Labor Day has always seemed like a funny name for a holiday. After all, people are going to have the day off tomorrow not work! I think tomorrow should be called Relaxation Day!
Of course the origin of Labor day was to celebrate organized labor and give the worker a day of rest. Most of the rest of the world celebrates the day of the worker on May 1st inspired by Karl Marx. American labor movement which differentiated itself from socialism claimed the September date. Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor said of Labor Day it"...differs in every essential from the other holidays of the year in any country. All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day...is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation." I learned from the AFL-CIO web site:
The first Labor Day holiday was celebrated on Tuesday, September 5, 1882, in New York City, in accordance with the plans of the Central Labor Union. The Central Labor Union held its second Labor Day holiday just a year later, on September 5, l883.In l884 the first Monday in September was selected as the holiday, as originally proposed, and the Central Labor Union urged similar organizations in other cities to follow the example of New York and celebrate a "workingmen's holiday" on that date. The idea spread with the growth of labor organizations, and in l885 Labor Day was celebrated in many industrial centers of the country.
As we reflect on being able to do other things with our lives besides work this Labor Day weekend, we need to remember with gratitude those who has fought and died for limitations on working and protections for the worker. At the turn of the century, Labor unions struggled for an eight hour day. With the growth of industrialization in the 1800's, the common laborer was working 12, 14, even 16 hour days six to seven days a week like a slave. About the same time as the first Labor Day celebration, the forerunner of the American Federation of Labor, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions passed a resolution decreeing that "eight hours shall constitute a legal day's labor from and after May 1, 1886." It took 54 years until the New Deal to get the 44 then two years later the 40 hour work week spelled out in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 passed by Congress. Some here today probably remember that day and can tell us about what those days were like during the conversational response.
I can only remember back in the 60's when we thought that the work week would continue to shrink so we'd have more and more leisure time putting in only 4 or even 3 days of work a week. Unfortunately, driven by global competitiveness, we see just the opposite trend. People are often working many more than 40 hours a week as we slip into the 21st Century. I know when I was a programmer and the software was late, as it always was, we'd be working 7 days a week without stopping except to sleep and not much of that! The way people work has been changing as we move into an information and service economy in ways that have gotten ahead of the labor movement.
In the old economy, the demarcations between work and personal time were clear. The average Joe and Jane got up in the morning, put on their working clothes, arrived at their place of employment and started working. I remember working on an assembly line as a summer job in college. I punched my time card in the clock to start and finish my day. While I was at work, I was expected to WORK. My professional employment as a computer programmer, test engineer and manager was a little more loose than the careful time controls of factory work. Still, when I was at the office, I knew I should be working while on the premises.
My experience of ministry has parallels with the way people work today. A great deal of my working time happens while I'm not at the Fellowship. When I attend a Board meeting or speak here on Sunday morning, I know I'm working. When I have lunch with someone or I'm chatting on the telephone or I'm reading a book or working on the computer, the line between work and personal time is harder to draw. Before I began studying for the ministry, I was very active in my congregation, serving on committees and participating in many different ways doing some of the same things I do today. Singing in the choir, for example, required a lot of what seemed like work but it was also felt like play. Were all of my volunteer efforts work or play ... or both?
Ministry is an example of a growing trend in our society toward self-employment, telecommuting, and home-offices. More and more people are discovering there are not clear lines between when they are working and playing. Office workers can now work from home, get beeped by a pager in the grocery store, or conduct business in the car with a cell phone while commuting. It is increasingly common for executives to take their portable computers with them on vacation so they can keep up with their electronic mail. Is it any wonder many end up feeling they are constantly on the job since and can't seem to escape their work?
The argument for the ability to use technology to escape the office was to allow us to mix work and pleasure. Finish that proposal on your portable computer while reclining at the beach, smelling the surf and listening to the waves. Talk with your client on your cell phone while taking the kids to soccer practice or lying in the bath tub. Answer the email in a bathrobe sipping coffee at the kitchen table in the morning rather than sitting in the rush hour fuming in traffic, burning valuable fossil fuels and polluting the air. Technology promised the ability to integrate one's work life better with one's personal life. For many - its not working!
Where people get in trouble is the creeping intrusion of work time into personal time. What at first is an attractive option can quickly become an loathsome obligation. To succeed at this intermixing of work and personal time, one needs to be able to set boundaries After 5:00pm, Philomena turns off her pager. When I'm on vacation I don't check my email. I've resisted getting a cell phone. One needs to take control of technology or it will take control of us.
Still, even when we are careful with boundaries between work and personal time, helpful as they are, they don't completely solve the problem. What is missing for many isn't non-work time. What is increasingly missing is time for rest.
What I see so much in working people today is a high level of over-stimulation. One reason I think there is such a cry for spirituality in our congregations is people are looking for a refuge from the world, a place to remember who they are. Unlike our forbears who thirsted for intellectual stimulation, many today seek intellectual integration. They are bombarded by information from the television, radio, newspapers, books, magazines, and now the Internet. It is becoming conventional wisdom that one is not saved by the amount of knowledge one crams into one's brain. There is just too much! They, dare I say we, need to be able to make sense of what is already within us. This integration process requires reflective time when we aren't feeding things into our brain. When we rest, there is space and time for the integration process to happen.
