Just Work

City Series M-7 November 18, 2012 Speaker: Ken Shigematsu Title: Just Work Text: Deuteronomy Deut. 26:8-16, 24:14, 25:13-16; Matthew 20-1:16 BIG IDEA: God’s people are called to work with integrity. INTRODUCTION: Last weekend I was flying to Boston and I was seated beside a couple of older women who are sisters – and because I was sniffling the older woman seated beside me reached into her purse and grabbed a Kleenex and said, “Blow your nose.” We got talking and when she discovered that I was a Christian minister, she looked in shock at her sister and said, “Oh, my God, I just told the minister to blow his nose.” There are some people who think that a Christian minister is in some special, rarefied vocation. But the word minister simply refers to someone who serves God in whatever vocation they find themselves in. Historically, people who serve in government here in Canada as Minister of Finance or Minister of Minister of International Trade have been called ministers because they are seen as serving in the church or government or some other sphere. Several months ago, I asked someone in our community who works in the corporate world if you ever thought about becoming a pastor. He said, “I feel like I’m called to be pastor in my company.” Last week, I met with him and he shared that at his company (a famous one which you have all heard of) they brought in a professional public speaking coach to train the managers on how to speak more effectively in public. As part of the exercise, they were all asked to speak about something they were passionate about for 2 minutes. Everyone talked about how passionate they were about the company. But when this person’s turn came around, he spoke about how passionate he was about Jesus Christ and this church. In a conversation that I was having with him this last week, he shared how he wanted to help change the culture in his company so that it was less cutthroat and more humane. Each of us who belongs to Jesus Christ or is being drawn into a relationship God is called to serve as a minister in our workplace. And Moses living about 3500 years ago understood this. So Moses, who is now an old man and is standing on the banks of the Jordan River, preaches a series of sermons to prepare the Children of Israel, his people, the people of God, for their life in the promised land of Canaan. He has told them that they have been blessed with the wisdom of God’s word and a sense that God is close to them, particularly when they pray—blessed not just for their self-flourishing or their personal fulfillment, but endowed with God’s wisdom and presence so that they would be a blessing to the nations, a light to the world. And one of the ways that they would become a light to the world is by reflecting God's character in their work. In Deuteronomy 26:16-17 16 The Lord your God commands you this day to follow these decrees and laws; carefully observe them with all your heart and with all your soul 17 You have declared this day that the Lord is your God and that you will walk in obedience to him… In this sermon we are going to be looking at a few texts from Deuteronomy—one on giving, one on compassion management, and a 3rd one using honest scales---that show us how we reflect the character of God through our work. This is a relevant question for us if we are like most people who spend most of the waking hours of our life engaged in some kind of work, either school, home, or the company. In Deuteronomy 26:6-17 we read when the children of Israel, the people of God, were suffering as slaves in Egypt they cried out to God. Then in verse 8 we read 8 So the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with great terror and with signs and wonders. 9 He brought us to this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey; 10 and now I bring the firstfruits of the soil that you, Lord, have given me.” Place the basket before the Lord your God and bow down before him. 11 Then you and the Levites and the foreigners residing among you shall rejoice in all the good things the Lord your God has given to you and your household. 12 When you have finished setting aside a tenth of all your produce in the third year, the year of the tithe, you shall give it to the Levite, the foreigner, the fatherless and the widow, so that they may eat in your towns and be satisfied. Moses is saying to his people, “God has been incredibly generous to us – he has led us out of Egypt that land where we were slaves He brought us into this promised land flowing with milk and honey.” Earlier in Deuteronomy 8 he says that God has given them the very capacity to produce wealth, so “now (vs. 10) bring the firstfruits of your harvest to him,” and (vs. 12) “set aside a 10th of all of your produce and give it to the Levite i.e. to those who oversee God’s work and the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow – that is to the poor.” One of the most tangible ways we reflect God's generous character to us is by offering the firstfruits of our income to God and the poor. One of the people who has inspired me most in my Christian faith through his example is the nineteenth century missionary from England to China--Hudson Taylor. When he was a young person, poor, barely making ends meet as a medical student, he learned to trust God enough to tithe, but he was so poor he found it difficult to actually give the first tenth of his income to God as a low paid medical assistant. He was sharing how he had worked this out with a friend of his. Hudson said, “When I calculated the cost of my