September 6, 2015THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO WESLEY
2 Corinthians 5:14-2010. Then and Now: Our Legacy and Our Calling
Preface to the Word
The apostle Paul was the founder of the Christian congregation at Corinth, but he had a serious conflict with the Corinthian Christians that enabled rival missionaries to question his ministry and lead the Corinthian church in directions he didn’t like. It’s just another reminder that much of what we accept today as Holy Scripture began as personal correspondence from a very real person to very human congregations! It seems the folks in the church at Corinth were angry with Paul for changing his plans to visit them,which he wrote to them about in a previous letter. So Paul visited them, tried to mend fences, and followed up with another letter, a “letter marked with tears,” a letter that we don’t have today.
Titus reported to Paul that the Corinthians welcomed his letter of tears and were once again reconciled with him. The news greatly encouraged him and prompted him to write yet another letter, which today we know asII Corinthians. It begins with Paul once again explaining why he had to change his travel plans and then launching into a defense of his ministry that goes on for seven chapters!
By chapter 5, Paul is moving toward wrapping up his defense by describing his work as that of an ambassador who represents Christ. Giving another brief justification of his actions, Paul turns to a summary of the good news, writing that Christ’s death for all people has resulted in a new creation for those in Christ, and that God’s reconciliation with sinners through Christ has resulted in Paul’s ministry as he represents Christ in bringing people into reconciled relationships with God.
Let’s listen to how Paul explains it in 2 Corinthians 5.
Scripture Reading: 2 Corinthians 5:14-20
SermonI.
- Paul described his ministry as a “ministry of reconciliation.” What is reconciliation other than a ceasefire, the restoration of friendly relations between those who have been divided? It’s an important image that Paul uses to describe God’s saving activity and the end of religious hostility among the Jews and Gentiles as a result of the good news of peace. So Paul’s image of reconciliation is both vertical (that is, restored relations between God and humanity) and horizontal (restored relations among humans)…. like the arms of cross that we see in worship every Sunday.
- Paul’s explanation of his ministry of reconciliation is a useful way for us to wrap up this summer-long sermon series on the gospel according to Wesley. All summer long, I’ve been preaching about the core convictions, perspectives and practices of the people called Methodists so that we can be clear about who we are, and why we’re here, and what we need to be about as a United Methodist congregation. It’s been based on the theology of John Wesley, which fueled the Wesleyan Revival in the 1700’s and still guides millions of Christians around the world today. While his ministry was certainly a “ministry of reconciliation” like Paul’s, Wesley referred to his teachings as the “Scripture Way of Salvation,” rooted in the Bible, the traditions of the Church, his own experience of the new life in Christ, and his reason.
- But the world has come such a long ways since the 1700’s, and even further since Paul’s time in the mid-first century. Thanks to science, we have new understandings of the universe and how it works. Thanks to technology, the world has shrunk as distance is erased by instant digital communication and many burdens of life have become easier through time-saving, labor-easing devices. Thanks to medicine, life spans have been prolonged, devastating diseases have been conquered (or at least tamed), and the quality of life improved. Thanks to visionary revolutionaries, new forms of government have arisen, including that of democracy which was a rarity in Wesley’s day. In the midst of all the change, why should we pay any attention to the old truths that drove the Wesleyan Revival?
What are the characteristics of Wesleyan theology that stand out as being meaningful and useful to our times, to this congregation?
A Theology of Balance
- One thing that stands out in this age of polarization, competition, and discord is that the theology at the heart of the Wesleyan Revival is a theology of balance. Over and over you can see this balance in Wesleyan thought and practice. And it’s almost always a “both-and” kind of balance rather than a middle-ground compromise between two extremes.
- For example, it can be seen in the balance between theological freedom and doctrinal responsibility, or what I referred to early in this sermon series as religious opinions and essential doctrine. People are free to believe as they are led to believe, but they are expected to place their faith in God’s essential truths. United Methodists today don’t have a lot of doctrinal tests for membership, but we do have essential doctrines that are at the heart of our faith. On the one hand, we have great latitude in opinions and we don’t expect everybody to be the same theologically, socially, politically, or in a lot of other ways. But on the other hand, we expect all to join together in the great cause of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. Wesley himself liked to use the motto that arose out of the Hundred Years War – “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; and in all things, charity.”
There is also a theology of balance in the way John Wesley treated the two major competing doctrines of his day, the evangelical and the Catholic. While others were choosing sides and taking aim at the other side, Wesley was the synthesizer who saw that these were not the only options. He developed a third alternative that brought together the evangelicalconcept of God’s sovereignty with the Catholic concept of human responsibility into one system of theology. He stressed both the Reformation emphasis on grace and the Roman Catholic emphasis on works.
- In his book, Seeing Gray In a World of Black and White, the pastor of the largest United Methodist congregation in the country, Adam Hamilton, helps us appreciate what a theology of balance looks like in our polarized world today and why it is so desperately needed. He describes in the introduction to the book how in the aftermath of 9/11, Good Morning America interviewed two prominent clergy at the time – Jerry Falwell and John Spong. Falwell had founded the Moral Majority and was known as America’s most outspoken fundamentalist and Spong had just written a book entitled Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalists and was quickly gaining a reputation as America’s most outspoken liberal Christian. By the time their heated conversation was over, Hamilton found himself thinking, “These two cannot be our only options for being Christian!”
