Posts by Bob Rhodes

Introduction We’re four weeks into Our Baptismal Vows, our series walking through the promises of the United Methodist baptismal covenant one Sunday at a time. So far we’ve renounced the powers that diminish us, accepted the freedom God gives us to resist evil and injustice, and confessed Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. The fourth promise is addressed to the congregation rather than to the one being baptized: will you nurture one another in the Christian faith and life, and include…

Introduction We’re three weeks into Our Baptismal Vows, our series walking through the promises of the United Methodist baptismal covenant one Sunday at a time. So far we’ve renounced the powers that diminish us and accepted the freedom God gives us to resist evil and injustice. The third promise is confession: to confess Jesus Christ as Savior, to put our whole trust in his grace, and to serve him as Lord, in union with the Church he has opened to people…

Introduction Last week we began Our Baptismal Vows, our series on the promises of the United Methodist baptismal covenant, and we started with renunciation: turning away from the powers that diminish us. This week we consider the second promise: to accept the freedom and power God gives us to resist evil, injustice, and oppression in whatever forms they present themselves. That freedom is God’s gift, and it is given first so that we are better equipped to give ourselves to others.…

Introduction This Sunday we begin a new five-week series, Our Baptismal Vows, walking through the promises at the heart of the United Methodist baptismal covenant one Sunday at a time. Most of us made these promises once, or had them made on our behalf, and we’ve rarely looked at them closely since. We start where the covenant itself starts: with renunciation. To renounce is to turn away from the powers that diminish us and to choose, again, who we’ll serve.…

Introduction This week we conclude our Wesleyan Vile-tality series. We have watched John Wesley climb down out of the safety of the pulpit and the church walls and preach in open fields, to coal miners and crowds who would never have set foot in a church. That was vile-tality in real life: Wesley let go of his own respectability so he could reach the people the respectable church had written off. This was a significant risk for Wesley, and that same risk…

Introduction We continue our Wesleyan Vile-tality series, and have followed the history of the people called Methodist. As the movement they built grew into an institution, more than once, the people lost their nerve. This week we turn to the ones who worked prophetically from within, refusing to leave and refusing to behave. They formed communities of accountability and care, and kept asking one plain and profound question: How is it with your soul? In the face of ridicule, the prophet Jeremiah…

Introduction Our series has followed the people called Methodist from the prisons of Oxford to the open fields of Bristol, wherever respectable religion had drawn a line and decided who was worth its time. As the movement grew into an institution, it began to prize its reputation, its membership rolls, and its standing in polite society. Again and again, when faithfulness and respectability seemed in opposition, the Methodists chose respectability. We built beautiful churches and even growing churches, and we…

Introduction This week our series follows the Methodist movement out of the church and into the open air. After Wesley preached in the fields of Bristol in 1739, going beyond the walls became a pattern. He and the people called Methodist visited the imprisoned, welcomed laborers and outcasts, placed women in leadership, and called slavery the evil it was. Respectable religion had already decided who was worth its time, and Wesley continued his “enthusiasm” and kept pushing further, toward those…

Introduction As we continue our Wesleyan Vile-tality series, we go back to the years before Bristol, when Wesley and a small group of Oxford students spent most of their time in the prisons of Oxford, among people the rest of the city preferred to forget. They called themselves the Holy Club. Others called them Bible Moths, Sacramentarians, and eventually, Methodists. This last word first appeared in print because of the stir they caused. In our text this week, Luke frames Jesus’ mission…

Introduction This Sunday is Pentecost, and it’s also the beginning of a new six-week series: Wesleyan Vile-tality. The series takes its name from Dr. Ashley Boggan’s book, which asks what it would look like for The United Methodist Church to reclaim its original identity as a movement of people willing to go where they weren’t supposed to go and say what they weren’t supposed to say. The title comes from John Wesley’s journal entry of April 2, 1739, when he “submitted…

Introduction This is the final week of our post-Easter series Reckless Love. Over the past five weeks, we have explored what it means to begin with love, expand the circle, love lavishly and openheartedly, and value the vulnerable. Along the way, our understanding of what love requires has widened. This week, we consider these core questions that undergird the entire series: whose examples are we following, and what does it look like to follow them with our whole lives? In John…

Introduction As we near the end of our post-Easter series Reckless Love, we arrive at a question that has been building for weeks: what do we do with the people we’d rather avoid? We’ve explored what it means to begin with love, expand the circle, give lavishly, and love openheartedly. This week, we are called to go further, toward the people our communities have written off. In Mark 5, Jesus crosses into Gentile territory and encounters a man living among the…