Transcription
So, I'm I'm giving everyone a warning in advance. This talk tonight is going to be a downer. I'm going to dig a big hole. I'm going to push us all into it. And the other speakers are going to have to try to dig you out. I will try to help a little bit tomorrow also to dig us out, but hopefully by the time we're done, we'll all be dug out. Otherwise, I will have really messed this up.
So, um And the the reason it's going to be a downer is uh what I'm going to talk about tonight is I'm going to kind of try and define and discuss the origins of a problem that we have. And that's a problem related to work. Because we've all been taught especially as men that one of the places from which we're supposed to derive our sense of identity our sense of who we are our sense of value of ourselves is our work. Is what we do, our vocation, our career. Not only have men been taught this, but women have been brought in on the action. We'll be talking about that more later. But we've been taught this. And there is a real fundamental problem when we look around these days at what kind of work is available to us. Whether there is even enough of the right kind of work available to us for us to be able to accomplish the things that work was supposed to accomplish. And whether once we found a job that lets us do things like provide for our family and these sort of things, we're also going to be able to derive any kind of sense of fulfillment from it as a human being.
So, there's this crisis. And we don't really know why. We realize things have changed. They've changed relatively recently because we can look at our parents generation and our grandparents generations and see that things seem to have been different and that's why we were taught what we were taught. But now it's not the same. So, tonight is going to be an attempted diagnosis.
So, I'm going to start by doing a little survey of what the scriptures tell us about work. Where it comes from. How it's supposed to function in our lives. Then I'm going to talk a little bit about some things that the church fathers say about work. And then I'm going to describe how we ended up where we are today. And I think by the time that's done we'll see this great contrast between work as our society sees it and work as it's envisioned by the scriptures and the fathers. That's where this is going. That's why it's going to be a bummer.
So, we have to begin in talking about work in Genesis chapter 2 and chapter 3. When Adam is created. When Adam is created he is created to do a certain kind of work. The beginning of the first chapter of Genesis Genesis chapter 1 verse 2 we're presented with these two problems as God creates the world. God begins to create the world and the world and the way it's translated in the King James is without form and void. In Hebrew it's tohu va bohu, which rhymes and sounds funny. But that's It means roughly that. Right? It means shapeless, chaotic, out of order on the one hand and empty on the other. And so then God over the six days of creation in Genesis chapter 1, right? He works and he fixes those problems. On the first three days he puts things in order. Separates light from darkness. He separates the sky and the sea. He separates the sea and the dry land. He puts these things in order. The second set of three days, he fills each of those spaces with life, so they're not empty anymore. So to the light he adds the sun, to the darkness he adds the moon and the stars. To the sky, he adds the birds of the air. To the sea, he adds the fish and the things that swim in it. And then finally on the sixth day to the dry land, he adds animals and then humans. And when he creates humanity, when he creates Adam, he gives him a commandment. People tend to think, "Oh, well the one commandment Adam had was don't eat from that one tree." But you're not paying attention when you read Genesis. The commandment he's given is to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it. And the word translated subdue there is a word that when it's used in other places in the Hebrew Bible means to capture a city. To go in and take possession of something. And so the commandments that Adam is given are to continue what God has already been doing in creation. To continue to put the world in order. To continue to fill it with life. God planted a garden in Genesis chapter 2, and we're told he plants it in a particular place. Meaning the whole world wasn't paradise yet. That was the promise. Was that the whole world would become paradise. And so part of Adam's job is to turn the world into a garden, because a garden is this perfect balance. A garden is orderly. Everything is in its proper place. Everything is being cultivated. But it's ordered in such a way that it brings forth life. You can have life without order. We call it a bayou in Louisiana. Right? And it's chaos, and it's dangerous. But it's full of living things. You could also have a parking lot. Which is very nice and orderly, and empty. In between you have a garden. So this is this is Adam's task that he's given. And he sets about to do it. This is what happens in Genesis 2. This is what Adam is doing when he's naming the animals. By the animals names, he's ordering them. He's describing them. He's defining them. He's ruling over them. But then there's a problem cuz his other job is to fill the world with life. And he's all alone. A lot of times we read Genesis 2 and we read, "Oh, it's not good that a man is alone on the earth." And we're like, "Oh, he was lonely." Right? He wasn't lonely. God was with him. Right? God, the angels. Right? Adam wasn't It's not that he was lonely. It's that there were no other humans. Right? There were no other humans, so he couldn't accomplish what God had asked him to do. And so woman is created from his side. And the command is reiterated, be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth. Right? Fill it with life.
