Some of you have commented on the fact that I don’t look at any notes while I preach.  Other than an occasional quote or something, I don’t really bring anything with me into the pulpit.  One of the reasons I do this is that a few years ago when I was first starting out I put my sermon notes on the roof of the car when I was on my way to church one Sunday morning, and I didn’t remember that I had put my notes on the roof of the car, that is, until I was driving down the road and saw them in the rearview mirror fluttering in the breeze in every direction as they blew off the car.  You learn to preach without notes really quickly that way.           

I also heard about the minister who thought he was really a pretty good preacher.  Not everyone else thought this though.  There was one church member who came and spoke quite frankly to the preacher one day.  The minister was thinking that it had been a pretty good sermon, and the man said that it had been okay as a sermon, but that, in general, he had three problems with the minister’s sermons.  One problem was that the minister read his sermons.  The second problem was that the sermons weren’t well read.  And the third problem was that the sermons really weren’t worth reading.  So I try not to read my sermons.           

But preaching, speaking in front of people, in general, is one of the things that people fear most, I understand.  Death, of course, comes to mind immediately as something we might fear.  But a Gallup Poll revealed that what people fear most, and by a wide margin, is public speaking.  Imagine this, people fear speaking in public more than they fear death.  Someone has said that what people probably fear the absolute most is death while public speaking.           

So we can have sympathy for these disciples, 70 of them, who Jesus sent out to speak in public, to proclaim the message that the kingdom of God is near.  We don’t know much about this larger group of disciples, but probably they were much like the twelve disciples: young and eager maybe, but inexperienced, uneducated, unsophisticated, overall fairly unimpressive yokels who were no doubt scared to death of this assignment.           

But these are the ones that Jesus chooses to send.  The proclamation of the kingdom of God will live or die based on the skill of these men, and others just like them, all ridiculously unprepared for their task.  But Jesus does something here so simple we might almost overlook the genius of it, he sends them out, not alone, but in pairs, two by two.           

My father used to tell me that two people working together can actually accomplish more than two working separately.  Now I’m sure he first told me this when I was a teenager, and he was trying to get me out of bed on a Saturday morning to help him wash the car or mow the lawn.  So I could probably have cared less about any deeply philosophical statement about working together.  But I’ve remembered this statement all these years: two people working together can accomplish more than two working separately.  Do you think he’s right?  I mean, it defies logic, doesn’t it?  You’d think that two people working together would accomplish exactly the same amount as two working separately.  But the cooperation, the spirit of working together, the synergy is the word we use now, the synthesis of two energies, the mutual reinforcement, the common purpose, common aspirations, does seem to make the work go faster and seem easier.  More is accomplished.  Stephen Covey, who wrote the book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, had the same idea as my father.  In fact, Stephen Covey got rich off this idea.  I’m not sure why we never got rich.  But Covey writes that this synergy, this esprit do corps, this spirit of cooperation, can actually make one plus one equal more than two.           

There’s an ancient African saying that when a man gets up to dance during some festival or celebration, if no one claps for him, he’ll soon tire and sit down.  But if everyone claps, he will dance all night.           

Soon we’ll see geese flying south for the winter.  And we all know that they fly in V formation.  Each bird flapping its wings creates an updraft or an uplift for the bird following it, so that by flying in V formation, the whole flock of geese gets over 70 percent better mileage than if each bird flew alone.  Obviously the first bird doesn’t benefit from these aerodynamics.  So when it gets tired, it simply rotates to the back where the uplift is greatest, and a new bird that’s more rested takes over.           

I think we get better mileage too when we work together.  When we succeed together, our success is multiplied, it is even more joyous, because we have shared the success, we’ve shared the thrill and the burden, with others.  And even if we fail, even if we fail, we have failed gloriously somehow because we failed together, we worked together.           

There was a medical study that was done a few years ago about people who were going in for surgery.  Some of them before surgery shared a room with another patient who had already come through surgery, and some shared a room with those who were also waiting for surgery.  What they found was that those who were waiting for surgery but who shared a room with a patient who had already come through surgery successfully and were now recuperating, healed faster and left the hospital sooner than those who roomed with other patients who were waiting to have surgery.  Did you get the gist of that?  Preoperative patients who roomed with postoperative patients, those who had already come through surgery successfully, healed faster and left the hospital sooner.  The idea is that those who had already been there, who had already come through the surgery, were living proof to those who had yet to go through it, that you could make it through, you could make it.           

I wonder if there aren’t some parallels for the church.  Someone has said that the church is not a museum for saints, it’s a hospital for sinners.  We’re all preoperative from time-to-time.  We all have our troubles, our doubts, our failures, our times of absolute struggle.  But almost always there’s someone who is postoperative.  They’ve been through it themselves once, maybe through the very thing we’re going through, and they’re there to give a word of support, to lend a hand, to say a prayer with us.           

I remember in one of our former churches, there was a man who is this great big guy, a weightlifter, kind of rugged looking, he has the roughest hands of anyone I’ve ever met.  He’s not a man who, in appearance, would seem to be at all gentle.  But he is very gentle on the inside, and one Sunday morning, he saw someone who was just softly crying during much of the service.  Just so you’ll know, it wasn’t that the sermon was that bad, that’s not why she was crying, it was just that her life was more than she thought she could bear right then.  At the end of the service, he turned to leave like he always did, with his wife, but something drew him back.  He told me later that he simply could not leave the church that day without going over to this woman that he didn’t even know and offering her his support, asking if there was anything he might do, letting her know that there was at least one other person who cared.           

John Wesley, the founder of Methodism as you know, likened the church to pieces of coal that were burning in a pile.  As long as the pieces of coal are together, they burn brightly, and warmly, and for a length of time.  But if you take one piece of coal from the pile, and place it by itself, it will quickly burn itself out and grow cold.           

I love that poem by John Donne:

No man is an island, entire of itself
every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
if a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were,
as well as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were
any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind
and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls
it tolls for thee.

So the church provides us with support, with community, with family.  But the most important thing about the church is that it’s the place where God is present.  We are a family, but most of all we are a family of faith.  The disciples who were sent out two by two, did not go out in their own power, to proclaim their own message, to glorify themselves.  No, they went proclaiming the message of salvation, preparing the way of the Lord.  It was in his power that they went.  And that still is the role of the church, that still is the call for those who are willing to go out two by two, or in whatever combinations, to proclaim and glorify and prepare the way.  And it is still in his power that we go.           

I once heard our former bishop, George Bashore, tell about his visit to a church in our Conference.  A woman came into the sanctuary with a small child.  She was running late and came in during the singing of the first hymn, and looked a bit frazzled.  She had yet another child to retrieve from Sunday School downstairs before she could settle in for the church service.  She and her husband always sat in the same pew in church.  But on this day, her life was just enough out of balance, that she went down the wrong aisle, and she identified the wrong pew as her pew, and more importantly, she identified the wrong man as her husband.  Without really looking, she just handed her baby to this man who wasn’t her husband.  And then as she turned to go downstairs to get her other child, she saw her husband sitting over there.  She looked back almost frantically to see what had become of her child, but she needn’t have worried, the man she had given her child to had taken the child up in his arms as if she were his own, and they were playing and singing with the rest of the congregation.  He probably wondered why the woman had given him her baby, but really it didn’t matter, they were all a community, a family, together.  He would watch over her child, if that’s what the woman wanted.           

This is, perhaps at its best, the church.  This is, at its best, us.  This is what this family of faith is about, as we worship together, as we work together, as we try to discern the vision God has for us together, as we love each other, and as we invite others, others we may not even know yet, to give their lives to God and join us.