The Work of The People

 Sermon delivered at All Souls Community Church
in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Sunday August 31, 2003

 © The Reverend Doctor Brent A. Smith

 READINGS

Genesis 3: 17-19

And to Adam God said, “[Because you have done this] cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you; and you shall eat the plants of the field.  By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it were you taken; you are dust, and to dust shall you return.”

“On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes,” William Ellery Channing

I say, then, that by the elevation of the laborer, I do not understand that he is to be raised above the need of labor.  I have faith in labor, and I see the goodness of God in placing us in a world where labor alone can keep us alive.  I would not change, if I could, our subjection to physical laws, our exposure to hunger and cold, and the necessity of constant conflicts with the material world.  Man owes his growth, his energy, chiefly to that striving of the will, that conflict with difficulty, which we call effort.  Easy, pleasant work does not make robust minds, does not give men a consciousness of their powers, does not train them to endurance, to perseverance, to steady force of will, that force without which all other acquisitions avail nothing.  You will see that to me labor has great dignity.  It has a higher function, which is to give force to the will, efficiency, courage, the capacity of endurance, and of persevering devotion to far-reaching plans. Ease, rest, owes its deliciousness to toil.

[But] in excess, work is not a good, when made the sole work of life.  It must be joined with higher means of improvement, or it degrades instead of exalting.  Man has a various nature, which requires a variety of occupation and discipline for its growth.  He has intellect, heart, imagination, taste, as well as bones and muscles; and he is grievously wronged when compelled to exclusive drudgery for bodily subsistence.  The only elevation of a human being consists in the exercise, growth, and energy of the higher principles and powers of his soul.  [This elevation] consists, first, in force of thought exerted for the acquisition of truth; secondly, in force of pure and generous feeling; thirdly, in force of moral purpose.  To act nobly, he must think nobly.

SERMON

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow,” said 20^th century scientific genius Albert Einstein.  “The important thing is to not stop questioning.”  I read this yesterday while I was ‘working out,’ the term we use for the simulation of work in place of the loss of the physical benefits of manual labor.  That is a statement out of a particular understanding of faith.  “The important thing is to not stop questioning.”

There are two kinds of understandings of faith in our world.  The first claims that the important thing is to believe so as to stop questioning.  The second understanding of faith frames life’s journey around the deepest, most profound questions one can ask.  As Unitarian Universalists we are part of a religious tradition that for nearly 500 years have chosen this second understanding of faith as our spiritual path.

Both of these understandings use the same words, the language of religion, but mean very, very different things by them.  Take the word, “work,” for example, especially “spiritual work.”  In the first understanding of faith spiritual work is what leads to salvation, to the preservation of the individual after death.  Spiritual work involves triumphing over the evil depravity that is our condition by virtue of our birth into a world from which one should escape.  It is driven by the fear of hellfire and damnation, and is shaped by the beliefs, the doctrines and dogmas that over the centuries the church has promoted as true ones.  Because it is spiritual it is work distinct from everyday work.  Everyday work is existence’s rebuke, and spiritual work is the effort necessary to escape that rebuke.  [Because you have done this] cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life...  By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread…

In the second understanding of faith “spiritual work” means something very different, although it is the exact same two words used.  And to see this difference requires us to understand something deeper about the evolution of humanity in the natural world.

One of my seminary professors, Mircea Eliade, the 20^th century’s greatest scholar of the world’s religions, reasoned that more than 600,000 years ago there emerged out of our earliest, pre-human ancestors a new creation: tools.  Archeological science established this proposal in the last century.  Apes will take objects around them and use them as tools.  It’s one of the characteristics of higher animal intelligence.  But, the emergence of a new form of ancient primates occurred, called the Paleanthropians, when they used tools to manufacture other tools.  They did work!  It was a higher form of tool use and the beginning of technology, by these ancestral tool and die makers.  To the older form of primate, like the modern ape, the tool was an extension of the self, the user conceiving of the tool and hand as one.  But here was a new discovery that led to a new creature! The tool was differentiated from the hand, as the creature who wielded the tool was from the world! Self-consciousness, which is now an unconscious bit of knowledge to us!  Television comedian Tim Allen was as archeologically accurate as he was funny, when as the tool man he would make ape sounds during his long running television series.  He was mimicking the evolutionary bond from no human consciousness to human self-consciousness, primate to a human being having been created as a creator.

The evidence for this is contained in the religious art these ancients produced through cave paintings.  The Paleanthropians used the tools they made primarily to hunt.  That created “group labor,” an ancient ritual you still see imitated every hunting season.  But this new technology – creating tools to make other tools to use in the hunt – also created a separation.  The Paleanthropians understood that as creatures they were distinct and separate from their surrounding natural world.  It was not a part of the understanding of the primitive primate before, which couldn’t distinguish itself from tool that was an extension of the self.  Consciousness initiated both the human characteristic of creativity and its recognition of a differentiation between self and world.

The adult sees the ancient echo of the evolution of consciousness, creativity, separation, and work when the toddler picks up a plastic hammer and pounds a plastic nail into a plastic board!  The self is exerting its autonomy and a new, creative connection with the world.  Cave paintings, engravings, bone and stone statuettes are all indications of this, and the attempt on the part of the Paleanthropian to reunite mystically with the natural world.  For the hunt, the use of tools, the product of group labor, was a sacred thing because it was the means for a reconnection.  The animals had souls in them, spirits like we do.  They were supernatural, and the blood of the animal sacrificed for the hunter was indistinguishable from the hunter’s blood.  Elaborate rituals were constructed to heighten the sense that emerging human being was still in mystical solidarity with a world that it, from the dawn of consciousness, was differentiated from.

