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.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

“For freedom Christ has set us free…” (Proper 8C; Galatians 5:1, 13-25; July 1, 2007)

“For freedom Christ has set us free…”

Proper 8C

Galatians 5:1, 13-25

July 1, 2007

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

The commercial touts what it calls a “freedom credit card.”  Freedom here seems to mean that the bank is willing to “give” cash back or points that can be used to buy stuff and that the user can switch back and forth at will between cash back or points.   Never mind, of course, that this is a credit card and that every use of this line of credit comes with a stiff price.  Buy a Big Mac, fries , and a soft drink today with this “freedom” card.  Pay it back at the rate that the bank suggests on its monthly statement and that $4.92 meal will cost just a little over $10.00.  Ain’t freedom great?

All the while in the background, Mick Jagger is singing “I’m Free.”  “I’m free to do what I want, any old time.”

Freedom, according to the Rolling Stones (and Chase Bank seems to agree) is what allows “what I want” to result in “what we are able to do, have or be.”  If I want something, but am unable to do it,  have it, or be it, then I am unfree.  If I want to do something, or have something, or be something and nothing restrains me from doing it, then, Jagger sings, “I’m free.”

When we think of freedom or its lack, we focus on external restraints, on the things outside of ourselves that prevent our wishes from becoming realities and our whims from becoming actions.  We are suspicious of any power that might prevent us from having or doing what we want.

But, said the French philosopher Michel Foucault, that’s not the way power operates, not any more.  Power doesn’t operate on us from “out there” somewhere.  It is no longer concentrated in a few places or institutions.  Power has, in a sense, disappeared, or at least cloaked itself.  Power no longer thwarts desires; it creates them.

The talk show guest was a young woman of seventeen who had had her breasts enlarged.  The host affected deep shock as she implied that this was a widespread phenomenon.  The young woman’s mother and her plastic surgeon were there.  The young woman said that this was what she “wanted,” as if that were an argument.  Her mother and doctor were focused on whether she was old enough to know what she wanted.  Having concluded that she was, they could see no reason why she shouldn’t be free to do it.

The young woman, self-described as under-endowed, imagines that her desire for breast augmentation is her own, that it is the product of her freedom, that she is free to want it.  This is not the case, according to Foucault.  No, her desire has been constructed.  She grew up in a culture that bombarded her with images of buxom, high-status women, beginning with the grotesquely proportioned Barbie doll she was given as a child and running through the worlds of music, fashion and cinema that fill her day dreams and her chatter with her friends.  Her wish might have seemed “natural” enough, but it is a construct.

She had been focused on whether or not she would face constraints on getting what she wanted.  That’s where usually look when we want to know if we are free.  Of what use, though, is unrestrained freedom to get or do what we want, if what we want is the product of someone else’s use of power?  In that case we will imagine ourselves to be perfectly free; we will never see our unfreedom.  At the point at which we imagine ourselves to be most free, we will be the most constrained

The Apostle Paul was not a post-Structuralist philosopher, but I think he, too, understood that we are not as much in control of our desires as our desires are in control of us.  He would agree that, if we think freedom is the freedom to “do whatever I want, any old time,” then we will never be free in any meaningful sense of the word.

For Paul, there are only two ways to go: one way is to live according to what he calls “flesh.”  Flesh normally refers to the soft tissue that covers our bones, but that is not what Paul means here.

There is a part of us that rejects a relationship with God.  We are God’s creatures; we live in a world that God fashioned; we are sustained moment to moment by God’s love.  And, yet, there is a part of us that wants nothing to do with God.  That part of us is what Paul means by “flesh.”

The other way to go is to live according to what Paul calls “spirit.”  Spirit embraces our relationship with God and the life that God gives us.  It revels in God’s love.  It animates our lives with the same life and the same power that raised Jesus from the dead.

Each of these ways has its own destination.  Paul describes flesh’s destination in this way: “The actions that are produced by selfish motives are obvious, since they include sexual immorality, moral corruption, doing whatever feels good, idolatry, drug use and casting spells, hate, fighting, obsession, losing your temper...” and so forth.  The more we follow the path of flesh, the less attractive our lives become, the less Godlike, the less holy, the less human.

As you can imagine, Paul describes the way of the spirit’s destination a little differently: “…the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  This is freedom, says Paul.  The more we follow the path of spirit, the more we become what God had in mind when God made us in the first place.  The further we move down that path, the freer we get.  Not the freer in the sense Mick Jagger sings about, but the freer in the same way that an eagle is free when it flies or a dolphin when it swims.

The other freedom we have is the freedom to choose between the two paths.  At the intersection Rt 9 and Rt 52, I have four choices: I can keep west toward Cresco. I can go north toward Burr Oak.  I can go east past Decorah and toward Waukon.  I can go south to Calmar.  I can decide where I’m going and then chose the road that will get me there.

