Make a Joyful Noise

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
June 21, 2009

Make a Joyful Noise to the Lord
Psalm 150

Can you imagine what Christmas would be like
if we didn’t have carols to sing?
What would Christmas be if we couldn’t sing
“O Come O Come Emmanuel”,
“Silent Night, Holy Night”,
or “Joy to the World!”?

Easter would still be a joy-filled day without music,
but how much richer our celebration
of that glorious day is when we can sing out,
“Jesus Christ is Risen Today… Alleluia!”

Music enriches our worship,
music makes worship deeper,
it helps us to feel our faith
in a way that words alone cannot do.

Music is a gift God has given us,
a gift that touches every part of our lives.
What would a birthday party be
without the Happy Birthday song?
Who hasn’t heard a song on the radio,
or even coming from a speaker in a mall
or the grocery store,
that suddenly evokes a memory
taking you to a time, a place
far from the here and now?

That happened to me on Friday night at Wolf Trap
when I heard Rain, a Beatles tribute band.
I grew up listening to the music of the Beatles,
and on Friday night as I listened to the band,
I was transported back in time,
back to my Junior High and High School days…
only the good ones, of course!
I don’t sing well at all,
but I was singing along with every tune.

Music has been an essential part of how we worship God
for as long as we have worshiped God.
Go back 3,000 years to the time of King David.
Even before he was anointed King of Israel and Judah,
David the shepherd boy expressed his devotion
to God through music.
Throughout his life, David wrote love songs to God
that we now call Psalms.
Songs of praise;
Songs of thanksgiving;
Songs of assurance:
“I will give thanks to the Lord with my whole heart.
I will tell of all your wonderful deeds.
I will be glad and exult in you.
I will sing praise to your name.” (Psalm 9)

Go back further, back to Moses.
He too sang his praises to God:
After leading the children of Israel through the parted Red Sea
and watching the waters wash away Pharaoh’s pursuing army,
he sang out in joy and praise:
“I will sing to the Lord…
[for] he is my strength and my might
and he has become my salvation.”
(Exodus 15)

Page through the Old Testament
and you will find not only The Song of Moses,
but also The Song of Miriam,
The Song of Deborah,
the Song of Hannah,
song, upon song,
children of God lifting up their voices,
singing their praises.

Jump to the early years of the first century
as Peter, Paul and others fanned out to spread the good news
of the gospel of Jesus Christ.
In those early years of the church
followers would gather in homes secretly
on Sunday morning to remember the Resurrection,
to celebrate Easter every Sunday morning.
In this way they started a tradition that we follow to this day
of observing the Sabbath on Sunday.

When they gathered, they would pray, and read from Scripture,
and always take a collection for the poor and the needy.
They would also sing.
We can find one of the first Christian hymns
in Paul’s letter to the Philippians:
“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,
who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
he humbled himself,
and became obedient to the point of death
-- even death on a cross.”
(Philippians 2:5-8)

Music is woven into every worship service we have:
from the elaborate services we have on Christmas Eve and Easter
to the simplest of worship services,
including those we have outdoors.

We have at least seven different musical offerings
in a typical worship service.
We sing together five times:
usually three hymns,
a response after passing the peace,
and the doxology after we receive the offerings.
Deborah provides us with a Voluntary to help us
prepare for worship,
and she provides an anthem when we take the offering.

I’ve noticed that when we sing hymns,
there are quite a few folks who don’t sing,
don’t even open up a hymnal.
Perhaps you are self-conscious about your voice,
you don’t want to inflict your off-key ramblings
on those standing around you.

I know the feeling: I am not a very good singer, either.
But nowhere in the Bible does it say,
“Sing well and sing tunefully to the Lord.”
What the Psalmist says again and again is simple:
"Make a joyful noise”
to the Lord our God.

Make a joyful noise!
Don’t worry about the quality of your singing,
just sing, sing joyfully.
The Psalmist tells us
“come into God’s presence
making a joyful noise to God
with songs of praise.”
It’s that simple, for all of us,
whether we’ve got good voices,
or voices best left in the car,
with the windows rolled up.

Think about what we are doing when we sing:
we are praying, praying to God,
lifting up prayers of adoration and praise,
of confession, of thanksgiving;
every song we sing is a prayer.
If you are not singing,
you are not praying,
silent in God’s presence.

