Dan Harper | Sermons

Category: Religion in society

  • Greedy Guts

    Due to a computer glitch, the last half of this sermon is missing. This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading this morning comes from Robert Graves’s two volume Greek Myths.

    “Midas, son of the Great Goddess of Ida, by a satyr whose name is not remembered, was a pleasure-loving King of Macedonian Bromium, where he ruled over the Brigians and planted his celebrated rose gardens. In his infancy, a procession of ants was observed carrying grains of wheat up the side of his cradle and placing them between his lips as he slept — a prodigy which the soothsayers read as an omen of the great wealth that would accrue to him….

    “One day, the debauched old satyr Silenus, Dionysus’s former pedagogue, happened to straggle from the main body of the riotous Dionysian army as it marched out of Thrace into Boeotia, and was found sleeping off his drunken fit in [Midas’s] rose gardens. The gardeners bound him with garlands of flowers and led his before Midas, to whom he told wonderful tales of an immense continent lying beyond the Ocean stream — altogether separate from the conjoined mass of Europe, Asia, or Africa — where splendid cities abound, peopled by gigantic, happy, and long-lived inhabitants, and enjoying a remarkable legal system. A great expedition — at least ten million strong — once set out [from] thence across the Ocean in ships to visit the Hyperboreans; but on learning that theirs was the best land that the old world had to offer, retired in disgust…. Midas, enchanted by Silenus’s fictions, entertained him for five days and nights, and then ordered a guide to escort him [back] to Dionysus’s headquarters.

    “Dionysus, who had been anxious on Silenus’s account, sent to ask how Midas wished to be rewarded. He replied without hesitation: ‘Pray grant that all I touch be turned into gold.’ However, not only stones, flowers, and the furnishing of his house turned to gold but, when he sat down to table, so did the food he ate and the water he drank. Midas soon begged to be released from his wish, because he was fast dying of hunger and thirst; whereupon Dionysus, highly entertained, told him to visit the source of the river Pactolus, near Mount Tmolus, and there wash himself. He obeyed, and was at once freed from the golden touch, but the sand of the river Pactolus are bright with gold to this day….”

    [pp. 281-282]

    The second reading is from the ancient Hebrew book known as Proverbs, chapter 8, verses 1-12.

    “Does not wisdom call,
    and does not understanding raise her voice?
    On the heights, beside the way,
    at the crossroads she takes her stand;
    beside the gates in front of the town,
    at the entrance of the portals she cries out:
    ‘To you, O people, I call,
    and my cry is to all that live.
    O simple ones, learn prudence;
    acquire intelligence, you who lack it.
    Hear, for I will speak noble things,
    and from my lips will come what is right;
    for my mouth will utter truth;
    wickedness is an abomination to my lips.
    All the words of my mouth are righteous;
    there is nothing twisted or crooked in them.
    They are all straight to one who understands
    and right to those who find knowledge.
    Take my instruction instead of silver,
    and knowledge rather than choice gold;
    for wisdom is better than jewels,
    and all that you may desire cannot compare with her.
    I, wisdom, live with prudence,
    and I attain knowledge and discretion.’  ”

    Sermon

    This is the second in a series of occasional sermons on the so-called seven deadly sins. I have to preface this sermon by saying that I most certainly do not accept the traditional understandings of sin nor do I accept the notion of original sin; that, as a Universalist, I cannot accept that an allegedly loving God would condemn anyone to hell for an eternity; and that therefore I do not accept the category of “deadly sins” which were, in traditional Christian theology, sins so horrible that to engage in them would be to risk eternal damnation. Yet having said that, the traditional listing of so-called seven deadly sins — lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, envy, wrath, and pride — remains a pretty good catalog of bad behavior and egregious human error.

    And on this, the biggest shopping weekend of the year, what better sin to talk about than the sin of greed? I always stay out of the shopping malls and stores on the days following Thanksgiving, but it’s not because I’m especially virtuous, it’s just that I am not fond of crowds. And what crowds turn out to go shopping on the days after Thanksgiving! You know those vast expanses of asphalt that surround malls, the ginormous parking lots that never ever seem full? On the Friday after Thanksgiving, those ginormous parking lots get so full that people wind up cruising around in their cars, unable to find a parking place; those huge parking lots are designed for the shopping excesses of one day a year.

