Looking Deeper

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
July 26, 2009

Looking Deeper
Luke 7:1-10

Push off from the shore and glide across the surface of the lake.
Dip the blade of your paddle into the clear, cool water and pull.
You can feel the canoe accelerate beneath you
as it cuts across the water.
You settle into a rhythm of paddling,
reaching, pulling,
your eyes drawn to the little whirlpools you create
with every stroke.

The shoreline quickly recedes
as you head for the clearing in the woods
directly opposite.
It isn’t far; most of the lakes in this part of the world are small.
You reach the bank and see the path
that connects the lake you are on
with the next lake, the lake you are headed to.
You remember not to refer to it as a path,
or a carryover –
you want to sound like you belong here,
not a tourist,
so you prepare to carry the canoe and your gear
over the portage.

This is Algonquin Provincial Park,
in the Canadian province of Ontario,
about 150 miles north of Toronto.
This is also a little bit of heaven.

I spent many summers in the Park,
camping and canoeing with family and friends.
Especially memorable were the summers of
1965, ‘66, and ‘67
I spent at Camp Pathfinder for boys.

The lakes in the Park back in the 1960s were so clean,
so clear you could dip a cup over the side of the canoe
and take a drink straight from the lake.
On my last trip there in the late 1970s,
the lakes were still lovely,
but they were beginning to show the stress and strain
of too many thoughtless humans.
Water had to be boiled first before you could drink it.

For as clear as the lakes were, though,
it was difficult to see more than a foot or so beneath the surface.
The lake bottoms were pitch black
a tangle of trees, limbs and branches,
remnants of another era
when many of the lakes were part of the forests
that covered Northern Ontario.

Camp Pathfinder taught the boys the history of the area,
that the lakes we paddled across in our cedar canoes
were once home to Abaniki and Objiwa Indians,
who trailed deer, wolves and moose,
animals that had once been abundant
but were increasingly scarce
as they competed with humanity
for space and food.

Camp Pathfinder taught boys to look past the surface,
to look deeper,
not just as we looked at the lakes,
but as we looked at the forests around us,
the skies above us,
the wildlife everywhere.

They taught us to look deeper
as we canoed across lakes
and hiked over portages,
to see more than just a group of boys and men
pitching tents,
building campfires,
catching fish,
and telling the kinds of stories
that only pre-adolescent boys find funny.

We were taught to look past the surface
of everything we looked at,
to look deeper,
as we drank richly from the beauty of God’s creation.

Sit on the side of a dive boat
as it bobs in gentle waves on turquoise waters
far from Algonquin Provincial Park.
Adjust your mask and your mouthpiece, and then,
at the word from the instructor,
fall backwards into the water,
and float gently down beneath the waves,
the bubbles from your tank rising to the surface.

You’re only a foot or two beneath the waves,
but you sense extraordinary calm in the waters.
Here you feel no waves, no wind.
The dive instructor beckons you to follow
and down you go, not far,
it isn’t very deep here in these reefs.

The sunlight penetrates brilliantly,
giving the waters a cathedral-like glow,
as though the rays pass through stained-glass.
The sun illuminates the wildly-colored fish that swim all around.
What fun God must have had
when he took his brush and his paints
to the fish that swim in tropical waters!
Sitting on the surface of the water
who could have imagined such an vibrant display,
just below the surface,
almost within reach,
a riot of life and color.

Life beckons us to look deeper,
to go beyond the surface, the gloss,
to look deep,
deeper,
as deeply as we can.

Life beckons, but we resist.
Looking deeper takes effort,
it can be too much like work.
It is so much easier to keep things on the surface,
to keep things superficial… not to go deeper.
And so we live our lives on the surface.
And as a result we are quick to judge people
on their looks, their skin color,
the clothes they wear, the cars they drive.
Around here, of course,
we want to know:
Democrat or Republican?

We do this even though we all know by heart
Jesus’ words to us:
“Don’t judge,
Don’t condemn,
Forgive.”
(Luke 6:37)

Ah, but there’s the rub:
we may remember those words,
we may able to quote them readily,
but we don’t know them by heart.
If we knew them by heart,
we’d live them, wouldn’t we?

