Happy New Year! I hope that Christmastide was good to you and you are braced for a lovely Ordinary Time! I find the New Year to not only be the time I start gathering all of my tax information, but also a time to reflect on the previous year’s practices. Last year, I reformatted Wesley Bros comics to optimize them for social media, like Instagram, because that seems to be where most webcomics have moved to these days. It was fun to break my normal “full-page” comic style and attempt to tell a story or a joke in only four panels or less, much like the daily comics I remember reading in the paper growing up. I thought for sure if I tried to make things less “Methodist-specific” and styled up the comic to fit trending hashtags, maybe I could be like these other webcomic artists who are bringing in tens of thousands of likes and shares on every post.
Ha.
Instead, I found myself hating the machine of social media even more than I had before. These platforms are now designed to make money, and that’s kind of it. Pay lots and lots of dollars to get Facebook and Instagram to get your stuff in front of more people…but it’s never the right people…it’s always the people who HATE my message and leave nastygrams in my DM’s and comment sections. So I stopped giving social media my money, and it turns out I have less views on social media than ever before.
But I’m also having more fun making comics. Every week I get to it I really love drawing again, love coloring, love researching, love telling stupid jokes that only four people think are funny.
This week’s comic is a bit of a John Wesley deep cut. Not to many people outside of Methodist seminarians have spent time reading any of John Wesley’s sermons (archived here!). But reading collections of those sermons has left a deep mark on my own theology and practice as a Christian, which is probably a big reason I draw comics featuring these dead British clergy bros. I remember reading The Circumcision of the Heart and being so moved to a life of deeper discipleship. Granted, Wesley also had his share of problematic and harmful discourse in some of these sermons. Take The Cause and Cure for Earthquakes, where Wesley preaches an entire sermon naming major earthquakes in Jamaica, Italy, and Peru, citing them as God’s judgment on the moral failures of the sinful people who died there. The cure of course, is that everyone repent and be saved and then there will be no more earthquakes. Not Wesley’s finest moment, to be sure, especially when we think of modern preachers publicly blaming 9/11 on abortionists, feminists and gays. I think it is important for us to acknowledge and call out poor theology, even when it comes from founders of movements to which we belong.
So in light of Wesley’s (better) sermon, Circumcision of the Heart, perhaps we can separate the wheat from the chaff, cutting out the harmful to give all room to the goodness of God. “Let all your thoughts, words, and works, tend to his glory. Set your heart firm on him, and on other things only as they are in and from him. Let your soul be filled with so entire a love of him, that you may love nothing but for his sake” (II.10).
***Update on January 27, 2024: several readers have brought to my attention that it was actually Charles Wesley, not John, who wrote the Cause and Cure of Earthquakes sermon! Egad! Well, the comic is already written, so apologies for the misinformation. #themoreyouknow