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General Synod: Prof Young's sermon at the General Synod Eucharist

15 November 2005

The Spirit you have received is not a spirit of slavery, leading you back into a life of fear, but a Spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry ‘Abba! Father!’ (Romans 8.15)

Unashamedly, given the Anglican-Methodist Covenant, I begin with John Wesley and one of his favourite texts (a few verses before our reading from Romans 8). Time and again Wesley contrasted the obedience of a servant and the obedience of a son - the joy with which a loving son does what his father asks, and the sense of duty and burden, indeed the slavish fear and the spirit of bondage, characteristic of a servant. Maybe the law is holy and just and good, he would say – it does after all alert us to our sin; but then it brings us into captivity, obliging us (as we might put it) to live with the stress of too many ‘oughts’. So who shall deliver us from this bondage? Why the grace of God, through Jesus Christ! The happy state of one who has found grace, or favour in God’s sight, Wesley would say, comes from the spirit of adoption whereby we cry ‘Abba! Father!’ This ends the guilt and power of sin, the bondage to fear. For where the Spirit of God is there is liberty, and the Spirit sheds the love of God abroad in our hearts, generating love for all humankind. You are called, Wesley would affirm, not to fear and tremble but to rejoice and love, like the angels of God.

Yes – Anglicans of the 18th century charged Wesley with ‘enthusiasm’ and misconstrued his doctrine of Christian perfection. It was after all only another way of insisting that genuine love, appropriate to human creatureliness and to a person’s level of maturity, is God’s promise and God’s gift, if only we can open ourselves to receive it. John Wesley knew, as we do, that the whole creation groans and travails in the pains of childbirth: the world, indeed the Church, is in a penultimate state, a state of hope, a time of expectant waiting. Yet for Wesley the first-fruits of the Spirit are available, and those fruits, as Paul says elsewhere, are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. The practical outworking of this in changed lives was, and is, the best proof that the Spirit is at work – and Wesley himself confronted perfectionists and bigots alike, charging them with self-deception and with making claims inconsistent with the Spirit of love shed abroad in our hearts through Jesus Christ.

Now the notion is surely mistaken that Wesley’s struggles belong to an entirely different world. Presumption is the persistent temptation of religious people. Legalism of all kinds can still undermine freedom and joy. Bigotry can still produce divisiveness, and of course it is always our opponents who are the bigots! The fault-lines that arise from differing reactions to modernity or post-modernity now run through rather than between denominations. So maybe that controversial but lifelong Anglican priest, John Wesley, might have some helpful pointers for Anglican Synod and Methodist Conference alike. A couple of suggestions:

  1. Institutions need proper management, but they head for sterility if they lose sight of their core values. I know from experience how easy it is for governing bodies to become legalistic in mentality, preoccupied with minutiae, bureaucratic in operation, joyless and humourless, even when not riven down the middle over matters of principle. Yes, of course, the job of the Church’s Parliament is to make laws and get things right. Too many people seem to imagine that institutionalisation is negative – something to be resisted – when in fact creating ordered conditions, within which human societies of all sorts can flourish, is an essential and indispensable vocation. Freedom is not anarchy. On the other hand, John Wesley was surely right to focus on the difference between a spirit of bondage and the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry ‘Abba! Father!’ The spirit in which we operate is core to our identity, and if it is violated, we will bring judgment on ourselves. In our ecclesiastical ‘Parliaments’ (Synod and Conference) debates are inevitable, but there is a world of difference between debates conducted in a spirit of malice and debates coloured by the fruits of God’s Spirit, where differences are respected, where there is an underlying faithfulness to one another, and people do not think of themselves more highly than they ought to think. Covenant is less about rules and more about relationships, says the Joint Implementation Committee; yet rules and laws enable covenant to work. Constraints may be necessary, but they should provide the context for joyful response and loving action.  And the second suggestion:
  2. The present needs to be put into perspective - by reference to the future and awareness of the past. Otherwise we take our selves and our generation far too seriously. Romans 8 makes it quite clear that the End is not yet, that even those who have the Spirit of adoption still await their redemption, and that hope means waiting patiently for what we don’t yet have. It even suggests that we don’t know what we ought to pray for, while the words of Jesus in John’s Gospel point to a future when the Spirit will guide into all truth. Dare we imagine we already have all the truth, or that our decisions (in Conference or Synod) can set the world, or the Church, to rights? Yes – John Wesley did plead that we take seriously God’s promises of transformation, that we should not be complacent about the sin within, among and around us – but he also recognised that God has yet more riches to reveal. The Joint Implementation Committee reminds us that covenant living involves dynamic tension: joy at what already is will be balanced by love - longing for what is yet to be. We have to live with a ‘now but not yet’ provisionality. For we live between the times, between Pentecost and the consummation. The issues that we struggle with will pass, or at least lose their intensity, and other issues will emerge, as has happened throughout history, but God’s Spirit is at work, in all our little deaths and resurrections, until the end of time. For

The Spirit [we] have received is not a spirit of slavery, leading [us] back into a life of fear, but a Spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry ‘Abba! Father!’ Amen