This morning, the blueberry harvest was plentiful but the workers were few. Indeed I alone was picking them, putting most in a bowl but eating some. Their good taste encouraged me to question a common interpretation of the ancient saying about harvest and workers that had come to mind. I was taught that the harvest was the “unsaved” and the workers were missionaries. I believe there were banners to this effect in my college years and workers were few since people resisted the altar calls during “special meetings” in the chapel, favoring instead meetings in off-campus bars. But the harvest is good! As the psalmist says about the earth yielding a harvest, “Yahweh gives what is good!” Maybe Jesus was encouraging the disciples to go out and harvest not for the sake of “the lost” but for the sake of themselves. Get up and go to “the harassed and helpless” rather than sitting in the synagogue or clinging to my robe and realize that in interacting with those outside your religious circle you will find goodness!
2 Comments
Don
6/30/2017 11:52:11 am
Wonder-ful! I, myself, just recently learned this lesson. You see, I used to sit with my problems, in the dark -appropriately enough- with my coffee in the early morning hours. And I'd sit and I'd sit and I'd think and I'd think, but it was all very much like Brer Rabbit's tar baby because things just got stickier and more complicated. But then I noticed the dishes one day and dipped my fingers into the Waters and felt the curve of saucer and cup, the straightaway of the handle of a fork, and saw the windowpane that consorted with the Light, and we all solved my problems together. Which is to say that what I learned was that the world I sat with in the dark with my coffee was just a cardboard cutout world and wasn't really the world at all. Just like them blueberries that the harvester reads and thinks about: -they're just cardboard cutouts, too, until you go out and actually meet them and find out that there's actually a lot of yummyness to them that one just doesn't see back there sitting in the dark with one's coffee in the early morning hours.
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Tim
6/30/2017 04:02:12 pm
Amen!
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