Praying Parents, Peacemaking and Perseverance | Rev. Adam Hamilton | Church of the Resurrection

14:33 where they grew in faith as young people. We don't know when the first building was built here, maybe as early as the 600s or 700s. But this building was built, the foundations of the nave were built in the 1100s. It was refurbished in the 1300s, maybe after a fire again in the 1400s, but largely it looks as it did in Charles Wesley's day and John Wesley's day and in Samuel and Susanna Wesley's day. So we're going to go inside. We're going to reflect upon the role that John Wesley and Methodist played in trying to heal a polarized society. And we're going to remember our baptisms. Let's go inside.

15:03 As you can see, we can also put it on the wall to see the path of becket there. This is to remiss to other people's events. This is to find you on the individual's website. This is to find you on the local website. This is to find you on the website. we're inside the beautiful St. Andrew church where John and Charles were baptized where they took their first communion but I just want to focus on one thing and that has to do with the polarization in England at the time and the polarization in America today so in the 54 years leading up to John Wesley's birth so I think about that I'm 61 so 54 years I was seven so if you think of the 54 years leading up to John Wesley's birth, you found great political polarization in England. There were two civil wars in England during that period of time. There was one monarch, Charles I, who was beheaded publicly at the command of parliament. You had the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell, and then you had Charles II restored as king. And then following that, you had James II, who was the rightful heir, but at the same time, he was a Catholic.

16:26 And how could a Catholic be the leader of the Church of England? And so he was forced to abdicate, and you had William and Mary came to power. There were great divisions among the people about whether James II should have been king or William and Mary should have been king and queen. And so a lot of divisions, those divisions were manifest in every community. They were manifest between the Tories and the Whigs. Those were like the Republicans and Democrats of that time. A lot of deep divisions, even between Susanna and Samuel Wesley. So there came a point where Samuel Wesley was praying for William and Mary, and Susanna thought that James was the rightful king, and so she refused to say amen at the end of the prayer. And he got upset about that, and they ended up sleeping in separate beds for quite a long time over the divisions in their politics. And we live in a time where we're hyper-polarized, but so far we haven't beheaded any of our presidents. We haven't banned the presidency. And generally speaking, most of us sleep in the same bed with our spouses, even if we disagree on politics.

17:20 So it's interesting just how polarized society was at that time when John Wesley was born. And in the years as he was growing up, how polarized things were. Now, it was not just a political polarization, but it was also a religious polarization, a religious division. So you had the Puritans, including among those were the Calvinists, you had Presbyterians, you had Baptists, you had people who insisted on baptizing adults and people who continue to baptize infants. You had the Church of England and you had the Roman Catholic Church and you had Methodists out there wandering around who were a part of the Church of England. deep divisions religiously. And in those divisions, people feeling like I can't actually fellowship with you. I'm not even sure you're a real Christian or not. And what was interesting in all of this is that John Wesley himself ended up being a bridge builder. We asked our congregation some years ago, we asked Resurrection, you know, what is our character as a church? What is our DNA? And there were four things that rose to the top.

18:15 One of those was that we were a bridge building congregation. And every two years during the election campaign, we end up running a campaign, our own sort of political campaign, which is a kindness campaign in which we invite people to love your neighbors, or we invite people to be just, be kind, be humble, or to do unto others. And so we emphasize that throughout the city. We have, you know, this is just who we are because we are a bridge-building congregation. It doesn't mean that we don't think that there is truth, you know, over here or over here. It's just that we think oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes the truth is found in both sides of the deep divisions, that if we can listen just a little bit better, we can hear a little bit more, we can say, I don't agree with you on this, but I do think you might have some truth over here and you might have some truth over here and we're actually stronger for it when we can listen and try to build bridges. That's a part of who we are at Church of the Resurrection, but that comes from our Methodist DNA. So John Wesley had grandparents who were dissenters from the Church of England. They were ejected from their pulpits because they refused to embrace the Book of Common Prayer.

