Amongst the gifts of God's grace in my life is a reluctance to limit that same grace as it flows and overflows in the life of our world and the church. Pentecost Sunday is less than a week away when we celebrate the coming of the Spirit whose first demonstration of that overflowing grace was the sight and sound of people talking about the death of Jesus, and the resurrection of the One they'd come to believe is the Son of God. And they heard them in their own language, an ad hoc sacrament of inclusion. During my entire life as a Christian, a commitment I made nearly 50 years ago, I have revelled in the diversity, variety, difference and imaginative inventiveness of a Gospel that takes human lives and fills them with the love of God.
I am an evangelical Christian who is a catholic Christian whose theology is informed and formed in respectful and attentive dialogue with the Christian tradition, as that tradition reaches out to us across the centuries and across all those cultural and denominational and theological differences. The first Christian thinker I seriously engaged was the Reformed Louis Berkhof, whose systematic theology was to a young Christian like stirring porridge with a plastic spoon. Then someone gave me In Understanding Be Men, a manual of doctrine published by Inter Varsity Press and which is still a remarkably clear and accessible summary of evangelical theology in systematic form. Then I was given Mere Christianity by C S Lewis and I was off. Augustine and Francis Schaeffer, Calvin and John Stott, Wesley and F F Bruce, some guy called Karl Barth (way too many words) and another called A W Tozer who wrote mercifully thinner books. By the time I was at University and then College I was revelling in what can only be called the ecumencial library of the ages. I've never lost that love of difference, and appreciation for insights and convictions which are offered as other people's ways of understanding the mystery of God and the revelation of God in Jesus Christ through the Holy Spirit.
All of this comes to mind as I am reading that great apostle of catholic Christianity, John Wesley; and there is a double significance in this Sunday as Pentecost Sunday - 24th May is the Anniversary of John Wesley's discovery of the reality of God's love at Aldersgate. Reading the Preface of Luther's Commentary on Romans he so famously wrote:
"I felt I did trust in Christ, 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."
I'm not sure how often before, Pentecost Sunday and Wesley's "conversion" have fallen on the same Sunday, but in celebration of this great Christian preacher, social activist, churchman, revival leader and five foot three dynamo (I mention his height as it is at least one characteristic I share with him!) here's a verse from one of the great Wesley hymns of inclusion in a unversal Gospel:
Oh, that the world might taste and see
The riches of his grace!
The arms of love that compass me
Would all mankind embrace.
And then there's the hymn which is often linked with the conversion of the Wesleys, not to Christianity, but to a living experience within Christianity of salvation which was so compelling, transformative and exuberant that is simply had to be sung:
And can it be that I should gain
an interest in the Savior's blood!
Died he for me? who caused his pain!
For me? who him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
Amazing love! How can it be
that thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
2. 'Tis mystery all: th' Immortal dies!
Who can explore his strange design?
In vain the firstborn seraph tries
to sound the depths of love divine.
'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore;
let angel minds inquire no more.
'Tis mercy all! Let earth adore;
let angel minds inquire no more.
3. He left his Father's throne above
(so free, so infinite his grace!),
emptied himself of all but love,
and bled for Adam's helpless race.
'Tis mercy all, immense and free,
for O my God, it found out me!
'Tis mercy all, immense and free,
for O my God, it found out me!
4. Long my imprisoned spirit lay,
fast bound in sin and nature's night;
thine eye diffused a quickening ray;
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
my chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.
My chains fell off, my heart was free,
I rose, went forth, and followed thee.
5. No condemnation now I dread;
Jesus, and all in him, is mine;
alive in him, my living Head,
and clothed in righteousness divine,
bold I approach th' eternal throne,
and claim the crown, through Christ my own.
Bold I approach th' eternal throne,
and claim the crown, through Christ my own.
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