Sermon: The Holiness of Work

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The Holiness of Work

By Charles Rush

February 11, 2001

at does it mean to be Holy? For centuries people went to the saints to collect their tid bits of wisdom on how to live their lives. We might contrast those with the quality of wisdom that is collected today. This comes from a list of "19 Things that it Took Me 50 Years to Learn" by Dave Barry.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings.

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

There is a fine line between hobby and mental illness.

No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11.

What does it mean to be Holy? In my quest to answer that question, I went to a website this week on the “Lives of the Saints”. It has had almost 3 million visitors in the past 5 years, so some of the answers found there are deemed relevant by quite a few people still.

I give you a few examples of Holy men from the past. St. Januarius lived during the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian and was a martyr for the faith. People who die for their faith were rightly lifted up by the early Church. Unfortunately, in the lives of the Saints, we have less what the martyrs actually did and more what disciples of them centuries later projected onto them as evidence of holiness.

Januarius was brought before the Roman judge Timothy who ordered him to sacrifice to the Roman gods. Januarius would not do so and violate his conscience. This filled the judge with anger and he had Januarius and several others bound in chains and delivered to the coliseum to be fed to the wild beasts. I read now from the lives of the Saints, “On the appointed day they were led into the amphitheatre and the judge Timothy ordered the wild beasts to be let loose; and when this was done, St. Januarius cried: ‘O brethren, seize the shield of faith and let us pray to the Lord our Helper in the name of the Lord who made heaven and earth.' And the mercy of God was so present that to the feet of Januarius like sheep with heads down ran the wild beasts.”

Later on judge Timothy ordered Januarius to be beheaded, whereupon the Saint prayed a prayer that the judge would see the light of heaven. Forthwith the judge went blind and accused Januarius of vengeance. St. Januarius prayed again that evil not be returned for evil and the eyes of the judge were miraculously opened again.

This display did not ultimately move the hard-hearted judged who ordered St. Januarius beheaded and he was, only in order that God would be glorified. Shortly after his death, the judged was seized by terrible pains that afflicted him throughout a long and torturous illness that led to his death… Oh that the world worked by so simple a spiritual calculus. The implication of this story, and there are thousands like it, are that holiness allows for supernatural conviction and the manifestation of miraculous powers to combat evil and witness to the good.

Another early and lasting tradition comes from asceticism. Here I would refer to Simeon the Stylite (390-459). Asceticism became very popular at the dissolution of the Roman Empire and it has been a central tradition in monasticism ever since. Simeon retreated to the desert to contemplate his sinfulness and prepare his soul to meet God in the afterlife through a series of fasts and mortifications that presumably strengthened his soul.

At one point, he decided to fast during Lent, as in no water and no food for 40 days. The first two weeks he spent praising God standing upright. The next two weeks he spent praising God sitting. The final two, owing to considerable weakness, lying down. A fellow monk heard about his plans and was worried enough to bring by ten loaves of bread and a jar of water in case of emergency. He returned on Easter day to check on Simeon and found him unconscious, the bread and water untouched. He was revived by eating the Eucharist and some lettuce leaves.

Simeon became well known and people sought him out for his wisdom, making arduous pilgrimages into the desert in Egypt to find him. Eventually he removed himself for contemplation and built a pillar, the last one 39 feet high. He lived on these platformed pillars about 40 years according to tradition. His strict regimen of fasting accompanied him all his life and he was also known for an incredible prayer life. One visitor reported that he bent down and prostrated himself in prayer some 1, 244 times in a day. Simeon also is reported to have performed miracles but he was known principally for his reporting of extraordinary experiences of God that came to him through his ascetical rigor.

This path to holiness is well known and has a proven track record. A friend of mine had a couple of college kids that came to the Monastery where he lived and asked to fast for a couple weeks. He asked them why they wanted to do that? They replied that they wanted to see God. “Well”, he said, “if you fast for five days, you most certainly will see God. You hallucinate.”

Holiness in this view is to be gained through renunciation that encourages a singularity of focus on God through concentrated prayer. It eschews all the materiality of this age, all compromise with the comforts of this world, in an effort to become united with God and prepared for the afterlife.

