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Most of the world observes May 1st as Labor Day, but not us.
The September date was chosen way back when because it was
halfway between the 4th of July and Thanksgiving. September 5,
1882 saw the first American Labor Day parade. It was held in New
York City with 20,000 participants carrying banners calling for 8
hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for recreation. Samuel
Gompers, the founder and longtime president of the American
Federation of Labor said of Labor Day it "...differs in every
essential from the other holidays of the year in any country.
All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with
conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and
discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation
over another. Labor Day...is devoted to no man, living or dead,
to no sect, race, or nation."(1)
OK. But, to be honest, contrary to Mr. Gompers, our
national Labor Day observance DID grow out of a conflict. Let me
tell you a story...a true one. Are you familiar with the name
George Pullman?(2) His company made the sleeping cars for the
railroads, the "Pullman Car." In 1880, George designed and built
a town near Chicago - Pullman, Illinois - to provide a community
for his workers that would be protected from the seductions of
the big city. The town was strictly organized: row houses for
the assembly and craft workers; modest Victorians for the
managers; and a luxurious hotel where Pullman himself lived and
where visiting customers, suppliers, and salesman would stay
while they were in town. The residents all worked for the
Pullman company, their paychecks drawn from Pullman bank, with
their rent, set by Pullman, deducted automatically from their
weekly wages. The town, and the company, operated smoothly and
successfully for more than a decade.
But in 1893, the Pullman company was caught in the economic
depression that gripped the entire nation. Orders for railroad
sleeping cars declined, and George Pullman was forced to lay off
hundreds of employees. Those who remained had to take pay cuts,
even while their rents in Pullman-owned homes stayed at previous
rates. So the employees walked out, demanding lower rents and
higher wages.
The American Railway Union, led by a fiery young socialist
named Eugene V. Debs, came to the cause of the strikers, and
railroad workers across the nation boycotted trains carrying
Pullman cars. Rioting, looting, and burning of railroad cars
soon ensued; mobs of non-union workers joined in. The strike
instantly became a national issue. President Grover Cleveland,
faced with nervous railroad executives and interrupted mail
trains, declared the work stoppage a federal crime and deployed
12,000 troops to break the strike. Violence erupted, and two men
were killed when US deputy marshals fired on protesters near
Chicago. Finally, on August 3, 1894, the strike was declared
over. Debs went to prison, his union was disbanded, and Pullman
employees signed a pledge that they would never again unionize.
As you can imagine, Labor was not happy. Protests against
President Cleveland's harsh methods made the appeasement of the
nation's workers a top political priority; after all, 1894 was an
election year. In the immediate wake of the strike, legislation
was rushed through both houses of Congress, and the bill arrived
on President Cleveland's desk just six days after his troops had
broken the Pullman strike. The President seized the chance for
conciliation, and Labor Day was born. The ploy did not work - he
was not reelected. In a final irony, ever since then, Labor Day
has been seen as the unofficial start of the campaign season.
A century has passed. The American Labor movement is not
what it once was. These days less than 15% of American workers
belong to unions, down from a high of nearly 50% in the 1950's.
Now Labor Day is seen by most folks as the last long weekend of
summer, the day to celebrate work by not working.
Let me ask you a question. From a biblical perspective -
and that would be an appropriate perspective here in this
sanctuary - from a biblical perspective, is work something to
celebrate? The answer is ambivalent.
The first encounter we have with work in scripture is the
story of creation in Genesis. God made everything, including us,
then, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of
Eden to till it and keep it."(3) From the beginning, we had
employment. Good, so far. But the next mention we get of work
is only a chapter later; it comes after Adam and Eve have eaten
the forbidden fruit and been found out:
Suddenly, work is not so attractive anymore. I know you
recognized our Old Testament lesson from Deuteronomy as part of
one of the readings of the Ten Commandments. You heard the
fourth commandment which establishes a day of rest, a sabbath.
