Labor or Leisure?
“So, what are you planning to do tomorrow for Labor’s Day,” a friend asked?
What a silly question I thought, isn’t the answer a bit obvious? Labor. No doubt I’d be washing up a few sink loads of dishes now that we’re cooking most of our meals at home. Perhaps I’d toss in a load or two of laundry, but not unless it was absolutely necessary. In truth, what I hoped to do was read several of the books I’ve started and to translate a bit more of Luke 18 – activities that currently bring me joy.
There are no plans for a barbecue. There is no extended family picnic planned at the park. I did pull two ribeyes out of the freezer to thaw for dinner this evening for just the two of us. Cooking that meal will be the most laborious activity of the day!
To be fair, maybe my friend was simply curious whether we had projects of labor planned? Or were we spending the day in pleasure, a long-deserved break from our daily labors?
From my childhood days, I knew many prone to judging others by how they spent their free time – especially concerned about which day they frolicked. If on the Lord’s Day, God’s wrath would strike. Labor Day seemed a perfect opportunity to measure one’s self against friends and neighbors.
What a relief that Labor Day always falls on a Monday! Play away!
Labeling a day – intended to be a holiday – with the word labor muddles my thinking. I’m not sure this day has ever been experienced as a day to rest. Instead, in my experience, this has been the day to clear out the clutter in the garage, to reorganize the closets, or to begin that arduous project we’ve put off for this very day.
Two holidays – Memorial day and Labor day – in particular bookend the summer season. Neither days are featured on the Church calendar as holy days.
Instead, these two ordinary days merely represent how society opens and closes a season of sun, frolicking, and pleasure. I guess we might classify both days as secular holidays serving a secular society – and there’s nothing inherently right or wrong about this. But that was not its original intention.
Learning from History
A closer look at the origins of Labor Day revealed there was a disagreement as to whose idea this initially was. Some claim that Peter J. McQuire, the founder of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, was “the driving force behind creating the Labor Day holiday.” Others claim that a “machinist Matthew Maguire … founded the holiday.” 1 Regardless of who coined the idea of a day to honor laborers, we can agree that the skills and expertise of both the carpenters (shout out to my son!) and the machinists, and all other skills, are necessary to build a nation – or to build and create anything for that matter!
Yet a very brief and quick foray into the history behind this holiday revealed something surprising. This holiday originally had a political agenda by attributing the success of the Great USA to the hard work of the laboring classes in society. This day of all our holidays is the time when “the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership – the American worker.” Many of our other holidays hint towards the provisions of a Provider outside ourselves. This day, in contrast, focuses upon human work and labor, with no mention of God.
Yet you, the American worker, should be proud that the government established a holiday that recognizes your toil and labor. Parse that out a bit further and no doubt we who are Christ-followers would remedy that view to better represent a biblical view of humanity and work.
At first it appears that the work of Labor Day is a work of resistance.
How so? It attempts to elevate the common person while dethroning the nobility and wealthy elite. That notion was uncomfortably too close to the ideas of Hegel and Marx, so the nation established Labor Day to be on a Monday in September to outsmart radicals who rallied for a holiday on a day in May. Yet, is this all there was to the story?
Lest we forget, Labor Day, “originated during one of American labor history’s most dismal chapters.”
This was the time when the “average American worked 12-hour days and seven-day weeks in order to eke out a basic living.”
And when the most vulnerable children, as young as five or six, barely out of toddlerhood, were “toil[ing] in mills, factories and mines across the country, earning a fraction of their adult counterparts’ wages.”
It was a time when “[p]eople of all ages, particularly the very poor and recent immigrants, often faced extremely unsafe working conditions, with insufficient access to fresh air, sanitary facilities and breaks.”
What really motivated the establishment of Labor’s Day?
Understandably, the extreme and unhealthy working environments led to revolts and work strikes which destabilized the progress of production and caused immense financial losses to the government and the wealthy factory financiers.
Was it an “attempt to repair ties with American workers?” Or, was it just another attempt to mollify the masses to get back to what they were meant for: laboring for the wealthy?
Lessons from Scriptures
It was a time much like that which the Hebrew people faced while enslaved in Egypt. When a workforce, upon which a nation relies goes rogue, the military is called upon to put everyone back in their place.
It was a time not unlike that facing those living under the Roman empire – the majority of society laboring hours on end to eke out an existence while filling the pockets of the wealthy of Rome and the religious and Temple leaders in Jerusalem.
Mary knew! No doubt, like the Israelites enslaved in Egypt, she had been crying out to be saved from the Empire that enslaved. Little did she know how she would enter into the redemption story. Her words are recorded in the gospel of Luke 2 and they reveal she bore and birthed Jesus during a tumultuous time in history.
I wonder how often she may have quoted from the Hebrew scriptures when rocking him to sleep? When answering his questions about the injustices he observed as a child? Perhaps she helped him memorize the very revolutionary words he spoke out at that synagogue in Nazareth.
Luke records Jesus’s words read from the scroll of Isaiah in Nazareth on the Sabbath day:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Perhaps we’ve learned a thing or two from the book of Exodus. When God hears the cry of oppressed people God moves! Could the story of Exodus have been changed? If Pharaoh had – after hearing the cries of his workforce- responded compassionately could life and labor have improved for the Israelites and all other captives in that empire?
If the temple leaders – after hearing the cries of the people and warnings from Jesus – responded in repentance, would life and labor have improved? That’s something to ponder for another time.
The lesson learned is that when an Empire closes its ears to the cries of her people, when it closes its eyes to her poor and her vulnerable members, the Exodus narrative and history as well, reveals that a time of reckoning is around the corner.
- History of Labor Day
- Luke 1:46-55
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