Holy Sweat(Sep05,2011)
Series: Thank God It’s Monday M1 (11 09 04)
Ken Shigematsu with Leighton Cantrill
Title: Holy Sweat: Reflecting God in Our Work
Texts: Genesis 1: 1-4, 6, 9, 14, 24; 2:8-15; Matthew 13:55; 1 Corinthians 3:6-7
BIG IDEA: In our work we reflect a God who works.
During the 1960s primaries in the United States a senator named John Kennedy was campaigning. He was standing by a mine shaking hands with the miners. One miner came to him and said, “Is it true that you’re the son of the one of the richest people in the country? Kennedy said, “I guess so.” The man asked, “Is it true that you’ve never really done a day’s work with your hands?” Kennedy nodded his head. Then the miner said, “Let me tell you this. You haven’t missed a thing!”
Many people feel that work, particularly hard manual labor, is a kind of necessary evil—something that people would not choose to do if they didn’t have to.
Many people in white collar jobs can feel the same way about their work.
I had coffee with a friend who told me that when he was a university student he made it his goal to work as a stock broker and then retire when he was forty, or earlier. Now as a stock broker who’s approaching his forties, he says, “With the downturn (in the markets), I likely won’t be able to retire until I’m forty-five… I don’t like work. I’m looking forward to my life beyond work.” People talk about “Freedom 45 or 55,” meaning they hope to able to retire at 45 or 55 from work and be free.
People say, “I live for the weekend…” that is my real life occurs when I’m doing something other than my work.
But does work have to feel like a prison sentence, like some penitentiary where we “do our time” and from which we seek an early escape?
If we’re a typical person, we will spend most of the waking hours of our lives working.
Throughout history, people have usually viewed work as something unpleasant that has to be done.
If you look at the Eastern accounts of creation, like the Enuma Elish there is this great battle of the gods, and Marduk, the king of the victorious group of gods, creates the world from the body of a defeated god. Then the other gods say to Marduk, "Uh, don’t you realize how much maintenance it would take to run this place?” Marduk replies, "I will produce a lowly, primitive creature called Man to do the work."
But how does the living God view work?
Please turn to Genesis 1-2:
In the very first page of Genesis we see God the Father working. God gets his hands dirty creating human beings (soil). He blows into man’s nostrils the very breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Adam literally means “from the earth.” We also see in the opening pages of Scripture God working as a gardener, planting trees, and crops. (shovel) He’s engaged in what we would call blue collar labour.
We also see God working as an engineer designing the universe. He’s involved in what we would call white collar work.
God the Father engages in blue and white collar work. And so does God the Son.
Jesus spent most of his adult life on earth working as a carpenter. We don't know much about Jesus' life between the time he was age twelve and thirty. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus followed his foster father into his trade as a tekton, which is usually translated "carpenter," but can also be rendered "craftsman." As Jesuit priest James Martin points out tekton may have also been used to refer to what we would today call "a day laborer." This could have meant that Jesus not only worked with wood, but also did day jobs: working on construction sites, hoeing fields, and harvesting crops.
During Jesus’ final three years as a human being on earth he, of course, worked as mentor and a teacher.
Because God only does what is good and because God engages in work—both manual and mental—we can know that work is intrinsically good.
White collar workers can look down on blue collar workers, believing they are employed in an inferior form of labor.
Conversely, blue collar workers can view those of us who with white collar jobs as having never put in a “real day’s work.” Someone spontaneously dropped in on me at home while I was working in the garden. When she saw me down on my knees pulling weeds, she blurted out, “It’s good to see you finally doing some real work!”
According to the Scriptures, we are made in God's image. We re-present in what we do. When we work, we re-present what God is like.
But specifically how do we re-present God?
In Genesis 1:1 we read:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
The expression “formless and empty” in Hebrew is tohu wabohu (sounds like a Japanese appetizer.)
It means formless and empty, something chaotic, disordered, something uninhabited and lifeless.
