Westworth United Church

Westworth United Church                                                           July 4, 2010.

Rev. J. Clark Saunders                       Galatians 6:1-16; Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Harvests of the Spirit

          Not long ago I happened to recall a little girl whose home life was not a very happy one.  There was a lot of discord and strife in her childhood home.  Certainly exposing her to Christian faith and the Christian life was not a priority for her parents.  But she had a friend whose parents took their daughter to church and Sunday school, and they asked her if she would like to join them.  Well, she did, and she quickly felt at home in the congregation.  In that way began a life-long involvement in the life of the church.

            Now I suppose we could refer to what that family did in inviting the girl to come to church with them as “sowing a seed”.  And the New Testament seems to be full of imagery about seeds being planted and growing.  Certainly Jesus told parables that used that kind of image.  Like the story he told that compared faith to a mustard seed, the smallest seed of all, but a seed that grew to be a tree that is big enough for birds to nest in its branches.  Or the one about the sower sowing seed that falls on various kinds of soil, and only some of the seed takes root and grows. 

            And today, each of our scripture readings had something to say about sowing and reaping, growth and harvest.  Paul, in his Letter to the Galatians, uses the saying that we reap what we sow.  And he warns his readers to sow in the Spirit (which I take to mean that they should live a Christian life) so that they will reap the harvest of eternal life. 

            And in our gospel reading from Luke, Jesus sends out seventy of his followers two by two to spread his good news to a potentially receptive audience.  But he, too, uses the imagery of plants that grow.  “The harvest is plentiful,” he says, “but the labourers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out labourers into the harvest.”

            Well, there’s no shortage of this kind of imagery in the Bible, but the metaphors aren’t always used in the same way.  The symbolic language doesn’t always use the symbols to stand for the same things.  The way I want to invite you to think about the image of the seed today is as the thing that we can plant in another person’s life – the seed of faith that is planted through our influence in that person’s life, the seed that can grow in their life and produce the harvest of a life that blesses both themselves and others.

            Now some of us, I imagine, may doubt that we have much influence in the lives of other people.  We may feel that we aren’t doing much good or that no one is paying attention to us, anyway.  Perhaps it would do us good to think of the people who have influenced us – the people who have planted a seed of curiosity about some subject, people who have planted an idea about what things are of real value in life, people who have inspired us or mentored us or guided us toward something that gave us life.

            Maybe they did it with deeds rather than words.  Maybe they did it in a way that was quiet and unassuming rather than spectacular.  Maybe their impact on our lives came about slowly and steadily rather than through some sudden revelation.  Maybe something they said or did did not bear fruit in our lives until much later when we were able to look back and trace the harvest of our life to some small seed, something that may have seemed insignificant at the time but grew into something momentous.

            Well, if all of these possibilities are true about the seeds that others have planted in our lives, they are no less true of the seeds that we may plant in the lives of people around us.  At times when we grow discouraged because we think our influence is small, we might benefit from reflecting on the ways in which a seed may be planted and nurtured.

            I think of the story of a young man who, after attending a church for a few Sundays, asked to speak to the minister after the service.  He wanted to know how to go about joining the church.  The minister was encouraged by this and asked which of his sermons had moved the young man to make this decision.  The young man had to inform the reverend gentleman that it wasn’t any of his sermons that had touched him particularly.  But he had noticed an old woman passing his house on her way to church each week.  She was badly crippled, and her progress along the street was slow and laborious.  As he witnessed this pilgrimage Sunday after Sunday, it began to dawn on him that there must be something significant happening at that church to warrant the woman’s going through all that to get there.  And so he decided to come and find out for himself.  Without a word being spoken, without her even being aware of it, that old woman had been planting a seed in another life.

            Or I think of an article that appeared many years ago now in The United Church Observer.  The author wrote, “I would like to go back to 1940 and write a nice letter to an old Sunday school teacher of mine to says thanks for what he did for me when on so many Sundays I was the only youngster in his class.  He treated me as though I were a person worth coming for.”

            Those words were written not long before he died by Dr. Al Forrest, for many years editor of The United Church Observer and a respected leader in our church.  What he became was due in no small way to a nameless teacher who planted a seed and may never have known the extent of the harvest it produced.

            When we look back over our lives, we may be able to identify the influences, the seeds that others planted, the words and actions of theirs that took root in our lives.  Perhaps that realization can encourage us to take the long view, to trust that in time the seeds we plant knowingly and unknowingly will produce a harvest of the spirit in at least some of the lives we touch. 

            That, I think, was the thought that was in the mind of the American poet, John Oxenham, when we wrote,

                                                I spoke a word

                                                And no one heard,

                                                I wrote a word

                                                And no one cared

                                                Or seemed to heed.

                                                But after half a score of years

                                                It blossomed in a fragrant deed.

                                                Teachers and preachers all are we,

                                                Sowers of seeds unconsciously;

                                                Our hearers are beyond our ken,

                                                Yet what we give may come again

                                                With usury of joy and pain.

                                                We never know

                                                To what one little seed may grow.