The Message of the Church to Labor                                 9/2/45

 

Scripture:  Matthew 11: 20-30

 

Text:  Psalm 104: 23;  “Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening.”

 

“The message of the church to Labor.”  If you were to speak on this subject, I wonder what you would think should be said!  Probably you would discover very shortly that the time usually allotted for a sermon is not enough for a very thorough treatment of the subject.  For, basically, the message of the church to labor is the same as the message of the church to government, or commerce, or education or industrial management.  It is a message to people - it is the gospel of Jesus, called the Christ.

 

Perhaps it has particular applications to the attitudes, problems, temptations and hopes of people in various walks of life.  But the church’s true message is the gospel for everyone.

 

Now suppose someone were to forget that almost everyone here takes it for granted that we know what the gospel of Christ is and should ask, like some unlettered heathen, “What is the gospel?”  How would you answer?

 

Probably, after suggesting a few familiar phrases or floundering around a bit as we often do over a matter long familiar to us, you would find again that the subject is too big to be developed in a brief twenty or twenty-five minutes.  Perhaps a genuine study of first century Christianity, and its founder and followers might startle us in the 20th century as it did those of that time.

 

For the Gospel of Jesus was the religion of the God-fearing Hebrews shot full of a new spirit that is revolutionary!  It was an announcement; good news; the launching and realization of the Kingdom of God.  And the Kingdom of God is vastly more than a phrase to stir formal approval of us who sit in comfortable pews and eat satisfying meals.  It means a new order - not in the mystic future of a life after this earthly existence, but here and now!  in and upon this earth!

 

We believe in a righteousness of justice and of laws that assure justice.  We approve and practice, for the most part, a considerable amount of charity toward the poor and oppressed and neglected.  So did the Jews of Jesus’ day.

 

But the message of Jesus and his earliest followers was more than equal justice under law.  It offered more than the bread of charity.  It assured the most humble person of his sonship of God and his brotherhood with man.  Don’t be lulled by the familiar sound of those phrases.  They are revolutionary!  They have never been mere platitudes.  They are, if they catch fire, soul-firing, society-shaking dynamite!  They proclaim the equality and dignity of man!  They elevate the poor!

 

Jesus did not pity the poor.  He did not bless the poor because of their poverty, but because they were people, capable of giving one of life’s most precious gifts - labor.  God-fearing men have tried for centuries to explain the necessity for labor.  They have thought perhaps it grew from sin - a disobedient Adam sentenced, after Eden, to live by the sweat of his brow and the aching of his muscles.  They have said, resignedly, that it must be ordained by God.

 

Jesus somehow impresses those who will notice it with the dignity of labor.  He proclaims that it is a divine principle that those are blessed and find their life who lose it, who spend it!  And the poor man who toils honestly at tasks of drudgery and monotony is as deserving of a place of dignity and respect as is the rich man who wrestles honestly, day by day, with the problems and demands of management.  And the man, rich or poor, who will not labor honestly according to his abilities, choosing to live only for narrow self, loses that dignity.

 

Now it is a sobering thought - and should be a constant thorn to all of us who are comfortable as most of us church folk of our day are - that Jesus appeared among the peasantry!! -- among people the more privileged felt they might despise.

 

I don’t want to detract one bit from the loveliness of the nativity story that we review at Christmastide every year.  But we ought also to remember vividly that the nativity was not a story of comfort.  Jesus was born to a peasant woman who was legally betrothed to a Palestinian carpenter.  People of that class were often too poor to afford the fees involved in a public marriage ceremony.  It was nothing for a hotel keeper to say to any of that class - “there is no room for you.”  It was even charitable for him condescendingly to allow such as they to spend the night in the cow barn because - well - even the poor need some place to be when a child is about to be born.

 

No physician, midwife or even neighbor was present at Jesus’ birth.  A poor woman, and her husband, got through it as best they might.  Jesus grew up in that peasant penury!  He was first son in a large family.  He knew the hardships of providing, for he lent his hand at the carpenter’s bench of Joseph.  That family knew the tediousness of toil and taxes.

 

Where are the greatest numbers of ordinary laboring folk of today?  Has the church forgotten to tell all of them that its Lord was born to the humblest of them?  He never knew the comforts of wealth and privilege except as a visitor.

 

And yet, out of his toil and tedium, he could say “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.”  [John 14: 6].  His basic sense of message was developed, not in a great university, nor even among the wise men of the temple and city gates, but while camping in the woods.  He knew that bread must be won and that no man has a right to deny it to the earner.  “The laborer is worthy of his hire.”  [Luke 10: 8].  But he knew also that the laborer needs his respite and re-creation.  He is not to be heedlessly wastefully spent by others like so much virgin timber or iron ore poured into one end of a factory.  He must have bread - and roses too - and his rightful chance to help build a new society.  “Man does not live by bread alone!”  [Deuteronomy 8: 3; Matthew 4: 4].

 

When, for instance, you find ordinary folk who labor with their hands and skills organized to bargain for their services; and when you see honest men of management willingly recognizing the right so to bargain and entering fairly and honestly into the spirit of bargaining agreement, you see men who - whether they realize it or not - are putting to practice a basic teaching of Jesus - a carpenter from the little town of Nazareth.

 

Bargaining with regular folk is not the way of the slave holder, the dictator, the haughty, the proud and heedless.  These have always ruthlessly told the poor, if they said anything.  That kind of power has made a new and terrifying attempt to grab the world of our day.  Thank a merciful Providence that it has been brought in check - but be not deceived - it does not die with V-E day and V-J day - and it must be constantly and vigilantly checked in our own country as well as abroad.

