Jesus tells us that “the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few."  Why is this so? Why is the harvest so plentiful, but the laborers few?

We know that we live in a time when people hunger for spiritual meaning in their lives. “The harvest is bountiful” and the quickest look through any bookstore will tell you people are looking for something, anything to make sense of our world, but at any ages in human history, at any age of any man, any woman, people yearn to know what is rock bottom real and what may be trusted. Our religious yearnings may embarrass us. We may try to drown them in a local “Speak Easy.” We may distract ourselves from them with amusements, but this hunger will be satisfied with nothing less than God. St. Augustine’s prayer is true for everyone of us. It simply says, “O Lord, you made us for yourself, and our hearts find no peace until they rest in you.”

The harvest is plentiful, but why are the laborers so few? What is it that keeps us from going into the harvest and speaking of what we have found in Christ and his church. We have little difficulty communicating or at least trying to communicate about matters important to us. But when it comes to speaking of our faith, when we must wrap words around spiritual sensitivities, we discover ourselves suddenly tongue-tied so to speak. We know this is important. We know that this is how people find their way to religious meetings. Very few wander into church because of an ad in a newspaper. They don’t come because a stranger comes knocking on their door. It isn’t because the pastor or the program of a particular church is so attractive. The vast majority of people who come to church, 86%, come because a friend or relative has invited them there. Some laborers went into this vast harvest of human hunger for the spiritual feelings and said, “I’ve found something special at this place or such a phrase as this, “I feel closest to God when I worship," or perhaps just saying, “Peace to your house.” But we find the words hard to say. Sometimes we excuse ourselves by saying “I just never know what to say to people.”

Jesus anticipated the problem. Here in words from the Gospel according to Luke tells what to say. “The kingdom of God has come near you today.” That’s all in there; there is no arm twisting, no guilt mongering, no heavy theology to lay on the people. Easy words to remember -- easy words to say, so why don’t we say them? It’s not the words, we know the words. We know how to say them. It’s something else. Something more difficult to talk about and Jesus points us to it as he prepares the disciples to go out into the harvest.

At first, Jesus’ instructions sound quite commonplace like a child going off to his grandmother’s for a summer visit knows what to pack; here’s what to leave behind; eat what is ever put on your plate; remember your manners. But toward the end of his directions, Jesus voice grows solemn as he speaks of difficult things. He tells the disciples what to do when people welcome them into their homes. But he also tells them what to do when they are rejected, when they fail. Jesus speaks very directly to the fear of failure. So often we are tempted to regard Jesus as a naïve dreamer whose plan and schemes, ethics and teachings are of small practical value in the rock hard realities of the place we live and work. We assume that Jesus didn’t understand the complications we might face today. Here, however, we just know how down to earth Jesus is as he educates his disciples and sends them out with the message of the kingdom of God. Not everyone will receive you he warns them.

Jesus know this from his own experiences. Not every village received him. Jesus left Nazareth and the Gospel according to Mark comments with embarrassing frankness; “He could do no deed of power there.” He was amazed at their unbelief. Even Jesus couldn’t win them all. And Jesus didn’t expect his disciples to win them all.

This is good news in a society where success has been elevated into something of a secular sainthood and which treats even the most relative failures; some kind of social leprosy. But Jesus said whenever you enter a town and they do not welcome you, when you reach that place, success does not and will not come forth, go out into the streets and say “even the dust of the streets that cling to our feet, we wipe off against you. Yet know this, "the kingdom of God has come near.”

The action Jesus prescribes may seem to be insulting, but it is a more humane alternative than the one the disciples themselves suggested. Only a few verses before this roving band of disciples and their master were turned away from a village, and James and John asked, “Lord do you want us to command fire to come down from Heaven and consume them?  We all think things like that when success won’t come our way and we become frustrated in a certain situation. Jesus rebuked his disciples for such a notion and they all went down the road. If you fail in one place you do not have the time to feast on anger and hatred, neither do you have time to nurse self-pity. Don’t slink away defeated. Cut your losses with a gesture of triumph and get on with your life. The famous theologian, John Oman has called this action, “the Sacrament of Failure.” By this sign Omar says Jesus secured his servants peace by taking into his own keeping the success which was not theirs to command. Jesus gives his disciples this “Sacrament of Failure” the kingdom of God not excluded.

We need positive ways of dealing with mistakes and we need stories and rituals that allow us to move ahead in life. For example, at the hung conglomerate IBM they tell about Tom Watson IBM Founder; a promising young executive had committed IBM to a rather risky venture. When the project had failed costing IBM dearly, Tom Watson summoned the joint engineers to his office. Expecting to be fired on the spot, the young man said, “I suppose you want my resignation?” "Your resignation, you can’t be serious," said the owner. We just spent 10 million dollars educating you. Perhaps it was a mistake on someone’s part but we all learn from it.

Jesus gives his disciples the sacrament of failure to redirect their thoughts from success and failure, we can at least be faithful to our work. Jesus relieves our fear of failure and our anxiety to success and failure are by no means saying this is a final word. So, what is the final word? The final word is “The kingdom of God has come near today.”

That is the message we are sent into the harvest to announce today. Whether they accept you or reject you, “The kingdom of God has come near.” The message is good news, news which people need to hear today. So therefore ask the Lord of the Harvest to send our the laborers into the harvest; we being the laborers of his harvest, creating our own mission in the Lord’s name.

James Nash, Lay Speaker and Saint in God's Kingdom