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Signs of the Times  •  4 September 2020 •  No. 206

Labor Day 2020

Above: Painting by Blue Bond

¶ Processional. “As we go marching, marching / In the beauty of the day / A million darkened kitchens / A thousand mill lofts grey / Are touched with all the radiance / That a sudden sun discloses / For the people hear us singing / Bread and roses, bread and roses.” —“Bread and Roses,”  performed by Bronwen Lewis, as sung in the 2014 move “Pride,” based on a true story, where a group of British lesbians and gay men support a Welsh miners’ strike

¶ Call to worship

Creator God, we give thanks this day for work: for work that sustains; for work that fulfills; for work which, however tiring, also satisfies and resonates with Your labor in creation.

As part of our thanks we also intercede for those who have no work, who have too much or too little work; who work at jobs that demean or destroy, work which profits the few at the expense of the many.

Blessed One, extend your redemptive purpose in the many and varied places of our work. In factory or field, in sheltered office or under open sky, using technical knowledge or physical strength, working with machines or with people or with the earth itself.

Together we promise:

To bring the full weight of our intelligence and strength to our work.

Together we promise:

To make our place of work a place of safety and respect for all with whom we labor.

Together we refuse:

To engage in work that harms another, that promotes injustice or violence, that damages the earth or otherwise betrays the common good; or to resign ourselves to economic arrangements which widen the gap between rich and poor.

Together we refuse:

To allow our work to infringe on time with our families and friends, with our community of faith, with the rhythm of Sabbath rest.

Together we affirm:

The rights of all to work that both fulfills and sustains: to just wages and to contentment.

Together we affirm:

That the redeeming and transforming power of the Gospel, with all its demands for justice and its promises of mercy, is as relevant to the workplace as to the sanctuaries of faith and family.

We make these promises, we speak these refusals and we offer these affirmations as offerings to You, O God— who labors with purpose and lingers in laughter—in response to your ever-present grace, as symbols of our ongoing repentance and transformation, and in hope that one day all the world shall eat and be satisfied. AMEN.

Left: Art by Ricardo Levins Morales, ©RLM Art Studio

¶ “Labor Day History.” The Canadian roots of Labor Day observance in North America.  (3:13 video)

¶ “Labor Day: Quotes, quick-facts, extracts”

¶ Hymn of praise. “,” drawing on the image of Isaiah 42. (Thanks Kathy.)

¶ Meditation.

My primary Labor Day memory comes from seminary days. I was assistant pastor at a church in New York City, and for several years running I was the designated preacher on Labor Day weekend. The congregation shrank to 8-10 people that Sunday, given the New Yorker tradition of leaving town in August, returning on September’s first Monday evening.

My favorite Labor Day tradition (unfortunately cancelled this year) is also a churchly affair. Members of my congregation hike in the Black Mountains east of Asheville, then convene under a picnic shelter in a nearby park for a leisurely, intergenerational potluck dinner and conversation, with plenty of playground equipment and a gentle stream for wading.

Picnics and discount sell-ebrations are synonymous with Labor Day, along with the cheap sentiments of Presidential Labor Day Proclamations. The latter’s sanctimony this year is dramatized by the wretched statistics of how the pandemic is disproportionately affecting low-age earners. More than 90% of the jobs cut during the pandemic have been from restaurants and other hospitality industries.

—continue reading “Labor’s bread and lovers’ roses: A Labor Day meditation”

Right: Photo from the 1912 "Bread and Roses" strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts

¶ Hymn of confession. “What makes a gringo your smart aleck lingo / When he stole this land from the Indian way back when / Don't he remember the big money lender / That put him a lincoln parked where his pinto had been / The almighty peso that gives him the say so / To dry up the river whenever there's crops to bring in / Such a good neighbor to take all his labor / Chase him back over the border till he's needed again.” —Merle Haggard, “The Immigrant”

¶ In Christian mysticism, the Latin phrase Ora et Labora reads in full: "Ora et labora, Deus adest son has" (“Pray and work, God is there,” i.e., God helps without delay.) The pray and work refers to the monastic practice of working and praying, generally associated with its use in the Rule of St. Benedict.

¶ Hymn of intercession. “There's an evenin' haze settlin' over the town / Starlight by the edge of the creek / The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down / Money's gettin' shallow and weak / The place I love best is a sweet memory / It's a new path that we trod / They say low wages are a reality / If we want to compete abroad.” —Bob Dylan, “Working Man’s Blues”

¶ Call to the table. “A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.” —Albert Einstein

¶ Altar call. “Those who participate in [sabbath] break the anxiety cycle. They are invited to awareness that life does not consist in frantic production and consumption that reduces everyone else to threat and competition.” —Walter Brueggemann, Sabbath as Resistance

¶ Benediction. “The ones who work behind the plow / The ones who stand and will not bow / The ones who care for home and child / The ones who labor meek and mild / The ones who work a thousand ways / That we might celebrate this day / The ones who raise our cities tall / For those who labor, one and all .” —John McCutcheon, “Labor Day”

¶ Additional resources on Labor Day

• “Labor in the shadow of sabbath,” a Labor Day sermon

• “Meditations on Labor and Leisure: Several reflections on Sabbath keeping”

• “Blistering Hope: A stonemason’s meditation on perseverance”

• Special issue of “Signs of the Times” on Labor Day (2015)

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©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org. Language not otherwise indicated above is that of the editor. Don’t let the “copyright” notice keep you from circulating material you find here (and elsewhere in this site). Reprint permission is hereby granted in advance for noncommercial purposes.

Your comments are always welcomed. If you have news, views, notes or quotes to add to the list above, please do. If you like what you read, pass this along to your friends. You can reach me directly at kensehested@prayerandpolitiks.org.

