Platitude Attitude

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

April 26, 2015

Platitude Attitude

Romans 8:28

We know that all things work together for good

for those who love God,

who are called according to his purpose.

***************************

Paul makes quite a statement,

absolute, confident:

all things work for the good;

All things;

All.

All?

For as strong as our faith might be,

there is something about this statement

that makes us want to question it,

given the often harsh realities of life.

All things?

Tell that to the woman who has just lost her job.

To the spouse who has just heard the words,

“I no longer love you.”

To the man two months into retirement

who just heard his doctor say,

“Yes, it is stage four.”

To the high school senior who didn’t get into the college

she was sure would admit her,

the place she wanted so badly to go.

Paul starts his statement with the words,

“We know”.

Well, what we know is that life is not easy.

Life can often be so hard,

filled with struggles and challenges,

setbacks, losses,

and heartbreaks.

When someone we know is going through a tough time,

what is easy, almost too easy,

is to respond with a cheerful platitude,

a sunny bromide:

“Don’t worry. All things work out for the best.”

But when we are deep in grief and despair,

platitude attitude is not what we want;

it isn’t at all helpful.

In fact, someone with a platitude attitude

can be downright annoying.

“Take your sunny smile

and leave me alone in my gloom,”

is what we find ourselves wanting to say.

Paul didn’t write the sentence that is our text

to provide us with a platitude,

a bromide,

an emotional band-aid,

something for us to keep at the ready,

to say to someone in despair,

when we can’t think of anything else to say.

Paul was, after all, writing to the

Christians in Rome,

where persecution and the possibility,

even the probably, of death,

hung over the community like a thick fog,

smothering joy,

smothering hope,

threatening to smother faith.

Platitudes were not going to help.

Paul’s readers and listeners were exhausted

by the struggle,

emotionally and physically exhausted

simply trying to live their faith as followers of Jesus.

They were so exhausted

they could no longer even lift up prayers

for help and hope.

Paul’s response to them was not at all facetious

when he said in effect,

“Don’t worry about it.”

He meant it, as he explained:

“God is with you even in your exhaustion,

your fear,

your despair.

God is so completely with you

that God will even help you pray.

When you can’t find the words,

God’s Spirit will pray through you

and for you.”

Eugene Peterson, in his wonderful paraphrasing

in The Message helps us to understand

what Paul is saying.

Listen to how Peterson writes the longer paragraph

from which our text comes:

“Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting,

God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along.

If we don’t know how or what to pray,

it doesn’t matter.

He does our praying in and for us,

making prayer out of our wordless sighs,

our aching groans.

[God] knows us far better than we know ourselves,

knows our [situation]

and keeps us present before God.

That’s why we can be so sure

that every detail in our lives of love for God

is worked into something good.”

Do you hear here what Paul is saying?

When we are so forlorn,

so exhausted,

so angry,

so grief-filled,

so down,

so all-but-out,

God will be there through God’s Spirit

to lift us up,

and even to pray for us,

if that’s what we need.

God’s Spirit will keep us present before God,

and help us to feel God’s presence.

God’s Spirit will give us hope.

So, as Peterson crafts the words of that final sentence,

“That’s why we can be so sure

that every detail in our lives of love for God

is worked into something good.”

That’s no platitude; that’s truth.

Truth that neither masks pain

nor denies struggle.

Truth that so simply and eloquently reminds us

that we live in hope,

resurrection hope.

Paul is speaking to God’s “covenant faithfulness”

to, with, and for us,

manifested in our Risen Lord.

As one writer puts it,

“The heart of Paul’s argument is for assurance

in the unshakable and sovereign love of God,

and the certainty that this love will win out in the end.”

After all, didn’t love win out over evil

and even death on Easter?

So even in our pain,

God will help us through,

God’s love lifting us,

leading us,

nourishing us even when we feel drained,

depleted, empty and hopeless.

Through the prophet Isaiah God reminds us that

there may well be times in our lives

when we feel ourselves up to our neck in problems,

caught in a torrent of struggle,

seeing no obvious way out,

no obvious solution,

not even the glimmer of light in the tunnel.

And still, God is with us.

It isn’t God’s plan that we go through periodic times

of suffering and even tragedy. 

To say so is a platitude:

that when something bad happens,

it is part of God’s plan.

It’s not only a platitude,

it is bad theology.

God doesn’t inflect pain and suffering;

life does.

What God offers is the hand of hope

anytime we feel ourselves

about to be swept away by life’s turmoils.

