DOING LENT [4-8-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Man—DOING LENT [4-8-25]

 

Are ye able said the master, to be crucified with me? Yea, the sturdy dreamers answered, to the death we follow thee…

I’ve told you before about my posse of young Lutheran women pastors who followed me around at a spiritual direction retreat, but, in case you’ve forgotten…

I’d had lunch one day with our leader, Lorraine Brugh, a Lutheran music professor. Lorraine got a doctorate in organ at Northwestern U and decided she could not interpret church music adequately without understanding its theology, so, although a committed Lutheran, she also got a doctorate in theology from the Methodist Garrett Theological Seminary, at Northwestern.

After lunch, the posse arrived to chat with us. Curious about this strange old Methodist who treated them like full colleagues, unlike the older Lutheran pastors--one asked, “What is the quintessential Methodist hymn?” I said, O, for a thousand tongues to sing, because it’s a Charles Wesley hymn, and always first in our hymnal. Lorraine accepted that, but as a Lutheran who studied with Methodists, she said, “I think for American Methodism, it’s more Are Ye Able, Said the Master. Methodists want to do their faith.”

That’s why Lent has never been very important to American Methodism. We’re not big on taking time out from doing good stuff to practice self-discipline and denial. We want every religious experience, including salvation, to be a jump-up doing, not just a sit-there thinking about it.

Hence revivals. Old-time revivals were active, something you did.

Salvation—getting right with God and one’s own true self—is not a one-time thing. It’s a day-to-day thing. Sometimes it is a moment-to-moment thing. It has to be renewed. In the midst of the toils and troubles of the world, we have to be reminded of who we really are. We have to be revived.

In a revival meeting, with loud exhortations to get saved, you did something, and Methodists want to do. You jumped up. you danced. You wept. You screamed. You shouted. You got saved. You got revived.

Salvation meant you had an experience of salvation. Over the years, the definition of experience was expanded, from a moment of external emotion--weeping, shouting, dancing—but it remains to some extent, even to this day, in those places where revivalism is still part of church life.

Because the emotions of revivals could get out of bounds—my long-time friend and clergy colleague, Bob Parsons, recently reminded me-- Methodists on the frontier used singing to give folks an emotional outlet so that they didn’t have to shout and dance and faint. The hymns and camp songs also taught…well, I’m not sure what “My father says that it’s the best, to live and die a Methodist” teaches. [One of the verses of “There’s a Meeting Here Tonight.”]

Revivals were so much a part of the frontier religious experience that Methodists—of course—felt the need to organize the whole thing. Yes, ordained pastors could preach revivals, but in addition to approval through ordination, there were folks approved for evangelism through licenses. Not only licensed evangelists, but also there was a license for exhorters. Those were the people who—while the evangelist was still carrying on and maybe praying with repenting sinners at the altar—would exhort the rest of the congregation—often over the tinkling of the piano-- to come forward, repent of their sins, and be saved.

Even though I grew up in a revivalistic culture, and started my preaching career in that culture, I never felt comfortable with the emotionalism of revival meetings. I like singing, though, and I know I need constant reviving. So… Are ye able, said the master, to be crucified with me? Yea, the study dreamers answered, to the death we follow thee. Lord, we are able, our spirits are thine. Remold them, make us, like thee, divine. Thy guiding radiance above us shall be, a beacon to God, to love and loyalty.

John Robert McFarland

“Are Ye Able” is by Earl Marlatt