Sunday, March 20, 2011

Company Along the Way

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
March 20, 2011
Second Sunday of Lent
Company Along the Way
Psalm 121

“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”
Those are the words Jacob spoke at Bethel
when he woke in the morning,
after having that strange dream.
Do you remember the story?
Jacob was the lying, cheating brother of Esau,
the one who stole Esau’s birthright from him,
aided and abetted by their mother.
No sooner had he received his father Isaac’s blessing,
the blessing reserved for the eldest son
back in those patriarchal times,
than he was on the run, fearing for his life
for having taken what rightly belonged to his older brother.

Jacob headed north to Haran,
far from his home, far from danger.
Haran was the town his grandparents
Abraham and Sarah had come from.
One night shortly after he fell asleep he dreamed;
it was a strange dream:
he dreamed of a ladder,
a ladder grounded in the earth,
but reaching straight up into heaven,
a ladder with angels going up, and coming down.
Artists have pictured it as a grand staircase linking heaven and earth,
a causeway for God’s messengers to go back and forth,
up and down.

And as Jacob dreamt of his grand angelic staircase,
the Lord God appeared to him in the dream,
standing beside him to speak to him,
to renew the covenant that the Lord God
had made with Jacob’s grandfather Abraham.
But then God added another promise to Jacob,
“Know that I am with you,
and will keep you wherever you go.”
(Genesis 28:15)

“Know that I am with you,”
“Know that I will keep you,”
Know that I will keep you wherever you go.”
This is not a promise God made only to Jacob;
this is God’s promise to us, you and me,
to be present in our lives,
to be with us, at all times and all places,
God in our lives, wherever we go,
whatever we do.

This is the promise that the Psalmist sings of
so movingly in our Psalm:
The Lord is your keeper;
the Lord is your shade at your right hand.
The sun shall not strike you by day,
nor the moon by night.
The Lord is our keeper because the Lord is always with us.

Psalm 139 captures the same promise in a different way,
a very lyrical way:
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there;
if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me
and your right hand shall hold me fast.

The Lord God is our keeper, watching over us.
always, at all times,
for the Lord God neither slumbers nor sleeps,
At work, at school,
at church,
on the playing fields;
when we are commuting, vacationing, eating, sleeping;
when we are in the warmth of our homes
with family and friends;
and when we are in the midst of destruction and devastation,
despair and death.
The Lord God is there.

We journey through life and God is with us:
as we walk through life a child,
a teen,
an adult,
a parent, a grandparent.
It doesn’t matter where we go;
it doesn’t matter what we do;
the Lord is with us, you and me,
our everlasting, ever-present company
journeying through life with us.

My life has been a journey to so many places,
so many stops along the way:
Growing up in Buffalo,
Schooling in Canton, New York,
Philadelphia,
Ithaca, and Princeton.
Vocational callings in Chicago, Buffalo,
New York City,
Washingtonville,
and for the past five years here in Manassas.
Travels for work and pleasure that have taken me to London,
Moscow, Paris, Rome, Vienna, Munich,
Toronto, Dallas, Los Angeles, Denver,
and even tiny Dorset Vermont.
A lawyer, an entrepreneur, an editor, a pastor.
A son, a grandson, a brother, an uncle, a husband,
a neighbor, a friend.

But for all my journeying,
wherever I was, whatever I was doing,
God was there as well,
right there with me,
company along the way,
keeping me,
watching my going out and my coming in.
I may not have always been aware of God’s presence.
I have had my share of “Road to Emmaus” moments
when I was oblivious to God’s presence in my life.
        
And I’m sure that I will continue to have “Road to Emmaus”
moments in the future, yes even me as a pastor.
It’s easy to turn a blind eye to God;
to close our ears, our hearts, our minds to God.
As we talked about last week,
life is so filled with distractions,
so filled with things that get in the way,
that clog up the channels, cause interference.

We find countless ways to make God disappear,
as though God wasn’t present in our lives,
as though we didn’t even want God in our lives.
C. S. Lewis reminds us it is as easy as focusing our minds
“on money, sex,
status, our health,
and above all on our own grievances.”
(The Seeing Eye)

Wormwood and Screwtape count on us to:
Keep the television on,
the ear buds plugged in,
the cellphone in hand ready for
the next call, the next text,
and in the process push God right out,
banish God to the farthest planet of the Solar System.

