Romans 4:4-5 (The Message)
If you’re a hard worker and do a good job, you deserve your pay; we don’t call your wages a gift. But if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—something you could never do it for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God, by God. This is sheer gift.
It’s Labor Day weekend – Yay! Some of us here work and some of us are retired – after having worked for a long time. I imagine that most of us have worked at a variety of different jobs in our lifetimes. I myself have labored as a file clerk, a darkroom technician, an accountant, a waitress, a seamstress and a professional quilter, a salesperson in a retail store, a marketing manger, a proof-reader, an administrative assistant, an educator, and a public relations coordinator.
I have worked for others, run my own business, and directed a large educational program with an extensive staff of volunteers under my direction. And for the past 18 years, I have been a church pastor.
Those are the paid jobs at which I have labored - but that list doesn’t give all the work that I have done, because I have also raised a family, studied and learned how to feed that family through some very lean times, volunteered at schools, been a student myself, counseled addicts and alcoholics for several years, and made music in many, many different settings – for none of which was I ever paid a penny.
Work or Labor? Looked at from one direction they are the same thing – we often tend to use the two words interchangeably. But if we use the biblical meanings of those two words – as we sometimes do to make a point, as I’m doing today – we find that labor is what we do for hire – the thing we do in order to pay the bills. Work on the other hand is all those things we do as our part in building up the kingdom of God. Even St. Paul made a point of the fact that he labored as a tentmaker in order to pay his own way, while I don’t think there is any doubt that his work was evangelization – telling the world about Jesus and the grace of God.
Work is when we are in the process of exercising our heart’s deepest desire – or in Frederick Buechner’s words, that place where our own deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.
The lucky few find a way to make their labor and their work be the same thing but for most of us there often is no obvious connection. All the same, that largely depends on how we approach our necessary labor. In my own case, on the one hand, I am lucky enough to be paid for doing the work I love right here in this church - this is the work that fulfills me. However, I’m not paid enough here to make this my only income and so I also labor at selling office supplies – hardly the stuff of my heart’s deepest desire.
I sit in a small cramped office and try to think and create marketing materials, working through through constant interruptions and often unreasonable demands. And though I try, I simply cannot convince myself that my choice of roller-ball over fiber-tip pen makes a difference in the greater world out there. But even so, there are choices I can make here that DO matter.
I can respond with courtesy to a customer who is not being courteous to me, refusing to repay ugly with more ugliness. I can put aside the work I’m doing – even if it’s a rush job – to take a few minutes to listen to a co-worker who, it is obvious, just really needs someone to listen to them right that very moment. I can refuse to participate in gossip about a person we all know – tempting though it may be. I can face an often boring job with all the grace I can muster and make the best of it I can.
Now, simply because I use my own experiences for my examples do not run away with the idea that I am offering myself as any kind of perfect model here. Far, far from it. This is more what, lying in bed at night reviewing the day, I wish I had done. I get tired and frustrated, and no more than anyone else, do I enjoy having to put up with rudeness. I use myself simply because I am the example I know best.
Besides the things I’ve mentioned here, there is a major difference between work and labor. When we labor, it often lands and stays right on our shoulders. We are given a task and expected to do it. Period. No performance, no pay.
The first requirement of our work, however, is to recognize that we cannot possibly do it all alone. In the words of Paul as given in our reading today:
I have worked for others, run my own business, and directed a large educational program with an extensive staff of volunteers under my direction. And for the past 18 years, I have been a church pastor.
Those are the paid jobs at which I have labored - but that list doesn’t give all the work that I have done, because I have also raised a family, studied and learned how to feed that family through some very lean times, volunteered at schools, been a student myself, counseled addicts and alcoholics for several years, and made music in many, many different settings – for none of which was I ever paid a penny.
Work or Labor? Looked at from one direction they are the same thing – we often tend to use the two words interchangeably. But if we use the biblical meanings of those two words – as we sometimes do to make a point, as I’m doing today – we find that labor is what we do for hire – the thing we do in order to pay the bills. Work on the other hand is all those things we do as our part in building up the kingdom of God. Even St. Paul made a point of the fact that he labored as a tentmaker in order to pay his own way, while I don’t think there is any doubt that his work was evangelization – telling the world about Jesus and the grace of God.
Work is when we are in the process of exercising our heart’s deepest desire – or in Frederick Buechner’s words, that place where our own deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.
The lucky few find a way to make their labor and their work be the same thing but for most of us there often is no obvious connection. All the same, that largely depends on how we approach our necessary labor. In my own case, on the one hand, I am lucky enough to be paid for doing the work I love right here in this church - this is the work that fulfills me. However, I’m not paid enough here to make this my only income and so I also labor at selling office supplies – hardly the stuff of my heart’s deepest desire.
I sit in a small cramped office and try to think and create marketing materials, working through through constant interruptions and often unreasonable demands. And though I try, I simply cannot convince myself that my choice of roller-ball over fiber-tip pen makes a difference in the greater world out there. But even so, there are choices I can make here that DO matter.
I can respond with courtesy to a customer who is not being courteous to me, refusing to repay ugly with more ugliness. I can put aside the work I’m doing – even if it’s a rush job – to take a few minutes to listen to a co-worker who, it is obvious, just really needs someone to listen to them right that very moment. I can refuse to participate in gossip about a person we all know – tempting though it may be. I can face an often boring job with all the grace I can muster and make the best of it I can.
Now, simply because I use my own experiences for my examples do not run away with the idea that I am offering myself as any kind of perfect model here. Far, far from it. This is more what, lying in bed at night reviewing the day, I wish I had done. I get tired and frustrated, and no more than anyone else, do I enjoy having to put up with rudeness. I use myself simply because I am the example I know best.
Besides the things I’ve mentioned here, there is a major difference between work and labor. When we labor, it often lands and stays right on our shoulders. We are given a task and expected to do it. Period. No performance, no pay.
The first requirement of our work, however, is to recognize that we cannot possibly do it all alone. In the words of Paul as given in our reading today:
...if you see that the job is too big for you, that it’s something only God can do, and you trust him to do it—something you could never do for yourself no matter how hard and long you worked—well, that trusting-him-to-do-it is what gets you set right with God...
God never expects us to do our work alone.
The second thing to remember is that we CAN change our labor into our work if we learn to approach it with the mind and heart of Jesus. In the words of an old Franciscan prayer:
The second thing to remember is that we CAN change our labor into our work if we learn to approach it with the mind and heart of Jesus. In the words of an old Franciscan prayer:
Blessed is he who loves and does not therefore desire to be loved;
blessed is he who fears and does not therefore desire to be feared;
blessed is he who serves and does not therefore desire to be served;
and blessed he who behaves well toward others and does not desire that others behave well toward him.
This – this willingness to do our labor with grace and to do our work without expectation of payment in return except the knowledge that in so doing we are pleasing God – this, again in Paul’s words, is sheer gift.
Blessings on your work AND your labor. And blessings on your resting this holiday weekend – all is holy.
Blessings on your work AND your labor. And blessings on your resting this holiday weekend – all is holy.
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