Every Sunday Deborah and I have both the joy and the challenge
of selecting music for our worship service.
Selecting hymns isn’t simply a matter
of the two of us getting together
and picking our favorites.
Our hymns have to fit the service,
complement the texts and the sermon,
and the other parts of the service.

Our opening hymns are generally songs of praise and thanksgiving,
focused on God: God the Creator,
God our Hope,
God our Strength,
the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
We use the hymn to prepare ourselves for worship,
to help us to focus our hearts and minds on God.

Our middle hymn reinforces the word of the Lord
as we have just heard it through the text and the sermon.
And the closing hymn reminds us
that even as our worship services is coming to an end,
our service as disciples of Jesus Christ is about to begin.

We are a very diverse group,
so the challenge we have
is selecting hymns that resonate with
as many people as possible.
Some of you prefer more traditional hymns,
while others find that more contemporary hymns speak to you.
If we sing a hymn you don’t much care for,
it is likely that it is a favorite
of a person standing within hugging distance.

As much as we love traditional hymns,
hymns by Watts, or Wesley, or Crosby,
we do look for more contemporary hymns.
There has been an explosion in hymn writing over the past 50 years,
so there are hundreds, even thousands of titles
from which we can choose.
And we do try new things regularly:
Deborah and I do not limit our search
to what’s in the pew hymnal and the supplement.
This morning is a perfect example:
we are using hymns from a variety of sources.

We try especially to look for hymns that come from other cultures,
other parts of the world,
to remind us that the gospel of Jesus Christ
can be found in every corner of the world.
The hymn we will sing in a few minutes has a Jamaican melody
that has a great beat
and may well transport you to the Caribbean.
But even as you feel the sand in your feet
and the ocean breeze wafting over you,
pay attention to the faithfulness of the lyrics:
“All you works of God, bless the Lord!”

Soren Kierkegard reminds us that
it is easy to look at the setting of a worship service,
which looks very much like a theatrical setting,
and think of the congregation as the audience,
and the worship leaders as the actors.
But we’d be wrong to think that way, he argues.
Instead, you the congregation are the actors,
and God is the audience.
We worship leaders are the prompters.

You are the actor –
you are the ones who are called to gather,
pray, praise, confess,
listen, learn, respond, and sing.
You are the ones who are called to lift your voices to God
as you make a joyful noise in spoken prayers,
and sung prayers,
and as you respond to the word of the Lord.
Deborah, the choir, and all the musicians:
their main role is to prompt and inspire you,
for God is waiting to hear the sound of your voice,
no matter how off key.

We’ll sing four more times in this service.
If you have held back before, don’t.
Sing out with enthusiasm,
conviction and joy.
God is waiting to hear your voice,
your voice, each of our voices.
Every note you sing is a song of love for God,
a beautiful melody.

So lift up your voices in the rest of this service,
and in every service, every Sunday.
God is in his seat, waiting for you,
waiting for you to make a joyful noise to the Lord.

AMEN

Love the Question, Live the Answer

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
June 14, 2009

Love the Question, Live the Answer
Selected Proverbs

“An intelligent mind acquires knowledge,
and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.”
(Proverbs 18.15)

This is just one of the many Proverbs that speaks to wisdom,
speaks to learning,
speaks to knowledge:

“Keep hold of learning;
do not let go;
guard her,
for she is your life.” (4:13)

“Whoever walks with the wise becomes wise.” (13:20)

“Give instruction to the wise
and they will become wiser still;
teach the righteous
and they will gain in learning.” (9:9)

“Whoever heeds instruction is on the path to life.” (10:17)

The Book of Proverbs seems like an appropriate book
for us to read from as we celebrate the accomplishments
of our young people who have graduated
from high school and college.
And we do celebrate with them, with great joy.
We celebrate their hard work,
their learning,
and all their accomplishments.

Even as they graduate, though,
even if their time in classrooms has come to an end,
we know that their learning hasn’t ended.
Our learning never ends, does it?
At least it should not…
for any of us.
God calls us to learn – always.
God calls us to grow in knowledge
so that we can grow in wisdom
as we grow in faith.

The Book of Proverbs is part of a section in the Old Testament
referred to as “Wisdom Literature”.
All the various writers of the different Proverbs
sought to help their readers grow in wisdom
throughout their lives.
The gateway to wisdom is knowledge:
knowledge of history,
of math,
of science,
of literature and language,
of arts and culture,
of the world all around us,
this world God created.

