There is an interesting thing about us as human beings. The book of Ecclesiastes tells us there is nothing new under the sun.  And yet we find ourselves convinced, particularly in this modern world with the revolution of technology, that there is a lot of change in the world. My son and I were down at Frye’s Electronics in Phoenix the other day and anyone who is into technology knows that I’m not talking about a grocery store. We are talking about this sacred temple of technology that all those who worship it in Arizona love to go to. It was an experience a non-technical type like me. Plasma screens and new car radios that had gizmo’s and flashes on them that if one of you want to buy me, I’d love to have it.  But they are too expensive for my budget. In many ways it was a testosterone driven event. There were very few women in there. I don’t know what that says, but that was my observation.  Certainly it’s interesting to see these young people crowding that store, looking and understanding that our world is new and full of possibilities and that they are living in a time like none other. But the Bible reminds us that there really is nothing new under the sun. That those things about human nature, which are important, never change. And what that means is that God has created us with some wonderful impulses that we need to claim and follow God’s will in.  But there are also those parts of us which fall short of what God would have us do and that we constantly need to struggle to improve.

Today I want to focus a little bit about the Religious Community. The biblical witness and the evidence of 2000 years of church history shows us that there are these wonderful moments when God steps into history and breaks open God’s grace in a way that is powerful and new. People caught in those moments may find a renewed sense in God’s grace in their lives, but there is a struggle from one generation to another, against what I would refer to as “true religion”. Religion of the heart, connected with God. An institutional religion which would somehow find some rules and regulations that would allow us to keep our faith going in ways that wouldn’t become dry and boring. John Wesley who founded Methodism was quoted as saying he never worried that there would never be a people called Methodists, but he did worry it would become a dry and dead sect. He wasn’t so worried about the Methodists as an institution as he was about its movement. A movement of God’s spirit breaking forth and changing people’s lives.

Now I’m going to hit on 3 difference places before I get toward the end, and hopefully I hope we’ll know where we are headed at the end of the service. I want to first go to Ezekiel. Children of Israel were given the law; were told what it was that they needed to do.  Follow God; yet they found themselves not doing that, and ended up banished, totally banished into exile.  It was the lowest point of their life as a people of faith.  Most of them had given up hope. Has that ever happened in your life? I’d be willing to bet that all of us have had those moments when we felt banished. So removed from God it felt like there was no hope. We have this wonderful passage of scripture, in Ezekiel.  I will remind you that all the great prophets of Hebrew scripture had one thing in common. There were lots of prophets in that time of Israel. There were many who got paid well to speak a word of the Lord that was comfortable and made everybody feel good. Rarely did those prophets make it into the scripture. The vast majority of prophets, who spoke the word of the Lord that ended up in Holy Scripture, were not liked well in their day and their time. There is a misnomer that prophecy is about foretelling the future. What prophecy in the bible really does is speak of the present, and where God’s will happens to be for it. And when these prophets spoke, very often people rejected the message because it made them too uncomfortable, because they thought religion was about respectability and looking good and pious. So here we find the children of Israel at their lowest moment. Ezekiel has given us this wonderful vision. He is in a valley of dry bones; death is the symbol there. And God says, prophesize, speak my word in other words, to these dry bones. You know the song; the knee bone is connected to the thighbone, et cetera. Bones come together, muscles come on, skin comes on and new life is there, and God breathes breath and there is a multitude. From these dry bones God has brought new life. And there is a new moment of life for God’s people.

