The Little Red Hen in the Bible
Matthew 9:35--10:4. The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.
This is the verse you always see quoted in discussions of calling new ministry. In the Episcopalian faith we believe that all people have a calling to ministry, it is just a matter of determining that calling. It is my strong conviction that we are all called to ministry in one form or another and that we cannot know the true nature of our ministry, that is the impact, from our own perspective, only God sees the whole picture. That said, though, this verse has always spoken a completely different message to my ears.
What if this verse means something else entirely? What is the Lord’s harvest? Is it souls? Or is it love? St. Paul said that he could learn to speak every language but without love he was a rattling bell. Love is, as was said by another famous Paul, all there is. Love is the all important thing. If love is the harvest, Matthew tells us there is plenty of it for everyone. But it must be harvested. We must take it from where it springs up naturally and easily from the ground and bring it into our homes and our work places. We must processes it and make it palatable. We must form it into various shapes and sizes and products that will appeal to everyone everywhere. And we must consume it. We must incorporate love into our very bones and enliven every one of our cells with the nutrient rich food we have made of the harvest of love. God wants us to be happy and whole, he wants us to draw up from the land that which will nourish us inside and out. He wants to take from the bountiful gifts he has given and improve ourselves and our world in our use of them. He wants to give us love and he wants us to make it a part of its harvest.
But the laborers are few. Why is that, do you think? Why are so few people able or willing to reach into the world and find love, to pluck it and mold it and incorporate it and share it? I think it the answer might be fear. So much that is pernicious in this life is grounded in fear. Are we afraid that there is only a limited about of love to share? Are we jealous or hording the love we find in the world? Surely where love springs up once, it will spring up again. There is fertile ground there and the seeds are dropped from season to season in natural order. Perhaps we are afraid that there is only a limited amount of love – a zero sum game – and that if we all take it away, there will be no more later, when we want it. Jealousy works like this. “My partner loves me but he has only a finite amount of love and if he gives it to someone else, there will be less for me.” I know that is not how I experience love. I love my daughter Emma entirely, but that fact does not impact how much I love my daughter Betsy or my son Sam. There is an unlimited supply of love. No matter how much you take, there is always plenty. Whether I take the love for myself or share it and spread it around, there is no reason to think it will ever run out. God’s love has been present from the start, there is no reason to think it will stop now.
Further, if love is the harvest, then the rules of harvest apply. We must reap in order to sew, and we must sew in order to grow more in the next season. We perpetuate the cycle by taking away the harvest. We clear the land for another crop, we make a place for the next harvesters to bring forth more of the bounty of God’s love in another season. And we make a place for ourselves in the seasons of growing. When we take love from the harvest and spread it around, the seed of love is perpetuated around us and we are, ourselves, a part of the process. When we move into the next season, the Lord welcomes us knowing we have been part of his plan for the Earth – the propagation of the harvest, the harvest is love.
Perhaps the reason why we do not harvest and share is lack of faith What if, after all, we are not able to harvest. We might reach out and try to take love and be denied. It cannot and does not happen in real life, God’s love is pervasive and perfect. But in an absence of faith, how difficult it is to know that. Perhaps we fear that we will take the love we are given and make it into something unacceptable to others. We have certainly all been rejected in love at one time or another and it is not a hurt we will easily forget. But so have we all had something bad to eat, and it has not kept us from reaching out again for sustenance. And that is all God’s love is: sustenance.
There are certainly some of us who do not harvest. They take advantage of the bounty but do not do their part to perpetuate the process. They eat the sweet meats, but never labor to produce them. What are the sweet meats of a harvest of love? More than the obvious. Once we take the harvest and mold it and shape it and transform it, what is it exactly that we can make from that one Divine ingredient? Peace. Love is the basic food group of peace. Brotherhood. Forgiveness. Mercy. Redemption. Solace. All of these delights spring from the essential ingredient of the harvest. All of these are the end product of the work of the Harvester. But if you partake of these things without giving back in the form of the work of spreading love, that is, if you consume the product but never burn off the calories working for it, then you have a problem. The name of that problem is gluttony. Or possibly greed. Type II Diabetes. In any case, it’s a bad thing.
This is really the Little Red Hen verse. The Little Red Hen found some wheat on the ground and asked, “Who will help me make some bread?” “Not I,” answered all the other animals. She then grinds it and forms it and bakes it and makes a loaf of bread and at every turn she asks for help and her friends deny her the help. When the bread it ready, she reminds them that none of them helped her. Now here is an interesting fact. The book to which I referred to be sure I got the story correctly, told that at the end the Hen ate all the bread herself and her friends looked on in envy. But the version I remember from my childhood ended differently. The hen lays on a six inch deep guilt trip about not helping, but in the end she shares her feast with the other barnyard animals whether or not they helped with the work.
So, here’s the question. Are you a laborer? Are you part of the process of the seasons of love sent to you from our Lord? And if not, why not? What are you making of the harvest? What sweet are you forming and with whom are you sharing it? And when you encounter that lazy cow who had to chew cud and would not help you, are you sharing your bounty with her as well? In short, are you one of the laborers of the harvest of God’s love?