Imagine if Jesus had skimmed through his ministry,
stayed on the surface,
never looking deeper.
How much easier his life would have been!

The story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well
would have been short and to the point,
Jesus dismissing her, first because she was
a Samaritan and second, because she was a woman.

We never would have had the wonderful story
of Zacchaeus, the corrupt chief tax collector.
You remember that story:
Zacchaeus was so short
that when Jesus came into town
and people gathered along the side of the road
to greet him,
Zacchaeus could not see over the people,
so he climbed a tree to get a better view.
And Jesus saw Zacchaeus in the tree and
told him to climb down so that Jesus could
have dinner at Zacchaeus’ home.
And there, the spirit filled Zacchaeus
and Zacchaeus was able to look deeper,
to see people as more than just pots of money
for him and his gang to shake down.
That day, salvation came to Zacchaeus’ home.

And of course, we would not have
the text we heard in our lesson
if Jesus had not looked deeper.
Jesus would have had nothing to do
with the Centurion’s servant,
because he would have had nothing to do with the Centurion:
an officer in the Roman army,
the enemy of the children of Israel,
the occupying force.
Why would Jesus have paid any attention to him?

Besides, Jesus had his hands full with the
group he called his disciples,
Look at them: why would Jesus have called
Peter, Andrew,
James, John, Matthew, and the others?
On the surface, none of them showed much aptitude
for the work Jesus had in mind for them;
they often seemed like such dim bulbs.

But Jesus looked deeper:
he saw something in each of the disciples.
Jesus looked deeper at Zacchaeus and
the Samaritan woman.
The impressive display of military hardware
the Centurion wore did not keep Jesus
from looking deeper.

Everything about our lives as followers of Jesus Christ
calls us to dig deeper, look deeper,
never to stop at the surface, at the superficial.
Here in this church,
in our homes, our work places, our schools,
in the world around us,
we are called to look deeper.

Looking deeper is the very essence of what we do
in Bible Study classes each week:
the Wednesday morning group,
the Thursday evening group,
the Year of the Bible group.

We learn that we have to go beyond the words
that appear on the page.
We learn to go beyond the words,
to work to discern what it is that God wants us to learn.
It is easy to read a few words in the text
and say, “This is it, I’ve got it.”
But we have to ask,
Do we really understand,
or are we looking just on the surface?
Do we need to look deeper?

Paul’s letter to the Romans,
which we are reading now,
is a powerful example of why we are called to look deeper.
In the neverending ordination wars
we’ve suffered through over the past decade,
one side is quick to quote from the first chapter
to say that Paul clearly condemns certain behavior.
A surface reading of the text easily leads us to say
yes, that’s just what Paul is doing.

But read deeper, look deeper;
there is more there,
much more there.
Multiple levels if we dig down.

Even if we just go one level down
and stop there, look what Paul does:
He warns us,
warns us that while we might be tempted to join
what looks like a call to a choir of condemnation,
“…[Y]ou have no excuse, whoever you are,
when you judge others;
for in passing judgment on another
you condemn yourself,
because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”
(Romans 2:1)

Skim along the surface, and look at what we miss:
we miss grace,
we miss grace and we miss love.
Look deeper and that’s where we find grace
that’s where we feel the Spirit,
where we feel the true presence of God.

Look deeper into Romans
and we learn that while God accepts us as we are
God expects us not to stay as we are,
but to dig deeper into faith,
dig deeper in our lives,
to grow and be transformed by grace,
to go beyond being a religious person,
to go deeper and become a spiritual person.

The religious person looks at the world
around himself or herself
and takes it in as information and facts.
The spiritual person looks with different eyes,
eyes that look deeper.
The spiritual person looks with “Jesus eyes”,
eyes that see as Jesus saw, as Jesus sees even now:
eyes, mind, heart, spirit
all together to help to see deeply,
to see past the surface.

Look with "Jesus eyes"
and we see the image of God in every person –
Samaritan, Roman, leper.

