HISTORY AND ROOTS: We All Come From Somewhere (18th Sunday after Pentecost; 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17; September 18, 2016)

We All Come From Somewhere

18th Sunday after Pentecost
2 Thessalonians 2:13-17
September 18, 2016

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, Iowa

We Americans love to think of ourselves as free from the past. We are not bound by traditions or old habits. The past is over, dead and buried. We are free to create our own future. That is what American is about. And that's why people come here. They want to be a part of that.

That, at least, was the story that European immigrants told themselves about themselves, to explain themselves to themselves. If you have good memories you will recognize that as my definition of a myth. In this case it is the myth of past-less-ness. This is the story that we are not bound to any story. The past is dead. Whatever story we are going to be a part of we must write for ourselves.

But as William Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."ⁱ We all come from somewhere. We--each person and each organization, group or movement--we all have our DNA, an inheritance from the past that profoundly shapes our life in the present and the possibilities for our life in the future.

We know this about First UMC. We say:

"As a congregation we value the history and roots of our United Methodist heritage, whether we were born into the denomination or found a church home here from another faith tradition."

We have a heritage, a tradition, and a legacy from the past that matters in the present. We may not have thought a lot about it, but it's true and we have the sense that this is, or at least might be, a good thing.

G. K. Chesterton, a Roman Catholic lay person, did think a lot about it. Here's what he came up with:

Tradition means giving a vote to most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. All democrats object to [people] being disqualified by the accident of birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death.ⁱⁱ

Tradition is a way of taking our ancestors seriously, but it doesn't have much room for our descendants. I could turn Chesterton around and say, "Posterity means giving a vote to our children's children's children's children. Posterity objects to people being disqualified from voting by the accident of their not yet having been born."

Native Americans are said to have invented the principle of the seventh generation. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I do know of one contemporary Native American who advocates for its use. Oren Lyons, a chieftain of the Onondaga Nation of the Iroquois, puts it this way:

We are looking ahead, as is one of the first mandates given us as chiefs, to make sure and to make every decision that we make relate to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come. ... What about the seventh generation? Where are you taking them? What will they have?

In this view of things, we are the generation that mediates between tradition and posterity. We must use the wisdom that has come to us from our ancestors to fashion a future for our descendants. We take what has been given to us by those who came before and we reshape it and pass it along to those who come after.

This process of receiving and handing on is what makes tradition. The word itself comes from the Latin, tradere, which means "to hand over, to hand on." A custom or habit becomes a tradition when and only when it is handed on.

None of this has to happen consciously. We just do it or don’t do it. We continue to do this or we stop doing that.

When we say that "we value the history and roots of our United Methodist heritage," we not only point to the reality of tradition, but we point to a particular tradition: United Methodism. Much of what we do and value can be traced to our roots in the work of John and Charles Wesley. We don't think about them very much or even know about them, but to paraphrase Faulkner, in many ways they are not dead; they aren't even past.

We value meaningful worship. In worship we occupy a middle ground between those traditions that have set liturgies (like Roman Catholics and Episcopalians) and those traditions that avoid formal liturgy altogether, like Baptists and Congregationalists. This is related to our history. John and Charles Wesley were very formal; they were known as high church Anglicans. When they were in college liturgy was everything to them. The demands of ministry, though, and the fact that a number of bishops refused to allow John to preach in churches, drove John into open-air gathering spaces. He preached in town squares, at the entrances to coal mines, and in any space he could find whether it was set aside as a church. His liturgies often consisted of a few hymns, a reading, a sermon, a prayer, and a few more hymns.

We value music in worship and we sing pretty enthusiastically. One hundred Methodists can out-sing two hundred Lutherans or five hundred Catholics. Charles Wesley wrote over six thousand hymns in his life, about half of which he considered suitable for congregational singing. He and John, when they were missionaries in Georgia, published the very first hymnal in the English language. The Hymnal not the Book of Common Prayer is at the center of our collective devotion.

We have an open table. When you come to the Communion table, we do not ask what church you belong to or even whether you are a professing Christian. That is rooted in John Wesley's understanding of God's grace. He called Communion a "converting ordinance," that is, he believed that someone who was seeking God in any way could experience God's grace at the table in such a way that they would be inwardly transformed. How could he refuse to serve someone who asked? We don't refuse them either. We know God's love and we know that love is open and welcoming. We are not going to put qualifications on who may come to the table when God's welcome goes beyond ours.

We Methodists aren't much for lofty theology. We don't build theological systems. Instead we are practical theologians. Theology should work. We should be able to do our theology. If our theology doesn't lead to growing love for our neighbors and for God, then it is automatically suspect. Love is the test of truth. Some of us don't get that. Some of us want to impose an orthodoxy on our church. Some of us want to know what we have to believe, but we've never been very big on creeds or lists of what you can or can't think.

There is a reason for this, for what John Wesley called a "catholic spirit," that is, a spirit that loves as God loves. In contrast, much of the recent centuries in England had featured bloody and deadly struggles over religion, pitting Christians against Christians and seeing them condemn, execute, and even slaughter each other in the name of God. The whole country was well past tired of religious wars.

The Wesleys and the other Methodists wanted a Christianity with warmth and fervor, but without the animosity and rancor that had been so much a part of Christian faith for centuries. If love is the truth test for theology, then theology that leads to hate must be seriously flawed.

Methodism has always been a political faith. We get that from John and Charles. Their ministry as undergraduates led them to the debtors' prisons to alleviate the miserable conditions there and to befriend the inmates. It was this work that led to their work with James Oglethorpe and their mission to Georgia. The Wesley's were abolitionists and the English Methodist movement in general worked to abolish slavery. Early versions of our rules held that slaveholders could not be members of our societies.

We value the web of relationships that form us into a community. John and Charles always believed in the value and power of small groups for forming and encouraging Christians. Almost wherever we look in our congregation's life, our Methodist DNA can be detected.

As someone who was trained as an historian, I have a high regard for the power of the past. I recognize that not everyone shares that regard. When I get to talking about some incident or trend in the past I can always tell those who do not share that high regard by the glazed look in their eyes. But acknowledged or not, our Methodist DNA still functions. I believe that we can benefit in the present from knowing at least a little more about our past as a congregation, as a denomination, and as a movement within the Christian movement.

I'd like to figure out how to package that knowledge in bite-sized and tasty morsels. This knowledge will be vital to us as we make decisions about our future as a congregation and as a denomination. I can and do insert bits of it in sermons where it seems to work. I could teach classes. We do talk a little bit about it with confirmands. But it seems to me that we need more.
If you have any ideas, let's talk. In the meantime, our Methodist past isn't dead; it's not even past.

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i W. Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun.

ii G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 4.