Are you poor in spirit?

John Wesley’s sermons on the Sermon on the Mount are at the core of his teaching. In them we find much of theology distilled down to its essence. His own view was the the Sermon on the Mount was the perfect summary of Christian life.

In his first sermon on the Sermon on the Mount, he speaks of the person of Christ — as the preacher of the sermon — and of the first two beattitudes. He argues that poverty of spirit is a state of utter awareness of our own guilt and unworthiness before a holy God, which opens the way to the joy of the kingdom of God revealed to us. He argues that the mourners who will be comforted are those who having once found Christ discover clouds and darkness and heaviness of spirit blocking their view of their Savior.

He ends the sermon by saying we also mourn for those who do not know Christ, and ends with an exhortation for Christians not to let the scoffing of non-believers stop them from sharing the gospel.

Ye, whose eyes are enlightened, be not troubled by those who walk on still in darkness. Ye do not walk on in a vain shadow: God and eternity are real things. Heaven and hell are in very deed open before you; and ye are on the edge of the great gulf. It has already swallowed up more than words can express, nations, and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues; and still yawns to devour, whether they see it or no, the giddy, miserable children of men.

When I talk to people these days, I get the impression they have an overly rosy view of the Christianity of earlier centuries. In fact, the world has always been full of non-Christians. It just so happens that in some places and times lots of non-Christians went around claiming the name of Christ. In John Wesley’s day, nearly everyone in England was officially a Christian. But he saw the truth.

In our day, more and more, people no longer feel and social pressure to claim to be something they are not, but people are no different than they were in 1740 or 33.

The last line of the quote above has a turn of phrase I think is particularly apt for us. Wesley wrote of “the giddy, miserable children of men.” Giddy is not a word we use a lot, but ours is a giddy age. We whirl about and are made dizzy by the spinning. We value laughter and frivolity nearly above all else. Our culture seems built to increase our giddiness at every turn. Faster and faster we spin, till we fall down staggering and laughing like drunkards.

Wesley says we are misled if we think that is the path to happiness. What we need is not giddiness, but poverty of spirit. Only then will we be happy.

Who then are “the poor in spirit?” Without question, the humble; they who know themselves; who are convinced of sin; those to whom God hath given that first repentance, which is previous to faith in Christ.

Who is Jesus?

A compelling little video that asks the key question.

Christ & Paddles sex club

What is the proper response of the United Methodist Church to the general situation described in this story from the New York Times?

At around 4 on a Saturday morning, a time when most of the gay bars in New York have closed and locked their doors, a steady stream of young and middle-aged men, almost all shirtless and some stripped down to their boxer briefs, have found their way down a dark stairwell and into a maze of basement rooms, where the décor can best be described as fallout-shelter chic.

They have come to Paddles, an after-hours sex club in Chelsea, not yet ready to end their evening. They prowl the long cinder-block hallway, exchanging knowing glances. A husky, bearded man in his 40s lounges on a corrugated black rubber bench, admiring a chorus line of smooth-chested 20-somethings, their flesh glowing under a pink neon sign and black lights. A man in a metal-studded black leather chest harness strides toward a back room, the hookup room, where a circle of men, skin glistening with sweat, hover around a swing, watching.

Before you jump on me, I am not saying this is 100% of the behavior for those with same-sex attraction. And I’d be happy to ask the same questions about heterosexual hook-up culture or the normalization of extreme pornography. Indeed, if you’d rather read those stories and post about them, please do. (I will warn you that the pornography story is graphic.)

What I’m trying to get my head around is how the church responds to what is considered normal sexual behavior in our culture. I’m trying to establish whether we have any common ground in our understanding of Christian sexual ethics by pointing to what looks like a clear-cut case and seeing if I am correct that it is clear-cut to United Methodists.

Do we agree that this kind of culture is not in keeping with God’s will for humanity? Do we want to encourage the men in the story I quoted above to change their hearts and lives?

The obvious answer is “yes,” right?

Our Social Principles would say that obvious answer is “yes.” Wouldn’t they?

Scripture, tradition, reason, and experience would, too, yes?

We all agree, don’t we?

If your congregation had its church building just up the block from Paddles sex club, what would you do?

