Personal Holiness

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 14:23-29 and 1 Peter 1:13-23:

On May 24, 1738, John Wesley recorded in his journal “in the evening 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." And thus, was what has become known as Wesley’s Aldersgate experience, where his heart was strangely warmed. And as we heard in the introduction to singing O For a Thousand Tongues to Sing, his brother Charles had had a similar experience three days before on May 21. I can’t imagine that there wasn’t just a little bit of jealousy on John’s part surrounding that reality. And so, as we remember that experience, and Charles’ on what has become known as Heritage Sunday in the United Methodist Church we continue in our series looking at beliefs that are unique to Methodism and move onto the idea of personal holiness.

Now personal holiness in and of itself is not very unique, but we do have some unique takes on it. And before we dive into those, it’s also important to give some context to the Aldersgate experience so that we can better understand what comes before, during and after that shapes Wesley’s thinking about personal holiness, conversion experiences as well as the acceptance of God’s salvation, or God’s saving grace given to everyone, including John himself, as well as you and I. Last week I talked about John and Charles coming to the Georgia colony in 1736, which didn’t end really well for either of them. On the boat trip over, they encountered a major storm and while the Wesley brothers, and others, were fearing for their lives, a group of Moravians, who were the first protestant church, coming into existence in Eastern Europe fifty years before Martin Luther. Who were on their way to the colonies for religious freedom, and rather than being terrified of the storm, they were instead praying and singing praises to God. This had quite an impact on John, and he began to wonder about his faith, and began to explore even more other religious movements beyond the church of England. But one of the things that the Moravians told him, as did the leaders of some other pietist movements, was that he needed to have a dateable conversion experience. That without that he was not a true Christian, and he was also told that unless he was absolutely filled with joy all the time that he also wasn’t a true Christian. Some of these groups were then ones that would deny him communion because they didn’t think him Christian enough to receive it. Johnj would write, as he was headed back the London, “I went to Georgia to convert the Indians,” a task at which he failed miserably, and then writes “but who shall convert me?”

Heart of Worship

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The texts were Ephesians 1:15-23 and Luke 24:44-53:

There is a church in Albuquerque, and on their marque it says “church like it used to be,” and I have a guess what that mean by that, but I’m not quite positive that I understand what that means. Several years ago, I took a month off in order to study worship, and in that time I went to 12 different churches in the Albuquerque area. One of the 12 was the Greek Orthodox Church. As I was listening to the divine liturgy, which, except for being primarily in English now, has been the basically the same for the last 1500 years or so. Is that what they mean by church like it used to be? Probably not. But I do think much, or even all, that church like it used to be has to do with worship. Indeed, when someone says they are going to church, what they nearly always mean is “I am going to worship”, the immediate circumstances being an exception. I heard last week that 90% of churches have gone to some type of alternative worship, with the vast majority being online. I don’t know about the other 10%, perhaps some of them never stopped worshipping in person, or more likely they stopped worshipping at all. Can you be church and not have worship? I think the two are inherently linked together, and worship is at the heart of the matter for who we are as a people.

What we hear in the passage from Luke for today is that after the disciples watch Jesus ascend, which Luke doesn’t really describe, that they then worship him. This has been a common theme of the post resurrection Christ, and then they return to Jerusalem with great joy and end up in the temple blessing, or worshipping God. Luke’s gospel both begins and ends in the Temple, but there is a distinct difference between the beginning and the ending, of course because of Jesus. In the first temple, or under the old covenant, sacrifice is made at the temple with animals, but under the new covenant, under the covenant of Christ, in which we are called to make sacrifices of praise of adoration to God in acknowledgment for what God has done for us. Joy in celebration of love and forgiveness. Jesus has already given a preview of this change when he encounters a Samaritan woman in the gospel of John, also sometimes called the story of the woman at the well. She says to Jesus that her people have worshipped God on their mountain, but that he says that people should worship on the mountain in Jerusalem, meaning the Temple. But Jesus says, the time is coming when people will no longer worship on either mountain, but they will worship the Father in Spirit and truth, and that’s where we are, no longer in the temple, but worshipping in spirit in truth, making worship the heart of the matter. But what does that look like?