He travels with his sister Jill, 12, and older brother Justin, 17. They're not homeless; in fact, Mom and Dad Swier organize and orchestrate their annual peregrinations.
They're custom harvesters, and they - along with many families like them, cut wheat for western farmers on a contract basis. He's only 14, but Jacob is a pro on the combine; Justin is old enough to haul grain to the elevator; Jill, along with her mother Pat, helps clean the RV campers and get the evening meals ready for the entire crew.
Custom harvesting is a job urbanites and suburbanites don't give much thought to as they push their toaster levers down to brown their bread, or when setting rigatoni to a boil. We wouldn't have toast for breakfast or pasta for dinner without custom harvesters, because it's custom harvesters who reap the wheat we eat.
It's good work, and the Swiers are a welcome sight to Western farmers with a wheat crop ready for harvest. The Swiers make it work by understanding who is capable of doing what, and assigning roles accordingly.
And therein lies an important truth for those of us who labor in the fields of the Lord. Jesus said, "The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few; therefore, ask the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest" (Matthew 9:37). Jesus is looking for some custom harvesters. There's not much worse in the kingdom than to watch a harvest ripen and rot for want of harvesters.
The experience of the Swier family, together with Jesus' remarks about the harvest provide an instructive window into the urgent task that many Christians today prefer not even to identify by name, but designate instead as simply the E-word: EVANGELISM.
Clearly, Jesus is not looking for a professional class of harvesters. He is searching for those who will answer the call and make themselves available. The Swiers are not special people. They are the salt-of-the-earth types with clean soil under their fingernails. They are part-time gypsies who, when between jobs, can be found traveling on high plains highways, in convoys of pick ups, RVs and John Deere combines.
The Swiers, like most custom harvesters, own a real home, send their kids to college and claim that rural America is a mighty friendly place to live and work.
These aren't dust bowl, Grapes of Wrath, refugees. No, sir. These are organized, mechanized, technologically adept and business-savvy moms, dads, brothers, sisters and hired hands making a respectable living out of three or four months of difficult skilled labor.
They're ordinary folk, like the rest of us, doing an extraordinary work. And if we're wondering if God wants us to work people-fields, harvesting souls, we need only to ask ourselves if we are alive and breathing. If we are, we're called. Unfortunately, when Jesus calls for disciples, he often finds that they're off in a secure and undisclosed location doing something else.
Another thing. Although the harvest in our text is "plentiful," sometimes the crop just isn't there. By the end of last summer, for example, the wheat farmers in Kansas were in big trouble. The drought was so bad that they plowed their plants and profits under. So Mom and Dad, Justin, Jacob and Jill moved on to fields that were ready.
There's no biblical warrant for the notion that the crop is supposed to come to the harvester. We don't just open the doors of the church and expect a "seeker" crop to walk through, cut, tied, bundled, winnowed, processed, baked and sliced, ready for the kingdom. If Jesus talks about seekers at all, he is talking about those who seek the harvest, whether they're ready or willing to be found or not.
The harvester goes to where the crop is and doesn't spend too much time on where the crop isn't. This is a variation of Jesus' "Evangelism-for-Idiots" comment in an earlier statement in the same chapter as our text: "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick" (9:12). He then says pointedly: "Go and learn what this means." He has a few drinks with the tax collectors, and the Board of Deacons complain. He's like: "Hello! Don't you get it!?" His exact words are: "For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." (9:13 NRSV).
The next lesson Jesus, Justin, Jacob and Jill teach us is that success happens when we concentrate on the right crop for our skill set. Choose a crop and concentrate. Some custom harvesters focus on wheat, while others choose corn, some soy, and some beets. Each has specialized and extremely expensive equipment built to harvest a single type of crop. You can't harvest a root crop like beets with a combine built to reap wheat, or vice versa. If you try, you'll fail, so there's no point. Choose a crop and concentrate.
Next, when Jesus was choosing his laborers, he made sure he was picking a combination of men who could identify a crop, who knew what tools to use, who recognized ripeness and were ready and realistic. In other words, he was into strategy. We need to know what crop, what kind of people, what demographic we're going after. Is it soy or beets?
One way to do this is to ask obvious questions, such as: Are we in a community of seniors or are we a suburb of young, busy families? Are we an aging farm community or a struggling mill town? Are our people employed or laid off? Who are we trying to reach? What is our crop? Before we laborers can harvest we need to know exactly what, or who, we will be reaping.
This is why we can't use the same pickers for all crops. Say we want to invite little old ladies from the local multilevel care facility to church on Sundays by offering a free ride service. We do not, do not give the job to a 17-year-old with jewelry spiked through navel, nostril, tongue and lobe who's also driving a custom low-rider Camaro with fat tires and a bass on his CD stereo that could send the elderly into hear attack. He may be a responsible driver, and a good kid, but one look at his car and those sweet little old ladies may never get in.
God gives each one of us special skills, too. Not everyone can pray like Peter or preach like Paul, or drive a combine, or cook food worth eating, or be able to counsel the dying, or give aid to the poor, or reach out to the elderly. If we try to use the same laborers for every job, the jobs never get done right and we are bound for failure.
Finally, custom harvesters work hard and fast. Their window of opportunity is limited. Jacob will be on the John Deere after dark with headlights flooding the field in front of him in order to get the job done. There is a sense of urgency, and we can hear it in the voice of Jesus: "The harvest is plentiful."
The need is urgent.
It's not that we don't have excuses. We're very good at plausible deniability. What God is looking for is some no-excuses harvesters who will answer the call.