Help Wanted

​Last week our son Nicholas learned where he will live for at least the next year. Nicholas is currently in Rhode Island participating in a training program with Amica Insurance. At the end of the training, he and his cohort will be assigned to an office somewhere in the country. Thankfully as far as Carrie and I are concerned, it is now official. They decided to keep Nicholas at their headquarters in Rhode Island, in relatively easy driving distance.
 
Like the other trainees, Nicholas is currently in furnished company housing, so, even though he isn’t going far, he will still have to find an apartment and move his stuff from our house to his new home.
 
I offered to help Nicholas with his move. With pity in his voice, he declined my offer. He plans to do what young men do: call a few friends, offer them pizza and beer, and get it done.
 
That’s how I used to move, too, back when I still qualified as a young man. And I had a lot of practice. Carrie and I moved ten times before settling in our current, hopefully last, home several years ago.
 
I remember very clearly the moment I realized my moving days were over. It was the first time we moved to Massachusetts. It was a temporary move, so we didn’t bring all our furniture. Still, we brought enough stuff for a family of four.
 
At the time, I didn’t have friends in Massachusetts to bribe with pizza and beer, so I hired people to help me unload the truck. Benjamin and Nicholas were still small, so Carrie took them off, while I waited for the movers to show up. After a bit, I started unloading. Time passed. I kept unloading. More time passed, and it became clear the movers weren’t coming. I ended up unloading the entire truck except three pieces of large furniture. In desperation, I started calling people, and finally got someone to help with those three. On that day, I swore never to move myself again.
 
Prompted by my conversation with Nicholas, I was thinking back to that last day as a mover as I read our passage about the plentiful harvest, so to speak, and not enough laborers to get the work done. That was certainly how I felt that day!
 
Finding people to get the job done is, of course, a perennial issue for Churches. Here at Saint David’s, we are blessed with a LOT of very dedicated volunteers. I am grateful to all of you for that!
 
But even here we sometimes bump up against our limitations. Resetting the Church after events is getting harder. In our planning, we try to be intentional about not overburdening ourselves. And, as Jesus says, we should be asking the Lord to send us a few more laborers!
 
I think also about the Church as a whole. Some of you may have seen a recent column in the Springfield Republican by Terry Mattingly called “Who Wants to Serve in Small Churches?” People here made me aware of it.
 
Mattingly reports that something like seventy percent of Churches in the United States have fewer than 100 people on a Sunday. We’re a small Church, but we are above the median size both in average weekly attendance and in our budget.
 
Personally, I have come to prefer smaller Churches where people can know each other, and the priest can know pretty much everybody. That’s not true in Churches with thousands of members. I also suspect that people in smaller Churches tend to experience more spiritual growth over time.
 
But the next generation of clergy is coming mostly from bigger Churches, and mostly they don’t want to serve in smaller ones. That is leading to a shortage of clergy available to the seventy percent of Churches that are small. In our diocese, that’s been a particular problem in the Worcester area, but it affects all of us.
 
The harvest is plentiful. There is plenty of pastoral work to be done in Churches across the country. But the laborers are too few. So we pray, “Lord, send out laborers. Raise up clergy for the Churches that need them.”
 
But in our passage, Jesus is not talking about individual parishes or even about the Church as a whole. The harvest Jesus is talking about is the whole world.
 
Jesus sends out seventy of his disciples “in pairs to every town and place he intended to go.” Their task was to cure the sick and proclaim the good news that “the kingdom of God has come near.”
 
Their task then is our task now. In this time and place, we are the disciples Jesus sends out into the world to help people in whatever way we can and to offer a word of good news.
 
And here’s what I know. Our world needs good news. There is so much violence and just plain meanness out there. And so many of the loudest voices in our country and around the world, including voices claiming to speak in the name of God, echo that meanness.
 
What we offer, at least what we should be offering, is an alternative. Two weeks ago, Scott preached on holy humor and the gift of Christian joy, the kind of joy that comes from God and that is possible even in really hard times. Jesus sends us, his laborers, out to share that joy.
 
Helping people is fine, and we here at Saint David’s are great about that. But for many of us, sharing the joy, explicitly talking about the kingdom of God, is scary.
 
I’m still working on this one, but I did OK on my recent vacation. I was travelling with thoroughly unchurched friends. They would not have been interested in hearing a traditional testimony from me. But I told them that I needed time in the morning for my prayer routine. One day our ferry ride was too early for me to get it done, so I told them I needed to slip away to finish my prayers on the boat. I didn’t make a big deal about it, but I hope they could see that prayer is important to me.
 
But the best moment was the night we stayed in a hotel across the street from an Episcopal Church with a labyrinth on their property. My friends were intrigued, and I love labyrinths, so we walked it. Afterwards, I told them what I know about labyrinths and why I like them. It wasn’t a big deal, but the whole experience clearly meant something to our friends.
 
I never said to my friends, “Know this: the kingdom of God has come near.” But I was glad to share a bit of my spirituality with them.
 
We can all witness that way. Just mentioning prayer or Church or God opens the door to possible conversations that could be literally life-changing for people who need God.
 
And, I say again, it is our task. Jesus sends us out to share the gospel with a world in desperate need of it. The task, the harvest, is enormous, and the laborers often seem few. But we are the laborers Jesus has. And because we act with God’s help, the kingdom of God really does come near when we do what we can do.
 
I invite you this week to talk about God, in one way or another, with someone you encounter. Share the Gospel in whatever way seems appropriate. And keep asking God to send a few more laborers to help.
 
In Christ’s name. Amen.