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[Preached four times from 5/29/88 at Elvet to sometime in 1993 at M.R.]

John Wesley had a problem, and he was too honest a man to pretend that it was not true. That is perhaps one difference between him and us. We are apt to sweep our personal problems under the carpet and hope that in due course they will disappear (and sometimes they do). Not Mr. Wesley. Before 1738 as well as after it, he was honest with himself; the problem would not go away. Even when he himself went to America, hoping, I suspect, not only (as he said) to convert the heathen Americans but to find a solution. There was no solution in America and he brought the problem home with him.

If you care to use Biblical language, it was the problem of faith and works; if you prefer, you can call it the problem of religion and ethics, but it was partly by thinking of it in these terms that Wesley got it wrong, and I prefer to avoid “religion,” as a word anyway. How do you come to terms with God, find peace with God, if we again may be biblical? By believing things, or doing things?

Wesley had tried that way of doing things. Few persons had done more. He emerged from the pious background of Epworth Rectory. Of course he would be ordained like his father, so he went to Oxford. Official Oxford was nothing like pious enough, so he found ways of making it more so, joined the Holy Club (previously founded by Charles, but led by John when he came back to Oxford in 1729) which met for study, devotion, and philanthropy. One’s first impression was that they were a crowd of quite insufferable young men; but why should they not have taken seriously what all Oxford professed to believe? And they visited the jail, and they gave sacrificially for the relief of the poor. And so it went on, across the Atlantic and back, another stream of good works.

Believing then: so far as this meant accepting the creeds there was no problem. Like a later figure in history, he would have signed not thirty-nine articles but forty if there had been another one. But was faith more than this? Some said it was, but Wesley was not impressed. It was later, I think, that he spoke of the “still brethren” the pietists3 who had fastened on the text “be still and know that I am God” and interpreted it to mean that one must not pray, receive communion, do good but just—be still. He did not trust that attitude; better surely to obey the commandments.

But what then did you do? I have continued a bit to make the point both clearly and briefly, but it was a desperately serious problem. Was there any way one could accept it with integrity? Put like that the question is one that faces many people today. Behind Wesley’s problem, we can see our own.

This was the point at which Luther came to Wesley’s help. Today someone will have to quote the famous words just once more, so let us get it done: it was on May 24th that Wesley went unwillingly to a meeting in Aldersgate Street where someone was reading Luther’s Preface to Romans.4 It was about 8:45 when he reached the vital passage, and from Wesley’s description there seems to be no difficulty in putting one’s finger on it. He was describing, says Wesley, the change God works in the heart by faith. Here it is:

Faith is a divine work in us, which changes us and gives us new birth from God (John 1.13), and kills the old Adam, makes us new beings in heart, will, mind and all our powers and brings the Holy Spirit with it. It is a living, busy, active powerful thing is faith, so that it is impossible that it should not incessantly be doing good. It does not ask whether good works should be done; before anyone asks it has done them, and is constantly so doing. Anyone who doesn’t do such works is simply without faith.

So the answer is not my painful religious striving, but faith. And out of faith comes more works and better works because I am not using them as a means to an end, but doing them because I want to do them, because God is making it possible for me to so forget myself that I spend all my time and all my energy in serving my neighbors.

How did Luther get there? What did Wesley learn from him? The core of it is in these words of Wesley which everyone knows: “I felt I did trust Christ, Christ alone, for salvation.” It is the solus Christus of the Reformation. Faith can forget itself precisely because it is focused upon Christ. And it does forget itself. The piece of Wesley’s Journal that on the whole people do not remember is this—“The enemy suggested, ‘this cannot be faith; for where is thy joy?’ . . . after my return home I was much buffeted by temptations.” Notwithstanding Wesley’s “I felt” faith is not feeling but objective trust, the recognition that my fate and the world’s is not in my hands but in God’s. And there it rests, whether I am happy all the day or not.

So much, as I drafted my sermon comes under the heading—Introduction. It does not follow that the main bulk of the sermon is still to come, only that on this special occasion we are having a higher proportion of Introduction. But Wesley himself knew very well that preaching was not a matter either of historical analysis or of recounting one’s experience. It is the exposition and application of the Word of God in Scripture. But the Introduction may help us to see Romans in sharper focus. What does the chapter teach about faith?

First that faith leads to reconciliation, peace, righteousness. Perhaps we have already had enough about this. The peace is peace with God, the righteousness is a right relationship with God. They are near enough the same thing, but the latter gives a sharper edge to the former. In a fight, either party may be right, and merely to knock the other fellow down doesn’t prove that he was wrong, and peace may be—often is—a matter of reciprocal give and take, compromise. Righteousness (with Paul’s great word justification) puts the conflict in the Law court, and the judge, this Judge anyway, is always by definition right. I who stand in the dock am accused by the Law, proved to be in the wrong by witnesses, and maybe by my own confession too. Yet the Judge finds his own way, at his own cost, not of letting me off but of taking me in, restoring me to the fellowship of society and his own. This is the relationship with my Maker, for which my Maker made me; it is not an odd queer thing; only in it am I my own true self.