Now I’m going to skip over the gospel lesson for the moment, and I’m going to talk about John Wesley. Think a little bit about Charles Dickens a famous writer of John Wesley’s time. An England not to be proud of in its history. A time when there was a great shift from agricultural to industrial revolution. People moving in the masses from a middle age system of agriculture into an industrialized urban world. The streets were full of orphans. Of children who’s parents died. Of children who’s parents simply wanted nothing to do with them. The vast majority of people suffered the ills of that transformation in Wesley’s time. We are told that 3/4s of the people that were imprisoned during that period of time was over debt that they could not pay. As I mentioned, Wesley’s own father an Anglican priest who was jailed twice for that. So what was it about Methodism that was born out of the period of English history? The church was a powerful institution, but not a very powerful movement of God’s spirit. You inherited pulpits. It was possible for that time for a minister to have five different congregations that they inherited and drew the salaries from and to never have attended any of those churches. Well, how did they conduct services? They hired someone very cheap to read sermons. Now doesn’t that sound fun? Is it any wonder that people didn’t go to church very often? The hundred years before Wesley’s death saw battles over power and control, not over seeking God’s spirit, but who controlled what. Catholics in control killed Protestants. Protestants when they got in control killed Catholics. When the Protestants split over whether it was going to be a reformed faith or something else, then they started killing each other off too. The church had lost all moral authority because of the corruption in it. John Wesley came along and threw a deep nurturing of faith that came primarily from his mom. Susanna Wesley is to Methodists what Mary is to Catholics, a major feminism force of God’s redemptive love. Wesley one day realized that all the discipline he might have is not going to bring him to God, but accepting God’s grace into his life, understanding that he could never live up to it, gave him a conversion that transformed his life. But unlike many people who claim those kinds of conversions, Wesley also understood that if one heart had truly been converted and changed, that the world had to change around you. What we see in the disciplined life of the followers of Wesley was that they prayed diligently. They met weekly to see how one another’s hearts were. How would you all like to do that? And they went out and they transformed the world that they lived in. Because Wesley understood that purity of heart could never be what God intended if it was not combined with social holiness. Within a generation all of English society was changed because one man was able to speak the word of God in his own day and age in a way that spoke to the masses of people. Wesley was not always seen as the favored son of the established order. Every pulpit that he preached in, he got banished from because he preached too much about changing people’s lives. And that made people who weren’t interested in that very unhappy. He came back to Epenworth, the place where he had grown up, the place of his father’s own ministry and was forbidden to preach in church.  So he stood on his dad’s grave and preached to the thousands of people. And since they wouldn’t let him preach in churches, he went out in the streets where people were. He went out to Whales and waited for coal miners to come out of those dark holes and he preached to them. People gathered by the thousands to hear him preach 2 or 3 hours at a time. I thought I might preach 3 hours today to re-inact that, but I was afraid you would not be real happy about that. And he spoke of the immediate sense of God’s grace though Jesus in people’s lives. And people’s hearts and lives were transformed.

I want to go back to Luke’s gospel for just a moment. Jesus follows the pattern. Remember I told you that nothing really changes in human nature? We always want religion to be respectable and we want predictable rules to use with our head to make it work. And no matter what movement is started out to be fresh and new and open to God’s presence in the present age, they all mange to become institutional. Methodists could never be accused of that with our thick book of discipline. I’m just teasing. Jesus spoke the word of the Lord in his own day. You notice what happened. This powerful message about God’s bringing him into the world so that the deaf would hear and the blind would see and the prisoner would be set free. Do you hear the redemptive power of those words? And yet, the religious people of Jesus’ age were so incensed by what he had to say that from the very beginning of his ministry, the people who had known him best where he had grown up, pushed him to a cliff and tried to throw him off because they are so scared of what God maybe speaking in their own day.

So where are we left? We as Methodist’s are a particular brand of Christian. We celebrate the birth of our founder over 300 years ago. Let us remember that the legacy that he has left us is not in pride of an institution. But in a heartfelt conversion to God through Jesus Christ that transforms and changes us forever. And that reminds us that God’s grace is first, and that accepting that grace, we cannot sit back and hold it in for ourselves, but that we must offer it to the world. Do we live in a cynical time? Do we live in a day and age where secularism has seemed to define everything?   Is there every reason to believe that that message won’t work today? Talk to Ezekiel about dry bones. Remember Jesus and the kingdom of God, and remember about Wesley, whose open heart was warmed by the fire of God’s spirit. And know the legacy of which we have been a part, calls us anew. Dry bones can come alive, and that cold hearts can be warmed. And the people of God said Amen.