Work, the creation of tools that were used to create spears, sharpen arrowheads, weave nets, was extended to become the work of the hunt, all of which assisted emerging humanity in influencing its world.  Work created our capacity to creatively manipulate the things of this world, and work, through the hunt, was expressive of our capacity to reconnect mystically to this separate world.  Work became “spiritualized”; that is, it became the means by which human consciousness was both separate from and reunited with its own existence!

When I got my first job as a minister, I was a student minister, a minister in training, in Seattle in 1981.  When we arrived my supervising minister gave me the reading I was to do two days later in front of 350 people in a sanctuary!  But I have never lacked for chutzpah or stupidity, which ever was at play that Sunday.  I was given a page with the text from the Book of Genesis typed upon it.  I read dramatically and forcefully the man’s punishment: By the seat of your brow shall you eat bread, till you return to the ground.  Well, it’s not the seat of his brow but the sweat of his brow, but how would I know a seat from a sweat, having not been raised on the Bible or in a church?  Somehow I felt I had been dealt a punishment of sorts by having been given this reading as my initial, public, ritualistic debut!

Somehow work came to be understood as a punishment, instead of an occasion for a mystical reunion with existence.  By the time of the authorship of that passage in Genesis, perhaps 8-12,000 BCE, the idea of work had degenerated into being the deserved retribution for having squandered the blessing of a “Garden” where all was provided.  The differentiation of human being from the natural world was now a condemnation from which we needed to flee.  And spiritual work, far from being the means to reconnect mystically with the world of our existence, became the path for that escape.

Why do you work?  Over the years I have asked others that question as much as any.  “I have to, to survive,” until in pressing deeper I have found our conception of work is so narrow that it is confined to that labor for which we get paid; a punishment, in other words.  Or, as a means to the escape of leisure.  “I work to fish,” reads a prophetic bumper sticker.  But in other ways, like the ancient Paleathropian hunters thought, work is the means to a higher, sacred reconnection of self and world; an existence that we have come out of, are separated from by the consciousness that constitutes us, the very capacity for self-reflective thought that distinguishes human nature from animal nature.

It is true that the origins of the modern celebration of Labor Day are political.  The public recognition of laborers began in this country in the late 1800’s, and today is one of the few, if not the only, of our holidays that doesn’t recognize a person, or a war, or the founding of this country.  It would be inconceivable without the industrial revolution, the economic and political insights of Karl Marx, and the disputes during the rise of the labor movement.  The first state bill introduced was in the New York legislature, and the first law recognizing a worker’s day was in Oregon in 1887, later to become a national day by President Grover Cleveland during the labor unrest associated with George Pullman and his company.  It is true that this day was conceived as a respite from punishing manual labor.

And it is true, too, that this day is a day of recreation.  In fact, it marks the end of summer, the time of recreation, as if to remind us for one last time this year that we return to the grind of our jobs for the escape of leisure.  In some ways we all work to fish, to “escape to the lake” whether we go to the lake or not, fish or not.

But, all the work of your day, that you do, why do you do it?  Why does the toddler, when given that plastic hammer, try with all her might to fashion something new from that plastic board, and in doing so, show such delight?  To give work its proper place in the landscape of our lives requires us to understand what makes us human.

The form of worship is called liturgy, literally “the work of the people.”  And I would submit that the purpose of this kind of work is not to give our life activity over to God; nor to see the activity of work as a punishment; the world as some place from which to escape to the lake or to heaven.  But in worship, “the people’s work,” we seek to know who we are.  That when eons ago, a creature picked up a long stick, a sharp rock, and some vines, and fashioned from that a spear that it might hunt and preserve itself and its young, that something new came into existence: Consciousness.  Human being was beginning to emerge.  And when that creature joined with others and hunted that all might survive, that ancient band of early humans worshipped, as they knew how.  They gave thanks to existence and its creatures for the bounty for which they worked that it might be yielded unto them.

And the work was hard, and to some seemed a punishment, because now they knew, they were conscious of, the toils, the burdens, and the labors necessary for their survival and the survival of those they came to understand they loved.  They knew they were separated from the animals and the natural world upon which they depended for their survival.  And today, our recognition of that ancient part of our human nature and our capacity to reconnect with existence is threatened by our enslavement to the idea that we work to escape.  So we worship, Labor Day weekend worship, “the people’s work,” to be reminded of who we are, creatures capable of a mystical solidarity with existence through our everyday work, our spiritual work.  We worship to understand how we might be liberated from the idea or need to escape our existence.  We worship to learn how to embrace life, to know that, as Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “We are unitarians of a united world,” part of a unity of the spirit our religious forbears called God.  We gather to do the work of worship, and to be reminded of all those things in this life for which we are grateful and upon which we depend.  In other words, this day, like all days, is more than a reprieve from the punishing labor of a sweaty brow.  It is a day when, like Channing noted, all who labor, all men and women, all souls would be elevated to act nobly by thinking nobly.

I say, then, that by the elevation of the laborer, I do not understand that we are raised above the need of labor.  I have faith in labor, and I see the goodness of God in placing us in a world where labor alone can keep us alive.  I would not change, if I could, our subjection to physical laws, our exposure to hunger and cold, and the necessity of constant conflicts with the material world.  We owe our growth, our energy, chiefly to that striving of the will, that conflict with difficulty, which we call effort.

 But we have an intellect, heart, imagination, taste, as well as bones and muscles...  The only elevation of a human being consists in the exercise, growth, and energy of the higher principles and powers of the soul.  To act nobly, a human being must think nobly.

AMEN.