Look with "Jesus eyes"
and we see the balance and order
of this world around us,
this creation in which God delights.

Look with "Jesus eyes"
and you look with grace and love.

Do you have “Jesus eyes”?
Yes: we all have “Jesus eyes”,
given us by the grace of God,
given us by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Here’s the more difficult question:
how well do you use them, your “Jesus eyes”?
Do you use them only for special occasions,
for an hour or so on Sunday
and then only sporadically the rest of the week,
otherwise keeping them in a compartment
separate and apart from other parts of your life?

Take them out of the special box,
the special compartment,
and use them, all the time,
use your "Jesus eyes"
to look at the world,
to look at all humanity,
to look widely,
and look deeply.

Use your “Jesus eyes”
and you are sure to see the world in a whole new way.
Not because the world has changed,
but because you have:
Look with “Jesus eyes”
and you’ve taken a big step toward a deeper spirituality,
a big step in response to God’s call
to a transforming life.

So look with “Jesus eyes”, here and now,
and then keep looking with your "Jesus eyes"
as you leave here and go back out into the world.
See with “Jesus eyes”,
use your “Jesus eyes”
and look deep, deeper,
Use them today,
but use them as well tomorrow,
and the day after,
and always.
The world will never look the same.
AMEN

Living on the Edge

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
July 19, 2009

Living on the Edge
1 John 4:7-12

This past week in our Vacation Bible School
we taught more than 100 children
to live on the edge,
to live on the edge as disciples of Jesus Christ.

We began each day with a video
featuring a woman named “Extreme Jean,”
who used “extreme” sports to illustrate each day’s lesson
as she urged the children to live on the edge.
Extreme Jean was so hyperkinetic
she would have “made coffee nervous,”
but she managed to tie rock climbing,
kayaking, and skiing to Reformed theology.
Even more impressive,
she managed the hold the children’s interest.

Living on the edge,
extreme sports,
the theological implications of rock climbing…
These all sound out of place for us as Presbyterians,
a little too “radical dude”
for disciples who find great comfort
in the words “decent and in order”;
After all, the light bulb joke for us
when you ask about how many Presbyterians
it takes to change a light bulb is 7:
one to change the bulb
and 6 to lament how much better the old one was.

But as radical as it was,
we didn’t hesitate to teach the children to live on the Edge.
“EDGE” was an acronym that stood for
“Experiencing and Discovering God Everywhere”
and that was just what we wanted the children to learn:
That God is everywhere,
everywhere in their lives.

Each day’s lesson built on that theme:
that God is with us,
that God guides us,
that God teaches us,
that God loves us,
and that God sends us
to help others experience and discover God
everywhere.

The children learned not only in each morning’s
Opening Assembly, but through a daily Bible lesson,
a science room, playtime, crafts, music,
and of course, snack-time.
Judging by their constant smiles
and their boundless exuberance,
I think the week was a huge success.

Extreme Jean was right:
we are called to live on the edge
as disciples of Jesus Christ,
lives in the extreme:
We are called to lives of extreme love,
extreme faith,
and extreme peace.
We are called to live this way
by our Lord Jesus Christ.
His was a life of extreme obedience,
extreme confidence in his Father in heaven,
extreme commitment to the work
his Father called him to do,
and extreme love for all,
even for those who sought to kill him.

In the Year of the Bible class
we are just starting to read through
Paul’s letter to the Romans.
What Paul teaches us is that through the extreme love of God
revealed to us in Jesus Christ,
all the rockiness that had marked our relationship with God
going all the way back to Adam
was set aside, forgotten,
as we were given new life in Christ.

That’s God’s extreme grace,
extreme love.
Through the life and resurrection of Jesus Christ,
we are no longer living on the edge of darkness,
the edge of death.
We are living fully in the life of faith
given to us solely by the grace of God.

But, through the extreme grace and extreme love of God
revealed in Christ,
we are called to extreme lives too,
as we carry on Christ’s work.
We are called to live on the edge,
just as Jesus did.

