Sunday, July 3, 2016

July 3, 2016 - Proper 9C


In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
            A few months ago, in the height of strawberry season, Ellie and I went out to Patterson Farms to pick strawberries. It was drizzling the whole time we were there, but that didn’t stop us from going out into a field of seemingly endless strawberries. We picked a row and went to work on filling our basket with the reddest strawberries that we could find. When we arrived home, we enjoyed the succulent and sweet fruits of our labor.

            As I read this morning’s Gospel text from Luke, the image of the harvest is one that stuck with me. And I wonder if you have memories of a harvest that you might call to mind as we enter this text? Perhaps you fish and can think of a time where you had a particularly good catch. Maybe you are a gardener and remember a certain harvest where you didn’t have enough baskets to carry all the tomatoes or zucchini in. You might be an artist and can recall a particularly productive time when the words, notes, or colors just came to you. Think about that harvest that you labored for – what did it look like? What did it smell like, sound like, taste like? It may have been a simple thing, but often we find the greatest sense of joy in something as simple as enjoying a juicy tomato sandwich which has come after the hard and dirty work of tilling the soil, pulling the weeds, and patient waiting for the perfect ripeness. A store-bought tomato somehow wouldn’t be the same. There’s just something about enjoying the fruits of your labors.
            Jesus is preparing to send out seventy disciples to every place and town where he planned to one day go. His rationale for doing so is the fact that “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” If the language of business and economics is easier to understand, Jesus is saying that there is more supply than demand. How often though do we confuse that equation, finding a scarcity instead of an abundance? Sometimes we see the world as a place where the harvest is scarce, and the laborers are too many; where there seems to be more needs than compassion; more brokenness than healing; more darkness than light.
            But God is a God of abundance, as counterintuitive as that may be to our capitalistic orientation. There really is enough room in our hearts to love our neighbors and ourselves. There really is enough in this world to sustain us all if we lived by the principle of none having too much and none having too little. There really is enough meaningful work for us all to do in the work of the Kingdom.
            I know this might seem like a particularly frustrating time to think about the image of the laborer in field. You might think, what difference does one person make? What difference does my $500 contribution to the church make? What difference does it really make if I recycle and drive a hybrid if my neighbor drives a gas-guzzling truck? What difference does my vote make when billionaires and lobbyists dictate the party platforms? What difference do my prayers make amidst a population of 7 billion people on this planet? Perhaps you see the harvest that Jesus is alluding to as the work of justice and mercy, and you just don’t see how your contributions will ever amount to any real change.
            As we will celebrate Independence Day tomorrow, I wonder how this world might be different if those 56 laborers who signed the Declaration of Independence saw the futility in standing up against the mighty British Empire. What if they had not declared that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all… are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”? What if the disciples and women who witnessed Jesus’ Resurrection had been too fearful to continue Jesus’ ministry, or doubted that anyone would listen to them?
            The interesting thing about the image of the harvest is that Jesus sends people out to be laborers to gather the fruit that is already there; not to be the merchants who sell it, not to be the farmers who plant the seeds, and not even to be the consumers who eat the fruit. But there is salvation in the work of the harvest. Perhaps you’ve heard of the “Ikea effect,” named after the “build it yourself” furniture company. Researchers have found that people who buy their furniture from Ikea and put it together themselves value the furniture more highly than if they had simply bought it fully assembled. Even after you put the bookshelf together and you have a few screws left over and maybe one of the shelves is slightly slanted, you will likely appreciate this bookshelf more than one that you did not work for. And it’s not just furniture, as the same effect has been found with Legos, origami, and cooking. In fact, when instant cake mixes were introduced in the 1950s, the public was initially resistant to them because it cheapened the perceived value of the cakes. So the recipes were changed to require adding an egg yourself. Perhaps this Ikea effect also applies to our faith.