What I can’t do is to turn south and drive to Rochester.  That way doesn’t go where I want to go.

If you had given me directions to Rochester and I turned south instead because someone else told me that going south was a shortcut, you would be angry.  Angry with my badly-informed informant.  And angry with me for taking their advice.  That’s why this is an angry letter.

Paul can barely contain his indignation.  Listen to how he begins the letter:

Paul an apostle who is not sent from human authority or commissioned through human agency…

And already we know that there has been a challenge to Paul’s credentials.

…but sent through Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from dead; and from all the brothers and sisters with me.  To the churches in Galatia.  Grace and peace to you from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  He gave himself for our sins, so he could deliver us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father.  To God be the glory forever and always!  Amen.

Now, what normally happens at this point in one of Paul’s letters is a prayer of thanksgiving.  Even the Corinthian church, Paul’s problem child, got a nice long prayer thanking God for the faith and spiritual gifts in their community.  But see what comes next in the letter to the Galatian churches:

I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting the one who called you by the grace of Christ to follow another gospel.

Instead of embracing the freedom of the path of spirit and instead of using their grace-given freedom to choose the path of spirit, they have chosen a different way.  They have embraced the Law of Moses.

This doesn’t sound so bad.  I think they must be good people or at least people who want to be good people.  That isn’t how Paul sees them.  Paul sees them as rejecting a relationship with God and embracing God’s rules instead.  Paul sees them as giving away the freedom that is a part of way of spirit in exchange for the slavery that is a part of the way of flesh.  Yes, flesh, oddly enough.  In Paul’s mind there are only two choices; if it is not spirit it is flesh.  Period.

I admit to struggling with this.  I’ve known Jews whom I can only describe as holy.  I’ve know at least one former Presbyterian who has become a Jew of considerable holiness.  I have a hard time believing that Jews are following the principle of flesh, if that’s what Paul means.

But I also see his point.  Rules may be good things.  The rules that Moses gave—especially—may be good things.  Following the set of rules that Moses gave, or the set of rules that Muhammed gave, or the Rule of Benedict, for that matter, may be a good thing to do.  But if we embrace the rules instead of God, if we prefer keeping the rules to being in relationship with God, then we aren’t following the way of the spirit, whether we’re Christians or Jews or Muslims.  We aren’t enjoying the freedom that comes from becoming who we were made to be.  Instead we are driving south on 52— and it doesn’t matter if we think we are going toward Rochester—we are headed for Calmar.

Freedom does not come from doing “what I want, any old time.” Nor does it come from seeking my humanity in any list of rules.  Freedom comes from reveling in God’s love.  Freedom comes from being transformed into the image of God we have glimpsed in Christ.  “Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control:” that’s freedom.  That’s the freedom for which Christ has set us free.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.

Naboth’s Vineyard (Proper 6C; 1 Kings 21:1-21a; June 16, 2013)

Naboth’s Vineyard

Proper 6C

1 Kings 21:1-21a

June 16, 2013

Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD

1^st United Methodist Church

Decorah, IA

Once upon a time there was a Jezreelite who lived in Jezreel, the story begins.  That’s odd, we think, Why does the story need to tell us that a Jezreelite lived in Jezreel, any more that we would say that a Omahan lives in Omaha?  The story-teller means to alert us right away to an important fact: the Jezreelite, whose name is Naboth, lives in the place where his ancestors have lived.  He is where his people have been.  Was he tempted to seek his fortune somewhere else?  We don’t know.  We just know that whenever he was faced with the decision of whether to “sit or flit”—as the Scots used to say—he chose to sit, to stay where he was, on his ancestral land.

Once upon a time there was a Jezreelite named Naboth who lived in Jezreel and he owned a vineyard.  Or did he?  Ownership implies that the vineyard was his to do with as he pleased.  He could produce wine, as he was doing, or he could produce something else, or he could sell the land to whoever offered a price that pleased him.  Ownership meant that the land was his property, like a shirt or a clay pot.

That might be the way that we think about land.  If we like the place, we buy the land and we build a house on it.  If we no longer like the place, we sell the land and go somewhere else.  If the land appreciates in value we can cash out.  If it appreciates enough we will cash out.  Everything has its price.  Enough money would compensate us for the loss of a place.

Once upon a time there was a king of Israel named Ahab, who also believed that money should be able to compensate for the loss of place.  Ahab was expanding his palace at Jezreel.  He wanted Naboth’s vineyard.  Ahab planned to do a lot of entertaining and he needed more garden space for his kitchens.

So Ahab went to Naboth with a very good offer:  “Naboth, my good fellow, today is your lucky day.  I need more garden space and your vineyard is in the perfect spot for it.  You know what they say—Location, location, location.  I’ll give you a much better vineyard in exchange for yours.  Or, if you’re ready to give up the wine-making business, I’ll buy it from you for cash money.  Name your price!”

