The Heart of The Matter, The Mess We’re In

September 11, 1994

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Most of you here, I presume, know who John Wesley is...or to be more accurate, WAS. He’s not living any more. I’m not trying to be facetious. Some here may NOT know about John Wesley. All who come to worship in this Church are not United Methodist, and that’s all right. Even some who are now come out of other heritages and have little prior knowledge of our denomination’s history and background. That’s all right, too. You bring gifts, and treasures, and experiences that strengthen us and make us a better Church. But John Wesley is more than just a Methodist phenomenon....

We look back on him as founder, as the one who more than anybody else created the Methodist societies which became in time the Methodist Episcopal Church, now the United Methodist Church, our official name since merger with the Evangelical United Brethren in 1968.

The name of John Wesley is behind all that.... Father John, some like to say, though he never had children of his own. He begat churches instead of biological offspring. Methodists don’t worship John Wesley..... Well, some come close to it, just as some Presbyterians make the sign of the Cross at the name of John Calvin.

Most of us, though, while stopping short of placing him on a pedestal, do respect Wesley and hold him in high regard----as a brilliant organizer---the very name Methodist pays tribute to that characteristic....as a preacher, as an evangelist, as a believer in missionary outreach...and as a theologian... a recognition not as often bestowed on him as those previously enumerated ones.

We know John Wesley was not perfect, but the more you study him today, the more you realize the man transcends the 18th Century, the time in which he lived; he transcends England, and he transcends as well one denomination. He never wanted to start a new church. That was never his intention---it happened over time, and he finally accepted it grudgingly, but what he wanted to do was reinvigorate, reform, revitalize his own Church of England, the one in which he was born, as a minister’s son, and the one in which he died 88 years later, still bearing the mantle of an ordained Anglican priest.

I’m convinced that Wesley’s theology continues to be as pertinent today as it was when he lived 200 years ago. Certainly the essentials of it do, even if not all the fringes, and all the trappings....

And it’s those essentials that I want us to look at for a few Sundays. There’s a freshness about them, and a probing relevance, and a deeply Biblical tone that somehow, like the Bible itself, conveys a timeless quality.

I don’t want to get sidetracked off into Wesley’s biography, which is a fascinating story in its own right.... I can recommend some good books on that, if you’re interested in pursuing it, and some day may try to deal with it in a sermon.... Wesley’s life will preach!

But what I DO want to get into, not just because it’s Methodist, but because it’s Christian, because it’s true, because it’s Biblical, because it’s alive and vital, is 3 cardinal themes, 3 theological themes Wesley emphasized as the heart of his preaching message.

In a way, and I’ve never read this or heard anybody say it, so you may want to rush right over to your nearest truly reputable Wesleyan scholar for either corroboration or rebuttal, but in a way it seems to me that it would be improper to call John Wesley a kind of theological Henry Clay, who was known in our history as the Great Compromiser. Wesley was that. He was always trying to find a synthesis between ideas and people wherever he could. His basic spirit was that of reconciler.

In him the Enlightenment with its emphasis on the primacy of reason and Romanticism, with its emphasis on feeling were merged into a harmonious balance. The Wesleyan ideal, still extraordinarily pertinent, was the coupling the coming together, the fusion of the warm heart and the lighted mind, not either/or, but both/and....

Think of the power resident in that combination. Think of the mischief when they’re separated... we see it all the time. Think how that balance is needed in spiritual thought right now. It represents religion at its best and most exciting.

He tried, as Albert Outler makes plain in a little book that is the stimulus for this series... I started reading Albert Outler on Wesley and got so excited I couldn’t sleep...Wesley tried in his day to pull together all, or at least several, of the divergent religious movements that were in flux in 18th Century England---The Church of England, the English evangelicals, and the Dissenters. He wanted to bring them into a kind of Protestant Alliance, sort of an ecumenical council, or at the very minimum a fraternal pow wow. It was a high minded, noble concept. It

just didn’t work.

The Dissenters ostracized him because he was too high church...they thought he was too stiff, too liturgical.

The Anglicans ostracized him because he wasn’t high church enough. He hung around too much with riff-raff.

He got it from both sides, and both closed ranks in agreement that to find common ground he had reduced the core of the Faith to a size that left too much out. They disagreed on what those essential omissions were, but they both said his list of what was central was too short. AND IT WAS CONCISE.