And we read also in verse one that darkness was over the face of the chaotic, primordial, wasteland.
Then we read God said,
“Let there be light,” and there was light and he separated the light from the darkness. (vs. 3)
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” (vs.6)
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” (vs. 9)
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years (vs. 14)
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” (vs. 24),
So in these verses we see God separating light from darkness, water from ground, he’s creating order (rule of life).
In creating the stars, the sun, and moon and the land with trees and all kind of plants, he’s creating beauty.
He creates plants and animals and finally us he’s creating life.
Whenever we work and create order, beauty, and life we are re-presenting God.
Let’s take “order,” for example:
When create order, we re-present God.
Sometimes creating order is obvious.
When a carpenter builds the frame of the house, he or she is creating order from wood, steel, and concrete. They are re-presenting God.
When a teacher is teaching, she or he is creating order and coherence in the minds of the students. They re-present God.
When an accountant prepares a tax return for a person or prepares financial statements for company, he or she is creating order with numbers and re-presenting God.
When we bring order from the Tohu wabohu, we re-present God.
When we create beauty, we re-present God.
I was talking to someone recently about the fact that she left her secure well-paying job to become an artist, a photographer. It is not as secure as her previous job, but she loves what she does. She's creating beauty. She is re-presenting God.
A couple weeks ago my wife and I saw my brother Tetsuro act in an outdoor play in the Steveston, called Salmon Row. The play reenacted the experience of Japanese and Chinese immigrants and First Nations people who came to Steveston to fish during Salmon runs in the early part of the 20th century.
The story featured the plight of individuals and families who had immigrated to BC were facing discrimination and struggling to make ends meet as fishermen… and how they had to for low wages as fisherman.
The play retold an important part of our British Columbia history in a beautiful, poignant and poetic way.
If you're an actor or an artist and are creating beauty you are re-presenting God.
When we create life, we we re-present God.
In some cases it's obvious. If you work as a doctor or a nurse you’re supporting life.
Shirley works as a housekeeper at a 250-bed hospital. She says “If we don’t clean with a quality effort, we can’t keep the doctors and nurses in business; we can’t accommodate patients. This place would be closed if we didn’t have housekeeping.” Shirley has “connected the dots” and understands that her work of housekeeping is serving people—literally helping to keep them alive.
Have you “connected the dots” in your work (now think in terms of paid or unpaid work) so you can see how your work brings life?
In some cases it's less obvious, if you work as a farmer growing crops, it's obvious how you are working to support life. But if you work in a factory that creates the boxes for the food (prop) to be packaged it's not as obvious, but it's a necessary part of the process that helps feeds people because there is a time lag between what you do and when it directly benefits people. Look down the line – does your work support life? If so, you are re – presenting God?
(Now, if say you are working as a drug dealer, or you are working in the sex trade (I realize you may be doing this against your will and you may feel trapped), or you are in the gambling industry, as you trace your work forward, while you may say that it seems like my work creates pleasure for people or some entertainment, in the balance if your work seems to bring people more death rather than life, it may that you need to consider the possibility of changing your line of work if you can.)
When we work, we not only re-present God, but with co-create with him as well.
Co-creators with God
In Genesis 2:15 we read, “The LORD God then placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Until this point in the history of the world, no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground (Genesis 2:5, emphasis added).
God can create order, beauty, and life out of nothing, but in his mysterious providence he chose to create through us. According to Genesis, in the garden of Eden there were not certain shrubs and plants because there was no human being to help plant and raise them.
There are certain things in the world that simply wouldn't be in the world if there weren't human beings to create them or co-create them with God.
TESTIMONY: Leighton Cantril
For those of you who don’t know me I am a regular here at Tenth, arriving in the country from Melbourne in March 2010, just after the Olympics. My wife, Sarah, and I came here for the Easter service last year – and just decided to stay!
As those of you who were in the job market in the 6 months following the Olympics know, a combination of seemingly lots of extra people in the marketplace with VANOC or Vancouver 2010 on their resume, and a slump in the amount of available work made it difficult for us to find work in our “regular fields”. We put in much effort and energy put into our job search; however nothing was paying much dividends.
