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Holy Trinity Anglican Orthodox Church
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Twelfth Sunday after Trinity |
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Genesis
41:25-40 Colossians 3:22-4:6 Keeping
a Right Attitude about Work Tomorrow
is Labor Day. And the very
best thing about Labor Day is that most of us plan to spend it doing
anything but labor. Maybe we
shouldn’t call it Labor Day anymore.
Maybe we should call it Holiday, or Fun Day, anything but Labor
Day. For we have come to
dislike the word “labor.” To us it brings visions of hospital wards called, “Labor
and Delivery.” Or it
recalls the punishment of Adam in Genesis 3:19, which says, “In
the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.”
Or we remember that our years are “but labor and sorrow,”
according to Psalm 90. But
“labor” is not a bad word. It
is just a synonym for “work,” and work is a good thing.
Work is a creative thing, for God Himself “works.”
He plans, He creates, He sustains, He redeems.
Genesis 2:2 tells us that on the seventh day God “ended
His work,” and “rested …
from all His work which He had made.”
Christ’s mission on earth, His ministry was work, labor, travail,
“He shall see the travail of His soul and be satisfied” (Is. 11:9).
God, through the Holy Spirit
continues to work in us, for we are being made into “new creatures”
and are God’s “workmanship created in Christ Jesus.”
And of course, the great promise that keeps us trusting God through
all the temptations and trials of life, Romans 8:28, tells us, “All things work together for good to those who love God.”
God works all things for our good. Thus,
the ability to work is a major part of what it means to be created in the
image of God. He gives us the
ability to dream, to imagine, to plan, as He does.
And He gives us the ability to try to make those dreams come true.
Work is the way we make our dreams come true.
Who has not enjoyed the sweat and even the frustration of building
something with wood, or planting gardens or even fields of crops?
And when the work is done and the flowers are blooming, or the
cupboard is lined with jars of freshly canned vegetables, or the beans and
corn have gone to the grain elevator and the check has finally come in, or
the hay is stacked in the barn for winter, or that child walks down the
aisle to get that college diploma, or the house is built and a family is
living in it and making a home there, don’t we forget about the blood,
sweat, and tears that went into creating that moment, and feel a sense of
accomplishment and enjoyment that makes us believe it was worth all the
challenges and more? When
that happens we have enjoyed one of God’s greatest blessings, the
ability to create something good, and to take satisfaction in the
creation, as He did when He looked on His creation and said, “it is very
good.” So
work can be a wonderful thing. But
all work is not created equal, so let us consider some of the
characteristics of worthwhile work. First,
worthwhile work is Godly. I
do not mean here that it must be church work.
Church work is good and I invite you to join us in our work to
build a Godly, Biblical, Anglican Church in the Powhatan community.
But all worthwhile work is not Church work, nor is all Church work
worthwhile work. The bad
attitude and half-baked way some people do church work can make it an
offense rather than a service to God.
For example, the Diocese of Exeter England in the mid 1800s was
known to have several clergy who were avid foxhunters.
Their Bishop believed his clergy should have a more becoming form
of recreation, but, as most of them were known to preach as hard as they
galloped, he said very little about it.
One priest, however, was known to be quite slothful in his
ministerial duties, while giving great devotion to the pastime of hunting.
One day, meeting his Bishop on the street and seeing no way of
avoiding a confrontation, the young priest advanced toward his superior
and challenged, “I hear you object to my hunting.”
The Bishop replied, “Not at all.
Wherever did you get such an idea?
What I object to is your ever doing anything else” (laughter from
congregation). When
I say worthwhile work must be Godly work, I mean that it must honor God
both in the way it is done and in the nature of the work. This means it must be moral work. Immoral things, such as purse, snatching and drug pushing,
then, are out of the question. So,
if you were counting on them to earn a little extra retirement income…
well, perhaps you might want to consider another line of work (laughter
from congregation). Second,
worthwhile work must be challenging.
It must require, even demand, much from us.