“Follow me” is what Jesus says.
Jesus never said “worship me”.
“Follow me:
Do what I do,
go where I go,
Do what I teach you to do,
go where I send you.
Following me means living on the edge;
if you don’t want to live that way
that’s okay; just make your choice.
If you prefer to lament the old bulb,
then you are welcome to sit in the darkness.
But if you are going to follow me,
you will live on the edge,
live often in the extreme.
It will feel at times unsettling,
even uncomfortable,
but always remember:
God is with you;
I am with you,
the Spirit fills you."

That’s Jesus extreme promise.

It takes courage to live fully in faith,
courage to respond to “follow me”
with an unwavering, “yes”,
yes, wherever Christ calls us and leads us.
Courage. A word that means
“it comes from the heart”.

We admire courage when we see extraordinary examples of it.
Men and women who serve in the armed forces --
those who serve in combat, of course,
but also others as they go about their work:
watch a Coast Guard swimmer jump from a helicopter
into 20 ft waves to save the victims of a capsized boat,
and you will see courage at work.
Firefighters show incredible courage
as they climb ladders to dizzying heights,
or rush into buildings filled with smoke and flames.
Police officers who respond to any radio call,
but especially the one that says “shots fired”,
show extraordinary courage.

My friend Charles, whom I spoke about last week,
lives in a place that requires physical courage.
In the part of the world where he lives his faith,
Christians have been known to be arrested,
and beaten if they live their faith too openly.

How many times was Paul beaten,
beaten within an inch of his life?
Living on the edge, living fully in faith
requires physical courage.

But living on the edge requires more than physical courage;
It requires moral courage;
it requires intellectual courage:
examples of courage that seem to be less and less prevalent
in our society today.

Moral and intellectual courage is grounded in truth,
it is grounded in honesty,
grounded in doing the right thing
without concern for what people will think of you.
The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. had moral and intellectual courage;
Mahatma Gandhi had moral and intellectual courage;
Desmond Tutu has moral and intellectual courage.

Moral and intellectual courage set a person apart.
A person with moral and intellectual courage
isn’t afraid to upset the balance,
go against the mainstream,
swim against the current.
The person with moral and intellectual courage
understands what it means to live on the edge.
Moral and intellectual courage
comes from living a principled life,
grounded in something that is more,
so much more, than yourself.

Moral and intellectual courage comes from God,
is grounded in Christ,
and empowered by the Holy Spirit,
giving us the strength to stand up and speak up,
when we see something that is wrong:
where justice is absent,
where hypocrisy and selfishness prevail,
where the strong thrive at the expense of the weak.

We live in a time when we need
moral and intellectual courage
in our society.
The current debate about our health care system
is not just a political issue,
or even a social issue,
it is very much a matter of justice and mercy,
righteousness and love.
How often do we read in both Old and New Testaments
of our calling to care for the sick?
That’s a calling to do more than just deliver
a pot of chicken soup to someone with the flu.
Christians of every political persuasion should be
speaking up for reform in our health care system,
to assure that everyone has access to good health care.

Every clergy man and woman works within the health care system
as we visit in hospitals and nursing homes, and other
health facilities.
I spent a year as a hospital chaplain
and I’ve seen enough over the years to know
our health system is in need of a major overhaul,
especially to eliminate the chokehold
of the insurance industry.
How can we allow an industry that labels
every claim it pays out as a “loss”
to control your health care, my health care?
Had insurance companies been in business 2000 years ago,
they no doubt would have dismissed Jesus’ healing
as “out-of-network” and denied all claims.

We need moral and intellectual courage to make this happen,
to do the right thing for all men, women and children.

Every Christian of every political persuasion
should be speaking out against the shameless greed
in the business world,
a world in which corporate CEOs
seem to have more in common
with “smash-and-grab” thieves
than with principled leaders.

Stephen Green, the chairman of HSBC,
one of the world’s largest banks
has shown moral and intellectual courage in a book
he’s written (Good Value)
in which he expresses his dismay at the greed
he’s seen in business in general
and his industry in particular.

Banks have been at the center of the economic collapse
largely due to poor management, selfish management,
and greedy management,
management that Green argues has been lacking in
moral and intellectual courage.

