An interesting date in United Methodist history

 

On this date in 1784 John Wesley chartered the first Methodist Church in America.

 After the American Revolutionary war ended in 1783 Wesley struggled with the question of how to bring order to the Methodists in America.  The Anglican Church refused to send priests to the U.S., believing that church separation would eventually force the new country to re-join Britain.

Wesley believed that the laying on of hands by an Anglican bishop placed priests of the Church of England in apostolic succession.  When the Anglican Church refused to provide spiritual care for these Christians Wesley began to search the scriptures for a solution.  He concluded that the bishops (episcopos) and elders (presbyteros) of the Primitive Church were functionally the same.  He decided that he himself had the authority to ordain priests.  So, he (along with other Church of England priests) ordained Thomas Coke and in turn directed that Coke ordain Francis Asbury when Coke arrived in America.

Wesley also provided a charter for the establishing of Methodist preaching-houses in America.  The Methodists opened the first of these after Coke arrived in this country.

This was not the first Methodist house of worship.  The Methodist movement had been gaining strength for almost two decades under the leadership of Francis Asbury, Philip William Otterbein, Philip & Margaret Embury and Paul & Barbara Heck.  The first Methodist congregation in “the colonies” was Wesley Chapel in New York City, which opened in 1766. It is still an active congregation – John Street United Methodist Church.

The Color for the Day

I capitulate.

That leaves the taste of old vinegar in my mouth.

But I give in.  Not give up, but give in.

The paraments, my stole and other appointments in our sanctuary today are green.  It is the color of life.  It symbolizes continuity.  It is the color prescribed by United Methodism (and most of the Christian Church) for ordinary time.  And so, green it is.

You have to understand, that through my childhood and even into the early days of my ministry, The Methodist Church and later The United Methodist Church observed a season of Pentecost that began on Pentecost Sunday and continued through the summer, terminating the last Sunday in August.  Then began the season of Kingdomtide, which carried on to the Sunday prior to the beginning of Advent.  In terms of color, red was the color prescribed for the Season of Pentecost, followed by Green for Kingdomtide.

With the advent of the work of the Consultation on Church Union (COCU) and the liturgical reform movement within United Methodism (which resulted in the issuance of a new Book of Worship in 1992), The UMC discarded the former color scheme and moved to one color – green – for “The Season After Pentecost (United Methodist Kingdomtide)”  With certain exceptions (All Saints’, Reformation Sunday and a couple of others) green is the color of the day.

While the church does not impose these color usages on local congregations (I have been a part of local churches that only had one set of paraments, and therefore only had one color option), this is the accepted denominational “way of doing things.”  I capitulate.  I can no longer in good conscience stand up firmly for the church rubrics with which I am comfortable, or with which I agree, while discarding policy I don’t like.  So green it is.

Green is the color of denominational choice throughout Ordinary Time (so labeled because we count the Sundays with Ordinals rather than with Cardinal Numbers).  So as a sign of my ordination and in symbol of my solidarity with the liturgical practices of my church (with which I do agree on just about every other count), I go green.

Ordinary green.  And that is not a comment on the numbering system.

The peace of the Lord be with you.

"I submitted to be more vile..."

It was on this date in 1739 that John Wesley preached his first open-air sermon.  A few days earlier he had been witness to the “field preaching” of his friend and fellow Holy Club member George Whitfield.  Wesley was at first appalled by the idea of preaching anywhere but in a consecrated church/chapel. But, the pragmatist (and evangelist) in him could not argue with the result.  People were coming to affirm salvation even here, in the most unlikely of places. 

His Journal for April 2, 1739, records:

At four in the afternoon I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people. The scripture on which I spoke was this (is it possible any one should be ignorant that it is fulfilled in every true minister of Christ?), “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He hath anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor. He hath sent Me to heal the broken-hearted; to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.'

The reference to “be more vile” is from 2 Samuel 6.  When Israel brought the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem, King David danced wildly at the head of the procession.  When he came home his wife Michal reproached him bitterly, accusing him of acting in the manner of a vulgar commoner before the people of Israel and even before his servants and slaves.

David’s response was that he was dancing and exhibiting his exuberance before God with no thought of what humans might think.  He then told her, “I will be even more vile,” promising to do such things again in praise of God, who had delivered the ark to David’s capital.

Wesley appeals to the same sympathy.  He himself – as noted above – had not been a big fan of preaching in the open air.  But he quickly came to see it as a way of glorifying God and serving the Divine purpose.  In that realization, he embraced the practice wholeheartedly and continued in it all his life.

Is it too much to ask?

Yesterday I observed that local churches sometimes receive members who come from outside their tradition because an individual has become disenchanted with their former congregation.  This can happen for some good reasons.  But frequently it is a form of pouting.  “I don’t have to put up with this, I’ll just leave” is not the greatest rationale for leaving one fellowship and uniting with another.

