[This sermon was the eighth in a series on the foundational beliefs of the Christian faith. The first seven were about the beliefs that all Christians share in common. Because it was preached in a United Methodist Church, we included this sermon about the beliefs of United Methodists. It clearly will be more helpful for other United Methodists, but I hope that non-Methodists will find it beneficial as well, since I am absolutely *not* claiming that simply because these things have been emphasized within the Wesleyan tradition that they are any less true for brothers and sisters in Christ from other denominational traditions.]
As you can imagine, every month when we publish our newsletter, we send it out to a handful of area churches. And every month we receive a handful of newsletters from other churches. The Lutherans always have an interesting page that explains their beliefs on a certain topic. They’ve had explanations of the Lutheran view on marriage or their view on separation of church and state or worship or human cloning or the Bible. Well, last month, the topic was “what is a Lutheran?”
Here’s the answer that was given: “A Lutheran is a person who believes, teaches and confesses the truths of God’s Word as they are summarized and confessed in the Book of Concord.”
Okay, so a Lutheran is someone who believes in the Book of Concord. But what is the Book of Concord? The article goes on to explain it: the Book of Concord is a collection of the Lutheran doctrines. Among them are the Augsburg Confession, written in 1530 by a man named Philip Melanchthon. It also contains the small and large catechisms, also written in 1530 by the great reformer Martin Luther. The catechisms explain the official positions of the Lutheran church on various topics. Then in 1537, the Smalcald Articles were added, which further explains Lutheran beliefs. Finally, in 1577, the Formula of Concord was adopted to address a variety of doctrinal debates and controversies. Together, these documents make up the Book of Concord. And Lutherans are expected to believe in these doctrines fully.
It ends up providing a very short answer to the question, “What is a Lutheran?” A Lutheran is someone who believes the doctrines in the Book of Concord got it right. Period. End of story.
Today, we’re looking at the question, “What do United Methodists believe?” And there’s a lot of people who want to ask what the Methodist equivalent of the Book of Concord is. What’s the doctrine we can point to and say, “If you’re a United Methodist, then you believe in this document, this book, this statement of belief?” Well… there isn’t any.
Let me ask, for those of you here this morning that have taken the next step of commitment and become church members here, when you joined the United Methodist Church, were you asked to state your belief in the United Methodist doctrine? No, you weren’t, because there isn’t one! Methodism has never had a unique doctrine or particular creed that sets us apart from any other group of Christians. We affirm the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed, but these are beliefs that all Christians share.
And all the beliefs we’ve talked during this “Back to the Basics” sermon series about the foundational beliefs of the Christian faith are beliefs United Methodists hold dear. But almost all the beliefs we’ve talked about during the Back to Basics series are ones that are shared by all Christians.
In fact, the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, made it very clear: “the distinguishing marks of a Methodist are not his opinions of any sort.” There are actually no doctrines or beliefs that belong exclusively to United Methodists. While we emphasize certain beliefs, there is nothing that United Methodists affirm that are not also believed by other Christian groups.
So, if our beliefs aren’t unique, what is it that sets us apart from any other group of Christians? Initially, John Wesley intended for Methodism to simply be a movement within the existing church that would motivate people to strengthen their Christian faith and to live it out more fully. Wesley had lived for many years with a pretty halfhearted faith, and he knew how empty that felt in comparison to fully living out the Christian faith. He wanted others to experience the fullness of the Christian faith as well, and Methodism started as a movement that would help people move toward a full and joyful expression of the Christian faith. He didn’t want lukewarm Christians. He wanted Christians who were on fire for God!
And really getting that fire stoked meant having a certain balance between the extremes. A few weeks ago, when we were up in northern Michigan on vacation with my family, we were getting a campfire started so we could roast marshmallows and make s’mores. My niece was helping out, and she asked why we were blowing on the fire to get it started. I explained to her that besides heat, a fire needs two things to burn – it needs fuel and air. By blowing on it, we were giving it more air so it could burn hotter. Fuel without air won’t burn. And air without fuel won’t burn. But together, fuel and air create a great campfire we could enjoy.