We learn and grow in knowledge in classrooms;
we learn in this Sanctuary;
We learn in family rooms and dining rooms,
in museums,
on playing fields,
hiking trails…
We can learn anywhere, any time.

As we grow in knowledge,
we begin to make connections
that help us to grow in wisdom.
As we read through the history of
the children of Israel for example,
we realize how we humans tend to repeat our mistakes,
how we don’t learn from the past.
We learn how just how stubborn we can be,
how “stiff-necked”,
to use that wonderful Old Testament expression.
As we grow in knowledge and understanding
we appreciate the wisdom in Santayana’s powerful observation,
“Those who do not learn from history
are doomed to repeat it.”

If we learn from our own histories,
from the mistakes we make,
we are more likely to avoid them in the future.
Do you remember the story of the adulterous woman
in John’s gospel?
That’s where Jesus invited “the one who was
without sin to cast the first stone.”
The Pharisees dropped their stones
and walked away.
And then Jesus spoke to the woman,
and his teaching for her and for us
could not have been clearer:
“Go and sin no more.”
(John 8:11)
In other words:
learn from what you did wrong
and don’t do it again.

Of course we can also learn from successes
we read about in history,
and build on those successes:
That’s history worth repeating.

The more we learn of literature, language
and culture,
the more we learn how much we have in common
with those who may speak different languages,
or come from other cultures.

In our Wednesday morning Bible Study group,
we have been working our way through a study of
comparative religion.
We are learning not only about
the other Abrahamic faiths – Judaism and Islam --
we are also learning about Hinduism,
and Buddhism,
Shintoism, Tao,
and others.
We are learning how those faith practices
differ from our own,
but more important,
we are also learning how similar we all are
as we live out our faith,
even if we don’t worship the same God.

Two weeks ago when we marked Pentecost,
we learned that language is no barrier to faith,
that the Gospel transcends all languages: Greek, Latin,
Hebrew, French, Spanish, …
and even that notoriously difficult language, English.

Back in March we talked about how
the more we learn about science,
the more we can see God’s awesome,
creative powers at work all around us.
The more we learn about science,
the more we realize that science and faith,
even the science of evolution and faith,
can happily and easily co-exist.

The Book of Proverbs is a book of wisdom,
filled with helpful reminders
that call us to keep open minds,
call us to walk in faithful humility,
call us to remember that none of us has all the answers,
that the moment we think we do
we risk looking prideful and foolish.

And the Book of Proverbs has harsh words for fools:
“A fool takes no pleasure in understanding
but only in expressing personal opinion.” (18:2)
“Fools think their own way is right,
but the wise listen to advice.” (12:16)
“The wise lay up knowledge,
but the babbling of a fool brings ruin near.” (10:14)

The word that we translate from the Hebrew as “Proverbs”
means “to compare”.
The Book of Proverbs is filled with comparative aphorisms:
“doing this is good,
but doing that is bad.”
“A fool gives full vent to anger,
but the wise quietly holds it back.” (29:11)

Proverbs also teaches us to compare,
to analyze,
to reflect,
and to discern
as we seek to live wisely.

To live wisely is to live fully in life.
“To possess the virtues of the wise
is to live deeply and intensely,
in rich relationships with all of life,
and, ultimately, with God.”
(Kathleen O’Connor, The Wisdom Literature, 41)

To live wisely is to learn that we should go through life
filled with questions, always asking,
always seeking answers.
That’s how we grow in knowledge.

Living in faith is not living in blind obedience and acceptance;
living in faith is living in the tension between
belief and certainty,
testing what we hear, learn,
see and experience.

Three thousand years ago Moses told the children of Israel
that other prophets would follow him after he died.
The children of Israel asked Moses how they would know
a true prophet from a false prophet.
The answer that God gave through Moses and
gave through all the prophets who followed Moses
was the same:
you’ll have to figure it out for yourself
through faith, wisdom and discernment.

Three thousand years later,
false prophets find ready audiences
among those who have not learned this lesson,
who don’t want to think,
who aren’t willing to do the work,
who don’t want to grow in wisdom or understanding.

Jesus is the master teacher of wisdom.
His favorite teaching tool was the parable,
those riddle-like stories that cause us
to have to read them three or four times,
discuss them, unpack them,
and even then we are not sure we’ve got them.
Parables force us to think,
to reflect, and discern.

