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?”

Joel: Inward or Outward

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Joel 1:1, 2:1-18:

When we were living in Melrose, NM, which is a small farming community in the eastern part of the state, they were dealing with a significant drought. Most of them were dryland farmers, which meant they depended upon rain to water the crops. In our two years there, the only people who brought in a harvest, in two years, were those who had irrigation, which were all people who grew corn. All the wheat farmers simply watched their crops wither and die every season. And because there were no crops to hold down the top soil, it began to blow away. There was nothing you could do to keep the sand and dust out of the house. As soon as you vacuumed it up, there would be a new coating over everything within a few days.  In our last spring there, we had a massive windstorm come through that just blackened and sky and had the old timers talking about it being just like the dust bowl, especially the storm that hit on Palm Sunday 1935 that is now known as Black Sunday.  The dirt and sand covered and coated everything and was beginning to bury fence lines, and in some cases starting to cover abandoned and collapses houses. Where do you find hope in a situation like that, when everything you need to survive depends on the crop coming in, and you haven’t had one what do you do? That is the image, and the experience, that came to my mind as I thought about the prophet Joel and the imagery he uses of destruction in a plague of locusts which eat and destroy everything, and then are followed by a drought that destroys everything that might have remained. Where is hope in that moment? Where is God in that moment? What are we called to do in that moment? Are we responsible for the drought? Has it been brought on by God because of our sin?

Like with Hosea last week, and really most of the minor prophets, we know very little about the prophet Joel. We are told in the first line that he is the son of Pethuel, which means nothing to us because we don’t know who he is. Obviously to those who first recorded this, his name had to have had some significance. Joel’s name, is really ya-el, which means “The Lord is God”, ya being an abbreviation for Yahweh and el meaning God. What is striking, especially when compared against the other prophets, is that there is not a list of names of kings at the beginning of his prophetic career, nor is there a single name of a king mentioned anywhere in Joel’s prophetic writings.  That makes dating the book very difficult, and so possible dates range from the 9^th century to the 4^th century BCE. Most scholars date it from the end of the 6^th century to the beginning of the 5^th, that’s still like a 150 year period. None of the reasons for this dating are incontrovertible, but they include the fact that no kings are named, which since there are no kings after the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 and the beginning of the exile, this would make sense. In addition, there is an emphasis on priests and elders and the centrality of the Temple, which could mean Joel is just ignoring the kings, or again that it takes place after the return from exile, and the rebuilding of the temple, along with the wall around Jerusalem, which is also presupposed in this writing. But probably the best argument for this dating is Joel’s use of other prophets, most importantly Obadiah, whose prophetic career takes place in the 5^th century. But, ultimately, the dating of Joel doesn’t have any impact on its interpretation, because unlike the other prophets, while there is a call to repentance for where the people have gone astray, there is no specific sin or transgression that is ever addressed.