Sunday, January 31, 2010

You

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
January 31, 2010

You
Jeremiah 1:4-10

Jeremiah was a young man,
somewhere around 20 when God came calling.
Like most 20-somethings he probably had plans for his life,
plans for work, for marriage,
for a family.
Is it any wonder that he balked when God came calling?

Jeremiah tried to turn God down in a nice way –
did you hear it?
“I am only a boy, God.
I wouldn’t know what to say.”
But Jeremiah should have known better.
Had he paid attention in Sabbath School
he would have learned from Moses’ experience
that trying to debate his way out of serving God
would not work.
God’s response to Jeremiah’s hesitancy was simple:
“Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’,
for you shall go to all whom I send you,
and you shall speak whatever I command you.”

God was not interested in arguing with Jeremiah;
he had work for him to do,
important work,
work that God wanted done immediately.

Since the death of King Solomon three hundred years before,
God had watched with dismay as his beloved children
strayed farther and farther away from him.
Almost every king who followed Solomon
seemed to have as his goal
how bad, how corrupt he could be.
The kings in the northern lands of Israel,
and those who ruled the southern kingdom of Judah
were a rogues’ gallery of faithlessness,
corruption, selfishness, and ignorance.

Only a few would have been able to take the vow
our own elders and deacons took two weeks ago,
to lead their people with energy, intelligence,
imagination and love.
They were more interested in leading with power,
military might,
cunning,
bribery, duplicity:
whatever it took.
Morals and ethics?
Responsibility to their people?
All those things would only get in the way.

The kings created a culture that prized wealth,
prized materialism,
prized pleasure,
a culture that was indifferent to the Lord God,
ignored the teachings found in scripture,
and was oblivious to the words
God had spoken through the prophets.
And the people loved it.

One hundred years before Jeremiah’s encounter with God,
God had sent prophets to warn the children of Israel
that they were in trouble,
and that they’d better turn from the path they were on,
turn back to the Lord God.

God spoke through the prophets in strong words,
so there’d be no misunderstanding:
“You have plowed wickedness,
you have reaped injustice,
you have eaten the fruit of lies.”
(Hosea 10:13)
“Your princes are rebels,
and companions of thieves,
Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts.
They do not defend the orphan
and the widow’s cause does not come before them.”
(Isaiah 1:23)
“I hate, I despise your festivals;
I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Take away from me the noise of your songs.”
(Amos 5:21ff)

But no one listened to the prophets.
There was business to be done,
wealth to be accumulated,
Who cared about the sick?
Who cared about the poor?
Who cared about the unemployed
the outcast, the foreigner?
Looking after them took time,
took money,
time and money that could be spent on personal needs.

So God looked for a new voice,
a new prophet to carry his message,
this time a young person.
A young person who would speak to the older generation
and say, “you’ve gone the wrong way.”

And Jeremiah reluctantly did what God asked of him,
and spoke the words that God commanded him to speak.
Like the prophets before him,
Jeremiah spoke bluntly:
“Hear this, O foolish and senseless people
who have eyes, but do not see,
who have ears but do not hear…
there are no limits to your deeds of wickedness:
you do not judge with justice the cause of the orphan,
or defend the rights of the needy….
Run to and from through the streets of Jerusalem
…see if you can find one person who acts justly…”

How do you think people reacted to Jeremiah’s words?
Do you suppose they heard him?
Heard his call to repentance?
Realized that they had indeed strayed far from God,
were weak in faith?

No, they were outraged that the young man
would dare say such things to them!
Their reaction to the message Jeremiah had for them
was to threaten to kill the messenger,
not ignore him,
but in fact kill him.
Jeremiah quckly found himself
cut off from his friends, even his family
because of the words God spoke through him.

Even today we struggle with Jeremiah and his prophecies.
We call a prophecy of doom and destruction a “jeremiad,”
as though everything Jeremiah said was so much
gloom and bleakness.
“Come on, Jeremiah”, we might say today,
“lighten up!”
“We don’t want to listen to a guy like you.
We only want to listen to someone
who tells us what we want to hear,
someone we like,
someone we’d want to have a beer with.”

Jeremiah prophesied bad times ahead for the children of God -
the Babylonian invasion and exile from their lands.
But he also made clear that the children of God
had a choice,
that they did not need to go down that path.
All they had to do was listen and repent,
acknowledge the error of their ways,
and turn back to the Lord God.
It was that simple.
Jeremiah’s words were a call to action
a call to a new life.

