On the Pleasures and Sorrows of Work

Church of the Incarnation

Sept. 5, 2010

Text: Matthew 5:13-16

I had a motley mix of jobs as a teenager. My older brother Aaron and I opened a concession stand at the baseball fields across the street from our house. I worked for the City Recreation Department during the summers.  I taught drum lessons - one of my students still plays in a country band, which is kind of like betraying your master.  I sacked groceries at the local IGA (there is great pleasure in sacking groceries properly during a busy rush).  One summer I delivered furniture.  Had I thought about how hot the warehouse gets during the summer, or about the fact that furniture is heavy, I probably wouldn’t have taken that job.  Donny was one of the regular delivery guys.  One day he and I delivered fifteen large dressers to a hotel downtown.  I assumed that we would carry each dresser up the stairs together.  So I bent down next to the first dresser and Donny just flipped the whole thing around on his back and up the stairs he went.  I have no idea how he did it!!  He carried all 15 up by himself.

But I made most of my money mowing lawns.  I love the sound of the mower, the smell of the cut grass.  I like the rhythmic nature of the work, the physicality of it.  But most of all I like the crisp finality of it - when you’re done, you’re done.  You’ve accomplished something, and it looks noticeably better than it did an hour ago.  This little piece of earth benefitted from my working over it a little.  So if I can generalize about my early work experiences: I worked primarily because I needed money; some work I would have enjoyed even if I didn’t get paid; some things I was good at, some things not; there was considerable joy and satisfaction  in feeling like I was doing the work well.  I suppose I was dimly aware that I was helping others, but I primarily liked the way the work made me feel.  And there was nothing particularly religious or spiritual about it.

One of the primary ways we love and serve God is in the work that we do.  To confess and believe and live this, you need a rich notion of the materiality of creation.  You need the story of God’s incarnation in the embodied life of Jesus, his daily work dignifying our daily work.  You need an earthy, embodied spirituality, and a social vision of what God is up to, a vision of the world’s flourishing as God’s primary purpose.  How we imagine the work we do depends on whether our imaginations have been shaped by the stories of Scripture.  So I’d like to raise a few questions along those lines.

1. What does God have to do with my work?

The Genesis story pictures God making Adam and Eve from the earth’s clay.  They are embodied creatures.  Their bodies connected them to the earth from which they came.  Their bodies were powerful for doing work.  The Garden of Eden was not a resort.  It was a place to join God in the work of cultivating and tending to God’s creation.  Genesis begins with God at work creating and blessing the world.  Then immediately Adam and Eve are invited into the work of ruling, naming, and cultivating the earth.  This bedrock story for both Jews and Christians makes it clear: work is a gift from God to be received with joy.  One of the ways we bear God’s image is that we work like God does.  We apply our powers and our skills in order to cultivate the resources of creation into new possibilities.

What do the gospels have to say about our work?  On one hand, Jesus says very little about our work.  He wasn’t big on career advice. He told tax collectors not to steal and Roman soldiers not to extort money.  He told the professionally religious rabbis that they weren’t doing a very good job helping people live well before God.  On the other hand, many of the stories Jesus told about God’s kingdom bear directly on the question of work.  There are stories about fishing, vineyard keeping, farming, cleaning house, tending sheep, owning and renting land, building a house, lending and investing money, civil service, and political rule.  So as a storyteller, Jesus identified all kinds of connections between the daily kinds of work that we all do and the call to enter God’s kingdom.

Jesus was, for most of his life, a laborer, a carpenter.  So he knew the daily pleasures and sorrows of work.  And his call for the crowds to become his disciples was addressed to people who worked hard.  Jesus invites us into a community where we are to be “salt and light.”  Both metaphors emphasize that our lives are to have a positive impact on those around us.  Salt is good for preserving meat.  And light functions to illumine the darkness.  So when Jesus calls us to be “salt and light” for the world, he is calling us into a community of God’s people whose work is to be a blessing to the rest of God’s creation.  We are to be salt and light in the way that we work.  By the work we do and the way we do it, we can enact God’s blessing on the world.

