Wesleyan Rooted: Read Faithfully (Bishop Berlin)
Today I want to talk about love. A week ago I returned from a trip with three classes of clergy recently ordained in the Florida Conference. We were on a Wesleyan Heritage tour in England. We were there to gain a deeper understanding of the Christian life from the perspective of John and Charles Wesley, the founders of Methodism. We talked a lot about love. The love that God has for us. The love that God calls us to have for one another.
Once you have that lens, you will begin to see love all around you. I saw love everywhere I went.
- It was in the way the members of the group intentionally sat at meals with people they did not know so that all would be included. .
- In a crowded St. Paul’s Cathedral, swirling with tourists, there was a man in a holy moment, kneeling at the altar in prayer.
I had a free day in London:
- In the British Museum I saw a teenage girl holding her mother’s arm tight, laughing with her.
- I saw an older couple sitting quietly on a park bench, holding hands.
- A woman pushed a boy up the street in a wheelchair. He had his head back, smiling, enjoying the warmth of the sun on a cool day.
On that trip I saw all sorts of beauty: remarkable architecture, radiant stained glass, and paintings by famous artists in the British National Gallery. All of them pale in comparison to expressions of love and kindness offered from one person to another.
There is nothing like love. It is odd that people can struggle just to be decent to one another. Three of our group in a row together on the airplane had to move from their seats because a man and woman behind them were kicking their seats and telling them to stop talking to one another. The flight attendant said, Let me find you others seats. This happens all the time. I don’t know what is wrong with people.
Humans can both struggle to both offer love in our deepest commitments and offer civility to people we barely know.
We need Jesus’ parable about love.
There are two sons. The youngest son was prodigal. Prodigal means, 1. wastefully extravagant . 2. having or giving something on a lavish scale
The younger son took the money and ran. He squandered his inheritance. After he wasted everything, he was left feeding pigs, just trying to survive.
Remember that Jesus is Jewish. His audience was Jewish. When Jesus said the younger son worked caring for pigs, an animal Jewish law declared unclean, everyone winced. When Jesus said that the younger son ate from the pig’s troth, they felt ill.
The younger son came to his senses when he recalled his father’s love. He considered the way his loving father treated his workers. His father was fair. His father was decent. His father compensated them well.
The younger son realized two things:
- He had squandered his father’s gift
- He longed to be home, even in the outer circle of his father’s love, again. He realized that a relationship with his father, which once seemed like a prison, was actually his treasure. He began a long walk home.
Here Jesus creates a tension for the audience. The begin to wonder, what will the father do when the prodigal son returns??
By contrast there is an elder son who never left home. He worked on the family estate. He is dutiful and responsible.
I once heard Rev. Tim Keller say that both sons suffer from The Problem of Alienation from their father.
The younger brother does a terrible thing. Asking his father for his inheritance is a bit like saying out loud that you wish the old man was dead.
The older brother wants the money from the estate as well. That is why he is so angry that his younger brother wasted a portion. The difference is that he is willing to wait. To gain what they desire, the younger brother chooses independence while the older brother chooses the appearance of community with his father. The elder brother feels that his father owes him something for staying and working and being dependable. That is why he gets so upset with his father and refuses to come to the party when his brother returns.
It is a failure of love. The younger brother does not love his father at the beginning of the parable and the elder brother does not love his father by the end.
We know we are in a failure of love when rather than empathy or compassion, which are qualities of love, we can feel judgement and even contempt for the prodigals around us.
Notice that there are two prodigals in this story. There is a prodigal son, who wastes his inheritance. There is a prodigal father, who exhibits an equally reckless and extravagant love for his son.
This father sees his son approaching and is filled with compassion. He runs down the road. Picture that. Where are his arms? I think they are wide open. He barely hears the son’s apology because he is calling for a new robe and ring and planning a coming home party. When people don’t understand the joy of the father, he explains,
Lk 15:24 For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.
The father offers a recklessly extravagant, prodigal love.
