First Thursday of Easter
Lectionary Texts:
1 John 1:1-4
John 21:1-14
There have been numerous attempts to discern the symbolic meaning of the number 153, the number of fish miraculously caught in our lectionary Gospel for today. Perhaps you have heard some. I won't rehearse them now. My own conclusion is that there is no symbolism. They simply caught 153 fish.
John Wesley returned to England during the early days of 1738, a broken man. He had been a miserable failure as a missionary to the Indians. He wrote, "I came to convert the Indians, but who will convert me." He had likewise failed at love.
While many of us today can sympathize with feeling lost in matters of faith, we don't put it in the theological terms that Wesley and his friends used. I'm not so good on these theological understandings myself. Although he had been brought up from day one as a Christian and had never entertained the thought of being anything else, he had doubt about his own salvation. He discussed the matter extensively with his brother Charles, his older brother Samuel, George Whitefield, and Peter Bohler. All believed that salvation came solely through the grace of God. Whitefield, a Calvinist, believed that a person's salvation (or damnation) was decided before he or she was born. Wesley rebuked that view. Bohler believed that justification came before sanctification, i.e. you had to be saved before you could be made holy. They were separate events. Samuel Wesley thought that salvation was not an event but that if you had faith, you had salvation. Charles Wesley tended to think of sanctification as subsequent to salvation. John Wesley thought thr two came together and that he did not have either one of them.
On the morning of May 24, 1738, John Wesley went to a Bible study on Romans at Aldersgate Chapel in London. During the Bible Study and while hearing Paul's words that justification comes by faith alone, Wesley says that he "felt his heart strangely warmed." He felt assurance of salvation. He felt that his sanctification came with it.
Wesley put the event entirely in theological terms, terms that don't particularly jell with thought today. Evangelicals would call it his "born again" experience. Wesley would not. Wesley said many times that he was not a Christian till that moment. His mother would not have agreed. Wesley said that others did not necessarily need a similar one-time experience in order to be saved.
Wesley then went for a few months to Herrnhut, a Moravian community in Germany, where faith was more lived than analyzed. He return to England. In the spring of 1739, finding no church or bishop who would take him, he began open-air preaching. The Methodist movement had begun.
O God of all centuries,
We give you thanks for the life and ministry of John Wesley. In all the ways that he was good and faithful, may we follow his lead. Amen.
Faithfully,
Christian
1 comment:
I can identify with having a profoundly spiritual experience of peace. I had one recently walking in my neighborhood. I had just finished reading Steve Hagen's "Buddhism: It Isn't What You Think," which is a complex title because in large part the book is about not *thinking*, simply *seeing* things as they are. I felt a powerful experience of being in the present moment, something that is very difficult for all of us, but definitely difficult for me as I tend to spend a lot of time in anxiety about the future or sadness about the past. At one with the trees and the birds and the old houses and the Black Lives Matter signs, I felt profoundly forgiven. I often reflect during Holy Week that when we spend a lot of time beating ourselves up over the sins of the past, we are missing the point: God has already forgiven us. We can choose to live in God's love and grace, or choose to live in our own deluded hell of guilt. In that moment with the trees and birds and signs, I seemed to step through a mirror and directly into God's grace and love in the present moment. Which is where I believe God intends us to be.
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