Episodes
Sunday May 12, 2013
Our burning hearts
Sunday May 12, 2013
Sunday May 12, 2013
Rev. Dean Snyder Luke 24:13-35
The story about two disciples on the road to Emmaus is a story about disappointment. It is a story for the times in our lives when we are experiencing disappointment and defeat.
A romance that had swept us off of our feet begins to go sour. A marriage doesn’t seem to be working anymore. A career we’ve invested years preparing for turns out to be about fund raising rather than changing the world. The God we’d prayed to and trusted lets us down. The justice we had worked for is defeated. The list goes on and on.
Two of Jesus’ disciples were walking on the road from Jerusalem to the little town of Emmaus on the first Easter Sunday afternoon brooding and depressed about their disappointment. They had invested three years of their lives following Jesus whom they had believed would bring the Kingdom of God to Israel.
They expected Jesus to overturn the Roman occupation army who treated the people of Israel unjustly – high taxes, no services, no jobs, no freedom.
But instead Jesus had been executed on Friday. The whole Jesus-movement had collapsed and people had begun to get strange starting rumors that Jesus had risen from the dead.
So these two particular disciples had decided to get out of town … to take a hike … to leave Jerusalem behind, take a walk to the nowhere town of Emmaus where nothing ever happens to wallow in their disappointment and lick their wounds.
It turned out to be a more eventful walk than they’d expected. A stranger joins them on the walk. It turns out the stranger was Jesus but they did not recognize him. The stranger told them a story about human history beginning from Moses that showed how Jesus’ crucifixion would help bring the Kingdom of God not only to Israel but to all creation … not only to the Israelites but to all humanity.
Later, after Jesus had vanished and they could no longer see him, the two disciples said to each other … "Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?" (Luke 24:32)
Didn’t our hearts burn within us?
On their walk to Emmaus the disciples went from broken hearts to burning hearts. Can that happen for us when our hearts are broken? Can we go from empty hollow defeated broken hearts to burning hearts?
I want to talk for a few minutes this morning about the beginnings of the Methodist movement of which this church is a part. We are Foundry United Methodist Church.
Methodism had its birth in John Wesley’s broken heart.
John Wesley was a priest in the Church of England in the early 1700s. He was born in 1703. He wanted to do something special for God. He did not want to be an ordinary minister preaching and baptizing and burying. He was driven to do something special for God with his life.
So when he graduated with his divinity degree he volunteered to go to America, to the colony of Georgia, determined to be a missionary to the American Indians. When he got to Georgia instead of being assigned to be a missionary to the Indians, he was made the pastor of a small Anglican Church on Saint Simons Island off the coast of Georgia, where there were no Indians.
In the church on saint Simons Island there was a young woman John Wesley had met on the ship to American. Her name was Sophia Hopkey. He fell in love with her proposed and then changed his mind, then changed his mind again, and then changed his mind again. . Sophia, having realized that John might have some issues, married someone else.
John Wesley, who had apparently changed his mind again, felt jilted and betrayed by Sophia because she had married someone else. So he banned her from the Communion Table. He refused to serve her Communion.
Sophia’s husband sued John Wesley. The trial ended in a mistrial but Wesley’s romantic misadventures had created so much conflict in Georgia that the governor petitioned the bishop to move Wesley back to England as far away from Georgia as soon as possible.
So John Wesley returned to London, his reputation ruin, the punch line of jokes.
My favorite biography of John Wesley is by Roy Hattersley. He is a British labor politician and a journalist in England and he seems to be able to more direct about John Wesley’s romantic and emotional struggles than most Methodist biographers.
Hattersely says that after the Georgia fiasco John Wesley experienced what we would call a nervous breakdown today. The journal shows that he was disappointed, defeated, humiliated and depressed.
It was during this time in his life he happened to attend a little German Moravian Chapel on Aldersgate Street in London. He went because he was so unhappy he was willing to try anything. The chapel had no minister so instead of a sermon someone was reading a passage from Martin Luther’s Commentary on the Book of Romans, which deals with sin and grace.
This is what he wrote about his experience at Aldersgate Chapel that night:
In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther's preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while the leader was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
That was May 24, 1738. John Wesley, defeated and disappointed, felt his heart strangely warmed. May 24th is considered the birthday of Methodism … the day Methodism began. The day John Wesley’s heart burned within him. The day John Wesley had his Emmaus Road experience and was resurrected.
Most of what God does in the world God does through defeated and discouraged people who have come to the end of their agendas and so they become open to God’s agenda. That is the most important thing I will say today so let me repeat it.
Most of what God does in the world God does through defeated and discouraged people who have come to the end of their agendas and so they become open to God’s agenda.
The two defeated and discouraged disciples on the Road to Emmaus said to each other, "’Were not our hearts burning within us while he was talking to us on the road, while he was opening the scriptures to us?’ That same hour they got up and returned to Jerusalem.”
John Wesley, defeated and discouraged, after his heart was strangely warmed began field preaching to the coal miners of England … a form of ministry considered so unsavory and tacky it was done only by Presbyterians and Quakers.
He wrote in his journal: “At four in the afternoon, I submitted to be more vile, and proclaimed in the highways the glad tidings of salvation, speaking from a little eminence in a ground adjoining to the city, to about three thousand people.”
Some say Methodism was born the day John Wesley’s heart was strangely warmed. Others say Methodism was born the day John Wesley decided to do something he considered vile and tacky … to preach in a field to the poor people of England who were not welcome in the churches.
The two go together. The disciples burning hearts would have not changed history had they not gotten up and returned to Jerusalem. John Wesley’s strangely warmed heart would not have changed history had not John Wesley decided to preach to the poorest of poor in England.
Actually there are four things that go together. Discouragement when our agendas in life fail. A story that God keeps trying to tell us about how justice and inclusion emerges out of our defeat. Hearts that refuse to dies. And the new thing that often feels vile and beneath us that God calls us to do.
When you are discouraged and defeated and on your road to Emmaus, it just may be the beginning of the great adventure of your life. Listen to your heart.
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