There were only three ingredients in the recipe, three themes he felt had to be included for a proper understanding of the Gospel. Some other peripheral things were negotiable, but those 3 were the irreducible core of the Faith message. In the language of Wesley, and the language of the 18th Century, they were: ORIGINAL SIN, JUSTIFICATION BY FAITH ALONE, AND HOLINESS OF HEART AND LIFE. Now abideth these three.

If expressed that way, it doesn’t do a whole lot to you, join the club. Expressed that way, it doesn’t do a lot to me, either.

But dress those 3 themes up in more modern attire, and they begin to appear more compelling. Get behind the words and you find them standing for realities that are as much a part of our lives as any contemporary issues on our agenda. IF instead of using Wesley’s somewhat stilted labels, we speak of something like, What’s Wrong With US, What God Has Done About It, and What Comes Next, it strikes a more resonant chord within us.

Or maybe a more graphic framework would be, The Mess We’re In, God’s Gracious Deliverance, and Post-Partem Follow Up, or Where Do We Go From Here, Baby. That makes it something we can tie into more readily, because this is pertinent stuff. Bring Wesley forward from the 18th Century, let him ride around in a Mustang instead of on a horse, modernize his speech so it conforms more to what our ears are accustomed to, and you’ve got a man relating to where it’s AT, to use a phrase I suspect he would not be caught dead employing.

My proposal, for which I seek your approbation, is to try to take a shot at interpreting these 3 key elements of Wesley’s theology in terms of our own day, not simply repeating them, but re-working them somewhat. I’d like to do one a Sunday, starting today, and going on 2 more weeks. At the end of the 3rd Sunday we’ll have a test..... No, we won’t...The test, I guess, will be whether or not you come back....

I know I’ll never do justice to the fullness of Wesley’s insights, or to the giant realities on which they stand, but I’m convinced that even a sip of this theological nectar can be wonders for both our diet and our sense of identity.

So we start with SIN, and wallow in it for the rest of the morning.

Wesley used the phrase “original sin”, which was not, of course, original with him. Classical theology coined it way back there somewhere as a way of talking about our natural tendency, our deeply imbedded tendency when we don’t try, when we just let ourselves go, NOT to get better, NOT to improve, but to get worse, to slide downhill morally. Somehow that just seems to happen when we coast. Doing the right thing requires greater moral effort than doing the wrong thing... or than doing nothing.

Haven’t you found it so? That’s the essence of original sin. The moral playing field is not level. It tilts somehow in the direction of iniquity. How do we know? Because we’ve been there. Because that’s how we’ve experienced it.

It’s easier to be bad than to be good, indeed, a good bit easier. It doesn’t take much training to learn how to goof off.

In his book Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor writes about that fictional, but very human community, “Left to their own devices, we Lake Webonians inevitably head straight for the small potatoes.”

Paraphrasing him slightly, the doctrine of original sin says, “Left to their own devices, people, human beings, we World Wobegonians inevitably head straight for that which subtracts from whole life, not adds to it.

There’s something in us which shoves us in that direction. Is it Adam’s fault that we’re this way? Can we put the blame on him? No, it doesn’t have anything to do with Adam, at least no more Adam than anybody else. We’re not talking chromosomes here, we’re talking cussedness, pure, old-fashioned, independent, individual, stubborn cussedness.

We didn’t inherit original sin from Adam, he inherited it from us...in the sense that his story is the story of all of us. The way people in the Garden acted is the way we act, too.......which lights up those first chapters of Genesis with a blinding relevance...

Don’t you recognize yourself?

Like them, we, too tend to overreach, to disregard boundaries, to put ourselves in the center instead of God, to live with the light of self-concern focused clearly and brightly inward.

Who do you know for whom that description doesn’t apply? Reading it is like looking

into a mirror. That’s the human predicament.

Now, let’s be clear. Original sin in the Wesleyan sense meant something more and worse than sins...that’s sins, with an “s”. Sins have to do with actions. SIN HAS TO DO WITH ATTITUDE.

Again, that wasn’t original with Wesley. He got it straight out of the Bible. Sin and sins are 2 different things, and are not interchangeable. Sins come out of sin, but sin is not simply the sum total of sins.

Sins are wrong deeds, and you can catalog them, I suppose, if you have enough time and interest in that sort of things-----BIG sins...murder, adultery, theft.... LITTLE sins....smoking behind the barn, gossiping about your neighbors, going to the movies on Sunday..... Well, maybe that’s not such a sin anymore... though I still remember the first time I did it, and the awesome burden of guilt that I couldn’t wash away for weeks....

