[Sermon delivered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, on the Fourth Sunday of Pentecost, July 3, 2022]
✠ In the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
“The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the Harvest to send out labourers into His harvest.”[1]
Lovely words, but for many the thought of what that harvest might be makes the listener uneasy. What is that harvest? What entails harvesting it? Who is harvesting it? Why gather that harvest at all?
Traditionally, we interpret the passage to mean people, people to fill the ranks of the Church Militant, people to be baptized into the Body of Christ, and then the misgivings become feelings of acute alarm. “Oh, no, that’s proselytizing!” we exclaim. “That is forcing our beliefs on others!” we object. If you listen closely, you can hear the undercurrent whispering, “But I will have to TALK to people!” and when the subject comes up in a sermon the acute alarm becomes panic: “Oh no! They’re going to ask us to go door-to-door!”
Frankly, we Episcopalians worry too much about that, whereas some communities of the faithful do not worry enough. In other words, many churches are dwindling because they fear being “pushy,” but other churches are leaving piles of broken, traumatized souls in their wake because they go in with sledgehammers. So how do we put aside our fear without wreaking havoc?
I will start by putting this verse into a larger context for you. In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus uses the same words when he looks out on the crowds hungry for what He has to say and has compassion on them.[2] In St. John’s Gospel, the same words come out when He and His Disciples are at Jacob’s Well in Sychar, Samaria, and St. Photini is about to bring the whole town to hear the Prophet who told her everything she had done.[3] Here we have people who need direction, who need hope. Not just in these cases, but throughout the Gospels Our Lord’s mission was simple:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”[4]
Seems simple enough, right?
The problem is a simple proclamation with nothing to back it up is worthless. Without concrete action backing it up the Gospel message at best is hollow and without teeth, but at worst is corrupt and rotten prosperity preaching. We need to confront the uncomfortable truth that often the Gospel message rings hollow because we do not put ourselves into living it. What have we done to BE the good news to the poor, release for captives, bringing sight to the blind, deliverance for the oppressed? How many of us need to pay heed to St. James’ admonition that, “Faith without works is dead?”[5]
I will, however, debunk a saying that we hear all over social media and religious blogs: “Preach the Gospel always, use words if necessary.” While we attribute that to St. Francis, the fact is he did not say it, nor really would he have said it. This sentence is in the company of others like, “God helps those who help themselves,” and, “cleanliness is next to Godliness.” They are apocryphal and based on BAD THEOLOGY. The stories around St. Francis have him saying a lot, actually. His order, like my own order, the Dominicans, was founded on actually USING words to preach the Gospel, because how is this good news going to be heard if no one says anything?[6] The driving force behind St. Dominic founding the Order of Preachers and St. Francis founding the Order of Friars Minor was rebuilding a dwindling Church drowning in the swamp of misinformation floating around southern Europe at the end of the Twelfth Century, and those who had the right information were either not sharing it or if they were, they were not living it. Both Orders were founded to proclaim the Gospel and to live the Gospel, both using different suites of spiritual gifts to effect that mission.
A dwindling Church. Groups proclaiming messages in direct opposition to the Gospel. Supposed ministers of the Gospel living lives of hypocrisy, in it for twisting profit out of the lost sheep to whom these false shepherds were supposedly sent to present a message of deliverance.
Does this sound like the Twelfth Century or the Twenty-First Century?
So much for the what and the how, but what about the who? Who needs to hear this? Whether we want to admit it or not, we still have people who are beaten down by this age who desperately want to hear about Our Lord Jesus, the deliverance He offers, and reconciliation with God. There are people who would be filled with the Holy Spirit and do mighty things for the Kingdom of God, if only they knew that God loves them, that God cares for them, and that God wants a relationship with them, no matter how unlovely or unworthy they perceive themselves to be. While once we could persuade ourselves that people just “knew” because the Gospel story was embedded in our culture, we can no longer presume on cultural literacy to get this message across. In fact, we never could make that presumption. Throughout the ages there was always some embedded cultural sin or sins floating around to obscure the Gospel message. People are not hearing the message, and that is a problem. St. Paul puts it this way, “How are people to call upon Him in Whom they have not believed, and how are they to believe in Him of Whom they have not heard?”[7] Those who need to hear are all around us, even among us.
That is the who, but what about the by whom? I had mentioned above that a big part of proclaiming the Gospel is acting on that proclamation, and that is what all Christians are called to do. Yes, all of us. St. James in his epistle is clear that without works, that is, the actual legwork of serving the poor, freeing the captive, liberating the oppressed, all of it, our faith is dead. Our Gospel work is not for our salvation, but to proclaim salvation to others. We need to be clear why we are doing this. A big part of the works/faith dispute is this fundamental misunderstanding. To St. Paul, works without faith are dead. To St. James, faith without works is dead. Both are correct. Because we have faith in Our Lord Jesus, we perform the work of the Gospel, and we need to be clear when we do them that people understand why we do them. Why are we feeding the poor? Why are we donating clothing to shelters? Why are we advocating against oppression of minorities? Why are we working as hospital volunteers? Why are we handing bottles of water and a fiver out our car windows to the homeless begging at Interstate interchanges? It is both the how and the why that bring people to seek a relationship with God in the person of Jesus the Christ.
So now what?
We have established that there is a harvest out there, that is, a need for people to hear the Gospel, to see the Gospel in action. We know that we need labourers to bring that Gospel to life, to show how it works, how we apply it, how God empowers us to act against the Spirit of the Age. This comes to the last point of this verse, prayer for the Lord of the Harvest to send out labourers.
This is an appeal for you, the Body of Christ, for you, the People of God, to pray earnestly every day for this.
Pray that we have more vocations to the priesthood, more vocations to the diaconate, more vocations to the religious life, more vocations to the multitude of lay ministries that would take me forever to list.
Why the priesthood? We need people who will lead us, teach us, uphold us, and bring the Sacraments to us to strengthen us in our relationship with God to enable us to do this work.
Why the diaconate? We need people who will coordinate our efforts in bringing the Good News outside the walls of our meeting spaces and help us find our ministries.
Why the religious orders? We need people who can in a community focus on a particular suite of spiritual gifts and provide that laser focus with the weight of persistent all-consuming dedication, whether it is the monastic powerhouses of prayer, or apostolic orders getting dirty in the trenches.
Why the lay ministries? We need people to do the work of the Gospel and to tell others why we are doing it.
We all have a role in bringing the Good News outside the walls of our churches, and we owe it to people to tell them why. We do it because in Jesus the Christ God has come among us to deliver us from the endless slavery to Death and Corruption, Karma and Darwinism. We do it because God loves every one of us, and in returning that love we show that love to all others whom He loves and for whom He died and rose again. Ours is not the faith of empty platitudes or sanctified might-makes-right that so many associate with Christianity. The Orthodox Catholic faith is where action meets resistance and where real change happens not because it is the right or ethical thing to do but because it is what people do who have real, selfless love that comes from the Lover of Humankind. But this will not happen if we do not stay in touch with the God who loves us, who gives His Spirit to us, who died and rose again for us. St. Paul tells us to pray without ceasing, and part of that is to send labourers, to send us, into the harvest.
And in so doing, God will send labourers into the harvest. Including you. “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”[8]
✠ Through the prayer of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Father Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.