come this table this morning,
this table our Lord has set for us,
this table our Lord invites us to,
come in repentance, your own repentance,
acknowledging all those things you know God knows
that has drawn you from righteousness and goodness.

Come in repentance
so that you can fully embrace the new life offered you
offered each of us, all of us in Jesus Christ.
Come to this table in repentance,
for it is here,
rather than under a Christmas tree,
that our greatest gift lies,
just waiting for us to open it.
AMEN