And we were feeling the weight of living on our savings that we had brought from another country.
So I tried my luck with a temp agency called Labour Ready. As I found out, employers call Labour Ready at any time of day and you get work for a half or full day of work. It usually ends up being the hard work that no-one onsite wants to do – lifting, digging, cleaning etc. At the end of the shift you then trek back to the office to pick up your cheque for the day.
So I would wake up in the wee hours, catch public transport, and go and wait in a plain large office filled with enough plastic chairs for about half of those that turned up to sit on, and then everyone else sat on the floor.
The office opens at 6am, you put your name on the available list. I soon learned that if I am going to get up really early for work that I am definitely going to work that day – so may as well make sure I was in line by 5:30 or earlier - whatever it took!
Most days this plan worked, but I recall one day I arrived, and sat from 6 in the morning on the hard floor, one hour, two hours, three hours. Others were getting work,. But they stopped calling people’s names before they made it down the list to me. I left the office around 10:30... pretty discouraged. No work and no money that day.
My first “half day” of work was unloading truckloads of boxes of frozen seafood from New Zealand and ginger from China onto pallets in refrigerated storage near Holdom skytrain station. Thousands of boxes – at 10-15 pounds a box…gets very heavy. I was lucky that I got the job because I was tall (6ft or over they requested) – a lucky break. My first pay cheque in Canada was $38.07 (SHOW PHOTO) for that half day of work. But for some reason, in spite of the muscle pain, early morning, and smelling like seafood AND ginger, there was a sense of satisfaction. Getting my job done, being part of the system that sent NZ seafood to restaurants and people’s tables. It was a cool feeling to be a small part of helping perhaps a mum and dad and their 3 children sit around the table and ordering NZ muscles, the special of the day to celebrate a birthday. I was a (small) part of them celebrating that day.
A few days later working for Labour Ready, 4 of us started working on a construction site where townhouses were being built... (SHOW PHOTO) we arrived in the pouring rain, which (being Vancouver) continued for most of the day. We were shoveling heavy gravel that had been mixed with clay. One of my workmates said that there was a chance that we could be “called back” if we worked hard I decided that grueling work was better than no work and put a really solid effort in. I left the job site knowing that I was getting a call back to that site the next day as they had seen my commitment to work – it felt really, really good!
I ended up working on that job site for about 3 or 4 weeks – building townhouses at 33rd and Main. Being the “extra hands” on the site, any of the “heavy lifting” work would come my way.
And in the midst of the digging, the lifting and the cleaning up, there were some moments where I actually saw my (small) role in the bigger picture. When my lifting and shoveling and pushing dirt made more sense. I was helping to create order and structure and safety for someone to live there, a family, maybe a couple. . (IF THERE IS ONE—SHOW PHOTO)
There was a community of people who were going to be based there, using it as their base, their shelter against the world. Where they would wake up in the morning and head to work, and where they would invite friends to watch the big game or a movie
Although initially I was unsure of the meaning of my being employed as a labourer for this time, God was able to show me through the sweat and rain how exciting it is for me to be a piece of the piece of the puzzle – knowing that it was and is God’s business to use his people to create and re-create using our minds and bodies.
Towards the end of my time working on these townhouses, I remember stopping for a moment to look around and think – wow – how incredible it is to take a pile of timber, siding, shingles and pipes and turn them into a house – where people can live. To stack boxes on pallets and know that it helps families celebrating life together. It is great to be able to play a role with my mind and body – God celebrating our echo of His great work.
In my hammering and lifting and shoveling there was opportunity to mirror the work of my Father in heaven who created order out of nothing, to the world that we live in today.
Ken Shigematsu: We live in a modest home not far from here. Not a day goes by when I am not grateful for our home. I've never met them, but I'm grateful for the people who poured the concrete, built the frame of the house, laid the pipes and the dry wall….