What stirs their hearts

I was following the Twitter chat about the upcoming Lion and Lamb Festival in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

Participants were asked what issues they were passionate about and what motivates them to act. Here are some of the answers:

• I am passionate about global policy on justice issues dealing with genocide.
• Empowerment of women & children around the world
• unity (or lack thereof) in the church- open and honest discussions about the future of the church
• Our broken immigration negatively impacts so many lives. Striving to work toward change!
• I’ve been thinking a lot about how broken the economic system is, and how we can fix it.
• I am passionate about unlocking missional imagination through music, word, visual art – for the transformation of the world.
• global health, mission, service & honest conversations about church, personal faith/doubts, connecting with non churchgoers
• awareness of sex trafficking around the world as well as in Indiana. Huge issue.
• It’s gonna sound weird, but I’m passionate about doubt & the role it plays in faith.
• children/youth justice issues, human trafficking, genocide. Hearing stories on these issues motivates

Edwards: Breaking the darkness

Jonathan Edward’s account of the revival that broke out in Northampton, Mass., in the 1730s is an interesting and careful account of the variety of ways that the Holy Spirit worked conversions in his community. He is a great antidote for anyone who argues that there is only one way for a person to be converted to God. That is not the book’s only virtue by far, but it is one that struck me while reading it recently.

Here is one passage that I particularly liked in which he described the way saving grace breaks through the darkness.

In some, converting light is like a glorious brightness suddenly shining upon a person, and all around him: they are in a remarkable manner brought out of darkness into marvelous light. In many others it has been like the dawning of the day, when at first but a little light appears, and it may be presently hid with a cloud; and then it appears again, and shines a little brighter, and gradually increases, with intervening darkness, till at length it breaks forth more clearly from behind the clouds.

NY Methodist distressed by UMC

A Methodist from New York has written a lament over what he sees as the rightward shift in the United Methodist Church.

“Theological pluralism”, or the “inclusive church”, or the denomination that practiced Mr. Wesley’s “If your heart is as my heart, then give me your hand”, are vanishing. They are being replaced by an exclusivity – and by a surprising and unfortunate overlooking of reason and of experience from the Quadrilateral – and by a narrow theological literalism that is contrary to the basic Protestant Christian teaching of the individual’s relationship directly to/with God.

The author makes use of a popular quote from John Wesley’s sermon “Catholic Spirit.” That sermon certainly rewards reading. I’m not sure Wesley would use it to advance the argument this author makes, but that would be an interesting conversation.

Oden on spirituality

Thomas C. Oden on the meaning of “spirituality” in his book Requiem

I intend by spirituality to point to personal life lived in union with Christ – a relationship with the incarnate and risen Lord through the power of the Holy Spirit, where his death is my death, his resurrection, my resurrection. This life expresses itself in praise of God through loving service to the neighbor. Spirituality in the New Testament sense is not a moral program, not a set of rules, not a level of ethical achievement, not a philosophy, not a rhetoric, not an idea, not a strategy, not a theory of meditation, but simply life lived in Christ.

 

A foolish consistency?

Two recent comments have me thinking hard about the meaning of ordination.

Dean Snyder engaged me in an exchange about taking ordination vows in a church that is not perfect. It is a place of saints and sinners and its polity, doctrine, and discipline reflect that. Snyder pointed out ways that our history has been filled with problems. If we won’t take ordination vows in a church that is sinful, then we will not get ordained. If we think the church’s current doctrine is without error, then we forget the principle that the church is always in need of reformation. (Morgan Guyton commented in the same vein, I think, when he testified that he feels strongly called to lead the United Methodist Church toward new doctrine and practices.)

In another vein, Holly Boardman commented on her own disillusionment with the UMC. She wrote of coming to see a church in the thrall of riches and too prone to let democratic values trump gospel holiness. These convictions led her to retirement. She came to see too large a gap between what the church claimed it believed and how it acted.

I am grateful that so many people share their own stories about how they have come to balance the competing tensions that are at the heart of ordination and appointment in the United Methodist Church. I am finding that there are really two different questions when it comes to a calling. The call of God is one thing. The living out of that call within a particular church is another.

I have been working under the influence of something Will Willimon wrote somewhere. He said preachers are not called to preach their own faith. They are called to preach the faith of the church. This has set in my mind — certainly in a place that I am inclined to go anyway — in the direction of trying to discern what the faith of the United Methodist Church actually is and what it is I am being called to preach and teach.

I wonder if that is a misplaced thought. Is looking for doctrinal integrity and coherence in the church a kind of idolatry? At the very least, it seems naive.