Weekly Sermons

 

Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for people, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward.  It is the Lord Christ you are serving.         Colossians 3:23,24

 

His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.       II Peter 1:3

 

 

After I graduated from high school, I worked for five summers in between college years for a natural gas pipeline booster station near my hometown.  They hired a few summer workers each year to enable them to keep the grass mowed on their huge grounds, and to do lots of sandblasting and painting of big pipes and valves leading to and from the building which housed the massive engines that propelled the gas onward.  The station foreman occasionally assigned us summer workers to work indoors assisting the permanent guys who were overhauling one of the engines, or to keep the oil mopped off the concrete floors of the football field-sized building.  The 25-person crew got our assignments at 8 AM each day in the lunchroom, then headed out to begin work.  We got 15-minute breaks back in the lunchroom  at mid-morning and mid-afternoon (which became more like 25 minutes with walking time) and a half-hour lunch break at Noon.  The shift ended at 4:30 PM, meaning that actual work usually ended soon after 4 as the guys put things away and headed to the locker room to clean up.  They were all sitting in their cars at 4:30 PM like the start of the Indy 500, ready to fire up their engines and head for home.

 

Those work hours and break times were all specified in the contract negotiated between the corporation and the labor union to which those permanent employees belonged.  We non-union summer workers were expected to adhere to the conditions of that contract (and were protected by it, too).  I tried to do the work I was assigned and not rock the boat, but my personal work ethic made me think that the company wasn’t always getting the seven and a half hours of actual work for which it was paying the best wages in town to all those guys.  I don’t recall that the mild-mannered salaried foreman ever reprimanding any of the hourly workers for taking extra-long breaks.  That might be because he knew what usually happened with the field crews who left in trucks each morning at 8:15 AM to do safety checks, maintenance, and repairs on many miles of pipeline running through that part of Kansas.  A friend who worked in field crews told me that the drivers with whom he rode had secluded spots where they parked their truck in the shade for 90-minute lunch and nap breaks on many days.  If the foreman tried to change the lax “system” that had developed and was tolerated over many years, the company would end up in a dispute with the union, and they obviously had decided it wasn’t worth that.

 

Each day I went to work at the booster station, I was required to wear steel-toed boots which the company made available to employees at a price far below retail.  Before leaving the locker room to begin work, we all had to be wearing the hardhat and earplugs the company provided at no cost.  The equipment we used each day had the latest safety switches and features to prevent injury to the operator, and there were printed safety procedures posted everywhere in the plant and vehicles.  All that was in place because sometime in the past, someone working in a similar situation without those safety measures had been harmed.  That ended up costing the company money and prompted the labor union to demand and negotiate safer working conditions.  I was always thankful for the safety precautions provided, and for five college summers getting to be well-paid to work in a potentially dangerous environment without being injured.

 

Labor Day is a good time to reflect upon the importance, privilege, and dignity of work and workers.  Labor Day came about at the height of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s as manufacturing steadily replaced agriculture as the main source of employment.  People often worked twelve hours per day, sometimes seven days per week, in unsafe, unsanitary factories and mines for subsistence wages and no added benefits.  Children as young as age 6 were put to work in factories and paid almost nothing.  Workers were considered expendable.  If any got injured on the job, they were dismissed and others eager for employment stepped in.  The wealth accumulated by the few industrialists and financiers who controlled the means of production led to the Gilded Age (1870-1900) of a small group of privileged, powerful people running a world filled by masses of barely-surviving workers. 
             Labor movements and strikes sprang up in Europe and spread to the US to protest the poor treatment of laborers.  Workers got organized and held the first Labor Day protest march in New York City on September 5, 1882, with 10,000 people walking off their jobs to demand higher wages, shorter workdays, safer workplaces, and days off.  Labor Day celebrations were held in several states on May 1 for the next twelve years as part of International Workers’ Day.  In 1886, a labor march in Chicago turned into the violent Haymarket Riot and resulted in the deaths of several workers and policemen.  In May 1894, Pullman rail car manufacturing workers went on strike in Chicago over wage cuts and disrespect of their local union.  A month later, the national rail workers union began a boycott of using that company’s rail cars, badly disrupting rail travel nationwide and again leading to deadly riots in Chicago.  Just two days later, Congress and Pres. Grover Cleveland made Labor Day an annual federal holiday in acknowledgment of the need for better balance between business and labor.  Labor Day was set on the first Monday of September in order to distinguish it from the May 1 celebrations promoted in countries moving towards communist political systems.
 
