A Brand from the Burning

John-wesley-150x150  One of the things that has been intriguing to me as we moved
back to Colorado from Utah is the difference in church cultures. In Utah, of
course, the dominant religious culture was the Mormon church, which really
affected the whole culture. It was interesting to be in a culture where, as a
Protestant Christian, you were definitely a minority (only 21 UM churches in
the whole state) and when you live in Utah a lot people outside the state make
assumptions about you. We were camping over here in Colorado once, for example,
and parked next to another Christian family who seemed to kind of avoid us for
awhile. We finally got together for a conversation and they visibly relaxed
when they figured out we weren’t Mormons (I don’t know what they expected a
Mormon family to do differently while camping, but…). I thought it might be
interesting to get a bumper sticker for the trailer that said, “We’re from
Utah, and no we’re not…”

Coming back to Colorado and especially the Colorado Springs
area, though, Protestant churches are everywhere—some 500 or so I heard
somewhere. Everywhere you drive you see churches or banners announcing new
churches. We’re a much more “churched” culture here, though a very large part
of the population has no church affiliation.

That got me thinking about us—how does TLUMC fit into the
mix? We’re not in competition with other churches (we’re all part of the Body
of Christ), but every church has something different to offer. What’s our
contribution? What makes us unique and what niche do we fill in the Tri-Lakes
community?

Well, I would argue that we Methodists have a unique
contribution to make to the Body of Christ and a message that can appeal to
those who are seeking a different experience of faith–one that combines reason
and intellect, deep personal and corporate spirituality, and an emphasis on
changing the world by serving others in light of God’s kingdom. In other words,
a faith that combines head, heart, and hands. Our identity as Methodists, while
certainly not making us better or more “right” than other Christian traditions,
does give us a unique voice and an opportunity to reach people for Christ in
ways that others may not.

This sermon series explores some of those unique and vital
beliefs and practices that we can offer to our community and, when we embrace
them, can help to transform us as well. Some of you are long-time Methodists,
others of you come from different denominational backgrounds, and some of you
are new to faith. What I want to do over the next several weeks is to bring us
all to a deeper understanding of who we are and who we can become as a church
and as disciples of Jesus through the lens of the Methodist tradition.

To do that, however, we need to talk a little about how we
got here. As a historian I’m a little biased, but I really believe that
understanding the history and evolution of a group or an idea has a way of
putting the present into context, so we’ll start our series this morning by
looking at some church history.

You may recall
that in the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation began when
Martin Luther, a Catholic monk, nailed his 95 theses or critques of the Roman
Catholic Church on the door of Wittenberg Cathedral in Germany. Others followed
suit, bucking the power of the Church which had essentially ruled church and
state in the Western world for some 12 centuries. In England, the reformation
found its legs not so much on religious grounds as it did in the personal
circumstances of the English King Henry VIII, who wanted to divorce his wife,
Catharine of Aragon, and marry Anne Boleyn instead. The Pope refused to
authorize the divorce, so Henry declared that he was starting his own
church—the Church of England, which would eventually become (and still remains)
the state church. The Church of England is also known as the Anglican Church
and the Episcopal Church in America retains ties to it today.

 
   By the 18th century, the Church of England,
however, had become a rather monolithic power in England, much like the
Catholic Church had been for centuries before. The Church was more involved in
the affairs of state than in spiritual matters. Priests were often absent from
their posts, collecting pay while having others perform their work in absentia.
The lines between poor and rich in pre-industrial England were sharply divided
even in the church as the rich purchased subscriptions to the state church for
political reasons and sat in pews while the poor were largely kept outside.
Religion and politics were one and the same and the result was to the detriment
of both.

 
   It was into this climate that, in 1703, John Wesley was born to
his parents: Samuel, who was an Anglican priest serving the Epworth parish and
his mother Susanna. John was the 14th of 19 children Samuel and
Susanna would have together, though only 9 survived to adulthood. Samuel was
the authoritarian clergyman, but Susanna was herself a woman ahead of her time.
She was educated, spirited, and a natural leader. She taught all of her
children to read, even the girls, and to her husband’s consternation led Bible
study meetings in the parsonage when he was away—something that was certainly
scandalous for a woman to do at the time, but more than 200 people would show
up. Susanna was a woman of God and a woman ahead of her time.

 
   As the local parish priest there in rural Epworth, Samuel Wesley
was the designated representative of the King. When the royalty decided to
drain the marshes around Epworth, from the which the people gained their
living, they took out their anger on the Wesleys.

When John was 6
years old, the Epworth parsonage was engulfed in a massive fire that some
historians believe was set by Samuel Wesley’s parishioners (if you ever get mad
at me, by the way, please don’t burn down our house!). John was miraculously
saved from the fire, and his parents called him “a brand plucked from the
burning” – believing that he was designated to do something important in his
life.

John grew up and,
as was expected, entered college to study for the ministry. His younger brother
Charles would join him a couple of years later. They attended Christ Church
College at Oxford. Oxford at the time was considered to be more of a social
club for the rich and so the Wesley brothers were a bit odd considering their
poor roots. It was there, however, that the Wesleys joined an emerging group
called The Holy Club—a small group of students who were seeking a measure of
spiritual devotion within the walls of the increasingly secular institution.

 
   Picture, if you will, a group of students who rose very early in
the morning for prayer and Bible study, who held one another accountable for
their failures, and who saw their mission as reaching out to the poor, even
going to visit prisoners in the local jail. They read the scriptures for 6
hours a day, fasted on Wednesdays and Fridays, kept meticulous journals and
generally maintained a strict discipline of life. They were considered by their
peers to be religious fanatics and were thus called things like “Bible Moths”
or “Sacramentarians” or “Methodists.” The name stuck, for they truly did have a
method to their spirituality. Imagine, however, having your movement named
after an insult!

