9/2/56

Scripture: I Corinthians 3: 5-16.

Text: I Corinthians 3: 9; “We are laborers together with God; ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.”

Seventy four years ago, in 1892, there was made the first proposal for a Labor Day celebration. That year, on September 5th, a parade was formed in the city of New York with participation by many of that city’s unions. In the years since then, the first Monday of each September has become a nationwide legal holiday. The day gives appropriate recognition to the important contribution of labor to the growth and well-being of our nation. The Sunday preceding that holiday has come to be marked on church calendars as Labor Day Sunday, or Labor Sunday, with thought being given, in many of the liturgies and in uncounted sermons, to the significance of honorable toil and skill in the light of divine purposes.

Some welcome the discussion of relationship between labor and management in the churches. They welcome other discussions in the field of social relationships and social ethics. Others -- leaders in the labor movement and in management alike, lift cynical eyebrows and think, even say: “Mind your own business, preacher. This is none of your affair. You stick to religion.” But of course those who attempt to compartmentalize religion in that way are wrong. If religion has any meaning at all, it is the very rootage of all life situations. Human relations are the business of the Christian church.

And so far as the laboring aspect of these social relationships is concerned, it needs be remembered that the founder of the Christian church was a carpenter. His two greatest apostles were a fisherman and a tent-maker. Much of his teaching was couched in terms illustrated by and easily understood by shepherds, vineyard growers, harvest hands, household stewards, and fishermen, as well as by landlords, governors and other supervisors.

The earliest church made eager appeal to, and rapid growth among, the working class or “common folk” of the time. Much of the Protestant Reformation was a revolt against a church that had grown too far away from the needs of working people. Certainly some of the most dynamic growth of the Christian church has occurred when religious faith was preached earnestly to laboring people. John Wesley, locked out of many of the established churches of his time and locations, went to the mines and the fields where vast numbers of the unchurched lived in neglect, and often misery. He preached, eloquently, to their spiritual need, and helped them to the kind of morale that helped themselves. Not alone the message of individual redemption, but the urgency of self respect and social concern, was his preaching and his action.

Now of course many ministers are not trained, or especially competent, in matters like the bargaining procedures between labor and management, in knowledge of and application of the laws to industrial relations. But some have given study to those matters and have been trained in some competence therein. More clergymen than one might think, have had some practical experience in labor and in management too.

Personally, I have known some of the experiences of common labor. I am the grandson of a man who worked for some time as an Illinois coal miner before going to South Dakota to homestead on a pioneer farm. I am the son of a man who, until I was thirteen years of age, operated a farm with his own knowledge and skill and hands. I learned about tired muscles and callused hands, and right and wrong use of common tools while working under his direction as a young boy and under the direction other farmers while I was a young man. My education included some training in the used of tools in the manual arts. I have worked among harvest hands and road gangs. And though I have never myself held a union membership card, members of my immediate family have. And there are many ministers with much more background in manual arts and labor experience than mine. And most of us preachers are not what one would call wealthy!

Now look at the church for a moment, in considering the makeup of its membership. There is a common assumption that labor is outside the church. Unhappily, many laborers are. So are many managers. There are those who say “the church is a middle class institution.” It isn’t. A great many folk from the so-called middle class and from the various professions are in the church. But so are a lot of owners, stock holders, managers in industry. And so are a lot of trade union members and skilled and unskilled workers. The boards and officers’ lists of the church that I serve have people of both managing and laboring experience serving on them. And the leaders have come from both groups. One does not have to look far among the churches of our city to find that labor is well-represented in the membership of the church. When we conducted, in our city a couple of seasons ago a survey of religious preference (in connection with the National Christian Teaching Mission), one of the astonishing findings was that only 2 or 3% of our city’s residents gave no church preference at all!

It may be true that, over the nation as a whole, half of labor is outside the membership of the church. But it is equally true that nearly half of the population as a whole is outside the church membership. That is the never-ceasing challenge to the half that is in the church!

---------------------

But the needs, the hopes, the aspirations, the welfare of all people, of every walk of life, are a fair concern of the church. And so are the inter-group and inter-personal relationships. Our whole community is distressed at the prospect of a strike and some kind of shut down in our industrial life. No one here is entirely unaffected by it. And some are very directly affected.

One of the things that all of us, management, church and others, need understand is that there are underlying fears that beset laboring folk and cause them to distrust management, political movements and church organizations. These ghosts that haunt the friends of working people include sickness, old age and unemployment. Many, now living, have not forgotten the hardship and despair of depression days. Some have known the bitterness of lack for their parents or others in the family. And if some turn, with little concern, to the benefits of a relief program, a lot of others dread it more than they will tell.

On the other hand, labor, church and others need to understand that every employer lives with his fears, too. And these fears often go home to his fireside with him at night as unwelcome guests. The employer wonders: “What about the market? How about government regulation? What shall I do if we have labor trouble? Can I continue to meet the payroll fully, and on time, and also be fair and honest with the stock holders?”

The church is a fellowship in which there needs to be general recognition of the problems and fears of both these and all other groups. And despite individual differences and group differences of opinion, we need to remain in Christian fellowship with one another. Church, labor and management all need to realize that it is only in the framework of this religiously-motivated fellowship and under the orderly form of our present government that we have any freedom or hope. What happens under the dictatorship of fascism or communism? Every pressure is exerted to bring the church to heel; labor unions are eliminated; owners and employers lose everything.

