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LIVING IMAGE OR
ROMANTIC ILLUSION?
Isaiah 52: 1-2, 7-12
Romans 5:1-11
Mark 12:28-34a
Dr. William K. Quick , Pastor Emeritus
Heritage Sunday - May 20, 2007

As Christians in the Methodist part of God’s family, today is celebrated as Heritage Sunday.

Today is a time to be aware of all the Romantic Images of the past that surround us. There is a richness in our past. Yet within that richness there are ghosts which continue to haunt us.

We are reminded on Heritage Sunday of our collective Methodist memory which teaches us what our heritage is and who we are in history.

It seems to me that a part of our responsibility as United Methodist Christians--with such a rich history—should be to see that warm memories don’t become romantic illusions; instead they become the living images after which we model this Methodism as we face the 21st Century.

For us to see our past as a living image, rather than a romantic illusion, we must exorcise the ghosts, benevolent as they are, and revisit Aldersgate as men and women who would renew their church out of the vitality of its beginning and out of the wisdom of its founder.

And to revisit Aldersgate, we must begin in America.

When on Christmas Eve, 1737 John Wesley sailed out of the harbor of Charleston, S.C. returning to England, he was a failure in his own eyes.  Wesley would write of himself one year later, “I was not a Christian then…”

The year—1738—was to be a year of theological re-orientation for John Wesley. When he arrived in England in February, he preached out of his own agony sermons which were received with anger.

There was the report to be made to General Oglethorpe, given with a sense of personal conflict and received, ‘under consideration’.  The following Tuesday—at the home of a mutual friend—he met a young theologian on his way to the new world as a missionary.

Peter Bohler—the German Moravian—became the pedagogue who gave John Wesley his post-Seminary training.

 --1--

WESLEY’S AWAKENING

The word he had was so exciting to Wesley that he spent the next three months in conversation—wrestling and arguing with Bohler. So important was this understanding to Wesley that he learned German so that he could more easily communicate with one who knew little English.

Listen to a letter which Peter Bohler wrote back to Germany to his mentor, Count Zinzendorf:

“I traveled with two brothers—the elder, John, is a good natured man—willing to be taught. Our mode of believing is so simple to the Englishmen that they cannot  reconcile themselves to it. They justify themselves—and try to prove their faith—and thus so plague and torment themselves that they are at heart very miserable.”

And Bohler had chosen the words rightly: Wesley was very miserable but the light was breaking.    Soon, after Bohler left for South Carolina, came the Aldersgate experience when Wesley’s heart was ‘strangely warmed’, so much a part of our memory.

On the night of May 24, 1738 Wesley attended Evensong at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Afterwards, he writes, “I went very unwillingly” to a society in Aldersgate Street. About a quarter before nine as one 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. I began to pray for those who had in a more especial way despitefully used me and persecuted me. I then testified openly to all there what I now first felt in my heart….” Straight away he went to share what had happened with his brother Charles who, in turn, testified to his own spiritual awakening.

But the story is not over!

Just a week after Aldersgate, Wesley decides to go to Germany, to Bavaria, to Zinzendorf himself, in order to complete this new understanding that is his.

Talk about a venture in faith: picture Wesley after Aldersgate, still seeking, walking across Europe to Herrnhut where the new theological understanding was being born into the history of the 18th century.  When Wesley returned to England that fall, he returned with a theological revolution in his brain and with an understanding of the Faith which would be adequate for the 18th century.

To recount what Wesley learned, what books he read, would be both impossible and unimportant. What is important for us is to be aware that Aldersgate stands at the center of a six months period in which John Wesley was converted from the 17th century to the 18th century.

His whole 17th century background---inherited from his parents, from his teacher, William Law, from Oxford and from his own missionary endeavor to Georgia was legalistic and scholastic and Calvinistic. The Word of God in the 18th century was to be for “all men, whole world, universal love.”

This is not to say there was anything incorrect about the 17th century outlook. Wesley was clear about this, saying, “I am only a hair’s breadth from Calvinism.”  He knew that the Word of God had been carried by these words in that century but he was also clear  the Word had to become flesh in his century, in his age, in his life and  ‘the hair’s breadth’ was a shift in eons in the history of man’s thought. 

