One of my joys is music. I enjoy listening to a variety of music from jazz to rock to pop to country to classical. My title this morning comes from a reggae song: Bob Marley's "Stir It Up."

Before Bob Marley used the phrase in a song title, John Wesley used it in a sermon. “Stir up the spark of grace which is now in you, and God will give you more grace.” Wesley is one of the people to whom we United Methodists trace the beginnings of our stream in the Christian tradition. The sermon quoted is “On Working Out Your Own Salvation” (sermon 85) from 1785. “The sermon is the late Wesley’s most complete and careful exposition of the mystery of divine-human interaction, his subtlest probing of the paradox of prevenient grace and human agency” (Albert Outler and Richard Heitzenrater, John Wesley’s Sermons: An anthology, 485). Wesley composed the sermon using Philippians 2:12-13: Therefore, my beloved, just as you have always obeyed me, not only in my presence but much more now in my absence, work on your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (NRSVue). Wesley wrestles with the paradox in these two verses – “work on your own salvation” and “it is God at work in you.” Which is it – God or you? Both/and. For Wesley, because God’s Spirit and grace are at work, we are able to do good. And because God’s Spirit, grace and love are at work, we are deeply moved to cooperate. We love because God first loved.

Then Wesley arrives at the point at which I began to quote his sermon. Let me offer the longer passage: 

Meantime let us remember that God has joined these together in the experience of every believer; and therefore we must take care, not to imagine they are ever to be put asunder. We must beware of that mock humility which teacheth us to say, in excuse for our wilful disobedience, "O, I can do nothing!" and stops there, without once naming the grace of God. Pray, think twice. Consider what you say. I hope you wrong yourself; for if it be really true that you can do nothing, then you have no faith. And if you have not faith, you are in a wretched condition: You are not in a state of salvation. Surely it is not so. You can do something, through Christ strengthening you. Stir up the spark of grace which is now in you, and he will give you more grace.

Stir it up. Stir it up. Stir up the spark of grace which is now in you and God will give you more grace. We have gifts to give, even if they may need a little stirring to emerge. We have gifts to give as individuals. The church has gifts to give. I want to identify some of the church’s gifts, and especially of the Wesleyan way of living our faith in Jesus Christ.

The church has gifts to give, and it is also important to confess that we have often hidden our light under a bushel basket. We have often failed to listen well to the deep questions people are asking. We have often offered good news in such a way that it is difficult to find the good in it. We have not lived up to our own professed ideals, and then we’ve compounded the problem by not being willing to acknowledge that. We have not always been willing to join with others in seeking justice, promoting the common good, and fostering a culture of deep dialogue. We’ve engaged in intense debates about relatively small matters. Why is it the A-L always is asked to bring hot dishes to the potluck?

There are some cracks in our plaster, some dustiness in our pews, some mustiness in our song books, some creaking in our bones, and we can also say, in Leonard Cohen’s lovely lyric, “there is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets it” (Anthem). It’s how the light gets in and how it gets out to be shared, and we still have light to share, and grace to give, and love to spread, and good news to proclaim and justice to engage in, and beloved community to build. We have gifts to give when we are at our better – at our better, not just when we are our best, but when we are at least closer to it.

As church, we have the gift of community to share. Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy released a report a couple of years ago entitled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.” Murthy cites research indicating that “social isolation and loneliness are significant predictors of premature death and poor health. “Lacking social connection is as dangerous as smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day” the report says. Among the remedies to the epidemic of loneliness offered in the report are strengthening social infrastructure and building a culture of connection, including “cultivating values of kindness, respect, service, and commitment to one another.” That’s us, at least when we are at our better, a place of connection that cultivates values of kindness, respect, service and commitment to one another.

I was struck by an essay last year in The Atlantic (April 3, 2024). The author, Derek Thompson, is a professed agnostic for whom “organized religion seemed, to me, beset by scandal and entangled in noxious politics.” Yet his essay charts a change in his thinking. “Maybe religion, for all its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.” He bemoans that “many people having lost the scaffolding of organized religion, seem to have found no alternative method to build a sense of community.” But we haven’t gone away, and we still have the gift of community when we are at our better. 