Every time we say the Lord’s Prayer,

we pray that God’s will be done,

and God’s will is love,

God’s will is grace,

and God’s will is hope.

We take this on faith, of course,

and faith, as we will sing in a few minutes,

begins with letting go;

letting go not of rational thinking or questions,

or even doubts.

But rather, letting go our lives,

trusting in God,

more with every passing day,

falling back into God’s everlasting arms.

It is seeing even in our most despairing moments

that God is with us, walking with us,

seeing us through.

I can speak from my own experience

and say without hesitation

that in those times of my life

when I’ve felt myself

most knocked around and down

I’ve not had any doubt that God was with me.

In fact, I’ve found that those have been times

my faith has grown noticeably.

I’ve traveled through enough years

to have had them all:

career setbacks,

financial concerns,

relationship meltdowns,

even serious health problems.

And in every situation,

God was present,

God’s Spirit praying for me when I couldn’t,

when I was too distraught, frustrated,

or exhausted to string words together.

Life can often seem so muddled, baffling,

even mysterious to us—

at times extraordinary, joyous, wonderful,

and at other times just plain awful.

So we learn to walk in faith,

we learn to walk in trust,

drawing hope from our faith.

In his letter to the Corinthians Paul wrote,
“What no eye has seen,

nor ear heard,

nor the human heart conceived,

what God has prepared for those who love him.”

And what God has prepared for those who love him

is what he said through the prophet Jeremiah,

“a future with hope”.

(Jeremiah 29:11)

Our Risen Lord said he came to

fulfill the words of the prophets;

(Matthew 5:17)

which means he came to fulfill those words,

that God will give us a future with hope.

                                   

Jesus came to give meaning to the promise

that underneath us are the everlasting arms of God.

Jesus came to fulfill and give meaning to

all God’s words spoken through the prophets:

“I am with you;

you are precious;

I have redeemed you;

fear not;

I will wipe away every tear.”

So yes, Paul is right in saying,

in Eugene Peterson’s version,

“that every detail in our lives of love for God

is worked into something good.”

Every detail: the good, the bad,

the happy, the sad,

the wonderful and the awful,

For God is present with us in our Risen Lord,

walking with us,

God’s Spirit with us as well,

nurturing, comforting,

sustaining us,

even when life’s dark clouds descend upon us.

“All things work together for good

for those who love God.”

We cannot argue with Paul’s bold, confident words,

for they are indeed

the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

AMEN

Vocation

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

April 12, 2015

Vocation

Genesis 2:15

The Lord God took the man and

 put him in the garden of Eden

to till it and keep it.

************************************

In the beginning God created.

God created the heavens and the earth.

Stop for a moment and listen.

Think about those words:

God….

created.

Do you hear?

God… created.

We should be in awe,

marveling at the very thought.

You and I can be creative,

but we cannot create.

God creates.

Only God creates.

We know, of course,

that the Bible is not a book of science,

so we need not get caught up in the literalness

of what we read in that first chapter of Genesis.

The point of those who wrote those words so long ago

wasn’t to say, “Here’s just what happened.”

Their point was to teach us:

God creates.

        

The stars in the sky,

the sun, the moon,

the vastness of the universe,

the concept of time,

the birds, the trees, the fish,

you and me:

God created;

God creates.

How?

We’ll leave that to God.

We’ll stay with, “God creates!”

It is in spring when we seem to be

most aware of God’s creation

as the earth reawakens from its winter slumber.

The trees are budding,

the grass is greening,

birds that wintered far away have returned.

Judging by how frequently

I’ve had to refill my bird feeders

to satisfy their ravenous appetites,

they traveled a long way to get back here.

                                                              

The flowers that filled our Sanctuary last Sunday

made some of us reach for Benadryl or Claritin;

but still, our sneezing and sniffling

couldn’t detract from the beauty of those flowers,

the colors, and the fragrances.

Who but God could have created such beauty?

God created;

God created all;

and God called it all good.

And what God created,

God created for himself.

                 

In our pride and arrogance

we often think God created the world for us.

But the psalmist understood, writing,

“The earth is the Lord’s

and all that is in it,

the world,

and those who live in it.”

(Psalm 24:1)

Yes: The earth is the Lord’s

and all that is in it,

including those who live in it: You and me.

“O Lord, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom you have made them all;

the earth is full of your creatures.”

(Psalm 104:24)

The earth is the Lord’s.

And all that is in the earth is the Lord’s.

We too are part of God’s creation.

And we’ve been given a special responsibility

in God’s creation;

we’ve been called to a special vocation

in God’s world.

