Out of this World

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
May 24, 2009

Out of this World
John 17:14-19

Go back some 3,000 years.
The Israelites have ended their time in the wilderness,
and have settled in the promised land.
Moses is long dead;
Joshua is long dead.
The people have lived under a series of judges:
Deborah, Gideon, and Samson, among others.

The prophet Samuel was now the one who spoke for God to the people.
He warned them repeatedly,
just as the prophets had before him,
that they were in danger of straying from the Lord.
The people paid no attention.
They saw no reason to pay attention.
Life was good: the land fertile,
the rains plentiful,
the crops bountiful.
The people were prospering and enjoying a good life.

Still, life was not without its problems.
There were no maps with heavily drawn lines
marking a country’s boundaries.
Borders came and went
depending on the viciousness of invading armies
and the strength of the opposition’s resistance.

The people of Israel decided that they needed
one man to rule over them,
one man behind whom they could unite for a common defense.
And so they approached Samuel and said,
“We want a king,
a king to govern us,
just like the other nations.”
(1 Samuel 8:5)

Samuel was deeply troubled by this request,
and took it before the Lord God.
God responded with disappointment and resignation:
“Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you,
for they have not rejected you,
but they have rejected me from being king over them.”
(1 Samuel 8:8)

And with that, Saul was anointed King,
and he was followed by David,
who was followed by Solomon,
who was followed by his son,
and on down the years.

When the children of Israel asked for a king
so they could be like other nations,
our ancestors in faith took a wrong turn.
They rejected God as their King,
God as their ruler, their only ruler,
their Sovereign.
They wanted to be like the other people,
the other nations,
The people of Israel had lost their focus,
had lost their sense of priorities,
as they grew more and more comfortable
in the Promised Land.
Moses had warned them that this might happen,
but they paid no attention to the words of a man long dead.

For the children of Israel
and for us,
the truth is: God is our King,
Christ is our Sovereign.
And yet, we too are like are our Israelites ancestors;
quick to forget that God is our Sovereign,
quick to push aside Christ as our King
when worldly concerns preoccupy us.

This is what Jesus was trying to help his disciples understand
as he offered his final prayer for them
on the night of his betrayal and arrest.
John’s gospel gives us something
that we don’t find in the other gospels:
He gives us Jesus speaking at length,
from chapter 13 through 16,
as he shared his final meal with his disciples.
In chapter 17 Jesus stopped talking to his disciples
and turned his voice to his Father in Heaven,
offering up a powerful and moving prayer
for those who had been with him throughout his ministry.

And the heart of the prayer was the reminder
to his disciples:
“they do not belong to the world,
just as I do not belong to the world.”
We can and should substitute “we” for “they”:
“We do not belong to the world,
just as Jesus does not belong to the world.

Eugene Peterson paraphrases the passage this way:
“They are no more defined by the world
than I am defined by the world.”
Or putting us in the text:
“We are no more defined by the world,
than Jesus is defined by the world.”
(The Message)

Our focus is on God,
our focus is on Christ,
or at least so it ought to be.
That’s what matters,
that’s all that matters.

We are called out of this world
to follow our God through our Lord Jesus Christ.
The reality is, of course,
that we live in the world;
We are part of this world.

We live in the world for however long our life span happens to be.
We go to school,
to work,
we play,
share joys and sorrows,
successes and setbacks
all as we walk through life in this world.

Jesus knows this,
and said as much in his prayer,
[Father], “I am not asking you to take them out of the world.”
Just watch over them, look after them.

In the early years of Christianity,
many thought life would be simpler
if they lived out of this world.
So they moved to separate communities,
set apart from the rest of the world.
Others were more extreme, moving out into the desert,
to live hermit-like lives in caves.
Their lives were focused on
nothing but praying and worshiping God.

The word “monastery” comes from a root
that means “to live alone”.
The idea of monastic life
was to remove oneself from the world
so nothing would interfere with a life of devotion to God.

Benedict established the Benedictine order in the 6th century in Italy
as a way for himself and others literally to wall themselves off
from the violence and chaos that was all around them
as the Roman Empire collapsed.
Benedict sought to develop a place
where men could live in humility and obedience,
where all things would be shared,
where all would live to serve one another
as they served the Lord.
He put his desire simply:
“the life of a monk ought to be a continuous Lent”
(Rule of St. Benedict)
A continuous Lent:
in the sense that life is devotional, prayerful,
worshipful, confessional,
humble, and obedient.

You and I don’t live cloistered lives, of course;
We live in the world.
But our calling is the same as those
who live behind a monastery’s walls:
to live lives of humbleness, obedience,
devotion
and worship;
our eyes, hearts, minds, and spirits,
focused first and foremost on God, and on Christ.

