A
Christian Understanding of Work
Proverbs
6: 6-11
2nd Thessalonians 3:6-15
John 9:1-5
Several
decades ago we began hearing of the “Protestant Work Ethic.”
Some people thought they had come upon the notion among early-day
Protestants that material prosperity was a sign, even the sign,
of God’s favour. Christians
were to work hard and prosper in order to secure God’s favour, or to
give evidence that they had already secured it.
In addition the so-called Protestant Work Ethic was supposed to
have boosted the modern addiction known as “workaholism.”
Workaholics don’t merely work hard; they work compulsively.
(Plainly a psychiatric judgement has been rendered here, since
compulsiveness is a manifestation of neuroticism.)
Workaholics are obsessed with work; they work fifteen hours per
day, day-in and day-out, sacrificing spouse, children and health.
If they work any less they feel guilty and unworthy. Their
holidays are the most stressful time of the year for them, which
holidays they customarily abbreviate in order to flee back to work.
They need work the way a “junkie” needs cocaine.
(I want to say in passing that the so-called Protestant Work
Ethic, the notion that work justifies us before God can’t be found
anywhere in the thought of the Protestant Reformers.)
Some people maintain that the bad publicity surrounding the “P.W.E.”
has precipitated a pendulum swing all the way over into the opposite
extreme: people are reacting to work-addiction by escaping into
non-work-addiction. Work is
now done less well, less responsibly, less conscientiously.
Work now appears often to be regarded like diphtheria: to be
avoided if at all possible. The
ultimate paradox and perversity, of course, is the person who works ever
so hard at avoiding work.
Where do we stand as Christians?
I:
-- In
the first place we must acknowledge that work is a divine ordinance.
According to scripture God ordains that we work, men and women.
(Homemaking is work; in fact it’s hugely important work, and
remains work whether done by housewives or househusbands.)
Work is as much a part of the God-instituted order as is the
earth’s revolving around the sun.
God commands us to work. His
command is a blessing. Work
is therefore good, and good for us in that it enhances our humanness.
God has made us working creatures.
Yet not everyone has thought this to be the case.
The ancient Greeks regarded work as demeaning, beneath highborn
men and women. Aristotle
insisted that no one be allowed citizenship unless he had forsaken
trades work for at least ten years.
Philosophers like Aristotle should have to do no more than
reflect. In the Middle Ages
in
Europe
work was considered beneath an aristocrat.
Jesus, on the other hand, was a labourer.
Paul was a tentmaker. And
since King Saul, royal ruler of all
Israel
, was found ploughing behind oxen, it’s plain that the Greek and
Hebrew minds are polar opposites with respect to work.
The Hebrew mind insists that work is good; God, after all, works
himself, and has constituted us working creatures whose humanness is
threatened by non-work. Without
work we lack something essential to human wholeness.
It’s for this reason that unemployment is so very serious.
The worst consequence of unemployment isn’t poverty (dreadful
as poverty is); rather it’s loss of self-esteem.
As self-esteem evaporates, self-deprecation sets in.
Demoralization follows. Soon
the unemployed feel themselves dehumanized, even disgraced.
(I noted years ago that when church members lose their job they
often cease attending worship, and reconnect with church life only when
they are employed once more.) Not
to work, not to be able to work, not be allowed to work is to be on the
road to inner fragmentation.
Admittedly, however, there are some people who don’t want to
work. Work is too much
bother. They’d rather be
kept. They won’t work as
long as they can sponge off their parents, off their children, off their
disability or employment insurance, off government “goodies.”
(Let me make a parenthetical comment here.
In my experience the poor are rarely those who sponge off the
social welfare system. The
poor -- who are as intelligent as anyone else -- lack the social
sophistication and the social contacts need to exploit the social
welfare system. The poor
customarily lack access to the levers that have to be “pulled” in
order to make the social welfare coffers ring; lacking such access, they
lack the opportunity to exploit. Those
who are adept at finessing the system, I have found, are those who have
the “tools” needed to pry money loose where they know it is kept.
The middle class, I have discovered, is more adept at exploiting
social provision than the poor.)
The apostle Paul came upon some people in Thessalonica who had
decided not to work. “We
hear that some of you are living in idleness,” he remarked, “mere
busybodies, not doing any work.” His
approach to them was blunt: “If you don’t want to work, don’t
expect to eat.” God
ordains work. It’s good to work.
II:
-- But
is work good without qualification?
Is work always and everywhere good?
We frequently hear work spoken of as a curse.
People who speak like this have seized half a truth: work itself
isn’t a curse, but in a fallen world (according to Genesis 3) work
lies under a curse.
