Will the real John Wesley please stand up?

Well, it’s been quite the week.  Many of my colleagues were saying to each other, “how do we preach to our people after what has happened on Wednesday?” Some of them had already written their sermons so that they could be recorded for Sunday days ahead of time.  Others decided that they would set the alarm clock for 4:30 am today. 

When such disturbing images flood our news feed, how do we find words, how do we find sense, how do we figure out what’s next after this?

When the world gets chaotic, we can respond in many ways.  The ancient biological responses kick in and we can find ourselves going into fight mode, like an alligator, flight mode, like a deer, or freeze mode like a rabbit.  But let’s face it, our rabbit or deer or alligator brain reactions will only complicate things more. How does our faith help us to come up with a better alternative than fight, flight or freeze?

John the Baptiser knew that ritual makes a huge difference to folks who are feeling embattled or discouraged or depressed.  In the chaotic and dangerous society he lived in, the people didn’t have a lot they could control, but they could enter into a river to show that they were ready to commit to a different way of living in relationship with each other.  A ritual of commitment that was both deeply personal and deeply public. A commitment that was about that most nebulous thing, faith.

When Jesus approached John, he made both a private commitment and a public statement that he was committed to the community and committed to God’s vision of empowering, encouraging and healing.  The ancient Greek translation of that moment suggests that God’s power broke open into the world and came into Jesus and the community at that moment.  A powerful symbol that change was coming, and the world would be turned upside down.

Peter’s writing tells us of the consequences of joining this upside-down community.  Instead of flight, fight or freezing, we instead find ourselves filled with God’s goodness.  Peter called us to take our faith and nurture it so that we add to our faith with goodness, and our goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with truly unselfish love.

Truly unselfish love then, is something that we grow with God’s grace.  It is both gift and practise, something we have and something we work on.  It is unselfish love that will lead us into a different kind of community and even society.  Selfish love leads to chaos and destruction but love that cares for all others regardless of their appearance, their DNA or their orientation leads to strengthening community and a society that cares for the vulnerable, the grieving, the powerless and the sick.

This scripture encourages us to exercise our faith muscle, and it has had a remarkable impact on our world.  A young man some 300 years ago heard these words and it changed his life.  He was an Oxford student, who became ordained so that he could get a job tutoring undergraduates.  He followed the usual career path, but one day he got a letter asking if he would go to the colonies and start a new church.  He travelled to the newest colony, barely two years old at the time.  He thought he would be spreading Christianity to the indigenous people but instead served the colonists who were building farms there.  At that time, the colony was committed to developing sustainably without any plantations or slave labor, unlike its biggest neighbors, but solely by small-scale agricultural practises, similar to English and Scottish farms back home.  That state was Georgia, surprisingly.  Can you imagine if Georgia had stayed committed to being a slave-free state, what history might have been like?

Anyway, that young man didn’t do too well at his first congregation, and two years later he was on a boat heading back for Oxford.  Many churches wanted him to preach about his experiences in the colony, but became disillusioned with him, banning him from preaching.  He became so discouraged that he decided to give up being a minister, and then he read the 2 Peter passage.  He heard its message of encouragement and empowerment.  With those words, he went to a prayer meeting that evening and found his heart ‘strangely moved’.  He found his resilience deepened, his faith strengthened, his message inspired, and his words heard by simple people hungry for hope.  He got his brother to help him with songs and preaching and before they realized it, their method for teaching the bible, for helping develop faith and deepen commitments had become more popular than the two of them could manage.  They were taunted as ‘Methodists’ because of the methodical way they taught about faith, and eventually these two devout Anglicans laid the groundwork for the Methodist Church, one of the founding denominations of our United Church of Canada, and the inspiration for the construction of this very building I have the honor of preaching in today.

John talked about using all our brains for our faith journey, our passion, our intellect, but also our sense of the historic journey we are on, and our exploration of our sacred heritage.  Some call it the Wesleyan quadrilateral, logic, emotion, tradition and scripture, as a way of discerning where God calls us on our faith journey.  It is a way of making sober, sensible, loving and faithful decisions in difficult times.  Such thoughtful methods are needed now more than ever so that we chose our paths as adopted children of God, not as alligators, deer and rabbits.  Let us remember that we are called to use all our best selves and especially unselfish love as a foundation of how we live our lives, and may our lives be an inspiration to all who follow in our footsteps as we are inspired to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, our Christ.  Amen.