Jesus is describing the character of God. We serve a God who is recklessly extravagant in love.
- Have you ever sought forgiveness from God for something you did knowingly or unknowingly that was wrong? Perhaps it hurt someone deeply or caused you to lose something or someone important. You thought you could never be forgiven. Yet, God did.
- Have you ever had a situation that you thought was irreparably harmed, and you sought the wisdom of the Lord, and were obedient to it, and the relationship began to heal?
The nature of God is a recklessly extravagant love that runs to meet us on the roads we take. It seeks us out. It reminds us that we are children of God, no matter what. We are draped in a robe of mercy. We wear the seal of God’s compassion and love.
All God asks is that we celebrate when such love is shown to others. All Jesus desires is that God’s ways become our ways. The love God shares is the love we share.
That is one reason that I am a United Methodist. That focus on love and grace is foundational to our theology. This open-armed love is an expectation of our community.
On our Wesleyan pilgrimage, we went to Oxford, where the Wesley brothers were educated at Christ College, a part of the University there. Charles Wesley started a Holy Club. John became its leader. Students met to grow deeper in their faith in Christ. They wanted to learn how to be like Jesus. They developed practices and methods of living out the Christian life. Other students made fun of them, called them Methodists.
There was a jail for debtors and a prison for felons. Neither was a place you wanted to be. Some of us walked to the place where the jail once stood. It was close to the campus. This holy club went to the prison to pray and minister to people. It made no sense. At Oxford all the students were winners. Most would go on to be successful, secure and even wealthy. The people in jail were the losers. The other students never understood why the Wesley brothers and their group would go spend time with the prisoners, telling them that God loved them. It was that open-armed love of God that compelled them to be kind to prisoners.
We went to Bristol, where John Wesley took over the ministry of George Whitfield, preaching in fields to people who were never going to go to a proper Anglican church. They were coal miners and people who worked, but who were poor. When John and Charles Wesley preached of God’s love and the life God offered, they gathered by the hundreds and sometimes thousands to listen. Only the prodigal, open-armed love of God could compel an Oxford man to preach in a field to such people.
We sat in a building that was called the New Room, where the first Methodist bands and societies met. In these small groups people learned the bible. They learned how to live in light of God’s love. They overcame addictions to alcohol. They learned to manage money and provide for their family. They learned how to be kind, pay attention to their words and care about their families, friends, and community. They learned honesty, decency, kindness, grace and compassion. The more methodical they became in the practice of the Christian faith, the more their lives improved, and the more others asked if they might join them.
The vitality of the Methodist movement has always been based on the extravagant, prodigal love of God. When God’s love is in your life, you develop a wide embrace of others. You release resentment and bitterness, and you love others as God has loved you. There is nothing better than that. Spend all the money in the world, and it will never be as joyful or fulfilling as experiences where you loved others as Christ loved you. This is what our Methodist heritage has taught me.
By the end of the story, it seems that the younger brother, who was lost, is found, but the older brother seems lost. The father told the elder son: ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ ” Lk 15:32
His father assured him that two things were true. He was secure in his father’s love, and he could participate in the love of his father’s life. We don’t know what the elder brother ultimately chose because the story is not about him. It is about us. Jesus is asking us how we will finish the story. Will we choose the security of closed arms that filter who gets in, or the father’s open-armed embrace?
The quality of our lives is based on this question:
Do we love others as God has loved us?
This week Sarah McKay, a United Methodist, a woman familiar to most people in Lakland, died. I have been reading of her life, her benevolence, her generosity and her sense of adventure. What a life, a person equally joyful on a sunny day in Lakeland Florida as she is on an international adventure. Read all the good things she did in her life and all the admiration others hold for Mrs. McKay. The best testimony read was by her son-in-law, Tom Mims:
“My mother-in-law loved. She loved old friends, new friends and not-yet-friends. She cultivated relationships with intention and kindness. She has been a rock for so many of us for longer than any of us can remember.”
You want a great life, a great family, a great church, or a great community? It’s all dependent on the wide embrace of love.