Psalm 90, Ecclesiastes 2:17-26 "Labor in Vain?" Scott Hoezee

This past summer was generally very dry and often very hot. In late-July the Midwest endured a dangerous heat wave, causing the mayor of Chicago to open up a number of emergency "cooling centers" throughout the Windy City. The mayor also pleaded with citizens to keep tabs on elderly neighbors and others who may suffer in apartments without fans or air conditioning. Probably what the mayor wanted to avoid was what happened in a similar heat wave six years ago when scores of people throughout Chicago died as a result of temperatures that soared close to 100 degrees for days on end.

That was in general a great tragedy. But perhaps the saddest spectacle following that 1995 killer heat wave took place six weeks after the weather had cooled down. Because it was then that the bodies of forty-one victims were buried in a never-to-be-marked pauper's grave outside the city. For six weeks these forty-one anonymous people had lain in cold storage in a morgue, waiting for someone to step forward, identify them, claim the body for proper burial. But no one came for these people. No one seemed to miss them. These were homeless people, mostly, who had lived in lonely isolation and who died the same way.

Something about that spectacle may strike a chord or two of fear in our hearts. Because the thought that we, too, might one day be forgotten chills us. True, most of us here tonight are blessed enough that we are unlikely to die alone. Still, we wonder sometimes how long it will take before there will be no one left--not even great-grandchildren and other descendants--who will remember who we were, what we were like, the work we did. Everyone dies twice, someone once observed: first we die physically, and then we die a second time when the memory of us winks out, too.

Does what we do in life matter? If it is mostly just forgotten within a generation or two anyway, does labor matter? As we prepare for another Labor Day, maybe thoughts like that cross your mind. We want our work to count. After all, we spend enormous amounts of time doing it. Most people spent on average over 2,000 hours per year at their jobs, with one out of every three people working more than fifty hours per week. We work hard, most of us, and a good deal of our identity is bound up with our jobs.

When you meet someone for the first time, you often ask about their work about as quickly as you ask what their name is. Jean Bethke Elshtain recently told the story about a friend who threw a cocktail party for a bunch upwardly mobile professional folks. At one point the hostess, engaged in a conversation with a business man, was interrupted by her four-year-old daughter, who suddenly appeared next to her, tugging on mommy's skirt to get her attention. The woman apologized for the interruption but then introduced her little girl to the other man, "This is my daughter Jennifer," she said. Without even realizing what he was saying the other man responded, "Hi, Jennifer. So what do you do?"

That's just the way we think and operate. Surveys reveal that though people often complain about work, 71% say they really want to do well at their jobs. But we're anxious that maybe we are not doing well. We worry sometimes about whether we are even in the right field, and so we sometimes make jokes about it. Comedian Paula Poundstone once observed, "I'll tell you all a little secret: adults don't really know what they want to do for a living. That's why we are always asking kids what they want to be when the grow up--we're looking for ideas!"

Work is the one thing most everyone shares in common. Represented among our four congregations in this room tonight is a great variety of jobs. Some of us sit in cubicles all day doing data processing while others of us are out on the road, traversing the state by car or the country by airplane. Some of us see a variety of people every day while others of us see almost no one all day long. Some of us have jobs which feel fresh, creative, challenging, and mind-stretching while others of us have work which feels dull, routine, mind-numbing in its "the same thing all over again every single day" quality. Even those of us who are retired have not completely left our life's work behind: if you are a blessed retiree, then you look back with satisfaction on a career with which you are at peace and which you believe did some good. If you are less fortunate, you look back bitterly at what you fear may have been a wasted life that didn't make a difference to anyone.

Does our work make any difference? Will anyone ever remember the long hours you poured into your job? Does work serve any larger purpose? Or is my and your labor lost, being no more than a mere pittance and blip to everyone around me and maybe even to God?

These are uncomfortable questions. Our hope as Christians is that maybe the Bible would provide some re-assurance. But the two passages I read this evening may do just the opposite! Reading Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes 2, you may find some of your darker fears reflected right back at you. Our days and years fly away, evaporating like the morning dew. Our toil under the sun is meaningless, a mere breath or hiccup that vanishes. What little we do gain from this hard toil ends up falling into the hands of less worthy people.

