The Harvest is Plentiful

Sermon — The Rev. Greg Johnston
July 6, 2025
Lectionary Readings

“The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.” (Luke 10:2) 

            We live in a world in which people are simultaneously hungry for a sense of meaning and purpose—and increasingly detached from traditional religion. This disconnect is so clear that you can actually measure it in survey data. Pew Research, for example, releases a regular Religious Landscape Survey. And in 2024, their data for Massachusetts show the following: 72% of Massachusetts residents believe in a God or universal spirit, but only 20% attend a religious service more than once or twice a year, and 63% attend seldom or never. 82% believe that human beings have an immaterial soul or spirit, but only 46% feel a sense of spiritual peace and well-being once a month or more. 71% believe that there is something spiritual beyond the natural world, even if we cannot see it; but only 48% report ever feeling the presence of something from beyond this natural world. And of course my favorite: 45% believe the Bible is extremely, very, or somewhat important; but only 26% report that they ever read it.

            Those of us who are deeply dedicated to the life of the church—and if you’re here in 90-degree weather on the 6th of July, that just might be you—tend to fixate on the statistical decline of church attendance over the last fifty years or so. We often forget about the enduring spiritual curiosity and hunger all around us, and the reality that as traditional religion has waned, people have experienced the same level of spiritual hunger with fewer ways to experience and make sense of spiritual life. As Jesus puts it: the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.

And so I want to look at what Jesus does in the Gospel reading today after he says this; to look at who Jesus is sending out here, to do what, where, and when—and then of course to ask “so what?” What does Jesus’ mission to these disciples 2000 years ago have to do with the spiritual lives of the people around us today?

            So first, the who. And what I notice here is less the “who” and more the “how many.” The number seventy is important to remember. Like any movement, the early Jesus movement had concentric circles of leadership and involvement. At the center of the circle you had the big three, Peter and James and John, who saw Jesus transfigured on the mountaintop; and then the twelve disciples who were Jesus’ inner circle, whose names the gospels list and our calendar of saints commemorates. And way out in the outer circles, you see anonymous crowds of thousands—the miracle of the loaves and fishes feeds five thousand men, the gospels tell us, beside women and children. (Mark 6:44, Matt. 14:21, Luke 9:14) And if you want to zoom out even further—ancient populations are very hard to estimate, but the population of Galilee and Judea at the time would’ve been on the order a million people or so. And so it’s notable to me that here, Jesus sends out seventy of his disciples. I understand this to mean something like the whole group of dedicated, faithful, but ordinary disciples; the twelve apostles we know, sure, but fifty-eight others, too, people whose names we are not told and whose stories we don’t know but who go out to spread the good news, nevertheless.

            And that’s what they’re sent to do: to spread the good news of the kingdom of God. Jesus gives them a greeting. “Peace to this house!” they should say. (Luke 10:5) And he gives them a to-do list: to accept the hospitality they’re offered, to cure those who are sick, and to say, “The kingdom of God has come near to you.” (10:8-9) Notice: He doesn’t tell them to ask the people in the villages about their prayer lives. They don’t ask to tell people whether they want to hear about their Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. They visit as travelers, and they eat; they heal the sick, and when they do, they point to that healing that’s happened and they say, “The kingdom of God has come near.”

            Now, Jesus will eventually come up. Because Jesus himself is going to appear; he’s sending the disciples as a kind of advance party “to every town and place where he himself intends to go.” (10:1) If they are not welcomed, and they wipe the dust off their feet—we might imagine that Jesus won’t actually waste time going there in the end.

            Because there’s only a limited amount of time. We know when this story takes place: Jesus is on his way toward Jerusalem, to face his ultimate destiny. This mission of spreading the good news is transient. He isn’t sending out thirty-five teams to plant churches in the villages and stay there for a while. They go and then return, having shared these brief moments of good news within the context of people’s ordinary lives.

            So let’s imagine that the mission Jesus gives those disciples is an invitation to us as well. What exactly would that mean?

            Well, first, it would be an invitation to us, to all the people in this room. Jesus doesn’t send out one priest, or two wardens, or a dozen Vestry members. Nor does he send the thousands of people who, when surveyed, would identify themselves as Christian but without doing much about it—those who’ve eaten of the loaves and fishes but not quite followed along with the rest. The set of people whom Jesus sends out to share the good news are at the scale of the seventy or so active adult members of this church, and I don’t think it’s an accident that the numbers are pretty close. Jesus extends this invitation to all those of us who have some real familiarity with his teachings, more than once or twice a year.

            But what exactly is he inviting us to do? Well, in a way, it’s an invitation to evangelism—but not the way people usually mean it. “Evangelism” is a word that has many connotations for many people, not all of them good. In modern America it sometimes gets confused with “evangelicalism,” as a religious or political project—that’s not what I mean at all.  At the heart of it, “evangelism” means “sharing the good news.”

And I think this story offers a helpful corrective to what we often think evangelism is. In this story, it doesn’t mean trying to convert people from one religion to another: Jesus, who is Jewish, sends his Jewish followers to Jewish villages to share the good news. And it doesn’t mean trying to recruit new members to the church. The 70 don’t come back as 140, or 280; they go to the villages and then return. It doesn’t mean intrusive personal questions about someone’s faith or prayer life—the name of Jesus doesn’t even come up!

            This kind of evangelism is something else. Jesus sends the disciples to go, and to share a meal with people. To offer healing where they can, and to look for what God is doing, and to name it: “the kingdom of God has drawn near.” I find this sequence so important: first the signs of God’s presence appear, then they name God’s presence there. When the disciples go out, part of what they’re doing is to help people make sense of the experience they’re having by sharing with them the good news that the kingdom of God has already come near; that God is already there, in their lives.

            In this world, in which the harvest is so plentiful and the laborers are so few—in which the spiritual hunger is so great but the religious knowledge so limited—the work of evangelism is not really about trying to convince anyone of anything. It’s about helping one another see what the God we say we believe in is actually doing in our lives.

            And so I wonder what it would mean for each of us to become evangelists in this way. Not to try to convert people to Christian belief. Not to try recruit people to our church. But to go out into a world in which 72% of us believe in God but only half feel a sense of spiritual well-being, and to offer the good news that God is right there. To go out, with our eyes and ears open, to look for God’s presence in people’s lives, and then to help one another see, “You know—I wonder if God has come near here.”

            That could mean a conversation with someone about the sense of purpose or meaning they find in a job, or in a community group. It could mean sharing some of the places you’ve found a sense of wonder or awe. It could mean simply being a loving presence in someone’s life. I don’t know what that might look like for you.

But I do know what a gift it would be to a world that is hungry for the very knowledge and love of God that we find here, if each one of us, by our words or by our deeds, could help share with the people around us just a taste of that love.