You’ll notice this morning the paraments on the table are green and I am wearing a green stole. I’m also not wearing an alb this morning, alb is the proper churchy name for the white robe that I and the assisting minister often wear, but that has nothing to do with the season of the church year. That’s because it’s hot and I long ago decided that it was less distracting if the pastor did not pass out during the sermon, thus no alb in the summer. But the green stole and the green paraments do have to do with the season of the church year. I point them out this morning, because soon they are going to become so commonplace that you will forget to notice them. That is because we will be in the green season for the next six months. I hope you like this stole, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of it. I will be wearing an alb again before you get to see a new stole.
The green season represents a growing time. Having spent the first six months of the church year being steeped in the life, ministry, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the sending of the Spirit out into the world at Pentecost, this season turns the focus of the church from Jesus to us. Namely, now that we have walked with Jesus through his life, ministry, death, and resurrection, now that Jesus has sent us the Spirit at Pentecost who has filled us with Christ’s own authority, how then do we live out the calling to which Christ has called us? To answer that question, we read Jesus’ teachings again. Only, whereas before we read to learn about the history of who Jesus was, now we read scripture as a manual for how we are to be. Jesus’ teachings have new meaning for us as post-Pentecost people, they are the words Jesus left for us as we do the work of fulfilling the Great Commission, and “mak[ing] disciples of all nations.”
All this to say, for the next six months we will be reading, chronologically for a change, through the Gospel of Matthew. And while we read, I invite you to focus not on what this teaches you about the historical Jesus, but what Jesus is teaching you about how you are to live.
And there’s really no better place to start this journey then with our Gospel reading for this morning. Because our Gospel reading for this morning is the beginning of what is known as the Missionary Discourse. It is a speech by Jesus to his disciples about how he wants them to carry out their mission of spreading his message to the world.
So as I was pondering the text this week, and thinking about what Jesus was trying to teach us about how we are to be church, there was a couple different things that caught my attention. First off, was the very opening line of the speech in chapter ten, verse five, where Jesus said, “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritan, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Jesus telling us not to help outsiders seems weird anytime; after all, he was always trekking off to Samaria and helping Gentiles. Jesus’ whole thing was helping outsiders. But it’s especially jarring when just last week we read the Great Commission, where Jesus literally told the disciples, “make disciples of all nations.” So where’d this come from? I read a bunch of commentaries, and scholars are all over the map on this, but the theory that captured my imagination the most is I wonder if there is a pedagogical aspect to this restriction. This is the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, the disciples have only just gotten on board. So I wonder if Jesus held them back a little bit, so they could practice in safer territory before he turned them out into the big, wide world. I wonder if Jesus was treating this like an internship, letting them practice their skills on friends and neighbors, so that as the kingdom of God spread the disciples would have the experience and the confidence to spread with it.
The other possibility for why Jesus may have encouraged his disciples to stay close to home, at least at this point, was the reality of the limitations of an incarnate God. When Jesus was on earth in the flesh, he was fully human. This meant he was subject to the same limitations that we all are, he could only be in one place at one time. During his time on earth, Jesus’ mission could only be to the immediate countryside of Israel, because that was as far as one man could travel. Once he had ascended to the Father, and was with them through the Spirit, he was freed up to be all the places where they could go, he could be all the time in all nations. That the incarnate Jesus is no longer incarnate in the same way is why we can say with confidence that Jesus is with us, here, at Trinity Lutheran Church in Battle Creek, Michigan at ten-thirty on Sunday mornings and he’s also at St. Mark’s on Illinois, and at my home church in Washington, DC, even though all these services are happening at the same time. He couldn’t do that when he was with the disciples any more than you or I could. The ability to be everywhere at once is something Jesus gave up for a time in order to be in the world in the flesh.
This limitation of humanity also seems to be some of what prompted Jesus to send out the disciples on this first mission. Our text tells us that as Jesus went through the countryside teaching, proclaiming the good news, and curing diseases he looked around at the gathering crowds and he had compassion on them. He saw they were like sheep without a shepherd, and he knew that he could not reach all of them personally, under the limitations of his own finite human body.
Jesus looked around this great expanse of needy people, and he knew that the crowds he saw were only part of the need. Knew there were people further out, who were desperate to hear the good news of the kingdom, desperate to learn, desperate to be healed. People who may not even know they were desperate yet, because they didn’t even know that the possibility for healing, for learning, existed. Knowing the rich harvest that was out there, Jesus turned to his disciples and said, “The harvest is plenty, but the laborers are few;” there’s a lot of need out there, a big, wide world full of hurting, hoping people, and there’s only one of me and a few of you. “Therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” Right off the bat, he empowered the disciples. There is a bit need out there, I see it, you can see it, pray that God sends us someone to meet it. Pray that there would be enough laborers to bring in the rich harvest of the kingdom of God.