But the people who heard Jeremiah
dismissed him,
dismissed his words,
cursing him in the process,
and their course was set.

Jeremiah is speaking to us even now,
2600 years after he walked the streets of Jerusalem.
Jeremiah’s words are powerful, timeless.
We cannot turn from the messenger,
for the messenger’s message
are God’s own words to you and to me.

Were Jeremiah to walk the streets of our cities now
speaking God’s words he might begin his teaching
by reminding us of the words of one of his predecessors,
words from the prophet Micah:
“He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?”
(Micah 6:8)

Do justice, and love kindness.
Such simple words from the Lord God spoken to us
time and time again through the prophets.
And yet, do we do justice?
How can we say yes,
when there are more than 40 million men, women
and children in this country who live in poverty?
During the decade just ended,
we successfully turned a blind eye
and a deaf ear to the fact that each year
another one million people fell into poverty:
one million more in 2002,
one million more in 2003, 2004, 2005…
and that was before the economic downturn.
Millions upon millions fell into poverty
while most of us were focused on home equity
and the latest electronic games.

The Great Recession over the past 18 months
has only made matters worse.
Fully one in five people in this country
are struggling simply to put food on the table.
One in five: that’s more than 70 million people
just in this country!
Would we consider it just
to allow 80 men, women and children
of this congregation to struggle to feed themselves?
Would we dismiss them as victims of their own laziness,
their own irresponsibility,
pleading that we were doing all we could do?

You have heard me say repeatedly that access to health care
isn’t a political issue,
it is a moral issue,
a justice issue.
Those who have politicized the debate
and in the process demonized it
with their lies of death panels
and 18-month waits for surgery
are not doing justice, not living justice,
and neither are we if we aren’t in the vanguard
to work to assure that the sick are healed
without regard to employment,
finances,
or the whims of a claims clerk
at an insurance company
who has been trained to define any illness
as pre-existing.

Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine
has argued that the question we should be asking
is not, “when will the economic crisis end?”,
but “Will we do things differently
as a result of the economic crisis?”
Will we create a new economic standard,
one that is still based on capitalism and free-enterprise,
but one that is also based on justice and equity
rather than greed and
what’s in it for the individual.

Corporate executives argue that the purpose of a business
is to make a profit.
That’s true…
if your business is loan-sharking, or drug dealing,
where your only goal is to make money
and you don’t care about the impact
of what it is you are doing.
But Peter Drucker, the great management writer,
very wisely and very faithfully reminded us
the corporations are social entities,
part of society’s compact to do justice,
to act justly.
The company that acts justly,
that blends its business with responsibility,
that seeks justice even as it goes about its business,
will still make a profit,
but profit will be a result of its work,
not the goal.

In our sound-bite, polarized world,
such talk is dismissed as quickly as Jeremiah’s prophecies,
suspiciously socialist,
menacingly Marxist,
but studies have shown that companies that do best
in the long run are precisely those companies
that operate ethically,
morally,
justly.
(see e.g., Drucker, Handy, Collins,)

Jeremiah is timeless,
walking our streets here and now
talking to me,
tallking to you.
We – you and I - can turn away from him,
not listen to him,
but we do so at our peril
because he, like the prophets before and after him,
spoke the words God commanded him to speak.

In turning from the prophets --
Amos, Hosea, Micah, Isaiah, Jeremiah --
turning from their difficult words,
their words that seem to make us so uncomfortable,
we – you and I - turn from God’s words,
God’s words spoken precisely to shake you, shake me
turn you, turn me.

Eugene Peterson has taken the passage from Micah
and worded it in a way that speaks so powerfully:
"But he’s already made it plain how to live,
what to do,
what God is looking for in men and women.
It’s quite simple:
Do what is fair and just to your neighbor,
be compassionate and loyal in your love.
And don’t take yourself too seriously –
take God seriously."

(from “The Message”)

Do what is fair and just to your neighbor,
Be compassionate.
And take God seriously:
that’s the message God was calling Jeremiah to share;
the same message our Lord Jesus Christ
shares throughout the pages of the gospels.
A message for me to hear, to respond to;
a message for you to hear, to resond to,
For God’s sake;
For Christ’s sake.
For your sake.
AMEN

Sunday, January 17, 2010

How Do We Lead?