Jacob’s grandparents, Abraham and Sarah,
lived a life of constant journeying,
moving from Haran down to Canaan,
a journey of more than 600 miles
all on foot, over difficult terrain,
with all their family, livestock, and possessions.
Even after reaching Canaan, they continued their journey,
to the Negeb, from there down into Egypt,
and again back up into Canaan.
Their lives may not have had the electronics
that cause so much distraction in our lives,
but they had just as many distractions in their lives
as we have in ours –
how easy do you suppose it was for them
to keep their minds on God as they herded and moved
thousands of goats, sheep, donkeys and other livestock?

But with every step they took,
they were aware of God’s presence,
especially, of course, Abraham.
With every step he took, he had faith in God’s abiding presence,
faith that God was watching his going out and his coming in.
Abraham’s faith in the presence of God was so strong,
that even two thousand years later,
the writer of the letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament,
marveled at Abraham’s faith.

Jacob didn’t have that kind of faith,
his was the faith that wants to believe,
but is always looking for some proof,
some concrete evidence.
Jacob response to God’s words in his dream
was no model of faith:
“If God will be with me,
and will keep me in this way that I go,
and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear,
so that I come again to my father’s house in peace,
then the Lord shall be my God.”
(Genesis 28:30ff)

A prayer that begins with a condition:
“IF God will be with me,
then I will believe in him.”
is hardly an example for us,
yet isn’t that how we’re more likely to pray:
asking God for something, bargaining,
setting conditions?

Jacob’s faith wasn’t that of his grandfather
but still God walked with him,
and through God’s unwavering grace
Jacob grew in faith,
turning from a callow young man,
into a man mature in his faith,
so much so that when God appeared again in a dream,
many years after the first dream,
God said to him,
“Your name is Jacob;
no longer shall you be called Jacob,
but Israel shall be your name.”
Israel, the father of a great nation.
(Genesis 35:9)

And Jacob, now Israel, continued to walk in faith,
knowing that God walked with him, keeping him,
his companion along the way,
His prayers no longer the prayers of one who bargained with God;
but rather the prayers of one who knew God walked with him.

God’s hope for us is that we’ll grow in faith,
grow in maturity of faith,
ever more confident that
God is our companion along the way
as we journey through life,
doubts lifting with each step,
lifting like a morning fog,
until we walk in the sunshine that is the glory of God,
confident of God’s unwavering presence
in good times and in bad.

You’ve heard me say many times
that there is no guarantee that
with God as our companion along the way
life will be easy;
When the angel of the Lord first approach Gideon,
back in the Old Testament days of the Judges,
the angel said “The Lord is with you”.
and Gideon’s response was a skeptical,
“If the Lord is with us,
then why are all these bad things happening”
(Judges 6:13)

It is a question we too ask in our own lives,
and in what we see all around us:
war, natural disasters,
a world in which compassion seems to be
considered a sign of weakness,
rather than a sign of Christ. 

Yet, God is with us, walking with you, walking with me,
gracing us with his divine presence,
refreshing our faith, renewing us through his Spirit,
so that we can read the Psalmist’s words as our own:

We lift up our eyes to the hills—
from where will our help come?
Our help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.
God will not let your foot or mine be moved;
for the One who keeps us will not slumber.
The One who keeps us neither slumbers nor sleeps.
The Lord is our keeper – yours and mine;
The Lord will deliver us from evil;
The Lord  will keep your life and mine.
The Lord will watch over each us
and keep our going out and coming in
from this time on and for evermore.

AMEN

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Remembering Names

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
March 13, 2011
First Sunday of Lent

Remembering Names
Matthew 4:1-11

It has happened to all of us, probably more than once.
You meet someone for the very first time,
perhaps here at church,
or at a party, a neighborhood barbecue;
you exchange names,
and even as you are shaking the person’s hand,
you are thinking to yourself,
“This person just told me his name,
and now, two seconds later,
I have no idea what it is.”

“He looked me in the eye,
He was articulate, firm in his voice,
loud enough for me to hear,
and still, I cannot remember.
Was it Bob or Bill?
Was his last name Talbot or Corbet?”

You try to find someone who knows the person
so you can ask them discreetly, “What is his name?”
“I’m just terrible with names,” you add,
and the other person nods sympathetically.

“I’m just terrible with names.”
Who hasn’t said that at least once?
But, the problem isn’t that we’re terrible at remembering.
Where we run into trouble is with focusing,
concentrating,
paying attention.
                          
What we tend to do when we meet someone for the first time
is simply not listen as they’re telling us their name.
We’re not listening because we’re thinking about
what we’re going to say next, after the introductions.
We don’t hear the name,
because our minds are busy with other thoughts;
we’re distracted,
even if just for the few seconds it takes
to hear someone say, “I’m Bill Corbet”.