 
   John and Charles would eventually be ordained as Anglican priests,
but John especially was still searching for a faith that went beyond the
formality and regimen of the Church of England. He was never satisfied with
himself or his faith and was constantly seeking assurance that he was doing and
believing the right things. He went to Georgia in the American colonies on a
mission to the prisoners and Indians there…not so much because he was zealous
about converting them to Christian faith but because he was searching for
assurance of his own faith. The trip was a disaster—his methodology was a
turn-off to the people in Georgia and a failed romance that ended badly sent
him back to England confused.

 
   It was on returning, however, that all the discussion and
wrestling and discipline he had subjected himself to began to pay off. In May
of 1738, he had a kind of conversion of his own as he was listening to someone
read from Luther’s commentary about the book of Romans. Suddenly, he had an
assurance—a heart “strangely warmed” and knew that God’s grace was available to
him and, indeed to everyone.

 
   It was then that the Methodist movement really began to take off.
Wesley began to preach in the open air among the poor, the people whom the
Church of England had ignored. He stood in marketplaces, at the entrance to the
coal mines, and anywhere else he could proclaiming to the people that God’s
grace and love were available to all. Wesley encountered resistance from the
state church as we might imagine, yet he never left it. Methodism was always
designed to be a reform movement within the church. That would eventually
change, but in its early stages the movement was about connecting people to God
in ways the church had failed to offer.

 
   Methodist “societies” formed all over England, characterized by
small groups where people held one another accountable for their spiritual
disciplines. To be a Methodist meant more than just showing up on Sunday—it
meant a life of devotion to worship, to individual prayer and study and to acts
of compassion and justice among the poor. Wesley himself wrote a book called “A
Primitive Physic” which was essentially a health manual that promoted simple
cures for various diseases (he was particularly fond of cold water and electrification
as remedies, by the way). The poor could come to a Methodist meeting house and
receive these primitive medications free of charge—a kind of early health care
system.

 
   Methodists also established schools to educate the poor and
ministered in places that proper English society would not go—to the inner
cities and to the poorest villages. When Methodism came to America in the mid-8th century,
it became the first religious group often to arrive on the frontier, bringing
good news to people trying to eke out an existence in a hostile environment.

 
   The point here is not to canonize John Wesley for sainthood. He
had issues, like we all do. He was a control freak, perhaps even a bit
depressed, had trouble with women, was very rigid and demanding. His theology
was not completely original and he seemed to change his mind often throughout
his life. He was probably not the person you would want as your pastor. His own
spiritual searching, however, helped him focus on a form of Christianity that
was different than the other Protestant reformers, who were mostly Calvinists
that believed that God had already ordained who was saved and who wasn’t.
Wesley believed that humans had a God-given will to choose a relationship with
God for themselves—to choose the God who has chosen them in love.

A theology of
grace that was available to everyone, the practice of spiritual disciplines to
help people grow in the knowledge and love of God, the discipline of meeting
together regularly for accountability and support, and engagement with the poor
and marginalized were the foundational principles of the movement. It grew
largely because it saw faith as being less about the trappings of institutional
religion and more about the relationships we have with God and each other.

Paul Wesley
Chilcote, a Wesley scholar, says that the uniqueness of Methodist lies in its
“conjunctive theology” – not a system of religious either-ors, but a
relationship of both/ands. In that way it is a balance of theology and
practice, belief and action, faith and works, public and private.

I want to offer
you a visual way to think about this balance (our General Board of Discipleship
came up with this). It illustrates what Methodism is all about. 


Jerusalem Cross Logo 

The Christian life
is a balance between the public and private, the spiritual and the temporal,
between devotion to God and service to others. All of this is infused with an
understanding God’s transforming grace. It’s the grace that Paul talks about
over and over again in places like the passage we read from Romans – grace that
doesn’t condemn but transforms!

Over the next
several weeks we’re going to be looking at Methodism, but we’ll be doing so by
looking at ourselves. John Wesley was a flawed person, just like all of us—but
he was working at being better and working to know God better. He believed that
God could transform us through his grace into the image of God we were created
to be, that we could be free from sin and become more and more like Christ
through God’s grace and love. A lot of Christian traditions emphasize being
“born again,” but don’t give you a way to “grow up” in faith, moving toward a
level of spiritual maturity. Some traditions are focused on when a person was
“saved.” Wesley was concerned about where a person is in the present. Are you
saved now? Are you growing in God’s grace today? Is your faith transforming you
day by day? Methodism offers a method, a process that is both biblical and
transformative.

A lot of churches
today are focused on being consumer-oriented. I went to two megachurches during
my time in Kentucky. One had free coffee and cupholders in the seats. Another
had you pick up your communion elements on the way out the door. Lots of people
are attracted to these full-service, seeker-sensitive churches. A lot of what
they do is pretty cool, but there was something missing—there was no cross.
There was no discussion of the fact that following Christ means bearing a
cross. There was a lot of talk about God can make you feel good, but less about
the hard work of transformation. I don’t want to run that model down because it
works for a lot of people, but I wonder if there isn’t a more organic and
long-lasting way of forming people into disciples of Christ?

Early Methodism
was all about transforming the lives of people. The early Methodist class
meetings all began with the same question: How is it with your soul? Where are
you in your relationship with God? Where is your life out of balance? What sins
are your struggling with? Are you growing into the person God has called you to
be? Who asks those questions today?

My prayer is that
over the next several weeks you will begin to see that having a method for
knowing God and growing in his grace will make a difference in your life. I
also think it will make a difference in who we are together as a church. We
want to move toward balance, toward maturity, toward the fullness of Christ. 

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