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
January 17, 2010

How Do We Lead?
Romans 12:9-17

Did you hear the vows our officers took a few minutes ago,
the vows I asked of them as we ordained and installed them
to the office of Elder and Deacon,
vows to serve God and this church?

It’s a long list, the nine different questions
I asked them to respond to,
all from our Book of Order,
all part of the service of Ordination and Installation
that every Presbyterian church uses
for Elders, Deacons, and Ministers.

There are the questions we would expect:
“Do you trust in Jesus Christ your Savior,
acknowledge him Lord of all and Head of the Church,
and through him believe in one God,
Father, Son and Holy Spirit?”

“Do you accept the Scriptures
of the Old and New Testaments to be,
by the Holy Spirit,
the unique and authoritative witness to Jesus Christ
in the Church universal,
and God’s Word to you?”

“Will you be governed by our church’s polity,
and will you abide by its discipline?
Will you be a friend among your colleagues in ministry,
working with them,
subject to the ordering of God’s Word and Spirit?”

“Will you in your own life seek to follow the Lord Jesus Christ,
love your neighbors,
and work for the reconciliation of the world?”

There is the question that reminds us
that we are grounded in Reformed faith
and that we look to our Book of Confessions
to help us understand how we live our faith:
“Do you sincerely receive and adopt
the essential tenets of the Reformed faith
as expressed in the confessions of our church
as authentic and reliable expositions
of what Scripture leads us to believe and do,
and will you be instructed and led by those confessions
as you lead the people of God?”

And then there is that last question that all officers respond to:
“Will you seek to serve the people with
energy, intelligence,
imagination and love?”
(all from W-4.4003)

Last weekend at our Officers’ Retreat at Meadowkirk
we spent some time talking about
what it means to serve with energy,
with intelligence,
with imagination,
and with love.
We wanted to go beyond the words
to dig into them,
to understand them as they guide us,
all of us,
as we serve God and this church,
this Body of Christ.

What does it mean to serve with energy?
Does it simply mean to do everything in a hyper-caffeinated way?
No, of course not.
We agreed that to serve with energy is to serve
with enthusiasm,
to serve with joy.
To serve with energy is to serve with drive;
to invest one’s self fully,
to be completely committed;
It is to act,
take action,
sometimes bold action.

To serve with energy is to work to make a difference,
as we work grounded in the spirit,
grounded in faith.

It is to work to be transformative,
understanding that the first step to being transformative
is for each of us to open ourselves
to the renewing and transforming power of God’s Holy Spirit.
“Do not be conformed to this world,”
Paul teaches us,
“but be transformed by the renewing of your minds,
so that you may discern what is the will of God.”
(Romans 12:2)

To serve with energy is not to say,
“I don’t have time,
I’m too busy.”
To serve with energy is to understand that
when God calls us, our response should always be,
“Here am I, Lord. Send me.”
God will help us set our priorities,
help us to find the time,
and help us to find a way to do what God calls us to do.

We does it mean to serve with intelligence?
We agreed that this isn’t about high IQs,
or a mastery of the Bible,
or a deep and broad knowledge of theology,
as much as it is about
serving with wisdom,
serving with sense,
serving with sensibility.

To serve with intelligence is to serve with discernment,
to serve with an awareness that begins
with being a good, careful,
and patient listener,
being a willing learner,
keeping an open mind and an open heart
absorbing and assessing information
without a rush to judgment.

The televangelist Pat Robertson this past week
gave us an extraordinary example
of what it means to serve utterly lacking in intelligence
with his comments about Haiti.
They were graceless and unchristian,
but mostly they were profoundly ignorant.
There’s often too much of that in organized religion:
intelligence replaced by dogma and certitude.
To act with intelligence requires us
to reject words and actions
that distort Christ’s teachings
and all that Christ calls us to learn,
do, and to stand for.

We are called to lead with imagination,
and our liveliest discussion focused on this term.
What does it mean to lead with imagination?
Leadership is often thought of as management,
administration,
governance: planning things,
and then implementing plans.
Is there room for imagination?

Yes, absolutely.
The very essence of leadership is bound up with imagination.
We are called to be open to new ways,
to dream,
wish,
hope,
to step back and think about new possibilities and paths
for our church.

To lead with imagination is to brainstorm,
to listen for God’s voice through the voices of others,
remembering that none of us has all the answers,
and that the voice we may be least likely to listen to,
may well be the voice God is speaking through.

