70 peaceful believers
Sermon for Pentecost IV, 2025, delivered at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Louisville, KY Text: Luke 10:1-1, 16-20 One spring day in 1990, I was doing laundry at a laundromat in Neudorf, a suburb of Strasbourg, France. I stepped out of the building for a moment and looked down the street several blocks and saw two young men, and I immediately knew who they were. They wore black pants, a white short-sleeved button-down shirt, a thin black tie, and a black name badge. They eventually entered the laundromat and I was right: they were LDS missionaries. We spoke French, and they didn’t realize at first that I was American until I told them. We broke into English at that point. LDS missionaries are bound by an absolute rule of their church that they must always be together, or within sight or hearing of each other at all times. Imagine doing that for two years, instead of a few weeks for the seventy [or seventy-two, depending on what version of the bible you read - EPW] that Jesus sends ou...