When Adam and Eve get expelled from paradise, that commandment doesn't get vetoed. But when we read what God says to them before they're expelled from paradise, we see that something has changed. So when he talks to Adam, he says, "You're still going to work the ground. You're still going to be a gardener. You're still going to be a farmer. You're still going to be working this by the sweat of your brow. Now it's going to be difficult. Now it's going to be hard work to do this." And he says to the woman, "You are still going to be part of filling this world with life. It's been granted to you to give birth to children. But it's going to be painful. It's going to be difficult. And the relationship between you and your husband is going to be a struggle. Right? Instead of being orderly and always loving. Now it becomes hard work. And so from this point forward Adam is called to take his labor, his work, his efforts, his energies and unite them to God's, to what God is doing in the world. This is something that came naturally in paradise. But now outside of paradise it doesn't necessarily come naturally. And in fact it's hard to do. And Adam will fail to do it.
When we get into Genesis 4 though, things get much worse. Right? Cuz while Adam was out there farming, Eve was at home raising Cain. Which is great chicken, but he was not a great guy. Um and Cain, as we know, murders his brother Abel. And God comes to him and he pronounces a curse upon him that's similar but not the same as what he said to his father Adam. Right? He told Adam, "Cursed is the ground because of you. And therefore you will face this difficulty." He says to Cain, "You are cursed from the ground. You are separated from it. He says, "It will not bring forth fruit for you. You will not be able to bring food out of the earth." Cain's sin is that much more severe. And so what does Cain have to do? He goes and he builds the first city. Because how is he going to live now? If he can't grow food to feed himself, he's going to have to barter for it. He's going to have to make war and steal it. He's going to have to engage in everything that goes on within urban life to get it. If you want to read more about this dichotomy between urban life and rural life in Genesis, Saint Augustine wrote about it for books and books and books. It's called the City of God. Making talking about this split. Because this continues through through Genesis.
When we get to Abraham, Abraham and his nephew Lot, they're both prospering. Meaning they both have lots of flocks and herds. They get to the point where they're overgrazing the land. And so Abram says to Lot, his nephew, "Okay, we need to go our separate ways. We're overgrazing the land." He says, "You pick where you want to go. I'll go the other direction. I'll let you pick even though you're the nephew." Lot of course says, "I want to go live by those cool cities, Sodom and Gomorrah." Right? We know what happens after that. And Abram says, "Good. I'll go live in the pasture lands." And he goes and lives as a nomad. Right? While Lot heads for the city. And as we see Lot through the rest of Genesis, first he's living near Sodom, then he's outside the gates of Sodom, then all of a sudden he's living in the city. And he's got his daughters engaged to two men who live there. So, there's this sort of slippery slope. And so, there are two very different kinds of work represented here, of things that we would call work. All right. One of which is the work of the hands. One of which is not. One of which is not producing things, adding value to the world, combining one one's efforts with what God is doing in the world to put things in order and fill them with life. All right. One is one is not. And the one that is not related to God, if you're talking about wealth generation, probably does better.
>> [clears throat] >> All right. And then, the other one is presented as as pleasing to God. And so, this becomes a theme through the whole Old Testament. Where we have the nomadic life presented as the greatest. If you can't do this, then agrarian life. Then, living in one place and farming. But there's a danger there. And God starts talking about it already in Deuteronomy as the people of Israel are getting ready to go into the land of Canaan. God says to them, "You've been living as nomads out here in the desert, wandering for 40 years." And God had been taking care of them. But he says, "Once you go into the land and you build your farms and you have your crops coming in every year and you're working your farm, you're going to forget about God. You're going to start thinking, 'Oh, these crops are my crops that the ground has brought forth because of my ingenuity and my hard work. And will no longer be seen as I am working with God to bring forth life. Right? I had to put this land in order to add my labor to God's creation to produce this, but I did this. I made this. This is mine. That danger is already there. This is why in a number of the feasts that we see in the Old Testament, God keeps making them leave places and travel to other places. You're going to go and live in tents for a while. You're all going to go to Jerusalem. You're all going to go right? To uproot them. Right? And try to prevent this danger from taking place.