As meaningful as work can be when we understand the order, beauty, and life that's generated through it, work can also be hard, frustrating, even degrading and dehumanizing.
In the book of Genesis we see that work was present in the garden in Eden before sin came into the world, work is not a punishment for sin, but as we later see in the book of Genesis the gift of work has also been tainted by sin and radioactive effects of sin.
When we are in a really mundane or hard job, sometimes we can lose sight of the order, beauty, and life we are helping to create in the end.Ken,
And we can create order, beauty, and life through our work itself, but we can also help foster order beauty and life in the people that we work with.
I’ve been blessed by the wisdom of the Jesuits. James Martin a Jesuit Priest in his excellent book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything describes one of his summer jobs as university student.
He worked on an assembly line in a local packaging plant. It was one of the worst jobs he'd ever had. His job involved standing on conveyer belt line standing in front of the deafening, machine taking the smaller boxes that came down the conveyer belt and put them into bigger boxes, and cover them with plastic shrink wrap.
James said, "I hated it. Everyone hated it. Every 10 minutes I checked the clock on the wall to see how much closer lunchtime was. After lunch, I watched the clock and prayed for (or at least anticipated) the end of the shift at 4 PM. The high point of his week? At least once a week, someone threw a piece of wood into the machine to shut it down temporarily. Then everyone got to take a break while someone called the repair man. That was the highlight of the work week!”
But surprisingly, three women on the line laughed almost the entire day. They had worked at the plant for several years, and knew one another and spent the day chatting about their children, their husbands, their homes, their plans for the weekend. Gradually James says these women drew him into their circle. By summer's end, James says, "They were ribbing me about all sorts of things: how slow I was, how young I was, how skinny I was, how much dust got into my hair, especially how afraid I was of sticking my hand in the machine to fix it when it was jammed. "Is you a man or is you a mouse?" one would tease. They hated their jobs but they loved one another.”
Even if we hate our job, and forget how the work itself in the end is creating order, beauty, or life, we can relate to other people in our work in ways that bring order, beauty, and life to them, and thus re-present God.
Say you don't like your job, say you’ve forgotten that your work creates order, beauty and life from the tohu wabohu and you work all alone, if you are earning money from your job that money can help create order, beauty, and life for someone else. Work helps put bread or rice on your table.
When my wife Sakiko was a high school student in Japan, she had the opportunity to study in Chicago for a year as part of a student exchange program. She did her home stay with a family of four: the parents were Bob and Judy and they had two daughters Julie and Jeannie. Sakiko was struck by the fact that though this family had a modest home and didn't have a lot of money, they seemed really happy. Bob was a family man, a salt of the earth kind of guy. He ended up working his entire career-for 40 years or so as an account with the same company: one that made tractors and buses. You might think as I thought, he must have really loved his job to stay at his whole working life. But, if you asked Bob, “Do you love your job?” He would have said, “No not really. It's a job.” “Why did you stay at it for so long?” Then you have showed you photographs of his wife Judy and his daughters Julie and Jeannie.
Through our work we can help create order, beauty, and life through the work itself, in some cases for the poor people we work with, and in other cases for a work we can help create order, beauty, and life for love ones: we can pay rent, put on the food table, and may help a little bit school.
We can honor God in our work, but we can also honor God with what is achieved through our work for others.
Earlier in the message, we talked about how Jesus worked as carpenter and a teacher.
But his greatest work was as a convict. He was convicted for his claim to be the Son of God. They flogged him and crucified him. The result: through his death on the cross, which was mysteriously paying the penalty for our sins, our sins can be forgiven and we can be restored into a relationship with our Father in heaven—and we can experience an order, beauty, and a life we've never known
When we experience that we can do our work not only with meaning that comes from knowing that we are bringing order, beauty, life for others, but we can do our work with joy as a way of saying thank you to the one whose work involved dying so that we might live.
That's another sermon that will be the focus of next week: Finding God in our Work which I will present with Betty MacLeod a member of our church, former VP of Olympic Business at RBC.