There is a kindred malady, and it is wreaking havoc in The United Methodist Church.  I am talking about the practice of wholesale receiving already-credentialed clergy from other denominations.  I want to go on record as affirming many of my sisters and brothers who, as they matured in their spirits, theology and ecclesiology turned to The United Methodist Church for the carrying out of their ministerial call.  I know a great number of clergy whose journey has carried them not away from something, but to something they valued in the UMC.

But there is another bunch.  And they are driving me crazy.  They come from denominations that will not countenance divorce among clergy for whatever reason.  The clergyperson doesn’t have to be flaming practitioner of adultery for their denomination to excuse them. They can be pillars of the community, but if their spouse leaves them for any reason at all, their denomination disqualifies them from the practice of ministry.  The UMC has no such prohibition.  Consequently, people who never change their denominational spots seek credentialing as Methodists because divorced clergy have a place in our structure. Some of these folks come in, receive church appointments, and then rail at our practices.  But we’ll give them a paycheck, and so here we are.  And they’re killing us.

These preachers have some kinfolk in a class of people who may bounce around church-to-church in their congregational denominations for years.  In such settings a local church can arbitrarily and immediately dismiss a pastor just because they do not like the cut of the preacher’s jib.  These clergy can wake up one morning not knowing if they are going to have a position by nightfall.  In The United Methodist Church, we have a practice of assuring pastors a “guaranteed appointment.”  That means that a minister in good standing will always have a place of assignment.  If a congregation becomes disenchanted with its clergy, s/he may be moved down the road, and the location might not be the most desirable in the mind of the pastor, but there is a place to go, a check to be collected and a roof over their head.  As you can imagine, that has an enormous appeal to some folks.  And, as was the case with their cousins above, once in the system they pretty much have the freedom to be as un-Methodist as they like.  And they’re killing us.

A separate but equally calamitous set of circumstances concerns the retirement arrangements for Methodist clergy.  Ministers are, for Social Security purposes, self-employed.  So, Methodist pastors pay around 13.5% of their earnings off the top to Social Security.  But they also make private contributions to a denominational retirement fund.  The local congregation where the individual ministers makes an in-kind contribution to the pension fund.  Over the course of a lifetime of pastoring the amount is not exorbitant, but it is superior to the plans in which many other denominations participate.  Especially as a clergyperson gets older, this looks pretty good.  As is the case with the aforementioned imports, once in, clergy who formerly ministered in another fellowship can practice a lot of theological – and therefore, hermeneutical – latitude.  And they’re killing us.

I may sound bitter.  That is not my aim.  But our great church is in crisis, not only in the area that the General Conference of 2019 addressed, but in almost every sphere of church theology and practice.  I don’t know how to fix it.  But I don’t think that it is too much to ask Methodist clergy to act like Methodists.

Otherwise, you have the hodge-podge that faces us now. 

And they’re killing us.

Take it down.

I heard a great sermon many years ago that examined 1 Corinthians 1 & 2.  Sadly, both the preacher and much of the content are lost to time and faulty memory.  What I DO remember is that the preacher labeled the claim of various Corinthian factions that stated, “I belong to Paul,” or “I belong to Cephas,” or “I belong to Apollos” to base sloganism.  The preacher explored the notion that it becomes easy to hide behind a motto or catch phrase and elude completely the truth behind what the phrase says.

The United Methodist Church claims a slogan of “Open Minds, Open Hearts, Open Doors.”  It has, since its adoption by the UMC in 2001, been a bit hopeful.  Perhaps hope is what the church needs.  But it has also been misleading and even untrue.  I know of one local congregation that loudly proclaimed 2/3 of the promise, saying in their advertisements that they were a church of “Open Minds, Open Hearts.”  The fact that this church did not include “Open Doors” as part of its proclamation spoke volumes.  Whether intentionally or not, its refusal to proclaim “Open Doors” indicated its true mind-set.  The slogan is gone, but the church has a rather unpleasant reputation locally of lacking “open doors.”

Recent events in The United Methodist Church have changed that motto from a misleading statement into an outright lie.  The church’s mind is collectively not open.  The denomination’s heart is anything but open.  Its community doors are not open (although thankfully a great number of local congregations have loudly proclaimed that their fellowship is welcoming to all of God’s children).

The conservative wing of the UMC, which has prevailed for the time being, cannot put any kind of smiley face on their position.  The conservatives – in this country and abroad – have drawn a line in the sand that they prohibit some people from crossing.  Their punitive and even vindictive stance against those who disagree with them causes them to forfeit any claim to openness at all. 

