Pentecost: 24/05/2026
(observed also as Aldersgate Sunday)
We are observing today Aldersgate Sunday: a key date in the history of the Methodist Church, with which St John’s is in partnership. Here is some background information:
FOUNDERS OF METHODISM: JOHN WESLEY (1703-1791) AND CHARLES WESLEY (1707-1788)
EXTRACT FROM THE JOURNAL OF JOHN WESLEY MAY 24TH 1738
In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society (Moravian meeting) in Aldersgate Street where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while the leader was describing the change God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given to me that he had taken away my sins, even mine and saved me from the law of sin and death.
Verse of one of the hymns Charles Wesley wrote to mark a similar experience he had on Pentecost Sunday 1738.
Come O my guilty brethren come,
Groaning beneath your load of sin,
His bleeding heart shall make you room,
His open side shall take you in;
He calls you now, invites you home.
Come O my guilty brethren come.
THE GATHERING OF THE PEOPLE OF GOD
Opening Sentence: O Lord, our Lord; how excellent is your name in all the world. (Psalm 8)
INTROIT HYMN: Let Every Christian Pray
Let us pray together:
Glory to you O God:
you raised Jesus from the grave,
bringing us victory over death
and giving us eternal life.
Glory to you O Christ:
for us and for our salvation
you overcame death
and opened the gate to everlasting life.
Glory to you O Holy Spirit:
you lead us into the truth
and breathe new life into us.
Glory to you. Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
now and forever. Amen.
The presiding Minister says,
If we have fallen into despair,
Lord forgive us.
If we have failed to hope in you,
Lord forgive us.
If we have been fearful of death
Lord forgive us.
If we have forgotten the victory of Christ,
Lord forgive us.
Silence
May the living God
raise you from despair,
give you victory over sin
and set you free in Christ. Amen
COLLECT FOR PENTECOST
O God,
who on the day of Pentecost
enlightened the hearts of your people
by the fire of the Holy Spirit:
give us wisdom and understanding,
and lead us into all truth,
that your Church may be kept in the unity of the Spirit
and the bond of peace;
through Jesus Christ, our Lord,
who lives and reigns with you,
in the unity of the same Spirit,
one God, world without end. Amen.
COLLECT FOR ALDERSGATE SUNDAY
Almighty God,
you raised up your servants, John and Charles Wesley,
to proclaim anew the gift of redemption
and the life of holiness.
Pour out your Spirit,
and revive your work among us;
that inspired by the same faith,
and upheld by the same grace
in word and sacrament,
we and all your children
may be made one
in the unity of your Church on earth,
even as in heaven we are made one in you;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
THE GLORIA, sung by Sue St Joseph
Glory to God in the highest,
and peace to God’s people on earth.
Lord God, heavenly King,
almighty God and Father,
we worship you, we give you thanks,
we praise you for your glory.
Lord Jesus Christ, only son of the Father,
Lord God, Lamb of God,
you take away the sin of the world:
have mercy on us.
You are seated at the right hand of the Father:
receive our prayer.
For you alone are the Holy One,
you alone are the Lord,
you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ,
with the Holy Spirit,
in the glory of God the Father. Amen.
THE MINISTRY OF THE WORD.
FIRST READING Isaiah 12, 1-6, read by Robyn Brotherston
1 You will say on that day: I will give thanks to you, O LORD, for though you were angry with me, your anger turned away, and you comforted me. 2 Surely God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid, for the LORD GOD is my strength and my might; he has become my salvation.
3 With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation. 4 And you will say on that day: Give thanks to the LORD, call on his name; make known his deeds among the nations; proclaim that his name is exalted. 5 Sing praises to the LORD, for he has done gloriously; let this be known in all the earth. 6 Shout aloud and sing for joy, O royal Zion, for great in your midst is the Holy One of Israel.
Psalm 130, 1-7 [Congregation to join in in verses in bold type]
Read by David Kerr
1Out of the depths have I called to you, O Lord;
Lord, hear my voice; *
let your ears consider well the voice of my supplication.
2If you, Lord, were to note what is done amiss, *
O Lord, who could stand?
3For there is forgiveness with you; *
therefore you shall be feared.
4I wait for the Lord; my soul waits for him; *
in his word is my hope.
5My soul waits for the Lord,
more than watchmen for the morning, *
more than watchmen for the morning.
6O Israel, wait for the Lord, *
for with the Lord there is mercy;
7With him there is plenteous redemption, *
and he shall redeem Israel from all their sins.
SECOND READING Romans 5 1-11
Read by Mark Toner
Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God. 3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, 4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, 5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.
8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. 9 Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God. 10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life. 11 But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.
