Sermon on Psalm 147:1, 7-14; Matthew 13:3-9, 18-30; John 4:34-38; and Revelation 14:14-15. Delivered 28 September 2014 at Pequea Evangelical Congregational Church.
Year after year, we and our neighbors sow seeds into the soil beneath our feet – an act of faith in the regularities of God's providence in nature, and in his willingness to bless us with enough to survive. And year after year, by God's blessing, we reap a harvest. Some years, the harvest is sparse. Other years, the harvest is abundant. So far as I've heard, this year is quite fine: a good harvest, a satisfying harvest, a harvest worth celebrating. So as we celebrate the Harvest Home, we thank the Lord our God for the fruitfulness of our labor, and for the practical wisdom that comes from his Wisdom, Jesus Christ, and for the Holy Spirit who always bears righteous fruit whenever he's sown in the human heart.
The Old Testament knows
of various harvest festivals – some for the grain harvest earlier
in the year, some (like the Feast of Tabernacles) for the other
harvests later in the year. Leviticus 23 outlines all of them, and
in speaking of the Feast of Weeks, otherwise known as Shavuot or
Pentecost, God reminds the Israelites to take extra care not to
divorce the joys of harvest from the urgency of love. The farmers
were to leave the edges of their crops unharvested and forget all
about the dropped portions, so that those without farmland could come
to glean. A portion of every field was reserved for the needy, and
Deuteronomy 14 shows us that one of the three Old Testament
tithes was specifically to replenish the town food bank for the sake
of those very same disadvantaged groups.
Today, we celebrate the
Harvest Home, one of our modern harvest festivals alongside
Thanksgiving. The same spirit of Leviticus and Deuteronomy is alive
and well here at Pequea, amen? We know that joy and love go together
in the harvest. We know that God doesn't bless us just for our own
selves. He blesses us to bless others. And from the bounty that God
gives us, we find ways to pour more blessings to those in need,
through cooperation with ministries like Jars of Hope Food Pantry.
Today we celebrate! Today we rejoice! Today is Harvest Home, and we
honor God as the Lord of the Harvest, the God of grace – and great
is his faithfulness. Whenever the Bible speaks of the harvesting of
crops, this perspective – uniting gratitude and grace – is
abundantly clear.
But the Holy Scripture
speaks also of another type of harvest, one not administered by
mortal hands. We see it in the Parable of the Weeds, for which the
Parable of the Soils sets the stage. The good news of Christ Jesus
is the seed for kingdom wheat – but will it find receptive ground?
Will it find soil too stony to grant it entry at all, or soil so
shallow it cannot resist the trials of the heat of life, or soil too
preoccupied with the thorns and thistles of worldly prosperity? Or
will it find soil devoted alone to it, soil deep and rich and fertile
for the kingdom's growth? Only then will it bear fruit – thirty
times, sixty times, a hundred times over, a yield fit for the kingdom
of God. What has it found in your heart? In your neighbor's heart,
in your brother's and sister's heart, in your wife's or your
husband's heart, in your son's and your daughter's heart? Do their
hearts need plowing, fertilizing, and weeding as the gospel-seed is
scattered anew? Take heart: the Spirit is at work in mighty and
mightily surprising ways, and the prayers of God's saints here may
avail much. Here, in this story, the evangelistic ministry is
planting the gospel seed, and the discipling ministry of preaching
and teaching and loving is tending mercifully to the crop – but as
Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 3:6-7, even in the best soil and
under the best farmers' and gardeners' care, all praise and thanks
for the growth goes to God alone.
But the Parable of the
Weeds – now there's a new complication. Before, in the Parable of
the Soils, the thorny weeds were a pre-existing condition, afflicting
the growth of the kingdom within each heart. Here, the weed is of a
different sort: a counterfeit and competitor within the community,
within the church. False wheat. Poison darnel, the infamous 'tare'.
Looks almost just like the wheat, until the wheat and darnel ripen
and make manifest what they each truly are. In this age, the
kingdom-field grows both: true wheat, the sincere believers, and
false wheat, growing in the same place, going to the same building,
putting food on the table at the same potlucks, listening and
teaching in the same classes – but grown, not from gospel-seed, but
from another kind.
Are there tares in this
sanctuary right now? Are there tares on our membership rolls? I
don't know. I hope not, I pray not, but I don't know. To a great
extent, I can't know; if I
minister seventy years here, I still may never know, at least not
perfectly – that's the point. The wheat and the tares grow side by
side until they ripen and make manifest what they each truly are –
“by their fruits, ye shall know them” – at the time of the
harvest, the great Harvest-Home of God. Did we not just sing, “Even
so, Lord, quickly come / to Thy final harvest-home”? At the great
Harvest-Home of God, the Judgment of the Last Day, the tares, which
proved to not belong to the gospel-seed, receive judgment in the
Lord's fire; but the wheat, the true and fruitful wheat, find
salvation in the Lord's barn, a mighty refuge in troubled times.
This
salvation here is the resurrection to glory, a resurrection of which
Jesus Christ is the firstfruits, presented holy to God, as Paul makes
plain in 1 Corinthians 15:20: “Christ has indeed been raised from
the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep”, and as
it continues, those who belong to him will be made alive when he
comes, and then he will destroy all dominion and authority and power
that sets itself up against the kingdom of our God – for the tares
and their devilish sower shall be no more. And on that Day, Christ
is not just the firstfruits – no, he holds also the sickle, the
sharp sickle to lead the reaping of judgment, either for destruction
or for salvation. How near is that Day? How near is the Great
Harvest of Heaven and Earth? It could be noon today. It could be
next Friday. It could be next year. It could be in 2020, or 2040,
or yet a thousand years hence. We don't know that any more than we
can pick out a tare from wheat on sight.
But
until that day, the Bible speaks of one more harvest. The great
Harvest to come yields final salvation through resurrection and
glorification, but the harvest before us now is the evangelistic
harvest, which yields initial
salvation to be confirmed later in the Judgment-Harvest. Jesus
himself urges us to look at the fields around us. Look at the white
fields of White Horse! Look at the fields of Gap, of Intercourse, of
Blue Ball, of New Holland, of Gordonville, of Honey Brook, of all the
land (named and unnamed) around us! God has been at work in this
land, in this township, in this county. God is no absentee! He is
present, he is vibrant, he is preparing these fields for harvest –
so much so that the workers are too few. There's more harvesting to
be done than harvesters actively doing it! So, says Jesus, pray that
the Lord of the Harvest would send more workers for the harvest. We
are those workers, we are called! Are we harvesting? Do we see, do
we behold the ripeness of the fields around us?
In
this season, we celebrate with thanksgiving as we and our neighbors
harvest the crops of their fields, sown by human hand, tended by
human hand, but grown and blessed by God. We have much to be
thankful for. But as we harvest the crops of our fields, or as we
see the large combines at work, or as we see the crop acreage shrink
and shrink as the corn and tobacco come in sector by sector, don't
leave your thoughts at a mere earthly level. These times were
appointed for more than that. Think also of the work set before us –
not merely to bring in the crops, but to bring the lost and ready,
once they're ripe, to Jesus: a “crop of eternal life”. The
harvest is here, there's reaping to be done, so let's go forth and
gather, bringing in the sheaves of souls for the High-Priestly Son to
wave before God the Father on high. And the Harvest-Home of God is
coming – maybe far, but maybe near, and always nearby.
Even so, Lord, quickly come / to Thy final harvest-home;
Gather thou thy people in, / free from sorrow, free from sin;
There, forever purified, / in thy presence to abide:
Come, with all thine angels, come, / raise the glorious harvest home.
Amen.