19:10 They were sort of low church people. And then Susanna and Samuel rebelled against their parents by becoming members of the Church of England again. and they conformed and embraced the Book of Common Prayer. And so they were a little more high church in their approach. And John Wesley grew up knowing that his grandparents had been famous dissenters and his parents were conformist in the Church of England. And I think he just inherently knew, you know, there's truth on both those sides. So, you know, Wesley embraced the Church of England and the Book of Common Prayer, but he had preaching houses where it was low church worship when people gathered together. And he said, both of these are good. They're both important. And when it came to politics, He knew his mom and dad were divided with each other. And he said, you know what? Maybe we shouldn't be focused on those divisions. Maybe we can focus on where we agree. And that became just a part of the spirit of Methodism. It's who we are as United Methodists. It's who we are at Church of the Resurrection. I think about John Wesley's notes on the New Testament. And he says this in the preface to them.

20:05 He says, would to God that all the party names and unscriptural phrases and forms which have divided the Christian world were forgot. And that we might all agree to sit down together as humble, loving disciples at the feet of our common master to hear his word, to imbibe his spirit, and to transcribe his life in our own. What if we stopped focusing on the things that we disagree about, and we started focusing on all the things we agree about? How would the world be different there? He preached a very famous sermon called Catholic Spirit. And the word Catholic means universal. It means, it's an adjective, it means everywhere. And so there are Roman Catholics, but there are Protestant Catholics. That is, we're all part of the body of Christ, the one church. And so in the sermon on the Catholic Spirit, he talked about the importance of, you know, looking beyond the divisions that we have and instead looking at each other's hearts. If your heart is as my heart, if we're both trying to follow Jesus, we can disagree about whether you baptize babies or not. We can disagree about how often you have communion and whether you dip your bread in the cup or whether you drink from the common chalice.

21:02 We can disagree about a lot of things. There's a whole lot of things that are central to our faith, captured in the creeds and the historic essentials of the faith, but there's a whole lot of things that we get divided over that we don't have to divide over. Though the polarization was intense, Wesley found himself as a navigator of what was called the Via Media, the middle way in Latin. And this was true of Anglicans. They had historically been a part of the Via Media, but Methodists really embraced that once more and said, we can bring people together across divisions and we can care for one another, love one another, and be the body of Christ, which is why Methodism has been known as a church of the both and not the either or. So we are both liberal and conservative. People ask me, I can't figure you out. are you liberal or conservative? And my answer is yes, of course. And they're like, no, which are you? And I'm like, do I have to pick because those are both good ideas? I've shared this with you at Resurrection before. To be liberal means to be generous of spirit. It means to be open to reform and seeing things in new ways you hadn't seen before.

21:55 That's really important. If you're not liberal, you're stuck. But you also have to be moored to something, right? To be conservative means you conserve traditions and ideas that are really important. And so at our best, we're liberal conservatives and conservative liberals. We are both high church and low church. We are people who embrace modern worship styles and traditional worship styles. And in so many ways, you know, we hold together grace and holiness. I mean, just so many ways that we are a church of the both and. And that's part of why I'm a United Methodist. And part of why I hope we can be, continue to be as a congregation, a bridge building church in the midst of politically polarized times. We can deeply disagree about political issues. We should, we can. But we can do that in a way that remembers that the most important commandment Jesus gave after loving God is to love your neighbor as you love yourself. And he even said, not only your neighbor, you got to love your enemy. And if you can't do that, you might've missed the point, which is where we are in our society today and why churches like ours are so important, that we bring people together instead of polarizing and dividing them. All right. So I want to end this section inside the church. We're going to, so the young people who are here, we're going to remember our baptisms in the baptismal font where John and Charles Wesley were both baptized, the very font where they were baptized. And this font became the model or the pattern for our baptismal font at the Resurrection of Leawood Sanctuary. So it looks a little different because ours is bigger and because the room's bigger. But what we're going to do is we're going to invite the young people who are here, and I'm going to have you dip your finger in the water and remember your baptism. And I just want you to be able to walk away, step aside, and just say, I'm yours, Lord. Wash me clean and make me new. I belong to you.

23:37 So we've come to the outside of the St. Andrew's Church, and this is in most of the British churches, English churches, and really in the United States, the churches in the early part of our country, cemeteries were built right outside them. And there are beautiful old graves here that go back at least to the 1600s. And here we stand next to Samuel Wesley's grave, John Wesley's father's grave right here. And there's a wonderful story that takes place in 1742. So John Wesley's come back to Epworth, his hometown. His father pastored this church for 39 years. John Wesley grew up in the church.

