Sunday, December 26, 2010

No Room

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
December 26, 2010

No Room
Matthew 2:13-23

It is Luke who gives us the Christmas story we love:
Gabriel visiting Mary to tell her she will give birth to Jesus;
Mary and Joseph’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem;
No room at the inn;
The newborn baby wrapped in swaddling clothes,
lying in a manger;
Shepherds abiding in the fields;
The heavenly host singing,
“Glory to God in highest heaven                                   
and on earth peace and goodwill to all.”

Matthew gives us none of that;
Nothing lyrical or poetic;
nothing that Linus could recite to Charlie Brown.
As we heard last week
Matthew gives us the whole birth story in eight verses.

Matthew’s and Luke’s stories are so different.
About the only thing they agree on is that
Jesus was born in Bethlehem,
but even there the circumstances differ:
Luke tells us that Joseph and Mary
traveled there to register for the tax census,
while Matthew says nothing of any journey,
suggesting instead that they lived there.
We draw that conclusion from reading that when
the Wise Men saw that the star they’d been following
had stopped, it stopped over a “house,”
and when they entered the house
they found Jesus and his mother.
No stable, no manger,
no inn,
not even a cave as some apocryphal stories suggest.

We talked last week about an even more noticeable difference:
while Luke focuses on Mary,
Matthew all but sets Mary aside to shine his light on Joseph.
An angel of the Lord,
unnamed in Matthew’s story,
speaks to Joseph three different times,
always in a dream as Joseph slept.

The first time the angel spoke to Joseph
it was to reassure him about Mary,
to tell him that Mary’s child had been conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and that he should marry her with no worries.
Most important, the angel told Joseph to name the child Jesus.

This morning’s text tells of the other two times
the angel spoke to Joseph:
The first message is chilling for us to hear even now:
“Get up, take the child and his mother and flee to Egypt
and remain there until I tell you;
for Herod is about to search for the child, to destroy him.”

King Herod was a psychopath;
his corrupt reign left bloodstains everywhere.
He was so frightened by the mere prospect
of someone challenging his power and authority,
that his reaction was the wholesale slaughter of anyone
who fit the profile given him by the Wise Men:
any infant boy born in Bethlehem within the past two years.

The wailing and lamentation of twenty mothers, thirty,
perhaps even more,
could be heard throughout Bethlehem
as they watched their infant sons ruthlessly,
sadistically murdered,
all so Herod could sleep at night.

But Joseph, having been warned in his dream,
bundled up Mary and the baby,
packed up whatever possessions they could take,
and fled to Egypt,
set out on a journey of more than two hundred miles
along a dusty, rocky road,
with bandits and thieves lurking around every corner.

Matthew tells us nothing about where they lived,
or for how long they remained in Egypt.
Our best guess is about two years,
when the angel of the Lord
visited Joseph in a dream for a third time,
telling him that it was safe to return to Israel.

And once again Joseph faithfully and obediently
packed up Mary and the young boy
and took them on another long, difficult,
and dangerous journey
across the Sinai, back to Israel.

But this journey turned out to be longer,
and even more difficult,
for we learn that Joseph feared returning to Bethlehem,
and so, guided by the Spirit,
or possibly one last angelic visitation,
he and his little family
trekked an additional 75 miles north to Nazareth,
where they settled
and where Jesus grew from boy to man.

Eleven verses in Matthew’s gospel,
some three hundred words,
and we are left overwhelmed by the sheer drama
that Matthew packs into these paragraphs.
Is it any wonder we prefer Luke’s version of the story?

Matthew gives us no inn, no stable, 
no manger, no shepherds,
but more than anything else 
Matthew gives us “no room.”
Matthew gives us a Judea, gives us Israel
with no room at all for the Messiah,
for the Son of God,
for Immanuel, God with Us.

No sooner was Jesus born than his life was danger,
and he and his parents were forced to flee their country.
No sooner was Jesus born than he became a refugee,
forced to live in a foreign land.
In Matthew’s gospel Jesus begins his life
as an illegal immigrant
because there was no room for him in the hearts and minds
of the children of Israel.

As the first chapter of John’s gospel tells us,
“He was in the world,…
yet the world did not know him.
He came to what was his own,
and his own people did not accept him.”

The bitter irony is that in Matthew’s story,
the only ones who had room for Jesus were three foreigners,
three men from far distant lands,
who made their own long and difficult journey
to kneel in Jesus’ presence.

