What is Your Heart Made Of?

During my sabbatical, I came to see the Wesleys as real people much like us, as men and women whose lives were often quite difficult.  Just imagine Susanna giving birth to 19 children and burying most of them before her own death at 72 or trying to provide for them during those long stretches when Samuel was absent because of religious duties or because he was in a snit about something. Think of the pressures of trying to stretch each meal just a little further, of teaching her brood to read and write while also instructing them in the things of God, of somehow finding time to write in her journal or compose her deeply theological letters.  And picture her whole-hearted offering of her life to God within the only context open to her, as wife and mother, and the way she stretched those boundaries with her leadership of prayer meetings, her spiritual counsel/direction of her children, even her Oxford-educated clergy sons, and her willingness to push her husband to broaden his horizons enough to recognize her as a spiritual equal.

John was very much like his mother in personality.  Like her, he was practical and rational, playing his emotional cards close to the chest, and he was generally more subtle than Charles in his challenges to those with whom he disagreed.  But a trait that most, if not all of the Wesleys seemed to share was a willingness to take a stance even when that proved unpopular or even dangerous.  In 1787 and 1788, he took on the slave trade by preaching a fiery anti-slavery sermon right in the heart of Bristol, one of the major slave-trading ports in England and issuing his Thoughts Upon Slavery, in which he pulled no punches. 

The excerpt below piles image upon image as his questions relentlessly force the listeners/readers to see the human misery and woe arising from this lucrative, evil practice, leaving them no place to hide from his denunciation of its villainy.  These are not thoughts whose relevance is confined to the pages of history, however.  Wesley challenges us to confront the systemic evils of our day, demanding that we examine ourselves in the light of Christ and of our common humanity.  He does so in phrases and sentences that insist that we look at the abject wretchedness of all who suffer -- children, refugees, the homeless -- and recognize our culpability and our responsibility to relieve them by ending the practices that prolong their agony, not as a matter of politics but out of simple Christian love and compassion.  Perhaps you will be inspired to read the entire document, but more importantly, perhaps you will be inspired to act on behalf of the powerless, to speak for the voiceless, and to advocate for the least of these, our sisters and brothers, in the name and power of Jesus Christ.

Are you a man? Then you should have an human heart. But have you indeed? What is your heart made of? Is there no such principle as Compassion there? Do you never feel another's pain? Have you no Sympathy? No sense of human woe? No pity for the miserable? When you saw the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts, or the bleeding sides and tortured limbs of your fellow-creatures, was you a stone, or a brute? Did you look upon them with the eyes of a tiger? When you squeezed the agonizing creatures down in the ship, or when you threw their poor mangled remains into the sea, had you no relenting? Did not one tear drop from your eye, one sigh escape from your breast? Do you feel no relenting now? If you do not, you must go on, till the measure of your iniquities is full. Then will the Great GOD deal with You, as you have dealt with them, and require all their blood at your hands.