Exodus 19:2-8a  Psalm 100 Romans 5:1-8 Matthew 9:35-10:8(9-23)

This is the season of graduation celebrations.  This year’s season of graduations has been one we will remember for its sadness, in that we were forced to gather only virtually.  And, it will be remembered for the compassionate and amazingly creative means that education administrators and loved ones have implemented in order to make these rites of passage a truly celebratory event.  We celebrate with our graduates this year with particular keenness.

For these sorts of celebrations – graduations, ordinations, retirements, and we might include weddings and wedding anniversaries – we salute significant accomplishments by the honorees.  There is an understanding that the honoree earned something special, certainly with the help of mentors and supportive family members, but all in all an accomplishment by the honoree that we celebrate.

Similarly, we celebrate birthdays.  But, in contrast to graduations and retirements, we can’t say we earned our birth.  Our birth was a gift to us from God with the help of our parents.  Yet, each year on our birthdays, we receive more gifts and felicitations as if it is some sort of worthy accomplishment.

Similarly, as Christians, we have received the gift of salvation; we receive this gift of salvation as a child of God, justified by faith alone.  Our salvation is not our accomplishment by us.

The Apostle Paul affirms in his letter to the Romans, ‘Since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand.’  It is through Jesus Christ that this grace is obtained.  We are justified by faith, and we have peace with God.  What greater gift could we imagine than peace with God.  This faith is sufficient; this peace is enough; and, it is a gift.  We simply have to take the gift in hand and heart and open the box.

The manifestation of our faith is our call to discipleship.  As in the gift of our earthly birth, with nurturance, we grow in body and spirit; the gift of our salvation is nurtured, inseparably, in our discipleship in the peace of God.

Within this peace of God, called into discipleship, Jesus’ words that we hear today are a loud trumpet blast.  “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”  I don’t know that I have understood Jesus’ statement with the same clarity as after spending ten intense days in Israel and the West Bank.  While there and since, the words ring in my head again and again: ‘The laborers are few.’  Here in the Land of the Holy One who walked and preached and healed, the laborers are few; Christians are a tiny minority within the minority of Palestinians – sheep in the midst of wolves.  The harvest – the huge majority of Palestinians and Israelis who face life every day without recognizing the gift – without opening their hearts to the peace of God through the message of justification by faith are, nevertheless, locked in centuries-long injustice, hatred, and death.  If only they would accept the gift – peace with God, the key to locked hearts.  The harvest is overwhelming; the laborers are brave and tireless, but few.

Jesus’ message is the same message that the Israelites received from God through Moses in the Wilderness.  God said, “You have seen … how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself.” But, Jesus brought a new understanding and clarity to these words.

The world is in sore need of the awareness of this gift.   “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few.”

We’ve all had cause for tears these past weeks as our sense of community has been ripped to shreds – tears of outrage, tears of sorrow, and tears of joy.  The news account of Lucy Hosley, part-owner of the Valentine Deli in New York, evokes all of these emotions and more.  Lucy stood in the street outside her smashed deli with arms crossed castigating the masked perpetrators who continued to vandalize and loot her store shelves.  In an interview later, she confessed she knew these young people.  In her words, “I know who you are, but I won’t turn you in; I’ll let God do it.”

Lucy knew them, as she described, because for years she had been feeding the children of her neighborhood on Saturdays at the local school.  Taking money out of her own pocket to begin this program, she wept as she described these hungry children eating eggs and bacon as if they had never eaten before.  “It broke my heart,” she said.  On this night, they broke her heart even more; not so much because of her destroyed business, but because of the dysfunctional unjust brokenness into which these young people had fallen prey.

Lucy described her own childhood growing up in the cotton fields of the segregated South, being told, even by her mother, that she would never amount to anything.  She credits her pastor for guiding her to put those thoughts out of her head and seek a better life for herself with the gift of God’s peace firmly planted in her heart; none of us is nothing in the sight of God.

Lucy ends her interview with a plea, not for punishment or restitution; her plea is to parents, “Stop telling your child ‘You won’t ever be nothin’.  We need to educate these children.  We can do better.  My life matters; their lives matter.”  Wise words from one who well knows the power of God’s grace.  The harvest is plentiful, but the Lucy Hosleys are far too few.

Much like our earthly birth, our salvation is a gift from God, peace through our Lord Jesus Christ.  We celebrate our graduation – our earning of degrees from esteemed universities; we cannot earn salvation; we can only receive it with open hearts and carry it forth with the hands, feet, ears and voices of laborers for Christ with the greatest celebration.

The Rev. William DuBose, a late 19^th century professor of theology at Sewanee was much more formally learned than Lucy Hosley, but the theology of each regarding God’s grace is in agreement.  To quote DuBose, “It is simply that we are not to bring our goodness to God, but to bring it from God.  We are to come to God with the nothing that we are, and receive from Him the all things that God is.”

We would be nothing without the gift of God’s grace so freely given; in that gift, is all that is God, peace that we cannot resist sharing with the plentiful harvest.    Amen