Homilies
The Harvest is Plentiful
There’s something quite remarkable about the way Jesus sends his disciples out in today’s Gospel.Luke tells us that Jesus appointed seventy people and sent them out in pairs. That might seem like a small narrative detail. But I think it tells us something really important about what Christian mission and ministry is meant to look like.
It doesn’t say that Jesus deliberated and chose the most confident person or that he found the person who knew the most. He didn’t even ask the person who was best at speaking in front of a crowd. He simply sent people ….together.
And I think that has something very important to say to the Church today. Because sometimes, the church or us, ourselves can have a rather narrow idea of ministry and who should be doing it. We can think of ministry as belonging to the person standing at the front leading the service and preaching.. And, yes, there is a ministry in standing here this morning and preaching. But the Gospel gives us a much bigger picture.
Ministry is for everyone. That is one of the reasons Jesus sends his disciples out in pairs. Because none of us are meant to do it alone – it is with and for God. It doesn’t belong to anyone but we can all play a part.
Jesus says: “The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few.” What he doesn't say is that there is no harvest. He doesn't say that people have stopped being interested in God or that the world has become too secular, too busy, too complicated or too difficult. He says: “The harvest is plentiful.”
This means, there are people around us who are searching. Searching for meaning, for belonging, for hope, for forgiveness, for community, for somewhere they can be themselves and sometimes, without even knowing it, searching for God.
Jesus sees all of that when he says: “The harvest is plentiful.” You see, the problem isn't that there is no harvest. The problem is that there are too few labourers. And I wonder whether that changes the way we should think about the Church. Because when we look at our churches, we can very easily become preoccupied with what we don't have.
We don't have enough people anymore or enough volunteers. We don't have enough money or enough children and young people. We don't have enough clergy. We don't have enough time or enough energy. And those things are real. We shouldn't pretend that they aren't. But Jesus looks at the world and sees something different. He sees a harvest. He sees possibility. He sees people who are waiting to encounter God's love. And then he says, in effect: Who will go? Notice the use of the verb ‘to go’. He doesn’t expect the disciples to persuade people to come to them…He sends them out, to the people, in their homes and communities to join in with their every day life. And that is important too because Christian mission is not something we do to people. It is something we do with people.
The Seventy go out in pairs together. They enter people's homes. They receive hospitality. They listen. They serve and they heal. They join in. And then they say: “The kingdom of God has come near to you.”
There is something spectacularly ordinary about that. They don't arrive with a pre-planned 10 step programme or a five-year strategy. They just arrive as people and they build relationships.
For me, that seems to be one of the most important things we can recover in the Church today. Because people don't usually come to faith because somebody has presented them the right argument. Often faith grows through relationship. Through somebody who listens, who notices, who remembers your name. Through someone who sits besides you when life is difficult or who invites you for coffee. Through somebody who is prepared to walk with you rather than tell you where you ought to be going.
Think about how many people first encountered the Christian faith not because they walked into a church looking for God, but because a person showed them something of God's love.
That is ministry and it doesn't require a dog collar. It doesn't require standing at the front or being confident. It doesn't require knowing exactly what to say. Sometimes ministry is simply being there.
And that is why Jesus sends the disciples in pairs. Because there are things we can do together that we cannot do alone. When one is discouraged, the other can remind them why they began. Sometimes we need somebody beside us just to say: “Keep going. You're not doing this on your own.”
I think that is particularly important for the Church. Because there can be enormous expectations upon the person who stands at the front. They are often expected to have all the answers, to visit everyone, to organise everything, to know everyone's name, remember every anniversary, solve every problem, preach every sermon, lead every service and to make the church grow when they have fewer people, fewer resources and limited funding. But that isn't the picture Jesus gives us. Jesus doesn't send one person to do everything. He sends people and He sends them in pairs. The Church is all of us.
And there is hope within that. Because it means there is a place for every one of us. Perhaps your ministry is welcoming people as they come through the door. Perhaps it is making coffee. It is visiting someone who is lonely or helping at a food bank. Perhaps it is listening to a friend who is struggling or encouraging a child. It might be praying faithfully for someone whose name nobody else knows or inviting somebody new to church. Perhaps it is simply being the person at work who treats people with kindness when everyone else is impatient.
We might not think of those things as “ministry”. But Jesus does. Because ministry is not about what happens at the front of the church. It is about what happens when God's people carry God's love into the world.
That is why Jesus says: “The harvest is plentiful.” Because the harvest is not confined to this building. It is in our streets, our workplaces, our schools, our families, our coffee shops and our community groups. It is in the conversations we have every day. Jesus is already there in it with us.
That is another important thing about this passage. The Seventy are sent ahead of Jesus. They are not taking Jesus somewhere he has never been. They are going ahead of him and preparing the way for him.
And that is our calling too. We don't have to bring God into people's lives. God is already there. Our task is to notice, to listen, to love, and to serve. To help people discover that the God they don’t yet know has been looking for them all along.
So this morning we might hear Jesus' words differently. ‘The harvest is plentiful but the labourers are few’ Not as a criticism or a demand. But as an invitation.
There is work for all of us. There are people who need kindness, who need friendship, who need hope and there are people who need someone to walk alongside them. And Jesus doesn't ask us to do it alone.
He sends us together. He gives us one another. That is one of the great gifts of being part of the Church: we don't have to carry the work of God on our own. Together we can go out into the world, not trying to build our own kingdom, but simply going ahead of Christ, and trusting that he is already at work.
Let's not begin by asking: “How can we get more people into church?” whilst remembering all the things we are missing. Instead we should begin with a different question: “Where is God already at work, and how can we join in?” Because the harvest is plentiful. There are people waiting. There are relationships waiting to be formed and acts of kindness waiting to happen. There are stories waiting to be heard and there are people waiting to discover that they are loved by God.
So Jesus says to his Church: Go. Not alone or when you have all the answers. Not as people who have everything sorted out. But now and together, with hope. Because Christ has gone ahead of us and wherever we go, he is already there.
Amen.