John Meunier

In Karl Barth’s Homiletics, he writes about what happens when the young pastor comes to the point when all the interesting things he had to say run out. There comes a moment when Sunday arrives and he or she finds out that the treasure of ideas and insights has run dry.

I hit something like this not long ago.

I discovered that I no longer had interesting stories or anecdotes to tell and relate. I found myself looking for stuff to serve as illustrations or stories. And I don’t like doing that. It feels like my writing turns into this:

yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda.

[Insert interesting story here]

yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda yadda

It feels forced and unnatural. It feels contrived. So, now I’m trying to figure out what to do when my resources have run out.

Jesus’ basic message: Repent, for the kingdom of God is near.

Apostolic post-Easter message: Jesus – who was killed on the cross – is the messiah. God has raised him. He will judge the world.

Where is the part where God promises me a new car and a promotion at work?

Worship is a measn of grace.

Or it should  be.

John Wesley wrote a good deal about what he called “the ordinary channels” by which God’s grace touches out lives. He believed and taught that God had ordained certain means by which humans could wade into the streams of his grace.

He did not believe grace was unavailable to use in day-t0-day life, but he did teach that these means were clearly set up by God the way a plumber runs pipes through your house. You can set out blankets on the hedges in hopes of collecting enough dew to drink, but there’s a faucet right in the kitchen waiting for you to turn it on.

In the General Rules of the United Societies Wesley specfically mentions worship as means of grace. In his sermon “The Means of Grace” he preaches about prayer, Scripture reading, and Holy Communion, three activities that are central to worship.

It follows then – if we follow John Wesley – that authentic Christian worship is worship that connects us to fountain of grace that God has established. Worship brings us into the presence of God’s grace. Grace ruptures our dull routines and disrupts our slumbering souls. It orients us away from the world and toward God. It assures us of God’s love and fills us with the joy of the Holy Spirit. It gives us the power to love God more fully and love our neighbors as ourselves.

Every worship service may not do each of these things. But when we come to worship open to grace and expecting to encounter God, we should find more than a way to let an hour of the week slip by. We should find a river of grace waiting there for us – a cool and refreshing flow in the wilderness and deserts of our day-to-day lives.

Do you get those chain e-mails with all the claims about stuff going on in America and the world?

I’ve never figured out the personal and pastoral etiquette of responding to or ignoring claims in such communication.

I’m a big fan of Snopes and PolitiFact, though. This painstakingly thorough and interesting (okay, interesting to me) analysis of a recent claim by a liberal commentator is a great example of why I love it. Long live old-fashioned fact checking and reporting.

Phillip Jenkins’ book The New Faces of Christianity recounts an exchange between a Western church leader and his African counterpart. The two were talking about the Bible. The African, in frustration, finally says to the Westerner, “If you do not believe the Bible, then why did you bring it to us?”

I read that just before sitting down with a couple of chapters in Numbers. Here Moses is ordering the victorious Israelite armies to slaughter all the boys and non-virginal women from among the defeated peoples.

Walter Brueggemann describes the Old Testament in one place as the repository of the long, fierce voice of Moses. Fierce, indeed.

How do we hear it? Or as Jesus says, “Let those who have ears, hear.” How do we answer the question of our African brothers and sisters?

These are the same questions we have wrestled with since the first days of the faith. They may never go away.

Reading the Bible with other people, though, is an instant cure for anyone who wants to cage it with their own readings and interpretations. It simply will not be read in only one way and will not speak with only one voice. It will continue to create ripples and upset our apple carts. The Word is like a mischevious child that way. You can hear that faint giggling sound coming from your Bible every time our readings of it lead us into confusion.

Indeed, while the Bible speaks of the value of unity, it seems pretty clear that it is does not intend to be read in a unified way. I wonder if the very arguments the Bible causes are meant to get us wrangling with each other. The Bible wants to draw us out of hermetical little worlds and into each other’s. It may lead to shouting and frustration, but when we are raising our voices about the Bible we are – at least – in the presence of our brother or sister. The children of God are in one room – even if it is a rowdy room – like a birthday party when all the distant relations show up and bedlam and bad manners erupt.

I was driving through town today

in my blue Dodge minivan

with the Jesus is a Liberal bumper sticker

right next to the Obama ’08 bumper sticker

right below the ribbon for apraxia of speech

with the windows rolled down

playing Def Leppard’s “Photograph”

and I realized

that this 41-year-old white guy

with the fat belly

and the thinning hair

must have looked pretty silly

to the college kids on the side of the road.

Alice Cooper talks about his Christian faith. (ht: Mark Covington)

A bit that I’d never have expected to read attributed to Cooper:

When people say, ‘How do you believe this? Why do you believe this?’ I just say nothing else speaks to my heart. This doesn’t speak to my intellect, it doesn’t speak to my logic – it speaks right to my heart and right to my soul, deeper than anything I’ve ever thought of. And I totally believe it. That being said, I’m not a very good Christian. I mean, none of us are ever ‘good’ Christians. That’s not the point. When you’re a Christian, it doesn’t mean you’re gonna be good, it means you’ve got a harder road to pull.

