When I joined the staff of American Baptist Churches in Valley Forge in 1971, church historian Robert Torbet was a colleague.
My spouse, who went to seminary in the eighties, was familiar with “Torbet.” He was a large, blue-covered book entitled A History of the Baptists. Robert was the author of the book, a standard in church history, and seminarians are still invited to go through their book bags “and open your Torbet to page 205.”
I knew Torbet as a tall, lean esthete, a scholar and dean who knew more about the Baptists than anyone alive. He had agreed to serve as American Baptist ecumenical officer while preparing to retire, and he was a shy presence in the round hallways of the American Baptist mission center in the seventies.
When I knew Robert, I was the young editor of The American Baptist magazine and the staff and I were preparing a cover story on George Lisle, an 18th century Baptist missionary to Jamaica. An artist drew a nice sketch of Lisle, who was of African descent, and we put it on the cover under the heading, “The First Baptist Missionary from America.”
As soon as the issue appeared, a political storm blew through the usually placid offices of the circular mission center. Not just a storm: a category five typhoon complete with lightning, hail, and cyclones.
Outraged staff from American Baptist International Ministries swarmed outside my office with figurative pitchforks and torches. Hugh Smith, former ABC missionary to China and now director of public relations for International Ministries, was spokesman for the group. Hugh was known as a gentle conciliator, and I welcomed him to my office.
But even gentle Hugh had trouble controlling his temper. He smiled at me through his teeth. “George Lisle was not the first missionary from America,” he said tensely. “Adoniram Judson was the first missionary from America.”
Judson, as almost everyone knows, was sent to Burma by the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society and served there for 40 years.
I listened quietly to Hugh, remembering the advice of George Cornell, religion editor of the Associated Press, that sometimes the best response to an angry reader was, “You may be right.” I invited Hugh to write a letter to the editor to make his point, and we shook hands.
But weeks later, during a staff meeting at the American Baptist Assembly in Green Lake, Wis., I happened to sit next to Torbet – the man, not the book – at an ice cream social in the canteen. Seizing an opportunity for vindication from an indisputable source, I asked him: “Who was the first Baptist missionary from America: George Lisle or Adoniram Judson?”
Robert was silent for a moment, tranquilly licking the vanilla ice cream cone in his hand. Finally, he cleared his throat.
“When did Judson start?” he asked, still licking. Robert, foremost among church historians, certainly knew the answer, so the question may have been rhetorical.
“1812,” I said, confidently.
Robert continued licking his ice cream.
“When did Lisle start?” he asked.
“1782,” I replied, also with confidence.
Robert pushed the nub of his cone into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully for several moments. Finally he dabbed at his mouth with a napkin and stood up.
“Then Lisle would have been first,” he said, and strolled away.
I felt vindicated for a second, until I realized Robert had accomplished something I had not yet learned to do: use unadorned facts to avoid a pointless political conflict.
In point of unadorned fact, Lisle served as a missionary thirty years before Judson. The difference between the two missionaries is that Lisle left for Jamaica on his own, prompted only by God to declare the gospel abroad. Judson was the first to be sent by a missionary society to declare the gospel.
And I do want to point out that Hugh was always one of my best friends when I worked at Valley Forge.
I’m sure it doesn’t come as a surprise that some of the more intense missionary conflicts take place not in the field but among the missionaries and within the churches. The Book of Acts records many of those early conflicts.
But before we look at what missionary quarrels have to do with today’s gospel about the 10 lepers, I have another Judson story to impart.
In the 19th century, as today, missionaries were required to take occasional furloughs to visit churches at home to ask for contributions to sustain their work.
The story is reliably told that in the 1830s, Adoniram Judson visited churches in the U.S., including the church in which I grew up a century later. Judson arrived in Morrisville, N.Y., late in the day and the leaders of the congregation welcomed him to the village. “We look forward to a wonderful missionary story,” they told him. “Please speak for about 10 minutes.”
Judson nodded, and when time came he went to the pulpit and opened his bible. “For God so loved the world,” he read, “that he gave his only begotten son, so that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but shall have eternal life.” Judson quickly and brilliantly summarized the salvation story of Jesus and his love, and sat down before 10 minutes had passed.
The congregation was stunned. On the way out, the pastor whispered to Judson, “They were expecting missionary anecdotes about the work in Burma.” Judson replied, “You gave me 10 minutes. I gave you the best story I had.”
Naturally, the incident impressed me because it was a historical event in my home church, but it could have happened anywhere. In the long history of church missions, similar misunderstandings are recorded daily. The churches send messengers into the world to preach the salvation story of Jesus and his love, and often the message gets lost, distorted, or misconstrued.
To be perfectly frank, the story of the church in mission is not always easy to tell. The difficulties began very early, almost as soon as Christians stopped being persecuted by Roman emperors and became the official religion of the Emperor Constantine, whose interpreted a vision of the cross as God’s permission to massacre his enemies at the Battle of Milvian Bridge. Later Christian monarchs led Christian armies into the Holy Land to slaughter untold numbers of Muslims in the name of Jesus. In Jesus’ name, Christians first oppressed and then slaughtered Jews, and during the Reformation and Inquisition Christians burned and quartered and beheaded one another.