Often, when it comes to our faith, we tend to focus on only one aspect or another. But really, to burn brightly, we need a balance between the various aspects of faith. I heard an interview with the United Methodist bishop Scott Jones this last week. He was asked the question: “What distinguishes a Methodist from anybody else?” His response: there are people who are extreme right and there are people who are extreme left. But, you know, whether its style of worship or how we read the Bible or how we look at the issues facing the world, United Methodists tend to be people of the extreme center.
He felt that the United Methodist Church, at its best, is conservative in some areas, and very liberal in other areas. I always marvel that both George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton can both be United Methodists – we’ve got room for a wide variety of opinions!
In general, United Methodists don’t fit a stereotype very well. For example, some churches emphasize evangelism and know how to help people who have never been in the church enter into the Christian life. Well, that’s important. But by itself, it’s a partial gospel. It’s only part of what we believe as United Methodists.
Other churches emphasize social justice: they’re all about helping the poor and they want to get people engaged with the current social issues. But they put little focus on helping people know God or become a follower of Jesus Christ. Again, that’s only part of the gospel.
But United Methodists, who stand at the extreme center, hold a theological position that embraces both of these extreme positions. We don’t see them as opposites, but we see how both sides really need each other. We see how incomplete our faith and life can be if we end up on one extreme or the other, so we stand at the center and hold the two extremes in tension.
That doesn’t mean we’re in the muddled middle, not caring about what we believe. In fact, the extreme center is often a very difficult place to be because there’s always people swiping at you from the extremes. Sometimes it seems like it’s a whole lot easier to hold an extreme position because then it’s easy to be clear and forceful. But you find you’re lacking the perspective of others who disagree with you. By occupying the extreme center, we see both sides are important and we can discover a position that embraces the whole gospel better.
Methodists are people who are passionate about living the fullness of the gospel, trying not to shortchange one side or the other, but instead, embracing the fullness of the grace and life God has given to us. Rather than being an “either/or” people, we are a “both/and” people. Like the campfire, having either fuel or air wouldn’t create the fire. It required having both fuel and air to get the campfire going.
I thought it might be helpful to look at a few of the ways United Methodists have done that in our life together, ways that we embrace the both/and attitude to discover a more complete way of living the Christian life.
Probably the first among these is the ability of Methodists to bring the tension of head and heart together. When my wife, Monica, moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, she got involved with a group that was part of the Assemblies of God denomination. And she remembers going to their Friday night meetings and they had dynamic music and passionate prayer, and the people there were just on fire for God! It was great! It was exciting! The people were deeply passionate about their relationship with God and their hearts yearned for that closeness and they were so excited about their faith that they shared it with all kinds of people and invited people into their fellowship.
But then, after a while, she began to notice that any time these people would come to a time in their lives when they didn’t feel close to God, it was a crisis of faith! They’d wonder if God had abandoned them because they didn’t get a rush from worship or speak in tongues when they were praying. And, over time, they went through that same cycle over and over again. Emotional high, emotional low, confidence and doubt. And it never seemed like their faith was ever taking them anywhere.
And then she got involved with the United Methodist group. And the United Methodists weren’t always as emotional about their faith, but they were passionate. And they were the kind of people that not only pursued God in worship and in prayer, but also in study and dialogue. They were knowing and loving God not only with their hearts, but with their heads, too! And when they felt far from God, rather than being an emotional crisis, it was a time of intense study and deep conversation with one another and a time of growth as their doubts led them to new questions and new depths about the character of God.
But then, I’ve also known people who had the opposite problem where they focus entirely on their head and ignore their heart. There’s a guy I met at the Bible study I do at the homeless shelter in Elgin. They call this guy “Bible Mike” because he’s always quoting Scripture. But even though Bible Mike has a tremendous amount of knowledge about the Bible, you can’t tell that he feels close to God in any real way. When you have a conversation with Bible Mike, it’s clear that he thinks it’s more important that he has all the right knowledge about the right information in the Bible than to actually know or feel the God found in the Bible! He knows about God with his intellect, but doesn’t actually know God with his heart.
But for me, the better I know who God is, the closer I am able to get to God. Both my head and my heart need to be engaged and working for me to understand the fullness of the grace God has in store for me.