Sins (with an “s”) are deeds with a negative moral value, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if that were all SIN meant? If that were all it meant, we could get away from it, we could renounce it, we could isolate ourselves from it, and even be proud of it, like the mid-Western college I read about that some years ago used to advertise in its catalog, “Our campus is located 7 miles from any known form of sin.”

That’s not what Wesley meant at all, or at least that’s not all he meant. There’s something deeper and darker behind all that...and therein lies the rub.

The episode in the Garden is not a story about a deity who is angry because people ate an apple.... IT’S A STORY ABOUT A DEITY WHO IS HURT, DISAPPOINTED, INFINITELY SADDENED BECAUSE HIS PEOPLE TRY TO LIVE AS IF GOD DIDN’T EXIST AT ALL.

Sin, without as “s”, is an inner thing, a condition, a tendency, a predisposition, an irresponsive attitude. It’s the shattering realization that all of us have proven ourselves to be unfaithful to God’s love.

I’m sure I’ve shared this incident before, but I remember one day back when I was Chaplain at Florida Southern College, a co-ed came into the office to talk about her boyfriend, her ex-boyfriend, and about their broken relationship. She went on a while discussing this and that aspect of what had happened, how he had done this, and how he had said that, and finally, she said, “You know, it’s not so much anything specific he ever did, I think I could handle that. It’s really more what he didn’t do. After a while, he just never even thought of me.”

That’s it, you see. That’s really worse than misconduct. That’s the sin behind sins, and that’s what Wesley came to see the Bible means by sin, not so much what we do, but our basic treason to God, our disloyalty, our hardness of heart, so that God can say about every one of us, at times, “Ol’ Tom, ol’ Denis.... Mary, Al.... he never even thought of me.”

Every one of us, EVERY ONE OF US, has made that betrayal. We’ve turned our backs on God. We’ve become estranged from Him. We’ve put ourselves at the center instead of Him. We are what someone has called ‘inveterate idolators’.

The tragedy, of course, is the ease with which that tendency grows and hardens. Leaving it alone or wishing it away doesn’t loosen its grip. AND THERE’S NO COMPARABLE BUILT-IN COUNTERFORCE. There is no natural inclination in us toward the higher, morally. The pull is clearly the other way. Resisting the tug of self-interest requires greater intentionality than succumbing to it.

You don’t have to look that up in some book to know it. It comes straight out of the Great Book of Life. G.K. Chesterton liked to say that of all the Christian doctrines, of all the teachings of the Church, the only one that is clearly and obviously demonstrable on the basis of experiential evidence is the doctrine of Original Sin. WE TEND NATURALLY, left to our own devices, NOT TO ASCEND ETHICALLY, BUT TO DESCEND. All of us..... even the best of us.

Wesley recognized the truth of it. By original sin he meant a fatal flaw in the human makeup that is radical, inescapable, and universal... a human malaise that can not be rooted out by simple stubborn grit and self-help efforts, yet is also not a part of God’s design and intention for His children.

Now, that’s paradoxical, isn’t it? And that’s what makes it so complex and so serious. Wesley knew it. So does everybody else who really thinks about it. Nothing is more evident than that SOMETHING is wrong---we are not the people we know we should be, and want to be, yet we can’t attribute our failure to God. Somehow we know, don’t we, that when we go astray it’s our own fault, and when we do right, it’s God working in us.

So we’re caught, held in the grip of something we want to get rid of but can’t. Something in us, more than allows, almost pushes us to go after false gods......the Bible actually says, to go “whoring” after idols of one kind or another, to put ultimate value on less than ultimate realities, to give our allegiance over to everything but the ONE TRUE GOD, yet doing so not as the result of an ironclad programming, but at least in some sense out of a basic, inward orneriness for which we know we’re responsible.

How do you account for it? If you chalk it up to faulty genes, or blame it on dysfunctional chromosomes, you’re saying God is the cause of sin, which of course is a heresy, but if you say all we have to do it ball up our fists and determine to be good---salvation by sweat---you are flying square in the face of the experience of the ages....

Just ask Luther, or Teresa of Avila....or Wesley himself... any of those towering, struggling giants of the Faith, all of whom knocked themselves out trying to do it that way... and found they couldn’t.