apartment rent, and food, and other fixed necessary expenses, I didn’t have ten percent leftover to give to God.” And his friend said, “So what did you do?” Hudson said, “Well I just found cheaper accommodations, lived more simply and was able to give.” Hudson learned to give the first tenth of his income and then more, and learned to live on the rest, even when he was very poor. Honoring God with the firstfruits of our income not only enables to reflect God's generosity back to him and the poor, but it also helps us trust God. As we'll see, we are called to reflect God in our work and the way we do that is by trusting him. One of the ways that we honor our Lord in our work is by reflecting his generosity and trusting him enough to give generously to him and the poor. Another way we honor God through our work, according to Deuteronomy, is by reflecting God’s integrity and compassion. Moses anticipated the day in which his people would no longer be a tribe of wandering nomads, but prosperous people in the Promised Land. They would be sufficiently wealthy to hire people who were poorer and in need. And this is what he says in Deut 24:14-15: 14 Do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is an Israelite or is a foreigner residing in one of your towns. 15 Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and are counting on it. Otherwise they may cry to the Lord against you, and you will be guilty of sin. It’s really clear in this and in other texts in Deuteronomy that God is especially concerned about the poor and needy and that the conditions they work in should be fair and never exploitative. Our translation says, “Do not take advantage of the poor and needy who work for you.” But this translation is too weak. In the Hebrew asaq means to oppress by robbery or fraud. And Moses is very practical here when he calls his people to pay their workers promptly. This law is for the benefit of people who were hired as day laborers. People who were hired for short-term jobs were often paid a daily wage. And in their world, daily pay was essential for daily food. And so any delay in payment meant that a worker and his family would go hungry. Moses says if an employer fails to pay his workers, it’s a sin against God. As theologian Christopher Wright points out, unjust pay and inhumane working conditions are not just social problems, they are sins against God. And this is why the prophets in the Old Testament like Isaiah and Jeremiah invoked the judgment of God against those who fail to pay their workers properly. Conversely, we see here in the later part of Deuteronomy 24:13 that when a creditor deals humanely with a debtor—when he gives his cloak back which served as collateral for the debt at the end of the day—because it’s his only cloak and only blanket—it will be regarded as a righteous act in the eyes of God. Jesus, in Matthew 20, told a story about a vineyard owner who generously paid a day’s wage for an hour’s work presumably because he recognized the need a man had to feed his family no matter how long a man had worked. When we are in a position to do so, we honor God in our work as we offer or advocate for fair pay. I happen to be reading the book Onward by Howard Schultz, which is a book about how Starbucks struggled to survive during the economic crash during 2008. How it sought to move onward without losing its soul (I will be tweeting inspiring quotes from the book this coming Edlyn please use twitter image you created @KenShigematsu). As I happen to be reading from this book now I’m going to draw some illustrations from it. I don’t want it to sound like a commercial for a company – I don’t even drink coffee myself – but I found this story to be informative and inspiring. When I was 7 years old, I came home from school one winter day and saw my father sprawled on a couch with a cast from his hip to his ankle. My dad was an uneducated war veteran, and while he was very proud, he never really found his spot in the world. He held a series of really rough blue-collar jobs to support our family, never making more than $20, 000 a year. He’d been a truck driver, a factory worker, and even a cab driver for a while, but his current job was the worst. He drove a truck picking up and delivering cloth diapers. That week Dad had fallen on a sheet of ice and broken his hip and his ankle, and for a blue-collar worker in 1960 there was no worker’s compensation. No health-care coverage. No severance. My dad was simply sent home after his accident and dismissed by the company. I never imagined I would one day be in a position to run a company a different way. But I did believe, even then, that everyone deserved more respect than my parents had received. By the time my father passed away in 1988 from lung cancer, he had no savings or pension. Just as tragic, in my mind, was that he never found fulfillment or meaning in his work. As a business leader, I wanted to build the kind of company that my dad never got a chance to work for (Schultz, 2011, p. 15). Howard would go on to create the company Starbucks. And largely out of a desire to build the kind of company his father never had a chance to work for, he was also no doubt partly inspired by the values of his heritage as a Jewish person, which of course has been shaped by the book of Deuteronomy. Howard Schultz, in the early years of the business when they were losing money, established two partner benefits which at the time were unique: full health care benefits and equity in the form of stock options for every employee. This was an anomaly. No