Lord, Guide Us in the Work We Do

The Reverend Shirley Smith Graham, St. Martin’s

Sunday, September 2, 2007

  
Next to Columbus Day, Labor Day may be the most underrated holiday of our secular calendar.  Other than being a chance to get out of town one last time before the school year starts, Labor Day lacks luster for many.  I believe it once signaled when ladies could fashionably wear black again (a fashion rule that I break all the time!).  But Labor Day has lacked significance, other than marking the gateway into anticipating the fall season and the beginning of the school year.

But looking through the eyes of faith, we can see that Labor Day offers us enormous enrichment for our Christian journey.  Who has not struggled with St. Paul’s admonition to pray at all times without ceasing – even during work?  Who has not fought boredom in a tedious task and wondered how, possibly, God could be here too in whatever mundane duty we find ourselves performing?  Labor – the doing of work – is part and parcel of our human lives, and as such labor offers us a deep dive into the spiritual life.

Let me draw your attention to the collect for Labor Day, featured on the cover of your bulletin.  This prayer was written by the Reverend Dr. Charles Guilbert and adopted into the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.   It is not the oldest prayer about labor, since the prayer for agriculture has roots in the 1662 edition of the prayer book.  Since few of us now farm for a living, it was high time that we receive an official prayer for our work that is relevant to our lives today.  It only took three centuries – not bad for change in the Church.

Would you take a moment and read this prayer on the cover of your bulletin?  I’m interested in what sticks out to you …

What sticks out to me is that God has so linked our lives with one another that all we do affects others.  Sounds like Dr. Guilbert knew about my table grapes that were perhaps grown in Chile, shipped to a southern port, transported by rail to a regional hub and then brought to my grocery store by truck.  We are able to live because of the work others do.  Others depend upon the work we do: we are interlinked, and our survival depends on our mutual cooperation.  This physical need of one another reflects a spiritual reality, too.  All of us appear before the sight of God as God’s children.  We all are objects of God’s care and concern.  And when we each individually respond to God – for us responding through the gift of Jesus Christ – we come into a fellowship hall filled with other people.  So our reality as daughters and sons of God is a communal reality – the mansions of God are lovely, crowded rooms.  And this reality, in turn, mirrors God’s reality – that Father, Son and Holy Spirit dwell together in community, mutually,  each the giver and the object of love, interlinked in the God-head.  So made in the image of God are we that we, like God, find ourselves interlinked, so that all we do affects, for good or ill, other lives.

This interlinked reality is one we may not always be conscious of.  We get compartmentalized in our individual homes and individual work – although Williamsburg is much better at community than many places.  But even if we don’t wake up in the morning conscious that we will affect others – for good or ill -- I think we know it at some deep-down level.  Think about how much stress and tension in our lives comes from wondering if we’ve done the right thing for a person; if we were supposed to do a task in some other way; wondering whether we treated a person well – or if we should have gone the extra mile; perhaps knowing that someone has not been treated well and worrying about how to make amends or make up for the loss.

I would suggest that instead of wondering or worrying, we apply a spiritual lens to our labor.  No matter what work we do – whether it’s educating, or counseling, whether our work is volunteering or gardening or cleaning up the breakfast dishes – any type of work can become a tool for spiritual growth.  The key is applying an ancient pattern to the labor: we take, we bless, we break and we give.  Take, bless, break and give.  Where have you seen this pattern before?  (Take, bless, break and give.)

… Each Sunday, we take the raw material, the gifts offered.  At the offertory I say, “Let us with gladness present the offerings and oblations of our life and labor to the Lord.”  And then on behalf of the whole congregation, I take what is offered of our life and labor, symbolized in the money offering, the bread and the wine.  All of these gifts go on the altar.  After the “taking,” then those signs of our life and labor are blessed – offered to God and consecrated by God.  At this moment, the Lord responds to our gratitude with blessing.  Jesus honors our gesture of presenting ourselves by presenting Himself to us in the real presence of the Eucharist.  Though the bread is still bread and the wine is still wine, nonetheless Jesus is really present to us in a way that transcends our understanding.   Jesus is remembered not just because we have remembered his gift of love but because by walking through the acts of sharing bread and wine as he told us to we are re-membering his presence, re-living it together, if you will.  In the Eucharist, God sees our gesture of coming to Him, and God honors that gesture of devotion by coming to meet us.

