Harvesting

                                                                                                                                                              by  Pizzazz

Every year in the U.S., millions of pounds of wholesome food are left to rot in the fields.

Or dumped in landfills.

Often as much as 50% of a crop goes unharvested to waste.

Some is left in the field because machines aren’t agile enough to reach it.

Some may be left to control prices—to avoid flooding the market with a surplus.

Hand-picked crops are selectively harvested.

An individual fruit or a vegetable might be blemished or oddly shaped or colored.

And no one would buy it at Whole Foods.

So, the pickers are taught to leave it, or toss it into the dumpster.

After all, the American harvest is abundant.

Why put any effort into that less attractive peach, or ear of corn, or head of lettuce?

Some groups are working to recoup that waste.

Taking a lesson from the ancient practice of gleaning.

Jewish law, and other laws, required landowners to leave some portion of their crop in the fields.

And to allow the poor to come in and take that crop.

Today, organizers match up growers with teams of volunteer gleaners.

The teams go through the fields after the harvest and gather the crop that was left behind.

And then they distribute that food to the poor.

One organizing group, the St Andrews Society, gleaned hundreds of tons of food last year.

A church group here on Capitol Hill gleans the potato fields of a nearby Maryland farm.

Jesus told us to ask the master of the harvest to send out laborers for his harvest.

And, as with so many messages from scripture, that call has multiple meanings and levels.

We might say the gleaners are answering Jesus’ call quite literally.

They’re going out and harvesting the food.

But they’re also answering another of his calls—they’re serving the poor.

A deeper level of meaning in Jesus’ call for harvesters is, of course,

The call for our help in harvesting souls.

And, those seemingly overly-literal gleaners are doing a good job at that level too.

Drawing others through their good works and example.

Helping others to see God’s action in the world.

As Jesus says, the harvest is abundant.

He needs all of us as laborers.

He needs us to spread the Good News of the Kingdom.

The word that God loves us all.

He needs us to show that we love one another.

And he doesn’t want to harvest only 50% of the crop.

He wants to bring in every soul—to thoroughly glean the fields.

So, we needn’t be too selective in choosing where to labor.

Every soul out there is blemished, but he wants them all—including our own.

The harvest gives us not only the opportunity to serve as laborers,

But to be counted among its finest fruits.

Tuesday 14th Week Ordinary Time

Mt 9:32-38      Read this Scripture @usccb.org