company had ever extended these two benefits to part-time workers who worked at least 20 hours a week. To the best of Schultz’s knowledge they were the only private company, and later the only public company, to do so. And that is very significant as the company began in Seattle, in a country that doesn’t have our generous Medicare system. And whether we are in management or lower on the totem pole in a company, one of the ways that we are to reflect the character of God and shine his light in our company is to create better working conditions for poor people, and in particular those who are poor and vulnerable. Again and again God says in Deuteronomy and throughout the Scriptures to the people of Israel, “Show compassion for the poor and the vulnerable, the widow and the alien, because I showed you compassion when you were aliens and slaves in Egypt.” And by the way, you don’t have to be a CEO to bring about change in your workplace. Like my friend I spoke about, he’s not a CEO-- he’s a manager who’s trying to make his work less cutthroat and more humane. You don’t even have to be a manager; you can be a front line worker to foster change. The Discovery Channel aired "Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich," a documentary on films found in archives after German’s reunification. The Nazis had a public relations problem: they wanted to exterminate weaker members of society, but Lutheran Germany had a history of compassion toward the old, infirm, and the mentally ill. In order to change public perception, the Nazis hired some of Germany's best filmmakers. The film showed patients at Hadamar, a facility for the mentally disturbed. Lights aimed at unnatural angles made the patients look ominous, their faces angular and deeply shadowed, their eyes wild. The film shifts to a bureaucrat displaying budget graphs. “It takes 100,000 Deutschmarks to keep one of these defectives alive,” he explains—“money badly needed by the Fatherland. We should follow the example of nature and allow the weak to die….” "Selling Murder" ended with a surprising twist. Despite their slick films and other attempts to sway public opinion, the Nazis failed to exterminate the physically and mentally disabled. However, Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals they murdered virtually without protest; the disabled, they had to let live. Why? The change in Nazi policy traces back to one brave woman, a Christian nurse who worked at Hadamar. When the facility was converted into a gas chamber, she could not keep silent. She documented the facts and reported them to her bishop, who released them to the public. The resulting outcry from the church forced the Nazis to back down. Her courage can serve as a prophetic model for Christians today. That one nurse changed Nazi policy. She was living under a totalitarian dictatorship, not in a liberal democracy like Canada. In a day before Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, it was far more difficult to build a platform – and yet she did. And her courage and advocacy as a follower of Jesus honored God. We may not be called upon to act in a setting as dramatically evil as Nazi Germany, but we are called to reflect God and make our workplaces more just and compassionate places. Whether it’s about paying fair wages, making the workplace less cut throat, or speaking out against it, as is true of tithing, it’s a matter of trusting God. As may be true of tithing, we may seem like we can't afford to pay fair wages, to make the workplace less cutthroat, to risk the pushback that comes from being a whistleblower, but the invitation is to say I’m putting my trust in God in my work, more than in my work itself. Finally in Deuteronomy 25:13 we hear Moses speak of business with justice and financial integrity. 13 Do not have two differing weights in your bag—one heavy, one light. 14 Do not have two differing measures in your house—one large, one small. 15 You must have accurate and honest weights and measures, so that you may live long in the land the Lord your God is giving you. The two different sets of weights, one heavy, one light, were of course used for the self-serving purpose of obtaining more than the standard measure when purchasing, but giving less when selling-- so you can manipulate a transaction so you would always buy low and sell high. God says in verse 15 that a commitment to honesty in business will bring a blessing in the land we are living in. On the other hand, if we are dishonest in our business dealings we are doing something that, according to verse 16, God detests. In fact, we can translate the word “an abomination.” To be engaged in dishonest business practices is an abomination to God. We think of idolatry as some aberrant sexual perversions or child sacrifice being an abomination to God. But when we engage in dishonest business, particularly in ways that oppress the poor and the vulnerable, it is an abomination to God. The Prophet Amos recognized this and so he says in Amos, Chapter 8:4-8: 4 Hear this, you who trample the needy and do away with the poor(H) of the land,(I) 5 saying, “When will the New Moon(J) be over that we may sell grain, and the Sabbath be ended that we may market(K) wheat?”(L)— skimping on the measure, boosting the price and cheating(M) with dishonest scales,(N) 6 buying the poor(O) with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, selling even the sweepings with the wheat.(P) 7 The Lord has sworn by himself, the Pride of Jacob:(Q) “I will never forget(R) anything they have done.