    Greed is such a fun activity to indulge in; what could be more fun than looking at all the enticing and wonderful objects available for us to purchase — video games and large-screen televisions and the latest Martha Stewart kitchen gadgets and those robotic vacuum cleaners that vacuum the house all by themselves and the latest digital cameras,, and hundreds of other fun gadgets and toys and objects — for greed is really more about the wanting and the desiring, than it is about the possessing. I’m especially fond of greed because I don’t necessarily have to own all those wonderful things — if I owned them, where would I put them all? how would I find the time to play with them all — because although greed requires that you accumulate lots of objects, the essence of greed (or so it seems to me) lies in always wanting more than you have now. Greed is a hunger deep inside our guts, a hunger that can never be satisfied.

    The story of King Midas is the classic story of greed. Good old King Midas begins as a fairly ordinary king in Macedonia. Midas enjoyed the many pleasurable things that kings may enjoy; as one example we are told that he devoted a good deal of time and energy and money to cultivating roses, to the point where his rose gardens became celebrated far and wide.

    As we heard in the first reading today, a drunken satyr named Silenus was one of the throng of followers of the god Dionysus. It should be noted that a satyr is a mythical being that is half-human and half-goat. Now Dionysus was the god of wine, and so his followers were not strangers to drinking and even to drunkenness; but it appears that Silenus was more prone to drunkenness than most of the others, for one day he got excessively drunk, and collapsed in King Midas’s rose gardens.

    The next day, King Midas’s gardeners found old Silenus asleep under a rose bush. They didn’t want to anger whomever this satyr might owe allegiance to, but at the same time the sight of this drunken reprobate, half-human and half-goat, lying asleep in the garden alarmed them enough so that they symbolically tied Silenus up with garlands of flowers, and only then led him to King Midas. Silenus then proceeded to entertain King Midas with outrageous and delightful stories; Midas felt that the stories were enchanting, rather than excessively untruthful. In any case, at last Midas sent Silenus back to the god Dionysus.

    Thus far, the story of King Midas is a story filled with excess — excessive drinking, excessively untruthful stories t old as entertainment, excessive attention to rose cultivation. Such excesses alone do not result in greed. But King Midas’s next action is greedy. For when the god Dionysus asks Midas what reward his would like for taking care of Silenus, Midas answers: Pray grant that all I touch be turned into gold.”

    This request may safely be characterized as greed! Firstly, it is self-evident that Midas has no need for addit6ional gold: not only is he a king, but he appears to lead a comfortable, even lavish lifestyle. Secondly, even if Midas were to ask for gold, he could have asked for something more reasonable, such as: “Pray grant that I find four large bags filled with gold in my bed, beside me, when I awaken tomorrow”; but instead, Midas asks fro something that he hopes will bring him an unlimited supply of gold.

    Thus Midas’s wish can only be characterized as greed, because he does not need more gold to begin with, and he certainly does not need an unlimited quantity of gold. No wonder the god Dionysus was so amused when Midas began to realize all the implications of his very unwise wish. When it turns out that even food and drink are turned to gold by Midas’s touch, suddenly Midas finds himself in the same position as people who are so poor that don’t have enough to eat, and so slowly starve to death; the irony being that Midas has plenty of money, money which is no essentially useless to him. And so Midas has to appeal to the god Dionysus, in order that he will not starve to death in the midst of plenty.

  • Pride, Prejudice, and Politics

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is from the Christian scriptures, the book of Matthew. In the opinion of scholars in the Jesus Seminar, this passage represents an accurate oral tradition of words originally spoken by Jesus of Nazareth.

    “For the kingdom of heaven is like a landowner who went out early in the morning to hire laborers for his vineyard. After agreeing with the laborers for the usual daily wage, [Greek: a denarius] he sent them into his vineyard. When he went out about nine o’clock, he saw others standing idle in the market-place; and he said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard, and I will pay you whatever is right.’ So they went. When he went out again about noon and about three o’clock, he did the same. And about five o’clock he went out and found others standing around; and he said to them, ‘Why are you standing here idle all day?’ They said to him, ‘Because no one has hired us.’ He said to them, ‘You also go into the vineyard.’ When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, ‘Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.’ When those hired about five o’clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. [Greek: a denarius] Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. [Greek: a denarius] And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, ‘These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.’ But he replied to one of them, ‘Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage? [Greek: a denarius] Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?’ [Greek: Is your eye evil because I am good?] …”

    [NRSV, Matthew 20.1-15]

    The second reading comes from the book The Parables of Jesus by Richard Q. Ford. Ford is a psychotherapist who also holds a Master of Divinity degree, and he has contributed scholarly articles to publications by the Jesus Seminar. This second reading is a commentary on the first.

