Sermon: Seeking Harvesters, Harvesting Seekers

Text: John 4:3-42

Date: February 27, 2005

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

One of the odd features of a minister’s life—at least this minister’s life—is that I don’t wind up spending much time with people who live their lives outside the religious community. Between the church and the family and ecumenical activities, I don’t have much time remaining for socializing with other folks. So while I’ve read a lot about the secular society, I don’t get to talk to people who live there much, except in business transactions. And you just don’t learn much about a person’s soul when your whole relationship begins and ends with, “Credit or debit?”

It was fun for me, then, to attend a conference at Seattle Center in January on the topic of “Unity and Diversity in Religion and Culture” that was co-sponsored by UNESCO and nine regional universities. Most of the people who attended the conference were from academic circles rather than religious communities. I tried to be a good host to the people I met from all over the world, which included taking a few guests to good restaurants. I felt a little like I was in “Wild Kingdom”---“Here we see an assemblage of ‘spiritual but not religious’ homo sapiens in their natural habitat. Watch closely as our observer joins the creatures at the watering hole, moving slowly and speaking softly so as not to startle the herd.” While I’m sure some of the people at the conference besides me had religious commitments, the majority appeared to view religion as a cultural curiosity. So it was fascinating to talk and listen to them. Of course, in that context I was the zoological oddity. I might as well have been a duck-billed platypus paddling around the conference, a real live preacher!

I had a wonderful time talking to a music and philosophy professor from Baltimore over a long lunch one day. Jerry had presented a paper at the conference that made a case for the anonymity assumed by participants in Alcoholics Anonymous being a model or method for people from diverse backgrounds to come together for peaceful dialogue. Jerry was definitely “spiritual but not religious.” He had grown up in a church-going household; his dad was a church organist and choir director. Jerry liked being in choir as a young person but he mostly connected with transcendence through music. He thinks religion does more harm than good in the world.

So there we were, having a friendly conversation, and I had a—for me—rare opportunity to witness to my faith to a non-believer. He was the one who brought it up, and there was a clear sense that a door was open, so I tried to go through it. I hope I did okay. I can’t remember exactly what I said. I acknowledged that the practice of religion could be harmful, even hateful. I compared faith to fire and water, saying that they could both kill, but they were also essential for life. I told him I thought a hunger for God was built naturally into humans, and the way to truly abundant life was to be in relationship to God and to a faith community. I said I thought we humans are happiest when we see ourselves as part of something bigger than ourselves, and for me Christianity meets the need for meaning in my life. I said I thought love was at the core of Christianity, and to love God and love others was the goal of my life. Or something like that. I tried to keep it personal and invitational. I’m sure I threw in a few good words for the United Church of Christ as a progressive church with plenty of room for seekers.

I’m not trying to make myself the hero of some epic tale of evangelism. I’m just re-thinking this encounter in light of the gospel story today, when Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well. After their conversation about living water, the disciples, who had apparently been out at the market looking to buy lunch, came back to the well where they had left Jesus. They looked astonished that Jesus was talking to a Samaritan woman, but they bit their tongues before they could blurt out something embarrassing like “Why in the world are you talking to her?” After she leaves, Jesus muses in a messianic way about completing God’s work, which is what has been doing by renewing a passion for God in the woman with whom he’s been talking. His words are a little confusing but fascinating: “Do you not say, ‘Four months more, then comes the harvest’? But I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting. The reaper is already receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that sower and reaper may rejoice together. For here the saying holds true, ‘One sows and another reaps.’ I sent you to reap that for which you did not labor. Others have labored, and you have entered into their labor.” [John 4:35-38]

You may know that Jews didn’t like to talk to Samaritans, or do business with them, or anything else. Jesus’ disciples were none too pleased to be passing through Samaria, which was deep in enemy territory as far as they were concerned. It must have been quite startling to them to hear Jesus’ challenge them to view these despised neighbors as a field ripe for the harvest. God had long ago planted seeds in these people—they, like all humans, would have had a yearning for the transcendent life of the Spirit (what one writer has called the God-shaped hole in the soul). Jesus wants the disciples to see the Samaritans as people in whom God’s grace had been sown, who needed the work of harvesters to bring faith to fruition. The woman to whom Jesus had spoken was already out planting more seeds in her town. If the disciples could overcome their reluctance to engage the Samaritans, they might actually experience rejoicing with sower and reaper together.

Jumping back to my lunch with spiritual-but-not-religious Jerry, and taking a cue from this story, should I have seen or see him now as “a field ripe for harvesting?” What do you think? Does that make you squirmy? It does me, a little, because I have met many Christians of a more evangelistic bent who seem to cruise through the world like sharks, looking for people to save, as if collecting “soul notches” on an invisible belt. I’ve heard Christians talk about leading people to Jesus as if each person is a trophy in their case. I can’t stand that. It seems disrespectful.

On the other hand, isn’t it equally disrespectful to keep faith to myself as if it were a private treasure that only certain people deserve to have? What if God had a hand in bringing Baltimore Jerry and I together over a dish of crab and artichoke dip, knowing that Jerry was hungry for something I might help him find? What if hundreds of people had been involved in sowing seeds in this non-believer’s spirit over his 60-year lifespan, and one more kindness or metaphor or idea would be just enough to bring faith to fruition? Wouldn’t it be disrespectful of both “farmer” and “field” to bypass that opportunity? I don’t need to know either what has gone on before my encounter or what might happen afterwards in order to enter into the labor of the harvest. Ultimately, I think Jesus was right in encouraging the disciples to look around at where they were as if they were in a ripe field and God was asking them to go to work.

