Homily on mission, 6th July 2025, Edward Smith

Isaiah 66. 10-14; Acts 12. 1-11; St Luke 10. 1-11, 16-20

Knock knock.

“Hello?”

“Hello Sir. Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ?”

Standing here, dressed like this, I think it’s quite apparent – even to those of you visiting from New York – that I am…fairly Christian.

And yet.

Presented with the opportunity to spend a few minutes of my day talking on the doorstep about that great love of all our lives – Christ – do I seize it with both hands? No. Nothing – nothing – fills me we greater horror and dread than the sight of two well-groomed young people with name badges standing on the doorstep, eyes agleam with evangelical fervour, inviting me into conversation.

‘I’m already a Christian!’ I want to cry ‘please, for the love of the God I promise you I believe in go away and leave me alone!’

I suppose we ought to amend my being ‘fairly Christian’ to ‘a fairly bad Christian,’ then.

Whilst I’m in a confessional mood I have another admission to make. As well as being a fairly bad Christian I am also someone with a Spotify playlist dedicated to the music I want at my – hopefully far-off – funeral. And this is not a playlist I put together a few years ago and have left well alone since – no. This playlist gets tinkered-with. (Here’s a guy who knows how to have fun I can hear you thinking). It gets amended sometimes when I’m bored and waiting for a train; and sometimes when I realise a piece of music has worked its way into my heart in that way they do – quietly, slowly, without us really noticing. One day we sing or play or listen to it and we feel it tug at something inside us and we know it has become part of the fabric of our lives.

A hymn which I first encountered here at St Matthew’s is one of those pieces of music. In the interests of not causing a diplomatic incident I will call it an American hymn, and I will refrain from pointing out that, what with words by a Scot and music by an Englishman it’s about as American as the tune of ‘My Country, ‘tis of thee’. Regardless, this hymn –

Come, Labor On – isn’t sung much over here and that’s a great shame.

Come, labor on!

Who dares stand idle, on the harvest plain

While all around him waves the golden grain?

And to each servant does the Master say,

Go work to-day.

You will already have worked out why this hymn came to mind when I read today’s Gospel reading. And ‘who dares stand idle on that harvest plain’ indeed. Worse still, who dares shut the door on those pairs of gleaming evangelists of the road? ‘Whoever listens to you, listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me, and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.’ Perhaps I can find a couple of minutes to talk about our Lord and Saviour, after all.

Last week I attended mass at All Saints Fulham, where they celebrated their dedication festival, welcomed a new curate, and said farewell to a long-serving lay reader. In his sermon the vicar spoke about a game he plays with confirmation candidates, based on a task familiar to anyone who’s ever done a team-building exercise: the construction of a tower with dried spaghetti and marshmallows. But instead of marshmallows, he uses Jelly Babies.

[I should stop here to say that, with today’s visitors in mind I asked Google whether Jelly Babies are a thing in the US: apparently they’re not, and as if to prove it I was directed to innumerable videos on YouTube of Americans trying them for the first time with predictably enthusiastic reactions. Suffice it to say they are small chewy sweets in the shape of human people with a squidgy interior and a slightly harder exterior. If any of the members of the choir are interested in exploring this further as part of your cultural exchange…well…]

I digress. Fr Peter – the vicar of All Saints – asks his confirmation candidates to build a model church with dried spaghetti and Jelly Babies. The trick, he told us – and I haven’t yet verified this – is to be generous with the Jelly Babies and conservative with the dried spaghetti. I’m sure you’re there already: bricks and mortar – spaghetti – is all well and good but without people then it is a fragile church indeed.

But as today’s Gospel passage tells us, there is something of a Jelly Baby shortage. The harvest is plentiful, but the labourers are few. And goodness me don’t we know it. The statistics speak for themselves and I don’t need to rehearse them here: we know that by virtue of being here this morning we place ourselves in a tiny, tiny minority.

And the problem is, of course, that the fewer Jelly Babies we have the harder each individual one has to work to hold up the church: yes, the bricks and mortar - the spaghetti – but also the countless unseen jobs that make a place like this work, week to week, and keep the doors open day to day. And the harder they work, the further inward their gaze is drawn until, one day, we realise that we’ve become so engrossed and entangled in the administrative and practical demands of the running of the church that we’ve forgotten that – just out there on Great Peter Street or just out there on East 29th in New York – waves the abundant golden grain, waiting to be harvested.

So what, you ask. Should we abandon this fine building? Sell it and give the money away?

Of course not. But…what if we did? This is an uncomfortable thing to say but I wonder…

I wonder how many of us if, freed from the constraints of money worries and parish council meetings and maintenance of the fabric and site-security would think: ‘great! Now we don’t have that to think about, just try and stop us getting out there in pairs – labourers into the harvest, proclaiming the good news.’?

I’ve already told you how I react to people trying to proclaim the Good News to me on my doorstep. Do I really think I’d be amongst the first to strap on my own sandals and take to the dusty road?

Probably not. And at least in part the reason is found later in the Gospel passage. ‘See, I am sending you out like lambs into the midst of wolves.’ Lambs into the midst of wolves.

Suddenly a PCC meeting doesn’t seem like such a bad option, after all. I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am not belittling or making light of the work that goes on to make a church – this church – a welcoming, safe place where people can come and worship free from judgement and in the knowledge that they are loved, by their neighbours and by God. But we must be so careful – and indeed as Anglo Catholics we must redouble our carefulness – that our cultivation of community and of a style of worship in which the beauty of holiness is front-and-centre does not, inadvertently or otherwise, become either exclusive…or a way for us to feel like we’re harvesting without actually getting out there, lambs in the midst of wolves.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we know that today’s Gospel reading isn’t a metaphor. We know that making this a place of beauty and welcome and prayerfulness and compassion and mercy and love and then hoping that the harvest somehow finds its way in isn’t enough. Build it and they will come? Not good enough. Build it and then go out and harvest.

Harvesting is not easy. It is hard, demanding, laborious work. And in some ways it is dangerous work, too. But we do not live in a country where Christians are persecuted and murdered like 25 of them were last week in Syria. We do not live in a country where we could be imprisoned simply for being Christian – we are not in China, or North Korea, or Vietnam. The wolves we lambs face on Great Peter Street or East 29th are very different, and if the prospect of meeting them keeps us facing inward, trying to ignore that waving golden grain, then we have some serious questions to ask ourselves.

‘The seventy returned with joy, saying, ‘Lord in your name even the demons submit to us!’. He said to them ‘See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you.’

Or, as my favourite hymn has it:

Come, labour on.

Away with gloomy doubts and faithless fear.

No arm so weak but may do service here.

By feeblest agents may our God fulfil

His righteous will.

No matter how afraid we are. No matter how weak our arm or feeble our faith, we are invited and instructed out into the waving fields of golden grain – us, few labourers, lambs into the midst of wolves.

And why? Prepare ye the way of the Lord.

It’s very simple, and Teresa of Avila knew it:

Christ has no body but yours,

No hands, no feet on earth but yours,

Yours are the eyes with which he looks

Compassion on this world,

Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,

Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.

Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,

Yours are the eyes, you are his body.

That is our calling; that is our vocation. So today, refresh and fortify yourself at the altar and then leave here and bring in the harvest.

And a glad sound comes with the setting sun: Servants, well done.

Amen.