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About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed.
Oh heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm—that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I'm alive!
Given that John Wesley and his followers in the Methodist movement in the eighteenth century were roundly accused of being guilty of a shameful and dangerous excess of "enthusiasm" in their religious observance, your starter for ten, as Bamber Gascoigne used to say on "University Challenge" is: Was the opening line of this sermon a quotation from John Wesley's Journal – or was it not?
It doesn't sound very eigthteenth century, does it, and you would be correct to think it not. More like the 1950s, you might calculate, and it is, in fact, a line spoken by the character, Jimmy Porter, in the play entitled, "Look Back In Anger", by John Osborne. Here was one Englishman who wanted enthusiasm to bring a bit of colour back to a drab post-war decade. But, for the most part, the English distrust those who show too much enthusiam, those who are too gushing in their expressed opinions and beliefs – be they religious or political. Perhaps that is the way that we are – reserved, careful, dignified, circumspect. Or, more accurately, perhaps that is the way that we were, for who has not seen the so-called "reality TV" shows, or modern talent competitions on the television and thought that we are as a nation now distinguished by false emotionalism and artificial over-dramatisation. Not even Jimmy Porter would have wanted the the dumbed-down histrionics of the characters in East-Enders when he asked for a little ordinary human enthusiasm… the key phrase being ordinary human enthusiasm, not extraordinary inhuman emotionalism.
Lord Balfour, the Conservative Prime Minister of the early Edwardian years, expressed the traditional Englishman's view of enthusiasm, which considered the emotion not so much as one of self-delusion, but one of downright deceitfulness: "It is unfortunate, considering that enthusiasm moves the world, that so few enthusiasts can be trusted to speak the truth," he said. It could have been a comment made about the fundamentalist fanaticisms that we see across the world in the twenty-first century.
It is a local, contemporary misapprehension too. I was walking behind a family in King Street recently and I heard a man in his mid-forties who was explaining to his elderly parents, whilst pointing at our church: "You don't want to go in there – they are all happy-clappy in there!" "You are mistaken, sir," I said to him, over his shoulder, much to his considerable surprise. "I am the minister of that church, and I can assure you that anybody that we catch clapping happily in there, we take outside and beat senseless with a floppy bible." Perhaps that overstated the case just a little, but at least it rid the man of his misconceptions.
However, despite all these reservations, on Aldersgate Sunday, in the calendar of the Methodist Church, we are obliged to take seriously the experience that John Wesley had on May 24th, 1738, which set him on his course for his life's true work and ministry. He felt (his) heart strangely warmed…
The temptation is to pitch the contradistinction between personal feeling in religious faith and a more impersonal, intellectual, general and rational conclusion about life, the universe, and everything. Given how church people always try to pigeonhole one another over their views, approaches, and tastes, you can understand the temptation, but it is not one that we ought to fall for.
On that May evening in Aldersgate Street, John Wesley found himself in a situation that we ourselves have known so often throughout our lives. Our minds sift through, more or less rationally, a series of experiences, propositions and conclusions, whilst our emotions draw us towards an undefined hope that all those rational ponderings cannot quite justify. And then it happens… Just one factor acts as the key to the door between heart and mind, the door swings open, and there is a justifiable correspondence between the two aspects of our being and nature, which results in a forward leap in our lives. Without that correspondence, we could never have taken it, and our souls would never have flourished. So what was the key for Wesley? It was the reflection of one of the great Reformers upon possibly the greatest of Saint Paul's letters.
The identity of the author of the testimony that unlocked the door between the heart and mind of Wesley is highly significant. How so? Well, both instinctively and consciously Wesley recognised in Luther a fellow struggler and seeker after Christian truth. The fact that Luther found in the Letter to the Romans the great moral and intellectual hope that so aligned him with Wesley's own pilgrimage of faith, intellectual and emotional, meant that here was a witness whose testimony was worth listening to. You do not have to re-invent the wheel, technologically or religiously – the example of the saints who have gone before us, with all that they learned, is there for our instruction and our illumination. We read the pages of the bible, especially the New Testament, with the same intent and the same hope of fulfilment and inspiration.
And so it was for Wesley. Sincere emotion, rather than artificial emotionalism, recognises the Holy Spirit at work for good in the lives and souls of other people. There is no contradistinction. There is no artificial separation. Heart and mind come together as joint foundations of what Wesley termed "Assurance": an assurance was given me that (Christ) had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.
Perhaps Jimmy Porter was not so far wide of the mark after all: I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! Hallelujah! I'm alive! Even for a circumspect Englishman, that is just a degree or two warmer than: I felt my heart strangely warmed.