Introduction

One of the opportunities I have as the interim pastor at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Beatrice, Neb., is to prepare a short column for a feature called “The Pastor’s Pen,” appearing in the Beatrice Daily Sun on Thursday, October 7, 2010.

Scripture

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.” (Luke 10:2, NRSV)

Meditation

Jesus and his followers lived in a time when the connections between farming and food were clear and personal. Most everyone either raised food or knew the people who raised their food for them. So naturally, Jesus could speak of ministry in the language of planting and tilling, weeding and harvesting, and people knew what he meant.
Some people in today’s world still raise their own food, or they know the people who raised it for them. In recent years, a whole movement, called “slow food,” has arisen to promote the healthy connections that grow when people eat food raised in the own locales. This might mean that we can become reacquainted with the images that Jesus used in his preaching and teaching.
In this little excerpt from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells his followers that they ought to ask God to send them and others to spread the good news among the people. It’s like standing by a field and seeing rows of ripe and ready corn, as far as the eye can see, and wondering how the crop can be harvested. Jesus says that what his followers—the Church—need to do is to ask God our Father to send help—more hands—to gather the crops, to tell that good news so that more people may be moved, by the Holy Spirit, to trust in God for their lives.
Beatrice and its surrounding communities are fields ready for the harvest, just as surely as the fields in southeast Nebraska are filled with corn and soybeans ready for the harvest. If this part of Nebraska is like most of the rest of our country, then on any given Sunday, seven of every ten people remain in the fields and were not gathered into the harvest celebrated in worship. The harvest is great! And so we ask the Lord to send laborers for the harvest.
It would be easy to hope that our work as laborers would be quick, easy, and full of celebration and good news. But the truth is that working as a laborer in God’s harvest is often arduous, filled with long hours, difficulties, and setbacks. In a time when we have grown acclimated and accustomed to quick solutions to complex problems and difficult projects, it helps to remember that living as one of the Lord’s laborers is not an easy.
My grandmother taught me an old hymn, “Bringing in the Sheaves,” written in 1874 by Knowles Shaw, which captures the challenges of working in the Lord’s harvest. The hymn says,

Going forth with weeping, sowing for the Master,
Though the loss sustained our spirit often grieves;
When our weeping’s over, He will bid us welcome,
We shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.

There is the hope, the assurance, the good news: “we shall come rejoicing, bringing in the sheaves.” And either way, whether we are laborers or sheaves, we will come into the Lord’s house as a part of his great harvest.