And United Methodists know how to keep both passion and intellect together in their faith. We deeply desire an emotional connection with God, we want to experience the presence of God and have a personal relationship with Christ, but we don’t want you to check your brain at the door! We want you to be Christians who are studying and learning and know what you believe and why you believe it. So we don’t believe in either head or heart. We believe in emphasizing both head and heart.
It’s also part of our history that we don’t believe anyone can have a complete faith in Jesus Christ unless you bring together our beliefs with our actions. Remember, the purpose of this church is to help people believe fully in Jesus Christ and to live fully for Jesus Christ. We need both of them to experience the fullness of the Christian faith.
John Wesley lived in a time not unlike our own. There were plenty of people who claimed to be Christians, but who, when you looked at their lives, you could hardly tell. Maybe they never came to church. But even worse, maybe they did, but then they lived the rest of their week as if they’d never been there at all!
Wesley was sure that being a Christian meant more than merely going to church on Sundays. He wondered: What does God really want from us? Turns out, Jesus answered that question very clearly in the Bible. Jesus says, what God really wants is for you to love God with all your heart, and all your mind, and all your strength – love God with everything you’ve got – and then, love your neighbor as you love yourself. That’s what God is looking for.
And John Wesley started preaching about that. Wesley confronted people, asking if they were truly loving God fully and truly loving their neighbor as themselves. And he wouldn’t let them off the hook easily, either! How can you do that if you come to church on Sunday but then live like everybody else around you the rest of the week? How can you do it if your prayer life is nonexistent and you never even crack open your Bible? How can you do it if you are not daily offering your life to the Lord and His work? How can you possibly love your neighbor as yourself when you’re not even thinking about anybody but yourself? Being a Christian, this is an everyday 24/7 kind of faith! And he called people to that!
You know what Wesley called those lukewarm Christians? He called them ‘almost Christians.’ He’d say “you believe the right things, but you sure don’t live like you believe them.” And he would call people to a radical commitment to Jesus Christ.
Wesley would go out to churches and preach: You folks are almost Christian, but you’re not altogether Christian. All you are doing is fitting Jesus into a little part of your life. You are finding space for Jesus in your life, but you’re not really living for the Lord every day. Altogether Christians live for the Lord every day! Commit your life to Christ! This is the time to do it! This is the hour! All who call on the name of the Lord will be saved!
You can imagine how this was received. Half the people were thrilled and were eager to take their faith to the next level. They were ready to stretch themselves and be challenged to make their faith fuller and more meaningful. And half the people were insulted, saying, “hey, I’m really busy and I’ve got a million other things to do, and besides, we’re doing a pretty decent job already.” They’d kick Wesley out of the pulpit and tell him never to preach in their town again!
It’s because Wesley called people to not merely believe in Jesus, but to live their lives the way God wants you to: really loving God with all your heart and mind and strength and really loving people just the way you love yourself. Some people called him a fanatic for it and others recognized his words as truth and made that commitment to become altogether Christians.
United Methodists have always believed that if you’re going to be an altogether Christian, you must give your heart completely to God and you must give yourself to your neighbor through your actions. It’s not either belief or action. It’s both belief and action. That’s the United Methodist way.
Another important way United Methodists embrace the both/and attitude is our understanding of salvation. Everybody is familiar with the evangelist Billy Graham. Billy Graham has spent his entire life preaching the gospel and bringing people to faith in Christ. Over 2 billion people have heard him preach and 2.5 million people have responded to his call to conversion and “accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior.”
But, at some point in his ministry, Billy Graham started asking the question: what happens after I leave town? It’s a wonderful thing for people to receive eternal salvation, but is their salvation making a difference in their lives now? Rev. Graham began making some significant changes in the way he did his campaigns, making sure area churches were fully involved so that individuals who had made a decision for Jesus Christ for eternity also had a place where they could grow in their faith in the here and now.
United Methodists have always held that salvation is something we grow into here and now as well as something we are promised for all eternity. This is really because John Wesley was the Billy Graham of his own day. Without the benefit of airplanes and television, Wesley traveled over 250,000 miles on horseback and preached more than 40,000 sermons during his lifetime. Wesley wanted to be sure that when people received salvation, it would make a difference in their present lives as well as their eternal lives. His solution was to organize people into small groups in every town and community he went to. And these small groups would meet regularly during the week for preaching and study and to encourage one another in the faith.
