Dear Friends
The sights and sounds and smells of harvest have been in the air. I mean outside, in the earthy world of farms and fields: the time when the brambles are big and the rose hips are ripe, and farmers go out to gather back in what they’d taken such trouble to scatter.
It’s part of the rhythmic annual liturgy of the land. Gathering what’s been scattered – and rejoicing in the increase. And what’s true in the way God has ordered His world is as true in the work of the gospel. We go out bearing ‘seed’ to be sown in the souls of neighbours and friends: and then we return, bearing with us the ‘sheaves’ which the seed, by God’s grace, has become.
The analogy is God’s, not mine … though I’m happy to use it, since the words of the psalm which express it so well have inspired and encouraged my heart since the day they were first impressed on my heart by the Lord.
“Those who sow in tears will reap with songs of joy. He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him” [Ps.126.5-6].
I had tears in my eyes when I first read those words: tears of sadness, despair and frustration through a sense of just how unworthy, inept and unsuited I was for all I’d been called to by Christ. These words from the psalm were as an oasis in the desert, like a beam of light shining into the darkness and distress of the pit of my own inadequacy.
They were a promise. A promise whose truth was paraded before my watching eyes in the cycle of the seasons and the sequence of the farmer’s world.
But they were more than a promise. I saw they simply recognized an elemental pattern in the way God works. He gathers, and scatters, then gathers again. This rhythmic annual liturgy of the land was a prism, I saw, through which we mortals with our ever so limited vision, could nonetheless grasp the whole grand purpose of Almighty God throughout eternity: He gathers, then scatters, then gathers again.
This, I saw, was the essence of the ebb and flow of history: this, I saw, explained the five great ‘acts’ in the drama of salvation which the Bible itself sets forth.
Gathered at creation: scattered by sin: gathered again at the cross of our Saviour, right at the cross-roads of history: then scattered once more by the Spirit: and gathered at last and for good in the glory of that final, lasting, joy-filled ‘harvest home’.
And what really struck home as I pondered this all was that no matter just where you might look in the course of this ‘large canvas’ flow, each part of the story you chose to inspect had this same basic pattern shot through it, like some sort of heavenly ‘trademark’. Gathered, then scattered, then gathered again.
The rhythmic sort of lifestyle of the countryside. And for this young man who had dreamed as a boy that he’d end up being a farmer, well, it pleased my heart no end to find that the Lord Himself was actually a ‘farmer’: or at least that the farmers were taking their cue from Him.
How does the Bible begin if not with the Lord’s trademark ‘gathering’? “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place ..” [Gen.1.9]. And so it goes on, as the great Creator gets to grips with the disordered mess of His formless ‘raw materials’, sorts them all out by separating out what is different, and by gathering together those things .. well, all that belongs together: like some hard-working parent intent on creating some order from the chaos of her children’s cluttered playroom: dolls in one place, the thousand and one bits of Lego all back in their own special box, soft toys here, all the puzzles there, and so on. Gathering, gathering.
And than, having wonderfully gathered the dust of the earth and breathed that into the wholeness of a brand new humanity – well, the next thing He does is scatter this ‘gathered’ humanity. His first words to this newly formed, and marvelously gathered humanity? “Be fruitful, and increase in number .. (that’s harmless enough! But look at what follows!) … fill the earth and subdue it…”
Dear me! No sooner gathered and enjoying the pleasures of the garden prepared for their living than their Maker is telling them – ‘Off you go, spread yourselves out through the earth and do yourselves what I have been doing for you…’
Every parent knows the drill. You step into the chaos and gather up and tidy away all the toys: but it isn’t for tidiness’ sake you gather them up: it’s to ensure they’ll be played with again, and more easily and fully enjoyed. You know they’re going to get ‘scattered’ all over again, indeed, you mean them to be scattered, that’s why you gathered them up.
God doesn’t suffer from some cosmic sort of OCD. That’s not why He gathers. It’s with a view to scattering, filling the earth with His well-ordered freedom and the serious fun of heaven.
And the striking thing is that all the way through the Scriptures this is the pattern you find.
