Isaiah 66.1-14; Galatians 6.7-16; Luke 10.1-11; 16-20 

It’s Harvest Festival in a small rural village church. The vicar is organising the annual harvest service. It’s a church where the congregation follows the tradition of bringing some of their produce to church with them to offer during the service.

People bring their home-grown plants and vegetables to the service. But this year is a bit different too. The village cricket team has just won its league, and the village is in celebratory mood, so the vicar decides to do something special and rather unusual - she will combine the normal harvest service with a cricket theme.

The day of the service arrives, and the church is filled with flowers. People bring their offerings of vegetables as usual, but in the middle of the display is a cricket wicket - a strip of turf with a set of wooden stumps at each end - and people place their offerings on the turf.

Everything is going fine, until one lady who doesn’t have a garden but still wishes to contribute to the Harvest thanksgiving comes up to the front of the church, and places a can of peas among the other vegetables. She is stopped by the vicar, so she returns to her seat, still clutching her peas.

The woman sitting next to her notices that she has returned with her tinned peas. “What happened?” she asked.

The first woman shrugged her shoulders, and said: “There’s no peas for the wicket.”

Harvest is about gathering in. When the time for the harvest of the kingdom of God comes, it will affect everyone - good or wicked, peas or no peas.

And people need to know that the time of harvest is coming. There is an urgency which Jesus wishes to instil into the 70 people he sends out. The mission has got bigger throughout Luke’s Gospel. In Luke chapter 8, Jesus himself goes through towns and villages; in chapter 9, the Twelve are sent out; now a larger group of disciples is being sent out.

They are to travel light, not encumbered by anything that might hold them back. They are to be reliant on God’s grace and people’s hospitality for their needs - no purse, no bag. They are not even to stop to say hello to people they meet on the road, because there is an urgent task to do. People must be told that the kingdom of heaven is drawing near.

If they are welcomed in, they are to receive the hospitality offered. The people are welcoming not just the disciples but also Jesus. But where a town is not welcoming, they are not to keep on trying, bullying them into offering hospitality, they are to move on and accept that some people reject God’s kingdom. That is their choice. In rejecting the disciples, we are told, they are rejecting Jesus too.

This urgency, this imperative to let people know that the kingdom is near and that they must be ready, is something that runs through the Gospels. There’s the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, the guests who turn down invitations because they have other things to do, the teaching of Jesus and of John the Baptist - the coming kingdom is near.

It’s hard to understand in the same way just how that urgency is still there, because we are living 2000 years later, and obviously what they expected hasn’t yet happened. But the imperative to go out and share with people that the kingdom of heaven is coming remains.

Evangelism - sharing the good news about Jesus Christ and about the kingdom of God  - is what those 70 were doing. We all decry the fact that children are growing up without knowing about God, without having any experience of church, but who is going to tell them about God, if we don’t. We all wish that more people came to church Sunday by Sunday, but who is going to invite them, if we don’t?

It will always be their choice whether they respond or not. Many of us are reticent about sharing our faith. I’ve heard many people say things like - I can be a good Christian without coming to church - but the Bible is clear that as Christians we need each other.

People say that it’s too embarrassing to talk about faith - Jesus didn’t let that stop him, and over the years, if people hadn’t shared their faith with others, then they would not have come to know about God for themselves.

People see faith as a private matter - something between them and God - but again that’s not the picture we are given in our New Testament, where Christians’ lives were much more intertwined with each other than they are now.

People also lack confidence about their faith. This is partly because their own knowledge and understanding might not seem to be up to much, but that can soon change with some study and prayer.

One of the reasons why we don’t talk to others about our faith is because we are worried that they will reject what we have to say.  But look back at today’s Gospel reading - it’s not us whom they are rejecting but it’s Jesus; whoever listens to you listens to me, and whoever rejects you rejects me and whoever rejects me rejects the one who sent me.

There’s a story about two shoe salesmen, who worked for competing shoe companies. Both were sent to a new area where neither company already had any salesmen. Both men arrived with a supply of shoes, hoping that they would manage to sell lots.

When they arrived they both realised that this area was unlike any they had ever been to before. It was the custom of the people in that area to go barefoot all the time. No one wore shoes. As soon as they realised the situation both shoe salesman raced to e-mail their home office to alert them to the situation.

But their messages were quite different. One sent the message: “Don’t send any more shoes. No one here wears any.”

The other wired his office and said, “Send all the shoes you can. No one here has any.”

We could apply a similar thing to church - we can say “There’s no point in inviting so-and-so to church, they’re not churchgoers.”

Or we could think - “I’ve something to offer that I want to share. So-and-so doesn’t come to church, why don’t I invite them along?”

Of course, it’s not just about coming to church, it’s also about growing and developing faith, and putting one’s trust in Jesus, and helping people to see God at work already in the world around.

However, research has shown that often the believing follows a sense of belonging. Churches can become cliques of like-minded people that outsiders find it hard to penetrate. Churches can become inward-looking and fail to extend true hospitality. Those who come to church week by week forget that for those who don’t a service can be quite a daunting prospect - even following a service booklet, if you’re not used to it, can be a challenge.

So a challenge for us is how can we encourage people to feel they belong? How can we encourage people to feel that this church building is for them as well as us? How can we as a church offer hospitality to those who are not part of our congregation.

There’ll be lots of different ways in which we can do this in our various churches, but we do need to keep asking those questions.

Because at root what we are talking about is our love for God and our love for our neighbour - in action. The kingdom of heaven is about love - God’s love - we are called to reflect that in our lives.