Jesus said unto them, “The harvest truly is great, but the labourers are few: pray ye, therefore, the Lord of the harvest, that he would send forth labourers into his harvest.”

May I speak in the name of the one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

As a boy of twelve years old, I had the opportunity to work on a farm.  Now I was born in Springfield, MA, so I never really had been exposed to farming.  I thought it might be fun to be outside, and it was a way to earn spending money.  I eagerly accepted the job from the old farmer, and I began work the next morning.  As a city boy, I had very little knowledge of what is known as 5 am.  In fact, most teens during the summer cannot be a witness that the sun does anything more than start at its zenith and set.  Getting up before the sun seemed wrong, but there was a great deal of work to be done.   

My first year on the farm, we had a bumper crop of summer squash, and as the year went on I noticed that more and more squash was being left in the field, and some of the squash was left to rot.  My grandmother, a veteran of the great depression, taught me that wasting food was wrong.  When I worked a hard day with the farmer and his family, I became increasingly frustrated at the amount of food left.  No matter how hard I worked, there was more to pick than we could possibly manage on any given day.  Finally, I complained to the farmer, “Look at all the food we are wasting. Can’t you hire another person to pick this squash?”  He told me that he had tried, but that no one wanted the job.  The Lord had granted the farmer a bumper crop.  He had plenty of what he needed from the land, but he could not find workers come harvest time.  When September rolled around, I went back to school and even more of the harvest rotted in the fields.  It didn’t seem right to me, but what could be done?

Some years later when I became a Christian, I read today’s Gospel lesson, and I looked back on my time on the farm.  Everyday when I pray morning and evening prayer, I pray that the Church of the Redeemer grows, but I really should be praying for something slightly different.  The Lord created the harvest, and the harvest is great.  It is! Look at the number of people in the community of Chestnut Hill, and in the cities of Newton, Brookline, and Boston.  There are so many people.  In fact there are more people than we could possibly reach.  The harvest truly is great.  God has put more people at our door than we could seat on a Sunday.  What I should pray for are labourers for the harvest.  The labourers are you and I.  Today’s gospel is one of the great evangelical ones of the whole Bible.  Jesus is encouraging us to go out and reap what God has sown.  God has made the first move.  There are plenty of people out there that need the healing power of Jesus Christ.  There are millions within a quick drive that have a void in their heart that only God can fill.  There are so many people who are not everything they could be.  They might have a successful career, a great marriage, and a wonderful family, but they are missing something they may not be able to articulate.  It is our job as labourers to find these people, and to gather them in. 

There is a reason that Jesus pairs the commissioning of the 70 with the passage about needing harvesters.  We are told that the 70 disciples are sent out throughout the land preaching the kingdom of God.  We are also told when the 70 return, that they have been casting out demons.  This comes as a bit of a surprise.  We were told before the apostles left on a similar mission that they had that power, but we were not told in advance that the 70 disciples had this power.  We are also told that disciples have power over snakes and scorpions.  Having spent some time in the Middle East, power over scorpions would not be such a bad thing, but we could also read this passage metaphorically.  Since the beginning of Christian tradition we have read about the snake in the Garden of Eden as the devil, or a demonic force.  We could read this passage as saying that the 70 had a power against evil, and the forces of evil.   

What could this mean for us at the Redeemer in the 21^st century?  As harvesters, as disciples of Jesus Christ, we have power over evil in the world and in our own lives.  The demons of war, poverty, disease, violence, and injustice, we have the power to cast out of our midst.  I don’t choose only to read this passage from a modern social justice standpoint, however.  We also have a strong mystical power over evil.  God has strengthened us to fight evil within our own hearts and minds.  With the help of God we have the power to cast out our own demons.  The demons of alcoholism, infidelity, and addiction can also be cast out.  Our predilections might always be there, but God can transform even these into character strengths.   

Paul is also using harvest metaphors in our epistle lesson.  Paul refers us to the ancient proverb, “You reap what you sow.” In other words, you get what you deserve.  If you sow to the flesh, you get corruption and death.  If you sow to the spirit, you get life and purity.  This seems simple enough, but Paul never concludes that we are on our own.  He did not teach that everything is always up to us to decide.  He immediately follows this passage of reaping what you sow by stating that he shall never “boast of anything except the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  Do we reap what we sow?  Yes, but it is more complicated than it seems.  Sowing in the spirit is not just doing good works, or trying to be the best person you can be.  Paul is pointing us to something beyond ourselves.  He is showing us that even our own happiness, even our own good efforts, are not completely our own.  Even if we do good works, and even if we are successful in this life, there is still something more out there for us.  Paul is pointing us to the cross.  It is only through the cross that we can be harvested and brought home to the place where we were created to be, with God.     

Today’s texts talk about evangelizing and turning toward God.  We are both the harvest and the harvester.  God is simultaneously working on us and working through us.  God wants us to be converted and to slay the demons within us, which he has given us, as disciples, the power to do.  The Bible is not a self-help book, however.  The gospel is compelling us to spread the good news.  Let us talk about our faith to our friends, colleagues, family, and neighbors.  Christ brings us strength and blessings, but we as labourers have some work to do to make it happen.  With the help of God, let us make sure no one is left to rot in the field. 

Amen.