The Underside of the Story (Luke 10:1-11, 16-20; Proper 9C; July 7, 2013)

The Underside of the Story

Luke 10:1-11, 16-20
Proper 9C
July 7, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA

Twice in Luke’s gospel Jesus sends out teams of his followers to preach the reign of God with words and with actions.  They proclaim God’s counter-imperial Empire and heal the sick.  In both stories, they are to rely on the hospitality that they meet in the villages where they work. 

The earlier story, the sending of “the Twelve” in chapter nine, doesn’t tell us much.  The second story that we heard in today’s reading gives us a few more details.  It tells us that the mission is risky.  They are to go without relying on their own resources.  They don’t even carry a beggar’s bag, like the traveling philosophers known as Cynics did.  Instead, they are to trust that God will give them what they need when they need it: a place to stay and food to eat.  The outcome of the mission will rest on the response of those who are on the receiving end of it. 

Thirty-six teams of Jesus followers were sent out.  The mission was a stunning success, so that Jesus was able to see in it evidence that the balance of heavenly forces had tipped toward God and God’s people.

Jesus’ disciples—whether numbered at twelve or seventy-two—are at the center of the story.  It’s a story about their ministry, an exciting story!  They came back full of joy from their mission telling tales of being able to cast out evil spirits because they used Jesus’ name.  The disciples are so fired up that Jesus has to calm them down a little, to remind them of what is truly important: not the fireworks of their mission, but the fact that they are God’s beloved children.

The whole of the book of Acts which is the second half of the Gospel of Luke is a series of mission stories about teams of Jesus followers as they go from place to place.  It focuses on Paul and his fellow missioners, on what they did and what they said and on what happened to them along the way.  The missioners, the sent ones, the apostles—all three mean the same thing—are the heroes of the story.

We have a similar set of stories in our own legends of the early days of the Methodist movement.  The heroes of those stories were what we called “circuit riders,” preachers who were sent into a territory to travel a circuit, organizing and strengthening congregations of Methodists.  They were appointed for a year at a time and had no fixed residence or place of ministry.  They, too, relied on God to supply them with places to stay and food to eat. 

These stories have so shaped Methodism that we can hardly think our way past them.  The logo of Cokesbury, our publishing house, is the silhouette of a preacher on horseback, reading the latest book to come off the presses, ordered on-line no doubt, since there are no longer Cokesbury stores.  Stories of the circuit riders loomed large in my Sunday School education, alongside stories of missionaries to Africa.

We didn’t call them circuit riders in those days.  We called them itinerant preachers, or itinerating elders.  We called the system of wandering ministry under the appointment of bishops “the itinerancy”.  Even though the life of preachers today is quite different from the life that preachers led then, we cling to the heroic mythology of the circuit rider.

I don’t want to downplay just how difficult that life was.  Early circuit riders died from all sorts of causes: disease, exposure, bandits, accidents, hostile congregations.  (I made that last part up.)  When the clergy gather each year at the clergy session of Annual Conference, we still begin by singing, “And are we yet alive, and see each other’s face?”  In those days the song carried a lot more freight.  Those who survived the physical assaults of this kind of ministry were often soon exhausted.  The average career of the circuit rider was about three years. 

There is an underside to this story.  For every circuit rider, for every apostle, for every disciple of Jesus sent in mission, for every hero of our founding myths, there is another set of people who, somehow, never got a lot of press.  I suspect that this is because the histories were written by apostles, disciples and circuit riders (or their agents).

For every team of disciples Jesus sent there was a householder willing to receive them.  For every apostle who journeyed there were householders who hosted them.  For every itinerating circuit rider there was a string of families who provided room and board.  It is only by reading these stories from the underside with our imaginations fully engaged that we are able to begin to tell these forgotten and neglected stories.

Rev. Bishop, the founding elder of our congregation, had a circuit that encompassed all of Winneshiek and Allamakee counties and a little more.  He traveled on horseback through his territory.  In each settlement he looked for Methodists and started with them.  For a few weeks he would preach, probably several times each week.  He would visit those who were sick.  He would baptize the children of believers and any adult converts who had not been baptized.  He would preside weekly at the Lord’s Table.  He would organize the people into small groups.  He would look for people who might be able to give leadership to these small groups.  He would recruit them and train them.  He might stay in Decorah for two or three weeks and then he was gone, off to the next settlement. 

