Lessons Learned

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

August 24, 2014

Lessons Learned

Selected Texts

I am hoping you can’t tell by looking at me.

It happened to me very quietly

a little more than a week ago.

In fact, a week ago Saturday:

I began my seventh decade.

20, 30, 40, 50….

and now at age 60

I stand on the threshold of my seventh decade.

I was born in 1954.

Today we live in a world of electronics

and screens

but back then television was in its infancy,

small black and white screens

in large, heavy boxes.

We watched Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo,

the Jackie Gleason Show,

and, of course, Ed Sullivan.

Every adult smoked cigarettes;

it wasn’t until 1964 that the surgeon general issued

his now famous report linking cigarettes and cancer.

As a small child I could sing jingles

from a half dozen different cigarette commercials.

In fact, jingles were popular for many products,

and I still remember a surprising number of them.

My formative years were the 1960s.

The soundtrack of my adolescence came from

the Beatles,

the Beach Boys,

the Supremes,

the Four Tops.

                                   

As I went through high school my 8-track tape player

blared the music of The Who,

Jimi Hendrix,

and, of course, Led Zeppelin,

a group that grated on the nerves

of most adults back then,

but who recently were recipients of

Kennedy Center honors

as a seminal influence on rock music.  

                          

I spent most of my 20s in school –

finishing college,

than graduate business school,

and finally law school.

By my early 30s I was married,

living and working in Buffalo.

I’d come home to Buffalo,

and bought a home in Buffalo.

I was ready to settle, make a home,

be home.

I went to church most Sundays,

but I skimmed the surface;

I didn’t put much effort into my faith

and so I got little out of it.

Back then I put more stock into hard work –

my career, especially.

But as the years went by

I learned that hard work can often be undone

by events over which we have no control:

illness,

a spouse’s addiction,

a failed business venture.

At age 40 I left Buffalo

and moved to New York City for a job

as editor of management and finance publications

for the Economist Group, the British company.

I settled in quickly at work

and found a wonderful church home

at the Brick Presbyterian Church

on Manhattan’s upper east side.

For all my schooling, all my education,

it wasn’t until I was in my early 40s,

when I began to think about seminary

and the ministry,

 that I really began to understand

what I had always known,

but never truly grasped:

that what life was all about wasn’t money,

position, or things.

Life was and is about goodness,

and family and friends,

and love and compassion,

and caring and sharing,

building up riches and treasures of the heart.

It wasn’t until I was in my early 40s

that I realized

that for all the places I’d lived,

all the places I had called home,

I was still longing for home,

still searching for home,

a home not built of wood or brick,

but a place inside me,

a place of peace and contentment.

Our ancestors in faith

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob

were wanderers, nomads,

men of no permanent address.

Abraham living as an alien, an immigrant,

Jacob on the move

trying to put distance between himself and Esau,

the brother he had cheated out of his birthright.

The author of the letter to the Hebrews

says of these men:

They confessed that they were strangers

and foreigners on the earth,

… that they were seeking a homeland.

If they had been thinking of the land that

they had left behind,

they would have had opportunity to return.

But as it was for each of them,

they desired a better country,

… a heavenly one.

(Hebrews 11:13-15)

These men had homes,

places they lived with their wives,

their children,

their extended family,

their livestock;

but still they sought a different home;

a special home,

a home with God.

This is not home in the sense

we sometimes hear the word used –

a reference to heaven,

a place we’ll know only in the next life.

I’ve never much cared for the euphemism

some use when a person dies:

that “God called him home”.

We’re home here, in this life

for God gave us this life

and calls us to live it richly and fully.

But the life we are called to live so richly and fully,

the life that creates a sense of home for us,

a sense of belonging,

of being settled,

isn’t a life filled with chasing things;

it is a life following Christ,

Home is where Christ is.

Home is a place of peace,

of assurance,

of presence – God’s presence,

Christ’s presence.

“Do not fear,” says the Lord,

“for I am with you.”

We think about home more and more as we age.

In fact, I am convinced that we are created 

with a nostalgia switch in our brain

that turns on automatically when we turn 50.

Memories become more and more important,

and especially memories of home,

the homes we grew up in,

homes of friends

homes where special celebrations took place.

The home that I often find myself revisiting

in my nostalgic moments is my grandparents’ house.

It was a big house in downtown Buffalo,

big enough to hold all the Ferguson clan

on Thanksgiving or Christmas.

It was a house old enough to be filled with mystery,

even a little spookiness up under

the eaves on the third floor.

It was a house that had things we no longer find:

a coal chute,

an incinerator,

an opening in the back off the kitchen

for the ice that kept the icebox chilled.

It is a home that in many ways grows more vivid

in my memories

even as those family celebrations

drift farther and farther away in time.

As nostalgic as we can get

as memories flood our minds,

I don’t think any of us want to go back.

We live in the present

and God calls us into the future.

Paul was so right when he said

for now we see only through the glass dimly.

(1 Corinthians 13:12)

But with every passing year,

that glass can grow a little clearer,

our understanding can grow a little more.

With every passing year we can understand

with greater clarity

that Paul was right when he said that only

faith, hope and love abide,

that everything else will turn to dust.

Faith, hope and love –

they are what matter,

and the greatest is love.

(1 Corinthians 13:13)

Love that comes from God

love revealed in and through

our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Jesus of the Gospels,

the Jesus who ate with the sinners,

the Jesus who said, “Do not judge.”

(Matthew 7:1)

The Jesus who said,

“Let anyone among you who is without sin

be the first to throw a stone”

(John 8:7)

The Jesus who taught us that

all are our neighbors,

not just those we know,

those we like,

those we accept,

those we approve of,

those we let in.

(Luke 10:25ff)

The Jesus who taught us that God will forgive us

anything and everything;

and if God will do that for us,

then we should do that for one another.

(Matthew 6:14)

The Jesus who Paul tells us said,

“it is more blessed to give than to receive”

(Acts 20:35

a lesson that sounds so upside down

and so out of sync with our

“me-first”,

“don’t step on me” society.

There are lessons here

I have learned over the years,

learned as I have longed for home,

learned as I’ve looked for home,

remembering Augustine’s famous observation

that our hearts are restless

until they come to rest in God.

But to say they are lessons I’ve learned

is to suggest that I have mastered them,

and of course I haven’t.

Even as I begin my seventh decade

I know I am still learning,

still learning all these lessons and more

as I continue to learn

what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ,

what it means to live

as a disciple of Jesus Christ.

“Now I know only in part,”

wrote the Apostle Paul,

and he is right.

I still have more to learn,

as we all surely do,

more to learn about not throwing stones,

more to learn about giving,

more to learn about forgiving,

more to learn about faith, hope and love.

Frederick Buechner writes of a lesson he learned,

“I have it in me at my best to be a saint to other people,

and by saint, I mean life-giver,

someone who is able to bear to another

something of the Holy Spirit,

And sometimes, by the grace of God,

I have it in me to be Christ to other people.

And so, of course, have we all”

                                   

This is a lesson for all of us;

certainly, it is a good lesson for me

as I continue to learn,

standing as I do

on the threshold of yet another decade,

and sitting at home

at the feet of Christ.

AMEN