Bono and Fanny Crosby

Patheos has an excerpt of a book featuring some of U2 lead-singer Bono’s reflections on Jesus and Christianity. I found this passage interesting.

Bono: I really believe we’ve moved out of the realm of Karma into one of Grace.

Michka: Well, that doesn’t make it clearer for me.

Bono: You see, at the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics; in physical laws every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you reap, so you will sow” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff.

Michka: I’d be interested to hear that.

Bono: That’s between me and God. But I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. I’d be in deep s—. It doesn’t excuse my mistakes, but I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity.

I find this interesting because I’m a United Methodist who reads John Wesley and sings “Blessed Assurance” on a fairly regular basis. In those last few lines above, Bono appears to be hoping for assurance that what he believes about Jesus is in fact true. The old Methodist response would have been to seek, and ye shall find. Assurance will be given to any who ask for it and seek it with persistence.

I don’t think we really teach that any more. I am much more likely to hear a variation on Bono’s hope than Wesley’s assurance. I wonder if Bono has ever heard of Fanny Crosby.

Wesley’s favorite fruitful practice

In 1787, John Wesley recorded in his journals the outcome of a worship schedule change.

The Methodists changed the time of their prayer and preaching service to be the same time as regular church. This was undoubtedly not something that Wesley was enthusiastic about, but I suspect was urged strongly by Methodists who were not as attached to the Church of England as he was.

In his estimation, according to a note on Nov. 5, 1787, that experiment failed.

The congregation was, as usual, large and serious. But there is no increase in the society. So that we have profited nothing by having our service in the church-hours, which some imagined would have done wonders.

We can see here Wesley’s practical side, but it is more striking to me how he measures the success or failure of the move: Did it enhance the size and work of the Methodist society?

In other words, if I interpret him properly, what mattered was not bodies in pews on Sunday but disciples in formation as part of the society. In our language, what he really wanted was not more worship attendance, but larger numbers of people engaging in “intentional faith development.”

Curse of respectability

Reading John Wesley and about the early American Methodists always gives me a sense of deep conviction. These were people who took God seriously. They knew that what they did was important. They were willing to suffer for it.

It is not that they did not feel the same pull and tug that we feel. John Wesley wrote more than once that if it were up to him he would not have moved around so much, but he felt God had put it on him. He famously described his first round of field preaching with a biblical quote about submitting to be more vile by taking to the fields.

These tensions did not go away when Methodism moved across the ocean. John Wigger reports in his book Taking Heaven By Storm the social pressures on circuit riders not to take up the hard, poorly paid, and disrespected calling of itinerant preaching.

Dan Young’s mother urged him to join the Presbyterians or Baptists rather than the Methodists, and John Littlejohn’s mother threatened to disinherit him if he persisted in his preaching. Benjamin Paddock’s father found the Methodists to be “about as distasteful to him as any thing well could be.” Word that his son planned to join the itinerancy “frenzied him.” John Cooper’s father “threw a shovelfull of hot embers” on Cooper when he discovered him at prayer, but Cooper became a Methodist preacher anyway. Even the audacious Billy Hibbard has his early doubts about the Methodists. Following his conversion, Hibbard was torn between his desire for respectability and his attraction to Methodism. “I wanted to be a Congregationalist, and to be respectable. But I wanted the love and seriousness of the Methodists.”

I know in my own heart the desire for respectability. I fear that too many of us have given into that desire, to the end that Methodism itself is no longer controversial.

In his book Mainline or Methodist?, Scott Kisker argues that is precisely our problem.

We United Methodists have become a privileged lot. We are educated well beyond the majority in our society. We pay our clergy, as distinctly mainline, beyond the majority in our society. If we are to recover Methodism, freed from its addiction to the American mainstream, it will require the kind of conversion Wesley experienced that day in Bristol [when he submitted to be more vile by preaching in the open air]. It is a conversion to god and neighbor because we are witnesses to God’s ultimate kingdom of the new creation. For such a recovery, we must humble ourselves before almighty God, trust in the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and expect a blessing through a miraculous anointing of the Holy Spirit. Following that we must take some risky, perhaps uncomfortable steps.

Do you visit house to house?

Do you visit house to house? How does that work? How do you do it?

It was from the first a challenge for Methodists and something that they urged on all preachers. Our order of ordination includes questions still about such visitation. The purpose, at first, was not simply to exchange nice words but to teach and instruct. And, yes, people did not take to it then either. Richard Baxter — who was urged as a model for Methodist preachers — wrote at length about how to deal with the fact that people in the parish do not want the preacher to come around quizzing them on the faith.

