Will He Thank Us?

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

February 13, 2011

Will He Thank Us?

Psalm 119:1-16

In the year 2067, Luke will be my age.

Looking at a seven-month-old baby,

it’s hard to picture him as a man in his mid-fifties.

About the only thing he and I have in common now

is the thinness of our hair,

and we’re traveling in very different directions on that!

2067 sounds so far away,

a year as far distant as a galaxy in the night sky.

2067 – what will the world be like in that year?

Will Luke’s life be much the same as ours:

off to a job each morning,

home each evening to family?

Will he have the same concerns we all have:

making ends meet,

looking after family?

If he lives and works in this area,

will the traffic be even more unbearable,

or will Luke step out his back door,

don his personal jetpak

and zoom off into the sky

for a three-minute supersonic flight to his office in Reston?

Perhaps by then Skype will have taken us

into the world of Star Trek,

and everyone will simply be “beamed up”

to wherever it is they want to go

and cars will finally be left behind.

One of the few things we can predict with any certainty

is that the world will be more crowded.

The population of this country will likely grow

from its current 310 million people

to more than 500 million;

World population is predicted to grow from its present 6.9 billion

to more than 9 billion.

Will the world be able to feed 9 billion people?

Will a third of the world’s people still live in poverty,

without things we take for granted:

food, water, medicine, shelter?

Will we make any advancement toward living in peace,

or will the competition for food, water, and resources

ratchet up already troubling trends of tribalism and nativism?

Luke will have no choice but to live with the results of climate change

that our lifestyles are causing now.

Deniers can continue to laugh and mock,

but they reflect their own faithlessness.

Will we have learned by 2067 that in giving us dominion,

God didn’t give us power over the earth and its inhabitants;

God gave us responsibility for looking after the earth,

responsibility for looking after all God’s creatures

now and in the future.

Will we have learned that this earth

is, always has been, and always will be God’s:

“The land is mine” says the Lord,

“with me you are but tenants.”

(Leviticus 25:23)

Will Luke attend church,

worshiping each week in community,

honoring the Sabbath and keeping it holy?

Certainly his parents and family hope and pray that he will,

and will raise him to want that.

But there is a very real possibility that by 2067,

while he may still consider himself a disciple of Jesus Christ,

he may not go to church.

                                   

He may opt out,

but not because he’ll be able to download

the weekly service on his iPad or iPod,

attending church on network,

No, he may opt out for more troubling reasons.

He may stop going to church

because he may agree with the growing consensus

among young people

that churches are more an impediment, a hindrance,

to spiritual growth and nourishment, than a help.

A national survey done a few years back shows that

a growing cohort of young people are saying “yes” to faith,

but “no” to church.

The survey, done among young people,

people under the age of 25,

found that they think churches across the board

of every denomination,

are filled with hypocrisy, judgment,

that they are places filled with the insensitive,

the close-minded,

places too eager to align themselves with political issues,

too eager to embrace war as Crusade;

places that are simply too dull, too boring.

(Kinnaman & Lyons, UnChristian)

Young people see churches as places filled with people

who are all too willing to read the Bible selectively,

pulling out passages that suit their ideology,

not hesitating to use biblical texts more like clubs

to attack those who disagree with them,

who don’t see things in exactly the same way.

Young people see churches as places filled with people

who are far more eager to tell you what they are against,

than they are to tell you what they are for.

Young people are telling us,

“the church is a poor advertisement for its Lord.”                 

(Charles Raven)

We cannot dismiss these findings;

we cannot say, “well it’s just young people.

When they get a little older they’ll think like us

and be happy with the way things are.”

We have to listen and we have to respond.

After all, we just made a promise to Luke,

every one of us,

the same promise we’ve made

to every person we’ve baptized,

a promise to “guide and nurture him,

by word and deed, with love and prayer

encouraging him to know and follow Christ

and to be a faithful member of his church.”

Does dismissing someone’s concerns because of their age

honor that promise?

We want to honor our promise to Luke,

our promise made to every young person,

by encouraging them all to know and follow Christ

through our words and deeds,

through our love and prayer,

so that they’ll be able to look back

years down the road

and be thankful for what we’ve done for them.