That was his life, but what about the people he left behind?  Three or four times each year they would have a preacher—hard to call him a pastor, exactly—for two or three weeks at a time, for a total of six to twelve weeks a year.  But what about the rest of the time?

There would have been no baptisms or communion, because there was no elder present, but everything else that makes up the life of the community of faith would have rested in the hands of lay people.  Pastoral visits would not wait for Rev. Bishop’s next visit.  Weekly preaching would be performed by those who had the gifts for it.  In those days, Lay Speakers were lay people who spoke!  Teaching children, checking in on the spiritual life of adults, raising money toward a church building or a church bell, reaching out to the community to make sure that disaffected Lutherans had somewhere to worship and live as Christians, all of these things and more were lay ministries. 

We tell the circuit rider story as if circuit riders were the key to Methodism’s growth.  Circuit riders were important.  The movement would not have gone forward without them.  But the underside of the story is the story of lay people who carried on almost all of the ministries of the church using the gifts that God had given them with only periodic supervision.  If they were faithful, the congregation took root and grew.  If they were not or if they were inadequately equipped for their work, when Rev. Bishop or his successor returned to the settlement he would have to begin the work all over again.

This was the model that over a century and a half ago allowed us to make disciples and transform this part of the world.  It was flexible, agile and responsive.  It met people where they were.  It helped the people who were isolated by the pattern of settling on homesteads connect with each other into genuine communities of support and accountability.  It gave people a chance to use their best gifts in service to each other and the faith community.  It trusted laity to do the ministry of the laity. 

Of course that model gave way to a different way of doing things, one that focused less on the role of congregations in making disciples and transforming the world and more on the wants and imagined needs of congregations.  But the original model is still in our DNA; it’s still in our bones; it’s still in our collective memory, even if we’ve suffered some amnesia.

And I think that a time for this older model is returning.  We are facing frontiers again, although they are not geographical frontiers.  Instead they are frontiers formed by class and ethnicity and language and life circumstances, but they are just as real and just as pressing as the physical frontier faced by early Methodism in the Iowa territory.  There are the rural poor who may not live right in Decorah, but who live close enough to work and shop here.  Likewise there are Spanish-speaking immigrants—some with papers, some without—who are no more Catholic than our inactive members are Methodist.  There are young people who pass through our community for a few years.  We are happy enough to have their parents’ money, but we’ve made very few inroads into their community.  We have people in Decorah who are pioneers of another sort, who are struggling to develop new ways of living that respect the earth and their own bodies, who are not particularly interested in Christianity, but who are interested in Jesus and who might be surprised to discover the rich resources our faith tradition really does offer them for their struggles.  There are veterans of our recent wars who have been wounded in ways that are not visible, who haven’t been able to come home.  We could help them do that.

At its last session the Annual Conference approved a strategic plan.  I’ve seen enough strategic plans that upon closer inspection turned out to be just a repackaged and rebranded version of the status quo to be a little suspicious.  But this plan might be an exception, at least if we take it more seriously than we’ve taken its predecessors.  Part of the plan calls for pastors to spend ten percent of their time in their communities in quest of “new people in new places,” as the General Conference has put it.  I take it that among these “new people” might be the rural poor, new Hispanic Iowans, veterans, students, and eco-concerned non-traditionalists and the “new places” might be wherever it is that they hang out.  I take it further that the Annual Conference in calling for me to spend ten percent of my time looking for them is asking me in effect to become a part-time circuit rider. 

To do that, I’ll have to spend ten percent less of my time doing other things.  We’ll have to figure this out, but it will have to mean that we move a little in the direction of our old model, our DNA, our foundational story. 

Jesus said, “The harvest is bigger than you can imagine, but there are few workers.  Therefore plead with the Lord of the harvest to send out workers for his harvest.”

It’s possible.  It’s certainly needed.  All I need now is a horse.

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