From production to harvest

2 Kings 5:1-14
Psalm 30
Galatians 6:(1-6), 7-16
Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

When I was farming, the work I liked best was the work of production; which is to say, the kinds of things people tend to think of when they think of farming—plowing, planting, watering, weeding, that labor where the focus is on the fertility of the soil and the growth and health of the crops.  Maybe it’s just because I’m an introvert, but I loved the solitary and contemplative quality of that work, the long hours alone on the tractor, the still, early mornings walking through the fields, opening and closing irrigation valves.  But inevitably, there came a turning point where the work would change, where the focus would be on sorting and weighing and packing and storing.  The attention of the farm would turn outward, to seek buyers, and negotiate prices, and schedule deliveries. 

That turning point was the harvest, when the crop, that was the fulfillment and culmination of all the months-long work of production, became the starting point for a whole new kind of work.  The harvest is what connected our needs with the needs of the city.  It was where the farm met the world of commerce, and the market that supplied it with all the things that it couldn’t produce for itself—seeds, fertilizers, tractor parts, diesel fuel.  The sale of the harvested crop is how we got the capital for a new cycle of production.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus sets his face for Jerusalem, and the climax of his mission.  He appoints seventy disciples to go, two by two, before him, to test the readiness of the people for the proclamation and demonstration of the kingdom of God.  And he impresses upon them the importance of the challenging work they are about to do, by likening it to the harvest.  “The harvest is plentiful,” he says, but the laborers are few.”  The work that Jesus does— his exorcisms and healings, his teaching of repentance and forgiveness and renewal, his invitation to outcasts and sinners to feast at the table of the kingdom—the work that he appoints these disciples to help to carry out, is a culmination and a fulfillment.   It is the harvest of all that Israel has learned about the authority and the wisdom and the justice, and goodness and compassion of God.

But the harvest to which Jesus sends the Seventy is also something new.  It is not just a turning point in their lives or even in the history of Israel--it is a turning point in the work of God.  It is God’s harvest.  “Pray to the Lord of the harvest,” says Jesus, “to send laborers into his harvest.”  It is the beginning of something new, so it requires laborers who are willing to try a new way of working that forms a new kind of community.  They are to travel empty-handed and depend on generosity of others.  They are to come as those who offer peace, who trust in the power of peace to turn strangers into friends.  They are to rely on the name of Jesus, and on the nearness of the kingdom of God.

And to show how profound this turning point is, what radically-new kinds of relationships will be called for, how the conventional wisdom about what it means to be God’s people must be discarded; Jesus is on the way to Jerusalem.  But when he gets there, the labor of the harvest will fall entirely on him.  It will get more and more concentrated and focused and intense until at last it is exhausted in the helplessness of the cross.    The body of Jesus, like a seed, will be laid in the tomb.  And it is there, where all the work of human production is swallowed up in the abyss of silence and stillness that is God, that the full abundance of the harvest will begin to be revealed.

I always knew, when I was farming, that the crops that we grew were for feeding people, but that remained kind of abstract for me as long as we were chiefly selling to restaurants and wholesale distributors.  I would walk down to the fields in pitch darkness and take boxes of produce from the refrigerator and load them on a flatbed truck and drive to San Francisco, and stack them at back doors and loading docks at 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning.  But then we started doing more and more retail sales at farmers’ markets.  It was there that I got to see people’s faces light up when they saw the banner with the name of our farm.  I got to hear their murmurs of delight at the variety of textures and colors of the lettuces and potatoes.  They would ask questions about how to prepare the food, and tell me about who was coming to dinner, and I started to truly understand how the harvest of the farm was shared with the world, how it passed into the hands of strangers to become the stuff of family and community, far from the fields where it grew.