    “Earlier in the day the landowner volunteers to some of the day laborers an ambiguous message: he intends to pay them ‘whatever is right.’ Does he mean, in the Hellenistic sense, ‘what is right according to custom’ or does he mean, in the Hebraic sense, ‘what is just in the eyes of God’?

    “By the end of the day, however, the landowner has moved away from his earlier ambiguity. By evening, when the work is done, he claims to be limiting himself merely to what is lawful. He says, ‘Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?’ The Greek ouk exestin moi means, more literally, ‘Is it not lawful for me…?’ or ‘It is not permitted to me…?’ He is no longer appealing, albeit ambiguously, to what might be understood as God’s just ways; he has now limited himself to customary legal obligations. Under cover of generously enhancing the expected daily wage, the landowner may have shifted the terms of his publicly declared honor.

    “Yet the owner cannot seem to free himself from his ambivalent desire to fit into the Hebraic norm. Using a double negative, he returns a second time to his ambiguous claim to be just. He describes his actions to a complaining day laborer with these words: ‘I am doing you no wrong.’ The Greek is ouk adiko so. The verb here, adikeo, is from the same stem as the earlier dikaios. The landowner’s phrase literally means, ‘I am not doing to you what is not right,’ or, in the Hebrew, biblical sense, ‘I am doing you no injustice.’ Strip away the double negative and there remains the echo of his earlier seeming promise to be just….”

    [Richard Q. Ford, The Parables of Jesus: Recovering the Art of Listening, p. 116]

    Sermon

    You may well have forgotten to plan your celebration for this year, but October 24 is United Nations Day. Let me tell you a story that has to do with the United Nations.

    In the spring of 2002, I was serving as the Director of Religious Education for First Parish in Lexington, Massachusetts. It’s a classic white New England church sitting right on the Battle Green in Lexington center, so naturally a fair number of tourists stop by wanting to see the church. As the educator on staff, I often wound up showing visitors around. One day, three or four people wanted to see the sanctuary, so I cheerfully took them in. They looked around, listened to my little spiel about how the interior had been much modified and almost nothing remained of the original 1847 interior. Then one of them, a youngish woman, cast a baleful glance on the United Nations flag that stood in a prominent place in the sanctuary, directly across from the United States flag.

    “You’ve got the wrong flag flying, that’s for sure,” she said calmly and spitefully. I ended the tour without telling them how First Parish Lexington had been the church of the Minutemen, who fought for freedom and justice for all, back on April 19, 1775. I couldn’t get rid of those tourists fast enough.

    As you probably notice, we here in New Bedford also have a United Nations flag in our sanctuary. We do so for religious reasons. The principles of the Unitarian Universalist Association specifically state that our congregations have covenanted to affirm and support “the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all,” and we Unitarian Universalists have long supported the United Nations as a solid first step towards world community.

    Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, it became acceptable and even fashionable to belittle the goal of world community. I often feel that most of our United States politicians, of both parties, continue to downplay the goal of a world community. Our politicians seem intent on proving that we know what is best for the world. I would put this in moral terms: here in the United States, we are full of pride. We pride ourselves in being the best country in the world; we pride ourselves on being the democracy that every other country should model themselves after; we pride ourselves on our honesty, on our forthrightness, on our high moral character.

    And some of that pride is justified. I do think this is the best country in the world — yes, the United States has some real imperfections, but it’s basically a good place to live. I do feel that we in the United States hold high ideals for honesty, forthrightness, and high moral character, even if we don’t live up to our high ideals. I am less certain about our democracy — lobbyists have far too much power in Washington right now, and we face many problems in our democratic institutions — but at least we seem to be facing up to our problems, if not in Washington, then at the state and local levels.

    It’s our pride that is a moral problem. Many citizens of the United States think we are God’s gift to the world — and I mean that literally. There are many residents of United States who think God is on our side, that God treats us specially, that God has designated us a “city on a hill,” a beacon of light to serve as an example to the rest of the world. Such an attitude constitutes immoral pride; for if you believe in God, you shouldn’t presume to know what God is thinking; and if you don’t believe in God, you shouldn’t presume to say what God believes. Such pride is immoral or sinful, because it damages human relationships. And the best way I can explain how it does damage is by way of the story we heard in the first reading.