–II--

MODERN AWAKENING

If Aldersgate is the symbolic center of a theological awakening in the 18th century, what does Aldersgate say to us as a theological contribu tion of the 21st century?

To be in the Wesleyan tradition is to be ‘willing to be taught’!  It is not to be in the 17th or the 18th or the 19th or the 20th century!  Too often and too recently, we’ve heard a plea that we forget Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann and Paul Tillich and return to Wesley.

To return to Wesley is precisely to hear the message from Aldersgate, which is: “Appropriate the Word made Flesh in your life, in your language, in your time.”

This ‘Word made Flesh’ which bursts into our century comes as the good news that YOU ARE ACCEPTED:

--- preached both to man blinded by his own easy self-acceptance and to those whose guilt-laden self image is that of utter unacceptability;

 --- your life has possibilities, promised to the many burdened by their overwhelming poverty and to the few captured by their own affluence;

--- your future is open, proclaimed to all persons whose humanity is threatened by economic or political or scientific determinism.

So we can just nod to the 17th century as Wesley did. Thank God for Calvinism, it carried the Word of God in that century and those people heard it.

We can nod to the 18th century, as Wesley would have us do. Thank God for the Armenians and the Moravians, they carried the Word of God for that century and those people heard it.

We can nod to the 19th century and thank God for the Camp Meetings and the Chautauqua’s, they carried the Word of God for that century and those people heard it.

We can nod to the 20th century and thank God for fundamentalism, it carried the Word of God in the face of an idolatrous scientism, and those people heard it. Thank God for the liberalism and the social Gospel, it carried the word and our fathers and mothers heard it.

We can nod to all of this, and affirm its contribution, but we can’t live in the 21st century with that Word. To renew the Church as John and Charles Wesley did is to be willing first to learn the theological Word made Flesh in the 21st century and then have a  ‘willingness to be taught.’

--III--

FIELD PREACHING 

ALDERSGATE is the word in our memory which calls us to this theological awareness. There’s a phrase in our Methodist heritage which can teach us that Wesley understands the way life was in his day and perhaps can help us understand the way life is in our day.  That phrase is: FIELD PREACHING. You and I must recover the real depth of meaning field preaching had for Wesley.

For field preaching, more than anything else, shows he had not only grasped the Word made Flesh for that time but perhaps equally as important, he understood the Cultural Revolution of the 18th century.

The Church of England barred Wesley from its pulpits. In his father’s Epworth parish, he was forced to preach on his father’s tomb and Wesley had to find other pulpit settings.  Now the image ‘field preaching’ raises in our minds is a pastoral setting-- but it was far from that in the mind of Wesley.

Our pictorial expression of field preaching is a flowery hillside with a large crowd of placid people listening to a  latter day ‘sermon on the mount’, a picture which is overwhelmingly rural in tone.

For Wesley, field preaching meant going deep into a natural amphitheater formed by an abandoned mine pit with water standing at the bottom. It meant the semi-darkness of  the early morning or late evening and a congregation of dirty, tired and often unruly miners and mill hands.

More important than what field preaching really looked like is for us to grasp what this implies about Wesley’s understanding of the cultural situation of his day.

Field preaching clearly shows that Wesley felt that the industrial revolution, like all revolutions, was primarily cultural and that it placed specific demands upon the Church. The name of the revolution was INDUSTRIAL; the cultural situation produced the new industrial man! The demand upon the Church was to carry the Word to the new industrial man.

It was out of this understanding of the cultural situation that the whole attack plan of the Methodist movement was based.  Again we must forget our rural images for Wesley did not visit every town and hamlet, but rather centered his efforts where the action was-- in the industrial cities being born: in the mining centers of Bristol and Kingswood; the textile centers of Manchester and Leeds; the steel centers of Birmingham and Sheffield; and the shipping centers of London and Newcastle.  It is perhaps more than accident that the center of the Wesleyan Revival was a meeting place whose very name suggested the Cultural Awareness: THE FOUNDRY.

