Help Wanted

I was really struck by something Richard Rohr wrote for this morning's devotional. He spoke of how Christians have gotten caught up in arguments about the nature of Jesus without paying nearly so much attention to what he lives and teaches. Churches fight and split over trivial matters, neglecting the promise of God's kingdom breaking in here on earth as a present and future reality.

"Despite it all, we turned Jesus’ message into a reward-or-punishment contest that would hopefully come later—instead of a transformational experience that was verifiable here and now by the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). Probably more than anything else, this huge misplacement of attention anesthetized and weakened the actual transformative power of Christianity."

I think it was these words, "anesthetized and weakened the actual transformative power of Christianity," that grabbed me and caused me to focus on a small part of today's gospel where Jesus says,  “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest."

I love theology. I enjoyed theology classes immensely in seminary, and I still get great pleasure from doing theological reflection. But I do worry that the church and therefore Christian faith are too much about words and not enough about actions. Words have transformative power, but only when we stop talking about them and start doing them.

One of the interesting dynamics that has evolved in churches over the years is that of talking and listening becoming the central activity for many. In the typical congregation there are paid talkers, pastors and such, who do a lot of talking in worship while others come to hear. For many, this defines church life, and as a result, the problem Jesus describes, a plentiful harvest with inadequate workers, continues to plague the church. Faith has become so much about believing the correct things that doing the correct things gets neglected. And though we call ourselves "the body of Christ," there is often little about us that proclaims what Jesus did. "Repent, turn, change how you live because God's new realm on earth has drawn near."

Now it certainly is true that people would not embrace some of Jesus' crazy ideas if they did not believe in him, if they did not believe he was the Messiah, the Son of God, etc. But you can also turn this logic around and say that if we do not do what Jesus says, we must not believe in him.

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