My grandfather, the first Whitworth Ferguson
was a very smart man.
Now there are lots of smart people in this world,
but he was also that rarer person:
a smart man who was also a very wise man,
and I learned a great deal from his wisdom.
Among the many things he taught me was: “remember names”.
When you meet someone for the first time, he taught me,
look them in the eye
listen to them as they introduce themselves,
and remember their names.
For my grandfather, a good and faithful man,
remembering someone’s name was not only the polite thing to do;
it was the caring thing;
it showed that you were truly interested in the person.

I tried to protest, “But, I’m terrible with names.”
and he just scoffed, “Nonsense.
Just pay attention;
Don’t be distracted as you are listening.
If you pay attention for two seconds,
remembering is easy.”
                                                     
Remembering names begins with listening;
focusing,
concentrating, not being distracted.
I work hard at it and I am pretty good at it,
but still I know that there have been times
when someone has told me their name
and it’s gone in one ear and right out the other.
And I know it was because I was distracted
from what I should have been focusing on,
that one simple task of listening,
listening to the person say his name or her name.

Distractions are everywhere, all around us,
so many different things vying for our attention,
pulling at us.
It’s hard to concentrate,
hard to focus,
hard not to be distracted.

We meet a character in this morning’s lesson
who just loves distractions,
who thrives on distractions,
who loves anything that causes us to lose our concentration,
lose our focus.
We meet the devil in this morning’s lesson.
He’s a character who is a very minor actor in the literature
of the Old Testament, hardly more than a bit player,
and certainly not the sinister figure
we find in the New Testament. 
It was in the two centuries right before the birth of our Lord
that we find the rise of apocalyptic stories,
and with them the development of the character we call the devil.
The Hebrew word satan,
which had been nothing more than an adjective
that meant “adversary”,
becomes a person, capital “S”,
the personification of evil.

All the Gospels speak of the devil;
Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us of Jesus’ encounter with him
at the end of his forty days in the wilderness.
Mark didn’t think the story important enough
to give it more than two verses:
“He was in the wilderness forty days,
tempted by Satan,…
and the angels waited on him.”
(Mark 1:12-13)

Matthew and Luke give us the three tests, three temptations
that Satan puts before Jesus.
In our lesson, the devil clearly hopes to shift Jesus’ attention
away from God, away from his faithfulness.
Surely, distracting a man who hadn’t eaten for 40 days
should have been as simple as putting a loaf of bread before him.
“If you are the Son of God,
command these stones to become loaves of bread.”
But as hungry as he was,
Jesus wasn’t distracted by the thought of food:
“One does not live by bread alone,
but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

The tempter tried to a second route to distraction,
this time cleverly quoting scripture to Jesus, as he said to him:
“If you are the Son of God,
throw yourself down from the top of the Temple.”
But again, Jesus kept his eyes, his mind,
his heart, his all, firmly on God. 

And then one last time,
the devil took Jesus to the loftiest height to show him all the world,
offering Jesus power and wealth,
but again Jesus remained faithful, focused, firm.

Jesus kept his focus, kept his mind on God,
trusting God to look after him,
even with the prospect of food,
untold wealth, worldly power,
all right there before his very eyes.

C. S. Lewis’s wonderfully creative “Screwtape Letters”
picks up on this notion of diabolical distraction
in a hilarious, yet insightful way.
“The Screwtape Letters” are the product of Lewis’s imagination
but they purport to be a collection of letters
from a young tempter named Wormwood
to his mentor, a senior devil
who refers to himself as Wormwood’s affectionate Uncle Screwtape.

In letter after letter,
the young Wormwood writes of the challenges he faces
as he tries to bend the mind and will of an Englishman,
toward the realm of what Screwtape calls, “our Father below”.
Screwtape repeatedly reminds Wormwood
that he doesn’t need to turn his man to profound evil;
he doesn’t need to turn the man into a murderer,
or a bank robber.
All he needs to do is distract him from God’s will,
God’s word,
God’s way.
                          
And the easiest way to distract him
is to work at turning the man’s attention inward,
on his own needs, his own desires, his own wants.
The more he focuses on himself,
his own whims and wants, likes and dislikes,
the less focused he’ll be on the needs of others,
the less focused he will be on doing the will of God.

