On our United Methodist calendar, this is Heritage Sunday. If you go to the United Methodist website, you'll see it's the 300^th birth anniversary of John Wesley this year. We have a heritage and today is the day to give it our attention.

What can you do with heritage? Well, one thing you can do is celebrate it. Sometimes we do that with costumes and songs and foods from many places. Sometimes we do it on the 4^th of July with firecrackers. It's especially fun to be with people from some countries that really take pride in their heritage with ethnic costumes and folk songs and dancing. Heritage is worth celebrating.

Something else you can do with heritage is to destroy it. We saw that happening in Iraq a couple of weeks ago when the National Museum was looted and thousands and thousands of priceless, irreplaceable artifacts tracing humanity's history back to the time of Abraham were stolen and destroyed. For days I was sick to my stomach as each day's newspaper brought news of fresh destruction of the world's heritage in Iraq -- not only the Museum of Antiquities looted, but the National Library was burned. Why did our own government, despite months of pleas from the American museum community, allow Iraq's heritage to go up in flames while keeping the Oil Ministry buildings safe? When anyone's heritage is destroyed, everyone's heritage is destroyed.

Celebration and destruction are not the only options with respect to heritage, however. There is something else you can do, and that is to transform it.

In Acts 17:16-31 the Apostle Paul is spending some time in Athens waiting for Silas and Timothy to join them from Berea. Berea is in Central Greece. Athens is a day's drive to the south, but of course Silas and Timothy didn't have a modern tour bus to drive them as Fran and I did two years ago. So Paul has to wait more than a day for Silas and Timothy to catch up. What do you do while you're killing time in Athens? Fran and I probably would have visited museums and historic sites and neighborhood coffee shops where you can sit outside and watch children play and traffic pass, but if you're an Apostle named Paul and you speak the language? You spend your time telling people about the new Messiah.

What really caught my attention about this story is that Paul didn't just start by talking about Jesus. He started with the heritage of the people in Athens. He started with an understanding of where people were and what they were doing. He affirmed their heritage. He noticed that Athens was full of statues to various gods. "I see that you are a religious people," he said.

Paul's strategy was not to destroy their heritage, but to build on it by transforming it.

What could he build on? He noticed that one of their altars was inscribed simply, "To an unknown God." Paul probably knew that the Athenians had that altar simply to cover themselves - in case, despite gods and goddesses of every conceivable kind, they might have left one out by mistake! But Paul built on this heritage and transformed it. "This God who is unknown to you," he said, "-I know who this God is. This God is Creator and Lord of heaven and earth."

God doesn't live in shrines, he assured them. God made us so we would look for God - and in fact, God is not far from each of us. Paul tied God to their heritage with a quote from their playwright Epimenedes: In God we live and move and have our being - and their Stoic philosopher Aratus -:"we too are his offspring."

When Paul was done, he had transformed the culture of Athens so it was now a foundation on which he could build the good news of the Messiah.

A. Transforming Worship

Christians have been transforming heritage ever since. Thomas Cranmer transformed worship.

In the English town of Oxford you will find St. Mary's Church, the church heart of Oxford University. During the reign of Queen Mary, when the Reformation divided Catholic from Protestant, trials for three Protestant English bishops were conducted here. In 1556 Archbishop Thomas Cranmer watched from a window as the first two were burned at the stake. Two weeks later it was his turn. Queen Mary had instructed that Cranmer must listen to a final sermon explaining why Cranmer must die. Then Cranmer arose to speak. While imprisoned he had retracted his Protestant beliefs, but now, inspired by the heroic deaths he had witnessed, he withdrew his retraction and stated his convictions with passion. When he was finished, he walked through the congregation to the stake outside from which he would be burned.

Thomas Cranmer transformed his heritage by taking the Latin mass, which ordinary people could not understand, and creating a Communion service in English in its place. Today's Communion liturgy for the most part uses Thomas Cranmer's words, which appeared first in 1549 in the English Church's new Book of Common Prayer. For many of us, the 'thee's' and 'thou's' of yesterday will feel awkward. For others of us who grew up in Methodist or Episcopal churches decades ago, these words are an important part of our heritage. When I was growing up these were the words we used every Communion. These words transformed the heritage that came before, and in turn they have been transformed in the service we normally use.

B. Transforming the Heart

Two hundred years later the same St. Mary's Church in Oxford was the scene where young John Wesley, 23 years old and already a faculty member, preached stirring sermons, until in 1744 he denounced the laxity and sloth of the senior members of the University. He was never asked to preach there again.

John Wesley and his younger brother Charles grew up steeped in the Anglican heritage in the town of Epworth where their father Samuel was the deeply unpopular rector of St. Andrews Church. So unpopular that one night a mob burned down the parsonage. Six year old John was the last out before the building collapsed, and ever after his mother Susannah referred to him as "a brand snatched from the burning."

At Oxford University the Wesley brothers formed a "Holy Club" and were so methodical about it that other students insulted them. "Methodists," they were called. A verse of the time went like this:

By rule they eat, by rule they drink,

Do all things else by rule, but think-

Accuse their priests of loose behavior,

To get more in the laymen's favor;

Method alone must guide 'em all,

Whence Methodists themselves they call.⁽¹⁾

The name stuck.