Is this a reflection of the Bible's view of work? What are we to make of these cynical ponderings? Let's think about that. What is work in the Bible, and how do passages as dark as Psalm 90 and as broodingly jaded as Ecclesiastes help nevertheless to shed a hopeful light on labor?

We will begin with a few general observations and then narrow our focus to these two passages. First, the Bible affirms the basic goodness of labor. Doing work was woven into the fabric of creation as right off the bat Eve and Adam had stuff to do in Eden. Work did not come about as a result of our collective fall into sin but only the toilsome, sometimes harsh nature of work. But even prior to sin's casting its dark shadow across the landscape of this world, work and holy vocation were already here by God's own design.

But even in a broken world the Bible makes clear that work can still be a good and God-glorifying activity. There are a number of Old Testament regulations aimed at making work fit in seamlessly with God's will for creation. The Ten Commandments do not order people to work, but the command to take a Sabbath's rest every seven days clearly assumes the prior reality of meaningful work from which you would then rest.

However, work in the Bible is always just a relative good--it is not the sole goal of human existence. That is something we forget these days. According to Jean Bethke Elshtain, the dominant understanding of humanity in the social sciences these days is homo economicus, "economic humanity," whose main function in the world is as maximizers of utility. In his classic poem "Wer Bin Ich" or "Who Am I," Dietrich Bonhoeffer pondered a number of different answers to that fundamental question of identity. In the end his finest and final answer was, "Who am I? Whoever I am, thou knowest, O God. I am thine." But most Americans now believe no such thing. We are our own and we are on our own, too, here to maximize our potential, exploit our opportunities, feather our own nests, and make hay while the sun shines in the belief that "whoever dies with the most toys wins."

That is a false, desperately truncated view. Again, the Ten Commandments do not command us to work but to rest from our work precisely so that we can locate ourselves chiefly in the divine economy, seeing ourselves as totally dependent on the God who holds our every breath. Work matters, but God matters far more for believers. If our work has any meaning at all, then it is only because God's stamp of approval rests on it. And it does. The Bible, unlike a good many other religious documents from the Ancient Near East, endows human work with meaning. The Babylonians and others viewed work as itself a divine curse, sometimes saying that human beings are just the "cattle" of the gods, consigned here to do the work which the gods are too lazy to do themselves. That, however, is a far cry from the portrait of Adam and Eve's divinely sanctioned tasks in the Garden of Eden even before sin.

But if all of that is biblically true, then why do we find the darker broodings we read earlier from Psalm 90 and Ecclesiastes 2? A quick answer is that both reflect the one thing which did change after sin came onto the human scene; namely, work got transmuted into toilsome labor. That is the perspective of the Teacher throughout the Book of Ecclesiastes. But what is it precisely that transforms work into toil? According to William P. Brown in a recent article, the difference stems in large part from the goal of the work. When the sole goal of your work is what the Teacher regularly calls "gain," then your work will always be "toil" in the darkest sense. If your goal is fame and renown, approbation and approval, lots of money and a glut of material possessions--if that is what motivates your labor, then it will always be a dead end, a foolish spinning of wheels, and so will be meaningless, meaningless.

Similarly in Psalm 90. The psalmist pummels us with negative images but they are there not because this represents human life at its best but human life at its sinful worst. Our lives flit past us, our years pass away with a groan, our work seems like short-lived grass under a hot sun because God's wrath is on us, God's judgment comes down upon a world where people pursue only gain and so have a wrong perspective. Sin makes us seek after only gain through our work, thus blocking God from view. And when that happens, it all starts to look fleeting, vain, temporary, and as often as not futile.

If gain or the pursuit of the almighty dollar is all there is to work, then who can fail to despair many days? Actor Kelsey Grammar gets paid more for one 26 minute episode of the TV show Fraiser than most teachers get paid over the course of nearly seven whole years! If we labor only for the compensation, there is no end to the ways and reasons why we may eventually throw up our hands in frustration and disgust.

Of course, we cannot pretend that the material gain we get from our work is unimportant. Indeed, some of us here tonight maybe take on extra work, a second job, or have both spouses working precisely because we need to pay the tuition, the insurance, the mortgage, the car payment, the grocery bills. We need the money we receive, and thus I would come off as extremely foolish tonight if you walked away from this sermon thinking that the proper Christian perspective on work is completely to bracket the matter of fiscal gain. That is probably as unfeasible as it is unnecessary.