(S) 8 “Will not the land tremble(T) for this, and all who live in it mourn? God calls us as his people—and the wider world—to engage in fair trade. Let me cite again from the book Onward as I happen to be reading from it. In 2008 Starbucks as a company was struggling to survive, at a time when their stock price had fallen so low that they feared that they might experience a hostile takeover from another company. Howard Schultz, the CEO, organized a leadership convention for nearly 10,000 Starbucks partners (that’s kind of inside jargon of theirs for those who work for them). Near the end of the convention Schultz introduced a surprise guest – Bono – the lead singer for U2, a committed Christian, and a global activist. So up came Bono in a black t-shirt and his signature red-tinted sunglasses. I’m paraphrasing here. “These are interesting times,” Bono began. Howard has brought me to talk to you in interesting, strange, unsettling times. For Starbucks. For North America. Times of crisis. Times of chaos. Times of opportunity….The sight of your stores closing – well, a sign of the time. Historically, though, it is times like these, times of disruption, where we seem to discover our greatness. Bono spoke not just about Starbucks and the economy in North America but also, more importantly, about his travels to Africa, a continent where 4,000 lives were being lost every day to preventable, treatable diseases, and where 12 million children had been orphaned because of HIV. It had sparked in Bono a rage that ultimately drove him to create [PRODUCT] RED. Then he spoke about the absolute necessity of companies to do well by doing good. Some people say,“Come on, markets are not about morals, they are about profits.” I say that is old thinking. That’s a false choice. The great companies will be the ones that find a way to have and hold on to their values while chasing their profits, and brand value will converge to create a new business model that unites commerce and compassion. The heart and the wallet….The great companies of this century will be sharp to success and at the same time sensitive to the idea that you can’t measure the true success of a company on a spreadsheet. And then Schultz, before his partners, during a time of great economic uncertainty, affirmed that the company’s commitment to doing business in a manner that was good for people as well as the earth. And he publically committed to these goals: • By vowing to ethically source 100% of their coffee by the year 2015, which at the time was nearly 50% more than what they were currently procuring. • They also committed to doubling their annual purchase of Fair Trade Certified coffee to 40 million pounds. There is sometimes a price to pay for doing good – but it is possible to do good and to do well at the same time. Bono rightly says it’s possible to combine commerce and compassion, the heart and the wallet. And again, if we are not a CEO or in Management, if we are a rank and file worker or a consumer, we can still push companies toward social change. Walmart has been regarded by many as the poster child of corporate ruthlessness, a retailer whose business model is undercutting all of its competitors. Partly because of pressure from consumers, Walmart has resolved to change its way of doing business for the sake of the future of the planet. The company has required its suppliers to reduce packaging to protect the environment and is trying to boost sales of energy-efficient light bulbs by giving them more shelf space and better placement in stores. At time of the article I read, the company was experiencing pressure from consumers to ensure fair treatment for the people in developing countries who work for its vendors. As is true of tithing, paying fair wages, some people will say [to themselves] I can’t afford to do business in a way that is green and that’s ecology sensitive. Again, it’s a matter of trusting God. As a people of God we are called to reflect the generosity, integrity, and justice of God in our work. We are called to put our trust in God in our work life. We’re to make the Living God and his Son Jesus the center of our lives. When that happens we will become a light in our workplace. As Parker Palmer says, “Every leader,” and I might add every person, “casts a mixture of light and darkness.” Again, whether we are an executive, part of the management, front line worker, a student – we cast a mixture of light and shadow. And the hope is to cast more light than shadow. And the way we can do that in our workplaces is by inviting Christ, the light of the world, to indwell us, to cleanse us and draw us and shine through us. And that’s what my friend has done—he’s trying to make his workplace less cutthroat and more humane. Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. She or he who follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of light itself.” And as Tony Campolo reminded us a few Sundays ago, Jesus is always with us, but is he in us? If he is in us, then the light of the world illuminates our life, and that is why Jesus said to those who followed him, “You are the light of the world.” Do you want to become a person who reflects more of God’s generosity, integrity, and justice? No matter where you are – at business, school, or home – create a place that is more whole and compassionate—a place that is filled with light and honors God. Then invite the light of the world to enter your life and shine through you as you work. And as John says, “The Light will shine in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it.” PRAY 9