    Let me retell the story. It’s harvest time, autumn, time to harvest the grapes to make wine. A certain landowner, the owner of a large vineyard, faces a labor shortage. So he goes down to the village center where he finds a bunch of day laborers hanging out. He points to a bunch of them, and says, So how come you guys are all standing around doing nothing? They tell him that they have no work that day. OK, he says, You want work, you come work in my vineyard, and at the end of the day I’ll pay you whatever is fair. Why don’t the day laborers ask the landowner how much the wages will be? Perhaps they feel that if they bargain the landowner will just pick someone less troublesome.

    The day laborers start working, and the landowner realizes that he needs even more workers to meet his deadline. He goes back a couple more times to pick up some more day laborers. He goes and gets the last batch of day laborers just a couple of hours before quitting time. At the end of the day, when it comes time to pay off the day laborers, he pays them all exactly the same. Even the guys who only worked a couple of hours get a full day’s wages. Not surprisingly, the day laborers who worked the longest grumble at this. But the landowner says to them, “Take what belongs to you and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?”

    Traditionally, conventional Christians have interpreted this parable in the following conventional manner: no matter when you convert to Christianity, you get to go to heaven when you die. You convert when you’re twelve years old, and you live to be ninety-seven, you get to go to heaven. You convert when you’re minutes from death, you get to go to heaven. Doesn’t matter how long you’re a converted Christian down here on earth, you get the same reward — you get the same wages — you get to go to heaven when you’re dead.

    In the 18th C., lots of reasonable, rational New Englanders figured out that it’s best to wait until the last possible minute to convert to Christianity. Good old New England common sense. If you think about it, probably the worst thing you could do would be to become a Christian and then do something bad that might keep you from getting into heaven. A much better policy was to hold off on being a church member, hold off on becoming an official Christian, until you only had a few minutes to live. That way, there’s less chance for messing things up. And no matter when you become an official Christian, according to this conventional interpretation, you still get to go to heaven.

    I believe the conventional Christian interpretation of that parable is completely wrong. Instead, here’s what I think that parable is trying to tell us.

    In Jesus’s day, the big landowners had accumulated their land by buying up land from smaller landowners. When the Romans took over Judea, Jesus’s homeland, they gradually began raising taxes on land. As the taxes went up, a few landowners found they could not pay their taxes, and so they lost their land. As the taxes kept going up, more and more landowners lost their land — and a few rich people bought up all the smaller parcels of land, assembling them into large farms and vineyards.

    This practice, however, was completely contrary to traditional Hebrew law and practice. In the book of Leviticus, God tells the Hebrew people that “The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land. If anyone of your kin falls into difficulty and sells a piece of property, then the next-of-kin shall come and redeem what the relative has sold.” [Lev. 25.23-25] In other words, according to traditional Hebraic law, no one was supposed to accumulate large parcels of land. In other words, the landowner in the parable was holding the land illegally!

    But there’s more on this topic in the book of Leviticus: “And you shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return, every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family. That fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you: you shall not sow, or reap the aftergrowth, or harvest the unpruned vines. For it is a jubilee; it shall be holy to you: you shall eat only what the field itself produces.” [Lev. 25.10-12] This passage is of great interest to us today because it clearly demonstrates that the old Hebraic law was found on principles of eco-justice; that is, that ecological justice and economic justice went hand-in-hand. In Leviticus, God tells the people that they must let the land lie fallow, in order to give it a rest. And in practically the same breath (as it were, assuming that God breathes), God tells the Hebrew people that they must forgive each other’s debts.

    The old Hebraic law held that no human being should exploit or take advantage of another human being. The principle is even broader than that: no human being is supposed to take advantage of or exploit the earth. Jesus tells us in the parable that non-exploitation is the kingdom of heaven. The kingdom of heaven is not something that we are supposed to wait for after death; if we follow some basic principles of liberty, justice, and equity, we can establish the kingdom of heaven here on earth.

    Knowing this, the parable begins to make much more sense. Those day laborers? Some of them were the original owners of the land on which they now have to work for day laborer’s wages. They know that the landowner holds their land unjustly under the terms of Hebraic law; he’s the legal owner under Roman law, but not under Hebraic law. Thus, no wage that he can pay them will ever be fair. And according to Leviticus he should return their land to them anyway, on the next jubilee year.

    But the landowner cannot see this because his judgment is clouded with pride, and with prejudice. He feels prejudice against the day laborers; he does not see them as people who are equal to him, as Hebraic law would have it; instead, he is prejudiced against them simply because they had the misfortune to lose their land to the Roman invaders. He is full of pride; just because he was lucky enough to amass or to inherit a large landholding, he feels in his pride that he can do whatever he wants to everyone else.

