"The Faith of a Methodist"
Sermon Transcript for October 10, 2004
Scripture Reading: Ephesians 2:8-9
Part 1 - By Rev. Mike Beck
Part 2 - By Rev. Dan Sinkhorn
PART 1
I have greatly looked forward to preaching this series of sermons on the “Faith, Heart, and Character of a Methodist”. We have a rich heritage as Methodists. But the vast majority of persons who worship in United Methodist churches have little understanding of that heritage and the unique perspective on Christianity that we have to offer to persons in the 21st century. Many persons have written off the mainline denominations. And as a denomination, we don’t have a very good track record over the past forty years as we have witnessed a slow but steady decline in membership. Several of our church members spent last Thursday, Friday and Saturday in Kansas City at the Leadership Institute at the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection. That was a church that didn’t even exist prior to 1990. They currently are in their third sanctuary. They have plans for a fourth sanctuary in 2010. They have 13,000 members; average 7,000 in five worship services each weekend; and this is a church pastored by Rev. Adam Hamilton who is very proud, celebrates, and lifts up our unique heritage as United Methodist Christians. We don’t dream dreams here at Grace Church of being a church that brings 7,000 in worship; we simply want to be faithful to the God who has called us to share His good news. But we do dream of being, within this Annual Conference, a model of a church that is healthy and vital. A model of a church that holds to tradition but at the same time enthusiastically embraces change. A congregation that is greatly diverse in age and theological perspective and yet is united around the good news of Jesus Christ.
Well, friends, realizing that dream begins with understanding our roots…of the principles that launched what is known as the Wesleyan revival of the 18th century. And then, once we understand those principles, understand and remember who we are as Methodists, to apply those principles in fresh new ways to meet the needs of the 21st century. So we are going to be looking this month at John Wesley. There are some materials out in the narthex at a discounted price and we encourage you, if you are a reader, to purchase one of those books. We especially invite you to come on either Tuesday or Wednesday evening to the programs I’m doing related to Wesley’s sites in England.
But to understand Wesley, we need to begin with a quick overview of 200 years of British history leading up to John Wesley. Because, friends, nothing happens in a vacuum. If you want to truly understand a person or movement, you must be able to see that person within context. That’s why today’s sermon is divided into two parts. I will do the history part. Later in the sermon, Dan will help you to see some of the practical implications of that history during the first third of the life of this man, John Wesley who I think we can safely say is perhaps one of the ten most influential figures in all of the 2,000 years of Christian history.
So a quick history lesson. Take you back to King Henry VIII who, if you remember, victoriously had eight wives, two of which lost their heads at the Tower of London Prison. Well, in 1532, Henry was married to his third wife, Catherine of Aragon who was unable to produce for him a son to continue the line of succession. So Henry VIII asked the Pope in Rome for a third annulment of his marriage. And the Pope replied, “Henry, I think we’ve had enough annulments. I’m not going to grant it.” Well England, being under the Roman Catholic Church, saw plenty of money slipping out of England down to Rome. So Henry VIII in 1534 says, “We are no longer under the control of the Roman Catholic Church. We are now the “Church of England” later to be referred to as the “Anglican Church”. And who becomes the head of the Church of England? —Henry VIII. A hundred years of conflict will follow between Roman Catholics in England and the new state church, the Anglican Church.
In 1547 King Edward VI assumes the throne. And if you know your church history, you know this is the time of the Protestant Reformation over in Europe especially beginning in Germany. Those ideas spread over to England and the Church of England moves further down the path of reform. But then in 1553, King Edward VI is followed by Queen Mary who is a strong Roman Catholic. She has 300 of the head Anglican clerics arrested and thrown into jail. And when I was in England in Oxford and also just a block up the street from the royal and ancient clubhouse in St. Andrews are large monuments where numerous Anglican priests and Protestant lay persons were burned at the stake under Queen Mary’s rule. That’s where the term “Bloody Mary” comes from. It’s not just an alcoholic drink; it has some history behind it.