Green’s thesis is that we begin to slide down the road to trouble
when we begin the practice of compartmentalizing:
when we separate our lives as bankers or business people
from our lives as neighbors,
our lives as disciples of Jesus Christ.
Once we start to compartmentalize,
we sever the Sunday-Monday connection,
and we are like an ice-road trucker who’s lost all traction.

Green, who was trained as an Anglican priest,
reminds us that we are called to live whole lives,
living love in every part of our lives:
in work, in family life, in church, in the community
and in the world at large.
The business person who considers himself a Christian,
but compartmentalizes his business life
separating it from his Christian life,
so he can focus on the bottom line in the office
maximizing profit,
is showing neither faithfulness,
nor moral or intellectual courage.

It will take courage,
it will take living on the edge,
to re-create and re-build our economy
as we come out of this recession,
to rebuild an economy in which the rich
don’t get richer at the expense of the poor.
Over the last decade, the number of people
living in poverty went up every year
as the rich grew richer.
That is unjust; that is wrong.

Green reminds his colleagues and peers
that businesses have a responsibility
to the larger community,
something the dean of management writers,
Peter Drucker, said time and time again.
Green knows that every business needs to make a profit;
but the business person who shows
moral and intellectual courage,
balances his focus on profitability with
his responsibility to employees,
the community, customers,
and even the environment.
Ironically, studies have shown that businesses
that operate this way are more profitable
over the long term.

We are living on the edge,
a tipping point with
how we provide health care in our society
and with how we manage our economy.
Living on the edge, living on the tipping point
means we can go either direction.

If we live in the Christian edge,
the place where God is, where Christ calls us
we will live our faith,
work our faith, as we talked about last week,
and live in love, love for all
as John teaches us.
“Whoever does not love,
does not know God.”
The minute we compartmentalize,
and close off love,
we close off God.
We have fallen off the edge back into the darkness.

Extreme Jean would tell us that life as disciples has risks,
just as skiing down a mountainside has risks,
or navigating a kayak down a rushing river has risks.
But Extreme Jean would remind us that God is with us,
as we live on the edge,
calling us to live courageously,
and gracing us with the courage we need
to do what God calls us to do.

So let’s join the boys and girls who filled this building
with such energy this past week:
let’s join them as we all live on the edge,
experiencing and discovering God everywhere:
in our lives here,
at work, at home, at school.

So come on, all God’s children,
grab your gear and
feel the Spirit fill you,
as you experience God everywhere.
Come on - let’s every one of us live on the edge.
AMEN

Now As Our Service Begins

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
July 12, 2009

Now As Our Service Begins
James 2:14-17

“Now as our service begins” --
such an ordinary sentence,
such ordinary words,
words that would seem so appropriate
at the start of our worship service,
perhaps right after the Call to Worship
as a prelude to the Opening Hymn:
“Now as our service begins,
let us sing out, making a joyful noise to the Lord…”

I’ve spoken those words in Worship from time to time,
but do you remember when I’ve said them?
I’ve never said them at the beginning of our service;
I’ve said them at the end,
as part of the Benediction,
right before we leave,
in a place in the service where they don’t seem to fit.
Our service is about to end,
not begin,
and yet: “now as our service begins…”

But those words do fit there, don’t they?
They work.
For in saying those words as part of the Benediction,
we are reminding ourselves
that even as our worship service
is coming to an end,
our lives in service as disciples of Jesus Christ,
are about to begin as we go from this place,
go back out into the world.

It was the Reverend Dr. Herb Anderson,
the senior pastor at the Brick Presbyterian Church
where I was active 15 years ago,
who always began his Benediction
with the words,
“now as our service begins…”
The first time I heard him speak those words,
I thought he’d made a mistake.
But then I realized it was intentional;
In speaking them, Dr. Anderson was reminding us
of the words our Risen Lord spoke to the disciples
on the evening of the first Easter Sunday:
“As the Father has sent me,
so I send you.”
(John 20:21)

Those are words Jesus spoke not just to the 11,
they are words Jesus speaks to all us
here and now every time we leave this place,
every time we set out into the world:
“As the Father has sent me,
so I send you.”