When we speak of a fallen world we mean a world that rebels
against God; a world that defies him, disdains his way and word and
truth; a world that flaunts its disobedience of him.
Such a world can’t fail to be characterized by greed and
deceit, hostility and strife. In
such a world work becomes an occasion of frustration, and the workplace
a battleground. God intends
work to be the sphere wherein humankind exercises its stewardship of the
creation and cooperates under him for humankind’s well-being.
In a fallen world, however, God’s purpose is contradicted, with
the result that work becomes the scene of self-seeking and quarrelling,
exploitation and rancour. In
a fallen world the blessing of work is riddled with the curse of
frustration and hostility.
We moderns have short memories.
We tend to forget that only 150 years ago children worked
fourteen hours per day in factories and mines under conditions so very
dangerous and damaging as almost to defy description.
Only 150 years ago? That
long ago in
Britain
and continental
Europe
, but today in so many countries of the world children are granted no
relief.
My grandfather began working for a major automaker almost from
the beginning of car manufacturing -- in other words, in the days before
the autoworkers’ union. A
car engine, weighing several hundred pounds, travelling on an overhead
conveyor, would fall from time to time and crush a worker on the
assembly line underneath it. When
workmates bent over the bleeding pulp ( i.e., what was left of the man)
a company official would hasten to the scene and snarl, “Get that
thing (the mangled worker) off the line and get back to work.”
My grandfather used to tell me of loading freshly painted car
axles onto railway boxcars throughout the morning. By
noon
he had wet paint up to his elbows. At
lunchtime he wasn’t allowed to wash his hands: there was no provision
for washing. A company
official would walk throughout the factory, and then point out to the
foreman a worker whom the foreman was to suspend without pay for three
weeks. The worker had done
nothing wrong. The company
policy, however, was to promote a “reign of terror” designed to keep
workers cowering before sheer arbitrariness.
(Needless to say, the suspended worker had a family to support.)
When workers attempted to organize in order to protect
themselves, company officials had Walter Reuther and his brother (the
first leaders of the autoworkers’ union) beaten so badly they were
both hospitalized for six months.
“That’s old stuff,” someone objects; “we live in a
different era.” It isn’t
so different that the workplace has ceased to be a scene of frustration
and hostility. Ralph Nader,
the American lawyer and advocate who represents consumers (he was also a
presidential candidate in the last USA election), exposed dangerous
defects in consumer goods only to have private detectives “tail” him
night and day hoping to catch him in “compromise”; i.e., a situation
with a woman which could then be used to ruin him and destroy his
credibility. This operation
continued for months, companies always denying it.
It was only in the light of public exposure and a threatened
lawsuit that Nader’s harassment ceased.
But of course extreme is always matched to extreme.
If employers behave indefensibly, so do employees.
We read of situations in
Britain
where for the slightest matter involving an employee, British workers
will shut down an industrial operation completely.
One of my relatives, a white-collar union steward in a Canadian
business office, found employees approaching her frequently inasmuch as
these employees resented being disciplined for habitual tardiness.
They couldn’t seem to understand why the company was opposed to
chronic lateness. (My
relative, by the way, maintained that any adult who couldn’t get to
work on time didn’t deserve a job.
Shortly she was relieved of her steward’s position.)
Few things are more frustrating, not to say costly, than hiring
people to do a job only to find that their “protection” allows them
to do as little as possible, as slowly as possibly, and as shabbily as
possible.
Obviously it’s silly to suggest that employers as a class are
demons while employees as a class are angels.
In a fallen world employer and employee alike are going to be
exploiters, given the opportunity. Both
will tend to push their exploitation all the way to criminality.
That’s why we find corruption, bribery and beatings within
worker organizations supposedly pledged to the well-being of the worker.
III:
-- Where
does all this find us as Christians?
We know that God ordains work to be a human good, an essential
ingredient in our humanness, even as we are aware of hostility and
conflict in the workplace. Then
what expression does our witness assume?
i]
The
first aspect of our Christian witness is both plain and simple: we are
to do as good a job as we can. Integrity
in the workplace is bedrock. A
day’s work is to be rendered for a day’s pay, or else our
“witness” is no witness at all and we are merely part of the
problem. Paul tells Timothy,
a much younger man, that work done should be work of which a worker need
never be ashamed. This kind
of work, the apostle continues, “adorns the doctrine of God our
Saviour.” It’s a most
unusual notion, isn’t it: what we do conscientiously, consistently,
competently in the workplace “adorns the doctrine of God our
Saviour.” The quality of our work lends attractiveness and credibility
to the truth of God by which we are known.
Integrity in the workplace is bedrock.
