The lawn needs mowing. Desperately. I’m planning to get to it, soon. Got other things on my mind right now. But I’ll get to it. Promise. That is if I can remember how. My dad always said “that’s why I have sons!” when he was asked if he mowed his own grass. I sent my mowing crew off to college. But the grass didn’t get the memo. Or the weeds didn’t. They’re growing with abandon. Like ... weeds, I guess you could say. And it’s time, past time the neighbors are thinking, I’m sure. We got a complaint about the trash cans being outside the garage while we were still moving in, so I imagine the grass really bugs them too. But ... the laborers are few.
There is nothing we like to complain about more than our work, it seems to me. And yet there is nothing more defining than what we do. It’s how we introduce ourselves. How we understand ourselves. We measure ourselves by the jobs we have. I remember when I was shepherding dad around to more doctors than I could count, I sat and listened as he answered the questions they asked over and over. There was one time when it came to that question - what do you do? = that he seemed to have gotten tired of talking about what he used to do, or that he was retired, and he said, “I’m a woodworker!” True, he has a garage full of tools and stacks and stacks of wood (more than he could use up even if he churned out folk art birdhouses from now until Jesus came back), true he sometimes puttered around out there, true he had plans, half finished projects all over. So, I guess he worked in wood. It was how he wanted to define himself. It was how he saw himself now. Fifty years of pastoring didn’t matter to him anymore. “I’m a woodworker” he declared in that doctor’s office.
What is the work that you do that defines you? Labor Day weekend seems an appropriate time to contemplate our work. And in particular the work our faith demands from us. I know it gets tricky there. Faith, we think, is supposed to help us in our lives, help us be better at whatever we do, whoever we are. It isn’t supposed to define us, isn’t supposed to add responsibilities to our already overfull plates. To add burdens to our already laden backs. “Come and I’ll give you rest.” That’s the labor day message we want to hear. We look forward to heaven as a place we’ll finally be able to get the sleep we need. Rest in peace.
Besides, a few hundred years of Christian theology tried to separate the ideas of works and faith. The fear was that an emphasis on work, on our effort, would cause us to think we were responsible to earning our salvation. That our actions, our choices, our work either brought us closer to the Kingdom or took us farther from it. So, to avoid confusion we taught that what you do doesn’t matter. You can’t earn your place in God’s house. Which is a truth that gives birth to a misunderstanding that brought about a people of faith who don’t know how to be a community, or how to be laborers in the harvest of the Lord.
Matt. 9:35-38 NRS Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and curing every disease and every sickness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; 38 therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."
So, I decided to not work on Labor Day Sunday, but to play instead. Don’t worry, I’m going to play at church, in worship. But, perhaps warped by the question series we just finished, I’m not going to do a sermon, but a bible study in worship. And the above verses are only the beginning. I intend to walk us through as much of Chapter 10 of the Gospel of Matthew as I can get through. Because those are, I believe, our marching orders as followers. Our work, the labor we are called to do, not in order to be saved, but because we are saved.
Back up a few verses in chapter 9, you’ll find Jesus working. He heals two blind men. Then he tells them not to tell anyone about it. But they go and tell everyone about it. And word spreads and Jesus’ fame grows, as does the opposition. Verse 34 has the Pharisees complaining that he is consorting with demons. The rest of chapter 9 is his response to that accusation. He doesn’t argue the logic of their complaint like he does a couple of chapters later when they really start getting on his nerves. No, for now he just works. He labors in the harvest of the Lord.
And then Matthew tells us why. We are given the clue not only to the labors of Jesus but to the motivation for our working as followers of Jesus. Jesus worked, Matthew tells us, because Jesus saw. Jesus sees us. Sees what is really going on in our lives. Sees what burdens we bear, what fears we harbor. Jesus sees us. Really sees us. And, even though that scares us, it shouldn’t. Because he sees and he cares. He has compassion, Matthew says. His heart goes out. He sees us, in our lostness, in our emptiness, under attack by enemies within and without, and he loves us. Harassed and helpless, he loves us. He doesn’t say, well they should have known better. He doesn’t say you’d think that by now they would have figured it out. He doesn’t say what a bunch of losers. He has compassion on them.
The labor of the kingdom becomes possible when the motivation is right. Church growth programs for the sake of church growth - or institutional survival these days - don’t work. Mission work done to enhance the reputation or the status of the worker, doesn’t help or heal.
When Jesus saw the crowd he had compassion. So, he turned to his disciples. Or, he saw the crowd and then he turned to the community. What’s the difference between a crowd and a community? This is a crucial issue for the church today. We’ve been a crowd, we think like a crowd and we act like a crowd. We’ve done some good work as a crowd, that’s for sure. We can be proud of our crowdness. We’re not, for the most part, an unruly crowd. There’s no danger of becoming a mob, which is crowd nature gone wild. But we are mostly in the crowd mindset. When what Jesus wants is for us to be a community. The laborers that Jesus asks us to pray for come from a community, they won’t come from a crowd.
What’s the difference? A crowd is a collection of individuals, who have come together with common hungers, with felt needs. They occupy the same space, but each is there to meet individual needs, to satisfy their own hungers. They might share, or they might not, that doesn’t matter that much. They come in and they go out and the value they place on their gathering was on whether their needs were met or at least acknowledged. The crowd is acutely aware of the struggle of their lives, they are harassed on a constant basis, burdened by living, and they don’t know what to do about it. They are looking for a leader who will bring them some comfort, some solace and are likely to follow any shepherd that comes along, like hungry sheep who hope this one knows where the food is and can bring some light into their personal darkness.
A community exists for each others and is open to those who haven’t yet found they way in. It isn’t about meeting needs or satisfying hungers, the community is about building relationships. It is about belonging and about serving. The secret that each member of the community knows is that individual hungers are more than satisfied in service to others, in hospitality that puts others before self, in setting aside personal preferences in favor of the attempt to see the other and to see the world through the other’s eyes. The members of the community don’t starve themselves, don’t deny their own neediness, but discover themselves surprisingly satisfied by the labor in the lord’s harvest. This is in part because the needs and the hungers change when we are taken out of ourselves long enough to love someone else. And in part because the deeper needs to connect and to love and to know and be known are sometimes redefined as something more surface, like happiness or recognition.
Jesus knows that the crowd needs workers to be among them. He also knows that those workers won’t come from the crowd, but from the community. So, he turns to us and asks us both to pray and to be the answer to our prayers.
Shalom,
Derek
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