Queen Elizabeth I assumes the thrown in 1558. And during her reign something called the Elizabethan Settlement is adopted which tries to combine elements of both the Catholic and the Anglican traditions. But neither side is very happy. Up to this point, the pendulum in England has been swinging back and forth between Catholicism and the new Church of England. But now the Church of England begins to be, under Elizabeth, more firmly established as the primary church. And now a new struggle, a new back-and-forth pendulum begins to emerge between Calvinists and Armenians. King James comes to the thrown in 1603. He is Armenian in his theological perspective. Prior to this time the main Bible used in the Church of England was the Geneva Bible. The Geneva Bible contained rather strict Calvinist footnotes so King James, being Armenian in theological persuasion, said, “We need a new Bible”. And so the “King James Version” of the Bible containing in its footnotes more of an Armenian flavor is written. Now for those of your fundamentalist friends who believe that Jesus carried around His King James Bible, please note that that Bible wasn’t even written until the early 1600’s.
This is going to have to be very simplistic in nature and that’s always dangerous. But let me describe, in a very simple way, the difference between Calvinists and Armenians. And, by the way, we are of the Armenian tradition. Calvinists, which began with Martin Luther, were reacting to what they saw in the Roman Catholic Church as basically “salvation by good deeds”. It is what you did—faithfully going to mass, saying prayers, doing penance—that earned you your salvation. And Calvinists said, “No, salvation is totally by the Grace of God” as we read in Ephesians 2 this morning it is a free gift, not of works. Well, contained within that you have the concept of “predestination”, of the “elect”—that there have been a certain group of people that have been elected of God that have no choice in the matter. They are Christian. And if you are not one of the elect, you are damned to eternal punishment. I don’t like the sound of that! I don’t think most of you do either.
And in reaction to the Calvinists, a group came into existence known as the Armenians, which says, “Yes, salvation is by faith and faith alone.” But salvation is available to all. God has given to people freedom of will. We can’t earn our salvation, but this gift is available to all who will but in faith receive that gift. So the pendulum is swinging back and forth now in England between these two ideologies. And the Anglican Church tends to embrace Armenianism but also it practices a very “high-church” form of worship very similar to Catholicism.
Well, out here you’ve got a group of very good folks known as the “Puritans” who begin to feel pushed out of the religious life of England. One entire group left for America on a particular ship. Somebody tell me the name—the Mayflower. And they landed on? – Plymouth Rock. And they were known as the? – Pilgrims. And just up the road from our church on Hurricane Road you have the Community Congregational Church, which traces its roots back to those Puritans.
King Charles I assumes the crown in 1625. And during his reign there begin to be a group of very radical Puritans who seek to seize control of the country. They do not like this high-church form of worship; they believe strongly in predestination. And under the leadership of Cromwell they assume control and the monarchy seizes to exist for a short period of time. We have what is called the English Civil War. The King that’s pictured on the screen is executed and a commonwealth was created for a few years but basically was a disaster and finally dissolved.
Charles II is returned now a king returns in 1660. The Anglican Church with its high-church form of worship returns to the forefront. But during Charles’ reign, in a historical round, we enter what is called the “age of reason” where it is believed that the intellect is the thing of primary importance, that salvation comes primarily—not by faith—but by knowledge. And that is very attractive to the people of England because they’ve seen enough bickering and bloodshed over various religious ideologies. And so the common thinking in England becomes: “We are a Christian nation so, of course, we are all Christians.” We’ll do our religious thing on Sunday without the Anglican Church, but there was very little connection between ones religious life and their personal morality. In fact, if you study England in the 17th century, personal morality was in sharp decline. Up to this point, people had kind of known that most of the kings had mistresses. In the 17th century, they now know those mistresses by name. Morality has just gone down the tube.
