On Labor and Labor Day

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
–Frederick Buechner
As a kid when I first learned the definition of labor, I smirked that our annual Labor Day holiday was marked by the absence of labor. It took me a while to get the unique history of the holiday. Like most boys, my Dad was responsible for first teaching me about work. He worked a lot. When I was fourteen I began working too. I started out small, just working once a week and then taking on some odd jobs every now and then. Once I left the house and started college, work became a regular part of my life, except for a couple voluntary and involuntary gaps between jobs.
For the most part my work was always a means to another end. I was working to pay bills, while preparing for something I loved—a calling. My calling happens to be directly involved with church ministry, but make no mistake, God also calls delivery drivers, plumbers, farmers, shop-owners, insurance adjusters, and even lawyers to contribute to his sacred work. That’s right, God designed us humans for work, even before sin distorted our world—including ourselves—cursing much of our work with being irksome. While a lot of people merely work to make a buck, we Christians who believe in a God who created us in his image for a specific purpose, consider our work to be a calling, or vocation. Our work is part of what it means for us to be human. According to Dorothy Sayers, work is “a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing.”
Of course, somethings are not well worth doing. A mafia hitman may take pride in the efficiency of his work, but there is nothing creative or dignified in coldly killing people for your bosses. Perhaps when you were younger, you had a job or two that didn’t seem worth doing well. My first job after completing several years of graduate school involved days full of un-stapling, copying, and then re-stapling mortgage documents for stuffing envelopes. Needless to say, I didn’t feel like it was work worthy of MY doing it well.
But I was wrong in approaching my work as just a paycheck rather than a regular opportunity to worship God and bring him glory. I failed to see how my work was a way for me to serve my community by serving my work, and my rotten attitude did not help the dignity of my coworkers one bit.
Approaching our jobs as a divine calling, or vocation, should give us a better perspective for all our labors. We serve our community by serving our work and doing it well. I once heard a comedian ponder the expertise Jesus had as a carpenter, joking that were he to be hired all anyone would care about would be the quality of his tables. But the comedian was right. When we reflect God’s glory through our vocations, it is by doing our jobs well. Were I a carpenter, my goal would be to make my customers pleased with high quality work that serves their needs.
I grew up hearing that if you really wanted to serve God, then you would serve the church through narrowly defined positions, whether they be as a pastor, missionary, teacher, usher, greeter, or choir-member. But the truth is all of us can serve God through our vocations, especially when we strive for excellence in our field and look for ways to show love to our coworkers, bosses, and costumers. Given our fallen world, we can often find ourselves in jobs where we are not invested in the end-product of our company, or in a global economy we may have serious doubts whether our corporation is doing good in the world. And we shouldn’t dismiss those concerns lightly. Perhaps our efforts would be better spent elsewhere, but that doesn’t necessarily mean we are limited to “churchwork” when it comes to serving God. Going back to Sayers, “The only Christian work is good work well done. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is Church embroidery, or sewage-farming.”
When Labor Day comes, enjoy your day off work. And when the next day for your labor comes, remember that you are in a sacred business and God is using you for his work too. Of course, the God who made us to work also designed us for rhythms of rest, but we’ll save reflections on the Sabbath for another time.For more on the history of vocations, see the introduction to my paper here.The Sayers quotes are from her book, Creed or Chaos?The Buechner quote is from his fabulous little book, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC