The Dignity of Labor

Picture taken from the murals in Coit Tower, SF depicting the idealism of the New Deal.

I look forward to Labor Day weekend. Who does not enjoy a 3-day break? However, because my day off is Monday, 3-day weekends are somewhat compromised for me. Yet, I rejoice in them because I know that many people I live and work with will enjoy three consecutive days of relaxation as summer ebbs into autumn.

The UK enjoys six 3-day or bank holiday weekends, two additional public holidays – Good Friday being one, and an average of 3 – 4 weeks of paid vacation leave a year. The average vacation leave in the US is 11 days a year. There’s an intuitive connection here to be fleshed out as it were – between American attitudes to paid leave, low pay, long hours, falling productivity, and a plethora of societal ills. These include increasing family and marital breakdown, rising tides of depression, suicide, and addiction, and rising civic strife. The American attitude towards work and recreation – indelibly shaped by the protestant work ethic and the immigrant experience is today something of a problem – with an adverse impact on the nation’s sense of well-being. Thus, current polls show that people remain pessimistic about their economic well-being despite record job creation, falling inflation, good economic growth prospects, and a booming stock market.

The Labor Day weekend is an important national observance. It is not only a well-needed three-day respite as summer ebbs into fall, but also a spotlight on current attitudes and practices that undermine American societal well-being.

How many of us know Labor Day’s origins? The US Department of Labor website tells us:

Labor Day, the first Monday in September, is a creation of the labor movement and is dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country.

A yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country. Really?

In 1993 on the 100^th anniversary of organized labor in Rhode Island, Rhode Islanders were reminded of the establishment of the first Monday in September as a legal holiday. A direct result of the 1893 financial panic – following a previous decade of worker agitation the General Assembly, under the prodding of elected representatives from various mill towns, finally joined the bandwagon, and Governor D. Russell Brown signed the authorization.

Arriving in RI was a novel experience for me. Here I found the vestiges of an old Labor movement culture where certain unionized workers such as firemen, police, state employees, and teachers enjoyed privileged work protections and secure pensions that contrasted with the denial of these very privileges to the rest of the working population. Following its decline as an industrial powerhouse, Rhode Island’s failure to transform itself into a dynamic opportunities economy only fuels resentment as the tax burden to support the generous work privileges for the few falls on the many denied similar benefits. The economic plight of RI is bedeviled by an inward-looking parochialism summed up by the much-used phrase – I know a man. The Washington Bridge debacle demonstrates the consequences when the man you know is incompetent and seemingly unaccountable – not an unfamiliar story in this state.

Rerum Novarum (from its first two words, Latin for “of revolutionary change”, or Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor, is the encyclical issued by Pope Leo XIII on 15 May 1891. It was an open letter, requiring the hierarchy to address the condition of the working classes.

Rerum Novarum discussed the relationships and mutual duties between labor and capital, as well as government and citizenry. Of primary concern was the amelioration of The misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class. It supported the rights of labor to form unions, rejected socialism and unrestricted capitalism while affirming the right to private property.

John Paul II on its 100^th anniversary reaffirmed Rerum Novarum in Centesimus Annus which affirmed work as our individual commitment to something greater than our own self-interests – namely the greater good. If one flourishes at the expense of another’s languishing – then society fails.

The Law of Moses and the teaching of Jesus recognized that labor is the basis for all human flourishing because labor not only generates wealth but also bestows dignity on the human person. Today, we recognize three core psychological needs necessary for human flourishing: someone to love and be loved by, a safe place to live, and an activity that bestows dignity fostering a sense of meaning and purpose.

Furthermore, in the sabbath regulations, both the Law and Jesus recognized the necessity for a healthy work-life balance. The balanced relationship between work and leisure contributes to individual as well as societal well-being.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops -the most politically conservative episcopal conference in the world, nevertheless cites 13 Biblical references in support of their affirmation that:

The economy must serve people, not the other way around. Work is more than a way to make a living; it is a form of continuing participation in God’s creation. If the dignity of work is to be protected, then the basic rights of workers must be respected–the right to productive work, to decent and fair wages, to the organization and joining of unions, to private property, and to economic initiative.

Marx defined capital as stored labor. The mere mention of Marx is enough to induce apoplexy in hard-right politicians and their supporters. It’s one of those curious paradoxes that those on the hard right – J.D Vance being the most current example – are flocking to the Catholic Church while holding economic views in sharp conflict with the social teaching of that Church. As over 100 years of Catholic social teaching asserts – to champion the rights of workers, to assert the dignity of labor, and to confront the abuses of labor at the hands of unrestrained capitalism is not Marxism – it’s Christianity!