“No room” is the thread that ran through Jesus’ life,
a thread that connects us today
with the people who lived in Jesus’ day;
a thread that connects us even farther back
with our ancestors in faith,
all the way back to David, to Moses.
God squeezed out, time and time again,
No room in minds,
in lives,
in hearts.

Words spoken by God’s children claiming room,
but actions speaking so much louder
demonstrating time and time again,
how little room for God there was, there is,
how often there is no room.

We are called to love the Lord God with all our hearts;
We are called to welcome the Messiah with all our hearts,
to follow the Messiah with hearts and minds.
We are called to make room in our hearts:
room for grace, for love, for mercy, for peace,
all the fruits of the spirit given us by God.
And yet what room we have
we are quick to fill with
judgment, rancor, cruelty, warfare,
jealousy, envy,
and as this past year has made so clear, greed.

Read through the gospels and we find
that the ones most willing to make room for Jesus
are those for whom society makes no room:
the poor, the outcasts, the destitute, the sick,
the different.
In Matthew’s gospel it is a leper, a paralytic,
the blind, a Samaritan.
                                   
Matthew’s gospel leaps from Jesus’ infancy
to the beginning of his ministry,
starting with the Sermon on the Mount,
that magnificent Sermon we often reduce
to a handful of Beatitudes,
but which goes on for three full chapters,
well over two thousand words.
Jesus tells us how to make room for God:
  • “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you”
  • “Do not judge”
  • “You cannot serve God and wealth”
  • “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”
  • “Be reconciled to your brother or sister”
  • “Blessed are the humble”
  • “Blessed are those who work for peace”
  • “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.”

Who in Jesus’ day made room for Jesus’ words?
When he returned to Nazareth, his hometown,
the people scoffed and mocked,
“isn’t this the carpenter’s son?...
Where did this man get this [teaching]?”
(Matthew 13:54ff)
The people “took offense”
that he dared to teach them of God’s grace,
God’s love, God’s mercy.
They made no room for Jesus, for his teaching;
they made no room in their hearts and minds
for the Word of God.

We all struggle to give Jesus room,
give him room in our minds,
give him room in our hearts.
Our busy lives crowd him out,
crowd out grace,
crowd out forgiveness,
crowd out mercy,
crowd out a hunger for righteousness and justice.

On Friday evening our Choir performed a magnificent anthem
entitled “The Dream Isaiah Saw”.
The lyrics came from Isaiah’s vision of the advent world
that we’ll behold when Christ comes again
and God’s Kingdom is established,
a world in which the “wolf shall live with the lamb,
the leopard shall lie down with the kid…”
and all the earth will live in peace and goodwill
because all the world will be
“full… full of the knowledge of the Lord”
full of the knowledge of the Lord
because every heart will have made room for God;
every mind will have made room.

The choir sang:
“Little child whose bed is straw,
take new lodgings in my heart.
Bring the dream Isaiah saw…
Nature reordered to match God's intent,
nations obeying the call to repent,
all of creation completely restored,
filled with the knowledge and love of the Lord.”

Filled – everyone of us filled,
filled with knowledge of the Lord,
our hearts and minds so completely filled
that we’ll have no room left for anger, enmity,
envy, greed,
judgment, violence, warfare
and on and on,
all those things that will simply disappear
when Christ comes again.

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton wrote,
“We live in a time of no room…
the time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time,
lack of space,
with saving time, with conquering space…
There is no room for nature,
no room for quiet,
no room for thought,
no room for awareness…
[There is] no room for God.”

As we turn from Christmas to the New Year,
we can all make more room for God,
make more room for Christ,
more room for grace,
more room for peace,
more room for kindness,
more room for justice,
more room for hope.

As we prepare to turn the calendar from 2010 to 2011,
go into the New Year singing:
“Little child whose bed is straw,
take new lodgings in my heart,
for I will give you room,
more room, even more room,
until you fill my heart, 
my mind, 
my life.”

AMEN

Sunday, December 19, 2010

The Perfect Christmas


The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
December 19, 2010
Fourth Sunday in Advent

The Perfect Christmas
Matthew 1:18-25

An extremely clever YouTube video I watched this week
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkHNNPM7pJA)
raises the question of how the story might have gone
if Joseph and Mary had had the technology we have today:
Would Gabriel have texted his annunciation to Mary?
Would Mary have e-mailed Joseph with a message
marked “high priority” telling him,
“We’ve GOT to talk!”

