The Cost of Discipleship 9: "Snatched from the flames"

 I said last week that the church needs constant revival and renewal. When a generation adopts their father’s and mother’s renewal, rationalizes it, and rounds off the rough edges, then they are setting it into the concrete of tradition. All the more difficult for the revival to reach their children. The renewal becomes a denomination. 

 Bonhoeffer saw what the Lutheran renewal, the Evangelical Church, became under Nazism in Germany. In different countries, different leaders have sparked new revivals. I begin here a Cost of Discipleship sub-series on the revivalist and reformer John Wesley.  

  John Wesley (1703-1791) and Charles Wesley (1707-1788) were born into a divided England with a history of troublesome times. About 150 years before their birth, King Henry VIII had taken over control of the English Church so that it became the Anglican Church, after which it answered only to him, not the Pope. His divorces and escapades are well-known. Ten years and two monarchs after his death, Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne and ruled from 1558-1603. England was steady, but the world was not because England was building its empire on piracy (against Spain), claiming land owned by indigenous peoples, and initiation the African slave trade for cheap plantation labor.

 Following that, and fifty years before the Wesley boys were born, Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) had overthrown the monarchy in favor of a government of Puritan values, even though the revolution included beheading King Charles I. After the reestablishment of the monarchy, the boys’ grandfather, John Westley (1644-1670), worked as a Puritan preacher though he was arrested four times and sent to jail. England was in no mood for dissenters whose preaching might lead to revival and/or bloody revolution. John Westley died at age 35.

 His son, Samuel Westley (1662-1735) went to Oxford, dropped the ‘t’ from his name, and was ordained in the Anglican Church. He married Susanna Annesley (1669-1742) who also came from Puritan stock; her father was a Puritan nonconformist preacher. Samuel was the rector (priest) at Epworth Church (Anglican). He held to the Puritan principle of the inner witness of salvation, and that did not always sit well with complacent Anglicans. He and Susanna had 19 children (not all at home at the same time). Susanna took time for each child each day, even draping a dish towel over her head and one child’s head to have a private devotion with them. 

 Society at the time was divided by class, the wealthy and noble classes stood high above the working class. But the upper classes provided no moral model to follow. Gambling, drinking, and whoring were the norm in society, just as we seem to be more titillated than disgusted by the behavior of our elite. 

 Bishop William Beveridge lamented shortly before his death (1708) that Christ’s “doctrine and precepts are so generally slighted and neglected” such that “little of Christianity is now to be found amongst Christians themselves: to our shame be it spoken” (A. Skevington Wood, The Burning Heart: John Wesley: Evangelist, 2007. Page 10).  

 The author of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe, wrote in 1722 that “no age, since the founding and forming of the Christian Church in the world, was ever like, (in open avowed atheism, blasphemies and heresies), to the age we now live in” (Wood, Page 10). Such an age calls for a disciple of Christ who will follow him in uncomfortable places. 

 Young John Wesley did not yet know the depravity of English society, after all he was only six years old. But he did know that he was in danger. The date was February 9th in the year 1709. It was after dark when the Epworth Rectory (parsonage) caught on fire. The rest of Samuel and Susanna’s family had escaped, but when they looked back, they saw at the second floor window little John looking out. Time was not on his side. The rectory had brick walls but a roof of timbers and thatch; those would go up in a matter of minutes. 

 I have been in that rebuilt rectory that stands beside Epworth Church. While I write, I am looking at a picture of the ‘Old Rectory, Epworth, North Lincolnshire’ that I bought in the town of Epworth. I have stood in the pulpit where Samuel preached, and also stood on Samuel’s flat gravestone where John preached outdoors one day; but that is another story.

  That night a villager ran up to the wall of the rectory, and another climbed on his shoulders, while others rushed to help. John was snatched from the open window and handed down just as the interior collapsed. Samuel invited all his neighbors to pray saying, “Come, neighbors, let us kneel down. Let us give thanks to God. He has given me all my eight children. Let the house go. I am rich enough” (Wood, page 31). 

 Wesley considered himself “a brand plucked out of the fire” (Zechariah 3:2). This passage, though difficult to interpret because it is one of a series of visions, points to God sending the right person at the right time. The “brand” refers to the new high priest Joshua who would minister to the returnees from Exile. The fire was the destruction of Jerusalem after the failure of Israel and Judah to carry out God’s plan of salvation for all. The next few verses promise that God is going to send another person, a man called ‘Branch’, who is God’s servant sent to remove the guilt of the people (Zechariah 3:1-10). It is not hard to figure that ‘Branch’ refers to the servant of God who is the extension of God, the Son of God. 

 So here are ‘brand’ and ‘Branch’; the former is part of the preparation of the way for the latter. John Wesley identified with the ‘brand’ and celebrated in years to come his being saved from the flames…for a purpose. John felt the calling, but it took several decades for him to find his vocation. He learned how to save others from the flames to come. 

 As a disciple, it makes one ask: To what purpose have I been saved and spared thus far?