Hard Work

October 16, 2016        Pentecost 22                            Luke 18:1-8

            Today, October 16 is designated by the United Nations as World Food Day.  That designation began in 1979 and it is in honor of the foundation of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in 1945.  It seems to be an excellent fit for our harvest festival today.

Indeed somewhere I came across a mailing for World Food Day suggesting that the gospel reading with the parable of the unjust judge and persistent widow makes an excellent connection to world hunger.  In the same way that the widow was persistent in working for justice from the judge we too should be persistent in working to end hunger.

I agree that is a creative way to connect everything, and it could work well.  Here for our harvest festival with our abundance I could preach about giving to the food cupboard and hunger related causes.  I could preach that hunger is not just about getting food to people but it is about poverty and justice.  Therefore we should write to our elected representatives and endlessly bug them about hunger, like the widow bugged the judge in the parable. 

I could also preach about how hunger is related healthy ecosystems and sustainability.  I could say that we should all stop buying processed foods wrapped in lots of packaging and instead we should all acquire reusable shopping bags made of recycled materials and go shopping only at farmers markets and buy locally produced in-season fruits and vegetables.

All of this would be good stuff.  And I could pull information from scripture and all sorts of studies backing up my claims.  If I did that maybe you’d think it fallen onto the Green Party bandwagon and just ignore me as a lunatic.  Or maybe I’d make you feel guilty and you’d pray about it for a while until your guilt goes away and you forget.  Or maybe you would give money to the food cupboard, write a letter to your congressional representatives and grab your reusable shopping bag and walk to the public market in Rochester.  And maybe after doing all that you’d have a good feeling inside for being an environmentally sensitive person and a socially active person working on behalf of those less fortunate than yourself.  Yay you. 

But all of that feels like it misses the point, and I don’t think it actually does anything.  All of that is just working harder and harder at the same old things we always do hoping that if we do it all right it will be good. 

I want to take a different approach, although I have no expertise to talk about this and no research to back it up.

A little over a week ago the Daily Messenger ran an article about the potatoes we harvested for our God’s Work Our Hands project.  It was a nice article even if it had lots of inaccuracies.  I couldn’t help snickering at the caption they put under the picture of Ivan Shuler pulling potatoes off a stalk.  The caption read, “Ivan Shuler digs deep for potatoes…”  Okay, but a machine dug out the potatoes.  We just had to pick them up!  Anyway, one of the things they did get right is where I said, “I have a lot of members with highly intellectual jobs who rarely have a chance to get their hands in the dirt.”

Here is my theory: I think we have largely insulated ourselves from most of the raw work that it takes to make our lives possible, but we’ve done it to our detriment.  While I like farming and gardening, most of the food I consume is grown by someone else.  I assume the same goes for you.

When you flip on a light switch do you ever consider what it takes to get power to the light?  Do you think about the wires in the walls, the wires on the streets, and everything back to the power plants?  Plus, do you really know how much energy it takes to light a light bulb?  One of the Boy Scout troops in Victor used to have a stationary bike that ran a generator, which then powered a light bulb.  You had to pedal plenty hard.  We’d all have a richer appreciation of the energy we use if we regularly had to put our own physical strength into generating it.

I think the same goes for travel.  A car makes it effortless.  You look at hills and distances very differently if you’re approaching them on foot or on bicycle.

How hard to you have to work to get hot or cold water from the tap?  Not at all.  These days you don’t even have to turn a knob.  Some faucets you just have to touch or wave your hand underneath!  The only time I ever actually carry water is when my family is out camping.  And more recently I make my kids carry water for me, so I don’t have to carry it then either!

I could go on and on.  While we can say we do work for what we have, I think we’re still pretty separate from it, maybe all of it.  And that affects our appreciation of things. 

If you live in a house I assume you love it.  That’s a good thing.  But how much more would your love and appreciation for it be if you had built it yourself from raw materials.  What if you had physically had to cut down the trees and remove the stumps with just axes and shovels?  What if you had dug out the foundation yourself with a shovel?  What if you had laid the foundation yourself from rocks you had collected?  What if you cut the boards by arm muscle from logs and assembled it yourself?

I think you get the picture.  While we think we appreciate what we have, I don’t think we appreciate it as deeply as if we had actually worked for it – if we could look at what we have and what we eat and say that it has come about by the physical effort of our very own arms and legs our appreciation of those things would be a whole different level; and I think a healthier level.

By many standards my dad had a miserable childhood.  He grew up as a poor farm boy and he didn’t really like summer vacation from school.  Why?  Because summer vacation meant spending time in the family’s fields hoeing lima beans.  My grandfather would supplement the family income every year by growing lima beans that were sold to a local cannery.  All day every day my dad, his siblings and his mother worked in the hot sun doing menial work.  His dad worked in a factory.  Today we would call it child abuse or a violation of child labor laws.  But my dad was learning something deeply significant.  No, it wasn’t teamwork or leadership skills or eye-hand coordination, or anything else we put kids in the hot summer sun these days and call it “sports”.  He was learning that he was a necessary part of his family.  He needed them; and they needed him because every person had essential work to do for survival.  There was nothing artificial about it.

I think giving a person an essential job to do is the best way to deeply instill a sense of self-worth in that person.

The widow in the parable was commendable for her persistence against the unjust judge.  Sometimes I wonder if the biggest threat we face is not an external threat but an internal one; and maybe our persistence needs to be directed there.

Maybe you’re different from me in this regard, but I doubt it.  If you gave me the choice of either weeding lima beans in the hot summer sun all day, or lounging in the shade beside a pool with a cool drink in one hand, you can bet I’m going to choose the pool!  I’m going to choose the pool every time… probably to my cost.  Without realizing it I’d be eroding away my sense of self-worth, and I’d be losing my sense of gratitude; I’d be losing an essential part of faith.

Our harvest festival today is a great celebration.  We should celebrate our bounty and be thankful.  But I fear our thankfulness isn’t as great as it would be if all this stuff came from our own manual labor.

It may seem stupid to ask for hardship.  It may seem stupid to ask for manual labor, but I think it important for us to persistently pray to God to make us whole, to help us to feel worthwhile, and to make us truly know our capabilities.  And then we can’t be afraid of the answers.  They might be hard!  And thus we can’t fear when something hard comes our way.  It is tempting to always take the easy way, but the hard way might be what we need.  May you have the courage and the strength to do and to face whatever it is to truly know wholeness and thankfulness.  And may you be persistent in bugging God until the way becomes clear.  Amen