May 24th, 2026 - Pentecost Sunday - "Methodist Refresh: Hearts on Fire" - Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris

Matt Nelson: Welcome to the sermon podcast from First United Methodist

Church in downtown Bentonville.

If you have questions related to what you hear today or just want to find

out more about the ministries at First United Methodist Church, please visit us

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Rev. Dr. Michelle Morris: Amen.

Some good songs and some great singing.

Thanks, y'all.

We are in this series called Methodist Refresh.

We're looking at some moments in Methodist history, and today

we're going to be coming to the camp meetings in a roundabout way.

And to frame that up, on this Pentecost Sunday, which is also Heritage Sunday,

we're gonna hear from Acts as well as Numbers to prepare us for the Word.

Hear now the Word of the Lord.

"When Pentecost Day arrived, they were all together in one place.

Suddenly, a sound from heaven, like the howling of a fierce wind, filled the

entire house where they were sitting.

They saw what seemed to be individual flames of fire

alighting on each one of them.

They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages

as the Spirit enabled them to speak.

So Moses went out and told the people the Lord's words.

He assembled 70 men from the people's elders and placed them around the tent.

The Lord descended in a cloud, spoke to him, and took some of the spirit that was

on him and placed it on the 70 elders.

When the spirit rested on them, they prophesied, but only this once.

Two men had remained in the camp, one named Eldad and the second named

Medad, and the spirit rested on them.

They were among those registered, but they hadn't gone out to the

tent, so they prophesied in the camp.

A young man ran and told Moses, 'Eldad and Medad are prophesying

in the camp.' Joshua, Nun's son and Moses' assistant since his youth,

responded, 'My master Moses, stop them.'

Moses said to him, 'Are you jealous for my sake?

If only all the Lord's people were prophets with the Lord placing His Spirit

on them.' Moses and Israel's elders were assembled in the camp." This is

the Word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

Let us pray.

Lord, open our hearts, our minds, and our eyes that we might see and know

the word you have for us this day.

In your holy name we pray, amen.

So in a couple weeks we have the family camp out coming up, and

I remind everybody that you're invited out to the family camp out.

It'll be the 6th and the 7th, and I got to go for the first time last year.

I had such a great time.

I'm going again this year.

But the Saturday that we were all gathered together last year, Allison

said, "We're gonna go for a hike", and she took about three-quarters of

the group that was there off to hike up in the wilderness, and there were

a quarter of us that stayed behind.

And she said to the quarter of us that were staying behind, "This is great.

You all can get the fire going.

At about this time, if you'll start the fire, then it'll be good and ready,

and we'll be able to prepare dinner, and all eat basically as soon as we

get back from the hike." "Okay, great.

Thanks, Allison."

And away she went.

She didn't ask if anybody who stayed behind actually knew how to start a fire

And you may think I live full-time in an RV, so I probably am very good at camping.

No, I am not good at camping.

You know, when I go camping, I take my entire house with me.

It is not exactly roughing it, right?

So no, I don't know how to start a fire.

I was among the adults who were all standing there not knowing what to do.

When, she was at the time a sixth grader, sixth grader Megan Montgomery

said, "Oh, I know how to start a fire." She starts piling the wood together,

and she's making- she's explaining.

She's not just starting the fire.

She's teaching all of us useless adults how to do it, right?

She's explaining, you know, you need to make enough room so that there's

oxygen can get in there, and that'll really catch the fire up, and here's

where you place the debris to get it going and really cook it all up.

And thank God she was there because we actually had a full going fire by the

time Allison returned with everyone else.

This weekend, we are celebrating those fire-starting moments in our

faith, and I just read you one of them, and that's the Pentecost story.

So Pentecost took place 50 days after Easter.

And note that the disciples, who have been told, "You are going to carry this

message. You are going to spread the gospel throughout the world," they've

been told that, but they're still just hanging out all together in one house.

They don't know what to do.

They don't trust that they're really the people called to do it.

They don't feel like they're equipped to actually do this.

And so in the midst of that space where they're still huddled together, the Holy

Spirit descends and flames of fire alight on their tongues, and away they go.

Now they can speak the languages of the world and carry it out into the world.

As I mentioned, today is also Heritage Sunday or Aldersgate Day.

This actually is Aldersgate Day.

And Aldersgate Day is a very important day in Methodism.

It marks the anniversary of what happened to John Wesley on May 24th in 1738.