So where can we look for guidance in how to balance work and rest? A journey into our religious heritage may provide some answers. The Hebrew Scriptures command us to keep the Sabbath holy and take one day a week away from any kind of work.
This was a pretty radical idea 3000 years ago. The Hebrew people were fairly unique in the ancient world where all but the wealthy and privileged worked from dawn till dusk every day. The Romans thought the Israelites were lazy because they didn't work on the Sabbath.
What is the source of this laziness? The core of the Torah, the 10 commandments:
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the LORD your God; in it you shall not do any work, you , or your son, or your daughters, your manservant, or your maid servant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. (Exodus 20:8-11)
Note this isn't just rest for the master of the house or his wife or his family. Everybody takes a day off even the servants, farm animals and the sojourners. Of all the traditions in Judaism, the sabbath, or shabbat as it is usually called, is the most holy ritual. Because it is such a special day, a great many rules and regulations have grown up around the proper observance of the time between sunset Friday night and sunset Saturday evening.
Most notable for us today is the prohibition against work on the Sabbath. Over the years this has been interpreted as a wide ranging prohibition against 39 activities such as:
Sowing , .plowing, .reaping and threshing
grinding, sifting kneading and baking
shearing, washing beating and dyeing wool
weaving, separating two threads, tying and untying,
trapping, slaughtering, flaying and salting meat,
writing or erasing two letters
building or tearing a building down
extinguishing a fire or kindling a fire,
hitting with a hammer
and taking an object from the private domain to the public,
or transporting an object in the public domain.
This list can seem strange and confusing without understanding the source and spirit behind the prohibition. These prohibitions are called `melachah' a rarely used word often translated as "work" but is better translated as " the kind of work that is creative, or that exercises control or dominion over one's environment"
These prohibitions lead to some fairly severe restrictions on activity on the sabbath for the observant Jew. For example the observant Jew must not drive an automobile. The reasoning is as follows:
The automobile is powered by an internal combustion engine, which operates by burning gasoline and oil, a clear violation of the Torah prohibition against kindling a fire. In addition, the movement of the car would constitute transporting an object in the public domain, another violation of a Torah prohibition, and in all likelihood the car would be used to travel a distance greater than that permitted by rabbinical prohibitions.
Some of the interactions of these restrictions can seem a little comical:
Wearing nailed shoes on the Sabbath was prohibited, because in the authorities' view the addition of the nails meant they were carrying an unnecessary burden. Even walking through grass was not allowed, because some of the grass might be bent and broken, which constituted threshing, one of the forbidden categories of work.
The religious leaders taught that, if a house caught on fire on the Sabbath, its inhabitants couldn't carry their clothes out of the house to spare them from the flames, because that would be bearing a burden. However, they were allowed to put on all the layers of clothing they could wear and thus remove the clothes by wearing them, which was acceptable.
Any tendency one might have toward compulsivity in one's behavior could be encouraged by this kind of attention to details following the law. To find the spirit of these prohibitions against work, the last prohibition is probably the most instructive for us: Taking an object from the private domain to the public, or transporting an object in the public domain.
The goal of resting from one's labor is to remain in one's private realm. The work of sowing , .plowing, .grinding, shearing, weaving, , and building pulls our attention outward into the world and away from one's inner life. The purpose of the sabbath is to allow one's mind to be fallow, to be empty of doing so we can rest in being. In the retreat from controlling the world, one can become reflective and receptive to the gifts of the spirit. Sabbath gives us time just to be with ourselves and renew our energies and commitments.
I encourage you this morning in joining with me on an exploration of what it means to keep the Sabbath and discover what value we might glean for Unitarian Universalism from this Jewish observance. If we allow work to consume our outer lives, our inner life can go unnourished. This time each week here at the Fellowship is a time of renewal to revive the spirit and connect us with the Spirit of Life we carry in our heart.
Is observing the sabbath something we could do? Could we give ourselves a day of rest each week. How many of us keep one day a week as a holy day where we do no work? I suspect many of you are like me using my weekends to get the chores done, and catch up on my to-do list. Our work oriented society has been gradually eroding the protections from activity on Sunday. Wouldn't it be of great value for us to give 1/7th of our life toward our spiritual well being?
As we honor the labor leaders who sacrificed and died to give us better working conditions, let us be grateful for their efforts to win rest for us from our labor. What a privilege to have time in our lives for other things besides just surviving. I encourage you to design your own sabbath which fills your spirit and renews your identity with the divine Being.
Spiritual wholeness cannot be earned or bought for it is priceless. The potential for spiritual wholeness is a universal gift of our human form. An important key to its attainment is allowing enough time in our busy lives for rest.
This coming week,
This coming month,
This coming year,
May we enjoy renewing rest
Before we find it in our final resting place.
So be it.
Closing Words
Today is our Sabbath - our day of rest.
May we keep this day and be at ease.
The work of the world is endless.
Our days walking this earth are few.
In the release of the fist of control and domination,
In the patience of witnessing the world as it is,
In the silence of inner listening,
will the bell of awakening be rung.