I recognize that a lot of church promotion claims are optimistic and even idealistic.  That probably should be the case.  But not here.  Not now.  At least, church, be honest.

Take it down.

Let us gather at the…table

In our congregation’s weekly Bible study recently, we considered   Matthew 11:28: Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.  It is a wonderful invitation, and I could spend a lot of time on it.

But what captivated my interest in that hearing was that it transported me to a time long ago.  In the church where I grew up, the first Sunday of each month was Communion Sunday.”  Our method in that observance was to follow the direction of the ushers and queue in the outside aisles between the pews and the sanctuary walls.  We would then go to the chancel rail and kneel.  There we received the little morsel of communion bread and the individual glasses of grape juice.  The pastor would usually move down the row with the tray of bread, and someone else would follow with the tray containing the cups.  When he had served everyone, the minister would give a table dismissal.  This was usually a short scripture verse and then the phrase, “Rise, and go in peace, and the peace of God go with you.”  We would all stand up and return to our seats by the center aisle.

One of the verses that our pastor would employ as a dismissal was Matthew 11:28.  Whether I was kneeling at the chancel or sitting in my seat, I sort of felt like I had completed the communion act when I heard, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”

As time went on, I was exposed to a number of alternate approaches to serving communion.  I found many (most) churches have the worshipers approach by the center aisle and return by the side passages. 

Many congregations, particularly those that have a larger number of worshipers, will serve the elements as the people stand at the head of a line that forms at the chancel.  In this same vein there are churches that use multiple stations to serve people, usually as the recipients stand. 

Of course, there are denominations that serve the elements to people while they remain in the pews.  Ushers or deacons or people with other designations serve the trays of bread and multiple cups to worshipers at the end of each seat and then these folks pass the trays to their neighbors.

It is the fashion in recent times to receive the elements by means of intinction.  In this method the communicant receives a morsel of bread and then dips the bread into a common cup.  This allows the entire worshiping body to share in the one loaf and single cup.  It sounds terrific in theory.  In practice it can be problematic.  For one thing, there seems to be a lot of people who cannot dip the bread into the cup without also getting a bit of their hand in the liquid as well.  Or, they pinch the very end of the bread by as few grains as possible, so that when they lower the bread into the cup, only about half of their bread comes back out.  Two or three floaters can put others off their feed very quickly.  This approach is unaesthetic as well as unhygienic. 

Churches that use true wine for the sacrament avoid a lot of this, of course.  The tradition is that the church serves wine in a gold or silver chalice.  After the priest serves each person, they rotate the vessel and wipe it with a clean napkin.  Studies show that this is an essentially risk-free method of approaching communion.

There are congregations that offer any combination of element forms or options for posture to communicants.  I am not of a mind to pass any judgment on the “right” way or “wrong” way to serve communion.  But I will have to admit that for the above-mentioned reasons and others I am beginning to lose my attraction to intinction.  The commonality is a plus.  It is also among the most time-efficient methods of serving.  However, I am beginning a campaign to put this practice in my rear-view mirror, at least for a season. 

I have spent no little time considering this and I believe it is time to move on it.  I’ll let you know how it goes.

A not-so-proud moment

U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy charged that communists had infiltrated the State Department at all levels on this date in 1950. This was the beginning of "McCarthyism."

McCarthy saw communists hiding behind every rock and tree.  This was in the Cold War era when “communist” was code not only for a political system that was over against so-called “democracy.”  It was also a label that right-wingers hurled at anyone who did not agree with every aspect of their politics, religion, sociology and all other opinions. 

McCarthy targeted liberals of all kinds, gays, artists of any medium and almost anyone else to whom he could make his charges of disloyalty, subversives and even spies stick.  “McCarthyism” is a term that applies to witch hunts and hurling unsubstantiated accusations at ideological opponents.

The McCarthy Era is among the darkest days of U. S. history.  Strong-arm tactics, ignoring of due process and outright lies are the characteristics of the period.  The approach was “make your opponent appear to be evil, and the opponent’s position appears evil.”  It is a rotten way to do business and is the polar opposite of civil discourse.

The U. S. Senate censured McCarthy in 1954.  Although he stuck to his guns for the rest of his life (and remained a Senator from Wisconsin until his death in 1957), he was never a force in national politics again.

One would hope that we would learn the lesson of history.  But, in contemporary politics and in church debate I am afraid that McCarthyism lives.

The ticking of the clock is getting loud

We are less than three weeks away from the United Methodist Church’s Special Session of General Conference.  An important milestone for me is that there is one more weekend before the session convenes.  Next Sunday will be the last opportunity delegates have to assemble in their own churches.  Sometime that week the participants will make their way to St. Louis and the gavel will fall on Saturday the 29^th.