Now, John Wesley had returned from being a missionary in the Americas

where he had done miserably poorly.

He was pretty sure he was a failure.

He was questioning his role, his call, and he was questioning his faith, and

he is pretty down in the dumps when he gets dragged to this Christian meeting

where he hears someone read the preface to the letter of Romans by Martin Luther.

And while he is hearing those words, he has this experience that he writes about.

He says his heart was strangely warmed

And not only did he have an assurance of his salvation in that moment, but he

also had an assurance of his call again.

And so we mark May 24th as the founding date of Methodism.

It's when our movement really got going.

It was in that, that warmth and that fire that came into John Wesley's heart

that then gives rise to our movement.

There are a couple of things that those stories have in common, one of which is

people who didn't think they had what it took to actually do the work of God.

And yet, in the midst of those people questioning their call and

questioning their role, the Holy Spirit comes to them and empowers them and

gives them all the gifts that they need to do the work that they do.

And what happened from that moment, from those giftedness?

Well, we stand here today because the disciples did go out and spread

the word of Jesus Christ and take it to the corners of the earth.

And so we are here claiming ourselves to be Christians because of their movement.

And we are also in a Methodist church because of that moment with John Wesley

when his heart was strangely warmed and he was reassured of what he was called

to do and could move out from that place.

But neither of those stories really stopped at those moments,

obviously, because as I've mentioned, we're all still here.

But John Wesley's movement had to go from England and make its way

across the ocean to the Americas.

And when it did, it encountered an incredible obstacle, and

that was the American frontier.

This country is huge, and people had spread out in it

And what we had, we, we tend to romanticize the frontier, but what it

actually was made up of was people who spent most of their lives in isolation,

rarely encountering other people.

They wouldn't see people for maybe weeks or months.

And yet they were still longing for community.

They still wanted connection, and they still wanted to be

connected to each other and to God.

And they were a scrappy group of people.

You know, maybe the people that were on the edges of society to begin with.

Well, as organized religion encounters the American frontier, on the whole, organized

religion decided it wasn't worth it.

Don't waste your time with the American frontier.

It takes too much energy, too much time, too many resources to reach too few

people who are spread too far apart.

So we'll concentrate on the areas that are developed and in the cities.

And by the way, those people out there, probably not worth it anyway

But coming across the ocean is this upstart faith, a faith that we heard

last week if you were here, had a founder who also submitted to be more vile.

And that involved not only leaving the, the bounds of the church, but

also reaching the people that the church didn't think were worth it.

So here comes this movement with that sort of founding fire That makes

Methodism uniquely suited for the American frontier because we are already prepared

to form community outside of church.

We're prepared to preach in the fields.

We're prepared to start class meetings that don't require a church building,

but just require a campfire to gather around and share life together.

And we're a faith that's already broken the rules about who is

authorized to carry the Word.

So as the Methodist movement is taking hold, the American Revolution breaks out.

When the American Revolution breaks out, the Anglican priests who were

here all faced a choice of two things.

They could either return to England, or they could turn in their orders and stay

and be part of the American Revolution.

The reason that that's the case is because they had all sworn allegiance to the king,

so they had to stay loyal to the king.

Well, John Wesley encounters this, and he's very worried.

He wants people to still be able to have their sacraments, and so he goes

to a bishop and he says, "Hey, can we just consecrate and ordain a couple

of people and just skip the vow to the king?" To which the bishop said,

"No, we're the Church of England.

We can't do that." So John Wesley does it anyway.

Uh, yeah.

And that is where the Anglican communion marks that we were no longer

Anglican, we were now Methodist.

John Wesley still thought we were Anglican, but nonetheless.

Anyway, so he sends folks over.

So we've already broken the rules about who's authorized, who's officially

authorized to be carrying the Word.

So we have a faith that doesn't require the bounds of a church wall, and we

have a faith that's already broken the rules about who's authorized.

And what happens is that we come to this American frontier,

and we're ready to serve it.

Now, we are still Methodist, so there's still method to our madness.

We still have a structure to it.

We still have deacons and elders who are ordained.

But we also, like I said, have these class meetings that are

entirely lay-run, entirely lay-run.

And then out of those class meetings, we start to see

people who are uniquely gifted.

So some of them are given a license to exhort, which is a

license to teach and to organize.

And then we are also seeing some that are really gifted at sharing the Gospel,

and so they're given a license to preach.