He goes on to write this: As many Christians are drawn to a centered or balanced faith, there is an increasing frustration with the role that Christianity has played in the culture wars. Too often faith has been used by Christian leaders and politicians to further a particular political party or political agenda. And in the minds of many non-religious people in America, Christianity is not associated with love or grace or justice, but with a particular view of homosexuality, or a particular stance on abortion, or a seemingly absurd and anti-intellectual view of human origins. Christianity is a wedge that drives people from Christ, rather than drawing them to him. And Christians have, in their political involvement, acted to divide our nation rather than serve as a balm that can heal it…
I believe that Christianity is in need of a new reformation. The fundamentalism of the last century is waning. And the liberalism of the last fifty years has jettisoned too much of the Christian gospel to take its place. Christianity’s next reformation will… draw upon what is best in both fundamentalism and liberalism by holding together the evangelical and social gospels, by combining the love of Scripture with a willingness to see both its humanity as well as its divinity, and by coupling a passionate desire to follow Jesus Christ with a reclamation of his heart toward those whom religious people have often rejected.
A theology of balance is our legacy and our calling, and it’s so needed today in a world that is increasing polarized and divided between extremes. Ours is a ministry of reconciliation.
A Theology for People
- Albert Outler, a renowned scholar of Methodism, called John Wesley a “folk theologian,” whom ordinary people heard gladly. Although Wesley was a man of training, sophistication, culture, and letters, he could talk to people in ways that they heard and responded to, while others in his day were failing to connect with them. Wesley was a working theologian, in the sense that his theology was worked out in the midst of the concerns and needs of real people in his day. He cared for people. His theology was always for people and not the other way around. It always served to illuminate their faith and to enable their salvation.
- One day in 1742, he came into Newcastle, a center of the coal industry. He saw things he had never seen before – massive suffering, low morality, foul language by children and adults. What he saw was a bruised and hurting people. Yes, their sins were apparent, but here was a people in pain because of the demands of the economy were stifling them and pulling them down. So when Sunday morning came, he went to the most iniquitous part of Newcastle and starting preaching from Isaiah 53:5, “He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.” One person was in the audience, but by the time the sermon ended, 1200 people had gathered to hear him.
But when he preached at a church in Clifton filled with wealthy people, his text was different: “I come not to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Some protested, but Wesley replied, “Oh, but if I were at Billingsgate (a much less affluent place) I would have taken, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sins of the world.”
The point is, Wesley was a theologian who cared about people, as well as the gospel he delivered to them. He had the bias that the Bible has, the bias that God has demonstrated through history, for those at the bottom, for those most in need, for those hurting the most, for those who suffered the greatest. His quarrel back in his day was not merely over the truthfulness of doctrine or the correctness of belief. His quarrel was with the sort of doctrine that sets up shop for itself and does not relate or respond to people.
- Our world and these times cry out for such a theology. When so many have narrow doctrinal litmus tests for others, we need to loudly and clearly hear John Wesley saying that people are not made for religious doctrines, but doctrines are simply a way of communicating the love of God to people in an understandable way that answers their needs.
A Theology of Salvation
- In defending his ministry to the Corinthians, Paul claimed that everything he had done in his ministry was for the purpose of reconciling people to God and each other through Christ. We could say the same about the ministry and theology of John Wesley. Above all else, his is a theology of salvation. Every sermon, every teaching, every quotation revolves around a theology of salvation. His ethics were ethics that emerge from the experience of salvation.
- His passion was for humanity to come to know the joy of salvation; to know the amazing grace – the universal, convincing, justifying, and holy-making grace that comes from God through Jesus Christ. This was his overriding preoccupation and his paramount concern. It was at the heart of his entire life’s work.
- Like Paul and his band of early Christian missionaries, the important thing about Wesley and the leaders of his revival is that they were persons of God who knew God and knew how to lead others to know and experience God. Philip Watson once observed that, “Such knowledge is neither the product nor the property of any one century.”
This balanced theology of salvation for the people is still ours today and the potential of its power is as great as ever.
Conclusion
- I want to end this sermon series today with a few more words of that Wesley scholar I’ve mentioned a few times before, Albert C. Outler. He spent a lifetime seeking to recover our Wesleyan message, not only for our own denomination but also for the ecumenical world. From his research, Outler found behind and beyond Wesley’s dated “opinions” a total view of the Christian life that is both comprehensive and realistic. It’s a view of God above all, and all else in and from God; of a human flaw that runs deeper than any human cure for it; of Christ’s suffering love as God’s redemptive love, restoring our lost humanity; of the Holy Spirit as God’s inspiring presence. The hungers of the human heart cry out for such a powerful gospel. The church needs a theology which is truly catholic, truly evangelical, and truly reformed, all together.
- Outler went on to say that like the character Simeon in the Gospel of Luke who waited expectantly for the birth of the savior, he keeps looking toward a day when Wesley’s embracing vision of God’s grace bringing human nature to its full potential, may find a rightful place in the kind of Christianity that will survive the crises that lie ahead.
“If I were a young mannow,” he wrote, “in a time when the great systems have collapsed and the church’s most desperate need is for a pastoral theology that is anchored in revelation and that swings wide and free to liberate people for the only freedom (in Christ) that will make them truly free, I think I’d explore John Wesley as a new frontier, with the same freedom to update him that he felt toward his own complex heritage…
“Even in my westering years,” he concludes “it still seems to be the best bet on the current theological tote-board!”
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.
(2 Corinthians 2:5:18-19)