The Other Side of the Fence

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

May 27, 2012

Pentecost

The Other Side of the Fence

Romans 8:26-27

        

The Willow Creek Community Church

was little more than an idea some 40 years ago

when Bill Hybels walked around neighborhoods

in the rapidly growing suburb of South Barrington

outside of Chicago.

He knocked on doors asking residents

who didn’t have a church home

what they would look for in a church

that would encourage them to attend.

Based on his shoe-leather research,

he started Willow Creek Church.

Within 15 years it had 15,000 members,

becoming the first and best known of the megachurches,

those churches with 5,000 seat auditoriums;

services marked by contemporary music,

bright lights and elaborate staging;

churches with small groups for almost any interest;

churches with Starbucks in the lobbies;

churches with fitness clubs and personal trainers.

Thirty years after its establishment,

more than 20,000 men, women and children

were worshiping there weekly.

Clergy from other denominations flocked to Willow Creek

to learn the secrets of its success.

Bill Hybels spent as much time

conducting workshops for other pastors

as he did within his own church.

The mainline churches in particular,

those known more for its membership losses

than its megachurches,

stood in awe of Willow Creek:

Huge facilities,

huge staff,

virtually unlimited financial resources.

The question clergymen and -women were asking was,

“How can my church be more like Willow Creek?”

An interesting thing has been happening at Willow Creek

the past few years, though.

They have been losing members.

Their budget has dropped.

Staff has been cut back.

Worse, even among those members

who have stayed with the church,

there has been a “lack of enthusiasm among the faithful”.

Bill Hybels is not one to sit back and rest on his laurels.

He has taken a long, hard, honest look at his church

and what he has learned is that for all its growth,

for all its success in drawing new members,

especially from among the unchurched and the “seekers”,

“Willow Creek has failed to meet the congregation’s

deepest spiritual needs.”

A large and growing group of members felt

that the church was not helping them

with their spiritual growth.

(“Christianity After Religion”, Diana Butler Bass, 73)

What happened to this church?

This church that not that long ago was so widely admired,

that the dean of management thinkers and writers,

Peter Drucker, wrote glowingly

of Willow Creek’s organizational model,

wrote that it was a model not just for other churches to follow,

but that even the largest for-profit businesses

could learn from them.

This was a church that was so innovative,

so imaginative, that at Christmas

it didn’t give its members the traditional pageant

with Mary, Joseph and Baby Jesus,

but a “a Cirque du Soleil-style show with professional acrobats,

musicians and flying angels.”

(Chicago Tribune)

What happened was they lost their focus.

 “We made a mistake,” Hybels has acknowledged.

They were outstanding at bringing people in the door,

but they were not teaching their congregation

spiritual practices,

the hard, disciplined work necessary           

to help them discern what God was doing in their lives,

where Jesus was leading them,

and how the Spirit was transforming their lives.

They learned that churches

are not in the business of entertaining,

even if it brings people in the door by the thousands.

We gather in community,

in the body that we call the church,

to be nourished,

to grow spiritually,

to grow in Christ.

Jesus did not draw men and women to him

by having a warm-up act, a juggler,

some acrobats, a sword-swallower,

all to pull a crowd together,

to get them ready then for his fast-paced presentation,

his three bullet points.

Jesus drew men and women to him

by feeding them,

feeding their deepest spiritual hunger,

feeding them with the Word of God,

assuring them of God’s mercy,

of God’s forgiveness,

of God’s goodness,

of God’s love.

Assuring them of hope,

of healing,

of new life.

Assuring them of God’s constant presence within them

by the Holy Spirit.

Last week we learned that Jesus drew a woman

caught in the act of adultery,

a capital crime under the Levitical code,

by offering her new life through forgiveness,

through mercy, through acceptance.

He showed her the path to walk

without judging her harshly.

Jesus fed her deepest hunger,

and surely awakened her

to the power of the Spirit within her,

the very same Spirit that is within all of us.

The Spirit awakens us to our missteps,

calls us back to the light,

teaches us,

disciplines us,

comforts us,

reassures us,

strengthens us.