Like the men of Athens, the Wesley brothers spent years religiously worshipping an unknown God, until in 1738 at a prayer meeting in a little room on Aldersgate Street, one by one they finally made their heritage their own. John said his "heart was strangely warmed" and after that he traveled about five thousand miles a year, mostly on horseback, preaching fifteen sermons a week. He died in 1790 at the age of 87.

His brother Charles wrote more than 600 hymns. Read all the Charles Wesley hymns in the hymnbook and you will have a basic course in practical theology, and so I selected all of this morning's hymns from the many in our hymnal written by Charles Wesley.

C. Transforming Society

The Wesleyan movement transformed not only the heart, it transformed society. At Annual Conference this year a vote will be held on a resolution to abolish the agency where I work, the General Board of Church and Society - because it does controversial things and meddles with society. I don't think it will pass. When United Methodists stop changing society, they will stop being United Methodists. Methodism is about transformation.

One of my hobbies is family history. Genealogy. I descend from settlers and farmers who came to Maryland in the 1600s. The only trace many of them left is birthdates in Bibles, deeds, and wills. So hobbyists like me pore over old wills to make sense of the past.

It's jarring when you read some of these wills, after reading about 100 acres to this son and the bedroom furniture to that daughter, to be confronted with the line, "And to my loving daughter Tabitha I will my Negroes Bessie and Thomas.". For two hundred years of Maryland history, human beings were property - real estate - to be documented in deeds and wills.

One of John Wesley's passions was his opposition to the slave trade. How could you be a Christian and own another human being? The early Methodists in America had rough going because they opposed an economic system that was deeply entrenched. Eventually they compromised. John Wesley would have been heartbroken. In 1844 the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, broke away because they would not give up their slaves..

James Day was my great-great grandfather. Born in 1760, he was just 15 when he ran off to join the Revolution and ended up guarding British prisoners of war in Frederick. When the war was over he married the Montgomery County sheriff's daughter. In the Rockville courthouse you can find several manumissions James Day recorded in the 1790's. These were the documents needed to set slaves free. But these manumissions make no sense. Various slaves were to be set free -- when they were old enough to get a living on their own. In an economy where slaves make money for you, why set them free the minute they're old enough to do that?

I found an answer in the Quarterly Conference - what they used to call the Charge Conference- of the Frederick Circuit of the Methodist church. Ordinary Methodists had to deal with practical issues. What was a good Methodist to do if he inherited slaves? Especially, if they were children? Did you just cut children loose to fend for themselves? Had you no responsibility? And there in the minutes was the solution to the puzzle of James Day's manumissions. If a Methodist inherited adults, they were to be set free right away. If a Methodist inherited children, he was responsible to raise them, and then set them free when they were old enough to get a living. James Day's father in law the sheriff died in 1794. James Day's first manumission is dated 1796. Putting two and two together, we can estimate that James Day was a committed Methodist by 1796.

When Methodism could repeat stories like that hundreds of times over, Methodism was transforming not only hearts but society.

What heritage needs to be transformed today?

We mustn't neglect physical heritage. When I was a college student, I was rather thin. Now, I'm not. You could say I have been celebrating my physical heritage. Isn't that a nice image? Every meal a celebration! But celebration alone is not sufficient to maintain one's heritage. Several years ago I realized if I wanted to keep this physical heritage I would have to not only celebrate it but exercise it. I still weigh too much. I need to celebrate this heritage less and exercise it more. Transforming heritage is a challenge.

We mustn't neglect our national heritage. We have a national heritage called Freedom. Many people wear American flags on their lapels. They are celebrating their heritage, and there's nothing wrong with celebration, is there? But like the physical heritage of our bodies, if we only celebrate it and don't exercise it, we may lose it.

And there's the challenge, because to exercise your freedom you have to say something unpopular. The nastiest dictatorship in the world is happy to let you praise the dictatorship - there's no freedom in that! But it's - well - unpopular to say something unpopular. The lead singer of the Dixie Chicks exercised American freedom when she told an audience last month that she was ashamed to be from the same state as President Bush. A number of country and western radio chains quickly banned her records from their airwaves and one radio station arranged an event where a bulldozer ran over their CDs. This trio of young women who sing country music have received hate mail and death threats. The message is clear - "don't you dare to exercise your freedom." Transforming heritage is a challenge.

Most important of all, we mustn't neglect our religious heritage, The stories we have heard this morning are of people who took something they inherited, and made it their own. They not only celebrated their heritage, they exercised it. In the process, they transformed it.

St. Paul looked at an altar to an unknown God and said, I know who this is, and you can, too. Thomas Cranmer looked at the Latin Mass and said, this is important! People must understand it in their own language! John Wesley gave his mind to God and kept struggling for years until his heart, too was strangely warmed. Countless Maryland farmers heard Wesley's message and transformed not only their hearts but their society. This is our heritage, and when we bring it into our own hearts and lives, we meet the God who has been with us from the beginning, and who says, "I make all things new."