Open Air Troubles

 Second Wednesday of Easter

Lectionary Texts:

1 John 3:1-3

Luke 24:36-43

Report on The Daily Office Project:

It's a simple report. I haven't done much yet. I have been re-reading St. Benedict's Rule. Benedict invented the Daily Office. Right now it appears that my best research procedure in going to be to read (1) the history of the Daily Office, and (2) all the English language renditions of the Daily Offices that are out there. To my knowledge there is no single history of The Daily Office. I'm going to have to piece together what I can from various books on the history of liturgy. 

On number (2) above I think I'm going to have to do a lot more than just read the different Daily Offices; I'm going to have to pray each one of them over a couple of weeks in order to really get the feel for what each office is accomplishing.

Today we return to our study of early Methodism. After his time in Herrnhut in Germany, John Wesley began to preach in earnest in England. His relationship with the Anglican Church always remained tenuous. His tendency toward "enthusiasm" did not sit well with either his superiors or his peers. After being so frequently denied pulpits in the English towns he itinerated, he began to preach in open air, wherever and whenever he could draw a crowd. He frequently preached to coal miners going and coming to the mines during shift changes. He was mostly ignored, sometimes abused, but on occasion heard. He began to make converts. We might not call them converts, because these men were nominally Christian, most of them having been baptized. But there was no room for them in the upright, stalwart Anglican Church. 

Predestination, in it various iterations and implications, was everywhere. Many Anglicans felt that the lower class were destined by birth to be where they were and stay where they were, both socio-economically and religiously. Religiously they were largely unacceptable in the Anglican Church. English society lacked any degree of social mobility. Predestination lends itself to stagnation, to the maintenance of the status quo. An unchanging God has created an unchanging society, in the Calvinist view. 

Wesley broke with his old Oxford classmate and fellow Holy Club member, George Whitefield, over the issue of predestination. Wesley began to advocate free-will. Humans could make their own choices, and God would hold them accountable for the choices they made. Wesley's position on free-will led to changes in other aspects of his theology. He had previously believed, like Whitefield, that justification and sanctification happened at the same time. Now he believed that sanctification was subsequent to justification. It was a second blessing. It was being made perfect in love in this life. This perfection was achievable and is what we should be striving for. 

Meanwhile, Wesley was having more success preaching in the marketplaces and town squares, the places where women would be. I have noted before my own view, disputed by some of you, that women are more amenable to the message of the Gospel than men are. As Methodism became more organized, under Wesley's direction, more and more of the people who ran the work of the Methodist movement were women. 

"Enthusiasm." although Wesley was not enthusiastic about it, bcame a feature of early Methodism. At a Methodist Society meeting at the town of Wapping, enthusiasts wept, fainted, trembled, quaked, and shook so violently they had to be held. Wesley said of it, "I have seen many hysterical and many epileptic fits, but none of them were like these."

Lord of the Dance,

We confess that we have become as staid as the Anglicans of Wesley's time. Help us to regain some to the "enthusiasm" of the early Methodist movement. Amen.

Faithfully,

Christian