For the past few weeks I’ve been preaching from the book of Ephesians, exploring its encouraging words to Christians, newly baptized into the community of faith. We wrestled with how walking in God’s love enables us to do something useful with all of our emotions, even anger. We celebrated how God’s Spirit moves us to song, which leads us into a deeper sort of wisdom. And last Sunday – as we blessed the backpacks of all the kids, youth, and young at heart embarking on a new school year – we reminded ourselves that God gives us all we need to be brave in our embodiment of the gospel. We have everything we need in our backpacks.
And today – we’ve departed from Ephesians, and we heard the opening of the Letter of James. Of all the epistles James has a particularly practical bent towards the call to ethical living. James admonishes the wealthy and gives us lines like “Faith without works is dead” – which so troubled the reformer Martin Luther that he questioned whether James should even be in the New Testament canon at all – calling it an “Epistle of Straw.” And on this Labor Day Weekend – our text from James is fitting and provocative.
And even though you may just associate Labor Day with the end of summer or extra discount sales in stores or just another random holiday on the calendar – there is a rich history of US churches advocating for workers’ justice. For decades, today has been celebrated as Labor Sunday in some US churches. Beginning in the early 20th century, churches took this Sunday to especially emphasize economic justice in preaching, songs, and prayers, as workers shared testimonies of how their faith animated their involvement in the labor movement.1
On this Labor Sunday these words from James ring in my head as I consider all of the ways each of you labor and are doers:
“But be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves…those who look into the perfect law, the law of liberty, and persevere, being not hearers who forget but doers who act – they will be blessed in their doing.” (James 1:22, 25).
Outside of pastoring, what I’ve been doing recently has been renovating a little outbuilding next to our house, to become my office. For the past month on Saturdays and my day-off Monday and sometimes for an hour or two some evenings, I rest from holding this congregation in my mind, and I’ve been laboring on this office-in-progress. The usual work of my hands is typing out words on a keyboard and holding a pen to jot down notes to remember or shaking the hand of another as we meet for coffee – but when I go work on the shed – my hands transition to holding a hammer or drill or level in the process of installing subfloor or windows or siding.
And inevitably I get tuckered out. And for the past week a certain friend has been my sign that it’s time to rest and call it a day.
Each early evening this past week, a beautiful big spider begins crafting it’s finely spun web. The spider builds a new web every dusk, stretching down from the eaves under the front stoop of the shed, placing it there for me to see illuminated by the nearby streetlights, and shimmering with the first dew of nightfall. As I put down my tools for the evening and leave behind my crude attempts at construction, I’m greeted by the intricacy and strength of this spider’s delicate web.
Each of us is laboring towards something. Each of us hopefully takes time to rest.
The spider and I pass each other in the evening, as we clock in and out of our shifts to move our web or office shed a little closer to our vision of a better world. For the spider that means feasting on bothersome flying insects. For me that means that making sure the windows don’t leak and the door is fairly plumb.
We all are working at something. We all need rest. And by God’s grace we return to our labors the next day or the next week.
The work looks different for each of you. The work is hard in different ways for each of you. You each have different ways of glimpsing beauty and meaning and taking pride in what you do. What you do with your labors, with your hands, with your lives, can be an act of co-creating with God. Your labor, whatever it is, is not in vain, when you are laboring alongside the God who gives birth to all that is good.
James uses the image of birth to describe the dangers that can come from following what James’ calls worldly desires. For James keeping oneself “unstained by the world” (1:27) means refusing to yield to the desire of the wickedness and greed that causes injustice. Pure religion boils down to caring for the vulnerable. And the temptation toward injustice James’ places responsibility for solely on humans. The verses right before our passage begin – uses the image of labor and birth to describe this responsibility:
“No one, when tempted, should say, “I am being tempted by God”: for God cannot be tempted by evil and God himself tempts no one. But one is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death. Do not be deceived, my beloved.” (James 1:13-16).
And next James surprises us, describing God as the source of generosity and the Father of lights and also portraying God as Mother:
“In fulfillment of God’s own purpose, he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.”
“In fulfillment of God’s own purpose, she gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of her creatures.”
This image bends our own conceptions of gender in its use of male pronouns for God while at the same time showing us a vision of God as birthing us by God’s very word.
James offers us a contrast between two types of birth – the spiral of greed and wickedness that leads to sin and ultimately death – and the birthing, laboring work that our mothering God does – in creating and nurturing us and this world.
So if this is what God has always been about – speaking words of life and birthing new creatures and communities that might flourish in peace and justice, what are we doing with our words and our lives? James encourages us to “welcome with meekness the implanted word that has the power to save your souls…and to be doers of the word, and not merely hearers who deceive themselves” (1:21).
So, what good news, what implanted word has weaseled its way down into the soil of your life? How are you called to embody and be a doer of the word that God has sown in you? And what does it look like for us as a church community to be thriving and fully alive as doers of the word?
This kind of humble yet bold living takes all sorts of shapes and forms. There’s all sort of ways to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our God.
For some, your labor is using your hands for acts of healing and compassion – working to restore health and wholeness to folks who are sick. Others of you use your hands to write code, to respond to questions, to create networks of possibility connecting us as humans.
For others of you your most important labor might be at home – the daily stacks of dishes and laundry to be washed and dried and folded and messes cleaned up only for there to be more messes, laundry, and dishes. Other hands in our midst build and fix things or plant seeds and care for beloved animals.
For others of you your labor is one of emotional intuition, you pay attention with your hands – writing a note to a friend at the right time, offering a hug, comforting a crying child, coaxing music out of an instrument.
Some of your hands spend time turning over book pages, your fingers work hard trying to type out what a more just world looks like, each new paragraph and page another possibility for peace.
For others of you your hands have worked for many years doing familiar things and now they find themselves learning and relearning new rhythms.
And for some of you – you wish you could be doing things with your hands to pay the bills and fill the time…but haven’t found the right fit, or the employer hasn’t called back and you’ve been ghosted yet again as you throw up your hands in frustration.
Or maybe it feels hard to know what to do with your hands some days. Or maybe you wring your hands in frustration at a world that values some kinds of work and dismisses the contributions of so many others.
We do so much with our hands. So may all of our hands, and all of our labor be blessed.
Be blessed in your doing, be blessed in your being, be blessed in your resting. Be blessed as doers of the word, as you work alongside the God who labors and rests with us, giving birth to new expressions of justice, mercy, and love.
- See the work of Heath Carter for more on this history. ↩︎