Rev. Cn. Richard Hogue Jr.
I hope everyone is enjoying their Labor Day weekend. I want to meditate on this national holiday this morning. When we speak about labor in the context of the church, what do we feel, what images do we see? How do we experience labor in the light of Christ? Perhaps we imagine the saints? Or maybe we think of the work of ordinary Christians, in food pantries, homeless shelters, hospitals, schools, and of volunteers? Perhaps we imagine missionaries, or aid workers mitigating climate disasters or other catastrophes, or the people who help run our churches. Certainly all of these are Christian laborers, but Labor Day is still a secular holiday in its inception.
When I first started thinking about a sermon and wanting to focus on Labor Day I ran into a small problem: I knew that Labor Day existed, but I knew nothing of its history, when it started, why it became a holiday, anything. Well, I did a bit of research, and while I don’t want to bore you with details, I do think it’s important to briefly say why this holiday is what it is. Also, my dad is a retired union carpenter and my mom a retired union teacher, so I want to honor that.
Essentially, the roots of Labor Day were laid in 1894, when the Pullman Company, a railroad corporation, laid off workers and cut wages, but did not lower the rent of their employees, all of whom lived in the company town. The American Railroad Union called a nationwide strike, and it brought much of the railways between Detroit and Chicago to a standstill, and the strike grew to 250,000 laborers across 27 states. Eventually, President Grover Cleveland, under the advisement of a corrupt attorney general, sent in the US Marshalls and the National Guard, who went town by town breaking the strike. The ensuing violence left thirty workers dead, and fifty-seven were wounded. In an attempt to appease other laborers during an election year, President Cleveland urged congress to pass, and then he signed into law, the public holiday of Labor Day. The head of the American Federation of Labor at that time said this was “The day for which the toilers in past centuries looked forward, when their rights and their wrongs would be discussed…that the workers of our day may not only lay down their tools of labor for a holiday, but upon which they may touch shoulders in marching phalanx and feel the stronger for it.”
After I read this, it totally changed my perspective on Labor Day and the human tradition it represents. And when I reread the scriptures for today, it made them that much more meaningful for me. When I read in the letter of James that “But those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act-they will be blessed in their doing.” I hear more than just labor, I hear that doers make sacrifices. I hear people who give themselves over to whatever they are attempting to build with their own hands. I remember when my dad and I took to building our own home, how it was a long labor of love for him, painstakingly building the rafters one by one, and pounding each nail into the plywood flooring. I remember the sweat and itch of putting fiber glass in the roof and walls, and then the dryness of my skin with drywall dust. And I remember my dad, demanding exactness and detail out of every square inch. Working means our hands get dirty in some form.
In our time, more and more of our labor is drawn away from this sort of manual work. We build things in the abstract, as I imagine some of you feel at work. Even if you like your work, sometimes the fruits of your labor are less tangible. Certainly, I know this as a priest, that even as I build relationships, people move on, and whatever I had built is seemingly ephemeral. I sense that when our own St. Paul called himself a “skilled master builder” in his first letter to the Corinthians (3:10-14) in reference to his constructing Christian communities in those early days of the church, it sort of feels like he had that abstract sense like we do. I say this because the early Christians had no church building, and they were a loose network. Building this community, much less getting paid for doing it, seems like something Paul might have been a little abstracted from, even if he was totally committed. The fact that Paul had to write letters in the first place, as he was elsewhere, speaks to this. It was like the first century version of working remotely!
Paul treasured his relationships, and in his crafting communities created a big tent. His emphasis was on the relationships of people to each other, and to Jesus. Christian labor, for Paul, is just that, maintaining the integrity of the Christian community. Paul, as you will no doubt recall, was a tent maker himself, and knew what it was like to work with his hands. There is a section from the book of Ecclesiasticus that Paul may have known dedicated to laborers:
“They do not sit in the judge’s seat,
nor do they understand the decisions of the courts;
they cannot expound discipline or judgement,
and they are not found among the rulers.
But they maintain the fabric of the world,
and their concern is for the exercise of their trade.”
I love that phrase, “But they maintain the fabric of the world.” The laborers, the people who craft, are the very fabric of the world itself. That image is so powerful. And I think it holds true for us. We as the church happen to be physically building something, we are building a Music Center that will enhance the fabric of this world. And while this seems ephemeral, look around you. I mean at your neighbor in the chairs near you, besides, in front, and behind you. Look at the windows and the Cross. Look back at your fellow Christians again. While the work of the church is certainly ephemeral in a sense, it also weaves into the actual fabric of this world, in our bodies, and in what we use to project the construction of the other world we belong to. In fact, we are the threads that God uses to stitch the kingdom of heaven into this place, right here, right now.
We are part of a long thread that begins with Jesus, and intertwined with all the other laborers and saints throughout the ages. We join them in our being, and we join them in prayer, with our hands and labor, and we join them in the heavenly feast when we take the bread and wine, and it binds us to our God, in this world, in this place, in this time. This altar, the table where we give thanks, with us around it, is a symbol of those two worlds becoming one. “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world.” Being unstained by the world isn’t about avoiding getting our hands dirty, it is quite the opposite. It means getting into the grit and grime of the world but not being overcome by it. It means getting our hands dirty in labor as stewards of the earth, the church community, and the future.
I hope that once we partake of this Eucharist, and we take our well-deserved rest tomorrow, that we can remember both the people who died, the people who get their hands dirty, secular and religious, to ensure that all laborers can take their rest, including the widowed and orphaned. And I pray that we remain a thread in God’s weaving of this same heavenly banquet throughout all the other places we go in our lives. Remember what we, the Christian community, labor to become something else. Continue to build that closer bond between God and our humanity, give thanks for the work that has already been done, and prepare for all that is yet to come. Amen.