 

 

Signs of the Times • 28 August 2020 • No. 205

¶ Processional. Northwest Tap Connection: #Blacklivesmatter

Among my bedrock theological convictions is that biblical spirituality is always personal but never private.

In this sense—and this sense only—do I identify as an evangelical Christian. Which is to say, transformation entails a profound shift, deep within, which leverages a corresponding change in behavior and allegiance.

A disarmament of the heart (which usually does not happen all at once but typically grows incrementally) is the unfolding of faith—which, as Clarence Jordan wrote, is not “belief in spite of evidence but life lived in scorn of the consequences."

In so doing, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote from his prison cell, "we learn to read history from below."

Of course the actual practice of disarmed living then renews, refines, and deepens the contours of the heart. Hearts and hands form a mutual learning pact.

Such faith imitates and participates in God’s transforming initiative in the Beloved's' enfleshment  (“while we were yet enemies of God”), relinquishing privilege, and then by way of Jesus' inauguration of the Reign to Come, setting in motion the disarmament of every ruthless power through the cross and resurrection. That selfsame movement—People of the Way—invites our participation even now.

This journey is not distinguished by a particular pattern of ritual observance, or precise doctrinal formulations, or set of moral strictures, or piety norms, or quality of emotional experience. The cruciform life lived inside resurrection’s promise is oriented by a beatific vision oriented to the coming Reign of God.

The work of grace is not like an emotional high, or a spa visit or an aromatherapy treatment or a mindfulness training. It is much more rigorous and robust. Grace has the power of displacing shame and fear, so that we develop the facility to living graciously, on the one hand, and fearlessly on the other, such that we receive the capacity to stand up against the threat of every malicious power.

“Freedom's just another word,” Kris Kristofferson wrote, “for having nothing left to lose.” This is our secret resurrectionary power.

Asking which comes first—disarmed hearts or disarmed hands—is a fruitless question. The one always guides and corrects and emboldens the other. These are not segregated acts but one unified exercise. Not unlike the relation between inhaling and exhaling.

The work of disarmed living—where the work of mercy mediates the demands of justice with the prerequisites of peace—is also holistic. It applies to every relational context of our lives, from the largest and most public to the most immediate and personal.

In this issue of Signs of the Times, I am offering examples from my own experience of attendance to the full range of where attention is needed: public policy, interpersonal relations, and familial kinship.

The first entails attention to the headlines, of needed public action, of attention to both the wretchedness and the hope of history’s large pallet. The second, an example of how we live with and care for friends and acquaintances. The third, how we sustain healthy relations within the intimacy of our own households (or at least with extended kin who gather for Thanksgiving meals).

The strategies we use for the work of healing in all three areas can be very different. None is more important than others. Different people give varying degrees of attention to one or another. But we all urgently need to be part of communities of conviction that nurture and encourage the work done in every level of our common life.

¶ Confession. “This old house is falling down around my ears / I'm drowning in a river of my tears / When all my will is gone you hold me sway / And I need you at the dimming of the day / You pulled me like the moon pulls on the tide / You know just where I keep my better side. —“Dimming of the Day,” Bonnie Raitt and Richard Thompson

PUBLIC POLICY

Kindred, the news is bleak. For we live in the valley of the shadow, when:

        • the stock market reaches record-breaking levels in the midst of near-record-breaking rates of unemployment;

        • when 1% of US citizens control $30 trillion of assets while the bottom half is saddled with more debts than assets;

        • when the median wealth of Black households is a tenth of that of whites;

        • when yet another unarmed Black man is shot—in the back, seven times, while getting in his car where his children are sitting—by police;

            —continue reading “Kindred, the news is bleak: Rouse yourselves to maintain custody of your heart”

¶ Hymn of assurance. “I don't feel no ways tired, / I've come too far from where I started from. / Nobody told me that the road would be easy, / I don't believe He brought me this far to leave me.” —The Voices of Light, “I Don’t Feel No Ways Tired”

INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

Watching the dual storms track through the Caribbean tonight make me remember a similar experience. Several years ago I was up late watching the course of a hurricane and remembering friends in several Caribbean countries and in South Louisiana where the storm was headed. It prompted a poem, which I dedicated to my friend and pastor, Rev. Francisco Rodés, in Cuba.

        —read “Weather channeling prayer: In advance of a hurricane”

¶ Hymn of intercession. “A greeting from my heart to Beirut / kisses to the sea and to the houses. . . . / My people’s wounds have flourished / And mothers tear / You are mine, you are mine / Ah, Hug me.” —English translation of lyrics in “Li Beirut” (“To Beirut”) performed by Fairouz 

FAMILIAL KINSHIP

Once a year in August my beloved catches up to me. For 14 weeks from late April, I maintain seniority in the house of age.

But then, in the dog days of summer, I lose my precedence. To be truthful, though, neither of us relish the accumulation of candles on our cake. . . . There have been hallelujahs and heartaches. Ecstasy in one moment, the laundry in the next.”

        —continue reading “Testifying on my beloved’s birthday: On the occasion of her 7 August 2020 birthday”

¶ Recessional. “The Blessing,” performed by an ensemble drawn from the churches of Aotearoa/New Zealand

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©Ken Sehested @ prayerandpolitiks.org. Language not otherwise indicated above is that of the editor, as are those portions cited as “kls.” Don’t let the “copyright” notice keep you from circulating material you find here (and elsewhere in this site). Reprint permission is hereby granted in advance for noncommercial purposes.

Feel free to copy and post any original art on this site. (The ones with “prayerandpolitiks.org” at the bottom.) As well as other information you find helpful.

Your comments are always welcomed. If you have news, views, notes or quotes to add to the list above, please do. If you like what you read, pass this along to your friends. You can reach me directly at kensehested@prayerandpolitiks.org.