Clearly, Cooper has not read my post about perfection, but that is a whole different topic.

I know all the elders have to say yes. They get asked if they are going on to perfection at ordination, but I’m trying to determine how central ‘perfection’ is to being a Wesleyan.

Rather I want to know how important is it to affirm that perfection is generally attainable in this life?

First, to clarify, what Wesley meant by perfection was not a general state. He wrote that perfection did not mean a person would be free of sickness or bodily weakness. Perfection did not prevent people from being ignorant or making mistakes about things that one encounters in every day life. Most importantly, perfection did not exempt a person from temptation. So, for instance, the fact that person such as Mother Teresa struggled with doubt and temptation does not remove her from the candidates of perfected Christians.

Wesley wrote that perfection means

one in whom is ‘the mind which was in Christ,’ and who so ‘walketh as Christ also walked;’ a man ‘that hath clean hands and a pure heart,’ or that is ‘cleansed from all filthiness of flesh and spirit;’ one in whom is ‘no occasion of stumbling,’ and who, accordingly, ‘does not commit sin.’ To declare this a little more particularly: We understand by that scriptural expression, ‘a perfect man,’ one in whom God hath fulfilled his faithful word, ‘From all your filthiness and from all your idols I will cleanse you: I will also save you from all your uncleannesses.’ We understand hereby, one whom God lath ‘sanctified throughout in body, soul, and spirit;’ one who ‘walketh in the light as He is in the light, in whom is no darkness at all; the blood of Jesus Christ his Son having cleansed him from all sin.’

For Wesley, the command in the Sermon on the Mount to be perfect as God is perfect (Matthew 5:48), and other commands to be Christ-like, could only make sense if the command implied an ability or the grace to allow us to obey. Therefore, perfection must be possible. Entire sanctification could be the goal of every Christian.

When pressed, Wesley said that if no evidence could be found of any that had attained perfection, then he would have to give up preaching it.

If I were convinced that none in England had attained what has been so clearly and strongly preached by such a number of Preachers, in so many places, and for so long a time, I should be clearly convinced that we had all mistaken the meaning of those scriptures; and therefore, for the time to come, I too must teach that ‘sin will remain till death.

As he preached perfection to the end of his days, clearly he was never convinced it was an error.

My question, though, is not whether we can locate a few individuals who with some confidence we might agree exhibit entire sanctification, but whether this is a goal for which we expect a great number or most Christians to approach?

My experience tells me that few reach it. Those who show some qualities of complete Christian love in one area of their life, may lack it in another. Some may show great zeal for some neighbors but have venom for others. Some may appear to be full of love, but then stumble suddenly and dramatically.

Eugene Peterson – who is decidedly not a Wesleyan – goes so far as to decry perfectionism as anti-Christian.

Perfectionism: a most ruinous deviation from the way, a detour from the way of Jesus. It is unlikely that it will plunge us headlong into damnation, but it certainly makes us most undesirable company with others on the pilgrim way. Perfectionism is a perversion of the Christian way.

We Methodists do not have to answer to Peterson, but I do wonder whether we see enough fruit of the preaching of perfection to hold to Wesley’s interpretation of scripture on this point. He admitted himself that if the preaching of the doctrine did not produce fruit, he would be forced to reconsider whether his reading of the Bible was right.

Of course, our first handicap in answering this question is the absence of much preaching of this doctrine today. Do one in 50 or one in 100 United Methodist pulpits announce the doctrine of perfection once a year? Do the Sunday schools?

I do know this. I have seen and known Christians who seem much further along toward perfection than I am. I have seen those who grow in grace. So, set out as a goal of the Christian life, perfection appears to be a good thing. It draws the Christian toward deeper harmony between Lord and life. Seeking the mind that is in Christ seems to be a prod that moves some Christians, and so it seems that it would be foolish to remove it - whatever Rev. Peterson thinks of it.

My provisional answer to my own question is this: Perfection is essential to Wesleyan understanding of the life of our faith, but we must be very careful with this term.

Too often, Christians justify criticisms such as Peterson’s by boasting of their own progress toward sanctification and drawing distinctions that do not exist between themselves and other Christians. This is folly and surely a sign of incomplete sanctification.

Perfection is not something we attain, but something we receive. We grow toward it only as we are watered by grace and fed by God’s love. But like all growing things, we long to grow rather than to wither and die.

The Archbishop of Canterbury shares his reflections about the ongoing controversies in the Anglican Communion over the issue of homosexuality. He states that most of the ideas are restatements of earlier ideas, but I have not read those, so this is new to me. His essay is much too long to fairly summarize here, but he suggests at the end that the best road ahead might be creation of “two tracks” of Anglicanism.

As we Methodists share a heritage with our Anglican brothers and sisters and grapple with some of the same questions, his essay is worth reading for us as well.

Allan Bevere will be preaching on the binding of Isaac this Sunday.

He has a wonderful reflection on what the story challenges in our preconceived notions of who God is. When you take the Bible seriously, it can challenge all kinds of things.