To serve with imagination is to think outside the box,
to be creative.
It is to trust,
to hear our Lord when he says,
“do not be afraid.”
To lead with imagination is to follow the example of Peter,
when he – and only he of the disciples –
stepped out of the boat,
stepped over the gunwale and onto the service of the water,
trusting completely, even if only for a few seconds.
(Matthew 14:29)

To serve with imagination is
to look at six acres of farmland on a hilltop
miles from center of town
and say, yes:
this is where God is calling us to build a church.
It is to see Sunday School classrooms
and imagine ways to fill them with people and activities
Monday through Saturday.
It is to see all the unserved and underserved ministries
we have in this church
and say, yes,
we can – we must –
add an associate pastor to our staff sometime in 2011.

And we are called to serve with love.
Love begins with respect,
that we serve God lovingly by working
with deep respect for one another,
listening to one another,
looking to see the gifts God has given each of us
and nurturing those gifts, drawing them out.

To serve with love is to be compassionate,
and empathetic,
putting ourselves in the other person’s place,
to try to understand their perspective,
their point of view.

To serve with love is to be patient,
forgiving, grace-filled,
calm,
filled with the peace of Christ,
confident that God is with us,
all of us,
leading us, guiding us
even through the most contentious, difficult issues.

To serve with love is to remember how easy it is
to injure another person with words.
It is to remember how the brother of our Lord teaches us,
“Let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak,
slow to anger;
for … anger does not produce God’s righteousness.
How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire,
and the tongue is a fire.
The tongue…[can] stain the whole body.”
(James 1:19ff)

Our elders lead by working with me
“to strengthen and nurture
the faith and life of the congregation.”
(G-6.0304)
Together we lead “by seeking to discern the will of Christ.”
(G-4.0301d)

Our Deacons lead “by ministering with compassion,
witness and service to all those in need
after the example of Jesus Christ.”
(G-6.0400)

But leadership is not limited to our officers;
we are all called to lead,
all called to lead with energy,
intelligence,
imagination,
and love.
This is not a charge limited to our ordained officers.
Everyone us is called by Christ, the Head of our Church,
to “demonstrate by the love of its members for one another,
and by the quality of its common life
the new reality in Christ…”
(G-3.0300c2)

Listen again to Paul’s words to us from his letter to the Romans:
“So, Let love be genuine; hate what is evil,
hold fast to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection;
outdo one another in showing honor.
Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit,
serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering,
persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the saints;
extend hospitality to strangers.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice,
weep with those who weep.
Live in harmony with one another;
do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly;
do not claim to be wiser than you are.
Do not repay anyone evil for evil,
but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all.”
(Romans 12:9-17)

That’s how we lead.
All of us.
AMEN

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Not An Invitation

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
January 3, 2010

Not An Invitation
Isaiah 60:1-6

ARISE!
SHINE!
ARISE!
SHINE!

This is not an invitation.
This is a command,
an order from the Chief,
as the great preacher Peter Marshall might have put it.

An order from the Chief:
every one of us called to respond,
Arise!
Shine!
The Lord has come.
Jesus is born.
The light shines in the darkness,
radiant light, spreading over all the earth.

And we are called to respond,
to reflect the light, each of us,
each of us glowing with the light of Christ,
the one Christmas present we all have in common.

Arise!
Shine!
This is our call as we begin the New Year.

But we hesitate,
we hold back,
we say we will let our light shine,
but we don’t want to call attention to ourselves.
We say we will let our light shine,
but not right now,
maybe in a couple of weeks,
when things aren’t quite so busy,
maybe in February.

But this is not an invitation,
not something God invites us to do
whenever it is convenient.
This is an order!
A command, straight from the top.

Those of you who served in the military –
what did you do when an order came from the top?
You did it!
You didn’t wait for a more convenient time.
You did it because you knew your responsibility
was to follow orders.
Why is that we pick and choose what we’re willing to do
when God commands us?

Perhaps it is because we are reticent.
“Reticent” is a good word for us Presbyterians.
Reticent.
It means “restrained or reserved in style”.
We Presbyterians are that, aren’t we?
restrained, reserved in style.
We leave the demonstrative faith to other denominations.
We don’t want anyone to confuse us with Baptists!

But shining doesn’t have to be demonstrative,
much less theatrical.
It can be quiet, serene, tranquil.
Shining is, after all, grounded in love,
love marked by grace, acceptance,
tolerance, kindness,
love that reaches out,
love that breaks down barriers.

