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September 3, 2006
The Rev. John Auer
Scripture: James 1:17-27,
Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
“Caregiving
Economy: The Word at Work in the World”
Moses the sheep-worker – and organizer of the
first brick-workers’ local! Prophetic herd- and vine-workers. Paul the
tent-maker – you could not pay him to preach! He was so unbought and unbossed.
Jesus the wood-worker – organizer of farm-workers, fish-workers, and the
occasional tax- and sex-worker. Working-class roots run deep among biblical
people – as they do among Methodist people.
According to pastor-historian Darren Cushman
Wood, “In 1812, nearly 80% of the [Methodist] class leaders in New York City
were journeymen, master craftsmen, or unskilled laborers.” Historian E. J.
Hobshawn adds, “When Lord Londonberry evicted strikers after the 1844 coal
strike [in England], two-thirds of the Durham Primitive Methodist circuit became
homeless.”
According to the “cursing” of Adam and Eve upon
leaving the garden, “labor” both in the field and in the home deeply marks human
existence. Jesus calls himself the promise of rest from our labors – embodying
words of Sabbath and Jubilee! When we celebrate Labor Sunday, connecting unions
and churches, we do not pretend that either is perfect – or that either is
particularly popular now. But we are the two organizations whose members
typically call each other “sister” and “brother!” We represent two of the few
arenas left for the practice of citizen- and disciple-ship. We both know how to
picnic, raise offerings, and sing!
Don’t know how many times I have told you the only story I know – the woman
shopping approaches the cash register to pay with a check. The clerk asks
her for some identification. The woman thinks a moment, reaches into her
purse, pulls out a mirror, glances into it, and proclaims, “Yep! That’s me, all
right!” But how often can I back up my story with a biblical text?
The apostle James here is urging us not to be hearers only of God’s Word but
doers of it as well!
To be imitators of that very Word who gives us
life as reflection of God’s image. God landscapes our lives to grow out of
God’s very righteousness, God’s mercy and love -- not from our own anger and
fear. James warns us not to let God’s Word just “go in one ear and out the
other” but to "act upon what we hear!” For “those who hear and don’t act
are like those who glance in the mirror and walk away, and two minutes later
have no idea who they are, what they look like.”
So we need to carry our mirrors with us! To
remind ourselves who we are as often as we forget! We are the children of God,
made in the image of God! James goes so far as to claim that God is “showing
us off as the crown of all of God’s creatures!” A big part of being the church
together is holding up the mirror to another in love -- helping us see who we
are and what is going on with us. We may be the last to see ourselves as we are
– as the whole person we are – and need all the help we can get. Yet we alone
can accept who we are, what is happening to us, and how we will respond. The
God of Labor Sunday creates each of us with identities and vocations, with gifts
and callings. God creates us not only as someone to be but also as something to
do! Something for each to contribute to the good of all.
Our family saw the movie “Little Miss Sunshine” last night. The heroine is
Olive, an 8 year-old contestant in a beauty pageant. She is daughter to a father
obsessed with selling “winning” as a whole way of life. Olive naturally
interprets that to mean her father hates all “losers” in life. As the
moment of her performance arrives, her well-meaning family wants to spare her
the humiliation and begs her not to go on. Olive studies herself in the
dressing-room mirrors – looking herself up and down and deeply into her eyes.
She realizes she cannot possibly win in the terms of these “pageants” of life
that pit all our images of ourselves in desperate competition for each other’s
approval and approbation.
Olive’s only hope – like our only hope -- lies
in being herself with such passion and power -- such faithfulness to her own
identity as so plainly revealed in the mirror -- that her performance will
expose and explode the very myth and illusion that life can be “won” as some
pageant – or even as some war! Olive offers what can only be called a
freak-loving dance (to the tune of Rick James’ music!) of earth-shaking
resurrection. As other contestants’ families and the pageant’s producers react
with revulsion to this undermining of their whole “way of life,” one by one
Olive’s family of “losers” finds grace and courage to join in her dance!
In fact, in that moment, they stop trying to
please life’s Pharisees and scribes – who are forever sweating the small stuff
of life as a way to judge and condemn one another – as to who’s in and who’s
out: who’s beautiful and who’s not, who’s clean and who’s not, who’s saved and
who’s not. By being true to the image of God not only outside but within her,
Olive helps her whole family become more like disciples of free-loving,
freak-loving Jesus. As Jesus points in this gospel, what we do from our hearts
always trumps what we say with our lips. No matter what the world may see in us,
or think of us, or try to make of us, we can only be defiled by what we find in
ourselves. Only we can know our deepest selves.