2. If our work is such a gift and blessing, why does our work often fail to make us happy?

If work is a gift from God, why is it so often the case that we experience our work as boring, tedious, meaningless, degrading, stressful, and frustrating?  The founding stories of Genesis suggest that our experience of work should be interpreted through the lens of a primordial curse.  In Genesis 3, God says to Adam and Eve after their disobedience: “Cursed is the ground because of you; you will eat of it through painful toil.  By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.”  Work is a gift from God, but all the work we do is subject to a curse.

Some of us might find this difficult to take seriously.  First, curses appear to belong to the world of witchcraft and magic, voodoo and superstition.  Second, our culture trains us to be very cheery and sentimental about our work.  Work should always be “fun.”  It should “energize” us.  We should always be looking for ways to work with “passion.”  This sentimentality is expressed in the book The Four Hour Workweek.  Work, quickly and easily lucrative, can be fully integrated with all the other fun things you want to do with your week!

Now I want to ask you to evaluate the claims of Genesis over against the claims of our culture.  Genesis says that our work is good for us and others but will often be experienced as a hardship.  Our cultural message is that work will make you happy and fulfilled.  Now let’s suppose that you love your dream job and view the curse language of Genesis as unnecessarily dark.  Ask yourself whether the person who empties your garbage or delivers your food would be able to hold the same view.  All in all, the classical biblical view is more realistic because it describes our experience in a richer way.  Moreover, it provides resources for coping with the difficulty of our work.  When we are left empty or bored or frustrated by our work, we are not experiencing an individual failure.  We are experiencing something written deep into the fabric of the world.  Work is both pleasure and sorrow.

3. Am I doing the work I should be doing?

I want to come at this question in the broadest way possible.  Are there any jobs that are off limits in the world God is bringing about?  One might find a career in selling drugs, or in financial pyramid schemes, or prostitution, or smuggling, or intellectual property theft - yet those ways of working contradict God’s calling to love and respect ourselves and others.  More complicated are the grey areas.  Working in engineering is a noble and productive line of work.  But what if one is asked to design weaponry?  Working in marketing is fine, but what if one is asked to market a product that is harmful to young persons or to design public relations campaign for a company that is a terrible polluter?  Banking and finance are necessary and noble careers.  Yet what if we are asked to design and sell financial products that do nothing other than generate fees?  How do we work in retail without seeing everyone who walks into our store as a consumer whose life will be more interesting if they throw away what’s old to buy something new?  How do we work in sales without exaggerating the benefit of our product?  How do we work in journalism without trivializing stories so as to make them more sensational?  

All of our work is fraught with complexity and calls out for reflection, prayer, and discernment.  It is tempting for those in the areas of the helping professions, labor, the arts, education and civil service to label business as heartless and dehumanizing.  And it is tempting for those whose work in business and commerce is financially well compensated to mistakenly assume that their work is more important and to see themselves as an elite caste of sophisticated humanity.  If we are to imagine a world begun in Jesus Christ and furthered by the work of the Spirit, that world requires both market-oriented commerce and forms of creativity and exchange that exist outside the forces of the market.  

Am I doing the work I should be doing?  While there might be a few jobs you shouldn’t take in good conscience, most work can be useful work when we do it well, when we allow God to shape our work as a contribution to a world where all things, and all people, flourish.

4. What is the meaning of our work?  Why do we work?

The movie “Office Space” - with its send up of Dilbert-like cubicle life and its TPS reports points to the crisis of meaning in much of our work.  The TV Series The Office is funny because of how incapable the leader Michael Scott is, how little work anyone gets done, how vexed are the relations between people crammed into the same space, and how doomed is their business of selling paper in a world being digitized.  Both have captured our attention because they send up the meaninglessness of so much of our work.

Alain de Botton argues that for most of human history our lives are given meaning by the twin themes of love and work.  Many people construct their lives and identities around their work.  It is their work that makes life meaningful.  First, work appears to make life meaningful when it is well-paid work.  Yet many of us do work that isn’t well-paid, or isn’t paid at all.  And well-paid work is problematic on its own - how long before I am replaced by someone who is better or who will work for far less?  Second, our work appears to make life meaningful when it leads to deep personal satisfaction.  Life is meaningful because we do work that is fulfilling.  Yet on many days our work feels hollow, futile, and senseless.  Third, work appears to make life meaningful when we are able to make a contribution to the world.  Yet how will we avoid despair when it dawns on us that our work will not last, but will be forgotten, sooner or later?  