Which takes us up to 1703 where in the small town of Epworth, a man by the name of John Wesley is born. John Wesley is the 15th out of 19 children. Ladies, I can’t comprehend that. Nineteen children—we had trouble keeping up with two! Nine of those children died in infancy. John’s father, Samuel, was an Anglican priest although he was referred to as a dissenter. His mother, Susanna, was a lady of great personal piety. When Wesley was born, countering the age of reason with very little emphasis on the emotion, coming out of Germany is a movement known as “pietism” which teaches that salvation is not primarily the intellect, but the heart has to be involved, the emotions, a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. That’s now on the horizon. This movement known as “pietism” coming out of Germany, one of the churches that greatly influenced the entire Wesley family was the “Moravian” church. Our dear friend, Marsha Frosch, who’s gone home to be with the Lord, came out of that Moravian tradition.
And most of you, if you know any Wesleyan history at all, know that in 1709 there was a fire there at the rectory. We would call it a parsonage. Odds are it was deliberately set by a member of the congregation who greatly disliked Samuel as their priest. But all of the family got out except John. And as they are gathered on the front lawn they realize the fire is now rapidly spreading, everybody’s out but little Johnny and they begin to pray that God will take his soul to heaven, when they look up on the second floor as little Johnny’s head pops through the window. And a man stood on the top of another man’s shoulders, reached up, grabbed little John from the window, took him to the ground and just then the roof collapsed. And Susanna Wesley, John’s mother, penned the phrase, “John was a brand plucked from the burning. Surely God has something special for John.” And although she poured herself into the lives of all of her children, she especially gave attention to John.
In the 1720’s John is away at school at Oxford. And although he’s grown up in a rich religious heritage, he feels something is missing in his life. He refers to himself in his journal as a “nominal Christian”. So he begins to look for more of God. He gets up every morning at 4:00 a.m. to pray. He takes the sacrament of communion almost every day. He begins to go and minister to the poor and to persons in jail. He begins to methodically write in a journal concerning his spiritual progress. And John and his younger brother, Charles, and a few others at Oxford begin to meet three times a week to encourage each other in their faith. And it was in that setting that a few other students at Oxford and in a derogatory way because, again, remember we are still in the Age of Reason where the worst thing you could be called was an “enthusiast” where most people kept emotion completely out of religion. In a derogatory way, this small group, in their disciplined pursuit after God, was referred to as “the Holy Club” or those “Methodists” because they were so methodical about the pursuit of God. Listen to John describe that group in his own words: “In November, 1729, four young gentlemen of Oxford begin to spend some evenings in the week together in reading chiefly the Greek Testament. The exact regularity of our lives as well as studies occasioned a young gentleman to say, ‘Here is a new set of Methodists sprung up.’ The name is new and quaint so it took immediately. And the Methodists were known all over the university. It being our one desire and design to be downright Bible Christians taking the Bible as interpreted by the primitive church and our own for our hope and sole rule.”
John’s father, Samuel, always aspired to be a missionary to America, to the colonies. He never achieved that goal. And so in 1736 John, considering a variety of options, decides that he will go to America to the colony of Georgia to be a missionary to the Indians. We don’t have time to go into detail. He was simply a dismal failure. He also had a lost love while he was in the colony. He dismally fails and he boards, in 1738, a ship headed back to England. And a great storm arrives and Wesley is scared to death to die. And on that ship was a man named Peter and a group of Moravians who had such great peace in the midst of the storm. And Wesley said, “I want that.” In 1738 he steps foot back in England a failure, a broken man. Broken in spirit, but yet his heart’s desire is to be an “all-together Christian”.
And, friends, there is a practical application here. Some of you may feel that right now you are in a very dark night in your life. Sometimes the brightest days occur shortly after the darkest night or a time of deep failure. For it was on May 24, 1738 that John Wesley has what he describes as his “Aldersgate” experience. Listen as he describes that night in his journal. “My experience in the colonies and a fearful journy home by ship in which we nearly perished, led me to see how empty was my faith. I was afraid of death. I felt no assurance or peace as a result of my faith. Upon returning to London, I doubted that I was even a Christian. On May 24th of that year, believe me I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone, for salvation! And an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins—even mine—and saved me from the law of sin and death. I now had an assurance of the love of God and I could not but speak about it. Some thought me a mad man. Some called me an enthusiast. But I had been as one who was dead and now I was alive again. I continued to bear witness to what God had done, to meet with others to encourage them in the faith and to seek to understand all that I had now experienced.”