The Spirit calls us together in community,

binds us here within this church,

and with all those who follow Christ.

The Spirit “is the divine energy of life,”

as the theologian Jürgen Moltmann puts it,

“animating the new creation of all things.”

(Moltmann, The Spirit of Life, 9)

We Presbyterians struggle a bit with this term “spiritual”.

It is not a term we readily embrace.

As often as not, when we hear the term “spiritual”

and “spirituality”,

we think of New Age books

that encourage a blend of yogurt and yoga,

something that is more magic crystals

than the Messiah Christ.

And yet, Paul puts it so matter-of–factly

when he says to us:

“You are in the Spirit,

since the Spirit of God dwells in you.”

(Romans 8:9)

Paul is talking about you,

Paul is talking about me:

every one of us who follows Jesus Christ.

We are all in the Spirit

because the Spirit of God dwells within us.

We are spiritual by faith,

and we are spiritual by definition.

We are spiritual by the grace of God.

Even as we struggle with the term,

there has been a slow but steadily growing trend

among the faithful to reject the term “religious”

 in favor of the term “spiritual.”

In fact, sociologists even have an acronym

for this growing group: “SBNR” -

Spiritual But Not Religious.

These are men and women who want to grow spiritually

but have found that the term “religion”

has become too weighted with institutional baggage,

suggesting an organization that is more concerned with

creeds, rules, dogma,

hierarchy and authority

than the spiritual growth and development

of its members.

Diana Butler Bass has observed in her work that

“the word ‘spiritual’ is both an critique of institutional religion

and a longing for meaningful connection.”

(Christianity After Religion, 68)

The members of Willow Creek articulated their frustration

with their church with their lament

that for all the activities,

all the programming,

all the liveliness of the place

there wasn’t enough to help them grow spiritually.

It is the Spirit that calls us here to worship;

the Spirit calls us in community.

It is the Spirit that draws us

to gather with brothers and sisters in faith,

to be nourished,

to grow in Christ,

to grow in maturity in our faith.

This is something we do together,

feeding one another,

caring for one another,

nurturing one another.

We do this in Sunday worship,

in Sunday School classrooms,

in Circles,

in Bible Study classes;

as we camp together,

eat together;

and as we pray with and for one another.

Those who have served on Session the past few years

know that I regularly remind Elders

that their principal call is to spiritual leadership,

that their call as elders includes time spent

managing and administering,

but that most of their energy should be devoted to

providing spiritual leadership for our church.

A few years back, when I was working on my doctorate,

my focus was on why Elders are so resistant

to taking on the role of spiritual leader.

Elders at every church I have been part of,

or studied and observed over the past 25 years

all embrace the work of managing,

of governing, of administering,

with energy and enthusiasm.

But the moment the term “spiritual leader”

is set before them,

you can feel even the most faithful elder back away,

as if to say, “I can’t do that.”

“I don’t know how to do that.”

“That’s the minister’s job, not mine.”

It is as though we have built a fence in the church,

with a small group of “spiritual” people on one side,

and most everyone else on the other.

But we all are spiritual,

all given the gift and power of the Spirit.

Our Lesson reminds that the Spirit will help us,

guide us,

strengthen us.

as one writer puts it, “give us legs to stand on”:

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness;

…because the Spirit intercedes…

 according to the will of God.

God is constantly seeking to

“break open,

tear down,

and make new” through the Holy Spirit,

the Spirit working through you and me.

And certainly God wants to break down our resistance

to embracing fully our spirituality.

Just as there is a bit of Easter

in every Sunday worship service

as we remember the resurrection,

there is a bit of Pentecost in every Sunday

as we gather,

called by the Spirit,

to be nourished by the Spirit,

and then sent out in the Spirit,

renewed, refreshed for service

by the very breath of God that is the Spirit,

every one, all of us,

spiritual women and men,

including, yes,

even the acrobats and the jugglers.

AMEN

The Old, the New

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

May 20, 2012

Confirmation Sunday

The Old, the New

John 8:1-11

We just heard one of the most powerful lessons in the Bible,

Old or New Testament.

