LAKE JAMES

NORTH CAROLINA

Sermon Proper 6 June 12, 2005      Tom Rightmyer  trightmy@juno.com
 

Jesus said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

For breakfast I like to eat oatmeal with blueberries. This week two pints of North Carolina blueberries cost $3.00. In winter I pay that much for 1/4^th the quantity, flown up from Chile. In spring the fruit comes from Florida, then Georgia, now North Carolina. Later we get Jersey berries, then Wisconsin, then Canada, and so on. When we go to Maine in late August I enjoy local berries for about $6.00 a quart

          The Holy Land grows winter wheat and barley. On my first trip, about this time over 40 years ago I saw men and women in the fields bent over, gathering a handful of ripe grain and cutting it with a hand scythe. The fields were small, maybe twice the size of this room. The laborers cut a few stalks at a time. The harvest was very labor intensive.  Jesus said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

          In human history souls have been harvested for the kingdom of God in many ways. In our time souls are harvested one at a time as individuals hear God’s call and respond to it. We each come when we are ready. Conversion can’t be forced. A friend told me recently of forcing a spouse to attend a meeting of a 12 step program, a meeting open to all interested people. The couple met there someone they both knew who looked at them both and said to my friend, “You’re ready, but you picked your spouse a little too green.” My friend did in fact go to the appropriate program, as did the spouse, some time later, when the time was ripe.

          Individual conversion has not always been the practice. In 10 days Lucy and I leave for Germany for a week conference near Hamburg and then to see the towns from whence in the 18^th century came our fathers’ ancestors. Her family came from Siegen north of Frankfurt to the Germanna colony in Virginia. Mine came from near Karlsruhe in southwestern Germany. Our family story is that they were Reformed or Calvinist Christians whose village was inherited or bought by a Roman Catholic prince. The rule was “cuius regio ejus religio.” The ruler’s religion determined the people’s religion. The Rightmyers had to choose whether to remain Protestants and leave, or stay and become Roman Catholics. They chose to leave and ended up in Reading, Pennsylvania.

          In much of the western world we enjoy freedom of religion, including freedom from religion. When I came to be rector in Asheboro in 1974 Bishop Fraser of North Carolina gathered the clergy who had come to the state from the north and said to us, “Boys (and we were all boys in those days), you’re fortunate to be living in the south where people still think going to church will do you some good.” (He had moved from Long Island to Alexandria, Virginia, to Winston-Salem to Raleigh and was a very wise bishop. His biography was titled, “Frequently Wrong but Never in Doubt.”)

          Things have changed. The social pressure for church membership – let along church attendance – is not what it used to be. There’s a backlash about that. We hear about the political influence of the Religious Right, and I still hear the Christian Yellow Pages mentioned. But we are here because we want to be, because we have heard God’s call on lives, and have responded to that call.  We are citizens of the kingdom of God because we have accepted that citizenship.

          There are obligations of citizenship. We pay our taxes; we generally obey the law of the land; we take a place in the life of the community; many of us vote and generally show up when we are called for jury duty – show up with excuses in hand.

          In the same way we show up to worship with others in the kingdom of God. We say our private prayers; we contribute to the Lord’s work, and when asked we are not ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified.

          Jesus said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” He calls us to be more active citizens of the kingdom of God, to exercise our full responsibility and authority as members of his body.

          As Jesus sent his disciples out on that first missionary journey we read of in today’s gospel, so he sends us as laborers into his harvest. Like those men and women in the Holy Land I saw many years ago our task is to bend over and take the stalks of mature grain and bring them one by one into the kingdom.

          Two things we need to ask: (1) Is the grain ripe? (2) Are we ready to gather the grain?

Is the grain ripe? Is the person to whom we are speaking ready to receive the good news of God’s kingdom? All of us are ready at different times to do different things. The laws of our society tell us that on average young people are ready to drive at 16. Many of us learned to drive earlier than that, some learned later. But the cost of insurance for an inexperienced driver is much higher than it is for a driver with three years experience. Readiness to learn is not always readiness to act.

          So also in the spiritual life. We believe that infants are ready to receive God’s gift of salvation and we baptize them. Children are able to respond in ways appropriate to their ages to the love of God in Christ Jesus. But they need to hear the story. They need to hear the story of Jesus and the story of how Jesus lives in us.

          We need to be ready to gather the grain. We need to be able to tell the story of Jesus, and how he lives in us. This takes reflection and work. We each need to spend some time reflecting on the spiritual life, on how we understand the story of Jesus, and how Jesus lives in us. And then we need to be able to tell that story, and to be able to ask the closing question. There are lots of ways to ask but what we need to know is whether this person is now ready to be an active member of the kingdom of heaven, a fruitful disciple, a laborer in the harvest. In that commitment God and we rejoice.   

          Jesus said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”

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