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“Harvest and Reapers”

Wilton Presbyterian Church

September 2, 2007

When I was a boy, after a summer storm, I remember going puddle-gazing, marveling at how small bodies of water could reflect so much of the sky above and the earth around. Today I still marvel at how so much of the story of heaven and earth—and humanity in-between—can be captured in small Biblical stories, sometimes even a single sentence.

Like the verse beginning this morning’s second lesson: “And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the Kingdom, and healing every disease and infirmity.” Jesus went about teaching, and preaching, and healing--the story of his life, and a model for all would-be faithful followers.

And then there’s the next sentence: “Seeing the crowds, Jesus had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” How many people manage to see an individual with compassion, let alone crowds? In every setting Jesus seems to see others with what we might call the “pain of love,” even when they are behaving badly, for he never fails to recognize that what is deserving of censure on the surface is underneath that surface worthy of compassion.

And haven’t we in recent months been witness to public officials behaving badly in private and to the quick, easy, righteous indignation of their colleagues at such behavior? But who, like Jesus, dares take the time and spirit to look beneath the public confessions and censures to feel compassion for those whose personal behavior is so troubling to their constituents and colleagues, to their families, and to what they hold dear to themselves?

Let us remember that Jesus was moved to compassion by the world’s pain—the paralytic, the woman who bled. All the sick and infirm touched his heart. So did the pain of the poor. Jesus delivered people from paralysis, insanity, leprosy, suppurating wounds, deformity, blindness and muteness. But time and again in word and deed he returned to the plight of the poor, whose poverty he considered no historical accident but the fruit of social injustice.

He was moved by the world’s sorrow: Mary and Martha grieving the death of their brother, Lazarus, the widow at Nain. He was moved by hunger, as we see in the feeding of the multitudes, always by the vulnerability of children as by the loneliness of lepers living out their living death.

And, as we see in today’s lesson, he was moved by bewilderment: ‘Seeing the crowds, Jesus had compassion for the, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Centuries later John Milton wrote: “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed.” It was the bewilderment of the crowds that prompted the now famous words of Jesus: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”

Note first what an incredibly high regard for humanity is reflected in Jesus’ view of crowds as a white harvest. “The harvest is plentiful.” The emphasis is not on the destruction of sinners but on their salvation. How long will it be till we realize that there is more mercy in God than sin in us? “The harvest is plentiful.” People are not chaff to be burned but wheat to be saved. For sure, no one knew better than Christ the cruelty, jealousy, terror, and secrecy of human beings. But still, he knew it was and always will be our destiny to live for God and neighbor in self-forgetting love.

And if regarding humanity as a white harvest seems a bit high, a bit risky, what of Christ’s view of the reapers? None of the twelve disciples he sent out had any of the so-called advantages—education, wealth, social status. They were as ordinary as ordinary gets, which makes the point that Christ is not looking for extraordinary people, but for ordinary men and women who do ordinary things extraordinarily well.

The point, of course, is that none of us can count ourselves out as reapers, by the grace of God, and God knows the harvest is white today, the crowds these days bewildered. We Christians are sinners, of course, but forgiven sinners. We are inadequate, of course, but as those who remember what Luther taught: ‘God can carve the rotten wood and ride the lame horse.”

So let me suggest, courtesy of the first lesson from Hebrews this morning, two qualities of reapers in today’s harvest.

The first is to find within ourselves a contentment with God. Harry Emerson Fosdick once wrote: “Those who cannot rest cannot work; those who cannot let go cannot hang on. My consultation hours fill up with men and women who have mastered the techniques of activity and aggressiveness and whose lives are going all to pieces because they have mastered no other techniques at all.” And he concluded with St. Augustine’s prayer: “Let my soul take refuge from the crowding turmoil of worldly thoughts beneath the shadow of thy wings. Let my heart, this sea of restless waves, find peace in thee, O God.” (And mind you, no one could accuse either Augustine or Fosdick of being so heavenly bound that they were of no earthly use.)