GRADUAL HYMN:
GOSPEL: Mark 12, 28-37, read by Kay Solaja
Hear the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to St Mark, chapter 12, beginning at verse 28
Glory to Christ our Saviour
One of the scribes came near and heard them disputing with one another, and seeing that he answered them well, he asked him, “Which commandment is the first of all?” 29 Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one;
30 you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ 31 The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” 32 Then the scribe said to him, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; 33 and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbour as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” 34 When Jesus saw that he answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.”
After that no one dared to ask him any question.
35 While Jesus was teaching in the temple, he said, “How can the scribes say that the Messiah is the son of David? 36 David himself, by the Holy Spirit, declared, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at my right hand, until I put your enemies under your feet.” ’ 37 David himself calls him Lord; so how can he be his son?” And the large crowd was listening to him with delight.
Give thanks to the Lord for his glorious gospel.
Praise to Christ our Lord
SERMON
A fortnight ago, when Bishop Nick was here, he encouraged us to tell our stories. With that in mind, let me begin with a testimony.
I was not shapen in iniquity, and neither did my mother conceive me in sin, as the Psalmist would have us believe. My parents were devout Christians. I am what is known as a ‘cradle Methodist’, born and bred.
In 1952, we were living in a very small village in Norfolk, near the famous town of Swaffham.
So, picture this scene.
It is Easter Sunday, April 13th of that year. Four days before, I had just turned 15.
In the village Methodist chapel on that Easter Sunday evening, it is the final service of a week of an evangelical mission by the Methodist church to the village. The chapel is packed to capacity and more – there is standing room only. The evangelist leading the mission preaches a powerful sermon, asking the congregation to commit their lives to Jesus. If anyone wishes to do that, he invites them to come forward to the front of the chapel as a sign of that commitment.
I begin to feel uncomfortable. Yes, I want to make that commitment. But I’m hesitant about getting out from my seat and making an exhibition of myself. After all, I’m a Christian, born and bred, as well as being a Methodist.
I’m sitting next my uncle. He is, like me, a Methodist Christian, and I can tell that he wants to go forward, because he begins to wriggle. Then the preacher announces the last hymn, which is that great hymn by Isaac Watts ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. We get to the last verse, ‘Were the whole realm of nature mine, that were an offering far too small. Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all!’
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To my surprise, my uncle gets up as we sing, and goes to the front. I feel a strange warmth in my heart, and I follow him.What has happened? What am I doing? What is this strange, warm, feeling inside me?
Let me take you back almost 300 years from today.
It is May 24th 1738. John Wesley has attended a meeting of evangelical Christian people in a room in Aldersgate St. in London. It was a strange kind of place for an Anglican clergyman to be seen in Hanoverian England!
He was in his mid-thirties, and he went through a very deep spiritual experience, which led him into a new relationship with God. He wrote in his Journal that he felt his ‘heart strangely warmed’. He became aware, for the first time, of the love of God for him as an individual – ‘Christ died for my sins, even mine’, as he put it. From that moment on, the lives of John and his brother Charles were given up to spreading this good news which they had discovered.
Thus Methodism proper began – a nickname which the brothers had been given when they were at Oxford as undergraduates, because of their ‘methodical’ self-discipline and way of life.
Today, as well as being Pentecost, is observed as Aldersgate Sunday in the Methodist Calendar, to recall that ‘heart warming experience’ which John Wesley had.
But what has this all got to do with us, almost 300 years on? Let me try to put it into context.
OK, so John Wesley had a significant heart warming experience. All well and good. But if he had just gone through the rest of his life in a warm, but perhaps diminishing glow, he would simply have been an enthusiastic Church of England parson, maybe in a small and undemanding parish.
But that isn’t what happened.
What happened was that not only was his heart warmed, but that his eyes were opened. What he saw was the Church of England with absentee clerics, leaving their curates to run things; with a church that pandered to the rich, and a church which to a large extent ignored the plight of the poorest people, the labourers, the miners, and those for whom the Christian gospel was an irrelevance. It wasn’t the ‘squirearchy’, for they had access to whatever the church was offering. Neither was it the nobility. What Wesley saw was people whose lives were ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, to quote a philosopher from a previous century to Wesley.
PhilosophyEverydays/
So, John Wesley, with his heart ablaze with Pentecostal power, set out to give good news to the poor, to those whose lives were miserable. He knew in his warmed heart that they were the ones who needed him most, and that while he could have had a good living, it meant foregoing life in a parish, and, instead, looking on the whole world as his parish. He would go to those who needed him most, wherever that might take him.
He was a master strategist, and he centred his work on major cities – London, Briston, Newcastle. But his reputation spread like wildfire. His brother Charles summed it up in a hymn, which begins: ‘See how great a flame aspires, kindled by a spark of grace’. The fire ran and ran, and so Methodism became established.
Now, for me, all this begs a question. How can we, the church today, appeal to folk of any age, old or young, whose lives know nothing of the love of God in Christ Jesus? How can we warm those hearts with that love? And you might well ask: is that what we should be doing? How does it work? Are there still people whose lives are ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’?
