Long Beforehand

Robert E. Hall
Tarrytown United Methodist Church

January 27, 2008

Text: Acts 17:22-28

Imagine these scenarios.

The young woman had not grown up in a religious home. She had never before stepped foot in a church except for a wedding or two. She was content with her life for the most part. Her career was on an upward trajectory. And yet she felt an emptiness, a void within. She goes buys a few books on self-help and spirituality. These only whet her appetite for more. In her work place, she meets a Christian woman who is so peaceful and loving, having a “hidden source of calm repose” in the words of Charles Wesley’s hymn (#153) like no one else she has ever known. She decides to ask her how she got to be this way. It is a first step.

A young husband and wife had both grown up in churches and had mixed feelings about their experiences. Since high school, they had both been focused on their careers and had not thought much about church or things spiritual. At their wedding in her home church, the groom finds his heart touched by the profundity of the vows: “Will you be faithful to her as long as you both shall live?” He feels that he is no longer in the preparation phase of life but he is a man now. He starts thinking about what it really means to be a man, a husband and perhaps a father. He decides to talk with his new bride about checking out some churches.

The old man had, long ago, turned his back on the church. From what he could see, preachers and the super-religious people he knew just wanted to scare people with talk of hell----and get into his pocketbook! He had, long ago, declared himself an atheist. He lands in the hospital for serious surgery. Being alone, and with his children living far away, he does not know how he will cope during his recovery. He is amazed on his first day home to be met by his neighbors with food----- and the same the next day and the next for a month, until he has regained his strength. He knows they attend a nearby church, and he is afraid they are going to preach at him, sooner or later. But they don’t. When he regains his strength, he decides one Sunday morning that he will visit his neighbors’ church. He comes to worship and they sit with him. He thinks to himself: “Maybe I have been missing something all these years.”

What’s going on here? Aren’t we in charge of our lives? Why these promptings, longings, changes of mind--- and coincidences?

John and Charles Wesley had a name for what is happening in these kinds of circumstances. It is prevenient grace. Grace is God’s unmerited favor at work in our lives; prevenient grace is God  at work in our lives, trying to get our attention, wooing us home, even and especially before we are aware of God’s hand in our lives at all.

John Wesley put it this way:

“Prevenient grace is all the drawings of the father; the desires after which, if we yield to them, increase more and more; all that ‘light’ wherewith the Son of God ‘enlighteneth everyone that cometh into the world,’ showing everyone to ‘do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with their God’ (Micah 6:8); all the ‘convictions’ which the Spirit, from time to time, works in every person---although, it is true, we generally stifle them as soon as possible….”

We are made by God, for God, to be in communion with God. God persists, though we may certainly resist.

When we baptize a child, the child may not have the slightest idea what is happening. So, is this a little wishful-thinking ceremony? “I wish this one will have God in her life.” No, it is more than wishing. Baptism is the sign and seal of God already at work in the child’s life and circumstances. It is a sign of God’s claim on him or her. The child may certainly resist God’s grace---as we all do! But God will never give up.

Paul is taken to the Areopagus in Athens, a place where philosophers and students would gather to hear and debate new ideas. They have heard Paul say something really new and they wants to know more.

They are, as Paul observes, a very religious people, as evidenced by their many idols to the various gods, even one to an “unknown god.”

Paul, faithful Hebrew that he is, could’ve jumped down their throats about their polytheism, but he does not. He says that God has made them in such a way that they naturally “seek God, in the hope that they might feel after him and find him,” for “‘in him we live and move and have our being.’”

God is at work in their lives whether they know it or not. It is this reality that John and Charles Wesley picked up on out of their Anglican tradition:  God’s seeking love is like the wind, moving where it will, prompting people to him.

What is the result of all of God’s efforts to reach us? Well, some respond and some don’t. But God has not predestined those who are going to be Christ-followers and those who are not. We are not puppets and God is not a puppet-showman. But it is God’s desire to save everyone! We can and do resist God’s leading. But when we look back in our lives, can see God’s hand at work, even before we were aware of what was happening.