Did you catch the lines where he said, “We gathered together in small groups to encourage one another in our faith?” One of our statements in our Philosophy of Ministry here at Grace—“Lives are best transformed in small groups”. What Wesley found that night is hard for me to believe that he wasn’t a Christian. A man who would get up at 4:00 a.m. every morning to pray and take the sacrament each day and do all of these things. What Wesley found that night was it wasn’t those good deeds; it was trust in Christ and Christ alone. An assurance was given to him that God loved him. It’s not a Wesley hymn; it’s written by Fanny Crosby, but as we conclude this first part of the message it speaks to what Wesley experienced. Let’s stand and sing one verse of the hymn, “Blessed Assurance”.
PART 2
Now the “Faith of A Methodist, Part 2”. This is not a sequel; it’s a continuation to carry on with the story we’ve heard so far. I want to take you back just a little bit now. You know when you imagine coming back and forth between Georgia and London, well these days you can do that up until recently you could do that in three hours on a Concord. But I want you to think for just a moment of how it must have been for Mr. Wesley. A journey that would have taken weeks and weeks on board a ship. This pulpit up here kind of creaks and it made me think as Rev. Mike was preaching about John sitting wiling away the hours and days and the weeks on that boat heading back from his failure in the new land in Georgia, heading back to England and trying to imagine what God had in store for him. A person who had gone through the things of faith and done the best he could to live out the faith as a Christian but having failed nevertheless. He had a lot of time to think about the order of things. The wind would blow and the ship would move closer and closer to his homeland. And then a storm came. Then he finds himself in fear for his life. And perhaps after weeks and weeks of analysis-- you do get the impression don’t you that Mr. Wesley was an analytical person? And after weeks of analysis about how what he lives out their faith and experiences their faith, he comes to a moment when faith is all he has and his life is this close to being snuffed out. And he realizes that his faith isn’t so strong. And he sees people on board the ship who are not quite up to the same standards that he must have held for himself and his fellows in the Holy Club who have exactly what they need at that moment when they are afraid for their lives. They have the peace that passes all understanding.
So this is the man who came back to England and had that experience in Aldersgate Street. And he gave us the traditions that we celebrate this month. You see, what John Wesley was striving for in being an all-together Christian was equally about not being an almost Christian. If you want to read one of his best sermons, I would ask you to look up his sermon called “The Almost Christian” because it was, I’m sure on that boat ride, when John Wesley began to realize what it means to be almost Christian. To have all of the right stuff but not be altogether Christian. And I think what happened to this Wesley on Aldersgate Street that night was that he began to realize that it wasn’t through his trying so hard that God loved him, but simply because God wanted to. That we can try to impress God, we can try to win God over to our side, we can beg his indulgence, but when it is all said and done, God loves us because God wants to. And there is really nothing we can do about it.
Let us refer back to that Scripture reading we had at the very beginning of the service. John Wesley used this Scripture as the passage upon which he based his sermon on St. Mary’s in Oxford in 1738 where he talked about salvation by faith. And just hear these words again. “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this not from yourselves because it is a gift from God. And not by works so that no one can boast for we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do.” You see, John went back to that passage and realized that there is a balance to be struck between accepting the gift of God that is grace—undeserved, unearned, unmerited love from God. Something God gives us because God wants to. He also recognizes that in response to that we are to live out our faith and to be people who imitate Christ and the good works of Christ.
I think that John Wesley must have experienced such tremendous joy when he finally began to figure out how to piece all that together, how to achieve this balance between the works that he did so well and the faith that always seemed to elude his intellect. I think it’s visible to us in a hymn that’s become another one of those theme songs for United Methodists, “O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing”. Let’s look at a couple of versus here. It should tell us quite a lot about his mindset. I know he was close to his brother, shared a lot with his brother. And together these words found there way into hymns.
