“Harassed and Helpless?”
Matthew 9:35-38
Think about the times in your life when you have been the most free and happy.
For me, they are when I have been so focused on serving Jesus through serving others, that I have forgotten about myself.
Every Monday evening, about a dozen of you come together, prepare approximately 100 meals, and take them to people living in the nearby extended stay hotels, and to some people living under bridges, in Camp Jordan and near the Flea Market.
On Wednesdays, several of you spend the day preparing and then giving out food through the East Ridge Community Food Pantry here at the church.
This ministry serves approximately 50 persons per week.
Every day calls come in to this church from people who are at the end of their rope.
I’ve become so used to the sound of their desperate voices and sobs.
People need electric bills paid.
Many folks are past due on their rent payments and are about to be kicked out of their apartment or hotel room.
They are asking for help.
They are begging.
They are desperate.
Their stories just about break your heart.
Every day, people knock on the doors of this church building in dire need.
They are “harassed and helpless.”
Not long ago, one of you came to my office on a Monday morning.
You had stopped at McDonalds to get coffee.
On your way into the restaurant three people asked you for money.
A few weeks ago, someone called me at 8 O’clock in the morning.
His estranged wife had died the day before.
Their 9-year-old daughter found her laying on the couch, unresponsive.
The wife had left the man I was speaking with a few years before and was the main care-giver for their three children.
She made a small salary working at a local daycare.
Recently, she had been trying to get the man on the phone to pay up on his child support, but, since he was nearly homeless himself—only working an odd job here and there—he was unable to pay.
As he spoke to me, telling me his story, he admitted to being terribly lost, horribly depressed.
Although he is only in his 40’s, he was recently diagnosed with congestive heart failure.
He nearly died a few months ago.
He chain-smokes and also chews tobacco.
During our conversation, he told me that he was already on his second beer of the day.
Again, it was only 8 in the morning.
He was saying how he will now be the one who is fully responsible for taking care of his three children.
He also spoke about the need to get a life insurance policy on himself for his kids since he doesn’t expect to live very long.
I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there is no way any insurance company would sell him a life insurance policy.
As we spoke, I could feel the hopelessness of his situation.
I also felt a terrible sadness for his kids.
What would become of them?
What chance do they have in a world where so many have so much and so many more have so little—and there’s not enough sharing going on?
God takes a special interest in the poor and hurting, and God expects us to share that interest.
There are several thousand verses in the Bible which deal with the poor and God’s response to injustice.
In the New Testament, 1 out of every 16 verses is about the poor.
Because of the weight that the Bible gives this subject, it seems like there would be more focus on addressing poverty in American Christianity than there is.
Way too much time is spent arguing over dogma.
Way too much time is spent judging sins, and trying to figure out who is in and who is out.
In our Gospel Lesson for this morning, we get a beautiful description of what motivates Jesus to do what Jesus does.
Jesus has been moving from town to town teaching and preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing the sick and diseased.
And we are told that when Jesus “saw the crowds” when Jesus looked on the faces of the people He came across “he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”
The description of “harassed and helpless” paints a picture of a predator and its prey, where the prey is continually mangled by the predator until it gives up trying to escape and just lies down and takes it.
And what is Jesus’ response to this mass of humanity in great need?
His response is “compassion.”
“He had compassion on them.”
Compassion is “a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for the plight of another, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.”
Compassion is the opposite of indifference; it is what prompts persons to act.
When we are helping someone in need we are said to be “showing them compassion.”
In Ashville, North Carolina there is a United Methodist Church called The Haywood Street Congregation.
They were founded in 2009.
They call themselves “a mission congregation.”
Their core programs include weekly worship, a clothing closet, a community garden, and the Haywood Street Respite, which offers a safe place for homeless adults to stay on a short term basis after being discharged from a hospital.
Twice a week they offer a free community meal known as the “Downtown Welcome Table.”
On Wednesdays this meal is lunch; on Sundays this meal is dinner.
