ACROSS THE LINES - Archive (2006-2020)

The United Methodist Church was born in a specific time and place, in the mid-twentieth century in the United States of America. Protestant denominations were ascendant, and with them a brand of "ecumenism" that would only decades later be recognized by those who championed it as culturally bound to the white "mainline." Mergers were all the buzz, including the one that created the UMC in 1968, and Methodists embraced their new denomination as partial fulfillment of a dream of "Christian unity." As the historian Robert Handy noted in his wonderful little 1971 book,  A Christian America: Protestant Hopes and Historical Realities , leaders of the new denomination thought of it as "a kind of unofficial national church." Because they sat at the midpoint of mainline American Protestantism in so many respects -- ecclesial, theological, liturgical -- it was easy for them to assume that as all churches became one, pretty much everyone else would eventua...

Methodism was born as a movement of renewal from within the Church of England. Its founders, the brothers John and Charles Wesley, understood their mission to be that of "raising up a holy people" and "spreading scriptural holiness over the land." Holiness was the “marrow” of the Bible, John Wesley argued, and he described his teaching about holiness as “the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists.” For the Wesley brothers, the basic task confronting ordinary Christians was that of "working out their own salvation," toward the end that they might  become more and more holy through the practices of Christian discipleship.  The Wesleys believed that eventually, the truly faithful might be "perfected in love," and they believed  the most likely place to find instances of such true holiness was at the end of life. For this reason the early generations of the Methodists made a practice not just of visiting the dyin...

A sermon preached on November 21, 2018, in La Jolla, California, at the 38th Annual Thanksgiving Eve Service celebrated by Congregation Beth Israel and the First United Methodist Church of San Diego.   I WANT TO BEGIN BY SAYING “THANK YOU.”   Thank you to the good people of Congregation Beth Israel for your hospitality.   Thank you to Rabbi Berk, for the many years of friendship and partnership, and congratulations on your upcoming retirement.   Thank you to Phil Amerson, our interim Lead Pastor at First United Methodist, for the generous invitation to speak this evening.   I think Phil knew how much this would mean to me, to preach on this occasion.   My brother and I used to ride our stingray bicycles across this land when there was nothing but dirt mesas as far as the eye could see.   I count it a great privilege and honor to share this time with you tonight.   Will you pray with me? "Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation ...

Did you catch it? Did you catch who it is that Jesus commends for his understanding and spiritual maturity? "One of the scribes came  near and heard them disputing ... " (YOUTUBE - sermon starts at 39:00) But wait a minute, I thought the scribes and the pharisees were Jesus' mortal enemies, his foils in our gospels as he put down the ways of old and inaugurates a new era. I thought the scribes and the pharisees were legalistic and narrow-minded, prone to heap burdens on people, and to miss the deeper meaning of God’s holy laws? Two comments are required: 1.      Anti-semitism, much of it justified by a partial reading of our New Testament scriptures, is one of the great scourges of human history, and the fact that we are seeing a resurgence of it in our times is as sad a commentary as I can think of on the state of our life together.  The Anti-Defamation League logged a 57 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents in the United Stat...