I went straight from college to seminary, and even after seminary went and did another degree before I finally began to earn a paycheck from a church. (To be clear, I'd worked since I was sixteen, but not full time.) I thought that I was about to begin to work for a living. But my grandfather made it known that if it wasn’t manual labor it wasn’t really work. By his definition, it wasn’t work if you didn’t sweat doing it! In fact, he said he was glad I’d gone to college and seminary, because that meant I would never have to “work” for a living!
Tone is very difficult to capture in a blog post. I want to be clear that he wasn't saying any of this to be mean. In fact, just the opposite, he was proud of me and all of his grandchildren and glad I wouldn't be braving the hard winter nights by climbing telephone poles. The writer of the first reading appointed for Labor Day from Ecclesiasticus had a similar worldview to Ernie Simpson. That writer sees work as making things and celebrates the artisan, the smith with “the breath of fire melting his flesh," the potter and so forth. I'm sure he'd celebrate the guy who works for the power and light company as well.
Labor Day emerged in the nineteenth century through the labor movement to honor this kind of work. But it can also be an occasion to think more deeply about the meaning of our work, the work that God has given us to do. In our culture we tie work and it's meaning to salary and all of us, unless we have trust funds, need to work to put bread on our tables. But the Christian notion of vocation is not tied to salary nor limited to what we do with our hands. A person who makes furniture, whether for “a living” or for pleasure, is doing work. But so, too, is a person who teaches, whether for a salary or as a volunteer for the Sunday school. Work includes practicing law or medicine, business and insurance and banking. But it also includes parenting, “working” on a relationship, coaching a soccer team or teaching someone to play the piano.
One of the more negative connotations we received from our Puritan forebears is that there is a tendency to think that if we’re having fun doing it it must not be work! Unfortunately far too many people are in jobs they find demeaning or degrading or boring. But most of us long for more: to make a difference, to achieve something of lasting value, to do a job well and honestly.
Defined in this way, our work is simply about using the gifts that God has given us to make a difference in this world—to leave it a little better than we found it. This is what St. Paul is getting at in his letter to the early Christians in Corinth, the second reading appointed for Labor Day.
This notion of work goes all the way back to the first chapters of Genesis, where God creates humankind to tend the garden, to be (in fact) co-creators with God. That notion remains central to Jewish theology to this very day. There is in Jewish theology a sense of unfinished-ness about the world. God rested on the Sabbath but then got back to work with humankind on day eight again. God invites the faithful to join in repairing the breach and building on what has gone before, in order to make the future a little brighter. That is in fact one of the main reasons God creates humankind—in God’s own image—to share in the tending of the garden.
It’s there, to be sure, in Christian theology as well. But I wonder if our appropriate emphasis on grace (as opposed to works) doesn’t sometimes lead us toward a misunderstanding of what it means to give something back to God in thanksgiving, to use our gifts for the glory of God. The fancy theological word for this, of course, is “stewardship," although that word gets so misused that as soon as a preacher says it out loud people instinctively reach for their wallets, worried that someone is coming after their money. I’m talking about that larger context. In Christian theology there are no “self-made” people as the collect for Labor Day makes so clear: God has “so linked our lives with one another that all we do effects, for good or ill, all other lives.
The purpose of our work is not so we can drive fancier cars or live in bigger homes, but rather that we have been given gifts in order to offer something back for the “common good.” That’s what it means, I think, to talk about being stewards not only of treasure but of time and talent. What will you do with this one, wild, precious life God has given you, with the unique talents that you possess, for the sake of God’s world?