Shining causes us to turn outward,
to turn our focus to the needs and concerns of others.
Shining helps us to realize that
the very essence of discipleship is community:
community that goes beyond Manassas Presbyterian Church,
community here in Manassas,
in Prince William County,
in our state, in our nation,
in the world.
Community that transcends all those manmade barriers
we are so quick to build when we are not shining:
barriers of prejudice, judgment,
even political ideology: “she’s not like us”;
“he doesn’t think our way, believe what we believe.”
That’s not shining;
that’s walking in the darkness,
the thick darkness.

Letting your light shine is to live a grace-filled, grace-full life.
It is to live the new life Zacchaeus embraced
when he climbed down from his tree,
glowing with the light of Christ.
You remember the story of Zacchaeus,
(Luke 19)
the corrupt tax collector
who climbed a tree so he could get a better glimpse of Jesus
when Jesus came to his town.
Jesus called to Zacchaeus to come down from the tree.
In effect, what Jesus said to Zacchaeus was,
“Arise, let your light shine”,
for that’s just what Zacchaeus did,
turning his life from his focus on himself,
from how to line his pockets,
pile up the money,
to a new focus, an outward focus,
caring for others,
living his concern for others.
Zacchaeus learned how to shine,
reflecting the new life he received from Christ.

The Year-of-the-Bible group finished their work
by reading the last book in the New Testament,
the Revelation to John,
that apocalyptic book filled with such wild imagery.
The group learned that most of those images, metaphors and allegories
that so many have tried to decode into some vision of our future,
are images and metaphors that John simply adapted
from other books in Scripture,
from Ezekiel, Isaiah, Zechariah, and others,
that most of what we read in Revelation,
we’ve already read elsewhere in the Bible.

The group learned that John wasn’t trying to predict the future;
he was writing a book that was a call to faith,
a call to arise, to shine,
even in the face of oppression from the Roman empire,
that empire that thought that their combination of
military might and economic power
provided them with all they needed
to build the world their way.

“Arise! Shine! Live your faith,”
was John’s call.
“Let your light shine, shine to reflect Christ,
shine brilliantly, at all times, in all places.
Even in the face of oppression,
even in the face of condemnation,
even in the face of death.”

Were Jesus to stand here now
would he say to us, “Well done good and faithful servants.
Your light shines brightly."
Or would he ask us,
“How can you tolerate such profound greed
and corruption among executives from so many businesses,
even as those same executives
have put so many other people out of work?
Did I not warn you that you cannot serve both God and wealth?”

Would Jesus say to us,
“Your light reflects my love and compassion."
Or would he ask us,
“How can you accept a healthcare system
run by private corporations that allocate healthcare
based on maximizing their profits?
How can you accept a healthcare system
that relies on the term “pre-existing”
to exclude and shut out,
rather than heal and make whole?
Did I not heal every person who came to me?
Have I not charged you to do the same?”

Would Jesus say to us,
“Your light glows warmly and brightly,”
or would he ask us,
“How can you tolerate foreclosures
that lead to homelessness?
How can you stand idly by,
when there are so many empty homes in your community
that attract only vermin and vandals,
homes that could provide shelter for men,
women and children?
Did I not call you to feed the hungry,
clothe the naked,
and house the homeless?”

Would Jesus say to us,
“Truly your light is not hid under a bushel”,
or would he ask us,
“How can you continue to abuse my Father’s creation,
this world he entrusted to you,
this world my Father looks to you to care for
for the generations who will come long after you?
How can you continue to drain the world of oil,
rip coal from the ground,
and fill the sky, the rivers, and the oceans
with your poison, your sewage?
If you would be my brother or sister,
then do the will of my Father, your Father, in heaven.”

Paul reminds us that the entire creation is waiting
“with eager longing
for the revealing of the children of God.”
(Romans 8:19)
The entire creation is waiting for us to arise and shine.

Let’s take the first step,
the first step toward shining brightly
by coming to this Table,
coming to this Table in response to
the invitation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
At this Table we can find nourishment
that will renew and refresh us,
and burnish our glow
so we can “let [our] light shine before others,”
just as our Lord teaches us.
(Matthew 5:16)

So come,
come to this Table.
You are invited by our Lord Jesus Christ.
And then go from this Table
go out into the world,
filled with the grace of God,
filled with the Holy Spirit,
Go out to arise!
Go out to shine!
These are orders from the Chief.
AMEN