Are you aware that the chartered banks write off millions of
dollars every year? Bank
employees pilfer it. (Please
note that the banks lose vastly more money to employee theft than they
lose to “hold ups.”) The
manager of a department store in suburban
Toronto
tells me that every year $600,000 in cash and merchandise disappears
from the store. Little of it
is shoplifted by customers; nearly all of it finds its way into the
pockets of employees. A
foreman working on the Trans Canada Pipeline tells me that at the
beginning of the year he purchases twelve dozen pipe wrenches, and by
year’s end his crew has stolen all 144 of them.
We mustn’t think that integrity pertains only to money and
goods. Integrity pertains to
time and attitude and diligence as well.
Today employers wince when they think of the outlook of so many
who make up the work pool. They
wince when they think of the carelessness, slovenliness and indifference
that pretends to be doing a job. The
Christian’s work is to be conscientious, consistent, competent -- and
therein “adorn the doctrine of God our Saviour.”
ii]
There is yet another Christian responsibility: we must try to
understand the situation of those whose work is especially
stress-riddled, or whose work is especially unfulfilling, boring, even
mind-bending. Some of us
work at jobs we find stimulating and rewarding.
We are very fortunate; we are also very few.
Most people work at jobs that don’t use anywhere near their
resources and abilities. For
this reason they crave more holidays and earlier retirement.
We must endeavour to understand the plea of these people when
they speak of the dehumanization and danger peculiar to their job.
Red Storey, an outstanding hockey referee of yesteryear, says he
refereed when every NHL game was “survival night.”
Recently I have found more and more schoolteachers, for instance,
describing their situation in terms of survival.
The public has become largely impatient with teachers, perhaps
with some justification. At
the same time, test after test has indicated that inner-city elementary
schoolteaching is the most stressful job in
North America
. In addition, the public
doesn’t know, among other things, that boards of education have asked
newspapers not to write up incidences of classroom assault on teachers
for one reason: it was found that whenever classroom assaults on
teachers were printed in the news media, such assaults increased.
Think of the people who work at jobs that are mind numbing.
When I was a university student I had a summer job I shall never
forget. I sat at a table
where I picked up one sheet from each of three piles (i.e., I was
collating them), pushed the packet under an electric stapler (“kerchunk”),
and set the stapled item aside. One
day I stapled 10,000 units. I
didn’t count them. By the
end of the day I was in no condition to count.
I happened to have used an entire box of staples, and there were
10,000 staples per box. My
mother tells me that when I arrived home after work, anyone who so much
as looked at me risked annihilation.
Some people are consigned to jobs like this throughout their
entire working life, with individual and domestic and social
consequences that are not to be dismissed.
I readily admit that I know little of industrial relations; I
know little of the research done concerning the social and psychological
and domestic effects of different kinds of work.
But if the church is ever going to attract someone besides the
upwardly socially mobile, then we shall have to learn to listen to
people whose work experience is very different from that of the
professional types who tend to assume that everyone’s on-the-job
rewards parallel theirs.
iii]
A third responsibility is that our congregation must reflect the
gospel truth that work is what people do; work is not who people are.
We must never be seduced into the mentality that sees people as
more valuable or less valuable just because the job they do is paid more
money or less. Paul insists
that in Christ Jesus there is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither male nor
female, neither slave nor free.
For “neither slave nor free” read “neither minimum
wage-earner nor company executive.”
In his Corinthian correspondence (2nd Cor.
5:16
) he states that Christians are to “regard no one from a human point
of view.” The “human
point of view” is the attitude that ignores someone who earns $20,000
per year but flatters someone who receives $200,000 (the sort of person
we are extraordinarily pleased to see affiliate with our congregation.)
This attitude has no place in the Christian fellowship.
Several years ago I attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous
where a newcomer, a university professor, newly rendered sober through
the AA movement, needed a sponsor. A
sponsor is an AA friend of greater maturity and wisdom who can steer a
newcomer around the pitfalls that might trip up his newfound sobriety.
The sponsor assigned to this professor happened to be a truck
driver. And the professor
wasn’t ashamed to admit that the truck driver possessed a maturity,
wisdom, discernment and experience in this area of life that he lacked.
Surely the Christian fellowship can’t be found wanting here, when to
us is entrusted the truth, “In Christ there is neither slave nor
free.”
Perhaps
you are thinking that the three points I have made concerning our
Christian responsibility don’t go very far in overturning the
turbulence in the work world. Still,
they give us a starting point for understanding God’s mandate
concerning work and the world in which we have to work.
In any case, as our seventeenth Century Quaker foreparents liked
to say, it’s always better to light a candle than to curse the
darkness.
Victor
Shepherd
September
2006