    Let’s see if we can apply this parable of pride, prejudice, and politics to the United Nations. Please note: I’m not claiming that Jesus had the United Nations in mind when he told this story two thousand years ago. Nor am I claiming that I have the one, true, final interpretation of Jesus’s parable, because I believe that there is no one, true, final interpretation; Jesus meant his parables to allow multiple interpretations to get us to think hard about big issues. So it is this parable helps us to think hard about pride, prejudice, and international politics.

    In the second reading this morning, we heard from Richard Ford’s book The Parables of Jesus: Recovering the Art of Listening. Ford asks us to set aside the old, conventional interpretations of the parable, and to extend our sympathies beyond the big landowner to include the day laborers. He asks us to listen to this parable from a new perspective, the perspective of the Hebrew listeners who first heard Jesus tell it; the Hebrew listeners who would have known that the big landowner got his land holdings contrary to Hebrew law.

    Richard Ford points out that the big landowner in the parable is unable to listen carefully to the grumbling of the day laborers. When the day laborers grumble about their pay, the landowner says, Hey stop grumbling! so what if I paid some of you more than you deserve! The landowner, says Ford, is torn between a desire to appear entirely fair and just, and his inability to understand the perspective of the day laborers because of his inability to listen carefully and deeply to them.

    People like the landowner, who have a lot of power over others, don’t have to listen to the people in their power. Because they have so much power, they don’t even have to try to listen deeply, carefully, and honestly to others. The parable shows that even when such powerful people mean to be just and honest, they can appear unjust and dishonest to others. Thus it is even more important that those with power listen carefully and deeply to those without much power.

    At the moment, there is not much careful and honest listening going on in the United States political arena. Our political discourse, both here at home and abroad, is dominated by outrage. Subsequent to the attacks of September 11, 2001, we had a right to be outraged, and it is perhaps understandable that our political discourse was then dominated by outrage. But politics in the United States is still dominated by outrage, although today much of it is mock outrage. Republicans are outraged — just outraged! — that Democrats would dare to question the way the generals in Iraq are conducting the war. Democrats are outraged — just outraged! — that Republicans are using so much force to combat terrorism. I am outraged! says one politician. The other politician responds, No, I am outraged! With all the outrage going back and forth, there is little or no chance for any deep and careful listening to go on.

    All this outrage — outrage on the part of the Democrats, and outrage on the part of the Republicans — is nothing more than pride and prejudice. We can hear echoes of the landowner in the parable — I don’t have to listen to you, because I know I’m right! Prejudice grows out of that pride, a prejudice that prevents real listening. Pride and that prejudice prevent us from listening to each other — and prevent us in the United States from listening to the rest of the world.

    We Unitarian Universalists value the goal of world community, with peace, liberty, and justice for all persons, everywhere in the world. In order to reach that goal, we need to put aside our outrage, whether it is real outrage or mock outrage, and listen deeply to those around us. Those of us who are Democrats must listen carefully to Republicans, and we might just find that Republicans are correct in saying that some threats to international peace and liberty require the use of military force. Those of us who are Republicans must listen carefully to Democrats, and we might just find that Democrats have recognized some real threats to international justice and liberty in the way force is being used.

    And we residents of the United States, we must listen carefully to the rest of the world. We are the ones in power — you and me and everyone who lives in the United States. We have to make a serious effort to understand how less powerful countries see things. True democracy only works when people truly listen to one another. It is up to us to make sure that we have healthy, working international forums where true dialogue can take place.

    Perhaps we can all think about this on Wednesday, October 24, which is United Nations Day. As we celebrate United Nations Day, we can ask: How can we — you and I — further the goal of world community, with peace, liberty, and justice for all persons? Can we — you and I — learn to leave our outrage behind, so that we might listen deeply to all persons?

  • Labor of Love

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2007 Daniel Harper.

    Responsive reading

    “A Magnificent and Generous Economy”

    Ellen Emerson, daughter of Lidian and Ralph Waldo Emerson, wrote this about her mother: “One of Mother’s talents was making something out of nothing and there was room to afford it great play.

    “Every rag of remains of her days of fine dressing was used in one way or another with great ingenuity till there was nothing left of it. Every garment could be made to serve a second term.

    “Whenever Mother saw an opportunity she spread out the wearing-out things and the stores in the bundle-trunk and devised intricate plans, having someone at hand to baste as fast as she could arrange the pieces.