The rationale cited is the memory of all the unrelenting hard
work that was endured during the centuries of slavery in Egypt.
Unrelenting hard work is not good.
Sabbath observance to this very day serves as the
distinctive mark of the Jewish people that separates them from
Gentiles and presents a testimony to their faith. In times of
duress, faithful Israelites would rather die than break God's law
by profaning the sabbath. To observant Jews, the sabbath has been a
joy, not a burden, a festive day of rest from labor, a day of
eating and drinking on which it was forbidden to fast, a day of
justice as servants and slaves received a much-needed rest of
which they could not be deprived, a day for the poor and hungry
to be fed.(5)
By the time we get to the New Testament, we find that this
sabbath had become more than just a day of rest from work, but
was now most holy ritual. Because it was so special, rules and
regulations had grown up around it. Thirty-nine basic actions
were forbidden on the sabbath - sowing, plowing, reaping,
threshing, grinding, baking, shearing, washing, weaving, tying
and untying, trapping, slaughtering, bearing a burden, building
or tearing a building down, starting a fire, stopping a fire,
hitting with a hammer, and so on and so on.
Wearing shoes with nails in them on the sabbath was
prohibited, because in the view of the religious authorities, the
nails in the shoes were a "burden" and since carrying a burden
was work, this would be verboten. Even walking through grass was
not allowed, because some of the grass might be bent and broken,
which constituted threshing. The religious leaders taught that,
if a house caught on fire on the sabbath, its inhabitants could
not carry their clothes out of the house to spare them from the
flames, because that would be bearing a burden. However, they
were allowed to put on all the layers of clothing they could wear
and thus remove the clothes by wearing them, which was
acceptable. Hmm.
The story we encountered in Matthew's gospel is reflective
of the custom. Jesus and his friends were apparently walking
along one of the narrow strips used as a right-of-way between the
cornfields. As they walked, some stomachs must have begun to
growl, so famished folks reached over and did what was OK most
days - plucked off an ear or two of corn, rubbed the kernels in
their hands, and ate them raw. Perfectly acceptable. In fact,
the Law expressly said that the hungry traveler was entitled to
do just what the disciples were doing, so long as only hands were
used in the plucking, not a sickle.(6)
But this was a sabbath day. Big problem. By plucking the
corn the disciples were guilty of reaping; by rubbing it in their
hands they were guilty of threshing; by separating the edible
from the inedible they were guilty of winnowing; and by the whole
process they were guilty of preparing a meal on the sabbath day,
for everything which was to be eaten on the sabbath had to be
prepared the day before.(7) Guilty, guilty, guilty, said the
Pharisees.
Jesus said no. He recalled the action of David on the
occasion when he and his young cohorts were so hungry that they
went into the tabernacle and ate the shewbread which only the
priests were allowed to eat.(8) He noted the sabbath work of the
Temple and the ritual there which always involved work - the
kindling of fires, the slaughter and the preparation of animals,
lifting them on the altar, and a host of other things - WORK for
the priests, but apparently acceptable in God's eyes. Finally,
he noted God's word to the prophet Hosea: "I desire mercy and not
sacrifice,"(9) the point being that if the Temple sacrifice is OK
(and all agreed that it was), how much MORE OK is a merciful
provision of food for hungry travelers. In a parallel passage we
hear Jesus say those familiar words that we learned in the
language of the King James Version: "The sabbath was made for
man, not man for the sabbath."(10)
So, where does that leave us in our search for a biblical
understanding of work? AMBIVALENT. Some good, some not so good.
We have no record that Jesus ever worked or urged anyone else to
do so. In fact, when Jesus invited people to follow him, they
QUIT their jobs as fishermen or tax collectors or whatever to
join in the entourage. Some still do that even today.
