“The Godliness of Labor
August
31, 2008; Rev. Carl W. Lindquist
First
UMC, Lexington, NC
"Now we command you, beloved, in the name of our Lord Jesus
Christ, to keep away from believers who are living in idleness and not
according to the tradition that they received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to
imitate us; we were not idle when we were with you, and we did not eat anyone's
bread without paying for it; but with toil and labor we worked night and day,
so that we might not burden any of you.”
(2 Thessalonians 3:6-8)
Labor Day weekend is an appropriate occasion to talk about
Christianity’s view of work and labor. I
would venture to guess that it is unlikely that you’ve heard a sermon on that
topic! While it’s not an official
doctrine of the church, such as you would find in a creed or a book of
systematic theology, one can find in the Scriptures and in our tradition a
definite perspective of work and labor that is important for us to be familiar
with, given the importance of labor and working to our everyday lives.
So let me begin by saying that this year marks the 114th anniversary of Labor Day as an official America holiday, originally established by Congress in 1894 to honor the social and economic achievements of the American workforce. In the culture at large, Labor Day also has come to mark the official end of summer, the last chance to get away for a little vacation before the beginning of the busy fall season.
Today we want to very briefly look at what our faith
understands about labor and work. In the
Christian faith, what we find is that work, in the ordinary sense of the everyday,
routine labor by which we earn our daily bread, our livelihood and the means to
sustain our life, is regarded as both normal and inevitable, a part of God’s created
order of things in the world.
In both the Old and New Testaments, productive labor is
strongly encouraged. In the Old
Testament book of Proverbs 10:4, for example, we read, “Lazy hands make a man
poor, but diligent hands bring wealth”. The
biblical writers did not think of labor as degrading, undesirable, or something
to be escaped from. Unlike the ancient Greeks,
who tended to think of working as beneath the dignity of a citizen gentleman,
leaving it for slaves and other inferior people to do, the Jewish people looked
upon daily work as a normal part of the divine ordering of the world, and no
person was to be exempt from it.
