146 Labor's Day

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Labor’s Day”, originally shared on September 6, 2021. It was the 146^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   Today is Labor Day, a day in which lots of us will be laboring around the house instead of at work, right?

   We will give less thought to what today means than to any other holiday on the calendar. Today is a holiday to celebrate and appreciate the work of those who labor. But, for Christians, every day is Labor Day. Today, we’re going to find out why.

   The idea that work has meaning is a particularly Judeo/Christian idea. It begins, though, with its opposite.

   Have you ever wondered what it would be like to do nothing at all? No stress. No work.

   To just kick back and relax with your spouse.  Just pick your food off the trees and hang out with the animals, none of which wants to eat you? Just live in universal harmony and peace?

   That’s the way the world was when God created it. God created human beings for a living relationship with God. But for their “Yes” to mean anything, God had to offer the ability to say “No”.

   The serpent lied to the woman and the woman said, “No”. The woman offered the “No” to her husband and he said, “No”.

   In other words, as it’s been pointed out, it took the devil for Eve to say “No”, but all it took for Adam to say “No” was for Eve to say, “Here Adam, eat this.”

   The people said “No” and evil entered the world as it still enters it, by people rejecting the one true living God and wanting to be their own God.

   The relationship with God was broken and, while God persistently offered ways to bring people back to that relationship without taking away their ability to say “No”, people rejected them and God’ words in the Garden defined human life. In Genesis 3:16-19 we read:

¹⁶ To the woman he said,

“I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing;
    in pain you shall bring forth children,
yet your desire shall be for your husband,
    and he shall rule over you.”

¹⁷ And to the man he said,

“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife,
    and have eaten of the tree
about which I commanded you,
    ‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
    in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
¹⁸ thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
    and you shall eat the plants of the field.
¹⁹ By the sweat of your face
    you shall eat bread
until you return to the ground,
    for out of it you were taken;
you are dust,
    and to dust you shall return.”

   Every one of those words is a sign that we are not what God created us to be.

   I’ve done that “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread” kind of work. I did “chore” kind of work when I was a child. I did what would today be regarded as grown-up work as a child, too. I sold greeting cards door-to-door when I was in about 6^th grade. I’ve worked in factories and on farms. I worked for a railroad maintaining and repairing tracks with the same hand tools that had been used for 100 years for several summers. But the hardest physical work I’ve done was the summer I worked in a concrete block production factory, the year before they automated, stacking concrete blocks in cubes all day by hand.

   But few of us break a sweat doing our work today.

   We live in a knowledge economy. Work for most people is sitting in front of a computer. The work we do is going on in our heads. This has led to a crisis for those whose families have worked with their hands and backs for generations, and for boys in particular who have traditionally done this kind of work. Who are they today? What is their purpose?

   We have to work for our living because we rejected God but tried to become like God ourselves.  Work is a part of what theologians call “The Fall” of humanity.

   That’s why Paul makes such a big deal of Jesus being about the redemption of humanity. In his letter to the church at Rome he writes, in Romans 5:12-21:

¹² Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— ¹³ sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. ¹⁴ Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.

¹⁵ But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. ¹⁶ And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. ¹⁷ If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.

¹⁸ Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. ¹⁹ For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. ²⁰ But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, ²¹ so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

  Jesus set us free from the consequences of our Sin with a capital “S”, that which separates us from a defining relationship with God. We are free from the consequences of sin, death, and the power of all the forces that defy God. We are a new Creation in a way that begins now through faith and Baptism and will be brought to perfection in the world to come.

   Work itself has been redeemed. We call it our “vocation”.

   Having a “vocation” means that we are called by God and gifted to accomplish what we have been given to do. Some people are called to be teachers, some others to lead businesses, or to work in factories, or hospitals, or be musicians, or a thousand other things. Some people are called to be pastors, but that’s just for order in the Church; it’s no higher or holier a calling than any other legitimate work.

   The most important way that we demonstrate that we are working according to our “vocation” is through excellence in our work. God has called and equipped us for it.

   As Martin Luther, the 16^th century Church reformer is said to have said (though if he didn’t say it, it’s in keeping with his beliefs) “The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship.”

   This work serves the community and the world because it serves God.

   Early in the Christian movement, we read in Acts 4:32-35:

³² Now the whole group of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. ³³ With great power the apostles gave their testimony to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great grace was upon them all. ³⁴ There was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. ³⁵ They laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.

   But apparently some challenges arose from this idyllic arrangement, and not long after, we read that the community takes another approach in 2 Thessalonians 3:10-13. Paul writes:

10 For even when we were with you, we gave you this command: Anyone unwilling to work should not eat. 11 For we hear that some of you are living in idleness, mere busybodies, not doing any work. 12 Now such persons we command and exhort in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living. 13 Brothers and sisters, do not be weary in doing what is right.

   Work is necessary in our fallen world, but it can be redeemed, as we have been redeemed, in work that serves God and our neighbor as we have been served at the cross. To work, in the Christian Community, is to do what is right. If anyone is unable to do work of any kind, then they are served by others to help them live their vocation.

   We are at a time in the pandemic when relatively high unemployment and a worker shortage are both happening at the very same time. A local restaurant typically has very slow drive-through service these days. It has a sign at its pick-up window that reads something like. “Please be patient with those did show up for work today. We are understaffed. No one wants to work anymore.”

   This is not an uncommon experience in many industries. Many reasons have been given: workers can’t afford to work in low-wage jobs and pay for childcare, workers can put together a decent-enough life with government protections, public money and private food distributions, people are afraid of getting the virus or a variant, and more. None of these is a desirable way to live. No one aspires to these conditions.

   What can we do about it?

   This Labor Day we can call for just policies and ministries for all people that lead to productive and meaningful work, work that gives the dignity of a job for all who are able to take one.

   We can pray with thanks for all those whose work makes it possible for us all, in our complex economy, to live a life that is the desire of the world, one for which people are literally dying to get here.

   And we can be grateful for work itself, through which we can be a blessing to others and so live the redeemed life of God that God has given us in our vocation. We can be thankful for the labor of Jesus, fully God and fully human being, for us on the cross.

   And we wait and we pray. We are longing for the day when the final Day will come and God’s Labor’s Day, the day when God’s work on the cross, including work itself, will be perfected and all things will be redeemed and restored to the life for which they were intended from the beginning of Creation. Amen. Come Lord Jesus.