Still, I will go so far as to suggest that we make the heart of our vocational perspective something other than gain. Again, taking a cue from both Psalm 90 and the Teacher in Ecclesiastes 2, it becomes clear that what endows work with its deepest and best meaning is finding joy not in what we gain from our work but rather joy smack in the midst of the fray in the doing of our work. Psalm 90 turns the corner from dark brooding in verse 14 when the psalmist asks that every morning God satisfy us with his unfailing love. The word for "unfailing love" there in Hebrew is chesed, which is in my opinion the closest Old Testament equivalent for what in the New Testament is called "grace." Every morning we begin with a reminder that grace is where we live. Who we are, the work we have to do, and whatever it is we may ultimately gain from our work all result from grace alone.

A similar move is made at the end of Ecclesiastes 2. At first blush this looks paradoxical: how can the Teacher go on and on and on about the utter futility of toilsome labor only to conclude the very same chapter by saying that it is a good thing to find satisfaction in work and that enjoyment of work is possible? If work is the futile and toilsome phenomenon he has been describing all along, then wouldn't satisfaction and enjoyment pretty well be ruled out where work is concerned? Isn't this sort of like a restaurant critic writing a thoroughly terrible review about the food at a local eatery only to conclude the same review by saying, "Nevertheless, I'd highly recommend you go to this restaurant, eat hearty, and enjoy yourselves!"?

Well, yes, that would be paradoxical and so nonsense. But for the Teacher in Ecclesiastes work need not be only toilsome. It becomes that way when the accumulation of wealth is the primary goal. If your work is driven by envy, by a desire to "keep up with the Joneses," and so is devoid of rest or of a desire to glorify God, then it will be a kind of curse. The blessing of God on what you do, however, redeems work--God's presence and blessing change work from a fruitless spinning of your wheels to a source of enjoyment.

If we do our work with God at the center, then we are motivated by something other than the fleetingness of worldly fame or wealth. If we begin each morning being refreshed by the unfailing grace of God--and if we can then find ways to rest in that grace throughout the day--then some lasting joy may emerge after all. We can relax a bit, knowing that we are not creating the world anew on our own but are merely participating in the larger creative action God began long ago. We don't carry the world on our shoulders--God's already doing that. This may help us keep some measure of perspective.

Also, if we can place our work into God's hands, then the threat of its eventual non-remembrance loses a bit of its sting. We need to recover the image of God as the Great Remembrancer. There is a lot about Process Theology with which most of us heartily disagree. But one of the more lovely images of Process Theology is how it depicts God not as some distant surveyor of the entire cosmic landscape but very much as the God who, by the Spirit, travels with us, watches over us, attends (up close and personal, as they say) what we do, and then remembers it all, making it a part of God's very self.

So to return to our earlier question: does our work matter? By grace (when we rest in that grace) the answer is yes. It matters to God, and when we see ourselves and our work in the light of God, we recognize something else: that God gets his providence done through us. As Martin Luther once pointed out, when a family bows its head in prayer at the breakfast table each morning and says, "Give us this day our daily bread," God is already answering that prayer by having the baker across town knead that day's first lump of dough.

God cares for this creation--he cares enough to have the Son of God die for it. He cares enough to continue to nurture this world by working through our efforts. That is also why we can be assured that our work is remembered by God, even if by no one else. In a media-driven age of hype and celebrity, maybe that thought leaves some of us cold. But that simply reveals how deeply we've wandered into that far country of meaningless toil because of our focus on gain and fame alone.

Some while back I read about missionary H.C. Morrison who spent his life as a missionary to China in the late-1800s and early-1900s. Finally the day came when he returned to America on board the same ship carrying former President Theodore Roosevelt home after a hunting safari in Africa. As the ship steamed into New York harbor, large throngs of people gathered to welcome home and cheer Roosevelt. No one was there to greet Rev. Morrison. And so as this dedicated missionary watched bands play and fire boats spray water into the air for Roosevelt, he quietly fumed. "What a lot of fuss for a man who recently did nothing more than shoot tigers in Africa! What kind of homecoming do I get after decades of work for God in China?!" His lifetime of work began to look insignificant, garnering as it was no reward or renown. There was no justice in this homecoming, he thought. Until suddenly a still small voice inside his heart whispered, "Yes, but you are not home yet." Amen.