    “Almira Flint, the daughter of one of the farmers, came to sew for us and told me afterwards that Mother taught her how to do many things by telling her how, and simply expecting her to do it; she made her a carpenteress, an upholsteress, a paper-hanger, a dress-maker.

    “Almira had naturally a true eye and a skilful hand, a spirit also that hated to give up. She wouldn’t say I can’t, so she and Mother were always triumphant together over many successes. Every economy and skill that she learned of Mother she used at home.

    “Economy was natural to Mother. She knew she was practicing a vigilant, active and inventive economy in all departments of her housekeeping.

    “To her economy was a large science with many intricate and minute ramifications. Her economy did not lie in going without.

    “Instead she wished everything to serve all the purpose it could. She was, as naturally, magnificent and generous.”

    From The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, by Ellen Tucker Emerson. Adapted by Dan Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading is from The Case of the Perjured Parrot by Erle Stanley Gardner (1939).

    Perry Mason regarded the pasteboard jacket, labeled “IMPORTANT UNANSWERED CORRESPONDENCE,” with uncordial eyes.

    Della Street, his secretary, looking crisply efficient, said with her best Monday-morning air, “I’ve gone over it carefully, Chief. The letters on top are the ones you simply have to answer. I’ve cleaned out a whole bunch of the correspondence from the bottom.”

    “From the bottom?” Mason asked. “How did you do that?”

    “Well,” she confessed, “it’s stuff that’s been in there too long.”

    Mason tilted back in his swivel chair, crossed his long legs, assumed his best lawyer manner and said, in mock cross-examination, “Now, let’s get this straight, Miss Street. Those were letters which had originally been put in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file?”

    “Yes.”

    “And you’ve gone over that file from time to time, carefully?”

    “Yes.”

    “And eliminated everything which didn’t require my personal attention?”

    “Yes.”

    “And this Monday, September twelfth, you take out a large number of letters from the bottom of the file?”

    “That’s right,” she admitted, her eyes twinkling.

    “And did you answer those yourself?”

    She shook her head, smiling.

    “What did you do with them?” Mason asked.

    “Transferred them to another file.”

    “What file?”

    “The ‘LAPSED’ file.”

    Mason chuckled delightedly. “Now there’s an idea, Della. We simply hold things in the ‘IMPORTANT UNANSWERED’ file until a lapse of time robs them of their importance, and then we transfer them to the ‘LAPSED’ file. It eliminates correspondence, saves worry, and gets me away from office routine, which I detest….

    ***

    The second reading is by W. E. B. DuBois, taken from his essay, “To His Newborn Great-Grandson.”

    The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work. With this satisfaction, and this need, life is heaven or as near heaven as you can get. Without this — with work which you despise, which bores you, with work which the world does not need — this life is hell.

    Sermon

    That last reading, the passage from W. E. B. DuBois, has been sticking in my head since I ran across it about six months ago. DuBois says, “The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work.” When I first read it, I liked this idea. Your work, whatever it might be, returns to us two things: whatever satisfaction each of us gets out of whatever work we do, and the world’s need of that work. As near as I can tell, this is a true statement.

    But the more I thought about this, the less I liked it. DuBois may have been speaking the truth, but I’m not sure I like the truth he was speaking. I say this because a good bit of the work I have done in my life has been pointless and not particularly necessary. By DuBois’s standards, that would mean that I have lived a goodly part of my life in a kind of hell. I say this also because I know lots of people who have fairly meaningless jobs that provide little satisfaction. This would seem to imply that a fair percentage of the population is living in a kind of hell.

    To better explain what I mean, let me tell you a little bit about one particular job I had — not that I think my life is particularly interesting, but rather I think this particular job is fairly representative of a lot of jobs out there. Twenty years ago, I was working as a salesman in a family-owned lumber yard, with about 80 employees. Probably ninety percent of our sales was to building contractors, with the rest to individual homeowners. I thought of it as a pretty decent place to work. The salespeople were treated with a certain amount of respect, at least as long as we kept our sales figures up. There wasn’t much room for advancement, but you could make a career there, as witnessed by a couple of older salesmen who had worked there for decades. We were required to work fifty hours a week, and sometimes you’d find yourself working sixty hours in a week, but when you punched the time clock at the end of the day, you could completely forget about the job. And the compensation was excellent — I made a heck of lot more money selling building materials than I make as a minister, with much better benefits besides.

