Don’t Be Ashamed Of Your Work 9/1/46
Scripture: II Timothy 2: 1-15
Text: II Timothy 2: 15; “Study to show thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”
I’m glad to see so much space given in the Wisconsin Rapids Tribune of last Friday - both regular edition and supplement - to a recognition of labor, and organizations of laborers. It is a healthy thing to recognize people - their own personalities and dignity, and their constructive endeavors. Our attention is focused today and tomorrow on the dignity and importance of labor - with emphasis on organized labor. We have our attention called to it by the publicity given the local celebration. The fact that tomorrow is a holiday will remind us of it - the more pointedly if we should absent-mindedly run to the stores to buy something, wonder why the mail or the local paper hasn’t been delivered, or try to cash a check at the bank. The whole nation takes cognizance of labor’s dignity and importance in this way.
We are glad to mark it in our churches, too. I have one particular regret about the celebration, however, and this is that it has begun today while practically all of the Protestant churches of the city are at worship. How can the church add much to the recognition of labor if the laborers and their families are lured away during church services by the holiday fun?
The truth is that ordinary people of every status have a claim upon Christianity and do well to present that claim faithfully by attendance at the worship of their several churches.
The emphasis of the day is by no means to be a lopsided affair, shoving aside a great many people so that other people may be honored. It is a mark of respect for some of the persons of our country in relation to their vocation, without prejudice against other persons and their vocation.
We Americans have not yet set aside a holiday to be known as “Management Day,” and perhaps have no particular urge to do so. But the system by which we express our ideals in living calls for ability and skill and integrity in all classifications of managers just as it surely does in all classifications of laborers. Ideally, there should be enough of muscular ache and submission to a routine in managers to appreciate the role of laborers. There should be enough real knowledge of the continuing problems, the fierce competition, the constant, inescapable responsibility of management in laborers to appreciate the role of managers. American enterprise, by which Americans receive their means of livelihood, is utterly impossible without both - each in its own recognized position of dignity.
It is commonly charged against the church, and sometimes particularly against some of the Protestant churches, that the church is a “middle class” institution generally (and here and there even an “upper crust” affair) - that the workers of the nation are largely left out of it - uncomfortable in it, or ignorant of it, and often quite indifferent to it as they have had some reason to believe it is indifferent to them.
The charge has plenty of truth in it to make it sting. But you know that there are industrial owners and managers, merchants, teachers, lawyers and doctors in the country who also pay little attention to the church - even with so elementary a consideration as financial contribution - and also for the reason that they are not convinced that the church has anything for them or cares about them.
The fact is that the membership of a church congregation is made up of people of all sorts of social status and economic standing - and it ought to be that way with increasing unceasing emphasis! The church is the fellowship of those who believe in God as revealed in Christ. - Put the period there with no other amendments of nicety or privilege, if you please. And the churches, particularly the Protestant churches, are largely what the people who will get into the membership want them to be and will make them be! For the hands, the feet, the body of Christ are the faithful people of his church. People are the messengers of God.
Now and then I hear a hint that such a church, or such another church in Wisconsin Rapids is a church mostly of “working people” - meaning, I gather by the tone, those who are not their own industrial bosses but work under the direction of others. The broad hint is that this church, with its fine stone house and rather favorable equipment and prosperous-on-the-average membership is not a “worker’s church” but a church of the privileged. A lot of us are privileged (I’m inclined to say, with reverence to the mercy of God, that all of us are!) A goodly proportion of us are engaged in the several professions, in industrial operation and management, in commerce and merchandising. But I have taken occasion to glance down the roll of membership with this concern in mind. And, at even a cursory glance, I see the names of twenty, thirty or more men and women whom I know to be connected with labor unions or the laboring enterprise. Add their families, and you see that this church is by no means a “class church.” It is, and must continue more earnestly to be, one of the churches of Christ - one of the fellowships of all sorts of Christian folk.
Now, with today’s emphasis on labor, it is fair to observe that Christianity began as a commoners’ movement. Its Lord appeared in earth in the home of a humble craftsman, born in emergency in a cow barn, son of parents properly betrothed, too poor for the pretensions of marriage ceremony; but not too poor to get to their temple with their own worship and gifts. This Lord was the eldest in a large family; he knew the hardships and necessities of providing and protesting; the tediousness of toil; the inescapability of taxes; the tasks of teaching and training a large family.