24:28 And now John Wesley is becoming a sort of famous, he's a preacher, he's an evangelist. but there's a lot of people who aren't sure how they feel about John Wesley, especially the priests in churches like this, that someone's coming and meddling in their town. John Wesley's coming and saying, you know, are you really a Christian? Are you serious about your faith? Are you just pretending? And, you know, that was offensive to many of the people who were Christians or thought they were Christians, and it was offensive to the priests. Are you saying I'm not doing my job? I'm not doing what I should be doing. Why would we need you to come in here? And they were very territorial. This is my parish. This is my parish. It's not your parish. and John Wesley was very famous for having said, the world is my parish. For us as Christians, wherever we are, we're meant to live out our faith. And so he was willing to break the rules. And so he came here and when he wasn't invited to preach and there were lots of people in the town who wanted to hear their favorite son, this young man, even if they weren't sure what they thought of his theology, they kind of wanted to hear him, but their pastor wouldn't let him preach in the church that his dad had led so long.

25:26 So John Wesley came outside here and he stood on his father's grave. It's such an interesting metaphor. Like, I'm standing in my father's grade not to dishonor my father, but to honor my father and to stand on the foundation that he laid for this church. And there's a very famous, several famous portraits, or not portraits, but paintings and etchings of this scene where he's standing here, and there's hundreds of people standing all around while he's preaching the good news to them and inviting them to decide to become altogether Christians, to be serious and committed followers of Jesus Christ. And what that points to for me is a couple of things. First of all, it points to the fact that Wesley was willing to do whatever it takes to proclaim the gospel, to help people find Christ. And this idea of whatever it takes is really important. So as I'm speaking to our young people here, part of this is about mentoring you to be our leaders for the future. You're leaders now, but to continue to be leaders in the church. And one thing that's been just critical for Church of the Resurrection in its 35 years is we started off saying, we're gonna do whatever it takes to be the church for people.

26:25 And there's a lot of churches who would say, I'm not really sure we can do whatever it takes. And that's okay. but we just said, we're gonna do whatever it takes. I'm gonna do whatever it takes as a pastor, as lay people, as staff, we're gonna do whatever it takes. I remember when we started Matthew's ministry and when the joiners came to visit our church and they had a little boy with special needs and I went to deliver a coffee mug to their doorstep and I remember it was snowing. There was like, I don't know, maybe eight or 10 inches of snow on the ground. Now that may be a pastoral memory. It could be five inches, I don't remember. I do remember I wrecked my car that day driving to deliver coffee mugs and I got to the joiner's house and I said, you know, we're so glad you came to worship with us. We were meeting in an elementary school gym at the time. We had 150 people. I said, we're so glad you worshiped with us. We really hope you come back. Here's a coffee mug as a sign of our welcome and I remember Ann Joyner saying to me, we don't really think you could probably be our church. We like the service today in the school gym but we're not really sure you can be our church. Like, why?

27:18 And she said, well, come on in and she introduced me to her son, Matthew who had severe disabilities and she said, Matthew needs one-on-one care during Sunday school and during worship and you're a small church. We couldn't expect that of you. And so, but thank you for coming to visit today. And I'm like, Ann, we'll do whatever it takes to be your church family. I promise you the people at Resurrection are the kind of people who would do whatever it takes to welcome and love your son and to love you. And I said, if you'll tell me what he needs in two weeks, we'll have the ministry started. And I, you know, Resurrection folks, you've heard this story many times, but I went back to the elementary school gym the next Sunday. And I said, okay, we had a family visit and they have a special needs son. and he's gonna need one-on-one care during Sunday school and one-on-one care during worship. And there's four Sundays a month. Let's just say five, some Sundays, some months. So we're gonna need 10 volunteers to work with, you know, say I'll give an hour a month to work with this young man and we're gonna welcome that family into the church.