United Methodists have always understood that, if you want to continue to grow as a Christian, and truly follow God’s commandments, you simply must get together with other Christians to encourage one another and help strengthen one another in the faith. Without other Christians to support us, we tend to fall away from God, slowly, over time.
But, if you have a group of people that you study with, you pray with, who encourage you, and stand by you, you will move forward and grow in your faith. Because, for United Methodists, salvation is not only that moment when you turn to God and receive the forgiveness of your sins. Salvation is that ongoing process of growing closer to God, becoming more free from sin, more able to love generously, more filled with God’s Spirit. Salvation isn’t either now or later. Salvation is something we enjoy both now and forever!
And what’s more, God doesn’t only desire an individual relationship with Him. Jesus said we should love God with all our heart, mind, and strength. But he also said we need to love our neighbor as ourselves. Again, it’s not a matter of loving either God or our neighbor. It’s about loving both God and our neighbor.
And so United Methodists ask the question: who is my neighbor? From the very beginning, the Methodist small groups took collections when they gathered and then took those gifts to the poor. They saw poor children who couldn’t read or write, and so we started schools. We saw sick people with no one to care for them and so we started hospitals and clinics. We see people caught in deep poverty and in natural disasters and we send people to help them and work with them to get them on their feet. It’s why the United Methodist Church was named as one of the “Big names in Katrina Relief” by Newsweek magazine, ranking up among the Red Cross and Salvation Army in charity for Hurricane Katrina survivors.
The gospel tells us that we need Jesus Christ in our lives. It also tells us that we need to take the love of Christ out to where people are, and especially to where people are suffering. How do we live as followers of Jesus in a world where there is hunger, war, and poverty. What do we do if we really love those people as we love ourselves? It’s not either a personal faith or a social faith. The United Methodist approach is to say we both treasure our personal faith and our faith impacts our society as well.
United Methodists do not shrink back from these questions, as difficult and complex as they are. We get into the discussion, we hold the dialogue, and we hear from a variety of perspectives. We are respectful of a diversity of opinions, but in the end, we focus on how to best embrace the fullness of the Christian faith.
When John Wesley was asked what a Methodist was, he described someone who expressed this fullness of the Christian faith. As Wesley said, they didn’t just know that God’s word is true. They were also fully committed to following God’s word.
They didn’t just believe in God. They love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength (Mark 12:30), and rejoice to be able to love God!
They didn’t just try to live a decent and moral life. They really had true Christian love toward others, loving their neighbor as themselves (Matthew 19:19).
They didn’t just take pity on those in need. They really were willing to be a servant to all.
They didn’t just take credit for their good deeds, but they proclaimed with Galatians 2:20: “it is not I, but Christ who lives within me. The life I live, I live by faith in the Son of God who loves me and gave Himself for me.”
The almost Christian gets along with everybody and figures they’re doing a good enough job. The altogether Christian knows they’ve put their faith solely in Jesus Christ for their salvation and that their new life is based entirely on the merits of Christ rather than their own good deeds.
John Wesley felt like an almost Christian for many years. He knew he had been like the people in the church of Laodicea, which is described in Revelation 3:15 as neither cold nor hot. They were lukewarm. And God says to the church in Laodicea, “I wish you were either cold or hot. But because you’re lukewarm, I will spit you out!” Once Wesley found himself really on fire for God, he knew for himself how much better that was than simply being lukewarm. And he started the Methodist movement to help people who were cold or lukewarm to get on fire for God!
And being on fire for God means not focusing on either head or heart. It means embracing a faith of both the head and the heart! Being on fire means not either beliefs or actions. It means both believing fully and living fully! It means a salvation that is both experienced here and promised for all eternity! It means both a personal faith and a faith that transforms our society.
So the next time someone asks you what it means to be a United Methodist, you can tell them, “I’m on fire for God because I’m in the extreme center, taking the best of the extremes and living in the fullness of the Christian faith!”
