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Proper 25

Matthew 22
34When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”


May 24, 1738

If you remember nothing else from this sermon, I want you to remember May 24, 1738. What’s that date?

Back in April Carmen and I engaged in that unusual ritual called “the honeymoon.” That’s the ritual where two exhausted and largely broke individuals visit faraway places and learn how to travel together, often for the first time, and hope to make it home.

On the day in question we were on our way to Westminster Abbey, location of every coronation since King Harold, and stumbled on Methodist Central Hall, located just across the street. The Chapel is noteworthy for a few things: built entirely by individual subscription, hosted the first meeting of the UN General Assembly, and home to one very tiny statue.

Tiny statue is a little misleading, because it is actually a life-size statue of a somewhat tiny man. It turns out that soon after his death, friends of John Wesley decided to have accurate likeness made, one that they could then present to Westminster Abbey. The Abbey, you see, is part church and part memorial to great Britons through the ages. What better place to remember a leading light in the history of Christianity. The Abbey refused to take it. It bounded around from church to church for a couple of centuries before finally finding a place at Central Hall, right across the street from the Abbey.

Maybe in your mind’s eye you can picture a life-size Wesley with Carmen posed beside him, a full foot and a half taller than the great man.

The most important date in his life was, of course, May 24, 1738. It was on that day John Wesley had his conversion experience, his heart was “strangely warmed.” But that is jumping ahead. He was an ordained Anglican priest, a former missionary to the Americas, and someone that endured hardship and the peril of ocean travel to serve God.

It was, in fact, on his trip to colonial America that he had the most powerful lesson in self-understanding. The storm-tossed ship was in peril, and John feared for his life. As he faced the prospect of death, he felt only terror, unsure that he had done enough to earn his place in heaven. Meanwhile, on the same voyage was a group of Moravians, a sect under the direction of Count Zinzendorf (not important to the story, I just like saying Zinzendorf) who weathered the storm with prayer and the singing of hymns and a general sense of contentment in the face of death. John knew he was on the wrong track.

Returning to England, he set about to reform his own faith, to overcome his fear of death and his self-professed fear of God. It led to a visit to Moravian meeting on Aldersgate Street on the evening of May 24, 1738 where he heard read Luther’s introduction to Epistle to the Romans. Then, at about 8.45, he felt his “strangely warmed.” His life was never the same. He preached more than 40,000 sermons and traveled a quarter of a million miles on horseback, founded a worldwide movement, and some say saved the UK from same revolutionary chaos that overtook France.

All of this based on a simple idea found in scripture: the righteous live by faith. It first appears in an obscure little book that is also fun to say: Habakkuk. St. Paul repeats it in Romans, in the first chapter. Luther reads it 1,500 years later and writes a single word in the margin of his bible: “sola.” And this word, meaning “only,” becomes the foundation of the Protestant Reformation we mark today. Wesley had everything he needed to save a nation except one thing: the abiding sense that God loved him. This sense, and the sense that his salvation depended on love alone, meant the difference between being a little man with a little life and being a little man who changed everything.

***

The quote from Habakkuk and Paul, “the righteous live by faith” is what we call a “bible inside the bible.” There are a few of these, and since we are thinking about memorization, who can give me John 3.16?

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

You memorized this precisely because someone long ago recognized that this described the very heart of our faith. It is a summary that manages to highlight in 25 words what many a theologian has spent a lifetime trying to say. It reminds us that Jesus’ presence in our midst is a gift of love; that he is begotten (of God) and not separate from God; that belief is the most important part of following Jesus; and that the goal of the Christian life is eternity with God.

The same “bible inside the bible” idea is found in Matthew 22:

“Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37He said to him, “’You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38This is the greatest and first commandment. 39And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’

You’ll remember back in September that I drew a parallel between the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ summary of the law. In general terms, commandments one through five concern the “love God” command and six through ten concern love of neighbour. Some might say one to four and five to ten, but you can think of this argument as homework, of something to solve over lunch. All you need to two commands and ten fingers.

Others argue that it is really only one command, and that love of neighbour is what naturally occurs when you keep the command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” Conflating the two makes our United Church hearts happy, because we have been committed to the cause of loving our neighbour for so long it has become second nature for us. We are the archetypal “neighbour lovers” from before the United Church began. Minister and future politician J.S. Woodsworth wrote about the slubs in North Winnipeg in 1911 and called his book “My Neighbour.” In 1930 the Toronto Conference of the United Church voted to abolish capitalism because it was an inhuman system that caused too much suffering in the world. If anyone says the church has become radical, you can tell them that, in fact, we have mellowed over the years.

So we have the neighbour thing down. We nailed it. But how about the love command? Let me go full circle on Reformation Sunday and quote the Westminster Shorter Catechism, a founding document of our Presbyterian tradition. Apologizing for the archaic language in advance, it begins with this:

Q. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.

Now, if you’re at the watercooler tomorrow morning, and someone says to you “so why do you go to church anyway?” I don’t know if it will help explain yourself to say “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” You might want to reword it. But there, made plain in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, is the heart of what we do and who we are. We love the love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all your mind. We glorify God by making God the centre of our life. We enjoy God.

How often do we tell people that we enjoy God? The Catechism passed though Parliament (hence Westminster) in 1648, and maybe we haven’t been describing our relationship in these terms much since then.

What would happen if we enjoyed God, truly enjoyed God rather than simply revered God or acknowledged God or flattered God with our fine prayers and bright hymns? What would happen if we imagined that God is a source of joy in our life, a joyful presence that warms the heart and brings a smile to our face. We gather and we laugh at ourselves and the humour of being human and God laughs with us, knowing full well that our chief aim is to never stop enjoying God.

What was that date?
And what time?

Remind me and I’ll tell you about Luther’s great pledge “Here I stand, I can do no other” memorable for the force of his conviction, but also because he said it at a meeting called the “Diet of Worms.” Who said history can’t be fun?

It can be fun, and joyful, as our faith is meant to be joyful. We are called to love God with every fibre of ourselves, to glorify God and to enjoy God everyday. The list of believers who made the journey from fear to love to joy is long: St. Paul, St. Augustine, Luther, Wesley: all of them feared God and lived lives defined by this fear until they met God in scripture and through the gift of the Spirit and found love and with it great joy. This is Good News for today, Amen.

posted by michael jacob kooiman @ 12:39 PM