Our communities of faith offer a larger purpose to our lives. Awhile back I heard the author Sebastian Junger discuss his book, In My Time of Dying, about his near-death encounter. In two interviews Junger discussed his new religious perspective, though he remains a “stone-cold atheist.” He says that for him, the most important thing is connection with others. “I don’t go to church but the worship that I conduct is of the present moment with the people that I love. It’s its own sort of church that you can attend on your own and it’s been very effective for me.”

Let me not make the typical church mistake of being hyper-critical of Sebastian Junger. I am glad he is alive and pleased that he has found a perspective that has helped him feel like a “whole human being.” I do wonder, for any of us, if church is only a solo exercise that we do by ourselves, where might we bump up against our own limitations and be encouraged to transcend them? In one of her books, Lillian Daniel writes, “We’re capable of being selfish and mean and losing our tempers. What mediates that if all we do is celebrate our every instinct? Religious traditions seek to temper that and suggest that folks have been thinking about these things for thousands of years.” (Tired of Apologizing for A Church I’m Not Part Of, 166)

I watched a documentary on the Kerner Commission a couple of years ago. The commission was formed by President Lyndon Johnson following riots in major cities across the United States in 1965-1967 and it was named after Otto Kerner, chair of the committee and Governor of Illinois at the time. The report remains hauntingly relevant, and if you want to have some conversation about race in your congregation, this documentary is a great resource. Anyway, one of the things that struck me about the commission’s work is that as the commissioners traveled to some of the cities and spoke with people there, their minds expanded. They could see somethings with fresh eyes. Community not only meets our needs for connection, but Christian community connects us with larger perspectives and purpose, the larger purpose of God’s transformative work – the work of healing, justice, peace, reconciliation, forgiveness, beloved community, beauty and love. The church allows us to be part of something beautiful.

At our better we offer a gift of thoughtfulness, of deep thinking. Sadly, this is an area where the church has not often enough been at its better, but we can rise to the occasion. In his sermon, “Love in Action,” Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “Never must the church tire of reminding persons that they have a moral responsibility to be intelligent. Must we not admit that the church has often overlooked this moral demand for enlightenment? At times it has talked as though ignorance were a virtue and intelligence a crime.” (The Strength to Love, 31). We have a moral obligation to be intelligent. Gil Rendle offers this: “The simple, powerful, life-giving narrative of faith can never thrive if the simple is allowed to become simplistic…. The simple must be mined deeply for the full depth of truth that it holds.” (Countercultural, 91-92). 

In a time when minds are fed with quick video sound bites, we can help people think more deeply. We proclaim a God who created a wonderfully complex and beautiful world, and we ourselves are wonderfully complicated creatures. Our faith should be thoughtful enough to acknowledge what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead called “the multifariousness of the world” (Process and Reality, original, 513) and the poet Anthony Hecht called “the inexhaustible plenitude of the world.” The novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” (The Crack-Up, 69). How can we not be thoughtful and offer that gift to others? We can and should do so with convicted humility.

Humility is about two things. It is about self-knowledge, about knowing our strengths and limitations and gifts. It is also about openness, openness to new learning being open to new learning, new growth. One can always learn more about the wonder and mystery of life and the love and grace of God. We can always see more broadly, feel more deeply, think more imaginatively, and love more profoundly. We can always open our minds, our hearts, our spirits a little wider – to others, to God, and even to ourselves. Years ago, I read this wonderful book entitled The Ironic Christian’s Companion in which the author writes: “curiosity, imagination, exploration, adventure are not preliminary to Christian identity, a kind of booster rocket to be jettisoned when spiritual orbit is achieved. They are part of the payload” (9). Faith in Christ is about adventurous and curious minds, humble minds, and the church can help make that happen. We can be places that welcome questions, curiosity, conversation, at least when we are at our better.

And as communities of faith we offer connection to God. We do not have a corner of God, but we offer a place where God in grace will meet others in ways that redeem, that save, that heal, that free. The heart of who we are and what we do is the good news of God’s wide and wild love for the world in Jesus Christ. It is the good news that God, through Jesus, still invites people into new life, transformed living. It is why we gather together in community. The transformative work of God’s love is the larger purpose to which we connect people. And “the simple, powerful, life-giving narrative of faith can never thrive if the simple is allowed to become simplistic…. The simple must be mined deeply for the full depth of truth that it holds. At the lived level, a life of intentional faith is a complex project” (Rendle, Journey in the Wilderness, 91-3).