Let’s pray.
Ken Shigematsu with Leighton Cantrill
Title: Holy Sweat: Reflecting God in Our Work
Texts: Genesis 1: 1-4, 6, 9, 14, 24; 2:8-15; Matthew 13:55; 1 Corinthians 3:6-7
BIG IDEA: In our work we reflect a God who works.
During the 1960s primaries in the United States a senator named John Kennedy was campaigning. He was standing by a mine shaking hands with the miners. One miner came to him and said, “Is it true that you’re the son of the one of the richest people in the country? Kennedy said, “I guess so.” The man asked, “Is it true that you’ve never really done a day’s work with your hands?” Kennedy nodded his head. Then the miner said, “Let me tell you this. You haven’t missed a thing!”
Many people feel that work, particularly hard manual labor, is a kind of necessary evil—something that people would not choose to do if they didn’t have to.
Many people in white collar jobs can feel the same way about their work.
I had coffee with a friend who told me that when he was a university student he made it his goal to work as a stock broker and then retire when he was forty, or earlier. Now as a stock broker who’s approaching his forties, he says, “With the downturn (in the markets), I likely won’t be able to retire until I’m forty-five… I don’t like work. I’m looking forward to my life beyond work.” People talk about “Freedom 45 or 55,” meaning they hope to able to retire at 45 or 55 from work and be free.
People say, “I live for the weekend…” that is my real life occurs when I’m doing something other than my work.
But does work have to feel like a prison sentence, like some penitentiary where we “do our time” and from which we seek an early escape?
If we’re a typical person, we will spend most of the waking hours of our lives working.
Throughout history, people have usually viewed work as something unpleasant that has to be done.
If you look at the Eastern accounts of creation, like the Enuma Elish there is this great battle of the gods, and Marduk, the king of the victorious group of gods, creates the world from the body of a defeated god. Then the other gods say to Marduk, "Uh, don’t you realize how much maintenance it would take to run this place?” Marduk replies, "I will produce a lowly, primitive creature called Man to do the work."
But how does the living God view work?
Please turn to Genesis 1-2:
In the very first page of Genesis we see God the Father working. God gets his hands dirty creating human beings (soil). He blows into man’s nostrils the very breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Adam literally means “from the earth.” We also see in the opening pages of Scripture God working as a gardener, planting trees, and crops. (shovel) He’s engaged in what we would call blue collar labour.
We also see God working as an engineer designing the universe. He’s involved in what we would call white collar work.
God the Father engages in blue and white collar work. And so does God the Son.
Jesus spent most of his adult life on earth working as a carpenter. We don't know much about Jesus' life between the time he was age twelve and thirty. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus followed his foster father into his trade as a tekton, which is usually translated "carpenter," but can also be rendered "craftsman." As Jesuit priest James Martin points out tekton may have also been used to refer to what we would today call "a day laborer." This could have meant that Jesus not only worked with wood, but also did day jobs: working on construction sites, hoeing fields, and harvesting crops.
During Jesus’ final three years as a human being on earth he, of course, worked as mentor and a teacher.
Because God only does what is good and because God engages in work—both manual and mental—we can know that work is intrinsically good.
White collar workers can look down on blue collar workers, believing they are employed in an inferior form of labor.
Conversely, blue collar workers can view those of us who with white collar jobs as having never put in a “real day’s work.” Someone spontaneously dropped in on me at home while I was working in the garden. When she saw me down on my knees pulling weeds, she blurted out, “It’s good to see you finally doing some real work!”
According to the Scriptures, we are made in God's image. We re-present in what we do. When we work, we re-present what God is like.
But specifically how do we re-present God?
In Genesis 1:1 we read:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
The expression “formless and empty” in Hebrew is tohu wabohu (sounds like a Japanese appetizer.)
It means formless and empty, something chaotic, disordered, something uninhabited and lifeless.
And we read also in verse one that darkness was over the face of the chaotic, primordial, wasteland.
