9/4/60

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 2: 12-26

Text: Ecclesiastes 2: 24, 25; “There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from Him, who can eat or who can have enjoyment?”

“There is nothing better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; for apart from Him, who can eat or who can have enjoyment?” So says the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament.

In trying to find the meanings and values of life, this writer has examined wisdom, pleasure, power, and toil. He is somewhat inclined to the view that life is an unhappy business, every road leading to vanity, or to a dead end. But above these doleful meanings comes a strong expression of the “hero in the soul.” For he has a glimpse of the dignity of satisfying work. It is good that a man should eat and drink as the fruit of his toil. It is good that a man should find enjoyment in his toil. Food and drink are homely blessings, but they are good, and they are necessary under the plan of God’s creation. The person whose bread is consecrated by the labor of earning it, may say “Give us this day our daily bread,” and thank God for hunger as well as for food. Each is from the hand of our Creator.

We come to the season of the year when our nation makes an official holiday of what we have come to call “Labor Day.” And it is well that not only as workers of many sorts, but as Christian churchmen, we give some thought to the meaning of labor, the necessary dignity of work. The Christian’s attitude toward his work, and his appreciative understanding of the work of others, is cause for our fair concern. To begin with, let us remember that both the Old Testament and the New Testament portray God as a worker with man in the creation of a better world. Recall the simple beauty of the Creation stories in the book of Genesis. There is the account of God’s works of creation and of His rest from that labor.

God’s resting after all the work of creating a world, and bringing forth life on a planet, does not suggest that God was resting because He was tired; or because there was nothing left for Him to do! He rested because He saw that it was a good thing He had done. He was ready for the enjoyment that comes from contemplation of a new kind of order which has been brought out of chaos or disorder.

Well, man shares in some of that kind of experience. We are part of the drama of existence when any of us has a part in bringing increasing new order out of the raw materials of disordered reality that abound in this wonderful world. Ideally, man’s work is to be a religious act. Was he not intended to find his enjoyment in tending a garden of Eden? Is there not great beauty and enormous satisfaction to be found in all kinds of order that can be made new from the great abundance that is spread about us?

Carry the thought forward to the New Testament, and we see that Jesus is portrayed there as one who works, not alone, but with the Father. He labors to bring forth new orders of the spirit; new understandings of right and wrong. Jesus understood not only the hope of harvest, but understood also the weeds that thwart it; the evil elements that produce disorder. And so we are helped to see that man’s work is to cope with the powers of disorder and, by spiritual and intellectual disciplines, to become increasingly skillful in the creation of order that reflects high virtue and noble hope.

Work can be man’s daily scourge and his high hope. When we are required to work under circumstances that deny us the feeling that we are creating something, we are scourged by the task, and we become blindly rebellious. We have an intuitive conviction that work should be the source of happiness, and a real service to mankind. There have been long periods in history when this conviction has lacked expression, and when workers have been treated as if they were like cattle. The shame of the diabolical slave trade; the wickedness of the coal pits; and the callused days when work at the steel furnaces quickly withered youthful strength -- these have troubled Christian conscience.

I recall the sober statement, of a man who should know, that one kind of labor in former days in the sugar cane fields, the carrying of the heavy piles of stalks up on the freight cars that hauled them to the mill --- that “hapai coe” or “carry cane” work would kill a man off in an average of 7 years. Now, fortunately, the task is done with machinery, and when we put a spoon full of sugar on breakfast cereal we can be grateful that our nourishment has not caused that kind of death to some men of labor.

But it is just as well for us not to spend too much time in grateful looks backward over a wicked past. For there are still evils that plague the creative endeavor of mankind, that call for our attention now. We have accepted the conviction that it is wrong to require a man to work 80 hours a week to get his bare share of a product, the creation of which is for the benefit of us all. Yet we need not look far to see that, in some areas today, thousands of workers are toiling under conditions that are truly evil. We have found satisfaction in the improved lot of the factory worker and have passed over the lot of the migrant harvester. Much of the food which we eat, obtained at prices that are low or moderate, comes to us because workers have been exploited. I shall not soon forget the white hot anger in the voice and face of a minister who had observed that some of the migrant workers harvesting vegetable crops in California lived like hogs as they worked. In fact, some of those families were quartered in swept-out hog houses, with no adequate supply of water, of sanitation, of school opportunities for children or any other of the civilized services we normally expect. The sole concern of employers appeared to be to use the labor of these workers to the full, get it over with, and then get rid of them quickly.

Here and there, it seems to be assumed that the raising of perishable food crops is not subject to the same Christian ethic which heavy industry and many commercial fields have come to recognize.

When work provides no sense of creativity, and results in no fair reward through recognition of its true value to mankind, then it is a transgression against God and man; a scourge and not a joy.

It ought to become clear to us that drudgery in a tomato field, a vineyard, a cucumber patch, or a fruit orchard is debasing and wrong when people are badly housed, shifted from one field to another in overcrowded trucks, and denied schooling for their children.

There is another area that may well trouble the Christian conscience. It is less crudely obvious than the one I have just mentioned.

The changing industrial world, with its magnificent technology, has produced new problems that Christians must solve. Advances in automation may cut out the necessity for laborers on an assembly line. But where, without those jobs, is the ability to purchase the products that are made by automation? These problems are not going to be solved by theological professors or by preachers. They may be glad to help. But we are in the area where Christian leaders in both labor and management must find solutions to these problems or court disaster. Possibly we face a new dimension in the nature of work.