By the time we get to the New Testament, there are some new phenomena because at this point, most of the people that for example St. Paul is writing to in his epistles are living in cities. Most of his epistles are named after cities that he's writing to. And so, these are early Christian communities that have sort of budded out of the local Jewish community and now had non-Jewish Christians come in to form this larger Christian church, this Christian community in the city. They're living in a city, but they're facing these unique challenges now. Because the work that they did, the work by which they supported themselves and their families, that provided them their identity, is all tied up in the pagan life, the pagan cycles of that city. So, the craft and trade guilds of the Roman Empire sacrificed to the gods all the time at their gatherings. Just one example. Meaning St. Paul is going to have to say, "Well, as a Christian you can't really take part in that trade guild anymore." And a new set of distinctions are going to have to be made. How does a Christian live in a city? Cuz you could read the Old Testament and just get the idea, "Oh, I probably shouldn't live in a city. I should go." Right? But there are now people for whom that's not necessarily an option. This is important for us. This is important for us. This is a tease as to how we're going to start digging out of the hole I'm digging right now. Right? Is that you can end up in a situation where the easy answer doesn't apply, but that doesn't mean there's no answer.
But so, St. Paul, for example, in uh 1 Thessalonians chapter 4 verse 11 which is one of his earliest letters, one of his earliest epistles. Some people think the earliest, I think it's probably the second one. But he sums up what we should aspire to in life by saying, "Aspire to live quietly and to mind your own affairs and to work with your hands as we instructed you." This isn't really what we aspire to in the modern world. Right? We don't aspire to live quietly. We aspire to be famous. We don't aspire to mind our own affairs. We aspire to be involved in everyone's affairs. And we don't aspire to work with our hands. If anything, we aspire to not have to work. Right? If we could collect money for doing nothing, that would be perfect, right? Just get a check coming in the mail every month that you don't have to do anything. But that's not what Paul says we should aspire to, what our goal should be, what our dream should be. Our dream life, according to St. Paul, right? Should be to live quietly, mind our own affairs, and work with our hands.
In Ephesians 4:28, in talking about people who had uh surely say problematic lines of work before they became Christians, um including thieves and other ne'er-do-wells, right? St. Paul says, "Let him labor doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need." Right? This is how to fix that problem. What you've been doing is wrong. Do honest labor with work of your hands. Then you'll be able to provide for those in need instead of taking from them. Right? So far this all sounds kind of good, right? Like, you know, if we interpret work of our hands very broadly. It's about to get worse. I'm I warned you it was going to turn into a downer.
So, uh in his sermons on St. Matthew's Gospel, uh St. John Chrysostom goes after certain kinds of work. You've probably never heard these quotes before. They're very unpopular. In contemporary America, I say this I won't name any names, but I once posted one of these quotes I'm about to read you on a social media site before I abandoned social media and had another priest's wife call me a communist. >> [laughter] >> There you I was literally I like I attributed it. I said all I posted was the quote, but okay. So, these are from St. These are all from his sermons on on Matthew. If a poor man comes to you asking for bread, there is no end of complaints and reproaches and charges of idleness. You upbraid him, insult him, jeer at him. You fail to realize that you too are idle and yet God grants you gifts. Then don't tell me that you actually work hard. If you call earning money, making business deals, and taking care of your possessions work, I say no, this is not work. But alms, prayers, the protection of the injured and the like, these are genuine work. You charge the poor with idleness, I charge you with corrupt behavior. He goes on a little after that to quote St. Paul in the original context saying the one who does not work shall not eat. We tend to think, oh, that's talking about lazy bums. Shouldn't get food. No, no, no, no, no. In the original context, St. Paul was talking about rich people who were coming to the Eucharistic meal early cuz they didn't have to work. And eating all the food. And so when the workmen and the slaves who are members of the Christian community got there, there was nothing left. And these other people had gotten drunk. And so St. John Chrysostom quotes it exactly that way. But even merchants, if they are not careful, gather much evil from this. I.e. their profession. For they add to their rightful labor the injustice that comes from buying and selling. And awful often pile oaths and perjury and lies onto their greed. And they care only for earthly things. They do everything they can to gain money, while they do not try very hard to give to those in need, since what they want is constantly to increase their property. What can one say about the mocking, the insults, the interest, the exchanges, the smell of trade, the shameless bargaining? St. John has a basic problem with merchants. Right? Because he points out something is worth what you paid for it when you bought it. So if you turn around and tell someone else it's worth more than that, you are lying according to St. John. And extracting money from that other person through your falsehood. I know it's getting dire. Right? I warned you. I gave a disclaimer at the beginning. He goes on about merchants. This means that the merchant can never or almost never please God. Therefore, no Christian should be a merchant. Or if he wishes to be a merchant, let him be thrown out of the church according to the saying of the prophet. Because I have not known bargaining, I will enter into the kingdom of heaven. He who buys and sells cannot be free of lies and perjury. For it is necessary that one of the merchants buying is not worth its price while the other swear that the thing he is selling is worth more than the sale price. Nor is the property of merchants stable. It is either destroyed while the merchant is still alive or it is dissipated by bad heirs or it is inherited by outsiders and enemies. Nothing that is collected evilly can come to any good.
