Text:  Matthew 9:35 – 10:8                                                                             W 4^th Sunday after Pentecost

Help Wanted

            In the name of him who, while we were still sinners, gave his life for us, dear brothers and sisters in Christ:  We heard Jesus our Lord and Savior say in this morning’s Gospel lesson, “The harvest is great but the workers are few.  Pray the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send workers into his fields.”  And friends, it doesn’t get any clearer than that.  Especially in an agricultural community like our own, the harvest image he uses here is something that we ought to be able to relate to:  a big job to do, and few hands available to do it. Jesus is waving the “help wanted” sign right in front of our faces.  He does this not to force us to enlist into his service, nor to shame us into doing what we know we ought; but rather to give us the opportunity to join him in the very task he left his heavenly splendor to come to this earth to do: to seek and to save those who are lost.  By extending to us an invitation to share in this work, he’s giving us the expectation of sharing in his joy over its successful completion.

            But I think there’s a lot of confusion and unbalance out there about what it is exactly Jesus is calling us to do here – not to mention high degrees of personal dread and apprehension.  I mean, you have only to mention the word “evangelism”, and that’s enough to send some Christians running for a place to hide.  On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are those who insist that evangelism is the sole purpose and function of the church to the exclusion of just about everything else.  For such people it’s “missions, missions, missions” with the goal of making converts, but seemingly no matching concern for the depth, quality, or power to persevere of the converts’ faith once they have it. That’s a formula pretty much guaranteed to ensure that those who now confess the name of Christ will soon be candidates for conversion again.

            So, all in all, I think that this is a topic that could use some clearing up among us.  And as I considered how best to do that, it occurred to me that a good approach might be to dig a little deeper into this morning’s Gospel reading and ask the basic questions:  who, what, where, when, why, and how; though for clarity sake, not necessarily in that order.

Let’s start with the What:  what exactly does Jesus mean when he says he sees a great field ready for harvest?  In the context, it’s clear that he is speaking of a harvest of human souls.  He created the world of people; planted them where they’d grow, so to speak.  He now means to bring them into the kingdom of God – which necessarily means that they aren’t there yet.  Ever since the fall of mankind into sin, the field has been under different management.  It’s been cursed along with everything in it:  bad plants producing bad fruit, with no way to change what they are.  But as it was put forth so well in today’s Epistle lesson, “When we were powerless, Christ died for the ungodly.”  The Son of God was sent into this world to die for our sins and to save us from wrath and judgment by justifying us with his blood. With his blood he bought back the rights to the field.  He made the ultimate sacrifice to reconcile us to God – this is what we call the Good News or the Gospel.  And this reconciliation is attained by the individual through faith; that is, to be reconciled, a person must know and trust Jesus and what he did to save him or her. So, the actual harvesting is done by sharing the message of the Gospel: telling people what Jesus has done for them so that they may come to saving faith and so, be cleansed of their sins and enter the kingdom of God. It’s that simple.

Okay then, knowing what the mission is, we now turn our attention to the Why.   The reason is stated very simply:  Jesus looks out at the vast sea of humanity before him.  He sees them harried and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd, and he has compassion on them.  The Greek word used there literally means that he feels for them in his guts.  And if you’ve ever experienced a really intense inward yearning or aching at the sight of people suffering or something going horribly wrong for them, you understand.  You really can feel it here, down deep.  That’s why Jesus reaches out to the lost masses and sends his disciples out to reach them as well.  He cares for them so deeply, and does not want to see them continue in their present wretched condition and ultimately perish forever.

That same sense of compassion needs to be the motivation for evangelistic efforts today. We need to see those who are without a living faith in Christ for what they are:  spiritually lost, blind, helpless, and filled with misconceptions as they plod along through life toward the edge of a great chasm.  We need to come under the conviction that those who are not brought into the kingdom of God while they live will certainly fall off the edge and spend eternity in hell.  We need too to come to proper appreciation for the gift we ourselves have been given so freely.  You see, we would still be among that lost herd heading for disaster had not Jesus used someone (or some ones) to share the Gospel with us by which he gave us the gift of faith.  But now that we have the gift, we can share it ourselves without ever exhausting the well. How could we fail to do so?

