Wesleyan Quadrilateral

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 16:12-15:

For the past five weeks we’ve been talking about what it is that we as Methodist’s believe, of some things that are unique to Methodism or to a Wesleyan perspective, coming from the founder of the Methodist movement John Wesley. We’ve talked about a Wesleyan understanding of grace, about person and social holiness, about our understanding of the sacraments, and last week about evangelism, and today we move onto how we read and interpret and understand scripture. Now there are many ways that we can approach scripture, and many different reasons for reading scripture, but if we are to take scripture seriously, then we have to be serious about how we take scripture, which has a definitely unique perspective when it comes to the tradition we have inherited from Wesley.

Now some people will often argue that they don’t interpret scripture, they just read it and understand what it has to say, or as the simplistic saying is “the Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.” Except it doesn’t really settle anything, because first of all the Bible is not like the Apple user’s agreement that we just scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.” And second is it’s impossible to read scripture without interpreting it, and that’s not even to deal with the reality that an interpretation itself is already being given to us because it’s being translated, which involves and enormous amount of decisions that have to be made that can convey one idea over another. But, we do the same. I will read scripture differently than you. I read it differently as a married man with children, then I would if I was single without children. I read it differently as a middle-class white American, then if I was poor in the developing world. I also read it differently than I did 20 years ago, and know that in 20 years it will also be different. It’s just natural to do these things, and we have to be cognizant of that so that we can know our default understandings and where we might be blind to some things. And we can also see different things depending on what it is that we are thinking and doing., and let me give you just one example.

Evangelical

Here is my message from Sunday. The passages were Acts 2:1-21 and Matthew 28:16-20. It was Pentecost Sunday:

In 1910 a series of pamphlets began to be published, focused out of the Presbyterian Church and Princeton Theological Seminary, it was entitled The Fundamentals, and sought, in their words to state “the fundamentals of Christianity.” Those who subscribed to the ideas being presented in these pamphlets began to be referred to as fundamentalists, which is where that term comes from. But, fairly recently, as these things go, as the term fundamentalist began to be applied to other groups, like fundamentalist Muslims, or those who subscribed to a very strict idea of a religion, with little to no wiggle room to believe other things, and the desire to blow things up to prove their rightness, Christian fundamentalists began to change how they referred to themselves, rejecting that term, and instead calling themselves evangelicals, which, in my opinion, has sort of corrupted that word, and the rest of the church really needs to try and reclaim it from simply meaning fundamentalist. Now it’s not that fundamentalists didn’t also have overlaps with evangelicalism, because they did, but evangelical had meant much more than what it tends to mean now.

And so when I say that the Methodist movement was part of the evangelical movement that doesn’t mean what we tend to think it means currently, instead it was about, much as we’ve talked about already when it comes to Methodist beliefs, about a lived religion that not only sought to make the believer’s life better, to bring about personal transformation, and then from a Methodist perspective to bring about a transformation of the world, but that also sought to spread that message to the world. Or as John Wesley would say, “to spread scriptural holiness across the whole land.” And so, as we already heard, Wesley said that there was no think as private religion, or only personal religion, that it had to be social, and that also entailed spreading and offering the good news to others, and that gets back to an original understanding of being evangelical.

Social Holiness

 Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Luke 10:25-37:

When people find out that I’m a minister I never know what to expect. Often people will project onto me whatever they think about the church, for good or for ill. Those on the right tend to instantly assume that I’m a fundamentalist, and those on the left tend to instantly assume I’m a fundamentalist. But it can lead to some interesting conversations, interesting being in all its connotations, although sometimes people don’t want to talk anymore once they know what I do. I was having a conversation once and when they found out I was a minister they then asked one of the inevitable follow-ups which is what denomination, which is part of the reason for this series on Methodism so that we can be able to say what it is that makes Methodism unique, which is not always the easiest thing, but his response was not what I expected.