The harvest of the gospel spread in the 1^st Century world, where new urban communities were forming, made up of a cosmopolitan, highly mobile people, dislocated from their roots in the tribe and on the land.  They were people hungry for a deeper encounter with God than was offered by the smorgasbord of pagan cults and exotic mystery religions.   They were drawn to the religion of the Jews, to its moral seriousness and curious mix of mythic profundity and historical realism.  But they required a new way of being Israel, one that they could share with fellow citizens of this strange and unsettling new world.  And they found that way through the Apostles of Jesus the Christ, the Messiah of Israel, and the story of his life, and his cross and resurrection.  It was a story that awakened in them a spirit of faith, reverence, and devotion, and the power to lay aside old prejudices and superstitions and to live together in loving service to others, in a manner such as they had ever known before. 

And this context explains why Paul is so adamant that the gentiles in the church in Galatia should not undergo a formal conversion to Judaism.  It would be as if there were a field full of ripe grain, and you drove into it and started to plow.   Still, every generation of Christians seems to need to remember for itself not to keep toiling at the work of production when it’s time to bring in the harvest.  We still make the law of love a religion of rules, so we can tell for ourselves who’s in and who’s out.  We still seem to think that the Christian people are a tribe, with a homeland to defend, and enemies to vanquish.  We still want a God high above, whom we’ll meet when we’re dead, and not one who seeks us and speaks to us every moment, as close as breath, as plain as bread. 

But there’s no way to go back and fix our mistakes, and there’s no time to waste on regret, because the fields are still ripe with a plentiful harvest, and laborers are still far too few.  If you have a taste for the good things of the earth, and hate to see them go to waste; if you know abundance when you see it; if you desire nothing more than to share the gifts of God, and to celebrate with friends and strangers in the peace of the kingdom; then the Lord of the harvest still has a job for you.

The ultimate goal

2 Kings 2:1-2, 6-14
Psalm 77:1-2, 11-20
Galatians 5:1, 13-25
Luke 9:51-62

When I was farming, near Muir Beach in Marin County, in my twenties, we had two tractors.  The Big tractor was for primary tillage.  In the spring, as soon as the ground was dry enough to work, I would hitch up the hammer-flail mower, and drive out into the chest-high stand of winter cover crops and mow it down.  I’d wait forty-eight hours for that green manure to dry, and then I’d plow it under with the disc plow.  Then I’d hitch up the chisel plow, to break up the subsoil, and rip the fields first one way and then crossways, like a checkerboard; and then I’d finish off with a lighting disking, with the ring-roller on behind, so that each of the fields, one, two, two-and-a-half acres, would be one smooth surface, like a bed sheet tucked in tight from one windbreak to the next.

Then we’d turn to the small tractor, a lightweight crop-tending machine, and start marking lines, shaping up beds for vegetable crops, or furrows for potatoes.  The goal was to make the first straight and then keep them straight and keep them parallel, because everything that came after, the planting, and laying out irrigation pipe, the cultivating, and fertilizing, and harvesting, all was done between the lines that the small tractor made on the freshly plowed ground.  I think it was in my second year on the farm that I became something of a specialist in bedding-up with the small tractor, because I knew the secret to making straight lines.  The secret was to not look back, and not look to the side. 

I would get the bedder lined up square on the three-point hitch and tighten up the chains on both sides, and I’d adjust the top bar so the spades got just the right amount of bite, and I’d set the front tires where I knew they needed to be and then I would pick a point at the far end of the field, and start driving.  And I would keep my eyes fixed on that point, not looking back, and not looking to the side, but just drive toward my mark until I got there and then I’d lift up the rear hydraulics and swing the tractor around and see my straight line.  I’d put my right front tire in the track I’d just made and sight down the center axis of the tractor and pick a point on far end of the field where I’d come from and start driving, and just keep going like that until the whole field was done.

I think about that experience every time I hear this story from the Gospel of Luke about Jesus setting his face for Jerusalem, not letting himself be distracted by the stubbornness of the Samaritans or the foolishness of his disciples.  I think about the words that Jesus says about how the man who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is not worthy of the Kingdom of God.   Jesus seems to be saying “my goal is the ultimate goal, and I’m going to go all the way there.  If you want to come with me, you need to set your eyes on that goal, and start walking, and to keep going toward it in a straight line.