28:10 And I told him, you're the kind of people who would do whatever it takes to welcome them. So I just need to see a show of hands, which of you will sign up right now? And at first people kind of sat on their hands, you know, and I just stood there. Don't make me out to be a liar now, come on. And pretty soon a hand went up. And then another hand went up. And pretty soon we didn't have 10 people. We had 25 people who signed up to serve in this ministry. And that's been characteristic of this church all along. And if resurrection is going to have a future, you know, way ahead of us, decades, generations from now, it's going to be because people remember to do whatever it takes. Now, there's limits to that, of course. There are certain places where we go, okay, that just, there's no way we can do that. But most churches say there's no way we can do that when it's here. And what we found at resurrection is, you know, you can do a lot more than you think. And I found that when there was something God called us to do, something God was calling me to do or other people to do, there were times I thought, okay, that sounds too hard.

29:04 I'm not sure we can do it. And we'd come up with 10 reasons, excuses for why we wouldn't do it. And we go, wait a minute, I think we can try this. And every time we tried to do the hard thing that we didn't think we could do at first, God just blew things wide open. It's like, and so we became the church that would do it, whatever it takes. And I just want to ask you, when God calls you to do something, are you willing to do whatever it takes? Are you willing to say, okay, God, if you're calling me, then I know you're gonna equip me and you're gonna help me to be able to do it. And I wanna encourage you who are our current leaders, but also our future leaders. When you face something that God is calling the church to do or calling us to be, to be the kind of people who say, we'll do whatever it takes. And I've shared this before, but a leadership principle that I have lived by and resurrection has lived by, and I've taught it to pastors across the country. We call her, I call it discernment by nausea. And discernment by nausea says that when there's a fork in the road, there's a decision that has to be made.

29:57 And one decision seems safe and easy and the other decision seems hard and difficult. Which of those two paths do you think is the Jesus path? Almost always it's the hard path. And what I know is there's a whole lot of people, a whole lot of Christians and a whole lot of churches who just thought it's just too hard and they took the path less traveled or the path more traveled by. And Robert Frost talked about this in his poem, right? I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. And so I can think about that. When Wesley comes out here, it would have been easy for him to say, oh, okay, well, the pastor doesn't want me to preach here and I need to go somewhere else. But he said, no, I can't. I felt God called me to come here today and I'm gonna preach even though I might get in trouble for it. And there are people who come to faith in Christ. And so I wanna encourage us to be the kind of church that continues to do whatever it takes to be the church for people who don't have a church, for people who don't know Christ and to serve the community in ways that may be hard or difficult.

30:50 And churches that do that, they have a great future. They have a future filled with hope. All right, so I wanna mention one last thing. And by the way, one thing I learned, I've shared this at church before too, but I learned this like my third year in ministry. Somebody said, you should take the Franklin Time Management course because you clearly don't manage your time very well. And you know what? I did take the course and I don't remember anything from it. I didn't practice any of it. I stopped doing the, you know, make your high priorities for the day. I don't do any of that stuff. And I would be a much more effective pastor if I did. But here's the one thing I remember from that course is they said the successful person is willing to do the things an unsuccessful person is not willing to do. I mean, how simple is that, right? It doesn't matter what field you're in. The successful pastor, the successful church, the successful lawyer or business person or student is willing to do the things an unsuccessful one is not willing to do. And by that, we don't mean doing immoral things. We mean to work a little harder, to make a little more of a sacrifice, in order to do the thing that you know God is calling you to do.

31:49 And I think that explains, in my mind, that's part of what has happened at Resurrection, is there's a whole lot of people, our staff and our lay people who've just said, we're gonna do the things maybe other churches wouldn't be willing to do. I remember we deliver coffee mugs to our first-time visitors every Sunday. And early on, we were seeing, I would see, I did it all myself, and then we now have teams of people. But I remember a young pastor came to me and he said, how has the church grown so fast? I wanna learn everything I can from you so that I can go out and do the same thing. I'm like, that's so cool, that's awesome. I said, let me just tell you one of the five things that I know are important. Love that.

32:25 One of the five things that are important, and I said, that is following up on every first-time visitor on Sunday afternoon. So they visit Sunday morning, get their name and address, go by and see them and deliver a coffee mug and just say, we're so glad you came. We hope you come back again. You don't have to say, are you saved? Do you know Jesus is your personal Lord and Savior? Just go and deliver a coffee mug and say, we're really glad you came. We hope you come back again next Sunday. And he looked at me and said, oh, yeah, I don't think I could do that. And I'm like, okay, well, that's all right. You asked me what it took to do this, and that's what it took to do this, is every Sunday afternoon to go out and knock on people's doors. And I knew he was nervous about meeting new people, and I knew he was like, I don't know if I have the time to do that. And what I found is I was nervous about meeting them too. Sometimes when I first started doing it, I would pray, Lord, please help them not be home when I get there. You know, and I can leave the coffee and I get their door with a note. But what I found is that personal connection made a difference, doing whatever it takes.