Would Joseph have posted on his Facebook page,
“We’re going to have a baby!”
Would he have used Google Maps for directions
from Nazareth to Bethlehem?
Would the story have been different
if Joseph had used Priceline.com to find a room?
Would Mary and Joseph have uploaded video
on their Facebook page showing visits
from the shepherds and the wise men?
And of course, how many people would have
sought to “friend” Joseph and Mary after Jesus was born?

With all the smartphones, iPads, notebooks,
Facebooks, Youtubes and everything else we have these days,
it seems so quaint to open up a book
and read from it;
to let words written two thousand years ago
settle on us, settle in us.

To read words printed on a page
with no multi-media presentation to go with them,
not even a single emoticon,
seems so antiquated.

Yet, there is no better way for us to share the Christmas story.
No better way than opening the Bible
and reading from pages both ancient and timeless,
reading the story of the birth of our Lord
as it comes to us from the Gospel according to Matthew,
and the Gospel according to Luke.

A story that begins, if we listen first to Luke,
with an angel, the angel Gabriel, visiting Mary,
appearing before her, face-to-face,
standing before the young woman,
and telling her she was about to conceive and bear a child,
and that she will name the child Jesus.
                 
Mary – such an otherwise ordinary young woman –
not from a prominent family,
didn’t come from wealth or power;
She was a woman chosen by God for her faith,
her calm, grounded faith,
summed up in her response to Gabriel,         
“Here am I, the servant of the Lord;
let it be with me according to your word.”
(Luke 1:38)
                                   
Matthew’s version of the birth story
is so surprisingly different from Luke’s.
The main character in Matthew’s narrative
is Joseph, not Mary.
The story begins with Joseph learning that his fiancée is with child;
how he learns we don’t know,
but the fact that Mary was pregnant before their marriage
was scandalous.
Joseph had an easy remedy under the Levitical code,
the law in scripture was very clear:
he could divorce Mary,
divorce her publicly, before the leaders of the synagogue,
shaming her for such an outrage.

But before we even get a hint of Jesus,
we learn of Joseph’s gentleness,…his grace,
his sense of righteousness.
The law gave him a clear remedy,
but he let his heart guide him and tell him what to do:
“dismiss Mary quietly”,
without exposing her to “public disgrace.”

It is only then that the story kicks into high gear,
with an angel speaking to Joseph,
speaking to him in a dream,
reassuring him about Mary, saying to him,
“Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife,
for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit.
She will bear a son,
and you are to name him Jesus,
for he will save his people from their sins.”
(Matthew 1:20)

Without hesitation, without question,
Joseph does just as the angel instructed him,
responding as though he, not Mary,
had been the one to say,
“Here am I, the servant of the Lord;
let it be with me according to your word.”
(Luke 1:38)

It is Luke who gives us shepherds,
telling us that they learned the wonderful news from an angel
who came to them in the dark and cold of night
as they tended their flocks in the fields,
the angel saying, “Do not be afraid, for see –
I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people;
[for] to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior,
who is the Messiah, the Lord.”
(Luke 2:10)

Matthew tells us the story of the wise men;
it is clear that they had to figure things out for themselves:
no annunciation,
no dreams,
no angels,
no heavenly host singing “Glory to God in highest heaven!”
They simply watched the night sky
and when they saw one star brighter than any other
they knew it meant something
and so they set out on what was surely
a long and difficult journey,
following the star, to find the newborn king,
trusting that the star would lead them
to the light they sought.
“And when they saw that the star had stopped”,
they knew they had found what they had been seeking
“and they were overwhelmed with joy!”
as they knelt before the baby.
(Matthew 2:10)

There is a sense of wonder in these stories,
a sense of the miraculous that no high-tech device
could ever convey.
Each vignette in both of these narratives
tells us the story of a man, a woman,
a group of individuals
from different backgrounds,
different lifestyles,
but all sharing such deep and abiding faith.
Every person in these stories responds to God
with “let it be with me according to your word.”

Look again at Joseph:
he is a model of faith for all of us.
Here he is a carpenter,
probably a very ordinary one,
someone who might work today framing out modest houses,
someone who were he alive today,
would probably be struggling after months of unemployment.
As we meet him, he finds himself facing such a dilemma:
a marriage that is about to implode even before it happens.
But his first reaction is to act with grace,
act with mercy,
act with righteousness and love.
                 
He didn’t have to;
he had the law on his side;
he had scripture on his side;
if he chose to,he could have shouted furiously,
“Scripture demands;
the law requires…”
But that’s not the choice Joseph made;
Joseph chose to act with his heart
even before the angel spoke to him.