Jesus used exaggeration and hyperbole, as well,
telling us to gouge out an eye or cut off a hand
if they cause us to sin (Matthew 5:29-30)
Aren’t we glad we don’t read the Bible literally?
We hear Jesus’ teaching and we have to figure out
what it is he’s trying to have us learn.
Jesus wants us to grow in wisdom as we grow in faith.

It was the German poet Rainer Marie Rilke,
who advised a young person much like our graduates
to go through life always questioning,
because in the process of questioning,
we learn, we discern,
and we find understanding.

He encouraged the young person
..to try to “love the questions themselves.”
and even more, to “live the questions”,
for in time, he wrote, if we live the questions,
we will live our way into the answers.
(Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

There is much in life that we should question.
We should question why there are men, women and children
dying right now of malnutrition and starvation
in other parts of the world
when obesity is one of our major health problems in this country.
We should question why we as a nation consume so much food;
why we waste so much food.
We should question why we aren’t working now
to find better ways to distribute food to assure
that no one dies for lack of something to eat.
As we ask the difficult questions
we will live into the answers.

We should question why we seem to turn a deaf ear
or even tolerate those who spew hatred
against men and women because of their ethnicity,
the color of their skin,
their gender,
their religion,
their sexual orientation.
We should question why we seem to think such talk is acceptable
because the talker is on prime-time television,
or speaks his hate-filled words into a gold-plated microphone.
We should question words that are so antithetical
to everything Christ teaches,
words that can trigger senseless violence
such as the murder of the doctor in his church,
or the guard at the Holocaust Museum this past week.
As we ask the difficult questions
we will live into the answers.

We should question why we are still so caught up
in the endless debate that has paralyzed the larger church
about who we should and should not ordain.
I have lived the question for most of my adult life.
I grew up in a decidedly homophobic time
and environment.
But as I have lived the question,
I have found myself living into some answers
--That the person I had looked at as different,
is a child of God,
and bears the image of Jesus Christ.
--That whatever sins I may think a person has
will be dealt with in time by the only judge who matters,
our Lord Jesus Christ,
just as Jesus will judge my own sins.
--And a call to service, ordained service in the church,
a call to serve as an ordained
Minister of Word and Sacrament,
or ordained Elder, or ordained Deacon,
is a call that comes from God,
a tap on the shoulder from the Chief himself,
as the Reverend Peter Marshall might have put it,
and there is no place for me between
God and the person God chooses to call.
As I have lived the questions,
I have lived into the answers,
answers that I think Jesus would approve of.

I have found the words of a wise pastor
helpful as I try to live these and other questions,
and live into the answers:
“It’s always a good time to change your mind
when to do so will widen your heart.”
(WS Coffin, Letters to a Young Doubter, 116)

Widening my heart:
that sounds to me like a proverbial statement
that will guide me on the path to wisdom:
Transforming myself,
transforming my thinking
becoming more accepting, open, loving,
“Learning in my own experience
what is fully pleasing to the Lord.”
(Ephesians 5:10)

If I were to offer a graduation address to our new graduates
mine would be short.
In fact, I would not call it a graduation address;
I would call it a commencement address
as a reminder that each day we are graced
with the commencement of new life in Jesus Christ.
So I would say very simply:
Live the questions;
live into the answers.
Grow in knowledge;
seek wisdom;
nurture your faith.
Widen your heart;
Love broadly, love deeply.
And may the Lord bless you and keep you
and make his face to shine upon you,
and give you peace
now and always.
AMEN

Always Working

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
June 7, 2009

Always Working
John 5:1-17

Clouds gather on the horizon,
thick black clouds.
The residents know a severe storm is coming;
the weather channels have been warning them
for the past 24 hours.
Food and water are stored,
windows boarded up,
fresh batteries put in flashlights and radios.
Lightning flashes, clouds collide,
and then a funnel drops from the sky and touches the ground.
It gathers energy as it races through the fields
on its way to the center of town.
It takes only a few moments
for the tornado to do its devastating work,
leaving a path of death and destruction:
an entire community leveled,
nothing remains.

A five-year old tells her mother she doesn’t feel well,
that her head hurts.
Her mother takes her to the doctor,
who, after a battery of tests,
has to tell the mother and father
that their daughter, their little girl,
has a tumor in her brain,
and that she will not live to
celebrate her sixth birthday.

A man buys a gun;
a semi-automatic gun that was not designed for sport,
but designed with only one purpose in mind:
to kill, to kill a human.
A few days later,
the man walks into a building on a college campus;
or perhaps it is a high school classroom,
or maybe it’s the place where he worked until last month
when he was laid off.
We all know the end of the story;
it has become all too familiar.

