A
Reflection and Poem for Labor Day All Saints’ Church, Southern
Shores, NC
September 4, 2016 Thomas E. Wilson, Rector
Labor
Continues
The
first lesson for today is from the Book of Ecclesiasticus, also
called the Wisdom of Jesus ben
(son
of) Sira, sometimes called Sirach. Ben Sira was a Rabbi who ran a
school for wisdom in the
late
3rd
and
early 2nd
Century BC in Jerusalem. His grandson translated it from Hebrew into
Greek
after ben Sira had died. It was a popular book used in Synagogues as
a source of wisdom
until
the Christians kept bringing letters from some of their people like
Paul to read in the
service,
thereby upsetting a lot of people. The Rabbis gathered together and
made some decisions
about
what would be allowed to be read in Synagogue services. One of the
rules was that the
books
had to be originally written in Hebrew. By the time they got around
to that decision, the
only
copies they had of ben Sira were in Greek, so they threw it out of
the canon of their
scripture.
It wasn’t until the 1900’s that archeologists found Hebrew
copies. The word
Ecclesiasticus
means “church book”, and it was given this name by the early
Christian Church
because
they liked it and it was included in the Catholic and Orthodox Canon
of Scripture. When
the
Protestant reformers in the 16th
century published Bibles, they followed the Jewish argument
of
that time, excluding the same books as Rabbis did. The Romans kept
them in their Canon
calling
them “Deuterocanonical”, meaning “later added to the Canon”.
The Anglicans put them
into
a separate section called the Apocrypha which means “hidden”
because they needed special
understanding.
In
this selection from Ecclesiasticus, ben Sira takes a look at how each
laboring group
approached
their tasks: “
So it is with every
artisan and master artisan who labors by night as well as by day; .
. .
All these rely on
their hands, and all are skilful in their own work. Without them no
city
an be inhabited,
and wherever they live, they will not go hungry. Yet they are not
sought
out for the council
of the people,
Part
of what ben Sira sees is that Labor is what God did in the beginning
of creation as the
master
artisan, and what a human laborer does is to continue the labor of
God on these
continuing
8th
days of Creation. In looking forward to Paul's letter to the
Corinthians for today,
he
sees that God has laid the foundation, on which each day we are
building with God's help. He
recognizes
his own debt to the laborers who do so much so that he can teach and
study, and he
teaches
his students to have that same kind of respect. He seems to be doing
a riff on Psalm 139
as
he goes into detail as God, the image of all laborers, lovingly
crafts the innermost part of each
of
us with an awesome quality to set each of us apart, or to use the
King James Translation: “We
are
fearfully and wonderfully made”. Ben Sira marvels when the potter
shapes us with the
infinite
patience of that potter’s palms. We are not the product of a
factory assembly line of
interchangeable
parts for we are uniquely knitted in the utmost depths. In the same
way the
divine
architect continues to walk with us and fashion us with sublime
thoughts. The Psalm for
today
asks that all of our labor be blessed and to be a blessing: “May
the graciousness of the
LORD
our God be upon us; *prosper the work of our hands; prosper our
handiwork.”
God
gives us the gifts of labor for the wellbeing of the world. What do
we do when we are given
a
precious gift? One thing we are tempted to do is to give an equal
gift in return, but that is a
little
hard to do; we can't get even with God. The other response is give
thanks and to use the gift
and
to be thankful every time we use it.
St
Augustine in his City
of God
suggests that there are really two cities operating on this earth
-the
City of God where people see all of their work in the context of
building and caring for a
community
of faith, and the City of Man which can do good things but is mainly
concerned with
people
finding their own limited and sometimes selfish goals. The city in
which we live depends
on
how we see what we and others do. Is a person working on the sewers
living in the City of
God
or the City of Man? It depends. If he/she goes to work only in order
to put their own bread
on
the table, they are a citizen in good standing of the City of Man.
There is nothing wrong with
a
person working for a living. If, however, they see all their work as
a gift given to God’s
creation,
of which they coincidently get paid a fair wage, then they have a
deeper citizenship. A
refusal
to pay a fair wage in order to increase one’s own profit is a sign
of the abandonment of
the
higher citizenship, as Jesus warns in the Gospel of Matthew reading
for today when he
suggests
that we cannot give primary allegiance to God and to our own wealth.
Choices for what
has
the greater call on us have to be made.
I
wake up early and go to the club to do my morning workout. Sometimes
I am so early that the
custodial
staff is still in the process of cleaning up from the night before,
and I see how hard they
work
to get the place ready for the new day. I treat them with respect
because each of them is a
gift
from God; they are not my servants, but they are working in their own
way with the gifts that
they
have. I don't talk religion with them and try to convert them to
being an Episcopalian, but
there
have been times when we have stopped for a few minutes to pray
together for something
that
is troubling them in their own lives. I see us as fellow workers
building on God's foundation.
Where
I come from, I call that “Stewardship”, in that we are stewards
of all of the moments of
our
lives, all the gifts we have, all the talents we possess. It is not
about giving 10% to God as a
tip
for good service, but about seeing all of life as ministry of the
gifts we receive. When I
cornered
Joe and Linda Wilson to head up Stewardship, Joe reached over to his
bookcase and
handed
a small book to me called the
Legend of the Monk and the Merchant
by Terry Felber.
Felber
posits that both the work of the merchant and the monk are holy work.
Both are holy men
had
to build on God's foundation, as they were giving themselves wherever
they were.
Two
weeks ago I addressed a group of teachers and leaders of a religious
school on their retreat.
Their
work was an outward and visible sign of their stewardship for they
were giving themselves
to
help their pupils. Yes they got paid, but I daresay much less than
they were worth for the time
and
energy they were giving. They felt as if God was calling for this
kind of work. They were
lucky
for their work was also their calling. They were given gifts, and
their labor was a gift they
were
giving. As the apostle James writes: “Every generous act of giving,
with every perfect gift,
is
from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is
no variation or
shadow
due to change.”
Labor
Continues
(poem)
with
potters patience. Then time came passion
as
thy hands wonderfully bodies did fashion
while
giving us freedom to use in infinite trust
hoping
each gift used might be for greater good.
We
often trash, squander those so precious gifts
giving
excuse such as our “need” or mood lifts.
Quite
surprise finding we still in Thy love stood,
forgiven
before we ask, turning failing into new
opportunities
to redeem even our selfish actions
finding
way, bringing peace to warring factions
within
us so gracefully from even them we grew,
taking
tears of regret from our eyes into a water
softening
clay continues handiwork of the Potter.
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