The accumulation of obscene wealth by the few at the expense of the many whose labor generated it has clear ethical limits rooted in our deeper religious traditions of a just society. As we celebrate Labor Day on the first Monday in September 2024, we might do well to remember the mantra from the HBO series Game of Thrones – paraphrased as November’s coming!

August 31, 2024 0

A Living Eucharist

Bread is the staple food in all cultures where wheat is the staple grain. In such cultures bread becomes a symbol of divine generosity – an embodiment of God’s care and concern for human beings. Our own collective religious memory contains countless instances and references to bread as a sign of God’s presence, God’s blessing – God’s involvement in human affairs.

I promised last week to continue to explore Jesus’ riffing on the bread metaphor found in John 6 – and I know you have been waiting with bated breath for today.

I love the verb to riff. It has a street-cred vibe. Originally, a musical term for a repeated melodic phrase, forming an accompaniment for a soloist – riffing has also come to mean a new variation on or a different manifestation of an existing theme or idea. In his 6^th chapter, John portrays Jesus’ riffing with gusto on the metaphor of bread. John records the grumbling of the crowds and the growing sense of alarm among the disciples as Jesus’ riffing on the metaphor of bread as spiritual food leads him to make some rather startling claims:

I am the bread of life, come down from heaven.
I am the bread of life, whoever comes to me will never go hungry.
I am the living bread, and this bread is my body, which I will give for the life of the world.

The disciples sense of alarm goes through the roof when he tells the crowds:

Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. This is the bread come down from heaven …. The one who eats this bread will live forever.

I’m put in mind of Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful line from her novel The River:

In the land of the nearly blind you need to draw really big caricatures.

For Jesus, bread is a metaphor for identity, his communion with God, and our communion with him – I am the bread that has come down from heaven – those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.

As John reports, Jesus’ bread riffing becomes more and more controversial. His audience is a hungry one. After the feeding of the 5000, Jesus is aware that many are coming to hear him in the hope of a free meal. The crowds have little bandwidth for bread as spiritual food while their bellies remain empty and their grumbling grows louder. Rather than placating their growing dissatisfaction, Jesus ups the ante. Like members of the Trump campaign team, you can imagine his disciples frantically signaling to him to please dial it down – you’re losing the crowd. They will later privately complain to Jesus that his teaching is just too bizarre to follow.

Because bread is one of the most familiar metaphors of our Christian faith – our familiarity with Eucharistic imagery insulates us to the shock value of Jesus’ statements. We miss that Jesus is drawing some really big caricatures – which if taken seriously – have the potential to turn our comfortable worldview upside-down.

In the Lord’s Prayer the request Give us this day our daily bread becomes a metaphor for all of life’s basic needs. Daily bread is not only having something to eat but also somewhere to live, something meaningful to do that enhances our human dignity, someone to love and be loved by. Our difficulty is one of familiarity. How many times have we prayed the Lord’s Prayer? How many times have we participated in the Eucharist? Familiarity inures us to the radical implications of Jesus’ teaching. If we long for the bread from heaven that feeds our spiritual hunger, can we avoid ensuring that everyone – and not just the few – receives their daily bread? How long can we go on blithely receiving the Eucharistic bread from heaven without accepting that with it comes a responsibility to work for peace with justice in the world?

Every sermon reaches a pivotal point at which the preacher has to decide to take a left or right turn and follow one path rather than another. Here is this moment. The right fork leads me to focus on the internal dynamics of the Eucharist. To speak about the theology of the presence of Christ made real through the inbreathing of the Holy Spirit. That in taking, blessing, breaking, and receiving bread and wine – Christ becomes present to us within the boundaries of this material space and time i.e., this place, among these people, in this moment when time as past and future collapse into the enteral now of the present.

I would speak of the Eucharist as a double transformation event. Catholic theology focuses on the Holy Spirit’s transformation of bread broken and wine outpoured to become the vehicle for Christ’s sacramental presence among us in time and space. Our Anglican twist is not to deny the emphasis of Catholic theology but to recognize with equal emphasis that receiving is as important as blessing and breaking. Through receiving – draw near with faith and receive – we the gathered people of God become likewise transformed to constitute the Body of Christ in the world. As a double transformation event. – the elements of bread and wine become transformed – yet so too does the body of faithful receivers.