We are all called to go out and serve,
and we serve the Lord in countless ways.
A small army of disciples will serve the Lord
this coming week as we welcome more than 100 children
to our Vacation Bible School.
Most of the children and their parents
will be visitors, new to us.
Most will have their own church homes.
That’s just fine.
Our mission, our ministry,
our service this coming week is simple:
it is to share the grace and love
we’ve been given through Jesus Christ.
And that’s what we will do:
through music, through playtime,
through crafts, through learning,..
and through a great deal of fun!

We go out and serve in other ways, too:
The Habitat team that will go off for a week
and help people with such a fundamental need:
a roof over their heads,
walls to keep out the wind and the rain and the cold,
a safe, and comfortable place.
Our Young people will be based at Meadowkirk,
the Presbytery’s beautiful facility out in Middleburg.
Meadowkirk itself is a mission and a ministry of our church
through the National Capital Presbytery.
Our young folks will be based there to worship, learn,
work and serve in different ways each day.

Perhaps within the next few years
we’ll be able to send a group of youth and adults
on a Mission trip to Central America,
South America, or some other part of the world
far from Manassas.
We won’t do that because the needs elsewhere
are greater than the needs we have right here
in our own community.
But experiences like that help us to break down cultural barriers,
help us to understand that God is everywhere, in all places.
and that followers of Jesus Christ
may speak different languages,
but we share a bond of love, grace,
and a commitment to service.

Once a quarter I receive an update from a classmate from seminary,
who three years ago moved with his wife and children
to rural northern China
where he felt God was calling him.
Charles had spent the previous six years
as director of Asian programs for World Relief,
and had traveled frequently to the area
where he now lives;
he knew it well, knew the people
knew their needs.
Charles’ background is similar to mine:
he came to seminary after a successful career in business.
He now lives his faith by teaching business skills
to men and women,
skills that will help them establish businesses and
improve the economy in that area.
His dream is to help establish a wind-power facility
to generate electricity a few miles away,
across the border that separates China and North Korea.
Charles and his family live the gospel
as they bring learning, hope, and love
to a desolate corner of the world.

Of course, we don’t have to pack a suitcase
and head to some distant location to serve the Lord.
We are called to missionary lives
the moment we walk out of this Sanctuary,
We are sent out to serve,
but that service can happen even before we
get to our car in the parking lot.

Mission work is not a program the church offers;
it isn’t something that happens only during a week in the summer
or from time to time
on a Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon.
Doing missional, missionary work is how we are to live our lives
as disciples of Jesus Christ.

The Rev. Leslie Newbigin, a British pastor and theologian
who wrote prolifically on mission, reminds us,
“Mission is not marginal to the life of the church,
but definitive of it, central to its being….
The church is God’s sending, His mission.”
(Signs Amid the Rubble, 95)

In living missional lives, we understand that
we are not “taking God” out into the world;
God’s already there.
What we are doing is responding to Christ’s call
to take God’s grace, God’s love,
God’s justice, God’s mercy into the world,
and we do that through our words and actions.

We do that in the lives we live in our workplaces,
schools, neighborhoods,
even where we go on vacation.
Newbigin tells us that our business is to go outside these walls
where God is already very much at work
and “become aware of what God is doing
and then join Him and work with Him.”
(Newbigin, 96)

This is our faith at work.
which is the point James, the brother of Jesus,
was trying to make in our text.
This is a text that has been badly muddled over the years.
It has been read as a directive for what was termed,
“works righteousness”:
that you have to work your way into the Kingdom,
pile up your positive points
to offset the negative points
that we inevitably accumulate each day.
The Letter has been read as conflicting with Paul’s teaching
that our salvation comes solely by the grace of God.
Martin Luther found this letter so troubling
he didn’t think it should have been included in the Bible.