“Your job is to fuddle [the man]”, writes Screwtape,
“Make his mind flit to and fro.”
Let him go to church on Sunday
but then distract him from concentrating on the words of the sermon
by having him find offensive the scent of the cologne
the man sitting in front of him is wearing.
During the hymns, distract the man from the words
he should be singing to God,
by having him think about how the singing of the woman
behind him sounds like a cat being swung by its tail.
“Find ways, any ways, the simpler the better,
to turn the man’s gaze away from God,...”
(Letter 4)

Wormwood is a rather dim bulb
but eventually he gets it,
that he doesn’t need to plant the seeds of evil in the man’s mind;
Simply distracting him with the unimportant,
the inconsequential,
the trivial and the trite,
all work just as well if not better.
As Screwtape reminds the young Wormwood,
“It is funny how mortals always picture us
as putting things into their minds;
in realty our best work is done by keeping things out.”

Jesus teaches us in our lesson,
“Live by the words that come from God.
Worship the Lord your God
and serve only him.”
That’s it; nothing else matters.
Anything else is a distraction;
anything else should be batted away.
                                            
Lent is the ideal time to develop new discipline,
new practices to help you recognize distractions,
to help you stay focused
and keep your mind more fully on God
on God’s will, God’s way,
on Jesus’ teachings
on living a Sermon-on-the-Mount life.

A wonderful resource I highly recommend
is a book entitled “Soul Feast” by Marjorie Thompson.
We have a copies of the book in our library.
Thompson guides her readers through simple ways
to develop new spiritual practices.
She starts with reading the Bible – no surprise there!
Read the Bible like a love letter, is her advice.
Read the Bible as though you were reading a love letter
from God to you.
Savor each word,
listen for God’s voice to you.

A good place to start reading might be the Psalms.
Begin with Psalm 1 and this is what you’ll hear:
Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.

Now, Wormwood and Screwtape might try to distract you
from hearing God’s voice to you
by having you start picturing this person or that
as a sinner, a scoffer,
anyone other than yourself,
all in their effort to distract you
from hearing God’s voice to you in the Psalm.

But if you follow Thompson’s advice
reading the psalm as a love letter,
you close the door to Wormwood and Screwtape.
Instead, as you focus on God’s voice
speaking directly to you,
this is what you’d hear:
Happy will you be, my beloved child,
when you do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but delight in my law
and meditate on it day and night.
Then, you will be like a tree planted by a stream of water,
yielding your fruit in its season,
your leaves never withering.

Of course, you’ll find some passages are harder than others to read
as a love-letter from God to you,
yet with a little work,
you can find yourself in every page,
you can find yourself in almost every story in the Bible.
It takes work, it takes discipline,
but with a guide like Thompson you can delve more deeply
into the pages of Scripture and
and find yourself growing in faith,
more focused on God,
God’s will for you;
you’ll find yourself less distracted.

We are just starting Lent.
We have the whole 40 days stretching out before us,
a wonderful gift to each of us to work on discipline,
to work on focus and concentration,
to learn how to fend off all those things that distract us
from following God’s will more faithfully,
from Jesus’ call to us more willingly.

Take advantage of these 40 days.
Work at taking on a new discipline
to help you grow spiritually,
to help you grow in faith.
And don’t be surprised
if you also find it easier to remember names.

AMEN

Sunday, March 06, 2011

Who Are You Talking About?

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
March 6, 2011

Who Are You Talking About?
Matthew 17:1-9

“We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ…
eternally begotten by the Father,…
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.”

These words of the Nicene Creed,
the Creed we said as we began our service, sound reasonable:
“we believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,…
of one Being with the Father.”
The word “begotten” may sound a little dated and obscure,
but it also sounds so appropriately “biblical”,
so perfectly “Old Testament.”
We say the Nicene Creed two or three times each year,
one of the eleven statements of faith
we Presbyterians have in our Book of Confessions.

Followers of Jesus Christ have been saying these words
for almost 1700 years,
saying what we believe,
Christians of all different denominations –
Protestants, Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox -
all of us sharing a common affirmation of faith,
sharing a common belief in God,
Jesus Christ,
and the Holy Spirit,
the triune God.

We say this Creed in the peaceful setting of our church,
but the Nicene Creed was born of controversy,
born more of fire and heat than of water and sunshine.
It was the culmination of more than 300 years of argument
that often resembled today’s bitter political debates
more than what we would expect as
prayerful discussions among the church elite
in contemplative cloistered settings.

For the better part of 300 years
there was violent disagreement
of just who Jesus Christ was.
Born of a woman,
rabbi, healer, preacher.
The human part was easy;
Jesus in the flesh and blood.

