Work and Its Rewards
The Rev. Matthew Johnson-Doyle
August 31st, 2008

Message: Work and its rewards

Note: The sermon is an oral event. This manuscript may not reflect the exact spoken words. © Matthew Johnson-Doyle, 2008.

In the seventh grade,
we took a field trip.
Not to the university library,
although we went there on another outing.
Not to the Seattle science center,
where we often went when I was younger.
No, this trip was the Borden Aluminum plant
in downtown Kent, Washington, where we lived.
I remember the trip well.
For one, it was noisy.
At this plant, they made garbage cans.
Folks worked the machines that pressed the aluminum into shape.

Part of me thought it was pretty cool:
big machines, shiny metal.
I liked how the aluminum arrived through one door in sheets
and left the other door as a recognizable object.

Another part of me, of course,
absorbed the lesson the teachers were trying to send:
this is why you go to college.

In the town I grew up in,
you were the son or daughter of Boeing engineers
or you were the son or daughter of Boeing machinists.

My best friend in 7th and 8th grade, Matt,
his dad was a machinist.
My dad was an engineer.

I don't recall Matt and I discussing that field trip,
but I wonder if his experience was the same as mine.
I doubt it.


The Borden aluminum plant is gone now.
Shortly after our trip,
it was surrounded by fence and wire.
I don't know where those jobs went –
most of them, I'm sure, to machines,
and the rest to Mexico or China, probably.

For years, the factory stood there, empty.
A little less than a decade ago,
they added a commuter train stop to our town,
it makes a few trips a day into and out of Seattle.
And the downtown started to become a bit more alive.
The factory was torn town.
My step-mom, who follows city affairs closely,
told me that there was a lot of environmental clean-up to do –
when I heard that,
I remembered the workers there,
and wondered about their health.

Where the factory was,
now there is a shopping complex.
A Starbucks, of course, and a movie theater.
A couple restaurants: A California Pizza Kitchen
and a Ted's Montana Grill:
The Starbucks, at least, is a local company.
All those boutique national chain clothing stores
you would expect.
It's better than a vacant lot or an empty factory, sure.
But I wish it was not quite so homologized.
I wish that it wasn't quite so familiar. So predictable.

Ministry is the only career I've ever had,
but it's not the only job I've held.
The others were part time or summer work,
and some were better than others.
I had a great job for a summer as a scorekeeper
for the parks and Rec. softball league.
Through most of High School,
I worked at a grocery store. Bagging groceries.
Cleaning the bakery and meat department –
one of the many reasons I don't eat beef –
doing the dishes in the China Express and Deli –
the reason I can only eat Chinese food if it is very fresh –
and stocking shelves, mostly in the dairy section.
I was then a member of the United Food and Commercial Worker's Union.

I worked for a summer in college as a video store clerk.
That was a mind-numbing tedious three months.
The store manager didn't understand why I declined
his offer to drop out of school
and enter the assistant manager program.

I worked the next three summers for the conferences and events office at my school –
setting up tables and chairs,
cleaning dorm rooms for conference guests,
running A/V equipment around campus.

And that was that.
Since then, ministry, in one form or another, has been my work.

I share this history with you for a few reasons.
Partly as an invitation,
an invitation for you to come into awareness of your own history.
For many, large parts of our lives are spent working.
These parts of our lives matter, too.
Meaning and purpose are at stake here.
I enjoyed the scorekeeping job,
and the conferences and events work,
because they were outside,
because I was needed,
because, for the most part,
the people I worked with were not in a hurry.

I hated the video job because it was lonely,
because in the first hour of training,
I learned all there was to learn about how to do it.
This tells me a lot about myself.
How do you feel about what you do, or did?
What does that tell you about your passions?
What does it suggest would make your days meaningful
at this time in your life?

I share this history also, though,
to make clear my limitations and my relative privilege
I grew up on the edge between middle-class and upper-class.
That's where I reside today too.
It isn't luxurious, but it’s comfortable.
I didn't earn where I started,
I was just lucky.

I spent a lot of time this week looking for a good reading,
something that would inspire me for labor day.
It was very frustrating.
I found myself reading though my 7th grade best friend Matt's eyes,
and so much of what was on my shelf,
well, it was patronizing or pitying.
Khalil Gibran has a chapter on work,
where he praises the laborer and waxes poetic about
serving the earth:
but I know Gibran's biography and the man never did such work.

I wish to avoid, today and every day,
any schema in which we fool ourselves into thinking
that some people are categorically different from others.
Such a theory,
all too common among "well-educated liberals" –
of which many, but not all, of us are,
such a theory posits that people who belong to
what is called the "working class" –
although that is not a good term –
that these folks have fundamentally different spiritual needs,
that they have different world views,
that they live on these planes because of their misfortune or society’s neglect.
This way of thinking is fundamentally contrary
to the good news of Unitarian Universalism

We believe that everyone has value.
Our experiences might be different.
Surely, the level of privilege or hardship we begin with is different.
The happenstances and accidents of life are meted out with variety,
sometimes cruelly so.
Lord knows,
those with power have used violence, fear, and oppression
to limit the opportunities and shorten the horizons of others.
But we are all more human than otherwise.

I had a hard time finding a reading.
Eventually, I thought: Whitman.
I wasn't around in 1867, when Whitman wrote this,
but I have a feeling it's a little overly romantic.
All the workers singing.
But at least there is a measure of respect.
A sense that this work is worthy.
That a person might find joy and purpose in it.
Making aluminum trash cans wasn't my path,
and I don't pretend that such work was what they all wanted,
but I know Matt’s dad enjoyed his work.