Yeah. And where this is kind of going as I now start to talk about our recent history is that we're all kind of merchants now. We're all kind of hustling to try to make the money we need to provide for ourselves.
So historically right, historically much earlier in our history as humans there were communities, right? There were tribes, there were clans, there were villages. Right? And in order for that village for that group of people to survive, there were things that had to be done. Food had to be gathered, hunted, grown when we get into the agrarian period. Right? Things needed to be mended, shelter needed to be provided on and on this list of things. And this work was divided up among the people. Right? Everyone did whatever it was that they were best able to contribute. Right? And then either everything got done and that people group thrived and survived or everything didn't get done and they weren't around very long. It was a harsh world. But that was sort of the division of labor. And so, the person who went and did that work, right, not only were they doing something that they were skilled at, talented at, suited for, but they knew that what they were doing was keeping not only their family, but their extended family, their whole village, their whole community alive and thriving. There was a deep sense of meaning and purpose there in that labor. Men in particular were the ones who left the village, left the community, right, to go out and what do what needed to be done outside. Right? Well, women took care of what needed to be taken care of within the community, the village. Right? And the men went out. That was paralleled once we get to the agrarian period, men went out and worked the farm. Women cared for everything around the house. They weren't housewives. They were doing a lot of work, too. It was just a different kind of work. Right? When you're on a farm, everyone works. Right? But it's the different kinds of work that different people are doing. And it's the whole family doing what they're suited to and able to do.
Then we move into an era where craftsmanship emerges. Where people are making things. Making things with their hands, working with their hands, making furniture. Right? Making tents, like St. Paul did. Right? Making physical things that you can hold and show and have the satisfaction of this is the thing that I made. Right? I took the creation that God has given me, I put my labor into it, and we've produced this, and this is how this has helped and served my family, my community, the people around me. Right? And again, there's the sense of dignity and purpose. Right? In working with God to produce these things.
Then things get a little askew in the Middle Ages, particularly in the West, cuz we enter into feudalism. And feudalism is where bargaining works its way into everyone's life. Because what feudalism really is is essentially a bargain between what is essentially a warlord. Right? And the people who work the land and farm the land to provide for things. Which is you give me a cut of your food. I will protect you, if we're dealing with a nice warlord. Uh I will protect you from myself if we're dealing with a not so nice. Right? It's sort of like the mob. They come in and they say, "You got a lot of nice stuff here. Be a shame if something happened to it." Make sure that doesn't happen.