 

Jesus has always been a peoples’ leader.  The Old Testament prophets also were peoples’ protagonists.  They were not men of some mystic double vision, or supernatural vision.  They had no cultural status except that of extraordinarily honest men.  They were bold speakers for the truth, champions of the oppressed, denouncers of hypocrisy and corruption.  They were peoples’ preachers and they used plain talk.  The common people heard them gladly, as they heard Jesus gladly.

 

Of course not all common folk heard Jesus gladly or intelligently.  And there came a time when rabble-rousers got enough of them to shout “crucify him!” so that the crucifixion did become a terrible reality.  Laborers can be misled, and often are.  Selfishness and narrowness is not confined to any one class of people.  That is why labor needs the gospel, just as everyone else needs it.

 

The gospel is a message of action and work.

 

Paul, the organizer of churches and ordainer of pastors, most aristocratic and highly trained of those called Apostles, was himself a man of skilled fingers.  He was a tent maker.  His labor did two things for him.  It made him independent of any owning class, and it related him definitely to every kind of worker.  After a day of labor, and probably a modest meal, Paul could write to the younger church leaders, “And see that ye be modest, and that ye labor with your own hands as we have instructed you.”  [I Thessalonians 4: 11].  To Timothy he wrote: “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”  [II Timothy 2: 15].  The ministry under the Master was a ministry to the masses.  It ought still to be!

 

The first congregations were made up of common folk - fishermen, peasants - even slaves.  They didn’t meet together just to worship, though now and then when they realized the source of Jesus’ strength someone did say, “Lord, teach us to pray.”  [Luke 11: 1].  They were communities with a common life.  They ate together, not just a wafer or a crumb of bread with a drop of wine.  They ate a downright meal for hungry people.  They dug down and provided for widows and orphans.  They ransomed their fellow-Christians who were imprisoned for debt.  They won new status for women.  They awakened a new sense of worth and desire for freedom in slaves.  They disturbed the dictated patriotism of the Caesars.  They spread social unrest in the Roman world.  They were not consorting with other parties.  They were a party in themselves.

 

There were numerous parties in their day, as there are in ours.  There was the party of the Pharisees, seeking to preserve the law down to its last minute detail; the party of the Essenes, waiting for heavenly intervention; the party of the Sadducees, compromising with the Romans; the Zealots, trusting in the sword.

 

The Christians were the party of the crucified carpenter creating a common society in which everyone who came - fishermen, tax collector, scholar or slave - was called to be a citizen of the Kingdom of God.

 

Our so-called “respectable churches” of today are accused of being “middle class” or “comfortable class” institutions.  The accusation is not entirely fair, but there is enough truth in it to make it sting!  If it is true that one third of this great, powerful, plentiful nation is poorly fed and clothed and housed, no one here or in any church has a right to be comfortable about it!  It is our business to be concerned, if our own citizenship is to have any Christian content.

 

It was a minister who remarked to his congregation in another city a year or two ago that: “A single convert from the comfortable class, raising his voice at a board of directors meeting in behalf of the brotherhood of bread, will do more for the cause of labor than all the pronouncements of the church at her stated conventions.”

 

It was a member of a labor union in our town, not a member of either church represented here but a church member in our city nevertheless, who said to me a few weeks ago, “I don’t agree with some of the things that my union does.”  But he is sticking in there, serving as one of the union’s officers, casting his vote and using his influence for what he does believe is right.

 

It has been said that the coming century is the “century of the common man.”  The church must realize that that is right up our river!  And if we aren’t concerned about it, the stream will flow right on toward the sea leaving our pitiful respectability ignored in some little eddy or crushed in some rapids.  For the masses are on the march.  The direction and spirit of their march is terribly important.

 

Last night General MacArthur made a statement to the effect that the problem of peace  is not one of military strength or political power but a theological problem.  I’m not sure he used the right word.  But he had a true idea.

 

Six years ago I looked from my home in Honolulu out toward Diamond Head after church one Sunday and saw the mighty China Clipper, having risen from a Pearl Harbor airport, wing out to sea.  She was flying so fast that she would reach San Francisco bay in 17 to 20 hours depending on the wind.  It was an unbelievable speed!  This week, a mightier plane flew from Pearl Harbor to Washington in a non-stop flight of 17 hours!

 

A generation ago it was possible to kill hundreds in warfare with artillery fire and poison gas.  In this war of 25 years later, thousands could be killed in one mighty bombing raid of hundreds of planes.  At the close of this six-year struggle it has become apparent that hundreds of thousands may be wiped out by one bomb from one plane, as the better part of a hundred thousand have been so killed.

 

In a world that has so far tasted of Eden’s tree of knowledge, the only thing that can possibly keep mankind from rushing to doom is the spirit of good will in the hearts of all mankind.  And that is the message of just one leader - a carpenter from Nazareth.  It is a message to comfortable America.  It is a message to poor and terrified and devastated war-torn countries of the battlefield.  It is a message to the islanders of the sea.  It is a thunderous prophecy to the seats of the mighty.  It is the gospel to the laborers and the poor of the whole world.

 

An ancient prophecy is pressing for fulfillment: “He hath put down the mighty from their seats.  He hath filled the hungry with good things.”  [Luke 1: 52, 53].  That is not clairvoyance.  It is just plain talk about the truth.

 

The Savior taught his own to pray, “Give us [notice the plural- not me but us - a lot of “us” - everywhere] our daily bread.”  [Luke 11: 3].  And then he advised them by no means to make clothing, drink, or even bread their primary concern for themselves.  What did he put first?  “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.”  [Matthew 6: 33].  And that means no greed, no lust for power, no willingness to live on the unrequited toil and suffering of other people even in distant lands.  It means the spirit of good will, the love of truth, the willingness to labor, to labor, for the common good!

 

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Delivered at the Port Edwards Community Methodist Church, and at Wisconsin Rapids Methodist Church, September 2, 1945.