Tragedy surrounds us,
suffering, pain:
senseless tragedy,
senseless suffering,
senseless pain.

There are times when it seems like it is all too much.
When we want to lift up our voices in anguish to God,
cry out with the lament that Matthew and Mark tell us
were Jesus’ final words on the Cross
“My God, My God, why have you forsaken us?”

Why do the innocent suffer?
Why do the good die?

We question God’s will and God’s purposes.
There are even times when we may wonder
whether God is even present,
whether he has turned away,
whether God could be treating us as he once treated
the children of Israel so long ago:
“When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen.”
(Isaiah 1:15)

But our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us
that God does not turn from us,
God does not abandon us,
God does not forsake us,
God does not stop listening to us.
Never.

God is always present,
God is always there.
And God does not stand idly by.
God is, as we heard our Lord say in the lesson,
“always working”,
Jesus is “always working”:
working in our lives
working “for our welfare,
and not for our harm,
to give us a future with hope.”
(Jeremiah 29:11)

Bad things happen;
Accidents happen;
Storms happen.
The will of God is not what makes them happen;
the will of God is to help us get through them.

It is illness, sickness, and disease that we struggle with the most.
When a disease attacks even the healthiest body,
especially when disease strikes down a young person,
that’s when we really wonder,
when our faith is really tested.

We don’t understand why a five-year old
would die of a brain tumor.

We can’t comprehend how a twenty-year-old
could learn she’s got lymphoma
with little hope of a cure;

We are stunned when we learn a forty-year-old
who went to the doctor complaining
of a pulled muscle in his lower back
is told that the pain is the result of
cancer of the esophagus,
cancer which has advanced so far
that he has only a few months to live.

In our anguish we lift up our voices to God,
Why? Why?
Why are there such terrible diseases?
Diseases that are so merciless and cruel.
Diseases that elude our best efforts to eradicate them.

In our anguish, we forget about all those illnesses,
all those diseases which we have eradicated,
those diseases for which we now have cures.
The paradox is, that the more successful we are
in finding cures for diseases,
the more difficult it is for us to understand
those that still elude cures.

But in every situation, God is with us.
God is at work.
Jesus is at work,
even in the life of a person with the most insidious disease.
The poet Walt Whitman wrote lines
in a poem that capture perfectly God’s presence:
“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels;
I myself become the wounded person.”
(Song of Myself, 33)

In the humanity of Jesus Christ
God took on our pain and our suffering.
When we suffer, God suffers;
when we feel pain, God feels pain.

The Psalmist understood this when he wrote Psalm 23.
He begins the Psalm by speaking of God in the third person:
“he leads me beside the still waters;
he restores my soul.”
But when the Psalmist walks through
the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
the Psalmist’s relationship with God becomes so intimate,
the presence of God so clear in his life:
“You are with me.”
You comfort me.
You feed me.
You anoint me.”

We may not fully understand,
but God is there,
always there, even in the most horrific circumstances.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of the classic
"When Bad Things Happen to Good People”
--written in response to the death of his 14-year-old son
from an incurable disease--
put it very succinctly when he wrote:
“God does not explain;
God comforts.”
(The Lord is My Shepherd, 110)

The apostle Paul reminds us that we do not walk by facts,
we don’t walk by sight,
we walk by faith.
Or as Gene Barndt said at yesterday’s service for Linda,
“We believe”.
We trust;
we have faith.

The English preacher Leslie Weatherhead has written,
it is a “dim cathedral called human pain.
It is a sacred place….
There are many windows in the cathedral
so we do not walk in black darkness.
And under the eastern window,
beyond which the sun of understanding
rises ever higher in the sky,
is a cross which whispers its eternal message
that God himself in Christ came right down
into our pain and shared it.
He understands how we feel.
He promises that one day we shall understand, too.” (Salute to a Sufferer)

God is present, here and now,
just as he is at all times and in all places.
Jesus Christ is present here and now,
just as he is in all times and all places.

Jesus invites us, all of us,
to come to his table and find peace:
peace in the assurance that God is the ever-present “I am”.

Jesus invites us to come to his table and find nourishment,
find comfort,
find hope.

Come to this table.
Come and be fed.
Come and find peace.
Come, for God in Christ is here,
present, working, as he always is,
so that our cups may always run over.
AMEN