Then, what has been taken and blessed gets broken so that it can be given to many.  The bread gets broken so that it can be given to the many who are here.  And in turn, we, fed and nurtured by the grace that happens in this place, take that blessing out into the world.

This pattern – taking, blessing, breaking, and giving – is a way of dedicating all our labor to God – not just the labor we present on Sunday mornings.  What would it be like if we started our work day by evoking this pattern of taking, blessing, breaking, and giving?  What would happen to us if doing the laundry started with stilling our minds and thinking about taking, blessing, breaking, and giving?  What possibilities for life and liveliness would there be if we brought to that moment of fixing the neighbor’s lawnmower the act of taking, blessing, breaking, and giving?  How would our tutoring of a child change if we were, in that moment, taking, blessing, breaking, and giving?  How might a child’s act of going to school feel different if it were started as taking, blessing, breaking, and giving?

At the 10 o’clock service today, I will invite teachers and students, in honor of their school year beginning this week, to come forward to dedicated themselves to their labor by engaging in this ancient pattern.  They will take themselves forward, offer themselves for blessing, allow themselves to be broken – by good learning experiences, failures and hard work – and they will be given to the world – first in their classrooms, in their after-school activities, their sports and hobbies, all in preparation for the world they will enter as adults.

It is no accident that, when we live this pattern, the final act of our labor is to be given – to be given out into the world, to be a blessing,  Once blessed, we are then to be a blessing in the world.  Think of all the different ways Jesus told us this: be good yeast, be a seed planted in good soil, make your treasure multiply, go out to all the nations, go – two by two to proclaim the good news, to heal, to bring justice, to make right the things that are wrong.  Once taken and blessed, then be willing to be broken and given to the world so that God may bless the world with you.  Be blessed, then be a blessing.

I spent some time this week reflecting on how our labor can become holy work through this four-fold action, and as I thought, I remember Satoko Kitahara.  It was the calamity of war that first caused this young, Japanese woman to do labor; it was the miracle of love that caused her last great work of labor.  Satoko Kitahara grew up in the suburbs of Tokyo and, in her teenaged years, while the Second World War raged, she was conscripted to work in an aircraft factory.  Under terrible working conditions that killed her teenaged brother, Satoko Kitahara, developed the tenacity to survive.  When the war was over and her forced labor finished, she resumed her life as a highly born Japanese woman having every advantage of economic well-being and class.  Other than learning to read and manage a household, there was not much work expected of her.  Still, she was a woman of dreams, and she finished her college degree in Pharmacology.  But one day, while walking along Tokyo Bay, she saw two nuns in their religious habit as they entered a tiny church.  Satoko followed them into the church, which led to her desire to be baptized.  However, Satoko found there more than the object of her faith; she found her labor of love – for not far from the church was Ant Town.

Ant Town was a shanty-town of social misfits: orphans, vagrants, dispossessed persons, panhandlers, black marketers and ex-cons.  Their work each day was to scour Tokyo, beginning at the break of dawn, and pick through the trash for anything that might be recycled or sold.  Carrying baskets or pushing wooden hand-carts, these “ragpickers” sustained themselves by picking up scrap and squatting on the tidal lands next to the harbor.

Like any people, the ragpickers had families, and so it was that Ant Town was filled with children – who needed schooling, who needed play, who needed affection.  And so enters Satoko Kitahara, having taken herself from her comfortably well-born life, having been blessed and broken – by baptism and war – to now give of herself for the children of Ant. Town.  She became their teacher and play organizer and, finally, she became a ragpicker herself, working the streets in the morning, caring for the children in the afternoon, and sleeping in Ant Town at night.  She gave of herself, following Jesus’ pattern, until there was no more flesh to give.  She died at age 28 of tuberculosis, which she had acquired during the war.  But the gift she gave kept giving.

Not all of us are called to give in the same way Satoko Kitahara did.  There are ways to do our labor that will enable us to be well people – well and healthy physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  But, if we’re not careful, we can do a lifetime of labor without much sense of benefit.  We will, by nature of being human, labor all our lives long.  The critical question is, will we labor in such a way that we are being a blessing to others?  Will we, in our labor, allow ourselves to be taken, blessed, broken and given?  Lord, guide us in the work we do.  Amen.