    So I had a decent job. However, considered in light of DuBois’s words, my job was pretty pitiful. The world has no particular need of lumber salespeople. Basically, my job was to sell as much building materials as possible, with as high a profit margin as possible. It was best for me when I could sell to contractors building big luxury homes — best for me, but not so good for the world. And I got no great satisfaction out of the job. Don’t get me wrong, I thought then and I still think now that it was a decent job, and I’m still mildly proud of the fact that my last two years there I was top gross and top net among the inside sales staff. But I got my satisfaction elsewhere in my life. Therefore, considered in light of DuBois’s words, the work I did at my job was pretty pitiful.

    Let us consider another kind of work. In the responsive reading this morning, we heard a little bit about the work that Lidian Jackson Emerson did in her life time; this comes from a biography that Lidian’s daughter, Ellen, wrote of her. After she married Ralph Waldo Emerson and became a housewife, Lidian could be quite sure that the world needed her work. In the New England of her era, children were cared for by women, the food was cooked by women, and the houses were managed by women; and while it might not be personally satisfying to all people, if we’re going to survive as a species, the children must be cared for, the food cooked, and households must be managed.

    This is not to say that the work itself necessarily satisfied her. Lidian had a small but adequate income of her own from an inheritance. Before her marriage to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lidian Jackson had devoted her life to charitable works, to reading and study, and to her Unitarian faith; she was thirty-three when she finally married, and you get the sense from Ellen’s biography that becoming a housewife — the endless details of caring for children, cleaning, cooking, and so on — consumed her time but did not entirely satisfy her. Yet she made of the work what she could. As we heard in the responsive reading, she took her work seriously and performed it well. She may not have taken her satisfaction from the inherent joys of the work, but rather from the knowledge that it was necessary work and that she did it well.

    You can understand that my work as a salesman differed from Lidian Jackson Emerson’s work as a housewife and mother. The human species will not survive without someone like Lidian Jackson Emerson to raise the children, prepare the food, and take care of the household. As for my old job, the world would be no worse off if there were no lumber salespeople. After I quit my job as a salesman, I went to work for a carpenter, and I found myself in a job where the work I was doing was necessary: we would go repair the roof of someone’s house, for example, and at the end of a day’s work I would know that I had accomplished something that really was worth doing.

    So much of the work we do these days seems relatively meaningless; so many of the jobs we fill seem pointless. We live in the information economy now, and a lot of our country’s wealth is generated from moving information around, which may be satisfying but which is not as elementally necessary as raising a child. Then there are those of us who work in big bureaucracies, or in big factories, where you can feel as if you’re just a replaceable cog on an insignificant wheel, going round and round in circles. Jobs are increasingly anonymous, workers are increasingly replaceable, and sometimes the work we do seemingly gets farther and farther away from the real world.

    Our work is increasingly divorced from meaning, and I am convinced that has become one of the great spiritual crises of our time. We are afraid that if we cross-examined ourselves, as Perry Mason cross-examined Della Street in the first reading this morning, that we would discover that much of the work with which we occupy ourselves could have been left undone, and transferred into a file marked “LAPSED,” and ignored; and no one would notice the difference.

    That is why I don’t much like DuBois’s words — because they ring true. He said: “The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you, and the world’s need of that work. With this satisfaction, and this need, life is heaven or as near heaven as you can get. Without this — with work which you despise, which bores you, with work which the world does not need — this life is hell.” I am lucky that I have never had work that I absolutely despise, nor have I had work that was entirely unnecessary; and the most boring work that I had at least compensated me well. But much of the work I have done over the years has been meaningless and not particularly necessary. Having talked with some of you about your work, I know that some of you feel similarly. Those of us who have had these experiences, according to DuBois, have lived — or are living — in a kind of hell.

    In order for work to be satisfying, it must fill some great need in the world, and it must bring inner satisfaction to the worker herself or himself. One of the great spiritual questions is this: “What is my place in the world?” Good work helps us answer this question, because if we know what we are giving to the world that the world needs, then we know a part of how we stand in relation to the world; from this knowledge can come an inner spiritual satisfaction. Another great spiritual question is: “What ought I to do with my life?” Good work helps us to answer this question, because if we know we are filling some need in the world, we know a part of what we ought to do with life; from this knowledge can come an outward-directed spiritual satisfaction.

    So what do we do to heed DuBois’s warning against “work which you despise, which bores you, work which the world does not need”? I don’t have any final answer to this question, but I do have some possible answers.

