The Wesleyan Way, Part 2: Liberating through God’s Love
The Wesleyan Way, Part 2:
Liberating Through God's Love
August 11, 2024
Ordinary Time
Luke 4:14-21
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These verses from Luke chapter four contain Jesus' first sermon. After his baptism in the Jordan river, Jesus had entered the Judean wilderness, enduring physical hunger and spiritual temptation for forty days. When he emerged from that wilderness, he traveled north, back to his home region of Galilee. He was "in the power of the Spirit" and ready to begin his ministry among his people.
He went to worship in the local synagogue. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. These were his scriptures, the words that had shaped his own human imagination and convictions and furnished the language for his own life of prayer. He knew what he wanted to say in that moment, which ageless promises of God he wanted to bring into center focus for his congregation.
"He found the place," Luke says.
Jesus found exactly what he was looking for. Full of the Spirit, he found Isaiah's prophetic speech about what ministry in the Spirit mean: Good news to the poor, release for the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed, the year of God's favor. Jesus brought the written word of God into contact with his present reality, he collapsed the distance between the word on the page and the word taking living form in and around his body. And then he preached his first sermon. It was less than ten words: "Today," he said. "Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
Today.
"Today" is one of Luke's favorite words to use in his Gospel. "Today" punctuates the critical moments of Jesus' story.
On Christmas night, when the heavenly choir of angels appears above the shepherds watching their flocks in the fields, the angels announce the good news of God coming to dwell among us: "For there is born to you today, in David’s city, a Savior, who is Christ the Lord" (2:11).
In Luke chapter 19, as Jesus is entering the city of Jericho, he looks up into the trees and sees a man there watching him, a “wee man” named Zacchaeus, and he calls up to this man, considered by many to be a dirty scoundrel of a tax collector: "Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today" (19:5). As they visit together, Zacchaeus pledges to return any ill-gotten gains back to the people. And Jesus says, "Today salvation has come to this house" (19:9).
And while hanging on the cross between two other crucified criminals, Jesus extends mercy to the dying man beside him: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise" (23:43).
Today. This is why Christ came to us, to make today the day of salvation (2 Cor. 6:2). He came to wake us up to his humble, mysterious presence in the world -- today. He came to be our guest and companion, and through his gentle provocations lead us to repentance and new life -- today. He came to suffer what we suffer, to suffer as we suffer, and through that solidarity to gain our trust so that he might tell us of a Paradise greater than suffering. And he came to call the people of God to action -- today.
Notice the second person pronouns attached to all those Todays. Born for you today. I must stay with you. You will be with me in Paradise, today. Today, this is fulfilled in your hearing. Shepherds, tax collectors, criminals, and congregations. Christ is the salvation of God for us, for you, today.
Jesus didn't search out those specific prophetic words for his first sermon because they were interesting, though they are; or inspiring, though they are; or beautiful, though they are. He reached for them to illuminate the movement of the Spirit in the present moment, to see if the people of God would wake up to the today and not remain stuck in the yesterday or fixated on the tomorrow. For God, every day is today. And what does God want to do today? Bring good news to the poor.
How often does the Church lose touch with the today-ness of it all? It is easy for us to live on memory or to wait for tomorrow. Sometimes we need a messenger to remind us that today really is the day of salvation, a messenger who will help us catch up with what the Spirit is already doing out among the oppressed. In his own time and place -- eighteenth century England -- John Wesley was that messenger. He came to his own people and said, Today.
After John Wesley experienced the strange warming of his heart during a religious gathering on Aldersgate Street in London, after he ended his anxious efforts to win God's approval and received the gift of simple, steady trust in Christ, the direction of his life changed forever.
What followed Aldersgate for Wesley was a time of searching for how to share the message of God's personal love with as many people as possible. This would mean that he needed to be present with the people, meeting them where they gathered, and that his preaching would need to be accessible to them, spoken plainly, not like the highly intellectualized treatises he had been trained to preached for his upper-class colleagues in the priesthood. It would mean transgressing the norms of the institutional church that had ordained him and to which he had pledged himself.
Wesley was living during the beginnings of industrialization in England. There was a whole new class of working poor folk who were coalescing around the mills, factories, and mines cropping up around the countryside. These laborers, some of the first nameless masses of early capitalism, were unprotected by the law and almost entirely excluded from the political process. Wesley took the message of God's love directly to them. He went to them, preaching beyond the church walls and the Sunday morning worship hour.