Clearly then, the words—FIELD PREACHING—should symbolize for us today exactly what they did for Wesley and we should be as aware of the Cultural Revolution of our day as he was of his day!

The imperatives placed upon us as Methodists is to be as clear about the urban, scientific, secular and technological revolutions of the 21st century as our fathers were about the Industrial revolution of the 18th century.  As long as we try to base our CHURCH’S MISSION on 11:00 a.m. Sunday morning; as long as we conjure up church programs which nostalgically remind us of 30-40-50 years ago; as long as we refuse to face the changes that have come and the even greater changes on the way in our city, state and world, it is clear we have not yet learned what it means to minister in the midst of the post-modern revolution. We are ignoring the wisdom of John Wesley.

FIELD PREACHING says as much about our willingness to learn from our culture as Aldersgate says about our willingness to learn theologically.

 --IV--

PRACTICAL IMAGES FOR THE 21st CENTURY 

These images show us that John Wesley made the practical decisions that were necessary to communicate the 18th c. ‘Word made Flesh’ to the 18th c. culture. The practical problem is always one of communication, as the late Marshall McLuhan reminded us in a sometimes highly threatening way.  We didn’t like to be told that the lighting in the Church is more important than the sermon in communicating the message of Christian worship. Or to be told that the color of the billboard may be more important than the words which go up there. To look at John Wesley is to see one who did understand the media of his day and who grasped that the ‘medium is the message.’

The phrase which reclaims the Wesleyan genius for communicating the gospel is: ‘SINGING METHODISTS’.

We are constantly reminded that the Methodist movement was one of great preaching and greater singing; that George Whitfield could be heard one mile preaching and two miles singing. As we read Wesley’s sermons today, we wonder that they communicated at all but to see him as a communicator is to see him as one who excelled at the art of pamphleteering in an age of the pamphlet as an art and communication form.

At the drop of a hat, John published a pamphlet and Charles a hymn. They knew the media that could bear the message and thus the phrase, “Singing Methodists”. And for us this may mean in our century, electric Methodists, those who have learned to bear the Word in our post-modern setting.

And there are other phrases from our memory that surely can remind us of the practical genius of Methodism. THE CLASS MEETING might be a model today of the power available in small group study and mission: the power Jesus referred to ‘where two or three are gathered together’.

Think of the practical wisdom of the term CIRCUIT RIDERS, in an age in which the Methodists moved with the pioneers. At the heart of this phrase is the promise of the kind of mobility that is possessed by the Church, ready to move, ready to change with the times, ready to go where the people are, ready to travel light and sacrificially if need be to accomplish the Mission. To be circuit riders in this century means to be ready to change not only our location, but also our organization or way of doing things.

Can we grasp for our whole church again what was meant by SHOUTING METHODISTS?  The implication for our day is clear. To be a Methodist is to be a participant and not just an observer in the life and work of the church; thus the responding, active, working, shouting Methodists.

Any attempt to recover the real Wesleyan heritage that should be carried in our Methodist memories must include the WARM HEART.  But to have a warm heart must never be to yearn for yesterday, nor can it be to revel in the memories of past greatness.  If OUR HEARTS are warm, they must be warm in our time…to our time…in this place…in our century…and in our task.  And Wesley’s heart was not just warm….it was BURNING.

It literally burned up his whole life on behalf of the future of the 18th c. in the name of ‘the Word made Flesh’!

The command that echoes out of our heritage is to burn up, to expand our lives on behalf of the 21st c. This means Metropolitan surely cares for—but even more--  trains, equips its  members to be in mission---not merely (as so often in her past)  hiring a staff to do our mission. It means that payment of World Service and benevolences is not only an agenda item but an intentional commitment which moves us from maintenance to mission.

 

METROPOLITAN’S CHALLENGE

 

It means moving beyond Cornerstone, Good Sam and other vital current programs to beef up our manpower, to grow again,  to enlist our members to be concerned for those who live about us in the heart of Detroit as well as all the other places across this metroplex where our membership is scattered.