The machines.
The camaraderie.
That something tangible is produced.
That when you leave work, you really leave it –
that's something I am sometimes envious of.

Hannah Arendt, like so many in the 1950's,
predicted that automation would eliminate
this kind of work from the world.
She was wrong about that;
though automation surely did reduce the number of jobs out there.
No, it was the ability to send the job elsewhere,
where people cost less, even, than machines,
that made my local aluminum plant disappear,
and so many jobs in Rockford disappear.
The things that used to be made here aren't anymore.

You can get plenty of politics these two weeks,
and I don’t intend this morning to engage in such things.
I’ve lived here not quite two months,
and I’m not ready get down and dirty
about what’s up with this town.

But I know the question of work and human dignity,
of vibrant community and opportunity,
these are live questions among us.

Our faith calls us to engage in the work of the world.
The sun arrives unspoiled from its journey around the earth,
from shining on hovels and castles alike.
The sun is as is regardless of such things,
but we are not permitted,
not by our faith tradition,
we are not permitted to remain ignorant of such realities.
We are obliged to give our attention and our action to such things.

Here’s the deal.
Religious prophets have been talking about poverty,
about the need to care for those without,
about how everyone ought to be treated with dignity,
since Hosea and Amos and Isaiah,
twenty-five hundred years ago.
Lao-Tzu said similar kinds of things,
recorded in the Tao Te Ching,
about the same time.

Our obligation to the poor
was THE central ethical message of the rabbi from Nazareth,
AND the messenger from Mecca
AND the young prince from Lumbini who became enlightened.

And yet we live in a world of unbelievable inequality,
both down the road from here
and across the globe.
This is a fact of existence at odds with our commitments
and our values.
Spiritual questions are at stake.
But religious encouragement doesn’t seem to have worked yet.

Mostly, this is because the powerful
have employed violence and death.
The history of anti-union efforts in this country
is just one example,
and pretty mild compared to others.
When we talk about oppressions,
we so often understate the outright violence involved.
When we get something cheap, today,
it is probably cheap because of violence.

Children kidnapped to do labor,
women and men locked in factories,
political dissent illegal, punishable by death.

When Arednt refers to the fact that freedom from labor is not new
it once belonged to the very few,
she refers to those elites of antiquity,
whose slaves did the everyday work.
Who bring in the food and put out the fire,
who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who stand in the line and haul in their places,
the mechanics and boatmen and sewers
who sing in Whitman’s poetry.
The ancient Greeks were quite clear that these people
were not truly human,
so long as this was their labor.
But it was not just those owned by others,
but it was also the merchant and the craftsman –
anyone who had to go to work was bound by necessity.
It was the privilege and the responsibility of those free elites
to engage in cultural activities and in philosophy,
and to be engaged in politics.
However, if a person was able to make enough money
that they no longer were bound to necessity,
even if that person had been a slave,
then they could be part of this free elite.
That’s the ancient understanding of slavery.

In modern slavery – which continues around the world to this day,
and did not end, as we were taught, in 1865,
in modern slavery
the powerful have worked on the rest of us a grand hoax:
they have convinced many people who are,
in fact,
bound to necessity,
that they are part of the “free elite.”
This is the glorification of labor,
the notion that our job is to produce things,
it is a way to dupe the great majority into believing
that this laboring is the meaning of our lives.
It is paired with a glorification of consumerism,
to buy, buy, buy, and junk, junk, junk at that.

But it doesn’t work, does it?
At least, not for us.
I think, not for any.
But some know not the alternative –
and this is a world of mindless labor and thoughtless consumption
and surely, nothing could be worse.

The Universalists have claimed,
for two hundred and fifty years,
that all people are loved,
that the human race is bound together.
The Unitarians have claimed,
for almost five hundred years,
that people are inherently good,
and that we are meant –
meant by God, by nature, by the universe –
we all meant for meaning and purpose.

It is not my vision that all will be materially equal,
although I would like to see less inequality.
Too large a gap is not good for democracy.
But I don’t go in for utopian fantasy.

No, my vision is that the professionals
and the managers and the engineers and the like
will shed the illusion
that we are not bound to necessity too.
We will recognize our common status
with those who might make less – or none at all –
who might have less but who are like us bound to necessity.
This is the first step and cannot be skipped.
Only this solidarity –
genuine, spiritually grounded, concrete solidarity
will help us avoid the perils of pity and condescension.
Better the romanticism of Whitman, I say,
than high-brow patronization.
Solidarity is the first step.
But then,
then let us say this:
though we are all bound to necessity,
this is not the sum of our lives.
The pursuits of joy, beauty, learning, and meaning
are for us all.

All children should have curiosity encouraged.
All grown-ups should do something beautiful with their lives,
something they need not do,
but do anyway.
All people should be able,
after a lifetime of being mostly about necessity,
to have a retirement mostly about freedom.
These things ought not depend on luck.
The folks who build trashcans and the engineers who design them,
whatever country they live in,
should all have the chance to be more than their work.
Sometimes our work is meaningful and important.
Sometimes it isn’t, not really.
But no matter what,
our lives ought to be meaningful and important.

That’s the witness of Unitarian Universalism.
If we start with this,
then I hope that we might be of more use
in the struggle for justice and dignity for all,
here in this town,
where it is so needed,

and around the world,
where the sun shines as it makes it journey,
on hovels and castles,
laborers of all kinds,
children and elders,
and arrives to us,
calling us to a new day.

I hope that on this morning we find within ourselves
the courage to use our freedom
the courage to help others use theirs
the courage to struggle, always,
for freedom for all people,
everywhere.
May it be so.