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?
