Labor Day special

September 2, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

Does God take a day off nowadays, or was it just that First Sabbath, after God had worked so hard for six days to get creation launched?

Labor is something which we all have to do, and all avoid. I don’t want to clean out the garage, for example. Bp. Paul Egertson once explained the traditional division of duties in his marriage, negotiated at the outset many years ago. Shirley would take care of all the inside stuff, and Paul would take care of the outside. The only thing, he admitted, was that Shirley did all the inside stuff every day, while raising six sons. Paul on the other hand, did all the outside stuff when he “got around to it.”

People today are busier than ever, although at what I’m not sure. For one, with more and more people living alone (divorced, widowed, never married, etc.) there is no division of labor in a family unit. A single parent does it all, all the time. And given the state of our economy and our greed, many people work several jobs in an attempt to scotch-tape a living together from several sources.

Yes, our greed plays a role in our exhaustion. Anthropologists tell us that a human being can work enough to provide for all his/her basic human needs with about 2.5 hours of work per day. Our needs met, we are obsessive/compulsive about acquiring stuff we don’t actually need. Don’t agree? Got to have that Hummer to get to work 43 miles away? Got to have that 54″ wide aspect ratio state-of-the-art television? Absolutely got to have it?

That being said, a sabbath rest is both a gift of God (God invented it, after all, Genesis 1), and a commandment: “Remember the sabbath day to keep it holy.” God knows that, if it weren’t a commandment, everybody would disregard its value as a gift. Gift and commandment belong together as a way of ordering life, of letting the rhythms of life function the way they were intended to care and nurture people and all other creatures the way we were intended.

We sometimes employ day laborers around the house, but I insist that we not do so on Sundays. They, after all, should have their day of rest as well, even if I know that they may just go back to the Home Depot parking lot and wait for someone else to hire them. Is life so desperate, either here or in Latin America where dollars earned here will flow, that the poor attempt to work every day?

We have more than a handful of people in our church who work on Sundays, and very rarely come to worship. It’s very hard to reason with them about this; some defensiveness is bound to come up however politely concealed. “Why can’t you talk to your boss, and tell the boss you are a church-going person?” I will say or at least think. “There are probably others who aren’t Christian that could just as easily work the Sunday shift.”

Yes, I know it’s not that easy. But even to have that conversation begins to move us back to the point of saying—claiming—that a sabbath’s rest is God-given. A day off is not part of the largess of our employers or the huge corporations that now rule the world. It is a God-given perk for being human, and one that in the Scriptures was meant to be practiced even for beasts of burden. I wonder, if we let our machines go idle on the sabbath, and let our horsepowers have the day off, couldn’t we even go a long way to slacking off the global warming and a host of other human-made problems.

I also can’t help wondering, what with this huge conservative Christian base in America that wants to cling to traditional values, why they haven’t clamored for laws to allow people to not work on Sundays, or on the religious sabbath of their choice. The current legal/political climate in our nation makes it harder to unionize, harder to talk back to one’s boss, harder to demand or get a living wage, harder to remain human in defiance of the corporate business machine that will do anything to extract ever-higher returns on its equity (a much greedier objective than merely making profits). As the list of things in society which seldom/never take a day off (global financial markets, for example) grows exponentially, human beings are dying for some rest.

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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