Then we read God said,
“Let there be light,” and there was light and he separated the light from the darkness. (vs. 3)
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” (vs.6)
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” (vs. 9)
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years (vs. 14)
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” (vs. 24),
So in these verses we see God separating light from darkness, water from ground, he’s creating order (rule of life).
In creating the stars, the sun, and moon and the land with trees and all kind of plants, he’s creating beauty.
He creates plants and animals and finally us he’s creating life.
Whenever we work and create order, beauty, and life we are re-presenting God.
Let’s take “order,” for example:
When create order, we re-present God.
Sometimes creating order is obvious.
When a carpenter builds the frame of the house, he or she is creating order from wood, steel, and concrete. They are re-presenting God.
When a teacher is teaching, she or he is creating order and coherence in the minds of the students. They re-present God.
When an accountant prepares a tax return for a person or prepares financial statements for company, he or she is creating order with numbers and re-presenting God.
When we bring order from the Tohu wabohu, we re-present God.
When we create beauty, we re-present God.
I was talking to someone recently about the fact that she left her secure well-paying job to become an artist, a photographer. It is not as secure as her previous job, but she loves what she does. She's creating beauty. She is re-presenting God.
A couple weeks ago my wife and I saw my brother Tetsuro act in an outdoor play in the Steveston, called Salmon Row. The play reenacted the experience of Japanese and Chinese immigrants and First Nations people who came to Steveston to fish during Salmon runs in the early part of the 20th century.
The story featured the plight of individuals and families who had immigrated to BC were facing discrimination and struggling to make ends meet as fishermen… and how they had to for low wages as fisherman.
The play retold an important part of our British Columbia history in a beautiful, poignant and poetic way.
If you're an actor or an artist and are creating beauty you are re-presenting God.
When we create life, we we re-present God.
In some cases it's obvious. If you work as a doctor or a nurse you’re supporting life.
Shirley works as a housekeeper at a 250-bed hospital. She says “If we don’t clean with a quality effort, we can’t keep the doctors and nurses in business; we can’t accommodate patients. This place would be closed if we didn’t have housekeeping.” Shirley has “connected the dots” and understands that her work of housekeeping is serving people—literally helping to keep them alive.
Have you “connected the dots” in your work (now think in terms of paid or unpaid work) so you can see how your work brings life?
In some cases it's less obvious, if you work as a farmer growing crops, it's obvious how you are working to support life. But if you work in a factory that creates the boxes for the food (prop) to be packaged it's not as obvious, but it's a necessary part of the process that helps feeds people because there is a time lag between what you do and when it directly benefits people. Look down the line – does your work support life? If so, you are re – presenting God?
(Now, if say you are working as a drug dealer, or you are working in the sex trade (I realize you may be doing this against your will and you may feel trapped), or you are in the gambling industry, as you trace your work forward, while you may say that it seems like my work creates pleasure for people or some entertainment, in the balance if your work seems to bring people more death rather than life, it may that you need to consider the possibility of changing your line of work if you can.)
When we work, we not only re-present God, but with co-create with him as well.
Co-creators with God
In Genesis 2:15 we read, “The LORD God then placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Until this point in the history of the world, no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground (Genesis 2:5, emphasis added).
God can create order, beauty, and life out of nothing, but in his mysterious providence he chose to create through us. According to Genesis, in the garden of Eden there were not certain shrubs and plants because there was no human being to help plant and raise them.
There are certain things in the world that simply wouldn't be in the world if there weren't human beings to create them or co-create them with God.
TESTIMONY: Leighton Cantril
For those of you who don’t know me I am a regular here at Tenth, arriving in the country from Melbourne in March 2010, just after the Olympics. My wife, Sarah, and I came here for the Easter service last year – and just decided to stay!
As those of you who were in the job market in the 6 months following the Olympics know, a combination of seemingly lots of extra people in the marketplace with VANOC or Vancouver 2010 on their resume, and a slump in the amount of available work made it difficult for us to find work in our “regular fields”. We put in much effort and energy put into our job search; however nothing was paying much dividends.
