United Methodist Church Westlake Village

Holy Diversity: The Body Needs All Its Parts

• United Methodist Church Westlake Village

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What does it mean to truly embrace diversity within Christianity? John Wesley, Methodism's founder, offered a revolutionary answer in his sermon "On the Catholic Spirit" that still challenges us today.

Against the backdrop of post-Reformation religious division, Wesley chose an unexpected path. Rather than demanding theological uniformity, he found wisdom in the biblical exchange: "Is your heart right as my heart is with your heart? If it is, give me your hand." This seemingly simple invitation became the foundation for a radical understanding of Christian unity that didn't require agreement on every point of doctrine.

Wesley's approach wasn't about watering down conviction but recognizing that God intentionally creates diversity within the body of Christ. Drawing from Ephesians 4, we see that different gifts—apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers—aren't accidental but divinely ordained for the growth and maturity of the whole church. Our differences aren't problems to solve but blessings to embrace.

This vision feels especially urgent today, as political and theological polarization threatens to tear apart religious communities. Wesley's words reach across centuries: "Love me not in word only, but in deed and in truth, so far as, in conscience, you can, retaining still your own opinions and your own manner of worshiping God. Join with me in the work of God and let us go hand in hand." In a world desperate for models of unity amid difference, perhaps Wesley's "Catholic Spirit" offers precisely the wisdom we need.

Listen now to discover how this 18th-century theologian might help us navigate our 21st-century divisions. Then share your thoughts—how might Wesley's understanding of unity without uniformity transform your own faith community?

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Speaker 1:

Friends, we've been learning a little bit about John Wesley, the founder of the United Methodist Church, and it's been, hopefully, a fun adventure. It was leading us into a new member class, so to learn a little bit about theology and the person that was behind a lot of what we have done was kind of fun, even for those of you who have been members for a long time and maybe lifetime Methodists. Hopefully it has been enjoyable for you. Week one we talked about Wesley the man, how the whole thing got started. Then, week two, we talked about grace, which is a theological concept not unique to us but really emphasized in a way that makes us pretty darn distinct. Then finally, last week we were talking about the importance of social justice in the United Methodist Church and for John Wesley in particular. He would even say are blessed to be able to do the work of justice and social justice in our understanding. So finally, we're talking today about Wesley's appreciation for diversity of faith, even in the body of Christ, the body of Christianity, and it comes with some a little bit of irony. I wanted to talk about Wesley's appreciation for diversity. It was especially amidst the other Protestant denominations. As United Methodism was getting started, we had Lutherans getting started, presbyterian Church getting started, episcopal All of those were kind of getting started and there was a bunch of diversity. And for us this diversity was somewhat unique because a lot of the other Protestant denominations and even the Catholic church that we pulled away from and the Anglican church that we pulled away from, were more creedal, meaning there was a set of beliefs that we all would agree to every Sunday. We might even read it out loud every Sunday, and United Methodists weren't necessarily against that but it wasn't a focal point in the same way as it was for others. Because Wesley had this appreciation for a certain amount of difference, a certain amount of diversity in the way we understood things, and we see it in his sermon, which is called On the Catholic Spirit. Now, in this case, catholic does not mean the church led by the Pope with all the Catholics, the 1.4 billion of those folks floating around everywhere. We're talking about Catholic with the smaller C meaning the church universal, all the people who are Christian, all the people who go to church. When he's talking about on the Catholic spirit, he's saying what unites all of us Christians, despite our denominational switches, all of us Christians despite our denominational switches, despite our at that time leaving the Catholic Church, and he went to this phrase in this sermon, this scripture from 2 Kings 10, it's verse 15. Jehu greeted Jehonadab and said Is your heart right as my heart is with your heart? Jehonadab answered it is, and Jehu said If it is, give me your hand. The famous phrase from John Wesley was Give me thine hand.

Speaker 1:

That's an interesting passage, right? If you want to pull it out of your pews, you can pull it out. It's there, 2 Kings 10. What you'll find is this really lovely verse about people who are a little bit different coming together in a common cause. Then they went and slaughtered a bunch of people who worshiped a different God. So a little irony amidst all of this passage, but he grabs it because he wanted to get that concept of coming together, even in difference.