Matthew begins his gospel with a genealogy,
a long string of “begats,” that we typically skip over.
It’s Matthew’s way of trying to show that
Jesus was of the House of David.
But the genealogy actually does a better job
teaching us that Joseph is the perfect descendent of Abraham,
a descendant by more than bloodline;
a descendant in faith,
a descendant in temperament,
a descendant in his trust in God.

Luke and Matthew give us these powerful stories of faith,
of trust,
of belief,
stories which are the foundation stones
of the Christmas Story,
the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is the story of Joseph,
the story of Mary,
the story of the shepherds,
the story of the Wise Men
on which the Christmas Story is built,
as firm a foundation as we could every hope to find,
for they are stories built on hope, grace,
faith, and love.

For all the time, energy and effort we all put into
decorating our houses,
cooking and baking wonderful meals and treats,
buying and wrapping presents,
all as we listen to our favorite carols,
what makes for a perfect Christmas
are these stories
these stories of men and women just like you and me
who put their faith in God,
their hope in God,
their trust in God.

What makes for a perfect Christmas
is hearing the stories and remembering the promise
that God gives us in Christmas,
the promise of hope that the birth of Jesus
is the beginning of the story of God’s new creation,
a story which will come to fulfillment on that day
when Jesus comes again
and all the earth will be filled with peace and goodwill,
peace and goodwill not imposed by war or by political will
but by the love of God revealed to us in a baby,
a baby born to a quietly faithful woman and man.

The perfect Christmas is yours and mine
to be found in these stories,
so short, yet so rich.
So read these stories in your homes this week.
Listen to them again on Christmas Eve,
and then rejoice and be merry,
for unto us a child is born.
AMEN

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Christmas Hearts

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
December 12, 2010
Third Sunday in Advent
Christmas Hearts
Isaiah 35:1-10
Psalm 146

We all have our favorite Christmas carols, don’t we?
It may be a tune you learned as a child,
your family all gathered together round the piano singing,
“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”
Or perhaps you were in a Christmas pageant
when you were younger
and sang a carol that has had
special meaning for you ever since,
“O little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie…”
Or maybe your favorite is one you sing in church
each year on Christmas Eve:
“O Come all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant…”
“The first Nowell, the angels did say…”
“Silent Night, Holy Night…”

There’s no shortage of wonderful songs celebrating the season,
songs both sacred and secular that are a joy to hear, a joy to sing.
I have more than 200 Christmas carols and songs on my iPod.
I favor the music and arrangements of John Rutter,
but I also have a lot of popular tunes:
James Taylor swinging through “Winter Wonderland”;
Ella Fitzgerald singing the obscure but lush
“The Secret of Christmas”;
The Beach Boys rocking on “Little Saint Nick.”

A favorite carol on almost everyone’s list
is “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
The words come from a poem
written by Christina Rossetti back in 1872.
The great composer Gustav Holst
set the words to music in 1906.
That’s the version that’s in our hymnal,
but there are other melodies and arrangements,
including my own favorite,
with music and vocal arrangement by Bob Chilcott,
who is probably the closest composer
we have to England’s John Rutter.

Chilcott uses organ, flute, harp, and voices
to create a “MidWinter” that I find
evocative, powerful, and deeply moving:
“In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.”

The song begins with those lyrics
with which Rossetti used more than a little poetic license
to describe the scene on that first Christmas Eve in Bethlehem,
with weather more typical of Buffalo!

Chilcott builds the song slowly,
reaching a crescendo right before the final verse,
which he offers quietly, thoughtfully, even prayerfully:
“What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him:
give my heart,…        
give my heart,
my heart.”

There is no Christmas present
that our Lord Jesus wants more from us
than our hearts.
To give our hearts,
to give our love;
it is to give our very selves.
We are called to love God
with all our strength, all our mind, all our soul,
but to love God with all our heart,
to give our heart, to give our love;
it is to give the very essence of ourselves.

We’re not quick to give our hearts, though.
We are protective of them,
perhaps willing to give a bit,
maybe even a large part,
but not all.
Yet Jesus wants our all,
wants us to give him our hearts fully and completely.

Jesus understands what we struggle to grasp:
that in giving our hearts to him,
we give up nothing,
we gain everything,
at least everything that truly matters.

No, we may not get a new iPad, or a Kinect,
or the keys to a Mercedes,
but those are after all
things that will fade away, turn to dust,
won’t last.
                          
