I have to admit right from the beginning this morning that my experience of what we might call “harvesting” is limited to a small vegetable garden in my early adolescence. I enjoyed tending the tomatoes and the squash and the onions and all the rest—it was a lovely little garden—but there really isn’t anything agricultural in my life that can be equated with the kind of image Jesus is using when he says “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” What we had in the garden was easy for my family to handle. We’d have to give away some extra zucchini from time to time but that was not labor.
“Harvest,” for me, ridiculously, conjures up bucolic festivals and folk dancing. And bandanas, which we do have for sale here at St. Mark’s if you should happen to need one for a harvest festival in the coming months. One for $15 or two for $25, and they look beautiful. Leslie and I have two.
You see, my agricultural vocabulary is sorely lacking. It goes right into commodification and knickknacks. Mention the harvest and the next thing you know I’m hawking bandanas. For me the harvest is a distinctly decorative notion, because I’ve lived a life in which agriculture itself feels like it’s somehow removed from living. It’s very different, I know, for those who live or have lived on farms, but I can present myself this morning as a representative of an uprooted, urban or suburban lifestyle.
It's a challenge, then, for me to hear that Jesus wants us to be laborers in the harvest. And here are a few things I’m guessing I don’t know about being that kind of laborer:
First: I don’t know what it’s like to do that kind of physical work. Not for a span of days or weeks, and not, certainly, for the lifetime that a farmer spends on a farm. I don’t know what it means that the work of farming doesn’t end, that “harvest” isn’t a one-and-done thing, something that happens and then is followed by a nice vacation.
I don’t know, either, what it means to have worked on the harvest on a particular patch of ground, in a particular community, for generation after generation. I’m not identified with what grows around me. I’m free to pack up and move.
I’m not bound by the climate or the soil or the water where I live. Or let me correct that: I’ve had the illusion, all these years, that climate and soil and water could be made to have a negligible impact on my life. If I didn’t like the heat, there was air conditioning. You can filter the water, or buy some if you need it. Part of the shock of life in the twenty-first century is for me the dawning realization that I’m connected to the earth. If there are fires in Canada I will inhale the smoke.
Another way to say this: I’ve had the luxury or delusion or both that whatever happened in the harvest, I might have to pay a little more at the grocery store but I could have what I wanted. I’m not used to thinking about the fact that I am dependent on the harvest. Is it possible that to be a true laborer in the harvest I have to know that my life depends on the harvest? The harvest isn’t an action that I am supposed to imagine myself doing to something static called a
crop; the harvest is a life filled with and bound up in and utterly dependent upon growth and seasons and shared effort and whatever blessings the weather might bring.
So I think we have established that I’m not a farmer. But Jesus is leading me to a deeper question here. Am I a Christian? Jesus speaks to his disciples, who are followers of his, friends of his, students of his, but he tells them to ask God to send laborers. And this prayer they are to offer, for laborers in the harvest, this prayer comes along with the expectation and the authority that they will go out themselves and do real ongoing work. He’s not asking them, it turns out, to be really moved by his teachings and interested in his ideas and drawn to him as a person. He is asking them to dig in. They will need to rest but the work won’t end and it won’t be a one-time volunteer opportunity.
They are going to cast out diseases and illnesses and unclean spirits. The worlds, seen and unseen, will pass like soil through their fingers. Something will grow, as they go out. They will grow with it. They’ll be identified with what grows, and where it grows and how it grows. It will happen in season and out of season. They’ll be utterly dependent on the weather, and on their own hard work, and on other people: in other words, dependent on God.
Are we Christians, then? Are we laborers in the harvest? This is a wonderful church. You are wonderful people. I’m not putting any of us down or implying that we aren’t enough. What I’m asking is, do our lives depend on this work?
Just as I’ve been able to live with the illusion that I was somehow separate from the business of growing food, we followers of Jesus have been led in a thousand ways to imagine that our connection to Jesus, our need to do the work of Jesus, our need for Jesus, is optional. In a thousand ways we need to be awakened from that dream. What has come close to us here is the actual kingdom of heaven. There is no replacement for it. Our lives in the church are the means God is using for casting out the demons and the sickness and the death in the world. In our world. And we don’t have another one. God’s redemption can only happen for us as it is happening right here and now, as we pray and turn to God and ask God to send the laborers, to make us into laborers, to bring about that plentiful harvest. God is meeting you here now, decisively.
A farmer can’t decide to harvest some other crops than the ones the farmer has planted. I don’t mean that we are unable to make choices about how or where we worship. What I mean is that there is no supermarket of experiences with God that we can run to, to buy what we need if the experience we are having with God fails. If I don’t love my neighbor, if I don’t open my heart to the love of God, if I don’t pray, there isn’t any other neighbor or heart or prayer that can replace the one in this moment and this place.
And yes that does make this church and this community and this Mass profoundly consequential for all of us. Because this is where we are planted today. This is our holy labor today. And just like in farming, longevity and preservation and consistency and care for the
future are part of being present for today’s work. If this were ever to fail, it couldn’t be replaced.
Of course nobody gets this right. Nobody labors in this harvest without failure and weakness. That’s part of the work. We all take small steps more often than we take big ones: chatting at coffee hour, signing up for a thing, praying for a moment as honestly as we are able: these are all actions that deepen our lives in faith. And did I mention buying bandanas? And I can look at our community as a whole and at so many of you and I can be moved deeply by your laboring. Because you do look as if your lives depend on this.
But the question about being a laborer, the hope that we would pray to God to send real laborers and that we might also be some part of the answer to that prayer, that’s not a one- and-done question. A wonderful church will never stop asking this question. Are we laborers?
This isn’t even a question about whether we could do more, necessarily; rest might be the most important part of the work for some of us today. But this is always a dig deeper question. Dig deeper until you start to know that the kingdom of heaven is drawing near, until you start to get that sense. Until it feels true that you are receiving without paying and can give without being paid.
And then when you get that sense of depending on God, dig a bit more. And when it gets hard, keep working, even when rest is the work. And when hope gets scarce, think of that as part of the work. Rejoicing is part of the labor of the harvest. Keep at it. And when you are bored and disengaged, think of that boredom as your labor in the kingdom for right now. It may all change tomorrow, but keep doing the work.
It may be that the single greatest testimony we can give about who Jesus is, is the acknowledgment that our lives depend on the harvest of our work with him. His work in us and our work in him, a growing and a harvesting. Essential. Perennial. Holy.
Preached by Mother Nora Johnson
June 18, 2023
Saint Mark’s Church, Philadelphia