Sermon for
May 8, 2005
Ascension Sunday
Festival of the Christian Home/Mother’s Day
“We Believe in Love (3)”
Acts 1:8; Luke 24:44-53 1:5
that Changes Your Heart Not Just Your Mind
According to a Jewish
proverb,
God could not
be everywhere and therefore He made mothers.
http://iwant.on.ca/Purple/AMothersLove.html
I believe this bit of wisdom is less about the actual Jewish belief in
the omnipresence of God and more about the value, importance, and
influence of a mother’s love. William Makepeace Thackeray, an
English novelist, put it this way:
Mother is the
name of God in the lips and hearts of children. Ibid
Any mother who has ever sent her
child off to school alone for the first time, or helped her son unload
his stuff into that first dormitory room and kissed him goodbye, or rose
to stand in her place at the front of the sanctuary as father
accompanied her daughter down the aisle on her wedding day, knows
something of what was in the heart of our Lord Jesus as he ascended into
heaven leaving his disciples to be the body of Christ in the world.
It had been 40 days since Jesus
rose from the dead. 40 days after Easter Jesus gathered his
disciples together at Bethany, a city just outside Jerusalem.
There he lifted his hands, blessed them, and was carried up into heaven.
His final earthly instructions accompanied his blessing as he entrusted
the message and the power of the Gospel to his church. He
commissions them to carry on his work in the world. As a mother
trusts her children to keep the truth and values she has worked so
diligently to instill in their hearts, so you and I as followers of
Jesus are entrusted with the love of God in us.
The question on Ascension Day, the
question on the heart and mind of every mother who first sends her
children out on their own, is the question the church has struggled with
ever since Jesus ascended into heaven. How do followers of Jesus
remain faithful to the truth and values of the Gospel? How do we
maintain, nurture, and grow that love the Gospel of Jesus Christ has
restored in us? How do we keep the image of God in which we were
created at the very center of our hearts?
The image of God in your
heart….it’s what called you back into relationship with God to begin
with. The image of God in you is that yearning, that longing in
you that is never satisfied until your relationship with God is
restored. This is the grace of God John Wesley, the founder of the
18th century movement in England that became our United
Methodist Church, identified as Prevenient Grace—the love of God in
you before you were born. That image of God was restored in you by
God’s justifying grace, as again John Wesley described it. But
once you heed the longing in your heart, once you accept again the gift
of life God gives you, how do you stay centered? When mother sends
her children out on their own, how can they stay true to mother’s
love?
John Wesley is again so very
helpful here as we consider yet another distinctive witness of our
United Methodist faith. He believed that God’s grace did not
begin and end at our justification. God’s grace does not
complete its task in us once our relationship with God is restored at
our conversion. John Wesley believed that the work of God’s
Prevenient and Justifying Grace is but the first fruits of the blessing
of God’s grace in our lives. He believed that God never stops
working in us until we are completely restored into the image of God we
were first created. He called this grace of God Sanctifying
Grace.
Every mother I know hopes with all
her soul that her children will remember the truth and values she has
taught them not just in here (the mind), but in here (the heart).
For example, doesn’t every mother want her children to know the ten
commandments at least as well as they know their “ABC’s?”
Every mother I know wants her children to face life with more than just
the ability to recite the Ten Commandments from memory, or even to
merely accept them as true. Every mother I know tries with every
fiber of her love to instill the wisdom of the Ten Commandments in her
children’s very hearts.
Every mother I know wants her children to be endowed with the skills,
maturity, and faith to handle anything life might throw at them.
Much as a mother seeks to bring her wayward children back to the ways of
life, so we believe God’s sanctifying grace works in us.
That’s why we
United Methodists believe that love makes you change your heart not just
change your mind. To believe is not just to understand in your
mind and assent to a set of intellectually objective truths. Life
is not about simply adopting a list of correct “beliefs,” a list of
correct beliefs or doctrine that John Wesley called by the name
“orthodoxy.” He spoke about this in his sermon called “The
Way to the Kingdom:”
neither does
religion consist in orthodoxy or right opinions; which…are not in the
heart, but the understanding. (One) may be orthodox at every
point; he may not only espouse right opinions, but zealously defend them
against all opposers; he may think justly concerning the incarnation of
our Lord, concerning the ever blessed Trinity, and every other doctrine
contained in the oracles of God. He may assent to all the three
Creeds…He may be almost as orthodox as the devil…and may all the
while be a great stranger…to the religion of the heart.