            We’ve all heard the phrase “you get out of it what you put into it,” which is largely true. However, the issue with this image of the harvest is that our task is to be the laborer, so we may not be aware of what we are getting out of it. If we work for justice, we very well may never see it come to fruition in the way we want it to. Just as Martin Luther King did not get to rejoice in the election of Barack Obama, we may not be able to partake in the feast that will come from the work of our harvesting. As Jesus commissions the 70, he says that their job is to, by word and deed, proclaim that “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”
            And to me, that seems more like planting a seed than harvesting a crop. While it could be that Jesus, or Luke, decided to change the metaphor in just a few short verses, there may well be something to seeing our actions as harvesting instead of planting. The task isn’t to plant seeds of the kingdom, but rather to bear witness to the fruit that the God is already bearing in our world and lives. When we see ourselves as the planters, we might actually think that things like justice, forgiveness, or hope are coming from us instead of God. But the laborers who harvest instead adopt a posture of stewardship – the plants are not there because of their work, but the fruit will rot on the vine without their work. St. Augustine said that “without God, we cannot; without us, God will not.” If God wanted to make the harvest happen without us, God would. But perhaps God knows that by sending us out into a field which we did not plant, that we will be overcome by a sense of abundance and generosity. We will see the rich harvest that has grown, and then by working to harvest it, it will be something that we value deeply through our labor.
            In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul writes “whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.” Working for the good of all is where harvesting needs to be done and where meaningful actions can be done. Can you think of situations where there is fruit of the Kingdom ready to be picked, but is just waiting for someone to do that work?  You might mentor an at-risk youth. You could visit members of our parish who live at Trinity Oaks and are unable to drive, taking them Communion so that they might share in the harvest of our Eucharistic feast. There is very likely someone in your life who had a profound impact on you, and you’ve never thanked them for it, so maybe you write them a note. You might want to stick a bit more literally to our symbol of the harvest and do some actual work of harvesting in our community garden and taking the produce to those in need. Or perhaps you might want to pray with the image of the harvest this week: what fruits do you want God to plant in your heart? Peace in the stress of life? Help with finding forgiveness? Ask God to prepare these things in your heart so that they might be ready to be harvested soon. There are countless ways for your to participate in harvesting the Kingdom; as Jesus said, the harvest is rich, but we are short on laborers.
            Mother Teresa once said that “I alone cannot change the world, but I can cast a stone across the waters to create many ripples.” Your harvesting of the Kingdom of God out of daily life might seem like a very small act, one that may well never be remembered by history. But who is to say what happen when someone else tastes the fruit of the Kingdom that you harvest? I recently read that Martin Luther King, Jr, whom most us would credit as being the father of the Civil Rights movement, was always quick to give that title to his father, Martin Luther King, Sr. And King, Sr. often said that the real father of the movement was the preacher who baptized him, Reverend Paschal. But before this minister died, he said that he thought that the father of the movement was a white legislator from Georgia who called for fair and equal treatment of all people and was killed on account of the legislation that he proposed. But before this man was killed, he had paid for Paschal to attend seminary, and then Paschal baptized King, Sr., who taught King, Jr, who gave us his glimpse of God’s dream. It all started by a small but very significant harvesting the fruit of the Kingdom and allowing someone else to taste and see God’s goodness.
Life is full of such situations where God’s grace and providence are waiting to be picked out of the seemingly every day experiences that we all have. The Kingdom is not furthered by our grand schemes or ideas, but by those moments when we reach out our hands and take a piece of ripe fruit and share it with someone, perhaps ourselves, who needs a bit of nourishment. If you see yourself as a harvester of the Kingdom, looking for God’s grace, you might just be surprised how much fruit you find all around you. And we just don’t know, our harvesting just might be a part of God’s transformation of this world.
Harvesting means paying attention to the Kingdom that has come near to us. Harvesting means participating in God’s ongoing cycle of sustaining us through abundance. Harvesting means not storing up crops in our own silos, but rather working for the good of all. The time for the harvest has come; what ripe fruits of the Kingdom do you see?