Speaker 1:

Jehu was the king of Israel. He was anointed by God partly to take down the house of Ahab and that he was to eradicate the Baal worship from Israel and Jehonadab. He was a leader of what's called the Rechabites, known for their strict adherence to a nomadic lifestyle and abstinence from wine as commanded by their ancestor. Lifestyle and abstinence from wine as commanded by their ancestor. So these were pretty driven people who lived on the outskirts of cities. You can get a picture for who that was.

Speaker 1:

So now, when the king Jehu was looking to overcome those who were worshiping a different god, he went to people he might have disagreed with people who were living on the outskirts of town because of it and said we can agree on this, right, we need to slaughter all the bald people. You know that we can agree on. You know, I'm being a little facetious. Sorry Boyd thought I said bald people, no, no. Sorry Boyd thought I said bald people, no, no. In any case, he was going to people who were different and saying, hey, we do share heart, right, we disagree on a lot of things, but we share heart. We are devoted to. In this case it was the Old Testament, god, the Hebrew Bible, god, the God of Abraham, that they were committed to. We share heart in that. So the point is the phrase as Wesley uses it was to invite a partnership between differences.

Speaker 1:

For Wesley, this was a time of some real division in the church, right, protestant Reformation happened not too much earlier than this, so this massive leaving of the Catholic Church and the Anglican Church had happened. Different denominations were getting started. So they were fledgling and really trying to get people into their understanding of God. The Catholic Church itself is trying to deal with that adjustment, that awakening, that looking in the mirror and recognizing a lot of people have left for some pretty important reasons, and so there was a lot of division, right, and it was a lot of turmoil, and so potentially you can understand why Wesley's writing a sermon talking about the unity of the Catholic Church, little c, the universal church, all of us Christians, and he makes the point that we all aren't going to agree on all points of faith, but we can be united in Christ. We can be united in our love for Christ and for the world God created and the people God created.

Speaker 1:

To me it's a point he makes about the diversity of the body and it was a pretty provocative statement to be making at its time this idea that maybe we could disagree even as we worship together. Maybe we can appreciate that, given the Christian church today with the stark divisions we have in the body of Christianity. But I like to think too. I like to stretch it just a little bit, because I think underlying is not simply a directive for us to get along. I feel like maybe there's an underlying value for God-given diversity itself. That's where I land at Ephesians 4. This letter from Paul to the church in Ephesus you should know going in this is one of my favorite scriptures of all time.

Speaker 1:

I really got baptized into it when I was in seminary and I was doing youth ministry. And first of all, I love the phrase in verse 12 where he says equipping the saints, equipping the saints for the work of ministry. It's one of my favorite phrases In seminary, which is where we go to get educated to become pastors and get our masters in divinity. In seminary there's a lot of conversation about your call. God has called you to something.

Speaker 1:

In seminary, are you called to being a church pastor? Because it can be hard at times, it can be challenging at times. You're getting pulled in a lot of different directions. They want to make sure you aren't just thinking, hey, I want to be a pastor, it's cool, I get all the free grape juice and bread I want. We don't want people walking in like that. You want people with the real sense of the whole thing and needing to understand that you're not just wanting to be a pastor, but you feel like God's calling you to be a pastor, and so for me that phrase equipping the saints was a really big part of my understanding of who I was being called to be Somebody who comes into a community like this, and that I was somebody who was equipping you folks to go do the work of God, you folks to go do ministry. So that phrase really resonated with me. But what I also like about the scripture is that it talked about how we're all equipped differently. We're all gifted in different ways, Different and yet necessary, important. There's this phrase here. Some were called to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors, some teachers. If you want to reach out to 1 Corinthians 12, there's an even fuller list of different spiritual callings, spiritual giftings.

Speaker 1:

I really appreciate this sense of everybody being unique in the way God created them, and not just unique but blessed with some sort of gifts to give back to the body, to build something, to go somewhere. And I loved that it was getting recognized in the church. You ever have those times where that epiphany of faith just kind of zaps you, where it all sort of clicks together. That happened with me with this scripture. It wasn't that I didn't believe that we it wasn't like I thought we were all supposed to be the same ahead of that. But the affirmation of seeing in scripture 2,000-year-old wisdom that we're all unique and called to something unique, that really resonated with me deeply.

