I
Peter 4:12-19
There’s
a great story behind this coffee mug, and I want to tell it.
I ordered it from a
website started by Charlie Baber, who is a deacon in the United Methodist
Church. He serves as a minister to youth
and families at a church in North Carolina and on the side he does cartoons
about theology. The main characters are
John and Charles Wesley. The original Wesley
brothers were part of a renewal movement in the Church of England in the 1700s
but Baber updates them to our own time. The
character on the mug is John, who always got more of the attention.
When
he first started out as an Anglican priest fresh from Oxford, he decided that
the American colonies needed him. He
made arrangements to go to the new colony of Georgia where he was going to
convert the natives in his spare time while he was serving as the only Anglican
clergyman in Savannah. I’ll skip all the
really juicy details, but he got into an off-again, on-again romance with the
governor’s niece that didn’t end well.
She married someone else and John Wesley had to leave Savannah in a
canoe under the cover of darkness and then find a ship in South Carolina that
could take him back to England in a hurry so that he could tell his side of the
story before the governor’s report got there.
No
matter whose version was told, it was clear that he had left a mess behind
him. Nobody knew that better than he
did. That left him in a serious
depression, because for all his faults and all his pride, he really and
seriously loved the Lord and felt like he had let him down. John Wesley was one of those people who
demanded the most from everyone around him, but not in a hypocritical way
because he never let himself off the hook, either.
Back
in England, he dove deeper all the time into a crisis of faith. If he had failed, it was his own fault. Maybe he really didn’t have true faith. Maybe he had been fooling himself and all of
his religion was a matter of wanting to look good to other people or, even
worse, trying to impress God with a false picture of who he was. He was sure that God could love the person he
wanted to be, even the person he projected to the world (at least the world
outside Savannah). What if that wasn’t
really the true John Wesley, though?
He
asked for help from a few friends, including his brother Charles and a Moravian
pastor named Peter Bohler. They did what
they could for him, and they may have kept him from giving up altogether, but
he hit a low point on the afternoon of May 24, 1738 (two hundred and sixty-two
years ago today) when he was sitting in St. Paul’s cathedral in London and the
choir was singing the psalm that says, “Out of the deep have I called unto
thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice.” (We know this because he kept a journal
very carefully.)
In
that journal he was able to pinpoint the moment when he bounced back from the
depths where he had been living (if you could call it that), and what had made
the difference. He wrote,
“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society
in Aldersgate-street, where one was reading Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to
the Romans.”
God reaches out to all of us where we are and as we
are. Remember, this was a man who was a
serious theology nerd, and what happened spoke to him in a way that was true to
who he was. This time, though, it was
more than what the words said, it was what the words meant – and there was
nothing academic or abstract about it.
“About a quarter before nine, while he [Luther, or the
man reading his words] was describing the change which God works in the heart
through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone,
for salvation: and an assurance was given me, that He had taken away my sins,
even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
Wesley’s spiritual struggles had not ended, but the
crisis was past. Despite the italics he
put on the words “my”, “mine”, and “me” he had finally learned it was not all
about himself. The center, the very
center of his life shifted, and the strange warming of his heart was a result
of the friction that comes when a great weight is lifted.
There
are some folks who just kind of float along and really don’t notice what’s
going on inside themselves or around them, and they are to be pitied as well as
blamed. Yet it’s my belief that everyone
who seriously engages in life at some point hits a moment where they go through
a time of testing which can mold them in the most amazing ways and shape their
lives for the better. Rarely is that a
pleasant experience, but always is it necessary. You don’t make steel or refine gold without
fire.
For some people it may be
a time of external emergency like a pandemic.
Consider what people – maybe you – have before you right now. You are faced with a choice to think of
others or to think of yourself. You are
forced to ask and answer the question of what you are willing to sacrifice for
the common good. How wide or how narrow will
your heart be? Will you care for yourself
alone? Will you care for your family,
but no further? Will you show
consideration for your neighbors? If so
will it be all of them, or just some?
Who is your neighbor, anyway?
For some people the
testing might be a personal crisis, brought on by a pandemic or arriving in the
course of regular life. It could be the
experience of becoming powerless after years of being in charge of
everything. Perhaps they lose a job and
its income, or they get sick and become the one who needs help and has to
ask. Perhaps someone dies, and the
weight of grief is too heavy. Or it
could be the hurt of rejection.
In all of this, remember
Jesus. What did he not lose? What did he not give up? And when it was all gone and soldiers had
gambled even for his clothing, when he lost his life itself and his body was
buried in a borrowed grave, what did God not restore to him?
“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery
ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange
were happening to you. But rejoice
insofar as you are sharing Christ’s sufferings, so that you may also be glad
and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.”
[I Peter 4:12-13]
Not everything that happens is good. Some of it is very, very bad. That’s one reason I personally don’t believe
that God is a puppetmaster behind the scenes manipulating every moment. But I do believe that God’s love, the
presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, turns even the bad parts into an
opportunity for goodness and holiness and reconciliation and even joy at some
point to spring up where they were missing before that. And I believe that faith gives us the
strength to wait for the full brightness of the day to come.
So
as you await that day, may God open your eyes and keep them open to his mercy
and his grace, which is the love that looks for us before we know what we
ourselves are looking for. As the mug
says, “May your heart and coffee be strangely warmed.”
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