The difficulty arose in how to reconcile the “divine” part,
Son of God; Messiah, the Christ.
We take it on faith that Jesus was
“fully human and fully divine,”
as we say in our Brief Statement of Faith,
our most recent Confession.
But in those early centuries of Christianity,
there was little agreement on what that meant,
or how that worked:
someone who was both human and divine.

Was Jesus born human, only to become divine later?
That’s what some thought,
a logical transforming moment happening at his baptism,
as he stood in the waters of the Jordan,
the Holy Spirit descending on him
in the form of a dove,
the voice of God breaking through the clouds.

Others thought the transforming moment
came in the setting of our lesson,
the story of the Transfiguration,
Jesus high on a mountaintop with Peter, James, and John,
“and he was transfigured before them,
and his face shone like the sun,
and his clothes became dazzling white.”

Matthew and Mark both say Jesus was “transfigured”,
“metamorphosized” is the word we find in the original Greek.
Luke doesn’t use that word, however,
agreeing only that Jesus face shone and his clothes dazzled,
but saying nothing about Jesus being transfigured,
transformed or metamorphosized.

Debate raged throughout the first three centuries.
Some argued that Jesus had a body that was human,
but with a divine spirit in place of human mind;
human from the neck down,
divine from the chin up.

Others said the divine and the human
were always within Jesus
but that they were separate, rather like oil and water,
each there, yet each retaining its own nature.

Still others argued that the human and divine
were mixed more like water and wine,
blended in Christ right from birth,
right through death
both natures always there.

It was the Emperor Constantine who
early in the fourth century told leaders of the church
that it was time to end the arguments.
In the year 325 he called church leaders from throughout the Empire
to gather at the town of Nicaea
to put an end to the arguments and
come to some form of agreement.

Nicaea was what today we’d call a resort town,
about 50 miles southeast of Constantinople,
the capital of Constantine’s empire,
the city we know now as Istanbul in Turkey.
Nicaea sits on the edge of a small inland lake,
in what was probably a serene, lovely setting,
ideal for an argumentative group
to gather and thrash out their ideas.

The group came up with an initial draft of the Nicene Creed,
but it would be another 56 years
before another generation of church leaders
finalized the Nicene Creed as we now know it:
Jesus: fully human, fully divine.
Son of God, yet God himself;
God and Jesus of one substance.
“The Word of God became flesh
and lived among us.”
(John 1:1ff)

Lived among us fully human;
Lived among us fully human to reveal God to us:
the loving Father,
the tender, nurturing mother,
the merciful, forgiving, compassionate God,
so different from the smoldering God
we encounter in the earliest books of the Bible.

Jesus, the Son of God,
and yet God himself;
the one who sits at the “right hand of God the Father Almighty”
and at the same time the one who walks at our side
saying to us,
“take my yoke upon you and learn from me,
for I am gentle and humble in heart,
and you will find rest for your souls,
for my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
(Matthew 11:29)

Peter, James, and John witnessed the transfiguration,
but even they didn’t truly understand who Jesus was.
Before we turn the pages from chapter 17 to chapter 18
we find Jesus rebuking his disciples for their “little faith.”
It’s such a powerful reminder of the humanity of the disciples,
that even those who walked with Jesus
struggled to understand who their teacher really was.

But now we say boldly:
“We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ…
eternally begotten by the Father,…
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.”
Jesus Christ, fully human, fully divine.

And this Jesus Christ, our Lord
calls us to our own transfigurations,
our own metamorphoses.
Not some instantaneous change,
but a lifelong transfiguration,
a lifelong transformation
as we live out our faith each day
working to become more holy,
more perfect,
more Christ-like
even as we remain fully human.

We are called by our Lord
to be transformed,
“changed into the one we see,”
the one who stands before us.
                          
It is why we say the words of the Creeds,
why we read the words of the Bible,
why we sing hymns,
why we lift up words of prayer;
why we work at growing in faith,
everything we do helping us in our own transformations
helping us to shine, to glow
to radiate the love and grace given us
by God in Jesus Christ.

Theologian William Placher wrote,
“By uniting humanity with the divine,
Christ changes what it is to be human.”
For “we share humanity with the Son of God,”
who in turn calls us to strive for the holy, the godly,
yes, even the divine.

Our Lord calls us to this Table
as part of our Transformation,
as part of metamorphosis.
Each time we share in this meal at our Lord’s Table
we are fed in spirit,
strengthened and nurtured in faith,
leaving the Table a little more holy,
a little more Christ-like.

So come, come to this Table,
fully human, each of us,
and share in this meal our Lord has prepared.
Come with the assurance that
when you go from the Table,
you will be a little closer to the divine.

AMEN