In the year 2067 will Luke be able to look back

and say thank you to you and me,

and those who come after us,

thank you that he’ll still be able to find a vibrant faith community

here at MPC,

a faith community that would be celebrating its 200th anniversary,

two hundred years of nurturing men and women,

girls and boys as disciples of Jesus Christ?

The kernel of the complaint that many young people have

is that too many churches focus on beliefs,

living and operating by creeds, even ideology,

encouraging everyone to think the same way,

or be ostracized, even forced out.

But as we’ve talked about the past couple of weeks,

when Jesus preached his Sermon on the Mount,

that Sermon that is the very core of his teaching,

he wasn’t offering a theological reflection;

It wasn’t a sermon about what to believe,

it was a sermon about what to do and how to live;

that we show our discipleship by acting, doing,

acting and doing in grace and love.

Luke will be able to say thank you to us

if we continue to build a church

that is a Sermon on the Mount church.

A church that isn’t hypocritical, but honest;

that isn’t judgmental,

but is filled with disciples who recognize

how easy it is to overlook the log in their own eye

if they are busy pointing out the speck

in another person’s eye.

He’ll thank us if we build a church

filled with disciples who take seriously

Jesus’ call to work on learning to live in peace with all,

going so far as learning how to love an enemy,

to live by the words of Scripture,

“if your enemy is thirsty give him water to drink

and if your enemy is hungry give him bread to eat…”

(Proverbs 25:21)

As one practical example,

Luke will be able to say thank you to us

when we finally resolve the endless debate

over ordination issues,

the debate which has wasted countless hours

in thousands of Presbyterian churches and presbyteries,

and distracted us from living Sermon on the Mount lives,

a debate filled with judgment

and has been at times mean spirited.

Luke’s generation won’t care about a person’s sexual orientation;

won’t consider a gay person a threat;

won’t consider their own marriages at risk

if a same-sex couple moves into the house next door.

Luke will thank us if we encourage him to come to his faith

with his mind as well as his heart.

An article in the paper recently

noted that that fully 40% of the American people

believe that creation happened

just the way we read about it in Genesis,

rejecting any notion of science and evolution.

It is truly astounding to think that

science and faith have been scrapping for more than 300 years,

ever since Galileo challenged the notion that it wasn’t the sun

that revolved around the earth,

but the earth that revolved around the sun.

“That simply cannot be,” came the response from the Church.

“Scripture is clear on that point:

‘God has established his world,

it shall never be moved’.”

(Psalm 93)

If we teach Luke to grow in faith with both mind and heart

he’ll understand that the Bible is neither a scientific text,

nor a historical text.

If we teach Luke to come to his faith

with both mind and heart

he won’t hesitate a moment

to say that God created the heavens, the earth,

and all that lives upon the earth.

But he also won’t hesitate a moment

to stand in awe of God’s ability to create

over hundreds of millions of years, even billions,

that evolution reflects God’s glory, God’s magnificence

and reminds us that all life on earth is connected.

If we teach him to grow in faith with both mind and heart

then the more he learns about science,

the more his faith will grow as he marvels

at God’s incredible creative powers!

                                   

Luke will thank us if we continue building

Manassas Presbyterian Church as a place

that “forms Christlike people,

people of Christlike love,

where he and everyone who comes here

can grow fully into the women and men God created them to be.”

(McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity)

Luke will thank us if we continue building a church

filled with disciples who live each day

lifting up the words of the Psalmist,

“…With my whole heart I seek you;

I treasure your word in my heart,

I will meditate on your precepts,
and fix my eyes on your ways.
I will delight in your statutes;

I will not forget your word.”

Luke may not be able to form the words just yet,

but in time he’ll find words of gratitude

for the promise we have made to him

to encourage and teach him by our lives,

showing through how we live

God’s grace and love given us and him in Jesus Christ.

If we each live Sermon on the Mount lives

and continue building this church

as a Sermon on the Mount church,

a place filled with Spirit of Christ, the Spirit of God,

then, as he and others prepare for this church’s

200th anniversary, he will be able to stop

and think of us gathered here in the year 2011, and say,

“Thank you, my friends, thank you.”

AMEN