There are hundreds of stories of missionaries slaughtering those who rejected their message of love. Hatuey, a Cuban tribal leader of the early 16th century, responded this way when he was asked to accept Jesus as his personal savior:
Here is the God the Spaniards worship. For these they fight and kill; for these they persecute us and that is why we have to throw them into the sea... They tell us, these tyrants, that they adore a God of peace and equality, and yet they usurp our land and make us their slaves. They speak to us of an immortal soul and of their eternal rewards and punishments, and yet they rob our belongings, seduce our women, violate our daughters. Incapable of matching us in valor, these cowards cover themselves with iron that our weapons cannot break.
Offered the choice between accepting Jesus and being burned as a heretic, Hatuey declared he had no desire to live in heaven with such Christians. He was burned in the name of Jesus.
More recent missionaries have not resorted to such draconian measures to convert souls, but some of their approaches have been just as heartbreaking. Well-meaning European missionaries have devastated indigenous cultures by requiring people to act like proper Victorian ladies and gentlemen. Equatorial and tropical cultures were forced to abandon practical and sometimes minimal dress in favor of heavy shirts and skirts (the missionary gift of shame, as Homer Simpson creator Matt Groening put it). Other indigenous cultures in the U.S. were encouraged to set aside implements the missionaries considered satanic, including the drums, indigenous dance, and percussive music.
Too, missionaries were often enthusiastic exploiters of the land, resources, and riches where their flocks lived, resulting in the oft-quoted observation, “Before the missionaries came, they had the bible and we had our land. When the missionaries left, we had the bible and they had our land.” The harshest description of these results is cultural genocide.
I think it would be wrong to ignore these unpleasant realities because it’s important to know why so many people distrust Christians. This is a reality the church has to face as it seeks to reach out in love to declare the gospel.
But I think it is also important to keep in mind that most of the modern missionaries I have known – American Baptist, United Church of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Lutheran, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopalian, and more – are the very antitheses of this unfortunate stereotype. Virtually all of them have acted out of a commitment to share the unconditional love of Jesus, and to share it consistently with the great commandments to love God and love our neighbor.
Let’s go back to the gospel. Ten lepers approach Jesus and ask his mercy.
When Jesus saw them, he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went, they were made clean.
Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice. He prostrated himself at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan.
Then Jesus asked, “Were not ten made clean? But the other nine, where are they? Was none of them found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?”
Then he said to him, “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” (Luke 17:14-19)
Don’t you love it when Jesus confounds us by not judging the very people we would hate?
The one leper who returned to thank Jesus: “And he was a Samaritan!”
For us, he might as well be saying:
“And he was a fracker, a defiler of clean water, a polluter of air!”
“And he was a jihadist!”
“And he was a Wall Street exploiter!”
“And he was a Congressman!”
But this brief passage in Luke makes it clear Jesus doesn’t care about any of that.
Jesus sees ten suffering persons. He doesn’t evaluate their ethnicity, their religion, their nationality, their profession, their age, their intelligence, or their financial status. All he sees is ten suffering people, and with barely a flick of his hand he sends them away to show the priest they have been healed.
No doubt all ten emerge from the temple blotto with joy, barely able to comprehend their unexpected good fortune, too intoxicated to notice God has given them an incomparable gift.
But one – the fracker, the jihadist, the exploiter, the Congressman, the Samaritan – remembers where his good fortune comes from and returns to Jesus to thank him.
Is Jesus angry with the nine other ex-lepers?
I doubt it. He can hardly be unaware of the joy and gratitude they must feel.
But I think Jesus may be amused by the fact that the one ex-leper who did remember to say thanks was the same one all the others may have despised. “Where are they?” Jesus asks. And I think he may have asked it with a smile. The Samaritan standing gratefully before him is a reminder of how God’s unconditional love gets lost amid the conflicts and prejudices of human affairs.
The story is also a potent reminder of Jesus’ expectations when he commissioned all us believers to go into the world “and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you.” (Matthew 28:19-20a).
Almost without exception, the missionaries we Baptists and Lutherans and United Church of Christ and Disciples of Christ and others have sent into the world have understood Jesus’ commandments.
May it always be that the missionaries we call will look to the persons with whom they have been called to minister and, like Jesus, take special note of
those who are poor,
those who are victims of injustice,
those who hunger,
those who suffer pain and illness,
those who have special needs,
those who are friendless,
those who are despised because they have too much or have too little,
and those merely hope to bask in the boundless love of God.
Jesus does not send any of us into the world to judge the world or the people in it. Our task is to proclaim the same message to the powerful and to the powerless: that the greatest commandments are to love God with all our hearts, with all our minds, with all our might, and to love our neighbors with the same intensity.
It is that great missionary message that guides us out of the maze of hatred, prejudice, entitlement, and injustice, and guides us into bright new day of justice, peace, and God’s unconditional love.
And if we have enough sense to return to Jesus to express our thanks for his healing grace, he will smile and tell us,
“Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.”
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