The church has gifts to give if we are willing to be stirred anew by the Spirit and stir up our hands, hearts, minds, and imaginations. Note that none of these gifts is related to the size of congregations. While we have important issues of economic sustainability to consider into the future, churches of any size has gifts to offer. And note again that we are not always at our better, that part of stirring things up to offer our gifts may mean change.

And there are particular gifts in our Wesleyan way of following Jesus. Grace. Grace is central to our understanding of God and our relationship to God in Jesus Christ. Wesley had a profound sense of God’s grace, a grace that seeks us out and touches our lives before we are even aware of it, a grace that empowers us to say “yes” to God, a grace that continues to move us to learn, grow, develop, mature. Some have defined grace as “unmerited favor,” that is, God loving us even though we are not worthy of love. I find that definition wanting. Who is ever worthy of love all the time, yet who is ever unworthy to be loved? I think grace is best considered as God’s wide and wild love for us that breaks all notions of worthiness or calculation. Our focus on grace is a gift.

Growth in grace. Our Wesleyan tradition offers the gift of growth and development. Wesley taught the importance of intentional, disciplined, holiness of heart and life with love being the heart of holiness. Wesley viewed the Christian life as a life dedicated to and actually growing in love. Wesley wrote often about what he called “Christian perfection.” This is reflected in the questions the bishop asks every annual conference those being ordained:

• Are you going on to perfection?
• Do you expect to be made perfect in love in this life?
• Are you earnestly striving after it?

But what is the essence of perfection? For Wesley: “By perfection I mean the humble, gentle patient love of God and our neighbor, ruling our attitudes, habits, words and actions.” (January 27, 1767). Our focus on growth is a gift.

The Wesley way is a way of a warm-hearted faith–and a heart-enlarging faith. Maturity of heart. “Let all that you do be done in love” as it says in I Corinthians 16:14. “Show by your good life that your works are done with gentleness born of wisdom” a linking of mind and heart in James 3:13. Have “sympathy, love for one another, a tender heart and a humble mind” (I Peter 3:8).

A warm-hearted faith is one that acknowledges the importance of our emotions and desires, and seeks to have our desires shaped by love. I deeply appreciate the morning prayer in our hymnal: “New every morning is your love, great God of Light, and all day long you are working for good in the world. Stir up in us desire to serve you, to live peacefully with our neighbors and to devote each day to your Son, our savior, Jesus Christ the Lord.” Stir up in us desire to serve you!

A large-hearted faith does let fear take up too much room in our soul. To mature in heart is to know joy, even when it is difficult, a joy that allows us to be astonished by beauty again and again. To mature in heart is to be gracious. To mature in heart is to have a tender heart, an open heart. In other words: “We may think that by closing the heart we’ll protect ourselves from feeling the pain of the world, but instead we isolate ourselves even more from joy…. The opposite of happiness is a fearful, closed heart.” (Elizabeth Lesser, The New American Spirituality, 180). An open heart risks seeing the other as other and as also loved by God. We listen intently to others. Part of what plagues us in both the church and our society is a failure of compassion, a closing of our hearts toward others. Another part of what plagues us in both church and society is a failure of imagination, the inability or unwillingness to imagine the life of others – their hopes, dreams, joys, fears, pains. What if we listened intently to and tried to imagine more deeply the experiences of persons of different racial-ethnic backgrounds, of persons on the economic margins, of persons not born in the United States but who came here seeking a better life, of persons whose sexual orientation is different from ours, or whose experience of gender is different? How might our hearts be opened? Our Wesleyan way offers the gift of a warm-hearted, heart-enlarging faith.

The Wesleyan way is also the way of a thoughtful faith. Mind and heart are not opposed, but partners in the spiritual life. The twentieth century theologian Paul Tillich once wrote, “Distrust every claim for truth where you do not see truth united with love; and be certain that you are of the truth and that the truth has taken hold of you only when love has taken hold of you” (The New Being, 74). 