33:20 Okay, here's the last piece that I wanted us to hear. And that is perseverance in faith. So Samuel Wesley is buried here, but in the grounds where you're standing, where our young people and teenagers are standing, There are a lot of unmarked graves you can't see. The tombstones have, nature has just slowly eroded them. And among the people who are buried here are six of Susanna Wesley and Sam Wesley's children. They had 19 children. And of those 19 children, nine of them died in infancy. And a lot of tragedy, a lot of sadness. And you know, a lot of times when we experience sadness or tragedy, we blame God. we sometimes we have this idea that God's supposed to protect us from anything bad ever happening. And as though God is pushing every button and pulling every lever, and maybe God made this happen. And, you know, but as United Methodists, we tend to say God doesn't kill babies. He doesn't give people illnesses, but that's a part of life, part of what happens. And in the 18th century, babies died much more frequently than they do today. But Suzanne and Sam Wesley didn't turn away from God in the midst of the tragedy. They turned towards God. And that wasn't the only tragedy. I mean, that was the biggest one, but the loss of all those children over those years.

34:31 But Samuel Wesley ended up in a debtor's prison for four months. Their house was burned down, or once burned down, once partially burned, twice, right? And at least one of those times, it was a parishioner who lit the house on fire, right? At least at resurrection. I get nasty emails sometimes if nobody's trying to light my house on fire yet. There was opposition. And you think about John Wesley when he was preaching. They were tossing rotten tomatoes at him and rocks and they're, you know, pouring manure on his head sometimes, snuck up behind him and poured manure on his head when he's preaching out of doors. And the thing is, it would have been so easy for him to give up and for him to say, you know what, this is too hard. And where's God in the middle of this? But instead he thought, well, Jesus died on a cross. What is it for me to get some manure tossed on me? Right? And there's terrible tragedies that happen. And I don't believe that's God's will. And I don't believe it's what God wanted to have happen, but it happens. And I'm going to turn to him and ask him to force something good and beautiful to come from the pain, right?

35:25 And that's part of what I wanna encourage you to do, all of you, because you're gonna face suffering in your life. There's gonna be hard times and difficulties and rejection and people are gonna say mean things about you. And sometimes there's gonna be, you know, somebody you deeply love who dies in a tragic act. There's just a lot of things that will happen. And the question is, do you really have in your mind that God is putting a protective bubble around everybody who believes in him and nothing bad will happen? How can that be the gospel when Jesus was tortured to death at the age of 33? so instead the gospel is that even in the midst of the hardest and most painful and terrible things we turn to God and God is able as Paul says in Romans 8 28 God is able to force all things to work together for good for those who love him and are called according to his purpose and that's what happened in Wesley's life in an early Methodism and it's what still happens in our lives today and so the question is do we persevere in the faith or do we turn away from God and I want to encourage us today as we wrap up this message to be the kind of people who turn towards God in the midst of tragedy, who find in him our comfort, our strength, and our hope, and who say, God, take even this. I know you didn't cause it, but take this and force something good and beautiful to come from the pain. And he will, and he does. And those are the lessons I think we take from our time here in Epworth today. And so I'd like for us to pray together if you'd bow with me in prayer. Lord, how grateful we are to you for the work that you did in the 18th century through John Wesley, thanks to his mother, Susanna Wesley, and his father, Sam, for the work you did through Charles Wesley and the great hymns that were written by him and the 18th century evangelical awakening or revival that transformed not only the British Isles, but across the sea in America and set the soul of a nation on a different trajectory.

37:07 And we pray that today as modern day Methodists, that you might rekindle the flames in our own hearts, that we might be people who are deeply devoted to you, who turn towards you and not away from you. People who are bridge builders in the midst of conflict and challenges and polarization and people who like Susanna pour into our children, our own children and grandchildren, our nieces and nephews and others, that they might know you and your love. So we offer ourselves to you today. We thank you for everything in Jesus' name.