The writer to the Hebrews exhorts us to be free to be content with what we have rather than ambitious—greedy even—for what we don’t.

Last week in his sermon John Celentano spoke eloquently to the “exceptional Christian and a man of extraordinary faith” that Bob Garland was among us. Those of us who knew Bob Garland (mostly after his retirement from Deloitte) understood him as a man who was quick, time and time again, especially as he struggled with pancreatic cancer, to say how blessed he was. John spoke poignantly of the Bob Garland we knew in his time with us; but what many of us did not know was the soil from which that deep down deep sense of blessing grew that rooted his life and winsomely infected others. As an infant Bob was abandoned by his father and left to wander with mother from place to place to place between St. Louis and Las Vegas, living on what little she was able to earn as a single mom. When he was graduated from high school, Bob joined the Air Force. One night during boot camp (or whatever the Air Force called it), his drill sergeant found him and his buddies, let us say, a bit overhappy and overzealous. That one sergeant that one night nailed Bob against a wall and said, in effect: “Bob, you’ve got a choice now to make: go to the brig or go to college. Choose, Bob. Now.” What a difference one person, one night, one decision make! Bob choose community college (at night, I believe) and from there blossomed, by the grace of God and his own hard, hard work, a distinguished career as an accountant, a beloved place as husband and father of six remarkable kids, and a respected position as civic and church leader who gave back to others out of this incredible sense of his own blessing—to be alive, to learn, to work hard, to love and be loved, never to consider himself victim when life threw him bad pitches, and to give himself selflessly to others—most recently by teaching at community colleges kids who faced similar challenges he had himself once endured. Through it all, never did an ill word pass from his lips. No blame. No regrets. And no fear, even in the face of death.

What does a human being need other than such a blessing of the presence and help of God the world can neither give nor take away? Maybe you recognize this presence and help of God. But maybe you don’t. Either way, however, whether you know it or not, there is within and around you, that presence and help of God. God himself said it: “I will never leave you or forsake you.” So we can say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?” (Heb. 13.5, 6)

An inner contentment with God, a deep down deep awareness of blessing from God. That is the first quality of a reaper. And the second flows from this first. “Let brotherly love be always with you,” the writer counsels us. The very circumstances of early Christians often threatened their brotherly love. Because they took their faith and their morals as seriously as they did, they lived with a double danger. First, there was the danger of heresy-hunting, of rushing to judge somebody else in order to defend and protect themselves. The very desire of Christians to preserve faith clean and morals pure often made them (us, too, if we’re honest with ourselves) inclined to track down and eliminate the persons whose faith or morals had gone astray.

Second, there was the danger of unsympathetic treatment of the one whose nerve had flagged and whose faith had failed. The very necessity of unswerving loyalty in the midst of an anxious, hostile, and yes, sinful world tended to add coals to the judgment of one who, in some crisis, had not the courage to stand for his faith or to follow what he knew to have been right and good. It is a great thing to keep faith strong and life clean; but when the desire to do so makes us narrow and hard, fault-finding, condemning, and unsympathetic, brotherly love withers; and we are left often with something far worse than what we wanted to avoid in the first place. It is one of our challenges as Christians to remember that, after Jesus himself, all our teaching of Christ and our preaching of God’s Kingdom finds fulfillment in the healing—not the judgment and shunning, but the healing of those who have disappointed—even sinned against--themselves, their loved ones and colleagues, and their God.

“The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few.” In this season when we experience a new year ahead, may we strive to hold our fellow human beings in the same incredibly high regard in which they were held by Jesus. And not sell ourselves short either. “God can carve the rotten wood and ride the lame horse.” In Christ’s eyes common people are uncommonly able. In Christ’s eyes sinful people receive the mercy of God. So with the peace of God in our hearts, and with Christ’s brotherly love in our lives, may we swell the numbers of those laborers whom, for the praise of God, Christ sends into the still white harvest in these bewildering times.