    First, let’s remember that we’re not talking about financial satisfaction; we’re talking aobut spiritual satisfaction. Work that brings you lots of money can still be work that leaves you in some kind of personal hell. We all need enough money to pay the rent, put food on the table, buy some clothing, pay the utilities, and support charity. Aside from that, money need not enter into this discussion. Second, let’s remember that we’re not necessarily talking about a paid job at all. Lidian Jackson Emerson didn’t get paid for her work as a housewife and mother; but she had work nonetheless, work which she was able to make magnificent and generous. Having made those two clarifying points, what can we do to heed DuBois’s warning against work which we despise, which bores us, work which the world does not need?

    One possible answer is the Henry David Thoreau answer. At one point in his life, Henry David Thoreau suggested doing as little work as possible — he recommended working as a day-laborer when you needed cash, but aside from that he advocated living off the land by living as simply as possible and growing as much of your own food as possible. Instead of working a regular job as a farmer or tradesman or schoolteacher, Thoreau chose to tune in to the transcendent reality of Nature, turn on to the wisdom of the world’s religions found in the Bhagavad Gita, the Bible, and the Confucian Analects, and basically he chose to drop out of the comfortable bourgeois life he was expected to lead. This is a very real possibility even today. I actually did this for a year or two — lived cheaply, worked three days a week, and spent my time reading and studying. However, in order to do this, I had no car or dental care, and it was only possible because I had no children to raise. It’s also important to remember that when Thoreau lived in accordance with his suggestions, he was very active: he finished writing a book

    What can we do to heed DuBois’s warning against work which we despise, which bores us, work which the world does not need? Here’s another possible answer. If you currently have a soul-deadening job with no redeeming social value, one possibility is to quit your job, and hope you can find another job that is more satisfying. This is the sort of thing that books like “Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow” tell you to do — and to give credit to that particular book, the author tells you that you better have a day job to pay the bills while you find that spiritually satisfying job, and she also suggests that you live as simply as possible. It’s also important to remember that if you come from a relatively well-to-do background, this possibility is more likely to work, because you are more likely to receive financial and material support from your family while you’re finding your new and satisfying job, and your network of family and friends will be more likely to include good contacts for finding a job.

    Another possible answer is found in Frederick Douglass’s first paid work. In his 1881 essay, “My Escape from Slavery, Douglass writes about escaping from slavery to New Bedford, and then finding work:

    “The fifth day after my arrival [her wrote], I put on the clothes of a common laborer, and went upon the wharves in search of work. On my way down Union street I saw a large pile of coal in front of the house of Rev. Ephraim Peabody, the Unitarian minister. I went to the kitchen door and asked the privilege of bringing in and putting away this coal. “What will you charge?” said the lady. “I will leave that to you, madam.” “You may put it away,” she said. I was not long in accomplishing the job, when the dear lady put into my hand TWO SILVER HALF-DOLLARS. To understand the emotion which swelled my heart as I clasped this money, realizing that I had no master who could take it from me,—THAT IT WAS MINE—THAT MY HANDS WERE MY OWN, and could earn more of the precious coin,—one must have been in some sense himself a slave. My next job was stowing a sloop at Uncle Gid. Howland’s wharf with a cargo of oil for New York. I was not only a freeman, but a free working-man, and no “master” stood ready at the end of the week to seize my hard earnings.”

    So wrote Frederick Douglass, and from him we learn what we already know: If you are able to work, and able to keep the money you earn for yourself and your family, there is spiritual satisfaction in not being in bondage. There is a larger principle at work here: Work that leads to liberation and freedom, however circuitously, can be spiritually satisfying work.

    And that leads us to another possible answer to our question, which is related to this last answer. It is possible to hold down a pointless job, or to have no job at all, and to find your spiritual satisfaction elsewhere. This applies as well to those people who are retired, or students who are not yet working. in the work of repairing the world. I have done so — I have had a relatively meaningless job, but when I punched out at the end of the day or the end of the week, I then did good work by volunteering in my church and in the wider community. This is what Frederick Douglass did. I do not imagine that shoveling coal for Ephraim Peabody provided enough spiritual nourishment for a man whose soul was as broad and deep as Frederick Douglass’s was; but on his own time, he began to speak out against slavery, and so he wound up changing the world for the better.

    I leave you with this one final thought: Those words from DuBois come from an essay he addressed to his grandson. And I believe this is the key to everything we have considered this morning: somehow we have to pass on to our children, and other youth in our community, what it means to have good work; somehow we have to let them know that there is more than one way to find good work in this world. May that be the work of all of us here: to let young people know what it means to have good work.