Rev. Bill and Rev. Sheri Daylong, pastors of the First United Methodist Church in Jefferson, saw the impending overnight visit of RAGBRAI to the community as something more than just a big bicycle ride coming to town. They saw the event as both a challenge and an opportunity for Jefferson people to step up with a spiritually-based kind of hospitality. And they have turned that into a month-long series of sermons.

“Radical hospitality,” they have explained, is a term that goes back 1,500 years to the writings of St. Benedict.

The Daylongs have used St. Benedict’s idea – that you give all you can to welcome, feed and shelter visitors – as a central theme for the sermons.

The series will conclude at 9:30 a.m. service this Sunday, July 20, featuring a special ceremony in which people will be “commissioned as ambassadors of radical hospitality” just in time for RAGBRAI’s visit, Rev. Bill Daylong said.

He opened the series on June 29, first explaining the historical roots of “radical hospitality,” and using stories from both the Old and New Testaments to illustrate it. “It’s a concept that’s been around a long time, but it’s become more popular again in the recent past,” he explained this week. “In fact, I did an Internet search on the term, and I was amazed to see there were 168,000 references.”

In the second week’s sermon, he related a homily about communion to the idea of people and their visitors “sharing a feast at the table of the Lord.” He noted that “God has prepared a table of abundance, but are we really ready for the feast, or do we get our minds all messed up with the busy work of the preparations?”

Last Sunday, he reminded the congregation that “radical hospitality is all about making space in our lives for strangers,” but sometimes we’re so distracted that “the strangers can wind up being ourselves. We all need to step back, take a deep breath and be sure that we are having a holy presence” with the visitors. “We need to remind ourselves, ‘Why are we really doing this? What’s the real importance of it?’ ”

The fourth sermon in that series is to be delivered this Sunday by Rev. Sheri Daylong. “I’m opening with an Old Testament story – about Moses’ last sermon to the people after they’d crossed over to the wilderness,” she said in an interview. “Moses reminded them how God had always been with them, even in all the crazy places they’d been. And then I’ll use other scripture to talk about how we all have prejudices about people who are different than we are, but radical hospitality is all about welcoming all visitors, even those who are strange or foreign to us.”

She said she will finish her message with a reminder of “how there is a role for each of us” in radical hospitality. “Not everyone can do heavy things like carrying food or washing dishes, but we can all do something – even if it’s walking around, smiling, greeting everybody and learning about our guests.”

The Daylongs, who have led Jefferson’s Methodists for eight years, said they have never served in a town when it hosted RAGBRAI. But they thought the bike ride is ripe with opportunities for spiritual interpretation.