But James doesn’t disagree with Paul at all.
What he was teaching was simple,
he was building on the words of his brother,
our Lord: don’t just be hearers of the Word,
be doers. (Matthew 7:24-27)
Live your faith. Work your faith.
No matter how deep and frequent your prayers,
no matter how spiritual your every word might be,
for James, “faith by itself,
if it has no works is dead.”

We are called to go out in faith and serve.
That’s what Jesus told the disciples on that first Easter evening.
Go forth, and they all did.
None found the journey easy,
but Jesus never said it would be.

In one of his many wonderful books
Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote that we are called
to “adventurous religion”
as we work in faith and work our faith for the glory of God.
“The life to which Jesus summons us,”
Fosdick wrote,
“requires bravery to undertake
and fortitude to continue.”
it isn’t just a feeling good, feeling holy;
It is about getting out there and doing.
It is about getting out
and moving mountains.

God looks to us to
help feed the hungry
help house the homeless,
help comfort the lonely.
But God calls us to do even more.
God call us to:
work for reconciliation where there is no hope for reconciliation;
bring love where there is no love to be found anywhere;
bring peace where there is no hope for peace;
bring hope where there is no hope,
God calls us to go out into the world
remembering the promise that is on our white bracelets:
“with God, all things are possible”
(Mark 10:27)

Building missional skills takes time and effort
but there is a very easy place where you can start,
an easy place where you can work on your works:
right here in this place
every Sunday as you cultivate your hospitality,
hospitality to one another,
and even more, hospitality to visitors and strangers.

You have heard me say before that
we should be a congregation of Jess Pepples,
every one of us, reaching out
in friendship and in welcome.
Hospitality, welcome, outreach:
it isn’t just the work of the Membership Ministry Team,
it is the work God calls every one of us to.

Talk gets us only so far, no matter how faith-filled,
no matter how spiritual the words sound.
Talk isn’t enough.
Our words are to be accompanied by action;
our acts, action and attitude in harmony,
here, and in the world at large.

So, go.
Go out to live your faith,
Go out and work your faith,
Go out and live “adventurous religion”,
for in just a few minutes
our worship service will end,
and your service,
your service as a disciple of Jesus Christ,
will begin.
AMEN

Not Much of a Carpenter

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
July 5, 2009

Not Much of a Carpenter
Mark 6:1-6

A sense of excitement ran through the town.
Everyone in Nazareth was out, talking….
talking about Jesus,
Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary,
the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon.

The people of Nazareth had heard the stories about Jesus
that had traveled with the wind:
his teaching, his wisdom,
and the healings,
and even miracles.
Had there been such a thing as a newspaper back then
the headline might have read,
“Nazareth Welcomes Jesus:
Local boy returns a celebrity!”

On the Sabbath, people crowded the synagogue
to see and hear Jesus.
It was the custom in those days
that when a visitor came to the synagogue,
he was given the honor
of reading from Scripture and then interpreting.
Jesus was handed the scroll of Isaiah
and he read from the book
and then he began to explain the text.

At first the people listened carefully, attentively.
but then questions began to course through their minds.
Not questions about the text,
about what God was saying as he spoke through the prophet,
but questions about Jesus:
“What is this wisdom that has been given to him?
Where did this man get all this?
What deeds of power are being done in his hands?”

And then the questions turned to statements,
critical, cutting, belittling, insulting.
We can almost hear what the people were saying
as the words became nastier,
attitudes toward Jesus spiraling downward:
“Don’t you remember him as a boy?
His head was always in the clouds;
He never played with the other children.
He was not the least bit respectful of his parents;
Who can forget what he did to poor Mary and Joseph
that time they went to Jerusalem for the Passover?
It took his parents three days to find him,
and then he didn’t even apologize,
he just said something about
being about his Father’s business.

It would have been good if had been
about his father’s business
and stayed put to work with Joseph.
That’s what the eldest son is supposed to do:
carry on his father’s trade.
For the little bit that he worked with his father,
he certainly wasn’t much of a carpenter.”

“And now he tries to impress us with wisdom,
as though he’s a man of scholarship and learning.
And who are these men with Jesus,
these …‘disciples’?
They look like a rather rough crew,
especially that Peter.
Imagine: a group of fishermen trying to teach others
about the Lord God!”