“O for a thousand tongues to sing my great redeemer’s praise
The glories or my God and King, and the triumphs of His grace”
Now think about the man who was on that boat not only fearing for his life in the midst of a storm, but fearing for his future. Having seen his dreams die and wondering what was next for him, he pens these words:
“Jesus, the name that charms our fears and bids our sorrows cease
Is music in the sinners ears; it’s life, health, and peace.”
What a great discovery he had made! He had found that he could know all the things that a Christian must know, that he could do all the things that a Christian must do, but they are meaningless until there is this transformation of the heart. It can only happen when we accept God’s unconditional love unconditionally. When we embrace His love for us without trying to figure out how it works. And so from those beginnings, John and Charles give us what we now call Methodist—United Methodists—people of many heritage but in particular these Wesleyan foundational beliefs that become the very core of who we consider ourselves to be as Methodist.
Now, the first thing you need to think of if you are going to consider yourself a Methodist or Wesleyan, is that you have to hold out a great tenacity to the “v-amania”. You saw that term on the screen a little earlier. John Wesley had studied the history of his land. He’d tried to figure out where this chaos had come from and how to achieve balance. And he felt, I guess, that Elizabeth may have been on the right track when she came up with this attempt at balance. A middle way—that’s what v-amania stand for, that’s what it means—the middle way. John Wesley realized, as he battled between his intellect and his feelings, between his piety and his raw emotions. John realized that the real middle way is that it isn’t either/or proposition to be a Christian but rather a both/and proposition. It’s a balance between faith and action that helps us and makes us able to listen to others and to learn from each other. It holds us together. And it’s such a wonderful gift! What John Wesley has taught us to be are people who can say, “Well, yeah the extreme liberal has a very important point of view that must be heard and considered. Yes, the extreme conservative has an important point of view that must be heard and considered.” And there is a middle way; there is a place of balance. It’s an elusive place; but it’s there. We learn that from Wesley because he struggled with that. And I would submit this morning that the reason this is worthy of our serious consideration is because it worked! Because John Wesley led a revival that transformed England and in many ways transformed this nation! It worked! So it is worthy of our respect to listen to the foundation for that change.
So here is what I think Wesley has taught us. You’ve already heard that there is this willingness to balance faith and intellect. There is a willingness to recognize the Bible as our foundational guide but to also listen respectfully to the traditions of Christians throughout the ages. There is a willingness to embrace the evangelical mission of the Gospel to teach people that through faith they can receive the grace of God and the peace that passes all understanding. That there is also a social gospel that says as saved believers in Christ we have a responsibility to make the world a better place. To be peacemakers, change makers. So there is a balance Wesley says between pure grace that brings us the salvation we need and the holiness. And it is a life lived as an expression and the change made by God’s grace and the presence of God’s spirit in our hearts. Wesley teaches us that there is a balance between the freedom of will that God gives to all human beings and the necessity for God to intervene through grace because our free will gets us into trouble all of the time. Wesley has taught us that we must be passionate about our faith but also open minded and intensely interested in the knowledge and understanding of others, and to be patient and kind yet steadfast in our core values.
This is summarized beautifully in something accredited to Wesley as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Now he didn’t invent the term but scholars who have followed him have assigned this term to him. And this is a really good way to sum up what it is in the foundational beliefs of the Wesleyan. First of all we recognize that the primary source, the number one most important foundation or element of Christian belief is the Bible. Wesley tells us that that’s where it all starts. And without the Bible, we have nothing. The Bible is truly our foundation. It is the keystone to everything else that we do and believe because it contains truth of who God is and who the people of God are.
And then he says that tradition is the next most important thing. Now tradition is the word that I have to admit that to pastors that can be a dirty word because, you know, the worse thing you can say to a pastor is, I’m sorry, but the worse thing you can say to a pastor is, “But we’ve always done it that way.” That’s not the kind of tradition that Wesley is talking about. He’s talking about truth that survives throughout the ages. Tradition is truths that have been revealed by people who have come and gone but the truth has outlasted them. And so there is no need for us as believers to reinvent the wheel. We can take hold of the truths that have been taught to us by our mothers and fathers in the faith and build upon their traditions or the truths that they have given us.