One major problem is not that of physical drudgery, but the feeling of many a worker that he is not involved in the process of bringing new order out of old disorder; finished usefulness out of raw material. Sometimes this just means that the modern worker lacks the imagination to see his part in the industrial process of creation, and he needs help to see it.

This applies to managers and workers, whether it is in the accounting department, in the advertising office, or on the machine production line. Our automatic world increases daily the number of folk who feel that they have become insignificant and easily replaceable.

There is not the same understandable urgency that there was when the farm hand knew that if he did not milk those cows they did not get milked. He might like, or he might heartily dislike, the job. But he knew its significance! And any worker needs some such understanding of his importance to his job.

The physician who gets routed out of a warm bed, with an emergency request that he come quickly through the drifting January snow, may hate that part of his job. But he knows its significance. And he is saved from a sense of meaninglessness. The necessity for one’s particular vocation in service is so important to all of us!

To have meaning, work does not have to be convenient nor pleasant. But it must have necessity to be significant. When we know that we are necessary, we are connected to meaning.

Now, at this point, we can hear it said, “Well, aren’t all workers necessary?” Most of them are, but they’ve got to feel necessary, and that feeling has to be grounded in fact.

The farm hand who knows the cows will be ruined if they are not milked, and the physician who knows his patients are in pain, have a capacity for enduring long hours or harsh cold, because they know that they are necessary people.

Now the church owes it to all people who work, to try to help interpret the meaning of their labor. There are two or three quite apparent things that we can do in this line.

1) First, we can quit condemning the affluent society, and we can pay heed to the plain fact that only an affluent society can meet Christian standards for life. Few men are attracted to “pie in the sky bye and bye.” They want a piece of pie for their labor right here and now. Distributed abundance makes the Christian ethic possible. The work of our hands and our minds and our automatic machines must help to distribute widely, food and clothing and shelter and public schools and culture and health. The assurance of Christian vocation can come to the paper machine tender who knows his work makes possible magazines and books and Bibles and hymnals and other blessings intended by God.

2) A second thing we can do is to find the means of a shared vocation as far as management and labor is concerned. Would not a deep sense of the meaningfulness of work give to management and labor a common ground? There need be no unfavorable reflection against the kind of work each performs, if there is a common understanding that the effort of both is directed to bringing new forms of order out of old disorder. The iron ore cannot be brought from raw deposit to finished surgical instrument without the efforts, in harmony, of both managers and laborers.

God worked, and then rested, to contemplate, in satisfaction, what He had done in bringing the void into new meaning. --- And we work with Him. There is a divinity that rests on the useful work we do!

[He then read the Labor Sunday Message, 1960]

On this Labor Sunday the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America conveys its greetings to all men and women who work, and especially those in the labor movement.

Many urgent tasks now await constructive action by both Labor and the Christian Church. We are mindful of the fact that there are millions of loyal Christians in our churches who are devoted union members. We need to recognize our common tasks, as well as the unique responsibilities of both the Church and Labor, in order that together we may increase our service to God and to mankind.

Our Tasks in Common

Among these tasks we face in common is the achievement of racial fraternity with equal opportunity for each person to attain the fullest possible growth and use of his potential talents. The Church and Labor are called to realize equality and brotherhood among people both as they work and as they worship.

We face together the perplexity and challenge of a continuously changing economic order which not only presents new opportunities but creates new insecurities. The causes of these insecurities are largely economic and social; but they affect the minds and spirits of people and their solution must be found in part at least in a renewal and deepening of our spiritual lives. We join in seeking the growth of religious as well as other resources which will help us to meet this continuing issue in a fresh and vital way.

We share together a concern for civil liberties and the freedom of our institutions. The changing structure of power always contains threats to freedom, for power has a way of becoming absolute. The churches must seek to guard against undue concentration of power anywhere in society; we look to the labor movement for the exercise of restraint in the use of its own power, and vigilance in preventing the abuse of power by others. Together with other responsible groups we can act creatively to the end that society as a whole may be spared those evils which develop when irresponsible power has corrupted either an individual or an institution.

Our nation approaches the hour of a great national election. We share with Labor as well as all other constructive elements in our society a deep concern for the political health of our country. Together we believe that candidates and political leaders, federal, state, and local, should engage in high level discussions of those issues which are vital to our national community life, and to our role as a friend of nations and a seeker for peace. We urge the voters to resist any appeal to narrow religious, racial, or special economic group interests.

Recent Achievements

We commend the leaders and members of organized labor responsible for certain specific and recent achievements in making far-reaching changes in racial and national patterns of employment, entering into agreements that provide creative adjustments to the mounting problems of automation, showing particular concern for the problems of workers in the lower wage brackets, and raising the general productivity of our economic order.

These signs of ethical vitality give us hope and cause for thanksgiving. With consecrated Christians accepting responsibility in the labor unions and in the churches we believe we can work together to serve God’s will on earth. At the same time we are conscious that God places us all under continual judgment and that His call to seek righteousness and love ever exceeds our reach. Neither in the labor movement nor in the church of God can we ever be satisfied with self congratulation. Always we are challenged to hear and respond to God’s high calling for the morrow.

[Prayer]

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

Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids (Labor Sunday Union Service at First Methodist Church), September 4, 1960