We heard it in our lesson,

that one simple verse:

we are to care for God’s creation,

we are to keep God’s creation,

look after it,

so it always and forever

remains a delight for God.

It’s too easy to skim past our text

as we race to the scandal

that draws our attention:

the scandal of disobedience,

the scandal of our ignoring our vocation,

our call, our responsibility;

the scandal of our walking off the job

given us by God,

in favor of doing what we wanted to do.

We know the end of the story, of course:

Humankind was sacked,

fired,

summarily removed,

shown the door,

sent out;

because we failed to listen.

We failed to do what God had told us to do.

But God, like the loving father

in the story of the prodigal son,

waits patiently,

waits patiently for us to return to

lives of obedience.

And God waits patiently for us

to reclaim our vocation,

our very first vocation

of caring for God’s creation.

God waits patiently for us to realize

that caring for God’s earth

isn’t something that should be politically divisive,

as we’ve made it.

God waits patiently for us to make

caring for God’s creation a priority,

because we recognize our call

to that responsibility,

that vocation;

that it isn’t politics or economics,

it isn’t ideology,

it is theology,

it is God,

it is God’s will.

Thousands of years later and God is still waiting

as we stumble in our disobedience,

stumble in our pride and arrogance,

treating God’s earth as something

that we can do with as we choose,

We focus not on the word “vocation”,

not on our call to “care for” God’s earth,

which is what the original Hebrew says:

“care for”.

                          

We focus instead on that word that comes later:

“dominion,”

and then we reinterpret that word,

not using it as it was intended 3,000 years ago,

a word that in the Hebrew means “responsibility”;

No, we prefer our contemporary meaning: power.

But how can we have power over God’s creation?

Yet, that is how we have acted over the centuries,

and in the process we’ve ignored our vocation

and abused God’s creation,

filling God’s oceans, lakes and streams with our poisons,

fouling God’s sky with toxins and dirt,

taking God’s magnificent blue

and smudging it with grays, blacks, and browns,

and then proudly saying, “that’s progress!”

And we’ve compounded our disobedience

by making “creation care” a divisive idea,

sneering at those who try to care for God’s creation,

mocking them as “tree huggers,”

without taking even a second to reflect,

on Who created the tree,

Who delights in the tree,

and Who gave humanity the vocation

of caring for the tree.

Creation care is is a matter of faith.

Not to care for God’s earth,

not to be a good and faithful steward of God’s earth,

is to live in disobedience to God’s will;

it is to live in disobedience to God.

The theologian Walter Brueggemann reminds us that,

the earth wasn’t created for humankind,

the earth was created for God.

It was created by God for God,

and our role was and is to care for it.

“From the beginning,” writes Brueggemann,

God [was] prepared to entrust the [earth]

to this special creature, this human.

From the beginning,

the human creature [was] called,

given a vocation,

and expected to share in God’s work.”

        

Creation care begins with acknowledging our vocation,

our call to look after God’s earth.

And it also includes acknowledging,

rather than denying,

how we can damage, destroy,

even push to extinction

life on God’s creation.

Our first great awakening came

two years before the first Earth Day,

when the astronauts of the Apollo 8 spacecraft

sent back pictures of our planet earth,

pictures taken as they completed their journey

around the moon,

pictures of the earth,

taken from 200,000 miles away

showing our island planet

set against the inky darkness of space.

                                                     

It is only in the movies that we colonize other planets;

this earth is all we have for 7 billion people,

or as our Lord Jesus would put it,

7 billion neighbors.

We have made progress in fits and starts

over the years,

acknowledging the impact of our actions at times,

while at other times, closing our eyes, our minds,

and our hearts to the damage we cause

to God’s creation.

                                                     

Lake Erie was thought to be too polluted

for safe swimming back when I was a teenager.

Industrial waste, as well as untreated sewage

poured into the Lake.

It’s much cleaner now,

as are other lakes rivers and streams

because we’ve acknowledged what we’ve done

and lived our vocation.

                                                     

But we still have a long way to go.

Google the term, “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”

to learn about what’s happened

to millions of tons of plastic debris

mindlessly, recklessly dumped in the Pacific,

God’s ocean.

We seem to be on yet another great awakening

as we are finally acknowledging our need

to reduce our carbon output.

Coal, so dirty to burn,

so dangerous to mine,

seems on the verge of becoming obsolescent,

much like whale oil in the 19^th century.

An article in today’s newspaper said,

“Coal is on the way out …,

and it is dying a slow death.”

