This morning is a gift from God, and the dawn’s new light is a summons to be greeted with gratitude and thanksgiving. We give thanks that we can:

See the forms of creation,

Hear the call of creation,

Smell the fragrances of creation,

Taste the sweetness of creation,

And touch the warmth of creation.

We give thanks for the lives we’ve been given; for the love that graces our days; and for the chance to assist in creation’s unfolding.

We light this Chalice to remember a truth,

Consecrated through the ages by the service and sacrifice

Of individuals and communities:

There abides a unity and freedom of the Spirit,

Expressed through a love for all souls.

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.”

We bow our heads this day, O God, that in spirit we might be present with those who suffer in our land and in our world. Lead us to see how we might join your generous and healing spirit to tend the broken ones, rest the weary ones, bless the dying ones, pity the afflicted ones, and soothe the suffering ones. Remind us again and again that although there exits a spirit of generosity, compassion, forgiveness, and love, such a spirit as this needs our hands to do its work. Remind us through the memory of those who came before us and bequeathed us their lives in the service of freedom and love; those whose lives were celebrated in this place. Remind us through recalling the newborns, infants, and children who were christened in this place, who learned in this place that there abides a unity and freedom of the spirit expressed and made manifest in love. Remind us through the faces we met here, some whose lives took them to other towns and cities and countries, that this spirit is universal, is alive to all cultures, all times, and to all people if we just have faith that it exists always. As we leave this place, remind us that this spirit of generosity, compassion, forgiveness, and love knows no specific place, no specific faith, no specific time, no specific race, no specific country, but that it is a spirit for all souls.

We live in trying times, O God. Daily we see the inhumanity we reign down upon one another. We see human brutality and fear, hopelessness and helplessness, terror and horror. Do not shade these from our eyes. But let them not be all that we see. The higher sentiments reside in us also; mercy, compassion, charity, a sense of what is right and good and proper. Lead us in our religious fellowship to invigorate the higher sensibilities of the human spirit. And by invigorating them, lead us to exercise them in our affairs with others. Therein lies hope.

May this place and what occurs here this morning be a reminder to us of all places, everywhere, in our lives A place of healing and rest for the spirit. A place of liberation and a cultivation of the spirit. A place of learning about the spirit. Yet, like every other place in existence, a place for the manifestation of the spirit. May all that is noble, lovely, and true abide with all who enter these doors, that freedom and love might prosper.

AMEN.

Most Western religious viewpoints can be divided into those that look to a glorious past that the present has degenerated from, like a Garden of Eden that human beings have fallen out of. The other general religious perspective represents the idea that the past gives us clues as to who and what we are as human beings, so that we can knowledgably search the future for the hope it can contain. The first is retrospective and nostalgic. The second is prospective and uncertain. Orthodoxy is represented by the first, looking to the revelations of the past to find the present’s fulfillment and meaning, regardless of whether it goes by the name of orthodoxy. It can easily be paraphrased by the Biblical quote from Ecclesiastes, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” (1:9) Unitarianism, and the liberal religious spirit, is represented by the second, looking to the past as a clue to creating hope in the future. It can easily be distinguished from the other as paraphrased by another Biblical quote, from Isaiah, “For behold, I create new heavens and a new earth.” (Isaiah 65:17a) These are competing views of the meaning of time and, thus, the nature, structure, and meaning of existence.

If you would go over to Chicago, to Hyde Park on the Southside, at 57^{th and Woodlawn, as our Youth ROOTS Coming of Age classes historically do in the fall, you will see a huge gothic church, the First Unitarian Church of Chicago. Don’t be fooled by its traditional form of architecture. There are many things in this world that are symbolic of deeper things, and those deeper things can escape the notice of one whose eye is not prepared to see it. Inside that old form of architecture there are numerous symbols carved into the stone, like there are in ancient European gothic church structures. But since this structure is from the 20th century and built in America not Europe, housing a liberal religious congregation, the symbols themselves are not ancient symbols of the past that creedal Christian orthodoxy has deemed religious, but representations of humanity’s daily life yesterday and tomorrow. Symbols of daily work – the machine, the anvil, the printing press – placed inside a sacred space symbolizes that it is the daily work of men and women that is sacred and holy, and not what the creedal church declares to be true through its symbols. Through symbol that whole church structure is a sermon on how daily work is when we are closest to the Holiest of Holies, to God.}

That is a new view of work, a new heaven and a new earth, here in our daily lives. It is a new view, a progressive view, because it does not identify as sacred the past, and what has been produced and created and done. Yet, as someone who has worked on the loading dock of a casket factory, the floor of a garment mill, and the assembly line of a school bus factory, I can truly state that at those times I did not feel closest to the Holiest of Holies, to God. Thus, for liberal religion, is the paradox of work.

In the past daily work by everyday people like you and men was perceived to be the punishment given to humanity for its rebellion. The symbol was of Adam and Eve being expelled from a paradise Garden of Eden. The world had been created by God but was not complete. So, God created a man, and took from that man the necessary ingredients to make a woman. God placed these two human beings into a paradise where all of their needs were provided for them. They did not have to till the ground for their food. They did not have to build their house. They didn’t have to create its furnishings to make their house a home. They did not have to load caskets, deliver bundles of cloth, or screw in panels on a bus until they retired. All that they needed was provided.