Look around us here on Bainbridge Island and in Kitsap and King counties. Look how the fields are ripe for harvesting. You may know that the Pacific Northwest region is #1 in the percentage of people who are unaffiliated with any faith community. About 63% of the adults around here are unchurched. We have the highest percentage of people in the country who mark “None” on the survey box with choices of religious affiliations, prompting Patricia Killen to sub-title her book on the subject The None Zone. We also have a large group of people who identify with a religion but remain unaffiliated with a religious community. That, in fact, is the single largest segment of the Pacific Northwest’s population. Can you guess what percentage of people in the Pacific Northwest are affiliated with the United Church of Christ, according to The None Zone? I mean, we think we’ve got a pretty good thing going in this denomination, how many people do you think agree? 0.2%.[1] That’s 0.6% of the religious adherents in this region. That makes me think we haven’t done so well as harvesters, eh?

Are we seeing this unchurched 63% of our neighborhood as a field ripe for the harvest? Should we be? You all get out more than I do; how much faith talk is going on?

We might be as reluctant to engage our unchurched neighbors as the first disciples were reluctant to engage the Samaritans. Perhaps it’s because we don’t want to condemn the “None” way of life. We’re not naturally condemning people, and that’s good. But we need to think through what value there is in the life of faith and being part of a faith community, so that we can re-frame our view of the unchurched in a fruitful way. I got to thinking about an old story line from a TV show, “E.R.” (I’d be embarrassed to admit how many years I have been watching that particular nighttime soap.) One couple a few years back had a deaf baby. They wrestled with a decision about getting a cochlear implant for the baby so that he might be able to hear. One person they consulted felt strongly that they shouldn’t pursue it because there was nothing wrong with being deaf and in fact there are many beautiful aspects of the deaf culture.

We might conceive of secular culture as a kind of deaf culture. It’s not that it’s bad in itself, and in fact there are probably fewer reasons to argue in secular culture—religious people can get awfully defensive about our various views of truth. We can be humble enough to admit that there are plenty of shortcomings among religious communities, including our own. But—there’s music. Do you see what I’m getting at? There’s a whole dimension of beauty, purpose, love, comfort, and passion in life, not to mention fearlessness in death, that only people engaged in the life of the Spirit are attuned to. I believe people who are outside faith communities are as deaf to that dimension of life as those who are physically hearing impaired are deaf to music. Can you live without music? Sure. But is life immeasurably richer when music sounds? Yes.

The words Jesus uses when he speaks and listens to the Samaritan woman are so musical, aren’t they? “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water…Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give will never be thirsty. The water I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” [John 4:10, 13] It’s as if he’s trying to attune her ear to “the music of the spheres,” as one hymn puts it, or the “real, though far-off hymn that hails a new creation,” as another one lilts. One scholar points out that Jesus doesn’t just come up and drench her with living water whether she wants it or not. He wants her to ask for it. He’s making a seeker out of her, awakening her thirst for something more than the ordinary water of the well. That seems to me to be a key part of sharing the good news of God’s love with someone—to coax the seeker to the surface. You don’t just dump the gospel on someone’s head. You help them discover their hunger and thirst for something that this material life can never offer.

Once this Samaritan woman has both discovered her thirst for living water and had that thirst slaked by Jesus, she becomes an evangelist herself. She’s off immediately to share her excitement with her neighbors. But look at the way she does it. Fred Craddock writes of her,

“The woman runs, not with the answer but only the question, to the city and gives the call to faith, "Come, see a man who told me all that I ever did. Can this be the Christ?"

If any wish to be fascinated by this woman, let them be so now. She is a witness, but not a likely witness and not even a thorough witness. "A man who told me all that I ever did" is not exactly a recitation of the Apostles Creed. She is not even a convinced witness: "Can this be the Christ?" is literally "This cannot he the Christ, can it?" Even so, her witness is enough: it is invitational (come and see), not judgmental; it is within the range permitted by her experience; it is honest with its own uncertainty; it is for everyone who will hear. How refreshing. Her witness avoids triumphalism, hawking someone else’s conclusions, packaged answers to unasked questions, thinly veiled ultimatums and threats of hell, and assumptions of certainty on theological matters. She does convey, however, her willingness to let her hearers arrive at their own affirmations about Jesus, and they do: "This is indeed the Savior of the world." [2]

Any of us could be that kind of evangelist, that kind of good news-sharer, that kind of witness. Can this be the Christ? Come and see. What if we were to approach all of our unchurched friends and neighbors with that kind of loving invitation?

Imagine this want ad placed in the “help wanted” section of your local newspaper by none other than God: “Now harvesting seekers. Seeking harvesters.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] Killen, Patricia O’Connell & Silk, Mark (ed.) Religion and Public Life in the Pacific Northwest: The None Zone Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira Press, 2004, p. 29

[2] Craddock, Fred “The Witness at the Well” at Religion Online, linked at textweek.com