Take the time of Noah. The ‘playroom’ of the world back then had become a bit of a bombsite: a mess, a tip, sheer chaos. Almost back to where we started in Genesis 1:2 – formless (disordered, chaotic), empty, and dark (morally anyway, and that’s the worst sort of darkness always).
So the Lord is back to His ‘gathering’, isn’t He, and Noah’s job is to bring them all in to the ark, ‘two of all living creatures, male and female’ (Gen.6.19), while the earth gets a thorough ‘spring-clean’.
Gathered. But then, just a matter of months down the line, they’re being ‘scattered’ all over again. Out they all came, off they all went, and the mandate from God once again – “Be fruitful and increase in number..” Back to filling the earth to its furthest corners.
Gathered, then scattered. It’s the rhythm which the Lord then writes into the life of the people of Israel. Spread out north and south through the land of ancient Canaan, they’re first gathered, then scattered on a regular, lasting basis.
Gathered each week where they are (the weekly Sabbath was far from being just a day of rest, as though simply downing your tools and stopping your work for a day was the be-all-and-end-all of the thing – the ‘rest’ for God’s people lay emphatically in their being careful to come together, to be gathered), and then scattered once more to get on with the business of God’s kingdom, out in the dust and dirt of their fields, or wherever it was that their energies best got applied.
And gathered, three times every year, on a much larger scale, all of these local ‘community groups’, as they all descended on the big central venue of Jerusalem; before, of course, being then scattered back across the land to bring the light of the knowledge of the God they had known to the farthest, darkest corners of the land.
He who goes out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him. It’s a pattern, you see, not just a rich and lovely promise.
And, of course, that pattern is nowhere better evidenced than in the cross of the Saviour Himself. It’s at the feast of the Passover, when the whole of Israel converged on the city of Jerusalem, when the city was filled to overflowing with a people who’ve been gathered from all the farthest corners of the land – it’s at that great annual ‘gathering’ that the Son of God is crucified.
And His understanding of what He’s accomplishing there? Well, this is how He puts it – I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself (John 12.32).
That’s what happened, isn’t it? A people previously scattered are marvelously gathered together. Read on into Acts and there you see it in the opening two chapters of the book. The mixed, disheveled bunch of His disciples are all gathered in one place (that’s miracle enough): and as the Spirit comes upon them all, a larger crowd is gathered, men and women, ‘from every nation under heaven’, sucked in by the wind of the Spirit, until at last there are thousands and thousands being gathered together to share the new and common life of the people of God.
But you’ve hardly had time to draw breath and to marvel at the miracle, than the Lord is back to scattering them all. “Go” becomes the operative word. ‘Go and make disciples of all nations… you will be My witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth..’ And He makes sure they are just that.
There’s a sense in which the simple visual emblem of the cross depicts this rhythm as well as anything. The four corners of the earth converging on the centre – the centripetal power of the Spirit of Almighty God: but at the same time the four points of the compass, north, south, east and west, to which the people of God are sent out – the Spirit of God in centrifugal mode.
It’s the story of the lifeblood of our living as the people of God, pumped out from the heart with the oxygen of the kingdom, scattered to the farthest corners of the body; then returning, drawn back to the heart. The rhythm of the kingdom. Gathered and scattered, gathered and scattered.
Why do I labour the point? Because of who and what we are as a fellowship, and because of some of the tensions with which we, therefore, have to wrestle. We’re intrinsically a ‘gathered’ congregation (although that’s a bit like speaking of a round circle!) which deliberately ‘scatters’ her people to their own localities to do the business of the kingdom there.
And precisely because we’re scattered geographically, and yet choose to ‘gather’ to a central point which isn’t all that ‘local’ in the main, this ‘rhythm’ in our corporate life is both thrown into sharper relief, and is all the more important we get right. For a people who are manifestly ‘scattered’, what we do when we’re gathered by God assumes a huge significance. And that’s what I’ll aim to pick up on next month!
When the people of God get this right, then this rhythm becomes the heartbeat of heaven, the breathing of the Spirit of God, whereby life is imparted, lives are renewed, and the purpose of God is fulfilled. Which is surely what we yearn for!
Yours in Christ’s service
Jeremy Middleton