Wesley teaches that the next thing that is most important in our lives is Christian experience. And again this is a troubling word because some of us are very uncomfortable with the whole idea about feeling. Well, we’re not really talking about a touchy, feely kind of thing here. We are talking about experience that, another word for that could be faith. I have come to believe in my own Christian journey that faith builds faith. And this is really the experience I believe Wesley is talking about—that you must reach out once to God in faith. Simply let go and give to God your confidence and God will not let you down. And then as you experience God’s faithfulness, you will affirm faith that builds more faith and more faith and more faith. This is the experience. In other words, read your Bible, listen to the truths of the fathers and mothers of our faith, and then go out and try it. And build the body of your own experience that will make your faith strong.
And then, finally, the fourth leg of that Quadrilateral is reason. Now isn’t it beautiful the way Wesley has balanced the Bible, which is an absolute truth, a foundation that we can trust with tradition, which is changing, and flexible. He’s balanced experience, which is flexible and changing with intellect or with reason that comes back to the foundations that we would call science. Those are the truths about the world that we discover with the use of our intellect so that we recognize that there truly is a middle way to be this kind of Christian to embrace the power of the intellect and the power of raw faith. This is the foundation upon which Methodism has been build. And this is what we are going to learn more about in the weeks to come. So we want to leave you with this solid knowledge, this practical application.
I want to conclude by simply telling you this: That I am a convert! I became a United Methodist on purpose. And do you know, I’ll tell you something that I’ve learned. It isn’t just true of me but all converts, if you ever want to meet somebody who really understands or wants to understand what it is to be something, go find a convert. You know, I was raised in the Roman Catholic tradition, and I didn’t really understand what it meant to be a Roman Catholic until I became a United Methodist. Because then it became my duty or responsibility to be an apologist to everybody I met for what it was to be a Roman Catholic. I had a problem. So now I choose to me United Methodist. I choose to embrace this Wesleyan understanding of the Christian life. I like the middle way. Before I understood anything about what the United Methodist traditions were, I was telling people that I knew that I liked the Methodist Church because to me it seemed like that wide spot in the middle of the road where there was room for people of many and diverse beliefs. And yet there was a centric, a core that was trustworthy and true.
So it’s easy for me to see the practical implications of the things that we have shared this morning. And I hope that it is for you. Now if you are troubled by some of what you have heard, if you feel that people who are taking the middle way are sitting on the fence and they are undecided, I understand. I would challenge you to keep in mind that Wesley has seen to lead people down the middle way led to transformation and change that has affected the history of the world. And it’s worthy of our respect and consideration.
I want to conclude this morning by asking us to pray together another Wesley prayer. I will read the words or pray the words for us and I would ask that in your heart you listen and if you feel so led to own these words for yourself. Let us pray, “To you, O God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, my creator, redeemer and sanctifier, I give up myself entirely. May I no longer serve myself but you all the days of my life. I give you my understanding. May it be my only care to know you, your perfections, your worth and your will. I give you my will and I have no will of my own whatsoever. May I will in you alone today. I give you my affections. Dispose of them all. Be love, be fear and joy in my life. May nothing that any share in them but with respect to you and for your sake. I give you my body. May I glorify you with it and preserve it wholly fit to you and for your purposes so that you can dwell in me. I give you all my worldly goods. May I prize them and use them only for you. I give you my credit and reputation. May I never value it but only in respect of you. I give you myself and my all. Let me look upon myself to be nothing, to have nothing apart from you. O my God and may all hereafter when I shall be tempted to break this solemn engagement, when I shall be pressed to conform to the world and to the company and customs that surround me, may my answer be, ‘I am not my own. I am not for myself, not for the world, but for my God.’ O God, be merciful to me as sinner. Amen.”
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