These are all still laypeople.

They are all still laypeople.

And then we have circuit riders who some of them are laypeople,

some of them are on the path to ordination, some of them are ordained.

It's kind of that middle road like our local pastors are now.

And so they're going out and covering an enormous circuit.

So what we have done is we have set people loose across the frontier

so that we can reach everyone.

And we stand on firm foundation.

Not only do we have the model of Pentecost, where the disciples, who

are these ragtag group of fishermen and tax collectors who are suddenly going

out and spreading the Word, but we have this story from Numbers In which

people were empowered and given the Holy Spirit, and it didn't even matter

that they didn't come to the tent.

The Holy Spirit still reached them, still went out there and grabbed them and said,

"You've got the gift. You share it, too." So we're standing on this foundation

of this is how Christianity has worked.

So here are these empowered people, this movement that's starting to take hold,

that doesn't require that there's a church building and an ordained person, and

it runs head into the Kentucky Revival.

When it runs into the Kentucky Revival, the powder keg that

is sitting there goes boom.

And suddenly we start doing camp meetings, which are week-long gatherings where

those people with a license to preach are getting up and preaching, and where those

who have a license to exhort are gathering people together and teaching them.

And there is this wildfire breaking out across the American frontier,

and we become the fastest-moving Christian movement in American history.

We cover the ground.

We reach out to everybody because, again, we don't see anyone as unworthy

of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

We're gonna go to the far reaches of everywhere and share this passion,

and we're gonna empower the people who are all around to do that work.

And it was on fire and alive

And yet, an old accusation that we had faced in England

followed us across the ocean.

That accusation was that we were too enthusiastic

We were too enthusiastic, too excited for and about God.

We were breaking the rules.

We were not abiding the order.

We were outside of the bounds of what was proper in the faith.

We are far too enthusiastic.

There were people out there seeking to throw water on this fire.

And I will say that that's the other thing that's common to all these stories.

There's always someone who's objecting.

There were the people who were saying for the Numbers story, "These

guys didn't make it to the tent.

They shouldn't be out there preaching the Word." When the disciples start going out

and speaking all these other languages, people say, "They have to be drunk." When

John Wesley sends this movement across the ocean, he faces the challenge of

being outside of the Anglican communion.

And I will share with you that that objection continues still yet today.

And one of the things that I sometimes hear about our church,

the objection that I hear about our church, is that we have too much joy.

Far too joyful in this church, y'all.

And people get upset about it.

They think we're not taking the faith seriously.

You can be joyful and take your faith seriously.

Those are not separate things.

In fact, please, my God, be joyful.

And this world needs joy.

And the other thing that we sometimes face is a criticism

that I let too many people preach.

I sometimes will hear that.

"You should not let all the people preach that you let preach." Well, sometimes I

think that's meant to be a compliment.

They wanna hear me preach.

That's nice.

I appreciate that.

But sometimes it is, "We're paying you to preach.

You should be the one to preach." Yes, you are paying me to share the Word,

but you are also paying me to order the church, and ordering the church

means identifying the giftedness of people and then empowering them in that

giftedness to lead and to share their gifts in whatever ways that that is.

And we are enormously gifted in this church in that we have had

so many people identify a call to preach, a call to teach, a call

to share the Word in some ways.

And who would I be if I were to stand in the way of the Holy Spirit and

say, "Well, you cannot get up here"?

This is not my pulpit.

This is God's pulpit.

And if God has put the fire in someone else, then by God, they better get

up here and have a chance to express that call Part of ordering the church

is embracing the disorder of the Holy Spirit, the boundary-breaking reality of

it, and allowing God's Spirit to work.

So my friends, I'm not gonna apologize.

I'm not gonna apologize for being part of a denomination that is charged too

often with being enthusiastic, and I'm not gonna apologize for being part of a church

that is charged with having too much joy.

There is nothing to apologize for there.

And I am not going to apologize for being part of a, of a church and a

faith that sees value and giftedness in all people, and that allows

the Holy Spirit, invites the Holy Spirit to be at work in all people.

I am not going to apologize for being part of a church like that.

It is my deep and abiding prayer, my friends, that I can always

say this about this church.

I hope we are always a church that takes a look at a sixth-grade girl

and says, "You know what? I bet she could start a fire." Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Matt Nelson: Thanks for listening to the sermon podcast from First United

Methodist Church in downtown Bentonville.

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Grace and peace.