Coal will be replaced by new technologies,

just as kerosene once replaced whale oil.

We’ll continue to replace the old with new,

the dirty with the cleaner.

                                   

Even here at our church,

there has been excited talk about

how we could and indeed should

consider installing solar panels

once we replace our rotting roof.

Doing so would, we hope,

save us money on utility bills,

and also help us to honor our vocation

to care for God’s creation.

God never said don’t use the resources

that are part of creation.

What God said was, care for my creation.

Care for MY creation.

The prophet Isaiah once painted a bleak picture

that could very well be prophetic for us

if we, like our ancestors in faith before us,

continue to live in disobedience:

“The earth dries up and withers,

the world languishes and withers;

the heavens languish together with the earth.

The earth lies polluted

under its inhabitants;
for they have transgressed laws,

violated the statutes,

broken the everlasting covenant.
Therefore a curse devours the earth,

and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt;
therefore the inhabitants of the earth dwindled,
and few people are left.”

(Isaiah 24:4-6)

That could be our future.

Or our future could what God wants for us,

what God intended for us:

humanity living joyfully, responsibly,

and harmoniously with all God’s creation,

all joined in the psalmist’s song

“Let the earth rejoice;

let the sea roar, and all that fills it;

let the field exult, and everything in it.

Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy”

(Psalm 96)

as God walks the earth,

God’s earth,

delighting in his creation.

AMEN

“I’ve Called You By Name”

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

April 5, 2015

Easter

 “I’ve Called You By Name”

John 20:1-18

Early on the first day of the week,

while it was still dark,

Mary Magdalene came to the tomb

and saw that the stone had been

removed from the tomb.

So she ran and went to Simon Peter

and the other disciple,

the one whom Jesus loved,

and said to them,

“They have taken the Lord out of the tomb,

and we do not know where they have laid him.”

Then Peter and the other disciple set out

and went toward the tomb.

The two were running together,

but the other disciple outran Peter

and reached the tomb first.

He bent down to look in

and saw the linen wrappings lying there,

but he did not go in.

Then Simon Peter came, following him,

and went into the tomb.

He saw the linen wrappings lying there,

and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head,

not lying with the linen wrappings

but rolled up in a place by itself.

Then the other disciple,

 who reached the tomb first,

also went in, and he saw and believed;

for as yet they did not understand the scripture,

that he must rise from the dead.

Then the disciples returned to their homes.

But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb.

As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb;

and she saw two angels in white,

sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying,

one at the head and the other at the feet.

They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”

She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord,

and I do not know where they have laid him.”

When she had said this, she turned around

and saw Jesus standing there,

but she did not know that it was Jesus.

Jesus said to her,

“Woman, why are you weeping?

Whom are you looking for?”

Supposing him to be the gardener,

she said to him,

“Sir, if you have carried him away,

tell me where you have laid him,

and I will take him away.”

Jesus said to her, “Mary!”

She turned and said to him in Hebrew,

“Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher).

Jesus said to her,

“Do not hold on to me,

because I have not yet ascended to the Father.

But go to my brothers and say to them,

‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father,

to my God and your God.’”

Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples,

“I have seen the Lord”;

and she told them that he had said these things to her.

*********************************

She could not sleep.

She had not slept in three days,

not since Wednesday night.

As she lay there in the darkness,

she felt smothered,

lost, alone.

Jesus was dead.

He’d been killed;

executed brutally,

hung from a cross on Golgotha,

like an ordinary criminal.

In fact, he’d been executed with two thieves,

petty bandits who’d come to prey on the crowds

thronging Jerusalem for the Passover.

And then as a final indignity,

they’d had to lay his body in a tomb

without properly preparing it for burial.

Observe the Sabbath, she’d been taught.

Follow the rules.

Alone in her thoughts, she wondered, why?

God himself seemed to have turned away,

and abandoned his children.

With Jesus’ death, hope had died,

hope for new life,

hope especially for people like her,

a woman of intelligence, ability, and faith,

yet a woman who was looked upon as an outsider.

In her Rabbi, her teacher,

she’d found someone who had accepted her

for who she was as a child of God.

He had healed her,

and then he had sought to bring out

the best that was within her.

She’d heard the gossip, the rumors,

about her and him.

She had tried to let the lies run off her

like raindrops,

but still they stung.

People could be so cruel.

Little did she know that centuries later,

she’d still be slandered:

religious leaders would fabricate lies

that she was a prostitute.

