Sermon by John McCall, Senior Minister
Isaiah 65:18-23
John 6:26-29
The summer after my first year in seminary, 1969, I got a job working at a machine tool shop. I’d just finished a year as a student intern at the nearby Congregational Church where the owner of the shop was a Deacon. I was assigned to the high‑speed grinder where I spent eight hours a day doing the same operation over and over. The shop foreman, named Bill, had worked 34 years there and was close to retirement. He said he’d never considered working anywhere else because in this job he really felt he made a difference.
When the summer was over and I went for my last pay check the owner called me aside. “You know why I hired you, McCall?” he asked. “‘Cause when you’re a fancy preacher standin’ in the pulpit with your hand out, sayin’ to the ordinary folks ‘gimme, gimme,’ I want you to know how hard real people have to work for their money.” Real people? Oh, I see, as opposed to clergy who only work on Sundays. No surprise I’ve never forgotten that encounter.
Most of us can’t choose whether we’ll work. We must. And many have to work at jobs that are unfulfilling, hard, even dangerous. Though I remember one time at a party saying to someone “what’s your work?” And he answered: “managing my wealth.” I’m not sure that qualifies.
The first verses of Genesis tell us that working is the human condition. God created Adam and put him to work naming the animals, then later tilling and harvesting good things to eat. We had to work even in Paradise.
Then a little later, after falling for the serpent’s trick, Adam and Eve were punished for disobeying God. They were expelled from Paradise; from that time women would labor to give birth, while men provide food and shelter “by the sweat of their brow.”
That ancient wisdom still carries a lot of power in our collective psyche. Just tune in the campaign rhetoric about work and welfare and economic class. Some, indeed, live to work. But most of us work to live.
Over the years I’ve wrestled with the balance between my work and my other interests and hopes: how to be available and engaged as pastor without sacrificing too much as a person, or asking too much of my family.
Now, as I think about the reality that my own work is not my life, and that my retirement next June will be the end of something huge in my mind and heart, I sometimes wonder what will fill my days.
We have to work. We can fashion labor saving devices, we can hire someone else to do the things we can’t handle – but it’s woven into the very fabric of life that we have to work to live.
By and large I don’t think we’re afraid of work. What we fear most is laboring in vain… working hard and having little or nothing to show for it. Do you know how that feels? You may have worked for years to build a nest egg, dreaming of security. Then comes illness, or divorce, or loss of your job, a collapse in the stock market – and you watch the dream dissolve. You feel that you’ve labored in vain.
Think of those who do work that’s never done, like Sisyphus rolling the stone uphill for eternity.
- You do the laundry. Every last bloomin’ thing is clean and back where it belongs. Then, within 30 seconds, the basket begins to fill again.
- You mow the grass and you soon have to do it again.
- You paint the house and the next day it starts to peel.
- You preach a sermon on Sunday and Monday morning you start all over again.
- So much of what we do doesn’t stay done!
It’s not work we fear. But don’t we want to feel our labor matters, making some discernable difference?
For the Jews, this image brought back the stories about slavery in Egypt. The men built houses they couldn’t live in because the dwellings belonged to their masters. The women labored to birth children who would live in slavery and misery for generations to come.
So when the prophet Isaiah offered the vision of the golden age in the realm of God, how did he describe it?
They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit. They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands. They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD– and their descendants as well. {Isaiah 65)
Jesus also asked his listeners whether they labored in vain. He put a slightly different spin on it. Jesus said “why do you labor for things that do not satisfy? Why do you store up treasures that rust can destroy, moths can eat and thieves can steal. Seek first the realm of God and everything else will come to you.” {Matthew 6}
My question this Labor Day Sunday is solidly biblical and very simple: do you labor in vain? Jesus’ answer to all of us is clear and simple – if you’re only working to earn bread to feed your body, you are laboring in vain. If you only work to store up temporary treasures then, yes, you are laboring in vain. No matter how important your job or how much you’re paid, if you aren’t taking care of the spirit, you’re laboring in vain.
The bumper sticker reminds us: “The Best Things in Life Aren’t Things.” The only labor that ultimately matters is when we work with open hands, longing to receive the bread of life – working for life in the Spirit. On this Labor Day Sunday, let’s give thanks for the ability to work, and remember Jesus’ great wisdom: don’t work so hard for things that perish, things that can’t last, things that are here today and gone in an instant.
Labor for those things that feed the soul.
Pay attention to Spirit.
And give thanks to God for the bread of Life.