The answer is that very often we don’t have that sense of compassion; at least not to a sufficient degree.  Oh, it might be there; I mean, we do care about the lost … it’s just that usually we allow competing concerns to trump our sense of compassion.  Perhaps the biggest culprit is the selfish fear of being embarrassed.  We’re more concerned about how we might look or be perceived than about the spiritual welfare of our neighbors.  But to show you how little sense this makes, let’s say you just stepped out of the shower and you’re toweling off.  And as you do, you glance out the bathroom window and you see that somehow the cute little toddler from next door, who just happens to be deaf, has crawled under the fence and is approaching the snarling pit bull terrier that you have chained up in your back yard.  The situation is critical.  Now, you could rush out as is, dressed only in nature’s own, and possibly save the kid, or you could pause long enough to make yourself decent and get dressed before going out – at which time it would likely be too late.  Which would it be?  I’m sure we’d all agree that the need to save the child is more important than the potential embarrassment you might feel at being exposed to the neighborhood.  This is essentially the same choice we are confronted with when it comes to sharing the Gospel.  What matters more, your possible embarrassment or someone’s eternal life? (And incidentally, I’d say that if you actually have a snarling pit bull terrier chained up in your back yard, then you haven’t got the sense that God gave to turnip and richly deserve to be exposed for the fool you are; but that’s beside the point.)   

The point is that the compassion we share with our Lord for the lost should be the driving motive behind our efforts to tell them the Good News – and for where we have been negligent or overly self-concerned, we need to repent, and turn to Christ forgive us and to fill us with his love precisely so that we’ll have the compassion we need to carry on and do what he’s asked.

            Very well, now that we know the What and Why, let’s consider the Who.  What fascinates me about this section of Scripture is how it unfolds.  Jesus looks out and identifies the huge task that lies before him and the relative scarcity of hands to help.  He tells his disciples to pray that the Lord would send workers, and then he tells them, “Go, I am sending you.”  It’s “Do you see this big job?  Ask the Lord to send people out there – and then go to work yourself.”  Usually we’d rather pray that the Lord send someone else.  Here he says, “Pray, yes; but recognize that you are part of the answer to your prayer”.  And what’s interesting to me that what follows is a list of the names of the individuals Jesus sent.  The names remind us that these were not just unknown, faceless followers of Jesus; but real persons, each with his own story.  They were people from various walks of life:  fishermen, farmers, tax collectors … anything but professional church workers and trained theologians.  Now, it’s true that later most of them became full time workers for the church; but this story takes place still quite early in the ministry of Jesus.  They hadn’t been with him that long – but already he deemed them competent to tell others the Good News.  And they continued to study and grow in the faith as they were doing the work of evangelism.  But what this list of names represents are the specific people that Jesus chose at a certain time and place to do his work.  My point is that we also, in this time and place, have a list of names: specific individuals chosen by Jesus to do his work in this part of his harvest field.  We call this list the church roster – and your name is on it too.

But it’s also noteworthy that Judas Iscariot is listed with the disciples that Jesus sent out.  And what we should learn from this is that not everyone whose name appears on the list is actively helping the cause.  No, some are trying to undermine it.  I mention this not so that we try to smoke out the Judases hiding among us, but rather that we ask the question the disciples asked the Lord when he said that one would betray him: “Lord, is it me?”

