St.
Paul’s United Church Sunday, June 19, 2005
An Early Harvest – Rev. David Mundy
Genesis
21:8-21 Matthew
9:35-10-14
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Last Sunday morning someone pointed out to me before worship that we are
celebrating more than the eightieth birthday of the United Church at this time
of the year. There is a plaque in the entranceway of the church which
commemorates the amalgamation of two congregations thirty five years ago on
July first.
A small country congregation called Salem made what must have been a
difficult decision to leave its historic building and join with this
congregation, St. Paul’s. Salem was a pioneer church with a history that goes
back roughly one hundred and fifty years. If you drive along the fourth
concession, you can still see the church building which was eventually sold to
another congregation for a whopping $30,000 and continues to be a place where
Christ’s people gather and worship.
I suppose I could have interviewed some of our former Salem members to
get their “take” on what transpired, but it seems to have been a happy
marriage. In 1970 about fifty members joined St. Paul’s. Today we still have active board members and
a committee chairperson and a choir member and UAW members who came here from
that congregation and continue to make significant contribution.
Have you ever heard that hindsight is 20/20? Would it have been good for
the wider church to have held onto that piece of property when the congregation
moved? If you drive out there some time and look south
from the old Salem church building, you see that the fields cleared by the
pioneers of another era for the growing of crops are taking on a different
look. There is another form of growth today. The new housing construction of
the town of Bowmanville is advancing northward
through what were once farmers fields. The municipal planning office provided
us with a map of approved development in town and it reminds us that we are
growing by leaps and bounds.
Studies done over the years have suggested that property be purchased
for the building of a new United Church in Bowmanville
but it has never happened. That aside, we need to ask the question of how we
are responsive as a congregation to the rapid growth of our community since we
are such an important part of the United Church presence in town.
Even if there wasn’t a new church, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we
suddenly had fifty or more new members to fill our pews and contribute to
congregational life? This is possible you know, but we will need to come at it
in a very different way.
One of our scripture passages today reminds us how. I decided that I
wouldn’t focus on the story of Abraham as the deadbeat dad of Ishmael this
morning. It is Father’s day after all, and the caring fathers here this morning
didn’t really need to hear that one of the fathers of our faith wasn’t much of
a father at times.
If our gospel lesson sounded strangely familiar this morning it is
because we listened to it last week as well.
I don’t think I have ever done this before – repeat the gospel lesson –
but it is such an intriguing passage. Maybe doing this isn’t so odd. After all, we are in rerun season on television,
so we shouldn’t be shocked that we heard our gospel lesson two weeks in a row.
“When [Jesus] saw the crowds, he had compassion
for them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a
shepherd.” This is
an appropriate verse because our resident shepherd, Jim Coombes,
came from Salem church!
This is followed by Jesus remark to his disciples, “The harvest is
plentiful, but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to
send out labourers into his harvest.” Of course Jesus isn’t referring to an
agricultural harvest. They aren’t going out to pick grapes or scythe grain. The
disciples are going to share the good news of the reign of God and they are
going to do what Jesus did, healing the sick and casting out demons.
Don’t you wonder if these former fishermen and tax-collectors looked at
one another and asked “is he talking to us?” It’s one thing to listen to
someone as a teacher and healer. It is another entirely to be instructed to get
out there and do the same. And while we think of Jesus as offering a message of
love, he sounds more like a military officer giving orders to commandos. We’re
certainly not told whether the disciples went willingly, or grumbling along the
way, or if anyone refused to do what was asked of them. They are told to
proclaim the good news of God’s reign but this may not have been great news for
them.
Are we ready and willing on this late Spring day to be sent out for the harvest? Well,
maybe, and maybe not! The tendency for many United Church congregations which
have been firmly planted in place for a long time is to say, “We’re here,
and if people want to find us they will!” Unfortunately we are often better
at celebrating our past than strategizing for our future. The former baseball
pitcher Dan Quisenberry once observed “I have seen
the future and it is much like the present, only longer.” Surely we don’t expect this to be true in the
church because we know it isn’t the reality in the rest of the world. The
future will not be the same as the present and it certainly won’t be the same
as the past.
