Creative Labor

Scriptures: Isaiah 65:17-25, John 16:16-24

I have not typically been here with you on the Sunday before Labor Day, so I haven’t had much opportunity to offer a true Labor Day sermon.  Which is too bad, because this is one of my favorite themes – especially in terms of how I want to present two ideas that share the same word this morning.  You know, we are well into the second century of the modern labor movement. Tomorrow marks the 117th anniversary of Labor Day.  And as with anything that’s over 100 years old, a lot has changed.  As Russell Baker once said, we no longer honor the “workingman” so much as the “working couple” — and this change has been caused by significant societal shifts.  Oh, there may not be quite so much in the way of labor strife this year, but then we can always anticipate a basketball strike to come along – and we just narrowly averted a football one.  On the other hand, the three most important issues on today’s political scene are:  jobs, jobs, and jobs. Unemployment continues to be extremely high in Nevada, as you all know.

Tomorrow’s Labor Day gives us a chance to look at the way labor has affected all of us — and now I’m going to be using the word in both ways that we have come to understand it:  that is, what a woman goes through to give birth to a child as well as the physical toil usually associated with earning a living.

Why do you think this same word is used for these two very dis-similar activities?  While it’s certainly true, as any woman who’s gone through it knows, that giving birth is hard work, it might seem odd initially to use the same word for both practices.  Yet, there are historical — indeed, Biblical — reasons for drawing connections between them.  In the Genesis story of the expulsion from the Garden twin curses are placed upon the woman and the man:

“To the woman he said,
‘I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children,….
“And to the man he said,…
‘cursed is the ground because of you;
in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life;….’”

The writers of Genesis looked at their own experiences and saw childbearing and toil as the chief, inevitable banes of human existence, and thus they reasoned that a vengeful God had inflicted them upon humankind.  In fact, this is the attitude that has been taken throughout most of human history to both our work and our childbearing.

Yet, it’s only in relatively recent history — since the Industrial Revolution — that work as such has been glorified.  The Protestant Work Ethic, in particular, has caused us to see labor (in the sense of toil) as defining who a person is.  A lot of us, of course, are retired – myself included (well, sort of), and it’s tough for people to move into this new role of “retirees”.

But this looks strange when compared with Biblical theology, for throughout the Bible people are valued for who they are – in the sense of relationships, self-understanding, reverence toward life and toward God, actions based on commitment — rather than by what they do – in the sense of work that provides a living.  There is nothing is Biblical theology, for example, that says that technology can’t take over much of the drudgery necessary to support human life (although it can also be quite frustrating as in those interminable waits while we go through a mechanized menu of options on the phone, when we are really longing to speak to a real person).  Labor in the sense of toil is neither curse nor glorification, but it is rather one piece to the puzzle that defines what it means to be human.

Coincidently, it was also shortly following the Industrial Revolution that the development in medicine of anesthesia caused labor (in our other sense of the word) to be viewed differently.  The child-bearing woman no longer had to feel the intensity of labor contractions, and thus labor, though it could still be a scary process, came to be viewed as helpful, in terms of the total experience, to the end result — the child.  Labor in this sense also became neither curse nor blessing; it is simply there as a small part of the total experience.

But ever since the late 1950′s women have been discovering that this 19th century understanding is an inadequate approach to the meaning of labor in childbearing.  Through preparation they are able to participate actively in their own labor, directing it as a positive factor in the process of giving birth.  Thus, women are enabled to envision not only the act of birth as an act of creation, but also the process of giving birth as a creative process.  There has even been some research in recent years which suggests that the intensity of labor for couples actually helps them in making the transition to becoming parents; as in all transitions pain is helpful to the process.

By analogy, then, I believe that it is both possible and important to see the process of our work as contributing to creativity, and not just to look to the end product of our work.  My main point today, then, is that if our labor is to be given any meaning from a Christian perspective — other than just giving us one last holiday and a long weekend at the end of the summer — it will need to be seen as a creative process which is not ruled only by the end product.