In the minutes of the early Methodist conferences, the issue is joined this way:

For what avails public preaching alone, though we could preach like angels? We must, yea, every travelling Preacher must, instruct them from house to house. Till this is done, and that in good earnest, the Methodists will be little better than other people. Our religion is not deep, universal uniform; but superficial, partial, uneven. It will be so, till we spend half as much time in this visiting, as we now d in talking uselessly.

James O’Kelly victorious?

In the early days of American Methodism the church split

James O’Kelly, a popular Virginia elder, opposed the power that Francis Asbury exercised over the Methodist connection. O’Kelly offered a proposal at General Conference in 1792 to allow preachers who did not like their appointment to appeal the bishop’s decision to the body of the conference.

In debate, O’Kelly drew a picture of American Methodism in which preachers and congregations had more control over appointments. He appealed to republican sentiments in the young nation and pointed out that Asbury had been raised under the influence of the English monarchy and brought those tendencies with him to America. He warned of the power of bishops.

Supporters of Asbury argued that O’Kelly’s system would create a situation in which wealthy and attractive circuits had a multitude of preachers and poor or undesirable circuits had none. An increase of congregational and pastoral control over appointments would all but destroy the itinerant system, they feared. It would also lead to sectional divisions within the church when preachers stopped being appointed beyond their home circuits and identified more with a region than with the broader agenda of the church.

O’Kelly lost in 1792 and broke off from the Methodist Episcopal Church. It turned out, however, that the Methodist system proved much more flexible and responsive to the needs of the growing nation than O’Kelly’s Republican Methodism, which failed to grow or spread like its parent church.

O’Kelly lost.

Or did he?

In some ways, it seems that today we United Methodists reflect his vision far more than Asbury’s. Could it be that James O’Kelly won the argument even though he lost the vote back in 1792?

The spark at Methodism’s heart

John Wesley wrote two fascinating letters to William Law days before and days after his Aldersgate experience. They reveal some of the spiritual transformation that he went through in the that momentous month of May in 1738.

William Law was a spiritual mentor of Wesley’s. He wrote books of practical theology that Wesley read and recommended to others, although Law’s turn to more mystical themes alienated him from Wesley, which we can see in the two letters.

On May 14, Wesley wrote Law an accusatory letter full of pain. Wesley had been following Law’s advice in his preaching — and own life — for two years. He preached the law of God in great depth and detail. When people found they could not follow the law, he exhorted them and stirred himself up to pray for the grace of God and use the means of grace. But, still, the law was too high for him.

Under this heavy yoke, I might have groaned until death, had not a holy man, to whom God lately directed me, upon my complaining thereof, answered at once, “Believe, and thou shalt be saved. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ with all they heart, and nothing shall be impossible for thee. This faith, indeed, as well as the salvation it brings, is the free gift of God. But seek, and thou shalt find.

Wesley turns from sharing his great discovery to a  pointed question to Law: Why had Law never told him this piece of advice while the young Wesley was groaning in misery?

If Law thought Wesley already had faith or was being prepared for it, Wesley wrote that he was mistaken.

If you say you advised them because you knew that I had faith already, verily you knew nothing of me; you discerned not my spirit at all. I know that I had not faith, unless the faith of a devil, the faith of Judas, that speculative, notional, airy shadow, which lives in the head, not the heart. But what is this to the living, justifying faith in the blood of Jesus? the faith that cleanseth from sin; that gives us to have free access to the Father; to “rejoice in hope of the glory of God;” to have “the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost” which dwelleth in us; and “the Spirit itself bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God?”

In this letter and the follow up answering some of Law’s defense of his conduct, I hear the eruption of a spiritual experience that would shape the entire Methodist movement for the next 50 years.

Wesley the serious priest intent on holiness and mindful of hell was groaning under the pains of his own attempts to achieve his salvation by his own work and effort. He strove with sincerity and earnestness that few Christians ever attempt much less attain. And it was all vanity. He groaned still.

It was the doctrine of salvation by grace that unlocked the torture chamber of his soul. It opened his heart and gave him exceeding joy. It burst the bonds of the law with grace.

The Methodist move in those early decades was built, I am hypothesizing, to nurture that same spiritual experience in others. It was an apparatus for helping others find what John and his brother Charles had experienced.

Over time, we have lost that focus. The apparatus broke down or got used for different purposes. More and more of us carried the name of Methodist but without an knowledge of the experience or inkling that it might be the animating purpose of the movement that became a denomination.

And so, now here we sit.

Gustavo Gutierrez in his book We Drink from Our Own Wells argues that every spirituality within the Church remains a resource for Christians today. Of course, he is Roman Catholic. Identity issues are not quite so fraught for him as they are for ever-fracturing Protestants.