It means Metropolitan’s members are challenged with the need to give talent and time as well as tithing our money to bear witness in this city. On Piety Row-- at 8000 Woodward-- stands not only a great Gothic church building—a monument to another era---but a people whose hearts are warm and whose loving arms and caring hearts reach out to all 21st century Detroiters.

Our hearts must be warmed—but even more they must be burning—as the Word becomes flesh in us.  Aldersgate burns in my heart and I pray, in yours, as we understand and appreciate the cultural revolution in this century, the paradigm changes taking place, doing the practical work and making the decisions necessary to bring the Word to this culture.

FIELD PREACHING, SINGING METHODISTS, CLASS MEETING, CIRCUIT RIDER, SHOUTING METHODISTS, ALDERSGATE , WARM HEART: These are the living images—not romantic illusions!

If these words have any meaning in our lives today, we are called to translate that meaning as we face the chilling tasks of the 21st century, undertaking our mission as people with hearts strangely warmed!

 

EPILOGUE

 

Thirty-two years ago I wrote these words to the Metropolitan family for inclusion in the 1976 Church Directory:   “Metropolitan Church has had a thrilling and romantic history. It has been known across America as one of the truly great churches of global Methodism… It has survived the tests of war, depression, prosperity, urban decay and a changing social order. While her current membership is the same in numbers as a century ago, she has members who are loyal and loving, determined and devoted. Her emphasis has not been so much upon liturgy and creed as much as fellowship and a personal experience with Jesus Christ.  She knows that the best evangelist is not the one who can put up a good argument but the one who can offer a convincing life. She is justly proud of her past, relatively satisfied with her present, and slightly timid about her future.”

I then challenged the congregation with words of the great Scottish preacher, Sir George McLeod:

“I simply argue that the cross be raised again at the center of the Marketplace as well as on the Steeple of the Church. I am recovering the claim that Jesus was not crucified in a cathedral between two candles, but on a cross between two thieves; on the town garbage heap at a crossroads so cosmopolitan that they had to write His title in Hebrew, Latin and Greek; at the kind of place where cynics talk smut and thieves curse and soldiers gamble. Because that is where He died, and that is what He died about; that is where church folks ought to be and what church folks should be about.”

As Metropolitan moves into the future, may the prayer of Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order in 1534, become our own: “Teach us, good Lord, to serve Thee as Thou deservest; to give and not count the cost, to fight and not heed the wounds; to toil and not seek for rest; to labor and not ask for any reward save that of knowing that we do Thy will. Amen”                                         

 

POSTSCRIPT

 

 Bishop Dwight Loder announced on May 5th, 1974 my appointment to Metropolitan. A brief message was sent in advance to be heard by the congregation, following his announcement. These were among my first words heard by the Metro family.

“I need not tell you that the cities of America have been in trouble for over a quarter century. The urban church crisis has been aggravated and worsened by the urban plight, yet I believe as the church goes so goes the city. If America is to survive, our cities must be transformed. The Christian humanizing of the city should be the thrust of our church’s mission.

“As the ‘Word becomes flesh’ through Metropolitan members, let us, by our example, set the pattern for Methodism across the nation with a dauntless courage worn on every occasion as soldiers of the cross.

“Let us move through the life of this great metropolitan area to bear a Christian witness to a humanity drugged and hypnotized in heavy slumber.

“May it be written of the last 25 years of the 20th century, no church influenced so many minds, no voice touched so many hearts, no congregation excelled in Christ’s work on earth as did Metropolitan Methodist of Detroit. Let the pulse of the church throb in the city’s life ‘til joining with our fellow Christians, Detroit may become truly the city of our God and of His Son.”

I believe there are tens of thousands—still alive though scattered across this city, this state and nation—who would stand and bear witness to the Living Image of accomplishments during that era.

But that was then—the 20th century. And this is NOW—the 21st century. The times—they are ‘a’ changing!

What Living Images will leave their imprint upon the soul of this city from these times?;

“What is it in your life that only Jesus Christ can explain”

Dr. William K. Quick, Pastor Emeritus

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