The God of Labor Sunday is a God of caregiving
economy whose word is at work in all the world to bring everyone into the full
and whole promise of God. A caregiving economy is what Dr. King calls the
“world house” where there is room for all and all become part of the family.
Everyone’s identity, made up of everything about us, is precious! And
everyone’s vocation, including whatever our job and our work in life, is
honored. God is such a “giver” of life. James says, “Every desirable
and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are rivers of light
cascading down from the Source of Light!”
I am not suggesting that our lives feel like “rivers of light” all the time.
But the river of light is there all the time– even when reduced like the
Truckee’s flow at the end of summer. It is just waiting for us to find
grace and courage to step into it again – knowing we never step in the same
river twice! We never know how it will be. If God is the great giver
of life, we are both given and gifted. We are “given” in the sense that we
simply show up when and where we do in life – from beginning to end -- in our
given conditions and circumstances, our given settings and situations.
Life seems a never-ending challenge to make the best of what we’ve got -- of who
we are and of what we can do – art any given moment.
But at the same time we are “given” we also are
“gifted” – in the sense that God don’t make no junk! That every one of us, no
matter anything else about us, is made in the image of God! That we are endowed
with certain inalienable gifts of a caregiving God. That these gifts include –
in biblical, in Christian, and in United Methodist tradition – a job at a living
wage! Physical and mental safety of workers! Equitable division of products
and services! Which is a gift we reaffirm and reenact every time we join in
communion together! Freedom in the ways we use our leisure time! A workplace
where we are respected not only for the jobs we do but for the persons we are,
the communities of whom we are part, and the ideas we may bring to make the
workplace more cooperative and collective!
The “Social Creed” of the United Methodist
Church – revised by General Conference every four years – will be one hundred
years old next conference in 2008! Here is the original creed in its entirety.
Please hear how much of it deals with labor issues – and how current those same
issues remain in today’s world! Every line of it is worth a sermon --
The Methodist Episcopal Church stands:
For equal rights and complete justice for all
men [sic] in all stations of life.
For the principles of conciliation and
arbitration in industrial dissensions.
For the protection of the worker from
dangerous machinery, occupational diseases, injuries and mortality.
For the abolition of child labor.
For such regulation of the conditions of
labor for women as shall safeguard the physical and moral health of the
community.
For the suppression of the “sweating system.”
For the gradual and reasonable reduction of
the hours of labor to the lowest practical point, with work for all; and for
that degree of leisure for all which is the condition of the highest human life.
For a release from employment one day in
seven.
For a living wage in every industry.
For the highest wage that each industry can
afford, and for the most equitable division of the products of industry than can
ultimately be devised.
For the recognition of the Golden Rule and
the mind of Christ as the supreme law of society and the sure remedy for all
social life.
Is that not a little amazingly apropos – to be
written in 1908?! Even before my mother was born!
Folksinger Charlie King says, our work is more than our job, and our life is
more than our work! Whoever we are, wherever we are, with whomever we are,
and whatever we are doing, we always are children of God! The mirror of
God’s image, like the river of God’s grace, is always there for us to see in and
step in!
We have been saying together as long as I can
remember that we feel a special sense of affirming the jobs, the works, and the
lives of those with whom we share downtown community. Our labor-saint Tom
Stoneburner, volunteer founder and director of the Alliance for Worker Rights --
whose memory and hope we claim even as we miss his work his life so much –
inspired us to see some of the local issues and some of the personal and
congregational ways we might respond. Issues include, for service workers
generally and hotel workers particularly – 1) not being paid a living wage;
2) facing discrimination due to immigration status; 3) working more and more due
to understaffing; 4) not getting adequate health care benefits; and 5)
experiencing retaliation for attempting to organize.
Our responses may include, 1) praying for
workers generally and downtown, service, and hotel workers in particular – in
light of scriptures and traditions that remind us each person is made to be the
mirror of God, and each person is meant to receive of the river of God’s gifts!
2) planning events, especially religious events, in union hotels and letting
hotel managers know our concern for the well-being and just treatment of all
workers; 3) sending delegations from religious communities and congregations to
meet with workers and unions and efforts to organize -- as well as with hotel
management; and 4) exploring with congregations the chance to affiliate with the
national organization called “Interfaith Worker Justice” (www.iwj.org)
and the current national campaign called “Hotel Workers Rising.” Please let me
know where we should start!
Again, our work is more than our job, and our
life is more than our work! Whoever we are, wherever we are, with whomever we
are, whatever we are doing, we always are children of God! The mirror of God’s
image, like the river of God’s grace, is always there for us to see in and to
step in. One sight, one step, at a time – let’s dance! Amen.
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