Not everyone, of course. No problem there - people can
still be dedicated Christians in any kind of occupation. That
was the special insistence of the protestant reformers who
pressed the position that one need not be a priest or a nun to do
God's work, but all those who did their own honest work well, no
matter what that work might be, were being equally faithful.
They called it "the sanctity of common life."
So saying, while honest work may be a good gift of God, that
gift (just as any gift) can be abused. Remember those signs
people carried in the Labor day parades a hundred years ago
calling for 8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, 8 hours for
recreation? We got that. 1938 - The Fair Labor Standards Act.
Then we began to hear that the work week could shrink even
further - 35 hours, even 30. John Maynard Keynes, this century's
most influential economist, parodied the gospel in expecting his
grandchildren to be like "the lilies of the field, who toil not,
nor spin."(11)
That never came, and, in fact, nowadays we seem to be going
in the opposite direction. All the so-called labor-saving
devices - fax machines, cellular phones, e-mail, laptop
computers, and so on - do not free us from the workplace, they
simply allow our workplace to follow us everywhere. And we
contentedly go along (and you know very well that I am as guilty
as anyone). The result is a work week that, according to
projections, will be as long at the beginning of the new
millennium as it was in the 1920's.(12) Not good.
Years ago, the irrepressible May West said, "Too much of a
good thing is...wonderful." Yes, work is God's good gift, but
too much of it is NOT wonderful. Furthermore, our work's
relationship to materialism and accumulation of goods is another
cause for concern. The Bible is rather relentless in its attack
upon the rich. Never in scripture are the poor blamed for their
poverty. It is the rich, those who work and accumulate, who are
in big trouble. The message writ large is BE CAREFUL.
Sometime back I ran across a magazine article with the
intriguing title, "If God Isn't a Workaholic Maybe We Shouldn't
Be."(13) The author noted our Presbyterian penchant for busyness -
the compulsion to work is in our blood, injected there by John
Calvin himself. But note was also made of the cycle of work and
rest built into creation, and then two questions were asked.
What if God would like us all to take more time out for playing?
What if God takes time out to have some fun?
"Imagine it: God has finished creating the skies and seas,
and the animals of the fields and forests, and the birds and
fishes and ants and bees and cockroaches, and people. Then God
says, 'I just don't feel like working today. Believe I will have
some fun.' So that is what God did...had some fun. And having
fun, created a number of things that are fun:
"It may even be that God created Presbyterians for fun.
Except that like some of God's other good creations, they began
to take themselves so seriously that they mostly were no fun to
God and in fact were so serious that the very thought of fun made
them nervous. It may have been much the same with Congress, and
assistant managers. You could add many more categories to the
list."
Here then is our theology of work. God gave it to us as a
gift, and certainly we hard-driving Presbyterians do our share.
But God also gave us gifts like baseball and monkeys and Autumn
and other things that are called fun. ENJOY THEM, and glorify
God in the process...especially on a holiday called Labor Day.
Amen!
1. Quoted by Samuel Trumbore, http://www.cyberstreet.com/trumbore/sermons/s891.htm 2. Historical background courtesy of the Online Newshour,
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/september96/labor_day_9-2.html 3. Genesis 2:15 4. Genesis 3:16-19a 5. M. Eugene Boring, "The Gospel of Matthew," The New Interpreter's Bible, CD-ROM,
(Nashville: Abingdon, 1998) 6. Deuteronomy 23:25 7. William Barclay, The Daily Study Bible, CD-ROM edition (Liguori, MO: Liguori
Faithware, 1996) used by permission of Westminster/John Knox Press 8. 1 Samuel 21:1-6 9. Hosea 6:6 10. Mark 2:27 11. Peter Marshall, "Living Like Gerbils," Christianity Today, 4/27/92, p. 15 12. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American: the Unexpected Decline of Leisure, (New
York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 1 13. Vic Jameson, Presbyterian Survey, 9/90, p. 2
To the woman [God] 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. 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; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for
you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the
sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return
to the ground...(4)
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