In a little more than two hundred words

we learn what matters to Jesus,

what is important to him.

In eleven short verses,

we learn what should matter to us as Jesus’ followers,

as disciples of Christ,

as we try to model our lives on his.

In one paragraph

we learn mercy,

patience,

forgiveness,

compassion,

and we learn the most important lesson of all:

we learn the importance of living with grace,

even as we live in grace.

At the same time we learn

the folly of self-righteousness,

the foolishness of arrogance,

how wrong it is to be judgmental.

A woman has broken the law;

not just the civil law,

but the religious law,

the Levitical code that binds the community

of the children of God.

and has bound them for a thousand years.

We hear no words of protest from her,

no claims from her

that she is innocent of the charge against her,

the charge of adultery.

We don’t know all the facts,

but in the context,

we can feel confident that she is guilty.

Which leads to the obvious first question:

Where is the man?

Adultery requires two people.

Where is the man the woman committed adultery with?

We don’t know, of course,

but do you suppose the scribes and the Pharisees

told the man to go,

to flee, to run away,

that they were not interested in him,

that they wanted only the woman?

It probably isn’t far-fetched for us to wonder whether

the man might have been a friend

of some of the scribes and Pharisees;

perhaps even a scribe or Pharisee himself.

The man flees and the scribes and Pharisees

then do something unexpected:

They don’t take the woman away

to be judged and condemned;

The men take her to Jesus.

It wasn’t justice these men,

these religious leaders were after.

No, the text makes that as clear as can be:

They wanted to throw the woman in front of Jesus

“to test him,

so that they might have some charge

to bring against him.”

The woman had violated the law,

but that was secondary to the men;

she was being used to trap Jesus.

The scribes and Pharisees assumed

that Jesus would argue with them

to try to free the woman.

They’d seen and heard how friendly Jesus had been

with people of questionable reputation;

surely he would have sympathy for this sinful woman.

                                                     

Jesus of course, knew exactly what they were up to;

Look at how he deals with them.

He doesn’t protest the woman’s innocence;

He doesn’t argue ethics, theology, morals, or the law.

He tells no parable.

He is silent, not even standing to face them,

but squatting down, scribbling in the dust on the ground.

looking lost in thought

before the roiling anger and outrage

of the scribes and Pharisees.

In his silence, Jesus seems to acknowledge

there is nothing to argue.

The Seventh Commandment says very clearly,

“You shall not commit adultery”

(Exodus 20:14)

And the Levitical Code is equally clear:        

“…both the adulterer and the adulteress

shall be put to death.”

(Leviticus 20:10)

“The woman is guilty, and we all know Scripture.

So go ahead men of God:

enforce the law.

Take her to the place of execution

and be done with her.”

Jesus’ silence seems to say all that.

But then Jesus speaks,

almost as an afterthought,

almost as an “oh, by the way,”

“Let anyone among you who is without sin

be the first to throw a stone at her.”

Even from a distance of two thousand years,

we can feel the angry, self-righteous energy

of the scribes and Pharisees

suddenly dissipate with Jesus’ words,

like air let out of a balloon.

Their will collapses,

a house built on a rotten foundation,

as they stand there looking at each other,

dumb, silent,

lost as to what to do, what to say.

By the standards of many churches today,

Jesus should have been the first to pick up a rock

and throw it at the woman,

the first to say,

“We must uphold Scripture.

We must obey the Word of God.

This woman is a sinner

and scripture is clear:

'the adulterer shall be put to death'.”

It is this kind of mindset,

this approach to faith,

faith without grace,

faith without compassion,

faith without mercy,

faith without love,

faith built on judgment

that is causing so many young people

to turn away from church,

to turn away from faith,

to turn away from Christianity.

They see faith practiced

by people quicker to judge and condemn

than they are to accept and embrace;

where the currency of the church is self-righteousness;

where the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees

is enthusiastically emulated

even as it is condemned from the pulpit.

                                   

We want our young folks to grow in faith,

to continue walking with Christ all the days of their lives.

