FCC 2024 Labor Day Sermon

Originally preached on September 1, 2024 at First Christian Church of Albany, OR.

Grace to you, and peace, both to our friends online and to everyone here in person. My name is Logan M. Isaac and I’m proud to be a member of this beautiful house of worship that we call First Christian Church in Albany, OR. I am also a professed Life Member of the Hospitallers of St Martin, an ecumenical monastic Community in the Episcopal tradition that focuses on Prayer, Hospitality, and Reconciliation for veterans and all those who have been affected by war, poverty, and violence.

Several months ago, Pastors Allison and Jared invited me to preach on Labor Sunday so they could take a family vacation before summer’s end. We don’t follow the Revised Common Lectionary at FCC. The RCL, for those who don’t know, is a three year cycle of scripture readings used by “high church” traditions. I also use it for my morning prayer podcast, First Formation. Choosing your own scripture for a sermon might be an exercise in narcissism, but it’s also a lot of work deciding what part of the Bible to preach from. And that’s what I’m up here to talk about, work! 

Work is Good

At the top of our reading for this morning, God looks upon creation and calls it very good. All of Scripture hinges upon this basic dogmatic assumption, that every thing created by God is good. Or, as I wrote in God is a Grunt, “Soldier or civilian, saint or sinner, grunt or POG, atheist or believer, You. Are. Good.”

Before reviewing everything as a whole, God has looked upon the animate and inanimate creatures and has declared them good. And this isn’t as though the authors of Genesis simply point out some accepted truth. Rather, God recognizes and affirms that each distinguishable created thing, in every cycle of creation, is good. God’s work is not “finished,” however, until the seventh day, when God rests; labor is incomplete without leisure. 

Rest, šāḇaṯ, is so important that God sets aside an entire day for it. Upon the completion of six cycles, God declares that all things, operating in concert with each other, are especially good, mᵊ'ōḏ ṭôḇ. It is not until this final day that God’s work of creating is complete. Your work is not done until you have rested.

Humanity had been made on the sixth day, but Genesis 2 returns to our creation story in order to expand upon the nature of our relationship with our Creator. After describing HOW we were made, Scripture points out WHY we were made. Although we are the youngest generation, humanity’s role in creation is “to till it and keep it.” 

The Hebrew verbs here are H5647 āḇaḏ and H8104 šāmar. English translations can very widely, but I prefer “serve” and “protect.” Abad is the root verb from which we get worker, servant, or slave. Shamar also appears in Genesis 4:29 as “keeper,” a responsibility Cain rejects; “Am I [Abel’s] samar?” The answer, of course, is yes; we are all one another’s keepers and protectors. But shamar is also what cherubim do for the tree of life in Genesis 3:24,

God drove out humanity, and placed east of the garden of Eden the Cherubim… to shamar the way of the tree of life.

Genesis describes not just the good in creation, but the bad as well. It is unique in the ancient Near East's creation myths for its humility. Whereas other cultures wrote corruption and violence into their creation stories, the Hebrew god defies worldly expectations by being the source of goodness rather than a scapegoat for human fallibility. The Babylonian Enūma Eliš, for example, depicts humanity as a product of cosmic violence and chaos. Who’s to blame us for being how we were made?

By articulating a worldview in which humanity is responsible for breaking things, the ancient Israelites crafted a religious system in which we share power with a universal Creator. To believe in the world Genesis builds is to have faith that, with God, we can work to restore Creation. To get there, however, we have to be honest about the danger of moral corruption. That’s why Genesis shows us that God has a responsibility to the rest of creation to protect it from us when we fail to be what we were made.

Work is Communal

If everything was created good, and Creation working in concert with itself is called very good, then what went wrong? Although we think the answer is evil, that’s not exactly how Genesis unfolds; the temptation was to eat of the Tree of Knowledge, there was no Tree of Evil in the garden. Evil is derivative in the Biblical narrative, that’s why Jesus taught us to pray 1) “lead us not into temptation, but [2)] deliver us from evil.” In Hebrew the word is rāʿa, wickedness, it is the result of behavior that violates the order of Creation.

So what corrupts goodness, what is its opposite, if not wickedness? “It is not good that humanity be alone.” This is where it gets fun for us English speakers, behind “alone” is this Hebrew word, baḏ (H0905). Bad is the Hebrew word for isolation, and it is an existential threat to Creation. When we act to isolate ourselves or to exclude others, the fruit of our bad behavior is wickedness. All work produces fruit, after all, the only variable is whether our work brings people together or assumes separate can be equal. 

Church names a distinctively human service that is necessarily communal. “Liturgy” comes from leitourgía, a compound Greek word meaning “work (érgon) of the people (laos).” That makes today a work day, and Saturday the blessed day of consecrated rest.

Although we are all called to work, everyone’s labor will be different. Some may be “apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers to equip the saints for the érgon of [service].” (Eph.4:12) Our calling is simple so that it can apply to us all, but simple is not necessarily singular. Although we have one call, our many members have diverse vocations. What labor of yours brings creation back from the brink of alienation? Maybe your Labor is also your job, what you get paid to do. That’s the dream, right?

But I’d wager that, for many of us, our job is not our calling. Sometimes our labor is reduced to little more than whatever can earn us a livable wage. Maybe you feel like you’ve had to settle for a job because your calling doesn’t pay the bills. [retirement may be the first time we have chosen our work] The reality is that we don’t always get to choose the work, the work often chooses us. 

I’m one of those, drafted into labor I’d probably not have chosen for myself.