I believe that there are such people here in Dumfries, and, indeed, across the world. Think of those of a younger generation, many of whom feel hopeless and helpless, due largely in part, perhaps, to pernicious social media, who seek ways out from that wretchedness in so many directions – and here I quote from a report – in ‘self-obsession, eating disorders, substance abuse, teenage suicide, bullying, and sexual (and domestic) ‘abuse’, to name some, then surely we, today, as Christians, as bearers of good news, surely we ought to be able to appeal to them in some way? If John Wesley was with us today, I’m pretty certain he would be able to find it.
If we think we have nothing to say, we ought to give up right now, this morning, and turn this church into a museum. If we think we do have something to say, then perhaps it is time we got our heads together, and discovered what it is, and how we can go about it. I don’t think it would take a John Wesley to do it. But I think he could point us in the right direction.
In our gospel reading this morning, Jesus saw that the scribe who had questioned him was on the right track, and said to him ‘You are not far from the Kingdom of God’. Sometimes asking the right questions can lead us on to do great things for Christ and his church. The trouble is that so often we are asking the wrong questions, chasing the wrong priorities, going down rabbit hole after rabbit hole.
One of the symbols of Pentecost is fire – tongues of fire seen over the heads of the apostles – the ‘pure celestial fire’ of which Charles Wesley wrote in that glorious hymn. He goes on the say ‘kindle a flame of sacred love on the mean altar of my heart,’ and ‘there let it for thy glory burn’, and again ‘still let me guard the holy fire, and still stir up thy gift in me’. There is much to warm the heart in that hymn.
In spite of that heart-warming experience, John Wesley was no plaster saint. His human-ness got the better of him all through his life, and he too made wrong choices, one of which led to a very unhappy marriage. What got him through, though, was his unshakeable faith in Christ which was locked into him that evening in 1738, and that it was that same Christ who called him to minister, as he himself put it, not to those who needed him, but to those who needed him most. This was his injunction to his preachers, and is much quoted even today at ordination services for Methodist ministers.
I hope that for you, on this Aldersgate Sunday, your hearts will also be ‘strangely warmed’ with the fire of Pentecost, and that this church of St John the Evangelist will find the best way of spreading the good news of God’s love in Dumfries.
Who could be the people to whom we go?
Who does need us most?
NICENE CREED
We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one substance with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven;
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father.
With the Father and the Son,
he is worshipped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.
INTERCESSIONS
Through Jesus, whom we confess as Lord, we give thanks and praise to the Father, calling on him who is judge of all:
Father, your kingdom come.
For all the peoples of the world; that they may know you as the God of peace, we pray to you, O Lord:
Father, your kingdom come.
For nations, for leaders and governments; that integrity may mark all their dealings, we pray to you O Lord:
Father, your kingdom come.
For all who labour for righteousness; that your presence and help may give them courage, we pray to you, O Lord:
Father, your kingdom come.
For communities torn by dissension and strife; that your forgiveness may bring them healing, we pray to you, O Lord:
Father, your kingdom come.
For the anxious, the lonely, the bereaved; that consolation and peace may be theirs, we pray to you, O Lord:
Father, your kingdom come.
For the Church, your household and family; that she may be firm in the confession of her hope, we pray to you, O Lord:
Father, your kingdom come.
For Nick, our Bishop, and for all who bear Christ’s name; that their lives may proclaim your glory, we pray to you, o Lord:
Father, your kingdom come.
For those who are separated from us by death; that theirs may be the kingdom which is unshakeable, we pray to you, O Lord:
Father, your kingdom come.
O God of peace, who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great Shepherd of the sheep: make us perfect in all goodness to do your will and to be what you would have us be; through him to whom be glory for ever, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
LORD’S PRAYER
We say together the prayer that Jesus gave us:
Our Father in Heaven,
Hallowed be your Name,
Your kingdom come,
Your will be done,
On earth as in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
As we forgive those who sin against us.
Do not bring us to the time of trial
But deliver us from evil.
For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours,
now and for ever. Amen
PRAYERS AND DISMISSAL
Silence
Let us pray
God of our salvation,
we thank you for our communion with the risen Christ
and with all who love him in earth and heaven.
We pray that, strengthened by his grace,
we may serve you faithfully all our days;
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen
God of mercy,
who inspired John and Charles Wesley
with zeal for your gospel:
grant that all your people may boldly proclaim your word
and evermore rejoice in singing your praises;
through Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen
BLESSING
The Spirit of truth lead you into all truth,
give you grace to confess that Jesus Christ is Lord,
and to proclaim the word and works of God,
and the blessing of God, Spirit, Son and Father,
Remain with you always. Amen.
CLOSING HYMN
DISMISSAL
Go in peace to love and serve the Lord
In the name of Christ. Amen
