Sermons
A Message by the Rev. Harvey G. Throop
Palisades Presbyterian Church
San Diego, California
September 6 , 2009
Finding Enjoyment in Our Work
(Ecclesiastes 2:18-25)
“ There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink,
and find enjoyment in their toil."
(Ecclesiastes 2:24)
Somewhere, I recall reading someone's observation that we Americans, more than any people on earth, seem to establish our identity on the basis of our jobs. Ask us who we are and we will tell you about our work.
Work is a complicated topic, made more complex by the fact that our faith tradition itself says different things about it.
Today's scripture reading, for example, begins with a fairly dismal view. It is from the book of Ecclesiastes , written several centuries before Christ by a kind of philosopher or preacher, as he is called, who reflects on the eternal question of the meaning of life. We know this philosopher mostly because of his prose on the subject of “time” in chapter three: "For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die ... etc.”
Yet, if the truth were known, the writer's a cynic: "There's nothing new under the sun," he concludes. "Vanity of vanities. … All is vanity."
When the writer of Ecclesiastes reflects on the topic of work, he becomes almost wistful: "I hated all my toil in which I had toiled under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 2:18).
Besides, he adds, I'm going to have to turn my work over to people who won't even do it like I do it, "and who knows whether they will be wise or foolish? Yet they will be master of all for which I toiled. … This also is vanity" (Ecclesiastes 2:19).
Finally, in verse 24, the writer makes a profound and good observation: "There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink and find enjoyment in their toil.”
Indeed. It occurs to me that right up there among the greatest blessings in life is the blessing of going to work on Monday morning to a job you love and, in Ecclesiastes' words, "to find enjoyment in your toil" (Ecclesiastes 2:24).
Yet, the fact remains that it is an illusive blessing. Many folks never experience it. And it is complicated even further by the economic climate in which we find ourselves today.
In our time, when we are seeing so much change taking place: new jobs opening up, old jobs disappearing, computers and robots taking over for real people, automation happening everywhere, increasing concern is being voiced over what is happening to people's lives in the process. Increasingly, when one calls a large company, one is given a menu to follow: Press “1” if you're calling about this, press “2” is it's about that, press “3” if it's about something else, etc., etc.
Or worse, you talk to a computer that sounds like it's a real person. There are more and more companies using that technology. Granted, that may be a technological marvel and all, but it has taken jobs away from real people.
Change is affecting work everywhere. We are told that the top 10 in-demand jobs in the year 2010 – next year -- didn't even exist in 2004, and that “we are currently preparing students for jobs that don't yet exist, using technologies that haven't been invented in order to solve problems we don't even know are problems yet” ( read on the Internet -- research by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and Jeff Brenman, under the heading “ Did You Know?”, 2009 edition).
Our faith tradition maintains that human beings, regardless of their wealth, race, ethnicity, gender, life condition or station, deserve and are owed respect, equality and opportunity.
We may well have come to a time when we, as a society, need to come up with a revised work ethic and, as Christians, a revised biblical theology of work.
Our faith has traditionally reminded us that one of the greatest opportunities we have for honoring and serving God -- for most of us, anyway -- lies in the pursuit of our regular employment. This is true, whether one is an engineer, an educator, a homemaker, a doctor, a factory worker, a computer programmer or whatever -- to name just a few.
The greatest threat to our American way of life and religious vocation is our loss of the sense of the dignity of work. At one time, the old Puritan work ethic seemed to dominate -- "If you are not working you are sinning." That way of thinking produced some workaholics.
I once read how friends of Louis Pasteur, the famous French chemist and microbiologist, would get on him for working everyday and taking little time off. The great scientist would reply, "It would seem to me that I was committing a theft if I were to let a day go by without doing some good work."
Whatever the case, that seems much better than the new pluralistic American work ethic, which seems to go something like this: "Make as much as you can, do as little as you can, and enjoy as much leisure as you can."
The creation stories in the beginning of Genesis portray God as a worker. God is always creating. By making us in our Creator's own likeness, God intended for work to be our normal lot. God created us to be co-workers with him.
God provides the resources and calls us to work them for God. The Bible honors all kinds of work. There is no distinction made between vocations or forms of work. What matters is the motive and the spirit in which the work is done. The clergy's work is no more sacred than the trash collector's, the plumber's, the teacher's, the nurse's or carpenter's. God gives us each different aptitudes and gifts, and calls us into different areas of labor for the good of all.
Perhaps the most important biblical word about work comes from St. Paul, writing to the early church in Corinth. "There are varieties of gifts," Paul wrote, "but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good" (1 Corinthians 12:6.7).
Each is given a gift, a skill or an ability to put to work for the common good. And so perhaps the most important task for each of us is to discover and claim our project, our labor. What a blessing it is if we can earn a living at it. But not everyone can do that.
Jesus brought dignity to his work as a carpenter, and you can be sure that the joints fit tightly and every yoke was sanded smooth as glass when they came out of his shop.
Every one of us needs to examine the attitude with which we do our job as well as the quality of our production. We need to ask ourselves, "Am I doing my job in a way in which God would approve?"
In this world, our Christian faith never affords us an escape from hard work. It makes us better able to work even harder.
From the perspective of our Christian faith, we don't work primarily for pay, ambition or to satisfy our employer. We work so that we can take every task and offer it to God. All work is done for God, so that God's world can go on and God's children may have all the things they need for their daily living. Every worker is answerable to God, equally, in performance reviews.
There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil.” (Ecclesiastes 2:24)
What exactly that turns out to be will be different for each of us. Some will teach, some will sing, some will write, some will be builders, some will plant trees. Some will work in offices, some will heal, some will be instruments of grace and enable children to become all they can become. Some will argue cases, some will move into the political arena, some will deliver mail, some will wash dishes and some will clean streets. The list goes on and on.
Someone once suggested that the greatest reformation our land could ever want -- a reformation that would mean a dramatic, economic, social, political and moral reform -- could begin if each of us dedicated our daily work to God, doing everything we do as unto God.
If we see ourselves as co-workers with God, then we will work to the end that God will say to us, " ‘Well done, good and faithful servant; … Enter into the joy of your lord'” (Matthew 25:23).