Speaker 1:

And Paul, he's using this metaphor of the body to talk about Christians, to talk about Christianity. We're all related, we're all related, we're all connected. In other words, your actions affect me and my actions affect you. We're not in this vacuum of experience. We're connected as one body, which the extension of that to me and to Paul evidently that to me and to Paul evidently was that our overall success as a body is largely dependent on our working together, on our figuring out how to allow everybody's individual gifts to be able to bloom, to blossom, to get used. You know God sent something inside of each one of us that God's intent was for that to get shared, to make the world better, to build God's kingdom, and that's all in this image of the body.

Speaker 1:

Now, that's not new imagery for most of us, is my guess. This is not the first sermon you have heard about the body of Christ. At least for most of you, it's just the best one you've heard about the body of Christ, at least until Pastor Lanny does one right, then he'll take it up a notch. No, my guess is this isn't the first time we've heard it. But how often, when we're talking about that body of Christ, this full complement of all Christians in the world, how often are we including those Christians that we disagree with in that body? We like that image and yet it's pretty easy to kind of think of others as not truly in the body. It's really easy to tell ourselves well, those Christians have chose something else. Well, those Christians have chose something else. You know, they've pretty much left the body, so I'm okay not to think that way anymore. Right, we give ourselves excuses to look at that church or that church or that church and say they aren't really doing it as God wants them to do, that, they aren't really doing it as God wants them to do that. And yet, even with that mindset, here we are still occupying the same planet as those people, the same nation as those people, the same community, the same community, the same faith and often the same church. How often are we in that space of discarding people, assuming they aren't really part of the body, even though we are sharing space with them, even though we are in space with them, even though we are in that same body with them.

Speaker 1:

To me, this is why Paul is talking about unity. Remember that in the early church, in these early churches that Paul was writing to, there was a lot of conflict, not just with Christians and Romans and authorities like that, but also with those who had become converted, jewish people who are now Christian and folks who had gone right into Christianity. Christian and folks who had gone right into Christianity had been persuaded by the message, persuaded by Christ. So you had both of them in these same communities of people with different understandings of what it means to follow God. So there was conflict and if you read through those letters, you see a lot of that conflict and it really shouldn't surprise us that Paul is preaching here about unity. But I want to point out he's not preaching about uniformity. He's not saying we all have to be the same. In fact, I feel like he's talking about the opposite. Not only are we different in this body, but we are different in a God-given way, with different gifts to offer to this world, to this community, and our job is to work towards the unity that allows all those gifts to be used, to be shared, to blossom.

Speaker 1:

I'm going to get us to the end of the passage here, because I feel like that's where it gets even more important. That unity is important because we are here looking for growth. We're looking to grow as individuals, we're looking to grow as a church, we're looking to grow as a body, at least this part of the body of Christ. And so here's this verse from verse 13. Until all of us come to the unity of faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ, I mean this is the goal that we are all setting course for. It isn't just merely to live, it isn't merely just to survive. We're talking about unity here. We're talking about maturity. Here we're talking about growing into the full stature of Christ. We're about progressing, not just existing, not just surviving, just existing, not just surviving.

Speaker 1:

So you have the church in Paul's time dealing with diversity and the need for unity, with the intention overall for growth. We have the church in John Wesley's time preaching in another time of difference, conflict, people trying to figure out different ways of understanding God. So maybe this message today is an important one for us as we live in what feels like another time of conflict, another time of working against each other, and it's into this conflict that Wesley looks to preach with the phrase give me thine hand. I want you to hear his words directly from his sermon and let them nourish you in what I feel are important ways here in today's world.

Speaker 1:

Love me If your heart is right, as my heart is right with your heart, then love me with a very tender affection, as a friend that is closer than a brother, as a fellow citizen of the new Jerusalem, as a companion in the kingdom.

Speaker 1:

Love me with a love that is patient if I am ignorant or out of the way, bearing and not increasing my burden. Love me with that love that is not provoked either at my follies or my infirmities. Commend me to God in all your prayers. Wrestle with him on my behalf that he would speedily correct what he sees amiss and supply what is wanting in me. Beg of him that my heart may be more as your heart, more right both toward God and toward humanity. Promote me to love and to good works. Speak to me in love, whatsoever you believe to be for my soul's health. Love me not in word only, but in deed and in truth, so far as, in conscience, you can, retaining still your own opinions and your own manner of worshiping God. Join with me in the work of God and let us go hand in hand, amen, amen.