2026-Jul-19
By Reverend Martha
Genesis 28: 10-19; Psalm 139: 1-12, 23-24; Romans 8: 12-25; Matt. 13: 24-30, 36-40
Our Gospel reading today from Matthew chapter 13 shows a major shift in how Jesus is presenting his message. He began his ministry by going to the synagogues and preaching to the people there, using the sacred texts of the Torah. But from here on in Matthew’s gospel he is no longer in the synagogues. Instead, we see him preaching in people’s homes, on the lakeshore, in fields and on mountainsides. Why?
One reason is the growing animosity that the Jewish religious leaders, the scribes and Pharisees, were developing towards Jesus. They saw his teachings as radical, dangerous and heretical. Instead of listening to his message, they watched him suspiciously to sift every word in order to find a charge against him. Even though the common people were eager to hear him, the hostility of the religious leaders made going to synagogues uncomfortable.
Another reason is his growing popularity with the common people, who flocked to hear him not just for his teaching but for his healings. Great crowds would fill the house where he was staying—Luke tells the story of the men who brought their paralyzed friend to him for healing, and had to remove tiles from the roof so they could lower the man’s bed down to where Jesus was! The crowds became so great that he had to move outside. Last week we heard about how he had to get into a boat so that he could be seen and heard by the crowds on the lakeshore. He went to where the people were, not to a building where the leaders thought that they “should” be.
One leading Christian figure that followed Jesus’ way of teaching was John Wesley, who lived from 1703 to 1791. Britain was going through great social and religious turmoil at that time. They had suffered through the Civil War between the royalists and the “Roundheads” or Puritans, ending with the execution of King Charles I. That was followed by the puritanical Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell, which ended with Cromwell’s death & the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The Anglican Church was also then restored to prominence. But it tended to be dogmatic and rigid in its presentation of religion. Socially, the Industrial Revolution was changing the nature of society and causing great social unrest and riots.
John Wesley and his younger brother Charles were raised in a strict Anglican parsonage, and had many eminent clergymen and scholars in their family tree. They were both ordained as Anglican priests, but John was primarily a theologian who taught at Oxford University. He tried ministry in Georgia (then still a colony of England) but saw himself as a failure, unworthy of God’s love, and became depressed. On his return to England, he became involved with the Moravian church, which led to his “religious conversion” in 1738 in a church in Aldersgate St. While listening to Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to the Romans being read out, he felt his heart “strangely warmed….I felt trust in Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance..that he had taken away my sins”. This was the first time he had felt a personal experience of God, as opposed to a merely intellectual belief. This Aldersgate Experience changed his life.
He began preaching heartfelt sermons based on his new convictions, but soon ran afoul of the religious leaders, much like Jesus had 1700 years before. He found that most parish churches were closed to him because he was not following the orthodox line. His good friend George Whitefield was also excluded from the churches of Bristol, so took to preaching outside in fields and streets. John also began to preach outside, and found himself attracting huge and enthusiastic crowds. Because of his traditional upbringing he worried that holding a service outside a church was contrary to “decency and order”, but soon recognized that open-air services were successful in reaching men and women who would not enter most churches. He went on to do so for the next 50 years! So you see that having outdoor services is well-founded in church tradition.
John was responsible for many positive social changes in how church functioned. Thousands of people came to his preaching, but needed follow-up, so he and Charles founded a network of support groups to sustain the revival and conversion of so many people. Because there were too few ordained priests following them, they used ordinary people, women as well as men, to lead the groups and to preach. This use of unordained leaders, and of women leaders, was a major bone of contention with the established church and heightened the hostility and exclusion from the Anglican church.
John reluctantly developed an alternative church structure, by developing chapels, forming conferences, and ordaining his own ministers. This developed into the Methodist Church, which became very popular in England and elsewhere. We don’t hear much about them today because the Methodist church in Canada joined with the Congregationalists & some Presbyterians in 1925 to form the United Church.
His brother Charles was also preaching and forming church communities, but his main occupation was writing hymns. In the course of his lifetime he wrote over 6,000 hymns, including such favourites as Hark the Herald Angels Sing, O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing, Christ the Lord is Risen Today, Love Divine all Loves Excelling, Rejoice the Lord is King, and many others.
There is so much more I could say about the Wesley brothers, but the point I want to make today is this: Both they, and Jesus, were called to minister during a time of great social upheaval and unrest. The established religion of the time was not answering the needs of the people, who needed to hear a message of hope and love, that God would protect and provide for them in their adversity, not punish them further. Both they and Jesus incurred the hostility of the religious leaders who saw them as a threat to the established way of doing things. Because Jesus was barred from the synagogues, and the Wesleys were barred from the parish churches, they turned to preaching outside, in people’s homes, in fields and lakeshores and mountainsides. And so they attracted many people who would otherwise not hear their message.
Both Jesus and the Wesleys made use of the people who followed them, whether they were ordained and educated or not. Both of them recognized the gifts of women and used them as preachers and teachers, despite the misogyny and resistance of the established religion. Because they were barred from conventional places of worship, they and their followers ended up forming a new church, and touching the hearts of so many people.
Today, we are going through a period of great social and religious change as well. How are we going to respond to it? While our climate is not conducive to meeting outside for much of the year, we can bring church to where people are—some congregations have services in pubs or restaurants, or peoples’ homes. Our church is making much more use of unordained lay people, and women, to lead services. With the shortage of priests, many parishes are holding more Morning Prayer services & fewer Eucharists. Morning Prayer is still an important way to meet and experience God’s presence, and Eucharist is appreciated much more for being less frequent.
So the church is changing, as it has done so many times over the years, and we must be flexible and change with it. We can move forward confident that the Holy Spirit is there to guide and support us, and that God is leading us in the way we are to go, unfamiliar as that may be. As the psalm says, “If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand will hold me fast”. Thanks be to God!
Amen.