We go out into the world sent by Christ as his disciples,
sent out to proclaim the good news,
sent out to live the good news.
Jesus sets the example we are to follow when he said,
“I always do what is pleasing to [my Father]”
(John 8:29)
That is our goal:
to strive to do what is pleasing to God.
Always: in all places, all times,
under all circumstances,
for God our King, our Sovereign.

Living this kind of life can, however,
sometimes put us in conflict with our worldly concerns.
Living faithfully as a disciple of Jesus Christ,
may at times force us to choose between
things of this world that we like or that are important to us,
and the things of God’s world.

Nowhere is this conflict more apparent
than in matters of war.
Our human history is one of warfare, constant warfare.
Historian Will Durant once estimated that in all of human history
only 29 years could be counted as years without war
somewhere in the world.

War is very much on our mind this weekend
as we remember those men and women
who gave their lives in war,
in service to us and to our country
over the years.
We should remember these brave men and women,
and we should take time tomorrow to honor their sacrifice.
No one said it better than our Lord,
when he said, “No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
(John 15:13)

But even as we honor those who gave their lives,
as Christians we know that there may be times,
just as there have been times in the past,
when we have to oppose the march to war.
We have to, not because of cowardice,
not because of lack of patriotism,
but because we put the Lordship of Christ first,
even before country.

We have to do this because
our Lord is not only our Sovereign,
he is also the Prince of Peace,
the one who teaches us peace,
the one who said so boldly,
“blessed are the peacemakers
for they will be called the children of God.”
(Matthew 5:9)

The Prince of Peace sends us out to work for peace.
The Prince of Peace makes clear his expectations for us:
that we are to reach out even to our enemies,
not with a gun but with a hand extended in fellowship,
even when we are all but certain,
our hand is going to be slapped back,
even when we may fear for our own lives.

We know we are to do these things
and live this way,
because even as we live in this world,
we are not defined by this world
any more than Jesus is defined by this world.
We do this because God is our King,
and Jesus our Sovereign Lord.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the Barmen Declaration,
one of the Confessional Statements we have in our
Book of Confessions, part of the Constitution
of the Presbyterian Church.
The Barmen Declaration was written in Barmen Germany
in 1934 to reflect the clear, absolute sovereignty of our Lord
in all circumstances, with no exceptions.

The Declaration is clear:
“there are no areas in our life
in which we [do] not belong to Jesus Christ.” (8.15)
The Barmen Declaration helps us to understand
that there may be times when we are forced to choose
between faithfulness and obedience to God
and obedience to the world we are part of.
The Barmen Declaration makes clear
that there may well be times
when saying “yes” to peace,
means saying “no” to war.

This is not easy.
Over the centuries we have tried to develop tools
to help us figure out if there are times
when we can find war not in violation of Jesus’ teachings,
not in violation of the sovereignty of God.
The “Just War” Theory is the most prominent tool
we use to help us, to give us a lens
to try to help us understand with greater clarity
what are always complicated, difficult situations.

As followers of the Prince of Peace,
there may be times when after prayer, reflection, and study,
we have to say, No,
we cannot support the decision to go to war.
That doesn’t mean we don’t love our country;
it doesn’t mean we are not patriotic.
What is means is that our decision reflects
the absolute Sovereignty of God,
as we strive to do what is pleasing and faithful to God,
even when that path may be one that puts us at odds
with the common political will.

And we know that the path of peace is pleasing to God;
God says so repeatedly in both the Old and New Testaments.
Indeed, as William Sloane Coffin has said,
“to give up on peace, is to give up on God.”
(Credo, 91)

In the Larger Catechism that is part of the
Westminster Confession of Faith, we are taught,
our “chief and highest end is to glorify God
and fully to enjoy him forever.”
(The Larger Catechism, 7.111)

We glorify God by being obedient to God,
as our Sovereign Lord,
as our King.
We glorify God by doing what is pleasing to God
as we live our lives as part of this world.
We glorify God as we follow faithfully the teachings of his Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ.
We glorify God when we recognize that there may be times
when saying yes to God, may well mean saying “no”
to worldly concerns, worldly matters.
We glorify God by remembering that
although we live in this world,
we are not defined by this world.

Tomorrow as you offer up your prayers of gratitude,
prayers of thanksgiving for the men and women
who gave their lives for us in service to this country,
offer up a prayer as well that you will work for that day
that God wants, that our Lord came to bring about:
that day when swords are beaten into plowshares
and spears into pruning hooks.

Offer a prayer that you will work
for what God our King wants for us,
that we will all learn the lesson
our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us
to take out into the world.
the world that we are part of,
but which does not define us.

And then after you pray,
go out into the world
giving all honor, praise, and glory
to our Sovereign Lord:
God the Father,
God the Son,
and God the Holy Spirit.
AMEN