But our young folks know they can choose their church,

they can choose their denomination,

they can choose to believe and be part of a faith community,

or they can choose to walk away and say,

“I don’t want anything to do with that.”

They can walk away nodding in agreement with

Anglican bishop Charles Raven

who once said that, “Christians were the chief obstacle

to his acceptance of Christianity…

the church a poor advertisement for its Lord.”

Our calling is to build a church modeled on

what our Lord teaches us in this lesson:

a church grounded in mercy and forgiveness,

compassion and righteousness,

a church grounded in grace and love.

A church that is a good and faithful advertisement

for our Lord Jesus Christ.

Now our lesson doesn’t end

with Jesus telling the woman to be on her way,

as though what she did was not a sin.

But he doesn’t condemn the woman, either.

Look at what he does:

he gives her new life:

He says to her, “From now on do not sin again,”

letting her know she is forgiven.

And with those words,

Jesus awakens her to the gift of grace and mercy

she received that day

“Go,” he says to her,

“Go and leave your old ways behind;

embrace the new life you’ve just been given by grace.”

We are called to build the church for the future;

a church for all of us,

but especially a church for our young men and women

like those we just welcomed into our membership;

like those who are donning caps and gowns this month and next

for high school and college graduations;

like those who are bringing their children forward

to begin their journey in Christ

through the Sacrament of baptism.

We are called to build a church

of community,

of openness,

of hospitality,

of relationship:

relationship with one another as well as with God in Christ.

We are called to build a church of grace,

where the adulterous woman can find words of welcome

rather than words of judgment;

a warm embrace rather than a cold shoulder;

a bright smile rather than a hostile stare;

a place where she can live fully into the new life given her,

given her by our Lord through grace.

We are called to build a church

where we are all can live more fully into

the lives of grace

we have each been given by God through Jesus.

We are called to build a church where,

even as we read and learn from the Bible together,

we remember that the ultimate lens through which we read,

the final interpreter,

is the Living Word: our Lord Jesus Christ.

And if Christ is love,

if Christ is the grace of God revealed,

then we are to read the written word

as a message of love,

a message of grace,

love and grace we are to share,

share freely, enthusiastically,

leaving judgment to God.

That’s the succinct lesson

we find in our eleven verses in this morning’s text.

John, chapter 8, revealing so powerfully

the grace-filled Word of the Lord.

AMEN

The Celestial Symphony

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

May 13, 2012

The Celestial Symphony

Psalm 19:1-4

Long before the first word was uttered,

long before God’s command boomed across the heavens,

“Let there be light,”

there was sound,

sound that moved through the stars and dust

that was the universe,

sound that reverberated over the void that was earth.

It was the sound of creation,

sound coming from God’s Holy Spirit,

the sound of God breathing life into the emptiness,

the void,

bringing life to the lifeless.

The sound was music

the music of life,

the first notes of creation,

beginning with the low rumble of hydrogen ignited within a star,

the nuclear reaction giving off light and heat.

Then came the groan of land masses moving,

grinding into one another,

slow-motion collisions that pushed up mountains,

and carved out basins to catch water

that would become lakes and seas.

The author Alan Lightman imagines

God hearing these sounds and saying,

“The Void had always vibrated

with the music of my thoughts,

but before the existence of time

the totality of sounds occurred simultaneously,

 as if a thousand thousand notes were played all at once.

Now we could hear one note following another,

cascades of sound, …

We could hear melodies.

We could hear rhythms and metrical phrases

gather up time in lovely folds of sounds.

…we were transfixed by the most exquisite sounds,

the tender and melodic

and rapturous oscillations of the Void. …

In every place and in every moment,

we were wrapped and engulfed in music.

At times the music poured forth in fierce,

heaving swells.

At other times, it advanced in the softest little steps,

delicate as a fleeting veil in the Void.

Music clung to our beings….

Music went inside us.

I had created music,

but now music created;

it lifted and remade

and formed a completeness of being.”

(“Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation”)

What Lightman captures so lyrically is that

God was composing, writing unique notes

stopping to listen from time to time

to the music he was creating,

music only God could hear.

And it was good, so very good,

for it was a symphony composed in love.