And we were feeling the weight of living on our savings that we had brought from another country.
So I tried my luck with a temp agency called Labour Ready. As I found out, employers call Labour Ready at any time of day and you get work for a half or full day of work. It usually ends up being the hard work that no-one onsite wants to do – lifting, digging, cleaning etc. At the end of the shift you then trek back to the office to pick up your cheque for the day.
So I would wake up in the wee hours, catch public transport, and go and wait in a plain large office filled with enough plastic chairs for about half of those that turned up to sit on, and then everyone else sat on the floor.
The office opens at 6am, you put your name on the available list. I soon learned that if I am going to get up really early for work that I am definitely going to work that day – so may as well make sure I was in line by 5:30 or earlier - whatever it took!
Most days this plan worked, but I recall one day I arrived, and sat from 6 in the morning on the hard floor, one hour, two hours, three hours. Others were getting work,. But they stopped calling people’s names before they made it down the list to me. I left the office around 10:30... pretty discouraged. No work and no money that day.
My first “half day” of work was unloading truckloads of boxes of frozen seafood from New Zealand and ginger from China onto pallets in refrigerated storage near Holdom skytrain station. Thousands of boxes – at 10-15 pounds a box…gets very heavy. I was lucky that I got the job because I was tall (6ft or over they requested) – a lucky break. My first pay cheque in Canada was $38.07 (SHOW PHOTO) for that half day of work. But for some reason, in spite of the muscle pain, early morning, and smelling like seafood AND ginger, there was a sense of satisfaction. Getting my job done, being part of the system that sent NZ seafood to restaurants and people’s tables. It was a cool feeling to be a small part of helping perhaps a mum and dad and their 3 children sit around the table and ordering NZ muscles, the special of the day to celebrate a birthday. I was a (small) part of them celebrating that day.
A few days later working for Labour Ready, 4 of us started working on a construction site where townhouses were being built... (SHOW PHOTO) we arrived in the pouring rain, which (being Vancouver) continued for most of the day. We were shoveling heavy gravel that had been mixed with clay. One of my workmates said that there was a chance that we could be “called back” if we worked hard I decided that grueling work was better than no work and put a really solid effort in. I left the job site knowing that I was getting a call back to that site the next day as they had seen my commitment to work – it felt really, really good!
I ended up working on that job site for about 3 or 4 weeks – building townhouses at 33rd and Main. Being the “extra hands” on the site, any of the “heavy lifting” work would come my way.
And in the midst of the digging, the lifting and the cleaning up, there were some moments where I actually saw my (small) role in the bigger picture. When my lifting and shoveling and pushing dirt made more sense. I was helping to create order and structure and safety for someone to live there, a family, maybe a couple. . (IF THERE IS ONE—SHOW PHOTO)
There was a community of people who were going to be based there, using it as their base, their shelter against the world. Where they would wake up in the morning and head to work, and where they would invite friends to watch the big game or a movie
Although initially I was unsure of the meaning of my being employed as a labourer for this time, God was able to show me through the sweat and rain how exciting it is for me to be a piece of the piece of the puzzle – knowing that it was and is God’s business to use his people to create and re-create using our minds and bodies.
Towards the end of my time working on these townhouses, I remember stopping for a moment to look around and think – wow – how incredible it is to take a pile of timber, siding, shingles and pipes and turn them into a house – where people can live. To stack boxes on pallets and know that it helps families celebrating life together. It is great to be able to play a role with my mind and body – God celebrating our echo of His great work.
In my hammering and lifting and shoveling there was opportunity to mirror the work of my Father in heaven who created order out of nothing, to the world that we live in today.
Ken Shigematsu: We live in a modest home not far from here. Not a day goes by when I am not grateful for our home. I've never met them, but I'm grateful for the people who poured the concrete, built the frame of the house, laid the pipes and the dry wall….
As meaningful as work can be when we understand the order, beauty, and life that's generated through it, work can also be hard, frustrating, even degrading and dehumanizing.