Now, I believe that this is one of the chief problems we have had as a society over the last several years — finding creativity in the meaning of our work.   Not finding that creativity contributes to a sense of malaise, to nervous breakdowns, to frustration.  The executive who sees her or his job as pushing paper from the In basket to the Out basket or who is busy making decisions all day when the effect of these decisions can’t be seen is as susceptible to this malaise as the factory worker responsible for putting one bolt on each assembly-line product.  You and I have heard complaints — and probably complained ourselves — about the quality of workmanship in our time — about the not-so-long-lasting repairs, about the products that seem to deteriorate as soon as we get them home.  This era of built-in obsolescence is for us a time of transition during which we will either come to some new understandings about the creativeness of work or we will become increasingly negative about the meaninglessness of it all.

In this time of transition I want to suggest that the act of creative childbearing can serve as a model for our understanding of labor in the sense of toil.  In the Lamaze method of prepared or conditioned childbirth both partners work at the exercises and prepare themselves mentally for the process of labor — thus, labor becomes something not simply endured by one person but interdependent on a mutual relationship.  Secondly, that which was formerly seen as pain or inconvenience is used as a helping tool in the process — for labor contractions become the signals by which conditioned responses help the process of birth.  Thirdly, the woman remains awake and aware throughout the process, thereby knowing that her creativity is in control of the whole situation.  And finally, each partner is prepared both physically and mentally — there is an interaction of body and mind, of spirit and psyche, as well as mutual interdependence — so that the entireprocess becomes a creative one.

Now, to be honest, as my wife who is a Lamaze teacher tells me, there is after more than 50 years of the existence of prepared childbirth something of a backlash.  There are those women who say, “Oh, I’ll just have an epidural and not worry about the pain or working at it.”  Similarly, we all know people for whom the drudgery or senselessness of much of their work acts as a kind of drug or anesthesia — dulling their capacity to find creativity in the process of labor.  Where this happens there is a strong need to give people a sense of control over their own creative processes, to demonstrate that interdependence necessary to creative work, to point out the necessity of preparation if creativity is to take place.  This, it seems to me, is what Christians must be about in our time.

One way to go about this is to broaden our definition of labor to include more than just work or toil.  We have compartmentalized labor into vocation and avocation, but this distinction breaks down when we look at the kinds of work involved in being creative.  Such a broadened definition might include, for example, working at building a relationship (in our marriage or with our partner), or working at improving a particular sector of our world, or working at discovering the meaning of our inner life.  This kind of an understanding of “work” is what the search for spirituality in our day is all about — and this search will only intensify as we move into the second decade of the 21st century.

When Jesus’ disciples are troubled by the prospect of his leaving in John’s gospel, Jesus talks about how their sorrow will be turned to joy, using this wonderfully evocative image:  ”When a woman is in labor, she has pain, because her hour has come.  But when her child is born, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy of having brought a human being into the world. So you have pain now; but I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice and no one will take your joy from you.”  Jesus — as he usually does — takes the pain associated with labor and creatively turns it around, so that what we are left with is spiritual solace.

And there’s more — at the close of his ministry in Matthew Jesus places the work of salvation in the hands of fragile human beings — people like you and me — when he sends his disciples into all the world with the Great Commission.  A great Christian woman once put this thought to me most wonderfully and succinctly when she said, “God works, and we perspire.”

In words like these we have been told, and we believe, that God has work for us to do.  Yet, the work of God in our hands becomes much broader than the image we have traditionally given to work.  It may include contemplation, or sensitive listening, or simply being present to feel the need of another, or speaking out on the ills of contemporary society, or serving others with no thought of financial reward.

I believe that this broadened understanding of the meaning of labor cannot help but influence all our work — including that which some of us do to earn a living.  There is in the final analysis no such thing as a Christian vocation, for all our work is part of God’s labor when it is viewed as contributing to the creativity God holds out to us in creation.

God’s work came to creative fruition with the birth of a child — a birth that was prepared for throughout history, a birth that had meaning because of the interdependence of a people and their faith, a birth that was able to utilize creatively what was at the time the overwhelming pain of crucifixion.  The process thus begun at creation, brought to a peak with the birth, life, and death of Jesus who is the Christ, and continued into our day is the same process that we enter into when we commune with God and with one another and when we view our labor as creative fulfillment of God’s will.

In this sense the idealistic vision of Isaiah:

“…my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.

They shall not labor in vain,

or bear children for calamity;….”

is no pipe dream, but a true vision of the end result of creative labor.  There is work to be done, and it is with joy that we enter into the labor of God.

Amen.

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
September 4, 2011