But Adam and Eve rebelled from this paradise, destroyed it by their disobedience, and in anger the Lord expelled them from Eden and they “fell” into existence. They fell into a condition whereby the women would suffer pain in childbirth and the man would suffer fatigue and weariness from work. In other words, this story, thousands of years old, handed down to the ancient Hebrews, with its source probably in an agrarian culture that had “fallen” to an industrial one, portrayed existence in this way. The past was ideal, whereas the present is full of a pain and woe born as a punishment.

And one can see why work would be conceived of in this way. If there is nothing new under the sun, then today’s work is just a repeat of yesterday’s, as will tomorrow be too. In ancient societies common men and women toiled just to subsist. They suffered in order to put food on their own table, and their lives were being risked everyday with the threat that they would not survive. It was not because of a lack of effort on their part. But neither was it because they lived in a world that lacked resources to better their lives. They could conceive of nothing more or better in part because they lived in cultures that looked to the past for inspiration and wisdom and faith. In terms of work what they saw was more of the same!

As many of you know our daughter and son-in-law are in the Peace Corps in West Africa, and they live in a remote village that is like the ancient world out of which the Garden of Eden story and retrospective religion originates. The villagers do subsistence farming. Today is like yesterday and tomorrow. The villagers will not change what they have been doing for thousands of years because to them there is nothing new under the sun; and to risk that there might be, is to risk their physical demise. But what happens to the human spirit?

Conceiving of work in this way persisted for thousands of years, but it was related to cultures that displayed common characteristics. It was not that this kind of world persisted because of a lack of resources to better human life or that they are lazier and possessed less ingenuity. But the culture that produced the Garden of Eden story, the West African village culture our loved ones now live in, and even the European world of our spiritual forbears in the 16th and 17th century all exhibit a characteristic that can so easily pass by our notice; like those symbols in the sanctuary of the ancient gothic architectural form in its more modern, First Unitarian Church of Chicago.

In the past an individual’s work was not his or her own. In the past the individual did not possess the freedom of the body that goes with owning the fruits of one’s own labor. In old world Europe the individual’s body was not his or her own because the labor the body did, would not yield something the individual had. The serf tilled the Lord of the Manor’s land. This old world view immigrated to this continent through indentured servitude and slavery; that a man or woman’s labor was not their own. We have struggled to be free of this view of human labor through the abolition of slavery, through labor movements and worker rights movements, and through profit sharing.

In other words, the issue of work is also about the issue of being an individual and being free to own your own body and mind. Historically, and something that is part of this day at this moment, labor is about the issue of who owns what you do with your body and your mind? Are you an individual and are you free? If you build furniture do you get paid equitably for YOUR work with YOUR body? If you design computer programs or see patients or write books or invent widgets or run companies or serve the public, do you get paid equitably for YOUR work with your mind? Your work is yours as your body and mind is yours as you are an individual and free. And we may not realize how revolutionary that idea is in the history of humankind, and even compared to other cultures today.

It is only the irony of our day that we associate leisure with freedom. “I work so that I can fish,” is still that old world view that somehow work is a bondage of the body, the mind, and the spirit. This is not to say that some work is not drudgery and mind-numbing and so repetitious as to be taxing on the spirit. But today unlike yesterday, and in this culture unlike other cultures, you can conceive of what you do as “work[ing] so that you can fish” because what you do with your body and mind is yours. If you can say, “Take this job and shove it.”

And that is because we have come to see what was not seen before: freedom is a spiritual thing, something that from birth all possess as a possibility to be lived into. You can decide to do something else because as created free, your body and mind is of your person and is owned by no other human being. Spiritual freedom doesn’t mean that exercising freedom has no consequences. You might quit a job and find no other. But, what Labor Day symbolizes is the spiritual quality of freedom that was not conceived of in the past when your labor was not yours; when there was no individual you and you as an individual could not be free.

So, let us take our leisure today, the freedom from work. But in so doing, let us also realize a spiritual freedom that is at work in existence as well. This spiritual freedom is not a freedom from. It does not make work a holy thing by saying it is in fleeing from work that human beings are made whole. Rather, spiritual freedom is a freedom towards. That when we see how we are conceived and created to be free, our work becomes a means towards which we establish, through our free creativity, the work of our hands upon us and the world. The Spirit can be liberated when we know, see, and have faith that what we produce in our work is what we, as individuals, working in a relationship with others, have made of the great gift of this creation. It unfolds through the work of our hands, our minds, and our hearts. All around us there are evidences of something deeper that our labor can reveal and our lives can be aimed towards. And we can be reminded of deeper things and wider aspirations by voices from the past, like Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, which calls us not back to their day, but forward to our own:

AMEN.

BENEDICTION

Be not afraid. And seeing there is naught to fear, and bearing witness to what can never die, go forth into the world in peace.

Be of good courage.

Search all things

And hold fast to that which is good.

Render unto no one evil for evil.

Strengthen the faint-hearted.

Support the weak.

Help the afflicted.

Love all men, love all women, love all children,

Love all souls.

Serving the Most High.

And rejoicing in the power of the Spirit.

AMEN.