The first time that John tried this open-air style of preaching was in 1739. The famous evangelist, George Whitefield, invited Wesley to come take his place preaching outside a factory. Though Wesley's heart had recently been transformed by an encounter with God's love, the idea of preaching outside a church building made him uncomfortable. What would people think? What would the religious people think? He was so torn between doing it and not doing it that he reverted to a superstitious practice and cast lots to decide. The lots fell for him to go and preach among the unchurched poor.
In his journal, Wesley wrote,
“I had been all my life (till very lately) so tenacious of every point relating to decency and order that I should have thought the saving of souls almost a sin if it had not been done in a church.”
Notice those words: decency, order. Notice how different they are in energy from the proclamation of Isaiah, Christ, and now, Wesley; how different they are in energy from words like good news, release, recovery, freedom.
His journal continues:
At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining the city, to about three thousand people. The scripture on which I spoke was this, (is it possible any one should be ignorant, that it is fulfilled in every true Minister of Christ?) ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor…’[1]
I like to think of this moment as Wesley's second conversion. His first conversion happened when his heart was renewed by God's love; his second conversion happened when he was thrust out among the people.
The Methodist Revival was born in that moment.
From that point forward, Wesley called people to join him on a way where personal holiness, which has to do with the purity one's own heart in relation to God, was joined to social holiness, which has to do with welcoming the kingdom of God on earth and serving others. For Wesley, personal and social holiness were two sides of the same coin; there couldn't be any social holiness without personal holiness, and personal holiness meant nothing if it was not expressed as social holiness. Wesley didn't invent this idea; it's as old as Moses and was confirmed by Christ as the meaning of it all: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind, and you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Wesley didn't think that he had come upon some secret knowledge. But he did think that his church had fallen asleep to the today. And when you fall asleep on the today, you fall asleep on the people living through today.
For the sixty-some years left in Wesley’s life and ministry, he and the growing number of Methodists sought to transform English society through solidarity with those who suffered. They supported fairer wages and protections for workers. They enlisted women alongside men as preachers and teachers. They established free medical centers and schools. They advocated for the end of the slave trade.
Because Wesley believed in the personal love of God for each individual human being, he he had no other option but to try and reach every person with Christ's invitation, and to better their circumstances as he was able.
Here are two snapshots of that early Methodist history that I think are inspiring and instructive:
The first piece of property owned by Methodists was a building in Moorfields, London called the Foundery. Originally, the Foundery was a factory that produced brass cannon for the British army. When John purchased and repaired the facility in 1739, he set about transforming it from a place that had created the weapons of war into a place that offered people, especially poor folk, comprehensive healing. Within a few years, Methodists at the Foundery complex opened a free medical clinic to their neighborhood, a free school for children, and free meeting spaces for community gatherings. This was a vision for property ownership that went clearly against the capitalist grain, a vision rooted in belonging, generosity, genuine encounter, and service. It is my prayer that as we raise a Roof for All, something of that early Methodist approach to property would grip us and pull us forward into the today of the Spirit.
The second snapshot comes from the very end of John Wesley's life. In 1791, he wrote a letter to William Wilberforce, the great British abolitionist. In the letter, Wesley described slavery as a "villainy which is the scandal of religion, of England, and of human nature." And he encouraged Wilberforce by saying, "Unless God has raised you up for this very thing, you will be worn out by the opposition of men and devils. But if God be for you, who can be against you? Are all of them together stronger than God? O be not weary of well doing! Go on, in the name of God and in the power of his might, till even American slavery (the vilest that ever saw the sun) shall vanish away before it."[2] Wesley passed the baton, acknowledged and empowered the good work of others, and had a clear moral vision.
This is our tradition. It's why at the beginning of this year your church leaders established ministry priorities related to health and housing, raising a Roof for All, and strengthening our partnership with our tenant daycare, TLC. We live in Pocatello in 2024. This is our today. And it's a day in which people need affordable housing. It's a day in which people need release from addictions and abuses. It's a day in which people crave belonging and peace. A day in which parents needs childcare that they can access and afford. A day in which people are hungry. A day in which our public servants are devalued and our public leaders are divisive. A day in which strangers crave to be welcomed and the earth itself cries out in agony.
And Jesus stands among us in this today. And he asks us, every time we gather, whether or not we will allow him to make this day his day of salvation. May his words be fulfilled in our hearing. May Wesley’s commitment serve as a model for us. And may the Spirit's work of loving liberation be incarnated, enfleshed, made real in the prayers, presence, gifts, and service that we offer to the world.
Amen.
[1]William J. Abraham, Methodism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7
[2]Quoted in James S. Thomas, Methodism’s Racial Dilemma: The Story of the Central Jurisdiction (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1992), 15.