Now, there’s nothing explicitly religious about the idea that we should have a goal for our lives, and be single-minded and focused in going after it.  On any given weekend in airport hotels and convention centers all around the world motivational speakers and professional coaches are charging people good money to tell them just that.  Where the religion comes in is with the faith that the only goal that is truly ultimate, that is really worthy of giving one’s whole-hearted devotion and single-minded focus to pursuing, is the goal for our lives that is in the heart and mind of God.  

Only the gift of God’s purpose for our lives is precisely suited to bringing forth the nobler powers that are latent in our created natures, and expressing them, transforming us into the persons we most want to be in our heart of hearts.  Only God’s goal for us is entrancing and fascinating enough to hold our attention and keep calling us back through all the wrong turns, and changes of perception, and reversals of fortune and course corrections, and swings of emotion that happen to us along the way, calling us again and again to consent to pursuing that which lies beyond ourselves, transcending our limited conceptions of what it is we truly want and need.

That’s what Paul is talking about in his letter to the Galatians when he speaks of the struggle between “flesh” and “spirit.”  We have to be careful here not to make the mistake of thinking that Paul is denigrating the body, as if religious life were about sacrificing the body, with it its needs and pleasures and limitations on the altar of some escape into a purely mental, spiritual, disembodied realm.  That’s not what Paul means here.  What he is talking about is the inner conflict, the daily struggle that we go through in the painstaking process of learning what it is that we truly desire.   “The desires of the flesh” is Paul’s symbolic shorthand for our maddening efforts to satisfy our ultimate longings by craving and clinging to things that never can.  And Paul knows, as Jesus knows, that the key to untangling the knot of all that frustrated desire is love. 

I just came back from a couple of weeks of vacation.  It was such a refreshing change of pace—I had to do a little work, preaching and celebrating liturgies on Sundays, but the rest of the time I was free to simply enjoy the beauty of the Sierra Nevada, and read, and catch up on my sleep, and most of all to catch up with my family.  When Meg and Risa and I get to spend long stretches of unhurried, un-stressed time together we remember how much we like each other, and love to be in each other’s company. 

And so as we get ready to begin our fourth year here at St. John’s, I’m not just thinking about my professional goals, or my goals for the parish, but also about the goal of making room in my family life for more of that kind of time.  And I’m sure this pertains to the ultimate purpose of my life.  After all, how can I preach about God’s gift of unmerited grace and unconditional love in Christ, and about the Spirit’s gifts of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control, if I’m not taking the time to share those gifts with the people I’m closest to.

Because it’s not like Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem because he wanted to die.  He did it out of love for God and for his disciples, and the desire to dispel forever their misplaced hope that any kind of political or military messiah could ever really set them free.  And Paul didn’t set out on his missionary journeys, in the course of which he met with floggings, and imprisonments, shipwrecks, hunger, sleepless nights, and every kind of humiliation and hardship, because he enjoyed suffering.  He did it out of love for the Lord, who, in spite of Paul’s being his sworn enemy, revealed to him the glory of his resurrection, and gave him the grace of an apostle to preach the coming of the Kingdom of God to the Gentiles.

As we seek for the ultimate goal of our lives, for what alone will make us truly happy and truly set us free, our only guide is love—the love we have for each other, for our families and friends, for our neighbors, for our fellow Petalumans, and Californians, and Americans, for our fellow human beings and fellow creatures on this earth, and our love for the creator of them all.  Love is what will lead us on the straight and narrow way through our tangled forest of misbegotten desires and all the lies and hurt and violence that people do to each other because of them.   And love, one and the same eternal and all-encompassing love, is the goal of the journey, that calls to each and every one of us in a voice that is uniquely our own.   

The light of dawn

Isaiah 60:1-6
Ephesians 3:1-12
Matthew 2:1-12
Psalm 72:1-7,10-14

In the seven summers before I got married I took long backpacking trips in the High Sierras of California.  John Muir called those mountains “the range of light,” and for me, as for him, that name evokes many images in the mind’s eye, memories of cloudscapes and waterfalls, of flowery meadows in the sun, and evening alpenglow on granite towers high above the trees.   And when I hear the words of Isaiah about the dawn, I think of a time my father and I camped amid the rocks above the shore of a small alpine lake.  It was the last night of a ten-day hike, and, as I usually did when the skies were clear, I did not pitch my tent but slept in the open. 