In the book of Genesis we see that work was present in the garden in Eden before sin came into the world, work is not a punishment for sin, but as we later see in the book of Genesis the gift of work has also been tainted by sin and radioactive effects of sin.
When we are in a really mundane or hard job, sometimes we can lose sight of the order, beauty, and life we are helping to create in the end.Ken,
And we can create order, beauty, and life through our work itself, but we can also help foster order beauty and life in the people that we work with.
I’ve been blessed by the wisdom of the Jesuits. James Martin a Jesuit Priest in his excellent book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything describes one of his summer jobs as university student.
He worked on an assembly line in a local packaging plant. It was one of the worst jobs he'd ever had. His job involved standing on conveyer belt line standing in front of the deafening, machine taking the smaller boxes that came down the conveyer belt and put them into bigger boxes, and cover them with plastic shrink wrap.
James said, "I hated it. Everyone hated it. Every 10 minutes I checked the clock on the wall to see how much closer lunchtime was. After lunch, I watched the clock and prayed for (or at least anticipated) the end of the shift at 4 PM. The high point of his week? At least once a week, someone threw a piece of wood into the machine to shut it down temporarily. Then everyone got to take a break while someone called the repair man. That was the highlight of the work week!”
But surprisingly, three women on the line laughed almost the entire day. They had worked at the plant for several years, and knew one another and spent the day chatting about their children, their husbands, their homes, their plans for the weekend. Gradually James says these women drew him into their circle. By summer's end, James says, "They were ribbing me about all sorts of things: how slow I was, how young I was, how skinny I was, how much dust got into my hair, especially how afraid I was of sticking my hand in the machine to fix it when it was jammed. "Is you a man or is you a mouse?" one would tease. They hated their jobs but they loved one another.”
Even if we hate our job, and forget how the work itself in the end is creating order, beauty, or life, we can relate to other people in our work in ways that bring order, beauty, and life to them, and thus re-present God.
Say you don't like your job, say you’ve forgotten that your work creates order, beauty and life from the tohu wabohu and you work all alone, if you are earning money from your job that money can help create order, beauty, and life for someone else. Work helps put bread or rice on your table.
When my wife Sakiko was a high school student in Japan, she had the opportunity to study in Chicago for a year as part of a student exchange program. She did her home stay with a family of four: the parents were Bob and Judy and they had two daughters Julie and Jeannie. Sakiko was struck by the fact that though this family had a modest home and didn't have a lot of money, they seemed really happy. Bob was a family man, a salt of the earth kind of guy. He ended up working his entire career-for 40 years or so as an account with the same company: one that made tractors and buses. You might think as I thought, he must have really loved his job to stay at his whole working life. But, if you asked Bob, “Do you love your job?” He would have said, “No not really. It's a job.” “Why did you stay at it for so long?” Then you have showed you photographs of his wife Judy and his daughters Julie and Jeannie.
Through our work we can help create order, beauty, and life through the work itself, in some cases for the poor people we work with, and in other cases for a work we can help create order, beauty, and life for love ones: we can pay rent, put on the food table, and may help a little bit school.
We can honor God in our work, but we can also honor God with what is achieved through our work for others.
Earlier in the message, we talked about how Jesus worked as carpenter and a teacher.
But his greatest work was as a convict. He was convicted for his claim to be the Son of God. They flogged him and crucified him. The result: through his death on the cross, which was mysteriously paying the penalty for our sins, our sins can be forgiven and we can be restored into a relationship with our Father in heaven—and we can experience an order, beauty, and a life we've never known
When we experience that we can do our work not only with meaning that comes from knowing that we are bringing order, beauty, life for others, but we can do our work with joy as a way of saying thank you to the one whose work involved dying so that we might live.
That's another sermon that will be the focus of next week: Finding God in our Work which I will present with Betty MacLeod a member of our church, former VP of Olympic Business at RBC.
Let’s pray.
posted by Shigematsu at 10:46 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home