If you have ever seen the movie, Seabiscuit,
you may remember the opening scene in which the narrator, talking about
Henry Ford’s Model T, said something like; The real invention wasn’t the car; it was the assembly line. Soon other businesses began to use it, and seamstresses became button sewers, and. carpenters makers became knob turners. Children
seem to know this intuitively. They
all want to astronauts, firefighters, and brain surgeons when they grow
up. Why? Because they
instinctively want work that will challenge them and require something of
them because only a challenging job will be a “fun” job, a fulfilling
job. That
leads us to the third characteristic of worthwhile work; worthwhile work
must be fulfilling work. It
must give us a sense of satisfaction that we have done something well and
done something important. About
ten years ago I bought a dairy farm.
I bought it for several reasons, one of which was that I wanted my
children to have the benefit of growing up with plenty of hard work.
They did. They started
every morning in the milking barn and ended every evening there too.
They worked hard every day, and they loved it.
And at the end of the day, that began long before sunrise and ended
long after sunset, we often went into the tank room and looked into the
tank at hundreds of gallons of pure, fresh milk, and it made us all feel
good. Babies would have milk
to drink, people would have cheese to eat, and ice-cream, and yogurt, and
all the other foods that use milk to make.
People would eat because of what we had done that day, and it gave
us a sense of satisfaction deep down in our souls.
Every human being should have the opportunity to feel that way
about his or her work. I pray that for every person. So,
those are some of the characteristics of a good job.
Now let’s consider some of the characteristic of good workers.
Saint Paul points these out to us in the Lesson from Colossians,
read a few moments ago. Paul
wrote about slaves and masters, but the principles are the same and apply
equally well to employees and employers, or labor and management. First,
a good worker serves God in His work.
St. Paul made this point several times in our Lesson.
Notice he was talking to slaves, some of whom may not have had kind
and loving masters. But Paul
did not allow that as an excuse for poor work.
Just the opposite, he said work hard as unto the Lord, as though
you are serving Him. He even
said in verse 24 that this is serving the Lord, Jesus Christ. Our
attitude and good work serves as a witness to our employers and our
subordinates that our lives are changed and ruled by the Lord Jesus
Christ. In that way we serve
God, as witnesses to Christ Second,
a good worker knows what he is really doing.
I’m not talking here about knowing the job. I’m talking about looking beyond the job to what you are
really doing. You are
building your house. You are
providing for your family. You
are providing for your church, and the mission of the Gospel of Christ on
earth. You are putting food
on your table as surely as if you were tilling the soil and reaping the
harvest yourself. You are
providing shelter for your family as surely as if you cut the trees and
hewed the lumber and raised the walls and the roof with your own hands.
You are building the Church as surely as if you built the building
and preached the sermons yourself. You
are educating the children, and building up the community, and doing a
thousand other useful things, just by being on the job.
And this is true whether you are a surgeon or a factory press
operator. So look at the
benefits you and others get from your labor, and rejoice.
Third,
a good worker does his job well. As
Paul wrote, “obey in all things your masters according to the flesh.” We
could paraphrase this as, “do your job.”
I think Christians do not understand the need to do our secular
jobs well. It is not simply a matter of obeying our bosses and
witnessing to Christ. It is
also an issue of obeying God. He
commands us to do our work well. And
work is a continuation of creation, of God’s “work” of bringing a
thing of beauty and good into being, and bringing Godly order and dominion
to His creation. Therefore,
it behooves us to do our work well. As
one of my favorite authors wrote in Letters
to a Diminished Church, which I highly recommend, and from which some
of the ideas in this sermon are borrowed; In nothing
has the Church so lost Her hold on realty as in her failure to understand
and respect the secular vocation. She
has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is
astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is
turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part
of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least
uninterested in religion. But
is it astonishing? How can
anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with
nine-tenths of his life? The
Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to
exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to
come to church on Sundays. What
the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that
his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly –
but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation
he is insulting God with bad carpentry?
~ Dorothy Sayers ~ Does
not this sound very much like Saint Paul’s exhortation, “whatsoever ye do, do it heartily as unto the Lord”?
Christians, let us do good work, and let us do it well. In the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, amen.
The Anglican Orthodox Church P.O. Box 128 Statesville, NC 28687 The Most Rev. Jerry Ogles, Bishop Metropolitan The Rev. Dr. R. Dennis Campbell, Vicar, Holy Trinity Anglican Church,
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