So, this coming Sunday will be (for most) the last regularly-scheduled service of worship prior to their historic meeting.  It will be the last sermon (preached or audited) before the crucial debates of the Conference.  It will probably be the last Communion for a portion of the crowd.  Sunday will be the final opportunity for encouragement.  There will be only one more gathering in a prayer circle.  Last handshakes and parting “Good lucks!” will abound.

It is coming so fast.

So, in these final days before General Conference, I entreat any who read these words to be in prayer.  No matter what your position on the issue of human sexuality, no matter which plan you support, no matter what your long-term vision for the United Methodist Church – please, pray.

There is so much violence to people and to the church that could come about.  Relationships could be fractured.  The delegates could make decisions that would take decades from which to recover.  As important as the issue before the Conference may be, I believe that our fellowship is more important still.  If people get hurt, if congregations and conferences splinter, can anyone truthfully say that this is the better option?

The clock is ticking.  The time is approaching.

Pray.

Please, pray.

The Wedding at Cana of Galilee

The Gospel reading in the New Revised Common Lectionary (NRCL) is John 2:1-11.  In some of our Bibles there are little section titles that describe what is in the following pericope.  Many Bibles label this tale The Wedding at Cana.  But, at least as many choose the heading The Water into Wine.  That’s fine.  There is nothing inappropriate there.  And it is the nature of the sign (John’s preferred designation over miracle).  So, I don’t quibble, I merely find it an interesting observation.

I always double-clutch when I read this narrative, or when I see it referenced.  The reason is that I have been in _way_ too many discussions about this story in which folks try to dispute the nature of the product Jesus produced.  Put simply, they deny that Jesus turned water into real wine.

It is a matter of their teetotalling leanings and a denial that Jesus could, in all righteousness, miraculously produce a beverage that contained alcohol.  In this conviction, they perform all manner of linguistic and logical gymnastics in order to “prove” that Jesus transformed the water into something like fruit juice.  Part of their argument has to do with the quality of the beverage that Jesus offered.  The steward says to the groom, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now. – John 2:10 NRSV  Their contention is that anything containing alcohol must really be undesirable in its taste, so that Jesus, in transforming the water into something else, must have given the wedding guests clear, sparkling, unadulterated juice that obviously (in their estimation) would have had a far more pleasing taste.  Their rationale goes on and on.  In the face of every bit of historical and linguistic indication they steadfastly hold to the position that Jesus would not have given the people at Cana wine.

I do from time to time encounter folks who establish their opinion and then not only cherry-pick from scripture in order to back up their position, but they will warp or misrepresent the Bible in a hardline attempt to support their stand. 

“What does the Bible say?” is my first line of inquiry in approaching life issues.  “What do I think the Bible says?” is much more shaky ground.  And when people seem to twist the witness of scripture in order to confirm a bias, they do a real violence to their argument and to any further appeal to scriptural authority they might employ.

I understand abstinence and teetotalling, I really do.  But wine is wine.  And Jesus did a really good job.

The Days Right After The Epiphany

We find ourselves in an odd stretch this week.  Epiphany fell on Sunday last.  So, there is a full week between the Epiphany observance proper and the unofficial commencement of The Season After The Epiphany.  The first Sunday after the Epiphany marks The Baptism of the Lord.  The season itself moves along – in this instance for eight weeks – before it concludes with The Transfiguration of the Lord. 

The season itself carries an emphasis on revelation and mission.   The gospel readings from the New Revised Common Lectionary (NRCL) during this stretch are all narratives in which Jesus reveals who he is to various audiences in a variety of ways.  They carry on the theme that began with the revelation of Jesus to the Gentiles, as that act is symbolized in the visit of the Magi in Matthew 2.

But, these days between the feasts of Epiphany and Baptism are a kind of No Man’s Land liturgically.  We are moving toward the observance of the first of the two theophanies that bookend the season.  But, we are not quite there yet.  Some older calendars marked Epiphanytide.  Most of the church now views this term as archaic.

The Daily Office Lectionary in The Book of Common Prayer marks this week with readings that tell of Jesus at the wedding in Cana, of a pair of healings, two more miracles (feeding of the multitude and walking on water) before finishing out the week with the story of the woman apprehended in adultery and a saying on discipleship.  Needless to say these readings all appear in John’s gospel. 

I would never say that any scripture portion was irrelevant.  But in these selections, there is a sense of marking time while waiting for something else.  I don’t offer an alternative.  I simply make the observation that this time has the feeling of pausing before things are revved up again.  Maybe that’s okay.  It could well be intentional.  It could be the case that the church (or the NRCL) sees the necessity for preventing things from getting too heavy while The Epiphany finishes doing its work on us.  It is the time between the ticks of a clock, the moment between the beats of a heart.  Perhaps the pause will do us good.