Finally, we have the example of the unity of with nature. The best example comes from St. Francis who was so imbued with a spirit of tranquility and peace that he was unified with the animal world. “He came to a certain place in which a great many birds of various types had congregated. When he saw them Francis, that most blessed servant of God, being a man of great fervor and very sympathetic toward the lower, irrational creatures, quickly left 8 his companions on the road and ran over to them. When he got there, he saw that they were waiting expectantly and saluted them. Surprised that the birds had not flow n away as they normally do, he was filled with joy and humbly begged them to listen to the word of God. Among the things he told them, he said the following: "My brothers the birds, you should love your creator deeply and praise him always. He has given you feathers to w ear, wings to fly with, and w hat ever else you need. He has made you noble among his creatures and given you a dwelling in the pure air. You neither sow nor reap, yet he nevertheless protects and governs you without any anxiety on your part." Both Francis and his companions agree in reporting that, when he had spoken thus, the birds exulted marvelously in their own fashion, stretching their necks, extending their wings, opening their mouths, and gazing at him. Francis walked into their midst, touching their heads and bodies with his tunic. Finally he blessed them and, making the sign of the cross, gave them permission to fly off to some other place” (from the Lives of St. Francis by Thomas of Celano)

The implication here is that holiness will produce a kind of harmony with the natural order, an ability to communicate that harmony so that natural fear is transformed by cosmic love. It is a triumph of the way of peace.

These traditions were handed down to us over twenty centuries, spawned the development of thousands of monasteries in their support, and had an influence of enormous magnitude. To this day, in Catholic tradition, priests that are cloistered in a monastery, devoted to the contemplative life of prayer, are more elevated than priests who serve in the parish, even if that parish should have several thousand families. The presumption is that withdrawing from the world, devoting oneself to the disciplines of meditation, study, and worship are more holy than building a family, working in the world, and being involved in the compromises that attend politics and the marketplace.

Of his many considerable achievements, Martin Luther's most important one, was calling this assumption into question. Luther was a New Testament professor who left the monastery because his reading of scripture could no longer support the notion that a contemplative life was spiritually superior. He said that the Christian life is a total vocation that affects all parts of our lives. In the words of St. Paul, we should work out our salvation amongst ourselves. In the words of James, our faith should express itself in action. Luther said that this means that all our activity in the world is the domain of our sanctification. It is the place we work on holiness. It is in being good spouses, becoming wise parents. It is in our work too. He said that barbers ought to see themselves as bringing beauty to the world- for Luther, of course that would be a modest beauty we would today consider somewhat severe. That farmers should see themselves as creating a garden that nourishes the community and nurtures livestock. That teachers should see themselves as forming character and inquisitiveness in the next generation. Unfortunately, I must report that Luther had nothing to say about financial investors that can be repeated in the pulpit. But the point is that Luther redirected our gaze. It wasn't so much isolated contemplation but the messy work of creating community that was the place of our salvation. Luther didn't develop this idea too well himself. But its impact his change of perspective was enormous.

Ernst Troeltsch's book Protestantism and Progress showed the development of this simple idea over the next several centuries in Europe. He showed how it inspired a new class of small businessmen and artisans across Germany, Switzerland, Holland, and Britain. How this new class developed a new formation of capital that by-passed the feudal land barons, promoting international commerce on an unprecedented scale. How it eventually gave rise to the Industrial Revolution and the formation of the new working class, middle class of managers, and entrepreneurs.

It was of enormous importance politically too, especially in the formation of our country. Hannah Arendt, in her brilliant book on the contrast between the French Revolution and the American Constitution, says that in France the economy was built on the old feudal order of landlords and tenants, with only a small middle class. As a result, the resentment of the peasants for the aristocracy was centuries old and they had very little experience with self-direction. Hence, when the monarchy died, the people could only replace the tyranny of the elite with the tyranny of mob rule. Heads rolled, violence destroyed the old order, but they were unable to replace it with a working democracy.