But if I had taken the left fork I would speak not of the internal dynamics of the Eucharist but of its direct effects as a political action in the world. After each celebration of the Eucharist, we hear the words of the dismissal – this Eucharist is ended – go in peace to love and serve the Lord. We are sent forth nourished by the bread from heaven to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.

William Stringfellow one of our great Episcopal theologians of the 20th century and a native son of Rhode Island soil – ending his days on Block Island. He was an apostle of a deeply catholic spirituality rooted in the action of the Eucharist as social and political action in the world. In Keeper of the Word Stringfellow wrote of the Eucharist as a transcendent event, [encompassing] all that has already happened in this world from the beginning of time and prophesying all that is to come until the end of time. Here, Stringfellow is articulating the cosmic significance of the Eucharist as an action collapsing the flow of time – past and future folding into the present moment involving specific persons – gathered in an identifiable place – in the here and now of a particular moment.

For Stringfellow celebrating the Eucharist was a political event of social action. He summed up social action as being the characteristic style of life for human beings in this world.

In this manner, Stringfellow echoed an earlier 20^th-century Anglican theologian and mystic, Evelyn Underhill in her poem Corpus Christi.

Come dear heart! The fields are white to harvest: come and see, as in a glass the timeless mystery of love, whereby we feed on God, our bread indeed. …Yea, I have understood how all things are one great oblation made: He on our altars, we on the world’s rood. Even as this corn, earth-born, we are snatched from the sod, reaped, ground to grist, crushed and tormented in the Mills of God, and offered at Life’s hands, a living Eucharist.

August 17, 2024 0

Bread and Action

In Year 1 of the three-year lectionary, we are treated to some rip-roaring yarns in our OT readings from the Deuteronomic History as recorded in the books of Samuel and Kings. Again, these stories remind us that without a knowledge of history, we can only stumble around blind in the present.

These OT stories have a soap opera quality, and they function similarly. These stories of the societal machinations among ordinary Israelite folk cast a powerful spotlight on our contemporary societal machinations. It’s another OT book – Ecclesiastes that reminds us that what has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

While our OT readings have offered ringside seats on ancient goings-on the gospel readings from John’s sixth chapter have been focused on Jesus’ perplexing and provocative bread metaphors. Jesus’ complex riff on bread metaphors is the unique characteristic of John 6. Consequently, the chapter forms the bedrock of Christian eucharistic understanding – of which I will say a little today but much more next week.

Two weeks ago, Kaley offered a reflection on the feeding of the 5000 as recorded by John. She began with a description of the nature of barley bread. I don’t know if I have ever eaten barley bread. Certainly, her description of its density and squishiness sounds very unappetizing to me. However, Kaley’s sermon got me thinking about bread.

As a child, I remember bread being delivered along with milk in glass bottles to the mailbox at the end of our drive in the early morning. My earliest memory is of bread that came as whole loaves in a waxed paper wrapper. It came in either white or brown. I remember when a third bread option became available – sliced. The arrival of the slicing machine in the bakery meant that in our house bread now came pre-sliced in a plastic wrapper. Pre-sliced bread was such a huge cultural achievement that it has found its way into the English language. It’s the best thing since sliced bread – we say to describe something new or innovative.

I remember bread as the staple of my childhood, not as the specialty item to be savored by the denizens of Seven Stars Bakery. Bread was bread, white or brown, sliced or not – used as toast or to make a sandwich or a bread pudding –a great favorite of visits to my maternal grandmother.

I also remember a time when eating bread had little downside. Unlike the overly processed wheat that goes into modern commercial bread, the bread of my childhood was baked from minimally processed grain – the purity of which and the metabolism of youth allowed me to consume bread without regard to quantity or consequence. Alas, the slowing of my aging male body’s metabolism now means that for me bread has become chiefly identified as the source of unwanted carbs.

Bread is the staple food in all cultures where wheat is the staple grain. In wheat-growing societies, dependence on bread as the staple food has led such societies to view bread as a symbol of divine generosity – an embodiment of God’s care and concern for human beings. Our own collective religious memory contains countless instances and references to bread as a sign of God’s presence, God’s blessing and involvement in human affairs.

Hence Jesus’ use of bread is not only a teaching metaphor for spiritual sustenance but a metaphor of connection with God – a metaphor for his unique relationship with God and through him our relationship with God.

We should recall that hunger was a commonplace experience for the masses of displaced peasantry that flocked to hear Jesus. 1st Century Palestine was undergoing an agrarian revolution with land being increasingly vested in powerful landowners who like corporate agribusiness in our own time – were intent on squeezing out the little guy – the peasant farmer – reducing him to the status of an itinerant day laborer. This is a story as old as time, and one alarmingly familiar to us as we view with a sense of increasing alarm the monopolistic trajectory of economic developments in our own day.