Now, where does the church stand then, in matters of dispute between labor and management? Is it to be pro-management or pro-labor? As a church it is neither! It must not “take sides” because its members are on both sides and its concern is for the welfare of both and with the status of both under God. The church deeply desires, and usually works for, several ideals in these matters. (1) One ideal is that human personality comes first. The primary issues are not so much wages or profits or victory, but people under God. Long ago, slavery was recognized as wrong because all people are important to God and therefore to other people (fellows and brethren under the Father.) The rich fool in Jesus’ story was not a fool because of his wealth, but because he put crops and barns ahead of neighborliness and character. [Luke 12: 16-21].

(2) The church knows that the attitude of good will and brotherliness must prevail. Progress does not move ahead in a straight line. No person and no group has a monopoly on wisdom and generosity, or on selfishness or foolishness. But in the hard search to find the right, continued good will is just common sense. More important than any invention, any law, any political election, any industrial formula to be devised in the next two months or ten years, is the recognition that we all need a better way of getting along together on God’s earth.

(3) The church is further concerned that the motive of service be recognized as the one most likely to bring peace and happiness. He who tries to get the most usually finds, in the long run, that he has gotten least of what counts in satisfaction of soul. Selfishness always backfires upon itself. This is true in the experience of individuals, of government, of labor and management, of the church.

(4) And the church also holds that God has a stake in all these matters. We are God’s children; this is God’s earth; the Kingdom of God is the goal. Recognizing this, we remind ourselves in our churches that our religion is not to veneer our selfish motives, secular values, or hateful attitudes. Rather, our religious faith is the point from which we probe our problems with greater honesty and firmer trust in God and man.

One thing we Christians recognize; and that is that we are all workers with God. When Paul was writing to the Corinthians, he was at great pains to point out that “we are all laborers together (fellow workmen) with God.” The very growth of their church was an act of God. Paul planted the message, another (Apollos) watered or nurtured the seed of the spirit, and God gave the increase in the church among them all. All worked together with God.

Whether we work with tools, with hands, with acquired skills, with ideas, with calculators or with the arts, we are yet all workers together. The labor of each has its effect upon all. We are the inheritors of a tradition that holds in high regard those who work.

Christianity has its moments and its hours of meditation, of prayer, of worship. Jesus himself withdrew from crowds and confusion to a hillside or a desert or a lake or a temple to worship and pray. But always these hours were a preparation for more work. And they were essential to his work just as they are essential to our best work. More peace of soul is to be found in work, honestly approached and effectively carried on, than can be imagined in Buddhist contemplation or in some permanent vacation.

Christianity thrives most, and makes itself felt best, when its followers are hard at work carrying on the Master’s business in His spirit and with vigor. To the extent that we leave that work undone it is not done, for we are workers together with God.

And we are workers with each other. Christianity is a cooperative venture. It began with groups of people working together. Twelve disciples worked together with Jesus. Working together, though not always of the same opinion, they were able to organize the church throughout the Mediterranean world. Groups of Christians working together in these churches made them strong centers of Christian influence and the seeds of spiritual power against the evils of the day.

Individual aloofness has never characterized the Christian movement. Individuals working together for the common good create the common strength for the ongoing of Christianity and the promotion of what is right. The Christian standard of work is not what we feel like doing, when we feel like doing it, but doing that which needs to be done for the common good and for God. Neither independence nor domination is the goal of our human endeavors. Cooperation is the spiritual rule of our survival in the church, in industry, in the political realm -- everywhere.

Christianity is a religion of work and workers. It is a cooperative endeavor of Christian working with Christian and with God. All our negotiations, all our formation of judgment as to what is fair, all our agreements reached and contracts signed, need to be approached in this light.

Washington Gladden was one of the great preachers of what used to be emphasized as the social gospel. Years ago he wrote a “worker’s pledge” which is good for the contemplation of employer and employee alike, for consumer and producer, for anyone of Christian sincerity. These are the words of that pledge: “One thing I am resolved upon: I will not be a sponge or a parasite. I will give an honest equivalent for what I get. I want no man’s money for which I have not rendered a full return. I want no wages that I have not earned. If I work for any man or any company or any institution, I will render a full, ample and generous service. If I work for the city, or the state or the nation, I will give my best thought, my best effort, my most conscientious and efficient endeavor. No man, no body of men, shall ever be made poor by their dealings with me. If I can give a little more than I get every time, in that shall be my happiness. The great commonwealth of human society shall not be the loser through me. I will take good care to put more into the common food than I take out.”

That pledge needs a real deep sense of fellowship with God and of Christian responsibility. Whether the present difficulties we see in labor-management relations in our community be quickly resolved or not, it has its best hope for solution in the Christian attitude of all those who work together on both sides of the negotiation.

And the knowledge that we are all workers together with God will give the labor of each its dignity and essential worth. Let it be our highest joy to do the work our Father would have us to do.

Let us pray:

O Thou who dost the vision send

And givest each his task,

And with the task sufficient strength;

Show us thy will, we ask.

Amen.

------------------------

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 2, 1956. (Labor Sunday Union Service at the Methodist Church.)