In her restlessness that Sunday morning,

she kept looking out the window,

looking for a glimpse of sunlight,

just the smallest hint of dawn on the horizon.

She was desperate to get out of the room,

get out of the staleness,

leave the fetid stench of the crowded city behind.

She couldn’t wait any longer;

She had to get to the tomb.

Better to wait there for sunrise,

than lie in that awful, closed room.

She quietly gathered up what she needed:

spices, ointment, and myrrh,

and then she slipped out into the darkness.

Why is it, she wondered, that the world seems

so especially dark, so utterly forlorn

in that hour before sunrise?

She walked quickly, quietly,

with her head down, her hair covered.

It was still technically the Sabbath,

at least until the sun wiped the sleep from its eyes

and rose from its celestial bed.

It didn’t take her long to get to the tomb,

the tomb that was in a garden,

the tomb where Joseph and Nicodemus

had so gently laid her Lord’s broken, bloody body

on Friday evening, which now seemed so long ago.

She could see little more than shadows,

but even in the darkness she could sense

that something was wrong, terribly wrong.

And then she saw it: the tomb was open,

the stone had been moved away.

She reacted instantly, furiously:

“Those craven cowards!

Did they have to steal his body?

Couldn’t they have let him find peace in death?”

She dropped her potions and ran back to town,

where she blurted out her news to Peter and John:

“They have taken the Lord out of the tomb,

and we do not know where they have laid him.”

The two men looked at one another:

“They”?

Who was the “they” she referred to?

Peter and John didn’t wait for an answer, though.

They were off, racing toward the tomb;

lithe, nimble John ahead of the stocky Peter,

Mary right behind,

all of them running in the darkness.

Mary watched the two men approach the tomb,

and then look inside,

each of them,

silently,

not a word spoken to one another or to her,

as though the very sight of the empty tomb

had stilled their tongues.

A few moments later,

they both walked past Mary

as though she wasn’t even there,

as though she wasn’t standing there in her anguish,

desperate for an answer.

She watched as they walked silently back to town.

Mary stood there alone

as the sun began to herald the dawn.

She thought she had no more tears left to cry,

but she broke down and wept,

sobbing in anguish,

despair,

and hopelessness.

Something moved her to look inside

the tomb even as she wept,

and then she saw what the men

must not have seen,

could not have seen:

two angels,

“sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying.”

They spoke to her, saying

“Woman, why are you weeping?”

Her response was automatic, almost reflexive,

“They have taken away my Lord

and I do not know where they have laid him.”

But even as she spoke to the angels,

something caught her attention

out of the corner of her eye;

someone was there, behind her,

and so she quickly turned,

and saw a man,

a man she did not recognize,

a man who asked, just as the angels had,

“Woman, why are you weeping?

Whom are you looking for?”

Surely this man must know, she thought;

this man,

who must have been the caretaker of the garden.

He would know who had

taken away her Lord’s body;

he would know where she could find it.

Desperately she pleaded,

“Sir, if you have carried him away,

tell me where you have laid him,

and I will take him away.”

She looked into his eyes

imploring him with her tears.

        

And then she heard her name:

“Mary.”

It was the voice she had grown to know so well,

the voice that had taught her,

the voice that had encouraged her,

the voice that had healed her,

the voice that had prayed for her,

the voice that had lifted her,

the voice that had told her she was loved.

It was his voice.

It was him.

The rays of the dawning sun shone on his face,

and she could see:

Her Lord was alive,

risen,

and he was calling her by name.

It is a promise that God makes to each of us:

I have called you by name,

you are mine.

(Isaiah 43:1)

It is a promise God keeps

through our Lord Jesus Christ,

our Risen Lord,

our Living Lord.

God calls us through Christ – you and me –

by name,

so we will know God’s grace,

God’s goodness,

God’s mercy,

God’s love.

and God’s promise of eternal life in Jesus Christ.

Jesus calls us by name…

so we will know God.

Listen!

Can you hear?

Our Lord is calling you,

calling me

calling each of us,

by name,

here in this place,

saying to you, saying to me,

“Do not fear;

I have redeemed you.

I have called you by name.

You are mine.”

(Isaiah 43)

        

And there’s more,

for Christ calls us by name to his Table,

saying to you,

saying to me,

“Come!

Come to my table;

come and share in this meal

which I have prepared for you:

the bread of life,

and the cup of salvation.

Listen!

For we are called,

each of us,

called by name,

called by our Lord Jesus Christ.

For Christ is risen!

Christ is risen!

He is risen indeed!

ALLELULIA!  

AMEN