Jesus speaks to the crowds using a series of bread metaphors – two of which we hear in today’s gospel reading – I am the bread of life, I am the bread that came down from heaven. Interestingly, John records that this teaching didn’t go down well. It makes little sense to the crowds, and they begin to grumble – even scandalized to leave him.

Eventually, Jesus focuses his bread metaphor through the lens of collective memory – reminding the crowds of the mana – bread from heaven – that fed their ancestors in the desert. Perhaps if Jesus had read Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs he might have realized that it’s a tall order telling people about spiritual bread as mystical nourishment when their bellies are empty.

Bread is one of the central metaphors of the Christian Faith. We pray: Give us this day our daily bread – extending bread as a metaphor for all of life’s basic needs. Daily bread encompasses not only something to eat, but also somewhere to live, something meaningful to do, and someone to love and be loved by. While we long for the bread from heaven that feeds our spiritual hunger, we have a spiritual imperative to ensure that there is enough to go around for everyone to receive their daily bread.

Paradoxically, we have the opposite problem to Jesus’ 1st-century hearers. To them the mention of bread reminded them of their hunger – bread to stave off starvation – they had little bandwidth for spiritual bread. Whereas we are all too comfortable with praying for the bread from heaven that feeds our spiritual hunger while ignoring or being complicit in systems that ensure that some have daily bread but not all.

The great Dom Helda Camara, Liberation Theologian and bishop of the Brazilian diocese of Recife between 1964 and 1985 was a hero of the Liberation Theology Movement so disliked by John Paul II and his rottweiler – the then Cardinal Ratzinger. He asked the awkward question -why when he gives bread to the poor, they call him a saint but when he asks why the poor have no bread they call him a communist.

Our Christian faith costs us. Fulfilling our Christian responsibility to ensure that everyone has their daily bread – bread being used here as a metaphor for multiple poverties – will cost us in terms of the sharing of the resources we currently claim for ourselves.

In the Eucharist, Jesus gives himself as the bread from heaven that feeds the life of the world. This is not a heavenly world, but a real world in time and space. In the Eucharist when we celebrate the bread from heaven given for the life of the world we are also – in the same moment – making our ethical commitment to the life of this world.

The spiritual bread of the Eucharist cannot be separated from being also the physical bread of food and shelter – of love and life purpose – made available in the everyday world. The Eucharist as the spiritual bread of communion with God is also the physical bread of food and shelter – of love and life purpose made available in the everyday world.

Note my use of the verb made – made available – not just miraculously available. The daily bread of the Eucharist is made available through the process of our participation in worship – sending us out into the world for political action – by which I mean our commitment to service and witness to truth-telling. More about that next week.

August 10, 2024 0

True Greatness

Six momentous words capture David’s true greatness. What are they? Hold on, we’ll get to them.

The books of Samuel and Kings are the product of a huge editorial process of weaving together multiple oral traditions into an integrated narrative to tell the history of a nation. Like a loosely woven tapestry, within the grand narrative sweep, we find multiple storylines relating. Multiple threads comprise individual storylines. Isolate and pull on a particular thread reveals a story told from a different angle. The story of David and Bathsheba is a fine example.

In a Man’s Man – the title of my sermon before I left for vacation – I spoke about the love that bound David and Jonathan together till death did them part. I commented that on receiving news of Jonathan’s death – David’s lament proclaimed Jonathan’s love as surpassing that of women. I suggested we understand this statement as a cultural expression in a world where women while suitable as the bearers of children were not full persons but property. You don’t look to a piece of property for soul companionship.

If Jonathan was the love of David’s youth, Bathsheba was the love of his mid-life. For Bathsheba to be the object of David’s lust is not surprising. But to become his soul companion requires her transformation into a person in his eyes – a major achievement within the culture of their day.

In 2021 in a sermon titled The Perils of Getting What you Want I teased the particular thread in the story that relates to the power dynamic between David and Bathsheba. After the rise of the #MeToo movement – it seemed timely to explore the power dynamic at play between sexual victim and perpetrator. Pulling on this thread in the story reveals Bathsheba as just another female victim of male sexual aggression -robbed of personal agency. Of course, the story is silent on the matter of Bathsheba’s own desire. The story of David and Bathsheba although couched as a significant love story – it’s primarily a story about David and the consequences of a sexual lust that drives him not only to steal another man’s wife but also to arrange for the husband’s assassination.