Even though we know this at some level, we can be rather daunted by the
prospect of taking our message beyond the safe confines of our church walls. We
may agree that helping others become aware of the life-giving healing and
wholeness when Christ
is part of our lives. Still, it can be a scarey
prospect to be buttonholed by Christ to share that message and make that
invitation.
Perhaps we make it more complicated than it really needs to be. It must
be twenty years since a small group in a congregation I served made the
decision to go door-to-door in a subdivision built directly across the street
from the church I was serving at the time. When I moved there the church
building was on the edge of town and surrounded on three sides by agricultural
land. Then, within a few months the houses were up and occupied. So, we made up
a simple flyer and knocked on doors and we developed a brief patter to
introduce. I recall being rather nervous about doing this. It seemed so
un-Canadian!
I may have mentioned before that one of our group, a fellow who made his
living in sales, looked up to see a woman vacuuming in the living room as he
approached the door. When she answered the knock he declared, “I’m here to vacuum
your house” and her response was “come right in!” The rest of us
weren’t quite as bold and I think we were a little relieved when there was no
answer at the door. In the end our group all survived this rather simple effort
at outreach and we did have people respond.
I have made some informal inquiries and while you may correct me, it
appears that there hasn’t been one door-to-door outreach effort by either of
the United Church congregations here on Church St since the rapid expansion of
the community began. Don’t you think we need to change that? Rather than just
being the “light on the corner” we can become the “light of the community.”
There is a great book that I keep going back to called Transforming
Congregational Culture by Anthony Robinson, who is the pastor of a mainline
church in the US. As the name suggests, Robinson looks at the practical ways
we can as congregations answer Christ’s call to get out there and be what he
describes as a real church.
Like the town bank, mainline
congregations can no longer assume that they have a constituency or base of
participants simply by virtue of history and location. What matters is not
being in town the longest, or being on the right street corner, but delivering
the goods.
Robinson goes on to suggest that too many congregations want folk to
come because they need more money or they want more young people and when they
get to a certain size they will be real churches. He says that this is largely
out of our hands. It is up to God. What we can do is extend the invitation and
share something of our own experience and that is what makes us real.
When we look outward, our faith grows and we develop a sense of mission.
It is essential that we change our mind set and our “heart set” to one of
“small-e” evangelism, a word which just means sharing good news and that we accept that each one of us has something to offer if
we are bold enough. In that way we can all be part of
the small miracle of renewal. If any of
you have miraculous powers to cure diseases and raise the dead, please speak to
me after the service today. You could be very effective around here. The rest
of us will have to settle for something a little less spectacular. It might be
as simple as telling a neighbour that this congregation is a good place to be.
It might be walking through a subdivision and leaving a flyer at a door. It may
be making outreach a priority for our board in the next few years.
I figure I won’t repeat a reading anytime soon, but sometimes it is good
to go back to a passage. I was struck when I revisited this passage that the
disciples are all named. Why would the writer, Matthew, bother to include these
names? In a way it slows down the narrative and surely those first readers of
the gospel knew who the disciples were. It does remind us that these were real
people who overcame their fears and reservations to be Christ’s ambassadors in
their world.
Perhaps it was to send a clear message that God works through
individuals, each one of whom has a name, to accomplish the goals and purposes
of the Christian community. It says that we are all evangelists, even if we are
reluctant ones.
And Jesus tells them and us that we should travel light and be brave. If
people don’t accept us, it’s okay. We shake the dust from our feet, and keep on
moving. There will be always someone else who needs to hear the good news of
Christ’s transforming love. And perhaps that is where we begin. We need to ask
if we have been “made new” by that love so that we have something to share. In
the photographs we have of the sign on the Salem church building we can make
out the words “Please Join Us.” It is an excellent invitation. And the fields are still ripe for the
harvest. Amen!