Frederick Buechner says that it was a series of “accidental” events which led him to Christ. He was raised in a secular, worldly environment, a nominal Christian. Highly educated, he pursued his career in literature as an adult. But, lodged in his memory were these: a painting of Jesus; a trip to a monastery for some peace and quiet time, when a priest asked him if he would like a blessing----to which he knelt on a hard floor and the priest laid hands on him and blessed him, and then said, “You have a long way to go.” And the discovery within himself of a deep aversion to racism and cruelty to others. And the words of a teacher who asked him if he had ever considered being a preacher. (Cassette Tapes of various Buechner Lectures, available through First Presbyterian Church in San Angelo, Texas)

Can you remember such “accidents” in your life, times when God was wooing you, drawing you to himself?

Some years ago I met with a group of ministers and our first day was spent in telling about our faith journeys. After listening to each other for 4 hours, this much was obvious: God is clever and persistent! God works through our decisions and in spite of them; through welcome serendipities and terrible reversals. No one story was the same and yet God had worked to nudge each one of us to where God wanted us to be----and was still doing so.

The Holy Spirit is like the weather, which moves from high pressure to low pressure.

Into our meaninglessness with the treasure of abiding purpose in life;

From  feeling like failures to knowing we are somebody important because of God’s love shed abroad in our hearts;

From being afraid and anxious about the future to being content deep within, come what may.

God pulls and pushes us so that we might see ourselves as we really are: persons who are in bondage to sin, needful, dependent upon God, and with amazing potential. And, seeing ourselves real, we may then turn and receive the free gift of forgiveness and reconciliation in Christ Jesus. “Sinners turn, why will you die? God the Spirit asks you why; he who all your lives hath strove, wooed you to embrace his love….you, with finer sense endued, creatures capable of God.” (Hymn 346)

God doesn’t bring us home, in other words, just to leave us the way we are. God brings us home in order that we may have abundant life in Christ and in the body of Christ, to be friend-makers for Christ in the world and peace with justice activists in daily life.

The apostle Paul winds up his sermon to the curious Athenians by saying to them: “The unknown God is now known. He’s not remote, he’s near. And this God is calling for a radical life- change.” God has raised him [Jesus] from the grave, and now is the time to decide: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son [without our consent], so that everyone [including all who are feeling after him and seeking him through other gods]  everyone who believes in him will have eternal life----the life for which they were created, here and hereafter.  (Eugene Peterson’s The Message) “The arms of love that compass me would all the world embrace.” ( Charles Wesley, “Jesus the Name High Over All,” 193)

Occasionally I see bumper stickers which read, “Another Happy Methodist.” The deep joy which has been the hallmark of Wesleyan Christians through the centuries is based on grace, the action of a God who is “pure, unbounded love.” (From “Love Divine, All Love’s Excelling” by Charles Wesley.)

The late Albert Outler,  closed his lectures on Wesleyan theology by speaking of John Wesley’s focus on love.

“[Love]  is why there is so much joy in Wesley…., so much happiness in a man who had been taught from infancy to hold his emotions in check and whose temperament was remarkably cool….And yet there is [in John Wesley] this strange, insistent reality of cheerfulness and high spirits that keep breaking through his knit-browed earnestness. He was, I’ve come finally to realize, a happy man, in his own sense of “happiness:” the human affects of loving God and serving others. And this joyousness of his (and of his brother Charles even more) was infectious. It became a part of the Methodist tradition, its hymnody, its distinctive lifestyle….[W]hat a wonder it would be if we could recover such a tradition’s inner springs: viz., the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ who is the Father’s redemptive love making life holy and happy, in and by the power of the Holy Spirit in our hearts!....God has made us for himself. Our first and last end is to love him and to enjoy him forever. (Albert Outler, Theology in the Wesleyan Spirit, 1975, pages 86-87.)

I have read through all of Charles Wesley’s hymns in our hymnal. One golden thread runs through all of them, summarized in these words from hymn 339:

“Come sinners, to the gospel feast; let every soul be Jesus’ guest. Ye need not one be left behind, for God hath bid all humankind. This is the time, no more delay! This is the Lord’s accepted day. Come thou, this moment, at his call, and live for him who died for all.”
 

*(The title of this sermon is taken from hymn 341, “I Sought the Lord,” in the United Methodist Hymnal. The author is unknown.)