Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday 18 June 2023.
• First Reading: Genesis 18: 1-15 (God visited Abraham – promise of a son to Sarah – Sarah laughed but denied it)
• Epistle: Romans 5: 1-9 (Justified by faith, and have peace with God through Jesus)
• Gospel: Matthew 9: 35 – 10: 8 (Pray to the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest field)
There are different kinds of laughter. The joy of being reunited with family and friends, and the lightheartedness of happy but informal gatherings.
There is the genuine hilarity when something really funny is said or done.
But there is also the laughter of sadness and disappointment. It is brittle, sardonic and often sarcastic. It is a way of coping with impossible situations, the dark humour of emotional survival.
And then there was Sarah’s laughter. She was embarrassed to admit it so God pinpointed it anyway. It was the forlorn laughter of waiting for a promise that never seemed to come to pass. A laughter of permanent waiting and disappointment. A sad and bitter statement beyond words.
And God heard it and knew it for what it was. Abraham had been promised his own descendants, the fruit of his own body and that of Sarah. She had tried the local custom of allowing Abraham to visit their servant girl to have a baby on her behalf but that only made things worse.
And what God had promised, God would bring forth into the light of day. This time next year. You’ll see.
And so it was.
Then she laughed with a different voice and a new joy. A pure, uncomplicated laughter, without trace of sadness. Yes, God’s promise in this had come true – and they entered with a new joy and confidence into the other promises that had been made to them.
What had been so impossible had indeed come to be.
Now look at Jesus’ instructions to His disciples, whom He was sending out to prepare the people of the villages of Galilee to receive Him.
They would travel light and live from the hospitality that their message generated. Their errand was simple: preach the gospel, heal the sick, cleanse the lepers and exorcise the troubled and tormented.
There was to be no special preparation and the message itself would be all they needed. All the disciples were engaged in this – including Judas Iscariot.
But Jesus would be all they needed. If rejected, no matter: move on to another village.
But more than that, this was Jesus’ message that they were handling. The message was powerful enough in its own right. No need for special presentations or events. No support team. No social media presence. No technique or cleaver effects.
They were not going to have to entertain their audiences – only to inform them and to exercise the authority that Jesus had granted them.
The power of their healings and deliverances would only support the authority of their main message. Jesus is coming – prepare to receive Him.
Yet they were not overwhelmed by the enormity of their task. They were entrusted with Jesus’ message and they were endowed with His authority.
Yet there is another aspect to Jesus’ instructions. The harvest is the Lord’s. The fields are His and so is their fertility and fruitfulness.
The servants are there to do their Lord’s bidding – and to do it His way. They bring their personalities and aptitudes to the task, and they come to it with their own particular perspectives – but the harvest is still the Lord’s and His also is the ingathering.
So their preparation is to be that centred on His priorities and methods. Their – or our own – preparations were to be based on His instructions. And what Jesus said, was: ‘Pray to the Lord of the harvest for the workers.’
Jesus was relying far more on their dedication to His message and their focus on His authority than any amount of technique.
And so, first of all, pray.
But next, pray together with one heart and one hope. Come together with one accord.
Do not be distressed by the scale of the task or the hostility of the times. Do not be distracted by your own sense of inadequacy.
Jesus has already placed His trust in you – He believes in you so why are you doubting Him?
Now the issue becomes much more modern and contemporary. We are definitely surrounded by a highly fashionable kind of rejection of our faith.
Some are put off by organized religion with people telling them what to believe and to do.
But then, for all our sophisticated society and culture, we are still struggling to sustain the credibility of our currency, and to maintain the levels of our health and social security systems when war is raging on our own continent and we face having to replenish our depleted munitions. Never mind rebuild our first responder and armed forces.
No. The harvest is the Lord’s, the fields are His. The message is His. And these are the days in which He calls on us to pray for the harvest that is yet to come.