But in America, there was no historical economic imbalance. Instead, the colonies were formed by farmers, artisans, small businessmen, import/export, and small industry. The vast majority of our citizens were already economically self-sufficient and they were used to managing their lives and being self-directed to run their businesses. The values of democracy were being nurtured day in and day out by the values of economic commerce inherent in small business. Without that, we would not have been able to craft those noble political ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, nor craft a way to carry them out in the Constitution.

Max Weber argued that the Modern world would not have been possible without the Protestant Reformation. He said that what we have witnessed in the past two hundred years is the secularization of the Protestant idea of making our work the way we express our holiness. Slowly, we moved from viewing the world as the place to work out our salvation to simply seeing of our involvement in the world as the most important part of our lives period. Religion has retreated from the workplace to our individual lives- to our families and our interior life. The space for religion has shrunk considerably over the past 150 years. At the same time we have baptized progress for its own sake, technological sophistication for it's own sake, prosperity and its comforts for its own sake. As we did, the role of spirituality retreated increasingly to a smaller sphere in our personal lives. Protestant faith increasingly became about my relationship with my friend Jesus, cut off from any serious considerations about my role in the wider world, my vocation in and through my work.

But these issues remained with us and through the course of the twentieth century more and more people are beginning to see the important of infusing spirituality into our vocations again. I cite Tuesday's paper as just one example. The New York Times reported on an egregious sweatshop in Samoa that sold their apparel to, among others, the J.C. Penney Corporation. The sweatshop was composed of 300 Vietnamese women, all of whom had borrowed $2000-$7000 to escape the squalor of their home country and seek a better life abroad. Alas they were paid only $400 a month and charged $200/month for food and rent. They were forced to sleep two to a bed and were subjected to beatings if they were not in the dormitory by curfew. The managers routinely watched them showers. As is often the case, the owners of the sweatshop are of another ethnic group from the workers and the managers of the shop were Samoan, another ethnic group as well. Take ethnic indifference, mix it with economically vulnerable labor, stir in no court of appeal for infringement of human rights, sprinkle in greed and lust, you have ripe conditions for oppression and abuse.

I read an article in The Economist a year ago that suggested that it would take our world about 500 years to evolve to the point that the labor market would be relatively uniform worldwide. It will be about 500 years before the Vietnamese will demand- and force the market to pay- about the same wage as a factory worker in Detroit. That means that situations like that in the sweatshop in Samoa are likely to continue to be a challenge for the next several generations. That is the challenge put negatively.

But there is an enormous positive potential as well. Squire Knox and I were visiting a mission in Costa Rica last spring. I was interested to read that the Intel Corporation is directly responsible for a quarter of the GNP in Costa Rica. I don't pretend to have a full understanding of Intel's investment there, but from reading the papers and talking to the locals, it appears to be largely a win/win relationship. There are lots more good paying jobs. There has been an increase in access to health, access to small loans, an increase in education and the growing development of a class of engineers because they have jobs to aspire to. There has been an increase in technological literacy that has increasingly connected ordinary citizens in Costa Rica to the rest of the world. I'm sure there are environmental challenges and other problems.

But the point is this. We want to create a world where everyone is prosperous. We want a world where an increasing number of people can find fulfillment through their work. We want a world where everyone has access to capital, to health care, to education. We want a world where people can grow old with dignity. We increasingly find ourselves in a position to make that happen, not only in our immediate work environments, but also around the world through international investment and commerce.

We know now that this kind of development is the only solid basis for the foundation of democratic values, national security, and international good will. We know this is the long-term path towards justice, peace, and spiritual integrity.

Sure the path forward from here is full of compromise, greed, and manipulation. Sure it is inexact, as the demands for monetary profit never align themselves exactly with what is spiritually profitable. That is why we need to infuse our work with faith and work out our salvation in and through our vocation. It is not going to be direct or easy, but you know what, it isn't direct when we try to improve ourselves personally. So, do not despair. Pledge yourself to work for a holistic vision of The Common Good, think about that vision, and work towards it wherever you happen to find yourself employed. Even if all you can do is tweak the direction that a deal dictates, that too is a victory. Whatever you do, pray that you fill your work with faith, with values, with meaning. And watch out! God just might honor that.

Amen.