And here’s where it gets really cool. Because Jesus turned to his disciples and asked them to pray for laborers, and then he summoned them together and gave them the authority to be laborers. Jesus literally made the disciples the answer to their own prayers. There’s a quote from Pope Francis, “you pray, then you do something, that’s how prayer works,” and that’s what Jesus did with his disciples. Not only did he ask them to pray for a need, then he gave them the power to be the ones to fill those same needs.
So what does this mean for us? This is all very interesting from a historical perspective, but what is Jesus teaching us about how to live? I don’t know about you, but I haven’t raised any dead recently. And if you come to me with an illness, I’m going to refer you to a doctor. If I read this text literally, then either the authority to cast out unclean spirits and cure sickness was only for the disciples, or Jesus forgot to give that authority to me. But as I thought about it more, I thought, Jesus had all that power in himself, but he sent out twelve disciples. And what’s more, he sent them out in pairs, Simon and Andrew, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, etc. And we’re not reading this as a handbook of individual discipleship in a vacuum, but as a guidebook for how to be church. So maybe the authority does not rest in us individually, but communally in the body of Christ. Some of us are called to be healers, to be doctors and nurses and therapists and nurses aides, to literally cure the sick. Some of us are called to work with systems to make sure that there is access for sick people to reach the care that they need. There’s a story in the bible about a guy who couldn’t reach Jesus, so his friends lowered him through the roof. Jesus did the healing, but if those guys hadn’t been there, he never would have been healed. Some of us have the authority to be healers, while others have the authority to be rope holders, and healing needs both jobs. Some of us may cast out literal unclean spirits, whereas others cast out unclean spirits of greed, poverty, selfishness, violence, and hatred. And we do this in a bunch of different ways. In as many ways as there are people. Just in this congregation, for example, we have people who work at the food bank and literally cast out the unclean spirit of hunger and we have people who bring food in for the food bank, and without the people who bring the food, there would be nothing for the food bank volunteers to give out.
And as I continued to ponder this thing Jesus did, of empowering the disciples to fulfill their own prayer for help, I started to think about how the very act of harvesting grows the pool of labor. Because, as is true for so many of Jesus’ metaphors, there are not two distinct groups of harvesters and laborers. Rather we are all, at the same time, both harvesters and laborers, in our laboring we find ourselves drawn in as harvest for the kingdom of God, and in the act of being harvested we find ourselves filled to labor.
And because this authority is not individual, but communal, each of us only called to a small part of a big task, it means the labor pool too, is bigger than we might imagine. Specifically, in our context here at Trinity, there are not many of us. We might at first look around the small group of us gathered here and read this as a lament, “the harvest is plenty but the laborers are few,” so God you better get busy and send us some more laborers because there is too much work for the forty or so of us who gather here on a Sunday morning. But as I worked through this text, and thought about Jesus flipping the script on the disciples, I started to wonder if maybe this time in our congregation’s history is Jesus flipping the script on us. We are not as big of a congregation as we once were, and that’s true for a lot of congregations across the country. But if we truly believe that Jesus gave us this authority, then maybe Jesus has done to us what he did to the disciples, and has answered our prayer already, and the answer is us. But more than just us, maybe part of that answer, as we will see it will also be for the disciples, is people who are already laboring alongside us who we do not yet recognize as laborers in the harvest. Maybe what harvest and laborers look like has changed over the years, and the problem with the church is not that Jesus has stopped sending laborers and a harvest, but that we’ve stopped recognizing the harvest and the laborers that Jesus has sent.
That is, for me, both the good news and the challenge that is Jesus’ lesson for us this week on how to be disciples. The good news is the harvest is plenty, and though the laborers are few, Jesus is increasing the labor pool by giving us the authority to continue in his work. The challenge is, what does that harvest and what do those laborers look like in our community, in this place and in this time, today. And that’s the question I want to leave you, leave us, with this morning. For us, at this time, at Trinity Lutheran Church in the summer of two-thousand and seventeen, what is the plentiful harvest which God has prepared, and who are our fellow laborers in this work? And how might we recognize them, will we be open to seeing them, if they don’t look like what we expect, or what we have been accustomed to? My sense, my hope and my prayer, as the pastor of this congregation, is that we will be. And as we start on this journey together, I cannot wait to see where God is leading us. Amen.
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