He said “I grew up a Methodist, but I stopped going when they began to be interested in social justice issues,” and my response, which was definitely not what he expected, and maybe not as pastoral is it should have been was “really, you were around in 1908 because that’s when the Methodist Church published the Social Creed which laid out the church’s position on many social issues.” Although I didn’t say this part, the Social Creed called for, amongst other things, the end to child labor, safety standards for industrial workers, a six-day work week for everyone, and a living wage. Now my response to this gentleman certainly didn’t further the conversation, which was part of my hope, honestly, and it wasn’t actually fully accurate because the Methodist movements concern with social issues goes back much further than that. In fact, it goes all the way back to the beginning.

Sacramental

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 and Luke 3:15-17, 21-22:

In 1736, John Wesley and his brother Charles came to the colony of Georgia, having been invited by James Oglethorpe, the founder of the colony, to preach to the English and native populations. When they arrived, they found things to be different than they had expected, and Charles returned to London after just a few months. But John decided to stay and began to fall in love with a member of his congregation by the name of Sophia Hopkey. Although most people expected them to get married, through a series of miscommunications, Sophy ended up marrying someone else, whom she had apparently also been seeing. As you might imagine, John was a little less than pleased, and when she showed up to church John took the opportunity to publicly rebuke her and then refused to serve her communion. This caused quite a stir, and her husband brought charges against Wesley for defamation. And then it gets even worse because not only was the judge of the colony known to be an ill-tempered despot, but he also happened to be Sophy’s uncle and allegedly bribed the grand jury to make sure that charges were brought. Wesley rightly reading the tea leaves decided to leave Georgia soon thereafter. And that story becomes important because later Wesley himself will also be denied communion, although then it will be because he was not considered to be a true Christian, which will impact Methodist theology on the sacraments.

We continue in our series on what Methodists believe. And while I said last week that we were only going to look at stuff that was unique to Methodism, rather than all our beliefs, that’s not really true for today, or not fully true, because there are some things that we believe as part of the sacraments that are broader than just Methodism. When it comes to the sacraments, we, along with most Protestant churches practice two, communion and baptism. That stands in contrast mainly against the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches which have seven sacraments. Protestants practice just two because during the protestant reformation Luther said he sought to follow only those sacraments in which Jesus participated and also commanded us to do. And while a lot more could be said about that, I’m not going to, so we can get into beliefs about baptism, which could be its own message as well.

Amazing Grace Times Three

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 3:14-21:

Today we begin a new series looking at what we as Methodists believe. And more specifically things that we believe that are unique to Methodism. This series is really based on the fact that one of the questions I get asked the most by people from outside the church is what is it that Methodists believe that make us different from other denominations. After all, if we believed the same thing as others there would be no reason for us to be separate. And I know that some of you have gotten the same question, and so this is to help all of us be able to articulate who we are. Now one caveat is that we are not going to be talking about everything, especially where there is overlap, say about the trinity or the resurrection, more orthodox positions, because even if there are slight differences, they aren’t big enough to answer that question what makes Methodists different. And we begin today with the thing that is definitely unique to methodism and that is our understanding of grace. I know many people who have become Methodists specifically because of our idea and practice of grace, and that includes several ministers who have converted as adults. But before we get into the weeds of what that means, a little bit of background and context.

Grace is a word we use a lot, but we never really define it. We just sang about god’s grace being greater than all our sin, so is grace then about forgiveness, or is something more. At the end of this message we’ll sing Amazing Grace, and the grace that that saved John Newton, and so is grace then about salvation? Is it about healing? Is it about relationship? And then there’s the fact that we call the prayer before a meal grace, and is that something entirely different? What is this grace thing all about? Great questions. There are several meanings of grace in scripture, although both the Hebrew and Greek words have a connotation of favor. In the Hebrew scriptures it’s about a sense of graciousness or goodwill. Think of Psalm 145 which says that God is gracious and full of compassion, so mercy is a part of this understand of grace.