The first time I woke up it was deep night.  There was no moon and it was as if there was no world but the stars, and the light of stars, shimmering like snow on the ground.   When I woke up for good it was the early dawn, and though sunrise was still far off, I felt surprisingly refreshed.  I sat up in my sleeping bag and watched the pale light creep over the sky, slowly stealing away the stars.  In that light, the earth came into view again, a blackness at the jagged edge of the horizon.  On those stark heights a cold wind awakened and blew down through a world of dim shapes and deep shadows.  I sat like that for an hour or more, listening to the silence and seeing the color gradually come back to the earth.  At last, with surprising suddenness, the sun cleared the ridge, flooding the hollow of the mountains with warmth and light, unveiling the beauty of the world’s morning.   

Today the church comes from Christmas, the birth of Jesus under the stable lantern and the starry sky, and arrives at the Epiphany, the breaking out of the Christ-event into the world-at-large.  By the likely date of the composition of the gospel of Matthew, the news of Jesus Christ had broken out of its family of origin, so to speak.  It had spread from Palestine, by the efforts of apostles like Paul, throughout the synagogues of the Jewish diaspora, to Arabia and Syria, Asia Minor, and North Africa, and on around the Mediterranean.  Strangely, Jesus’ own people, the Jews, largely rejected the proclamation.  In the main it was gentiles who greeted it with enthusiasm. 

In the synagogues of places like Damascus and Antioch, Ephesus and Corinth, there were a lot of non-Jews, religious seekers of pagan background, who came on the Sabbath to hear the scriptures and to pray to Israel’s God.  To these gentiles the knowledge of that God was like the rising of the sun.  It filled heaven with a light of clarity and peace, that they had never known before.  It revealed the world in its true colors, as a harmonious and unified creation, where every drop of water and every grain of sand came into being together and was sustained by the power of a single loving will. 

But before the sun rises, you’ll remember, there is the pale light of dawn, a light that sharpens the contrast between earth and heaven, and reveals a world of dim shapes and dark shadows.  The God of the Hebrew Scriptures was a god of justice and compassion, a god who hates evil and hears the cries of the poor and the oppressed.  This was not a remote ideal principle of Oneness, like the God of the philosophers.  This was a God who cared, deeply, achingly, for his people, and promised to deliver them from grip of suffering and death.

The Gentiles came to the synagogue and heard that this promise now included them.  They heard that God’s own Son, the anointed righteous king of the Jews, had come.   They heard that he’d been crucified, and every barrier to God’s inclusive love had died with him.   They heard he’d been raised from the dead, to reveal God’s hidden plan of salvation which held a central place for them.  And they embraced this message, and a new community began to form at the periphery of the synagogue, a community in which Jews and Gentiles, men and women, slaves and free persons, sought the grace to live as equal citizens of a new people of God.

 In the eyes of these followers of Jesus, their community was itself a sign that he is the messiah, and that the promised deliverance had begun.   They heard anew the ancient prophecies of the dawning of a new age, when all nations would come and offer tribute and worship to the one true and living God.  In the light of that dawn, they began to hear the scriptures in a whole new way, to see things that weren’t visible before, and find new meaning in familiar stories.   They also told new stories, stories about Jesus.  They repeated things they’d heard about him, the things he did, and the things he said.  They told new converts and new generations about his life and death and as they spoke their imaginations were full of the light of the scriptures, the Hebrew Scriptures, which were the only scriptures that they had.