The More Things Change….    The press reported this week that 12.6 million Americans would take to the skies for Labor Day weekend trips.  Timed for maximum impact over the busy travel holiday, the airline pilots’ union picketed at 13 major US airports on Thursday to demand higher wages and (unspecified) improved working conditions.  The union’s spokespersons assured reporters that the picketing pilots and flight crew members were off duty and not causing flight cancelations.  One can’t help being somewhat skeptical about that claim after this summer’s record number of canceled flights, usually blamed on bad weather but also related to pandemic schedule cuts and crew layoffs.  In Indianapolis, journalists demonstrated over similar demands and concerns late this week at the offices of a national news service where digital publishing and other technological changes have displaced many workers.  After sixty years of almost unchecked growth in the power of big business, the steady weakening of labor unions, and the rapid widening of the wealth and income gap in our society to Gilded Age levels, there are plenty of other industries facing similar stresses and tensions in 2022.  Workers seem to have the upper hand at the moment due to high post-pandemic demand for goods, but that pendulum will swing back before long.  The external circumstances may change over the decades, but human self-interest rarely does.  It really does seem that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

 

“Quiet Quitting”     Into that current reality comes the new social media-fueled phenomenon of “quiet quitting.”  Its proponents say that it means rebalancing one’s life to no longer allow a job to dominate your existence, avoiding any job-related activity outside working hours, and instead filling your after-hours life with enjoyable, completely unrelated things.  On its face, that doesn’t sound all bad.  In real life, they say it means declining to do anything more than is required by your job description or remunerated in your paycheck, and never working extra hours or taking on extra work assignments.  One proponent termed it “taking care of yourself, carefully coasting, rejecting the ‘hustle culture’ of chasing ever-greater income.”  Its critics see it as slacking, as ceasing to care about one’s work, employer, or coworkers.  I see some truth on both sides – Christian simplicity certainly calls us to reject “hustle culture” — but I also see “quiet quitting” being lived out as one more expression of our currently self-focused, self-obsessed culture.

 

Clashing Cultures     It has long been my conviction that God’s calling for the Church is to reveal the resurrected Jesus to the unknowing world by letting his Spirit fully live within us.  We are called to accomplish that by first striving to know Christ as deeply as possible (a) through our inner life of contemplation and prayer; (b) through our study of his character and principles for life as described in the Bible; and (c) through our fellowship with others who genuinely are seeking to know him too.  Knowing Christ like that is the key to being able to be like him, to “follow in his steps” (I Peter 2:21).   Then we can joyfully, authentically tell and show others the difference knowing him has made in our lives.  In answering that calling to make Jesus known, we will challenge and hopefully help redirect “the kingdom of this world” toward “the Kingdom of our Lord, and of his Christ” (Revelation 11:15).  We are called to challenge and influence the world’s dominant culture towards the Way of Jesus.  That Way is the way of humility, of servanthood, of sacrificial love, of dying to selfishness and trusting the Lord to care for our needs while we offer his care to those around us.   Unfortunately, it feels most of the time as though that challenging and influencing is going in the opposite direction. 

 

Adversarial Competition vs. Mutual Well-being     It is absolutely essential that Jesus’ followers are grounded in the life and ways of his Kingdom, and that they evaluate and respond to the lesser kingdoms of this world with the Kingdom of God as the standard and measure, not the other way around.  The systems of this world are set up as adversarial.  People go into courts of law with winning their case, not discovering the truth, as their highest goal.  Employees negotiate with bosses to get the most wages and benefits for the least commitment of time and effort, and they suggest they’ll quit or look elsewhere if they don’t get it.  Employers negotiate with workers in the same way, looking to get the most work out of them for the least wages and benefits possible.  “Quiet quitters” show up to get a paycheck but have no real investment in the customers who need the product, in relationships with coworkers, nor in the success or well-being of the company.  That makes it pretty easy for them eventually to just stop showing up.
             In contrast, the Kingdom of God is a relationship of mutual well-being.  Trying to bring those adversarial ways into friendship with the Lord is fatal to one’s spiritual life and harmful to his Church.  There is no negotiating with God – he has already given us everything in giving us his Son, and the only appropriate response to that gift is to give him all of ourselves, nothing held back (I Cor. 6:19,20).  His goal for you is to provide you a meaningful, joyful, purposeful earthly life until he welcomes you into his presence for eternity.  Those who accept the gift of his redemption and his Spirit’s indwelling presence become fully invested in the purposes and success of his Kingdom.  They acknowledge that their time, their skills, their families and other relationships, their job, their possessions, and every other detail of their lives belong to God and are to become avenues for witness and ministry as the Spirit leads to opportunities.  If something we are doing is not compatible with a life of witness and ministry for Christ, we choose to stop doing it.  We have no business calling him Lord if we’ve not put him fully in charge of everything (Luke 6:46).

 

At that pipeline booster station and at other jobs I’ve had, I sometimes heard people say, “it’s good enough for government work” to excuse a shoddy or incomplete task.  They obviously didn’t think about the fact that we all are the government, and they were hurting themselves.  On this Labor Day weekend, I pray that none of us will ever have that attitude about our work for the Lord.  I pray that we will be thankful for our jobs (or the jobs we had in our working years), for the lives and opportunities they’ve made possible for us, and for the work of others who’ve helped and blessed us.  And I pray that we all will be fully invested in the well-being of God’s Kingdom, giving our best in all we do, for as long as he gives us breath. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1)  When was a time that your daily job afforded you an opportunity for meaningful ministry to someone?

2)  In what ways have you seen today’s secular culture influencing the Body of Christ negatively or harmfully?

3)  What is the best way to find a faithful balance between remunerative work, rest, and soul-nurturing activities?

4)  How might “quiet quitting” as described above be done with spiritual integrity?