Here’s Jesus returning to his hometown,
to the people who knew him as a boy,
and the words fly fast and furious,
ugly and insulting.
The text tells us the people “took offense” at him.
Another way we can translate the sentence
is that the people “stumbled over” him,
they did not know what to do or think.
So what path did they take?
in today’s parlance,
they “went negative” on him.

The people of Nazareth thought they knew this man,
and they rushed to judgment.
Gossip turned to insults,
insults turned to outright hostility.
In Luke’s version of this story
the people not only run Jesus out of town,
they try to run him off a cliff.
(Luke 4:29)

“A prophet has no honor in his hometown.”

This is an awful story.
The people who think they know Jesus
better than anyone else
don’t welcome him,
don’t listen to him,
don’t learn from him.
They belittle him, tear him down, mock him.
Jesus ends up the astonished one,
astonished by their faithlessness,
astonished by their unbelief.

Now, before we go too negative about the people of Nazareth,
the question we have to ask is
had we lived in that time and that place,
would we have thought or done anything differently?
Wasn’t what they did
what we still find all too easy to do?
Aren’t we quicker to tear down
than we are to build up?
Aren’t we quicker to criticize
than we are to praise?

Paul saw this tendency even in the most faithful.
He spoke to it in almost every one of his letters:
To the Christians in Rome he wrote,
You are not going to argue with one another
over petty, silly things, are you?
“Let peace fill your hearts,
build up one another.”
To the people of Galatia he warned,
“If you bite and devour one another,
take care you are not consumed by one another.”

To the people of Corinth he wrote,
“As long as there is jealousy and quarreling among you,
you are not following Christ,
not opening yourself to the presence of the Spirit,
you are closing yourself to faith and belief.

Even the people of Philippi,
of whom Paul thought so highly,
he still felt compelled to remind them,
“Do all things without murmuring or arguing.”

He summed up his teaching
in his letter to the Colossians,
“…clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness,
humility, meekness and patience.
Bear with one another,
and if anyone as a complaint against another,
forgive each other;
Just as the Lord has forgiven you,
so you also must forgive.
Above all, clothe yourselves with love…
and let the peace of Christ rule your hearts.”
(Colossians 3:12ff)

We are called to build up,
build up,
build up one another through our every word,
and every act.
Build up one another in this church,
in our community,
in this nation whose birthday we joyfully celebrate,
and in the world.

In Paul’s words, we are to:
“Love one another with mutual affection;
[and] outdo one another in showing honor.”
(Romans 12:10)
“Let no evil talk come out of [our] mouths,
but only what is useful for building up…
so that [our] words may give grace to those who hear.”
(Ephesians 4:29)

It is hardly what the people of Nazareth were doing
as they spoke about Jesus.
But they found the path they went down so easy,
just as we do.
We find sharp remarks funny, clever, comical;
television sit-coms seem to be built on insulting comments.
We eagerly laugh at the remarks of acid-tongued curmudgeons.
Teddy Roosevelt’s daughter Alice was well known for her barbed tongue,
summed up in her comment to a guest
at a White House dinner:
“If you don’t have anything nice to say about anyone,
come sit by me.”

But going down that path, while it brings a laugh or two,
leads us away from God, away from Christ,
closes our hearts and minds to the work of the Holy Spirit.
As you come to the Table this morning,
I invite you to renew your commitment
to the life that Jesus calls us to:
a life grounded in love,
a life grounded in words that build up,
words that praise, words that encourage;
a life turned away from words that
find fault, that belittle,
that criticize, that insult or mock.

As you come to this Table,
I encourage you to reflect on Paul’s words
to the Christians at Rome:
“So let’s agree to use all our energy
in getting along with each other.
Help others with encouraging words;
don’t drag them down by finding fault.”
(Peterson, The Message)

Come to this Table to be renewed and refreshed
by this grace-filled meal,
and then go out sharing grace-filled words
building up here, and in all places, and all times,
speaking in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.
AMEN