After Henry was born in March of 2000, I was a stay at home dad that next Fall and Spring.  We made this decision for pretty practical reasons.  Steph was making more money than I was, and my work was flexible.  That year of taking care of our first child while trying to write and teach was the most difficult work I have ever done.  It was unpaid and uncelebrated.  It was lonely and emotionally draining.  There was nothing unique or special about it.  Millions of people do it every day, and do it better than I did.  So was it meaningful work?  I think so.  I was caring for another person, paying attention to a child’s needs so that this child could grow and be loved and one day do his own good work.  And in that sense I was cooperating in God’s work of blessing everything God has made.  This privilege of participating in God’s work is what can ennoble and give meaning to our work.

5. What are we to do when we want to do good work but can’t.  How do I deal with frustration, or failure, or unemployment?

Some of us want to find good work but can’t because of historically high unemployment rates.  Some of us are working at jobs we would leave if we could.  Some of us have failed in our work, either because of moral failure, or because of illness or depression.  Some of us have come to the difficult realization that we will not achieve in our work lives what we set out to achieve.  Some of us have worked hard and live with the pain that comes from that good work going unrecognized by anyone else.

A friend of mine works at a metal fabricating plant.  The work is hard, hot, and dirty.  He confided to me that he was able to keep this job only by volunteering to clean the bathrooms every night after work, off the clock.  He was ashamed and knew that he was being taken advantage of, but he has six children and needed the paycheck.  My friend’s life is hard, no doubt.  Yet he doesn’t define himself in terms of his work.

It is always difficult to believe the gospel of course.  But in periods of frustration or unemployment the gospel is a matter of life and death.  The good news of Scripture is that our work is important but it is not the final word about who we are.  What we do matters but it does not matter nearly so much as what God has done in loving, forgiving, and blessing us in Jesus Christ.  Perhaps one true story of your life is that you have not been able to do good work.  Even so, that it not the truest story about you.  The gospel is the truest story about you.  You are God’s beloved creature, and God is at work in your life to lead you towards abundance and flourishing along with the rest of creation.

Conclusion:

Yes, it’s often difficult to do good work.  Yet our work is one of the primary ways we love and serve God.  It is one of the most direct ways our lives bless others.  And through our work we participate in God’s active work of blessing all of creation into a full flourishing.  Whether we are mowing lawns or caring for children or trading stock, whether we have a good job or no job at all, let our working and our waiting for good work be offered to God as a gesture of love.

A Prayer for Good Work:

God you are the one active and alive and working.  We give you thanks for the work you have done and continue to do, creating and sustaining and renewing - for we know now the great cost of inviting us to share your life and love.  We praise you for your work done while incarnate in Jesus - for the daily, mundane work of carpentry, and for how that work dignifies our daily work; and of course we praise you for the work of caring, healing, feeding, and teaching, and for the work of liberating us from sin and death through your suffering.

Give us good work to do.  Give us the patience and skill to do it well.  Give us delight and satisfaction in work done well.

For those of us deciding what kind of work to do, grant us creativity and discernment.

For those of us who feel pulled in too many directions, grant us peace of heart.

For those with promising careers, with dreams of what we want to accomplish, center our work and motivation on serving others.

For those who may need to leave their work, either because they need to rest, or because it is work unbecoming your servants, grant us courage.

For those trapped in jobs they don’t like, grant us new opportunities for better work.

For those who are tired or depressed, renew us and enable us to take delight in your love.

For those tempted to despair, unable to see the meaning in their own work, grant insight and illumination, and encouraging friends.

For those who need to work but are not finding jobs, grant support both emotional and financial, and a renewed economy with enough good work for all.

Forgive us for the many ways that our work is superficial, selfish, short-sighted, and mindless.  Fill us with hope.  Bring to our hearts your lively promise that you will establish the work of our hands.  Help us to imagine a future in which you thresh away the chaff of our work, and enlarge whatever good work we have been able to do.  In Jesus’ name and through the power of the Spirit, we will offer you our best work as we wait for love to conquer all things.  Amen.