Today some of the spiritual descendants of these gentiles, here at St. John’s, along with about 700 other people around our diocese, are beginning a project to read the entire Bible by the end of the year.  Every day we will read three chapters and psalm from the Hebrew Bible, the so-called Old Testament, and one chapter from the New.   Reading in this way, we will restore a connection that has been too often and too cruelly broken, the connection between Israel’s God and the one that Christians worship as his Son.   Our reading will echo the experience of those first gentile believers who came to the synagogue to hear the glorious truth that God is one. 

This is a courageous undertaking.  Not just because the Bible is a long book and a year is a short time in which to read it all, nor just because it takes some effort to understand even a little part of it.   But because it is a book that is full of light.  It contains the light of stars, as when Abram stands outside his tent in the desert night and God says, “look up and count them—so many will your descendants be.”  It is full of the light of evening, and morning, and of that dark hour just before dawn, when the world is a place of dim forms and dark shadows, a light that reveals the darkness of history and the coldness of the human heart.  And it is a book that is full of the light of God, like the glory atop Mount Sinai, which no one can see and live.

But like those other gentiles, the wise men from the East, these adventurers will not set out empty-handed.  They bring something with them.  For one thing, they bring the understanding that not all the world’s light is contained in a book.  The wise men followed the leading of a star, and it is worth noting that it is when they took a detour to consult the experts in biblical interpretation, that they almost ruined everything. 

The wise men carry gifts, and we also bring rare treasures on this year of journeying.  The gift of life experience, of remembering what we have seen, of lessons learned and choices that cannot be undone.  We bring the gift of feeling deeply—hot anger, belly laughter, love, joy, envy, malice, gratitude, world-weariness that sinks into the bones, and every other emotion there can be.  We bring gifts of intellect, and imagination, and wonder—even the gift of doubting that it is true.  And none of us would be daring to take this "Bible Challenge" if we did not possess in some small measure the supreme gift, the gift that makes us shine, that makes us radiant with the glory that has risen over us like the dawn—the gift of the willingness to give ourselves, to offer what we have brought, to lay it down of our own free will, for nothing more nor less than love.     

The mission of the little ones

Genesis 22:1-14
Psalm 13
 Romans 6:12-23
Matthew 10:40-42

In the spring of 1987 I walked across the state of Massachusetts from west to east as a participant in a Lenten pilgrimage for peace in Central America.  And as our little band went from village to village and town to town we received the hospitality of people of faith—mostly Christians-- Methodist, Baptist, Unitarian, Catholic, Congregational or Episcopal, but also Jewish and Buddhist communities where we were invited to share worship, prayer, and conversation, or given a meal, a place to sleep, or just a dry place to rest our feet and a clean bathroom and a drink of water or a cup of tea.    

I could tell many stories about that journey, but the one I’m remembering today took place on a late afternoon as we were walking along Route 9 between Ware and Worcester.  We came to a country crossroads and sat down for a rest, and we hadn’t been there more than about 5 minutes before a convoy of  cars and pickup trucks pulled up,  driven by Trappist monks.  We piled in and were driven up a long road to the top of a high hill looking out over forests and fields, to St. Joseph’s Abbey.  We were taken by twos and threes to rooms in the guest house, where we found snacks, and clean towels and hot showers.  And after we cleaned up we went to the abbey church for vespers.   Now, if you’ve been to a Trappist monastery you know that there is usually an area for visitors and guests off to one side of the church, at some distance from, or even out of sight of, the monks’.  But that wasn’t where we were.  Instead we  were invited  into the  choir,  to sit with the monks and stumble our way through the ancient chants, the psalms, canticles, and responses, with the evening light  streaming  through the  great  rose  window above the altar.

And I’ll never forget the looks of puzzlement on the faces of  the other guests, mostly Irish and Italian families from Boston in their Sunday best, at seeing us  in our parkas and hiking boots coming out of the church after the service with the white-robed monks.   We stood in a big circle out in front of the church as the abbot presented us with the gift of a branch from olive tree in the monastery cloister.  It was a scion of a tree from their sister monastery in the Holy Land, and we promised to carry it with us to our journey’s end at the Statehouse in Boston. 