It is a symphony that continues to be written,

for our earth,

for all the universe

God is forever creating, 

forever re-creating,

adding more music, more melody,

more harmony, more rhythm,

the Celestial Symphony eternally playing

yet forever unfinished.

Stop by a stand of pine trees –

not the scrub pines that we have around here,

but proper pine trees like you’d find on

the Green Mountains of Vermont,

the kind of pine tree we want in our homes at Christmas.

Listen to the sound of wind as it blows through the branches.

It isn’t the rattle of dried leaves

that have yet to fall from

the branches of a maple or an oak,

but a whoosh,

a solemn hiss,

as the wind is forced through the needles,

branches bending to the force,

but the needles standing firm, resolute,

combing the wind,

and in the process making music,

God’s music,

Creation music.

We humans love music.

Our hunger for melody and harmony

was evidenced long before Apple gave us

iTunes, the iPod and earbuds.

The first instrument was a bone hollowed out

and then drilled with a couple holes to make a flute.

What prompted a human to make such a thing,

to look at an animal’s bone and think to himself,

“if I hollow it, then put some holes in it,

and then blow through it,

I’ll be able to create sounds,

lovely sounds”?

That was 40,000 years ago

and we have been making music ever since.

In King David’s time

instruments were used regularly to help the faithful

worship the Lord God:

harp, lyre, cymbals, drums.

Many psalms have instructions that say,

“To the leader: with stringed instruments;”

Others say simply, “A Song”,

while some psalms are referred to as “maskils”,

a Hebrew term meaning “artful song”.

Psalm 150 calls all the faithful to pick up an instrument,

any instrument,

 and join in joyful song:

“Praise God with trumpet sound,

Praise him with lute and harp!

Praise him with tambourine and dance;

Praise him with strings and pipe!

Praise him with clanging cymbals;

Praise God with loud clashing cymbals!”

Music energizes us;

it teaches us,

it inspires us,

it lifts us;

Music also soothes us,

comforts us,

calms us,

gives us peace.

Music touches us individually,

and  music binds us together in community, as well.

Feel what happens in this very room,

when we take a 47-year-old song –

not even a hymn -

and let it fill us

let it cause our toes to tap,

our fingers to snap,

voices joined together…

 [Play “My Girl” by the Temptations”]

We sing so many wonderful songs together each Sunday;

They inspire us to bind our voices together

in sung prayers of praise, of adoration,

of confession, of thanksgiving,

songs that help us express our wonder,

our faith, our hope,

even our frustration,

 our sadness,

our grief,

our pain.

Music gives voice to all our emotions.

The hundreds of songs we have in our hymnals

are a mere fraction of the tens of thousands of songs

men and women have written to the glory of God

over the centuries.

We all have our favorites, of course,

and inevitably we each have hymns

we don’t care for all that much.  

Something always to keep in mind, though,

is that the hymn you may not care for,

is surely someone else’s favorite,

perhaps the favorite of the person standing next to you.

The composer of the hymn

we will sing in just a few moments,

“When in Our Music God is Glorified,”

was so right when he wrote,

“How often, making music, we have found

a new dimension in the world of sound,

as worship moves us to a more profound Alleluia.”

That’s what music does: it moves us,

moves us to more profound worship,

more profound prayer and praise,

truly, a more profound alleluia.

Every piece of music,

even the staid hymns of Isaac Watts or Fanny Crosby,

are at their essence spirituals,

for they move us spiritually,

as we listen,

as we sing,

as the melody, the words, the feeling

captures us,

drawing us in, mind and heart.

We don’t have to be musicians;

we don’t have to know how to read the notes on a staff,

or even sing on key;

all we have to do is open ourselves to the Spirit,

to let the breath of God move us to lift up our voices,

to become part of the celestial symphony

that has been playing since the beginning of time,

the music of ongoing creation,

re-creation,

by the Lord God, the master composer,

The heavens do tell the glory of God,

and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork;

all as part of the symphony playing all around us,

God’s magnificent song, composed

“to give us faith to sing always: alleluia!”

AMEN