Ahab was a once upon a time king, but he had a modern mindset.  He could not imagine that anyone in their right mind would respond the way Naboth responded: “Yahweh forbid that I should give you my ancestral inheritance.”  No deal.  Keep your money.

Where Ahab saw real estate and deeds and bills of purchase and monetary value, Naboth saw something entirely different.  Naboth saw a covenant.  “Yahweh forbid,” Naboth said, because this matter of land did not lay between buyer and seller.  It had to do with Yahweh, the God of Naboth’s ancestors who was, apparently, Naboth’s God as well.

Yahweh had promised the land to Abraham and Sarah, do you remember?  Yahweh promised the land as an inheritance that Yahweh would give to their descendants, among which Naboth numbered himself.  It was a gift, this land.  Under the terms of this gift, the land did not belong to Naboth.  It belonged to a line of descent that stretched from his distant ancestors in the past to his distant descendants in the future.  He and his family were to care for the land.  The land—that land in that place—was to support him and his family—past, present and future.  He and the land were in covenant with each other and that covenant relationship between Naboth and his vineyard was in turn part of the covenant between Yahweh and Yahweh’s people.  “Yahweh forbid,” said Naboth, because Yahweh had in fact forbidden it.

Ahab was like a lot of people today: he knew the covenant, but he liked to forget it.  He was a king.  What’s the use of being king if you can’t get what you want now and then?  How could he be expected to make do with the land of his ancestors?  The covenant was all well and good for once upon a time, but Ahab much preferred being able to convert the value of everything into money so that it could be bought and sold as a commodity and so that his money could buy anything he wanted.

But in Naboth, Ahab—king or not—met someone he could not impress or buy.  In Naboth Ahab met a man in covenant with Yahweh and with the land that Yahweh had given his ancestors.  Naboth would not budge and Ahab knew that as soon as Naboth said, “Yahweh forbid!”  So Ahab went away sulking.

Kings are accustomed to getting their own way and so sulking is not something that he had a lot of practice doing and he wasn’t very good at it.  But he gave it his best shot: he lay on his bed with his face to the wall and refused to eat.

Perhaps Ahab would have gotten over his snit on his own; perhaps not.  As it happened, his wife Jezebel came to him and said, “Tell me what’s going on.”  So Ahab did that and Jezebel responded, “Am I married to the king or not?  Who’s in charge here anyway?  Well, never mind about that, dear, just leave it to me.”  So Ahab stopped pouting.

In our story Jezebel is an entire stranger to Yahweh.  She knows nothing about Yahweh and cares even less.  Her gods are gods of production and control.  They don’t care about covenants or ancestors or stupid vineyards or anything else standing in the way of progress.  And neither did Jezebel.  So she arranged for trumped up charges of blasphemy and treason to be brought against Naboth.  She got the justice she had paid for and Naboth was executed by stoning.  Jezebel went to Ahab and said, “Problem solved.  Naboth is dead.  Go check out your new garden plot.”  “Yippy, skippy!” cried Ahab and went down to look at the vineyard that used to be Naboth’s.  End of story.  The rich and the powerful get what they want and there isn’t much that any of us can do about it.

Or do they?  There is a character in the story who has not yet been heard from, a character whom Naboth invoked, a character of whom Jezebel is ignorant, a character whom Ahab preferred to forget. 

Yahweh has seen this injustice and will not keep silent.  Yahweh sent Elijah the prophet to confront Ahab—that wayward child of the covenant—with Yahweh’s displeasure.  No, let’s just say it the way it is.  Elijah goes to speak Yahweh’s angry rejection of Ahab’s policies and even of Ahab himself.

This is hard for us.  We think of God as merciful and loving.  And that is true.  But love and mercy are notions that only make sense in the midst of justice.  Without God’s passionate commitment to justice we are left with “sloppy agape.”  A god who is not just is a god who sides with the powerful and the rich even when they use their power and wealth to oppress the poor and the weak.  God has a vision for creation that includes doing justice.  Those who do justice will find themselves on God’s side.  Those who refuse to do justice will find that God rejects not only what they do but also rejects them.  In short, those who refuse to pay attention to the demands of God’s justice will find themselves on receiving end of God’s wrath.

This is what Ahab discovered when Elijah found him.  “Have you killed and also taken possession?” said Elijah in Yahweh’s name, “In the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood.  Because you have sold yourself to do what is evil in the sight of Yahweh, I will bring disaster on you; I will consume you.”

Against Ahab Elijah utters the final judgment pronounced on a consumer society.  When everything becomes a commodity to be bought and sold, traded, exploited and, eventually, consumed, then Ahab himself will become a commodity and he will be consumed.  Ahab is the man who knows—in Oscar Wilde’s memorable phrase—“the price of everything and the value of nothing.”

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.