I tell you this story because, as we leave behind the great experiences of the resurrection and ascension of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit, and move into the Season after Pentecost, our Sunday scripture readings turn set us down right in the middle of the practical problems of carrying on.  You see the disciples of Jesus understood that they had been given these experiences to empower them for a mission, to continue Jesus’ work in the world.  To make sense of that mission, they looked back, to the mission of Jesus.  Looking back at the things he did and the things he said from the new vantage point of his death and resurrection, they could see with a new clarity how he’d been preparing them to carry on his work.    And this process of telling and re-telling the stories about Jesus, as a way of understanding  what we’re supposed to do now,  how we’re to live now, that the apostles began, continues to this day.   It is what we mean when we say the word “Gospel.” 

And today’s Gospel lesson is from the 10^th Chapter of Matthew, which is all about mission.  Jesus calls together his Twelve Disciples and gives them spiritual authority and then sends them out on a mission to the villages of Galilee.  They are to announce that the kingdom of heaven is coming near, to cast out unclean spirits, and to heal the sick.  And the key to the success of the mission is the hospitality of the people who receive them.   Because a lot of people don’t.    A lot of people just aren’t interested, and in fact a lot of them are hostile.   So Jesus prepares them for rejection, and there are sayings in this chapter about being thrown out of the synagogues, and dragged before governors to testify to their own defense, about being betrayed by your own brother, and about taking up one’s cross. 

But when we get down to the final verses of the chapter, the part we heard this morning, Jesus also tells his disciples that there will be those who do welcome them, who will want a share in the mission.  But it won’t be because of their charisma, or their fantastic preaching or their healing miracles, or anything else that they do.  The secret X-factor that unlocks people’s hospitality to their mission is God.  "Whoever welcomes you”, Jesus said, “welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”   It is God who opened your minds to the Gospel.  It is God who awakened your hearts, God who gave you hope for peace, confidence in the future, and love for the poor and the oppressed.    It is God’s love working in you that looks at a stranger and sees a brother or a sister.  And the same will be true for those to whom you are sent.

Now you may be thinking to yourself “that is all well and good for them.  They are the twelve Apostles, Jesus’ own hand-picked helpers.   Of course God worked through them.”  But I think we sometimes forget that the disciples weren’t really “all that.” Notice the little twist Jesus throws in at the end: “Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward;”—“Yep.  Prophet. Sure, anybody would welcome a prophet.”  “And whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous;”—“Mm-hmm.  Righteous person.  Check.”   “And whoever gives even a drink of water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple--truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward." —one of these little ones.  Of course there are great spiritual rewards in recognizing a prophet, or a righteous person, and welcoming one of them.   But the same goes for people like you and me, the little disciples of Jesus.  What does the name”disciple” mean except one who is still learning, a student, someone still just struggling down the path.

None of us are too insignificant, too unimpressive or unimportant, too ignorant or spiritually un-enlightened to make a contribution to the mission of God in the world.  We all have something to contribute just by being ourselves, and by making a little effort in the way that seems to us to be pleasing to God.   And we have an impact on the lives of others that we don’t control and we can’t measure, because God works through us in ways we don’t even know about. 

By the same token, none of us are in a position to look at another person and say, “that one doesn’t matter.  I don’t care what that brother over there has to say about things, or what that sister over there thinks is important.  They don’t impress me at all.  They don’t seem well-informed or well-educated.   They don’t have any clout in the community.”  No, we need to welcome everyone, to honor everyone, for God’s sake, because everyone has something to contribute to God’s great reconciling mission in the world.  They may not be doing it very successfully because of poor self-esteem or emotional trauma or errors of judgment of one kind or another, but just because they can’t see their own gifts, and we can’t see them either, doesn’t mean that they’re not there. 

And we will never be able to help anyone do any better, including ourselves, if we don’t begin from a place of welcome, of looking for the common ground and listening for the shared story.  The mission of the Gospel begins with simple gestures of mutual hospitality, of welcoming and being welcomed.  The work of Jesus is founded on the little ones, and the little things, even if it’s only the gift of a cup of cold water on a hot, dusty day.