John Wesley, “The Way to the Kingdom,” The
Works of John Wesley,
vol. 1, ed. by Albert C. Outler (Nashville: Abingdon, 1984); 220-221
quoted in
“Methodist Doctrine:An Underdstanding” by Charles M. Wood, Quarterly
Review
(Nashville: United Methodist Pulishing House and the United
Methodist
Board of Higher Education); Summer 1998, vol. 18, p. 171.
United Methodism is not so much about doctrine as
it is about faith. It is more a matter of the heart than a matter
of the mind.
In this respect, United Methodists
believe love never gives easy answers to the hard questions of life.
It is always the very real temptation for the church to offer the list
of 5 beliefs or the 7 spiritual laws which, if you simply assent to
them, will make life whole, happy, and reasonable. Love knows all
too well that life is just not that simple. Love calls you into
the midst of the challenges of life armed with the faith and the heart
of one who ultimately believes in love. When you believe in love
you know deep in your own heart that no matter what may happen or what
my come love will always prevail.
Now a mother’s worse fear is
that her children will forget—they will stray from the love they
experienced and learned in her home and act and behave in so many ways
opposite to what she taught them. They do that because we are all
victims of the Fall—we always prefer to go our own way, disobey God,
and take life into our own hands. We do that because we always
know better than God does! So we all make wrong choices and,
rather than build life on promise and hope, we surrender to a life of
fear. When you stray so far from love even after love has been
restored, how does love ever get you back? A mother’s love
always seeks to love her children back to love if they ever go astray.
In the same way United Methodists
believe love does not threaten, frighten, or scare you back into love.
A God of love does not hold over our heads the threat of punishment,
evil, or natural disaster to force us back into relationship. This
is just one thing love does not do. You see, this love planted in
the human heart in the beginning—it’s always there (in your heart).
That love, placed there by God, continues to call to you—it is a love
you can never forget. If you already follow fear then fear is not
going to win you back to love. Only love can do that.
Now this is not to
say we don’t believe in sin. No, John Wesley looked at the sin
of his day straight in the eye. He denounced slavery, exploitation
of workers, child labor, economic injustice, unfaithful relationships,
and all the rest. We stand firmly in that tradition. He knew
though that it is the heart that needs to change. Only love can
change a heart. For this reason we believe God doesn’t try to
scare us back but, rather, God loves us back to love, for God still
believes in love. Such is the working of God’s sanctifying
grace.
In 1710 six year old John Wesley
was rescued from a burning house. As his mother Susannah Wesley,
who had lost 9 of her 19 children at very early ages, held in her arms
her fifteenth child that was almost taken from her in a fire, she
prayed,
I
do intend to be more particularly careful with the soul of this child,
which Thou hast so mercifully provided for, than ever I had been, that I
may instill in (him) the principles of true religion and virtue.
(Halford E. Luccock, and Webb Garrison, Endless Line of Splendor
(Nashville: United Methodist Communications, 1992 ed. p.
11)
Susannah Wesley was true to her vow. By the
influence of her love, dare we say by her son’s experience of the love
of God through her, the seeds were planted for John Wesley’s
remarkable discoveries of the depth of the grace of God.
As he later was considering
becoming a minister, his mother advised him,
The
true end of preaching is to mend men’s lives, …not to stuff their
heads with unprofitable speculation.
(Ibid)
At his ascension our Lord Jesus
entrusted his followers to the love of God as he blessed them.
This love is the sanctifying work of God in your life and in our world.
This is God’s sanctifying grace continually molding, shaping, and
renewing you.
Dorothy Fisher could have easily
had Susannah Wesley in mind when she said
A mother is not a
person to lean on but a person to make leaning unnecessary.
http://iwant.on.ca/Purple/AMothersLove.html
If it is true that a mother’s love never leaves the hearts of her
children, there is no question that the love of God never lets you
alone.
William G. Davidson
South Roanoke United Methodist Church