Or ask Paul, who out of his own exhaustion from trying to lift himself by his own bootstraps, finally cried out in an anguish you can feel even across 2000 years: “I don’t understand my own actions. I do not do what I want, I do the very thing I hate.... I can will what is right, but I can’t do it. I do not do the good I would, but the evil I do not want is what I do.... Wretched man that I am. Who will rescue me?”

Maybe no more gripping testimony to both the reality and the enslaving power of original sin has ever been written.

Paul, of course, was a spiritual genius, a person extraordinarily attuned to the nuances of sin’s hold on the inner being.

I don’t think most people today feel with the same painful intensity the wretchedness Paul felt over the warring conflict of sin and righteousness inside of him. The feeling of guilt in people of our time is probably less sharply honed than it was in our ancestors, even a generation or so back. Some of that removal of guilt is good, is healthy. Some of us have felt guilty about the wrong things. BUT SAY WHAT YOU WILL, all of our self-help books, and motivational inspiration talks, and attitude adjustment techniques haven’t been able to obliterate that deep sense of unrest and incompleteness that still lingers inside like a festering canker.

We know we’re not what we ought to be. We know we’re not what we’re meant to be. AND WE KNOW, DESPITE OUR BEST EFFORTS, WE CAN’T MAKE OURSELVES BE. Something down inside of is out of kilter, somehow.

Made for fellowship, made for intimate communion with our Maker, we have become estranged, separated from our rootage, cut off from the Source of our very being. If we don’t experience it as actual pain, so much as Paul did, maybe for us it’s more of an emptiness.

Remember that little quatrain from one of W.H. Auden’s poems:

Faces along the bar cling to their average day;

The lights must never go out, the music must always play;

Lest we should see where we are, lost in a haunted wood;

Children afraid of the dark, who have never been happy or good.

It’s not a bad snapshot of original sin in the 20th Century. Sometimes the language of poetry captures a more accurate image of the human situation than the language of traditional religion.

I’ve just finished reading Kathleen Norris’ newest book, entitled “Dakota”. She calls it a spiritual geography, because she wrote it after moving out to her grandparents’ old homeplace in the bleak, wide-open, treeless plains of western South Dakota, and uses that landscape as the framework to tell her spiritual journey. It’s essentially a coming home to a recognition of timeless spiritual truths she now sees her parents, and their parents knew in their way, but which she had to discover for herself, afresh, in her own life.

Even though a Protestant, she received enormous help from periodic sojourns in Roman

Catholic monastery retreat centers. She says in one place in the book: “I had thought that religion was a constraint that I had overcome by dint of reason, learning, artistic creativity, sexual liberation. Church was for little kids, or grandmas, a small town phenomenon that one grew out of, or left behind.... I was still that child in The Snow Queen, asking “what is sin?”, but not knowing how to find out.

Fortunately, a Benedictine friend provided one answer. “Sin in the New Testament’, he told me. ‘is the failure to do concrete acts of love.’

That’s something I can live with, a guide in my conversion. It’s also a better definition of sin that I learned as a child--sin as breaking rules. Comprehensible, sensible sin is one of the unexpected gifts I’ve found in the monastic tradition. The 4th Century monks began to answer for me what the human potential movement of the late 20th Century never seemed to address: If I’m O.K., and you’re O.K., and our friends (nice people and like us, markedly middle class...) are O.K., why is the word definitely not O.K.?

Blaming others wouldn’t do. Only when I began to see the world’s ills mirrored in myself did I begin to find an answer; only as I began to address that uncomfortable word, sin, did I see that I was not being handed a load of needless guilt so much as a useful tool for confronting the negative side of human behaviors.”

You’d never confuse that with the writing of John Wesley. He wouldn’t have put it that way. But I have an idea that if somehow someone were to read it to him, his eyes would light up, and he would nod his head in solemn agreement.

Is it the last word? NO, thank God it’s not the last word in religious truth. Thank God we have a Gospel to proclaim, a Gospel not of our doing, bigger and able to overcome the mess we’re in that is of our doing.

That’s next week’s story...Don’t miss it.

BUT THE RECOGNITION OF THE REALITY AND INSIDIOUSNESS OF SIN IS THE FIRST WORD. The Christian can never be shocked about life because he’s looked deeply into his own heart and seen there with unblinking honesty the degradation of his own treason.

“Lord, be merciful unto me, a sinner.” When you’re able to say that, and say it truly, He’s not far away.