The next basic question we want to ask is the Where.  And it’s here that we get a response that may surprise us.  Jesus directs his disciples to begin their evangelistic efforts not out in the world at large, but rather with the lost sheep of the house of Israel. What he’s saying is that mission work begins right here:  in the church, in your family, with your neighbors – with people who already have God’s Word but, who for one reason or another, do not as yet know the Good News or perhaps, how to apply Good News to their lives. This text doesn’t mention large crowds coming from afar to see Jesus; instead it tells us that Jesus has been going to teach in the synagogues.  That’s where he’s finding the crowds of people that he describes as helpless and oppressed sheep:  among those who are sitting in the pews every Sabbath.  And you may ask, “Well, how can they be lost, oppressed, and shepherdless if they are in church?  The answer is that they were sitting there listening to false shepherds who were proclaiming a false gospel.  In Jesus’ day, you had the Pharisees and those who thought like them, who were oppressing people with their legalistic understanding of the Scriptures.  They were telling people what they had to do to reconcile themselves to God.  And for the most part, people believed them.  So the very leaders they looked up to and who they counted on to lead them in the paths of righteousness were heaping burdens of law on them and guiding them toward the edge of the gaping chasm I mentioned earlier.

And the same is true today. It pains me to say it, but the fact is that in most modern churches that claim to teach the Gospel, the Gospel itself is rarely if ever heard.  Instead, the Gospel is just sort of assumed, and most of the time people are taught how to live as Christians.  It’s about what you do, not what God has done for you.  So, you see, the Pharisees aren’t gone; they’ve just changed the name of their party.  And even where the Gospel is clearly proclaimed, there are always some folks who still just don’t get it.  They hear the words of God’s forgiveness through faith in Jesus the Savior, but they always end up trying to justify themselves before God.  It really is the natural inclination of all of our hearts: to want to justify ourselves. This is why evangelism has to begin here, why we constantly revisit and confess the faith here, and why it is we have to ask people what it is they actually believe.  We have the tendency to think that if someone goes to a church or at least claims some church affiliation, that’s good enough.  We’ll leave them alone, not discuss the faith with them, and simply assume the best.  It’s a bad assumption.  Modern Pharisees go to church every Sunday.  And look, I’m not saying that you should get in people’s faces and tell them that because they go to church x, y, or z that they’re going to hell.  No. But I am saying that you owe it to them to find out what it is they believe, because going to a church and believing in “God”, or in “the Bible” or in “Jesus”, or “in doing the best I can to live to God’s glory” will not save anyone from the fires of hell.  Only trust in the Gospel of Jesus Christ will. So evangelism, like charity, begins at home.  You don’t need to go out and convert the world while members of your own family and the person sitting in the pew next to you are perishing.

            And this task of evangelism takes on a sense of urgency as we consider the question, When?  Jesus said that the fields are ripe and ready.  But you know what that means:  while the crop stands in the field it is only a potential harvest.  That which is not harvested during the window of opportunity presented by the season will fall to the ground and rot, or be eaten by pests and wild animals, or in some other way be lost for good.  We are dealing with human lives – lives fragile, perishable, and subject to loss at any moment.  The question really isn’t “when should we begin?” but rather “how can we yet delay?”

            —Which brings us at last to the question:  How?  These days everyone is looking for a flashy gimmick or a new technique or program of some kind – some Madison Avenue style campaign that will ignite hearts and minds and draw crowds of curious onlookers.  Jesus has a better, simpler, and time proven method. He says:  “As you go, proclaim this message:  ‘The kingdom of God is at hand’.”  That’s the Good News, the Good News that Jesus suffered, died, and rose again to pay the debt of our sin and open the kingdom of God for us.  Those who believe that Gospel have entered the gates of the kingdom, and have become a kingdom of priests, a holy nation unto the Lord.  And in this kingdom every day the sickness of sin is healed, the dead in trespasses are raised, the leprosy of guilt is washed away, and evil spirits are displaced by the Spirit of the living God.

            Because of God’s great mercy in Christ Jesus, freely all of this is happening to us in the kingdom even as I speak.  Here we are literally bathing and being reborn in God’s love.  We can’t force others to come in.  But by God’s grace, we can invite them in the door. May it be that we freely do so, in Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!