But I wonder how we United Methodists cohere and persevere as a church that no longer is defined by its founding spiritual experience and impetus. So many of our pastors and laity have no identification with the groans that tormented Wesley or the joy that met him in the word of grace.

Can we recenter on that spiritual experience? Should we? If we don’t, how do we remain custodians of it in ways that enrich who we are?

John Wesley does adult baptisms

From a letter by John Wesley to the Bishop of Bristol in 1741:

Several persons have applied to me for baptism. It has pleased God to make me instrumental in their conversion. This has given them such prejudice for me, that they desire to be received into the Church by my ministry. They choose likewise to be baptized by immersion, and have engaged me to give your Lordship notice, as the Church requires.

My assumption here is that these were dissenters who were not baptized as infants in the Church of England, but I could be wrong. I am no expert on 17th century Anglicanism.

Putting death to good use

The text of a letter John Wesley wrote to Jasper Winscom in 1786:

I am glad to hear so good an account of the work of God in Witney. If the Lord will work, who shall hinder? This should encourage you to still greater zeal and activity. The death of that miserable backslider was a signal instance of divine Providence, and very probably might excite some others to flee from the wrath to come.

Lest we suffer any illusions that Wesley thought the work he was doing was a light thing, let us consider these words of his. A person died, I’ll presume a man to ease my pronoun choices. He had been a Christian, possibly a Methodist, but had fallen into a life at odds with faith in Jesus Christ. And he had died. In response to the news of his demise, Wesley did not mouth pious sentiments about death. No, he sensed and opportunity. Perhaps the man’s death would shake up some others. Maybe they would begin to worry about eternity and God’s wrath.

You see, Wesley believed the Methodists were locked in a struggle of ultimate importance. If that meant angling to exploit the death of a backslider, then so be it.

However we might fault or dismiss Wesley in out day, we cannot deny he went about his ministry with the conviction that the stakes were high and what he did impacted the lives and eternal happiness of people touched by his ministry.

Do I make broad what is narrow?

“Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.” (Matthew 7:13-14, NIV)

These words were brought to mind recently listen to someone opine about the love of God. The gist of the argument this person was making was that if God loves us, he would never hold against us such minor things as the kinds of sins most of us do. It would really be unfair and disproportionate to leave in the power of the devil those who do not conform — or aspire to conform — to a high standard of holiness.

And as pleasing as this sounds to my ears, I cannot avoid thinking of Scripture passages that appear to say the very opposite. The above from the Sermon on the Mount stands out the most clearly to me.

The biblical witness appears to describe a black and white choice. With apologies to Adam Hamilton, the Scripture does not appear to see much gray. There is a way of life and there is a way of death.

In his sermon on the two verses at the top of this post, John Wesley pointed out just how broad the way of death is:

For sin is the gate of hell, and wickedness the way to destruction. And how wide a gate is that of sin! How broad is the way of wickedness! The “commandment” of God “is exceeding broad;” as extending not only to all our actions, but to every word which goeth out of our lips, yea, every thought that rises in our heart. And sin is equally broad with the commandment, seeing any breach of the commandment is sin. Yea, rather, it is a thousand times broader; since there is only one way of keeping the commandment; for we do not properly keep it, unless both the thing done, the manner of doing it, and all the other circumstances, are right: But there are a thousand ways of breaking every commandment; so that this gate is wide indeed.

Now we recoil at this description of God and our status before him. I have long lost count of the number of people who have told me that talking about sin with people is the surest way to turn them away from God. I have to admit that all the talk and my own natural inclination to get along with people and not offend has kept me from preaching about the topic nearly as much as John Wesley would have me do it.

In the end, though, my people pleasing side just cannot shut up the voice of Scripture. Both testaments speak of the holiness of God in very clear terms. Neither describes a large mushy gray area between the way of life and the way of death, the holy and the unholy, the righteous and the wicked. As much as we Wesleyans like to talk about both/and, the Scripture trades in a lot of either/or talk about these issues.

So, then, how can I be a faithful preacher and proclaimer of Scripture and not draw attention to passages such as Matthew 7:13-14 and the other places where Scripture teaches us to mind where we tread?

All I want is …

A fascinating comment on Dan Dick’s blog tells the story of a cradle Methodist’s struggles with the UMC and the discovery of the Triune God that has invigorated her faith. In the comment she lists some things that energize her right now:

All I want is to go to church and learn there is a bigger and better story than mine going on.
And then I want to learn how to fold myself into that story:
Who is this God?
What has He done?
What is He currently doing?
How do I become a Christian?
How do I remain (and thrive/grow) as a Christian?
Let’s quit talking about how to “fix this” and start “telling each other the story of Jesus”.