In that background, he could say with assurance, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” [John 14: 6] - and people listened. They had to! Those who didn’t like it opposed him and plotted against him. Those who did like it, and hoped in him, crowded to him. Those who came to him were common people (in the best use of the word common). Most of his most intimate first followers seem to have been people from humble station - not all. It was not long before the highly trained Pharisee and tent manufacturer, Paul the convert, joined them with tremendous weight. There was a grafting tax assessor and collector who became a convert and joined them with a sincerity that put new practical meaning in a crook’s change of heart. There was the tragedy of a young man of considerable personal wealth who was moved and interested enough to come to this humble Lord, whose possessions were not condemned, but whose love of, and dependence on, and use of possessions was rebuked and who, unhappily, “couldn’t take it.”
The kind of people who gathered about this Lord in person make it clear that he and his gospel and his way are for the common man of sincerity. His mind working parallel with his hands in the shop, or camping in the open near the shop after work, Jesus thought out his basic philosophy. He laid aside all temporary cures to the ills of human life as he prepared his career. Bread alone is not sufficient social reform. Bread, of course! Didn’t he always see that it was provided - not by magic but by the sharing of what was available? And didn’t he teach his own to pray for daily bread? But more than bread! “Man shall not live by bread alone.” [Matthew 4: 4; Deuteronomy 8: 3].
1900 years after he spoke a lot of women engaged in a garment worker’s strike for better conditions used as their slogan: “We want bread and raises too!” Certainly! And where did they get that idea? I wonder how many of their rank and file knew that it had been taught, struggled for, and died for by a fellow worker, a carpenter, 19 centuries earlier!
Man does not live by bread alone! Mere popularity of a social system does not save anything in the long run. Neither does surrendering to arrogant authority in some high places, nor does attempting to subdue and exploit the masses. Jesus bypassed the temporary as failure, and looked to the permanent. “The Spirit of God is upon me. He sends me to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to release the prisoners, recovery of sight to the blind, the year (or era) of God’s favor.” [Luke 4: 18-19]. Here was a people’s platform and it was for common people - not alone for the “proletariat,” but for every person of need, of troubled heart, of guilty conscience; of repentant spirit; of good will.
There were a lot of what are sometimes called the “lower working classes” in the first congregations of the Christian church. The people of that same area of need and hope ought to be in our church today - and in every church - knowing and glad that the church is theirs, being welcomed by all, and in their turn welcoming all others. The possibilities for that kind of Christian evangelism are tremendous!
Does social, or economic, status make a good or a poor church member? Do you remember how Paul had a Christian runaway slave come to him? How Paul sent him back to his legal master? (That didn’t put any stamp of approval on slavery, either.) Do you remember that Paul sent a letter to the owner - also a Christian - asking him to receive Onesimus back without punishment for his escape? Paul was putting his dependence on the assumption that the spirit of Christ in the lives of two men, as widely separated in status as legal owner and legal chattel, should enable them to meet on common human ground. On that ground - if they had the will to meet there, each a sacred personality - the issues of justice could be settled and men could rise above the compulsions of laws devised for the control of evil.
Whatever the place where we find ourselves, whatever be our contribution to the means by which people live, let us take pride in our work. I had more than a taste of what manual labor is like as a child and youth on a farm and later as a summer farm hand. I once knew the feel of different employment as a gravel checker on a highway construction job. Now I am engaged in what people are pleased to call a profession. I have sons, one of whom is chiefly a student as yet, but is temporarily a mill laborer. None of our household is ashamed of the work of any member of the household, and I hope that we shall all be given to do what we have to do as unto the Lord.
May it be so with you who worship here, and with all those who gather in celebration of this year’s Labor Day. The honest toil of the worker in factory and on farm, in office or in kitchen, by counter or desk, behind pulpit or tractor, is a service before God - to bring forth bread - and much more than bread - for all God’s children. Let it be performed without greed, compensated by a fair share of its fruits, with the dignity of conscious contribution. But let it be performed first of all as a service in the light of God’s will!
Paul was writing some advice to a younger Christian named Timothy. “Study to show thyself approved unto God,” he wrote, “a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.”
Dr. Moffatt gives us a newer translation of the letter. “Do your utmost to let God see that you are a sound workman, with no need to be ashamed of the way you handle the word of truth.”
Well, the advice is still good for all of us.
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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, September 1, 1946 (Labor Sunday)