There’s an old Chinese curse – may you live in interesting times. We’re certainly living in interesting political times. What makes contemporary politics interesting is that once again within a decade we are poised on the knife edge of a momentous choice that will decide the future direction of the nation with profound implications for the Western alliance. Some say our democracy has grown old and listless leading many to pontificate that we are a culture in decline. We are all too close to events to know if this is so or not. However, the American Republic is being weighed on the scales – precariously poised between decency and weirdness.

The imagination of the American Republic draws heavily on an evocation of the Roman Republic which spanned an astonishing five centuries between 509 and 27 BCE. The last years of the Republic were marked by decades of civil strife that led to a sustained corruption of firstly, the electorate – marked by the degeneration of popular aspirations and values – secondly, the rule of law, and finally, the Senate – the core institution of republican government. The death blow to the Republic came swiftly. In 27 BCE the Roman Senate granted extraordinary powers to Julius Caesar’s appointed successor – elevating Octavian to the status of princeps civitatis – in other words, emperor. As a symbol of this dramatic development, Octavian took the new name of Augustus – he who was now above the law. On a show of hands in the Senate the Roman Republic was consigned to a footnote of history.

None of us can be in any doubt about the implications of the recent Supreme Court ruling on Presidential Immunity. This decision could be likened to the Roman Senate’s raising of Octavian to one who is above the law. With the publication of Project 2025, we have further evidence of a planned pathway that will sound the death knell of our republic and put us firmly on the road to the kind of autocracy to be expected in a second Trumpian term.

What might appear a strange diversion through contemporary politics via the Roman Republic provides the preamble or segue to my pulling on a different thread within the David and Bathsheba story.

David was a strong autocrat. He could be magnanimous but also brutal. He was a living example of how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. He’s the most successful of Israel’s kings ushering in a period known as the United Kingdom. But despite white Christian Nationalism’s more comic flight of fancy, David is far from the modern role model white evangelicals depict him as. In practice his rule was absolute. As we see from Uriah’s fate, he did not hesitate to orchestrate state-sponsored assassination of those who stood in his way.

Yet we need to note that Israel’s king may have been absolute in practice, but he remained in theory, God’s regent. For by the terms of the covenant with the Lord, Israel had only one king and YHWH was his name. Alongside the monarchy’s growing centralization of political power, the office of the prophet emerged as the voice of opposition through which YHWH periodically reminded David and those who followed him – that despite appearances they were not unaccountable.

Enter Nathan into the David-Bathsheba storyline. Nathan appears to be the first after Samuel to exercise the counterbalancing authority of the prophet. With ingenuity, Nathan constructs a story that acts as a mirror to reveal to David the sober truth of how much his adultery with Bathsheba leading to the assassination of her husband has displeased the Lord. Nathan engineers the story to trap David into condemning himself out of his own mouth. The great David is reduced to stunned silence as Nathan reminds him of all the good things that the Lord has done for him before finally capping the litany off with – and if that had been too little, I would have added as much more.

David sits in stunned silence as Nathan passes YHWH’s judgment on his action. He pronounces that a sword of division and strife shall wreak havoc in David’s house and his line. Breaking his stunned silence David whispers six momentous words – I have sinned against the Lord.

In the verse following the ending of today’s portion of the story – Nathan tells David that because of his repentance, the Lord has put away his sin and as a result, he will not die. But the child of his adulterous union with Bathsheba will fall ill and die. We learn of David’s deep anguish as the child’s illness moves towards death. His servants who had been in terror at the prospect of the child’s death now have to tell David the child has died. They expect the worst but are amazed as the king breaks his fast, dries his tears, washes his body, and changes his clothes before going into the Lord’s house to worship. There is no explosion of violent emotion, no ranting at the unfairness of things, no cursing of God. After his visit to the house of the Lord David returns home to his wife Bathsheba and consoles her. But the unfolding of the Lord’s judgment upon David’s house will continue through the events of family strife – rape and fratricide and periodic insurrection.

David is remembered as the greatest of Israel’s kings. His greatness lies not in his considerable political power or military success. His memory rests not on his prowess as a strong man. His greatness rests in his ultimate humility expressed in those momentous six words whispered to Nathan. David’s story is a reminder that even autocracies operate within a framework of the moral universe – a framework in which power is subject to ultimate truth and accountability sooner or later.

I have sinned against the Lord. Six momentous words expressing humility and repentance become the hallmark of a great leader – that is a leader who puts the interests of his people and his nation before his own attachment to power.

August 3, 2024 0