In giving our hearts to Jesus,
you and I get gifts that we will have in this world and the next,
gifts we will have as we await the return of our Lord,
gifts that we will still have when he does return in glory:
Love, peace,
pure joy,
shalom, which means wholeness, completeness.
We will be whole, complete
as God intended us to be.

A few years back at the church I served before I came here,
we invited a woman to come speak at 
a special program we had arranged.
The woman was the sister of one of our members,
and it was so clear to me from the moment I met her
that she was one of those rare individuals
who had truly given her heart completely and utterly to Christ.

What made this woman doubly remarkable
was that the heart she had given to Christ,
the heart she gave to Jesus each moment of every day,
was not the heart she’d been born with.
The heart she gave was a heart that had been given to her
when her own heart succumbed to disease.

A few years before she came to speak to our church,
she had been living like any of us, a busy life:
juggling roles as a loving wife, a devoted mother,
a dedicated nurse, a faithful member of her church.
But she had contracted a very rare disease,
a disease that attacked her heart,
and quickly and methodically destroyed it.

She sought the best possible medical care in New York City
and every doctor she spoke with gave her the same grim news:
without a heart transplant she would be dead in a matter of months.

Now the unfortunate reality is that
there are far more men, women and children
in need of organ transplants than there are organs available,
so that means that priority lists have to be set up:
some will get transplants sooner than others;
some will never receive a needed transplant,
they’ll die before a suitable donor becomes available.
More people need to be willing to offer the gift
of organ donation.

The severity of her condition put her at the top of the priority list
for a heart transplant.
But still she had to wait for a suitable match.
She and her doctors and her family waited,
waited,
waited even as her heart was quickly dying each day.
And then finally the call came – there was a match,
and before she knew it she was in surgery,
her diseased heart removed,
replaced by a healthy heart.

Privacy and anonymity are foundational to organ transplants,
so the woman knew almost nothing about the donor of her heart.
Her doctor shared only what he was allowed to share:
that the heart had come from a 17–year-old boy.
That’s all she knew.
        
She knew nothing about the circumstances of the young man’s death;
she could only imagine 
the grief his parents must have felt in losing their son;
she could only imagine 
how difficult it must have been for the parents,
when moments after their son had died,
probably under tragic circumstances,
they were asked by a doctor they likely didn’t know
whether they would be willing to have their son’s healthy heart
donated to a stranger,
a stranger who would die without it.

Two years after her heart transplant
the woman wrote a short book about her experiences,
and in the book she wrote of the deep emotion she felt
as she thought about the young man whose heart now beat within her:
“I felt as if I knew him personally.
Though I couldn’t see his face, I knew his heart.
I welcomed him like a friend.
He is with me everywhere.
Every time I think of him, I smile;
I think of him with love, respect, and wonder.
There is such joy in my heart.”

This woman’s heart is a Christmas heart;
a heart given in love,
a heart that gives in love.

You and I are called to have Christmas hearts,
every one of us,
hearts given to Christ,
hearts given as we prepare the way of the Lord,
prepare for that day when he will return in glory,
prepare for that day when God’s Kingdom will be established
and we will live as God intended for us to live.

It is the world our texts painted for us,
a world where:
“the eyes of the blind will be opened;
the ears of the deaf unstopped;
the lame shall leap like a deer;
the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.”

It will be a world in which
there will be no children dying because they lack food;
no children dying because they don’t have access to clean water;
no man or woman unable to find a job
even as senior executives claim
tens of millions of dollars in salaries and benefits.
As Mary, the mother of our Lord Jesus
said so eloquently in the song of praise she sang
after she learned she was to give birth to the Son of God,
in the new Kingdom, God will:
“scatter the proud,
bring down the powerful,
lift up the lowly,
send the rich away empty,
fill the hungry with good things.”

This is the world to come,
the world that our Lord Jesus Christ will bring,
the world we await.
It will be a Christmas world,
a world filled with the joy we feel this time of year,
a world where everyone will have a Christmas heart.
It will be a world filled with
“everlasting joy,
everlasting joy and gladness,
[and world where] sorrow and sighing shall flee away.”

But even as we live in Advent,
watching and waiting for our Lord to return,
we cannot stand idle.
We have work to do:
we are called to prepare the way,
to make straight the highway,
to make the way ready for the new Kingdom.

And the first step to preparing the way
is to give Christ our hearts,
give him our hearts,
your Christmas gift, my Christmas gift
to our Christmas gift.
When we do that, we will leave the bleak midwinter behind,
and find the joy of everlasting spring.
AMEN