Secondly, faith leads to character. Paul sees it working out through tribulations; Wesley would do the same. These tribulations are our moral education in the world, and for the Christian they lead to endurance and tried character. There is nothing automatic about this. Consider how many times tribulations—annoyances, fears, being abandoned or done down by people you trusted, physical pain and weakness, loneliness, the loss of a loved one; make it real. Tribulation which has such an old-fashioned sound has led you into despair, bad temper, cowardice, retaliation, deceitfulness and the like. It is faith that gives it a positive outcome and enables you to glory in it. Apart from glorying in the Lord, there are only two kinds of glorying that Paul can tolerate. One is glorying in tribulations, the other is glorying in life, that is in the future, God’s future. These are both safe because by definition they mean I am not glorying in myself, in what I now am, in what I have now achieved. In tribulation, in life, I can only glory in God.

We forget this educational element in the Christian life at our peril. I suspect that Wesley over-simplified the notion of holiness, though he did not simplify it nearly as much as some people think he did. In any case, he was right to insist that becoming and being a Christian is a moral experience. There may be joy in it, or there may not, but if there is not love, love that is ever seeking to be perfect love, there is something wrong.

Thirdly, faith is for all. It is an offer to all. It is not restricted to the virtuous, the naturally religious, the intelligent. “It was while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us.” The only qualification for the Gospel is sin, and all the unqualified may get up and go out. But you have already uttered the words yourselves:

Outcasts of men, to you I call,Harlots, and publicans, and thieves!He spreads His arms to embrace you all;Sinners alone His grace receives;No need of Him the righteous have;He came the lost to seek and save. (Charles Wesley)

I need not tell you that the Wesley exegesis and the Wesley poetry became the Wesley program. It is precisely at this point that we must be careful to live in the real world. I suppose there may be in the Elvet congregation a few people who work for the Inland Revenue—publicans in the biblical sense. I do not think there are any harlots or thieves here. Wesley would have been more comfortable in this fellowship if there had been a few. Let me quote the first lines in the Times for Good Friday of this year:

Modern Methodists would be wise to admit that their sharp edge has been blunted by two centuries of institutional religion. A modern Wesley would be as likely to lead a movement outside Methodism as within it. The vivid hymns of his brother Charles Wesley, so moving and stirring at the time are now the old favorites, sung more for nostalgia than for fervor.

The Church of England itself has begun to reclaim Wesley as one of its own—at last. That may be an ecumenical advance. But it is also a sign that modern Wesleyanism has lost its spikes and is now safe to embrace. Your minister is keen, and so am I, that we not use this service simply as a celebration of a fairly distant past. We must think about our own Church, in our own world, in our own day. What Paul says in Romans 5 is of eternal validity, so that is something. What else is there time to say?

We talk easily about Wesley’s conversion. Some people say that we ought not to use that word. It wasn’t a conversion. He didn’t change his beliefs. He was an orthodox Christian before and after. He did not give up an evil life; he did not have an evil life to give up—he had been too good to be true. Well there is some weight in that argument though for myself I continue to say conversion. What we can say is this. Before 1738, Wesley wasn’t bad but he was inhibited. He tried hard, but he could not find his feet. He served God, he said, as a servant; later he was to serve him as a son. It was only when he trusted Christ alone that he was free—free to be the man God always wanted John Wesley to be.

We do not belong to a bad Church. Of course it has its faults, fewer perhaps than most, but it is not a bad Church. I think I could make a case for saying it is an inhibited Church, that has not yet attained, or perhaps rather has lost, the freedom that belongs to faith and the Gospel. We are too concerned about what other people, people in other churches, people outside the church, will think about us. We are; I am. But though the Church will always have to think, to plan, to organize, it needs nothing so much as to lose its inhibitedness and enter into the freedom of the children of God. And that we achieve, as each one learns to find Christ, Christ alone. I’ll give you one more picture of what it means. I do so with an apology, for I have told this story in Elvet before; it was however on 6/23/57 and the two or three who were here, will be tolerant.

When Wesley travelled to America, it was not in the Concorde or on the Q.E. but in an 1712 cork-shell of a ship on which there were also a group of Moravians—a sort of Lutheran sect. There was a storm and Wesley was afraid, afraid to die. The Moravians he could see were not. He asked their leaders why. “They know whom they have believed.” To see a comparison you need to only read between the lines of Wesley’s report that the Moravians had certain humble practices and were laughed at by the English for doing so. There was not only danger of drowning; there was the reality of sea-sickness. There were of course no professional stewards and stewardesses so the Moravians cleaned things up. It seems to me that you need a good deal of the love of God in your heart to clean up other people’s stinking vomit, when you are more than a little queasy yourself and are being jeered at for doing so. They know who they have believed—Christ only. And out of that trust the practical love that cleans up the vile mess of the world. Wesley embraced both, and the world and God waits for us to do the same.

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3. Editor’s note—in this case, Moravians.

4. Editor’s Note: Actually on closer inspection what the sources really say is “on Nettleton Court off Aldersgate Street” but something about the phrase “the Nettleton Court experience” doesn’t quite roll naturally off the tongue.