Hundreds of people come to these meals each week.
And it’s not your run of the mill soup kitchen type of situation.
They use real cloth table cloths and cloth napkins.
Food is served on china plates.
The food is abundant.
Each table is decorated with flowers.
They do this to counter the notion held by those living on the streets that hand-outs, hand-me-downs and left overs are “all that I deserve.”
The food is prepared by 16 area “restaurant partners” who have been impressed by the ministry and have gotten a taste of what it means to love and serve—to “show others compassion.”
Church members volunteer as the wait staff.
They also sit at the tables with those who come to eat.
They socialize and get to know one another.
People are encouraged to linger, as they would in a fine restaurant or a dinner in someone’s home.
Their website makes the following statement: “This is a not a ministry where ‘the haves’ help ‘the have nots.’
We are a ministry that acknowledges each of us as privileged and each of us as being in need.
While some come with hunger from the body others come with a hunger in their souls.”
I don’t think the only persons who are “harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd” are the poor and the down and out.
Some of the most unhappy and miserable folks I know are some of the wealthiest.
Some of the most angry are people of great means.
We live in a lost and broken world.
We have an enemy, the devil.
And as we are told in 1 Peter 5:8, he “prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”
We are the preyed upon.
We are also the privileged.
And what makes us privileged is the fact that we are created in God’s image.
We are loved by God.
And God desires to live in relationship with us.
God also gives us important jobs to do on this earth.
We don’t want to miss out on that.
For Jesus has come to give us life, and not just life—but abundant life.
And that abundant life is found in service to God and others.
That is what feeds us spiritually.
That is what brings us joy.
We have only a very short stay on this earth.
We choose whether our short stay will be joy-filled and rewarding or unhappy and wasted.
Jesus looked at the crowds of people in the towns and villages and saw them not only like sheep without a shepherd but, also like a field full of wheat with nobody to harvest it.
They are eager for God’s kingdom, but don’t know where to look to find it.
They are ready and waiting for God to act, but who will tell them that God’s action has already begun in Christ Jesus the Lord?
“Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.
Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
Other than the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus doesn’t often tell us what to pray for.
But this time He does.
“Go to the farmer,” Jesus says, “and beg him to send workers to bring in the harvest.”
And, as we, His followers, pray this prayer, the answer comes back that we, ourselves are to be the answer to our own prayer!!!
The answer to our own prayer is the mission Jesus has called us to.
And when we give ourselves to serving and caring for others we will come to find that we forget about ourselves.
And there is great joy and great freedom in this.
Cutting edge medical science concerning research on the brain has shown that the front part of our brains get more active when we forget ourselves in order to concentrate on God and projects that are bigger than we are.
When this happens the neurochemical dopamine—and the natural high it gives—starts getting secreted.
The harassed and helpless aren’t just the “have nots.”
They are also the “haves” who are living with a deep seated need to be living for something greater than themselves.
When we get focused on Jesus, and become overwhelmed by God’s love, and learn to see others the way God sees us—we will live lives of active compassion.
And in living lives of active compassion, we find ourselves in a place and a situation that we wouldn’t trade for all the treasure in the world.
This church is doing incredible things for the harassed and helpless in our community.
And we can do so much more!!!
Who can you invite to help volunteer for one of our existing ministries?
What other ministries should we be offering folks that we don’t currently have?
How can we better share the good news of God’s Kingdom with a lost and broken world?
The harvest time has come.
Workers are needed in the fields today!!!
Are you working?
Are you giving of yourself for God and other people?
Are you experiencing how wonderful and how much fun it is to do God’s will?
Do you have the ‘natural high’ that comes through serving God by serving others?
Let us pray: Oh Lord of the Harvest, the harvest is ripe but the workers are so few.
We ask that you will send workers into your harvest fields.
We pray that we will be the answer to this prayer.
In Jesus’ name and for His sake we pray.
Amen.