I have said quite a bit about a thoughtful faith already, but let me offer a couple of comments about such a faith from Wesley himself. In an August 17, 1760 letter to a preacher named John Premboth, Wesley wrote: What has exceedingly hurt you in time past, nay, and I fear to this day, is want of reading…. Do justice to your own soul; give it time and means to grow. Do not starve yourself any longer. Five years later in the Minutes of the 1765 Conference, Wesley wrote out a question and answer scenario: “But I read only the Bible.” Then you ought to teach others to read only the Bible, and, by parity of reason, to hear only the Bible. But if so, you need preach no more…. This is rank enthusiasm. If you need no book but the Bible, you are got above St. Paul. He wanted others too. “Bring the books,” says he, “but especially the parchments” (Heitzenrater, Wesley and the People Called Methodist, 254-255). Wesley encouraged learning among his preacher and among the members of the Methodist societies and classes.

In a letter to a Dr. Rutherforth, Wesley wrote: “It is a fundamental principle with us that to renounce reason is to renounce religion, that religion and reason go hand in hand, and that all irrational religion is false religion.” (Burtner and Chiles, John Wesley’s Theology, 26). Our Wesleyan way offers the gift of a thoughtful, thinking faith.

The Wesleyan way is the way of a faith that moves us into the world in mission and service, including grappling with social issues which affect the well-being of persons and communities, including gospel-bearing. We are all aware of the stated mission of The United Methodist Church: “to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.” Did you know our Book of Discipline also offers a process for carrying our our mission? ¶122: We make disciples as we: (1) proclaim the gospel, see, welcome and gather persons into the Body of Christ; (2) lead persons to commit their lives to God through baptism by water and the spirit and profession of faith in Jesus Christ; (3) nurture persons in Christian living through worship, the sacraments, spiritual disciplines, and other means of grace, such as Wesley’s Christian conferencing; (4) send persons into the world to live lovingly and justly as servants of Christ by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, caring for the stranger, freeing the oppressed, being and becoming a compassionate, caring presence, and working to develop social structures that are consistent with the gospel; and (5) continue the mission of seeking, welcoming and gathering persons into the community of the body of Christ. Note: send persons into the world to live lovingly and justly as servants of Christ by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, caring for the stranger, freeing the oppressed, being and becoming a compassionate, caring presence, and working to develop social structures that are consistent with the gospel. That kind of active, caring, compassionate, justice-seeking faith is a gift of our Wesleyan tradition.

Friends, we have gifts to give as the church and as those living out our faith in the Wesleyan tradition: gifts of connection to God, of community, of purpose, of thoughtfulness, of grace and growth in grace, of enlarging heart and mind, of seeking justice, beauty and the good. And each of you have gifts to make this happen, to help the church be at is better, to let our Wesleyan way shine. You have gifts, and if you say you don’t, well, in Wesley’s mind you are in a sad place, but a mistaken place. Shake it off and stir it up. When we let God transform us, and we participate in God’s transforming work we develop our gifts, live into our best selves in Christ and we help stir up the gift that is the church.

So, my friends, I encourage you to stir it up. Let the winds of the Spirit blow fiercely and gently on your souls. Let the waters of the Spirit lift you up and carry you forward. Let the waters of God’s grace wash over you. Stir it up.

Let the winds of the Spirit blow fiercely and gently on your souls, the waters of the Spirit lift you up and carry you forward, the waters of God’s grace wash over you so you have the courage to make needed changes in your church so that our gifts may be given more freely. Stir it up. 

Let the winds of the Spirit blow fiercely and gently kindling the fires of love you have inside you. Stir it up.

Let the waters of the Spirit lift you up and carry you forward, enlarging your mind, flooding your thinking and imagination and dreaming. Stir it up.

Let the winds of the Spirit blow fiercely and gently, let the waters of the Spirit lift you up and carry you forward into breaking down dividing walls to create communities of love and forgiveness, grace and healing. Stir it up.

Let the winds of the Spirit blow fiercely and gently, let the waters of the Spirit lift you up and carry you forward to live lovingly and justly as servants of Christ by healing the sick, feeding the hungry, caring for the stranger, freeing the oppressed, being and becoming a compassionate, caring presence, and working to develop social structures that are consistent with the gospel. Stir it up.

Stir it up. Stir up the spark of grace which is now in you, and God will give you more grace. Stir it up. Amen.