Covenant Service at St Giles Cripplegate. |
What shall we say in the light of this gospel? Applying it would take all the diplomacy for which Leslie Griffiths is famous. Who is to be identified with the younger brother who went off and wasted his substance in riotous living? Who does the curmudgeonly elder brother remind us of?
The figure who has a word for us this evening is the Father. He does not domineer or demand submission to his wishes. He gives when asked and lets the younger brother go. When the prodigal comes back, he is seen when still 'afar off' and the Father 'is moved with compassion' and runs [most undignified for a Middle Eastern Patriarch] and welcomes his son with a kiss. He cuts short the penitential speeches and organises a celebration and they began to be merry.
That is God as we see him in the life of Jesus Christ, God's human face.
We all are comprehended in the two brothers who show us two ways of coping with life on this earth.
Fear and death, life and love are at the heart of the Christian story. The fear, the nagging anxiety at the heart of many lives is traceable to fear of punishment and death.
How do we cope with this fear? One brother was determined to do it his way, to go out, make a splash and make something of himself. It is not possible of course. We have no life in ourselves to make ourselves, lonely atoms, our life lies in entering the great exchange of love but we rebel against this simple truth. The younger brother does at least show some gumption. As Luther was to advise rather later, he went out and sinned boldly and this brought him to the brink of the abyss. He experienced emptiness, hunger and thirst.
He wanted to come back, but he was still keeping his distance by negotiating. He was still stuck at the point where he had rightly gone beyond dependence on the Father's handouts. He was independent but not yet ready for the commitment and the service involved in loving interdependence. He was prepared to admit his folly and wanted to be punished and treated as one of the employees, not as a son. The Father as we have seen cut short the speech, embraced him and prepared the celebration.
The other brother had chosen a different response to fear and one that looked more religious. He had also kept his distance from the God revealed by Jesus Christ by exalting his Father's will, 'I never transgressed a commandment of thine', keeping his nose clean but his heart disengaged. He was in fact full of resentment. People very often project the unacknowledged parts of themselves on scapegoats like 'this thy son [the brotherly tie is denied] which hath devoured thy living with harlots'. It is the waste of money that has really got to him.
This is the kind of passage from Scripture that forces you to your knees and fills you with intoxicated delight. One reason why I love John Wesley was because the power of Scripture clearly was a transforming influence on his life. He knew that there was no transformation without a return to the well spring in the life and teaching of Jesus Christ.
I looked through Wesley's Journal to see what he was doing about this season of the year.Wesley's Journal for September 1736, 'I began reading ..Bishop Beveridge's Pandectae Canonum Conciliorum. Nothing could so effectually have convinced that both Particular and 'General Councils may err and have erred'; [and of the infinite difference there is between the decisions of the wisest men and those of the Holy Ghost recorded in his Word]. - The Church is always under the judgement of Scripture in which the faith is 'uniquely revealed'.
But you are sliding out of it, Bish, how on this occasion do you apply the story of the two brothers and their Father to our present undertaking.
Fear of death and punishment leads to a hectic, heedless lifestyle where we do not listen or learn from the stillness and silence of God. We live in the fast lane under the delusion that the faster we go the more we shall get out of this short life. This civilisation is haunted by a fear of death. The noise and accumulation of things may look like life but illness, some shock or simply waking up one morning and asking ourselves what we have been flogging ourselves to death for, can bring about a sense of emptiness and hunger to connect which can set us on the road to return to a place which we can call home but which really we never knew before. The destitution of the church in some of its parts is full of hope if rightly interpreted.
This opens us up to a truth which we can only enter into when we give up the idea that we can be fully alive by possessing more and more things. We come to the truth by loving and serving Jesus Christ and we see and serve Jesus Christ in our neighbour, in one another. We desire the Church to be united not because tactically it makes sense [although it does] but because we enter into life through our brothers and sisters.
The other response to fear is rigidity, clinging on possessively to the rules, to the road map, which will prevent us from straying. This life of chronic conformity is perhaps more common in religious circles than the life of heedless risk but both are responses to the fear which is deadly and which is only cast out by perfect love.
This is great night. All around us are the memories of the spiritual renewal whose midwife John Wesley was. We are close to the site of the little Moravian meeting house, where he saw things in anew light. We began in Wesley's Chapel a shrine of international importance for all Christians. But we are also in the church from which Wesley's grandfather was excluded in 1662 and we are close to those many churches where after an initial welcome Wesley was forbidden to preach. Those who attacked him were afraid of disorder and religious fanaticism and in our own day when we have learnt again the real danger of religious fanaticism we are likely to be more understanding of the anxiety which prompted Bishops and others to say such uncharitable things. But what we have done tonight is to say that they were wrong. Methodism was a movement from the Father who was moved by compassion and ran in the person of his servant and son John Wesley to bring aid to the hungry and thirsty growing population of his day for whom the rumour of God was faint.
In our day also there is a call and a challenge to us in the life of this great world city London. In Millennium year alone London gained 120,000 new citizens from every community under the sun. In both our churches the Korean congregations are one of the most vibrant and growing. We have work to do together and unity is best served when we act on the gospel we share, to look in the direction of a common challenge. When we look in the same direction and work then we come to have experiences together which outflank antique perceptions and polemics.
In this work John Wesley rediscovered some ancient truths which have a contemporary resonance. Any church worthy of the name must have a lively intellectual life, a competent institutional structure but it must also have a mystical dimension and know itself to be constituted in the present as a spiritual organism, on the foundation of Jesus Christ by the work of the Holy Spirit. Wesley knew that by experience.
Then the organisation of the church must also give room for a genuine growth in relationships so that congregations are real con-gregations and not disguised aggregations. The Methodist class movement anticipated the cellular structure, which is being re-discovered in our own day.
Certainly the parochial mono-culture which created huge difficulties for the relationship between Methodists and the Church into which the two Wesleys were ordained has now been modified. Parish Church survive like this one, but a parallel system is growing up of network churches, drawing not from a particular locality but from communities of interest often widely dispersed.
It is also significant that the role of personal leadership and relationship in maintaining unity in this more diverse Church, clearly visible in the life of John Wesley, is one that modern Christian leaders must never forget. The energy which comes from committee work is diminishing and so is the consent which committee decisions command. We have to develop new kinds of personal apostolic leadership.
The breach which occurred hereabouts between the first Methodists and their brothers and sisters in the Church of England, has widened and reverberated throughout the world where there are of course rather more Methodists than Anglicans. The breach began here; the reconciliation should begin here. Please God what we do this night, will not be some token gesture but a fresh discovery of the Church which was not founded by act of Parliament or by human will, but which is founded on the compassion of the Father, expressed by the Son and made present by the Holy Spirit. Fear and death, life and love - these are the keynotes of the gospel. Let us embrace as lovers and make merry with our friends.