Then we move into the industrial era in the world. Now it's factories making things. And now people are going and working for a wage in a factory, but still the factory is producing something. Right? The factory is doing something. And you get factory cities and factory towns. Right? Where the whole community is working together, not now dividing labor among here's all the things we need to do for our community, but our community is going to produce textiles and the neighboring community is going to produce something else. And this other city is going to produce something else, and together we will produce all of these things that we all need. Right? And so again we're playing a part. We're getting more modern now. Let's talk briefly about Henry Ford. Not any of the many bad things we could say about Henry Ford. I'm just talking about the car industry. Um Outside the car industry, he was not a nice guy. And even in the car industry, he was not always a nice guy. But he creates the assembly line. That's the important part here. Right? He creates the assembly line that again transforms work. But if you're living in Detroit in the 1950s and you're working at an auto factory, you may be the guy who just turns one bolt on every car that comes down the line. But you still have a car rolling out of the front of the factory, one after another, and you could say I was part of that. Right? I helped make that. Or you work at the canning plant. Right? And you see the trucks going out, bringing the food to people, and you could say I was I was part of that. I was part of that. And on the side, right? In addition to you having that dignity and having something to point to that you contributed, you're also able to have your own car and a house and provide for your family and raise your family, which was another source of dignity that that work had.
But now we're in another stage. Now we're in another stage. Those factory towns are desolate in the Midwest if you've driven through one recently. So are the coal towns, the steel towns. Right? Those are done. And what's happened in the economy that surrounds us is it's been financialized, meaning people are just making money from money, not from producing anything into the world or doing anything. It's just they take money and use it to make more money. All right. And it's become not a question of I'm going to have a career which will give me work that has dignity and purpose to it. Maybe even that I can see in some way this is me working with God to produce things. I mean we're getting tenuous right? When you're making salad shooters at a factory, right? But now we're even past that. Right? Instead of that it's just I have bills. I have to find a way to pay them. I have to find a way to get money. And so it's start a YouTube channel, sell your blood plasma drive Uber deliver McDonald's to people. Have 12 of these different things that you're running around doing. Right? None of which is particularly fulfilling. None of which is particularly dignified. None of which gives you something to point at and say I worked with God to create this. This thing is of benefit in the world. Right? And not even really able to provide for us barely able to provide for ourselves. Right? All the people younger people I talk to even in my own family. Like the idea of owning a house is ridiculous. The idea that they would ever own one. They're hoping they manage to get financially secure enough to get married. Outside chance they might be able to afford to have a kid. That's how we think about children now. This is luxury items that some of us can afford. And heaven help a woman who dares to have a child while poor. And the things she gets called. And so we're into this very bad place. At best, if we have a good job by and by that we mean it pays us a lot of money, we're usually involved in somewhere in that financialization where what you've produced at the end of day is like a spreadsheet. Or you've moved some money around. Or you've been to a bunch of meetings about something to promote synergy, not with God, but with something else. Unknown. Right? And so we're kind of in dire straits. We're kind of all merchants now. We're kind of all just hustling to try and get some money. And it's not even just us men anymore. Because there was this There was this big bamboozle that happened in the 1960s where it was sold to women, "Hey, you can go out and have a career, too. You can be fulfilled, too." And so the workforce nearly doubled and wages went down. And now couples all have to both work to try and afford their rent. This, by the way, is about to go a step further. I don't know if you pay attention to the news. You probably shouldn't. It will just depress you. But states all over the country are repealing child labor laws because high schoolers have a right to work. And so it won't be long before that further depresses wages and we're going to have families where everybody over 15 is going to be working. With the kids in addition to trying to go to school. To all try to cobble together enough money for this family to live.
And so the reason we're seeing these problems, the reason there isn't this fulfillment is pretty easily diagnosable when we read the scriptures and read the fathers. They warned us. They said the things you're doing aren't the things that God intended work to be. They aren't those things. As I said earlier, there's not though an easy solution. I wish there was. I wish I could just now say, "But here's what you do. Homesteading, right? Like let's go move to the woods and plant a garden and grow your own food. It'll be perfect, right? Like if you could do that, cool, man, but most of us can't. Right? Most of us can't do that. That's not an option. We're stuck with the 12 side hustles trying to pay our bills.
But what I and the other speakers are going to try to present to you is a way that we can live in the world we live in, which is a very inhuman world. Right? It's a world that is not trying to work together with God to do anything. Quite the opposite. Right? But there is a way to live in this world, even as bad as it's gotten, right? In this respect. Even as bleak as it is. And still work with God in the world to produce good, to start turning the world into a garden, to make good on what Adam was called to do. There are ways to do this. And they're not They don't require you to win the Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes, which I have won twice. I'm not joking. Once I won $10. The second time it was the princely sum of $5, which I think was like my share of some prize that 80,000 people won, but um doesn't require that. Doesn't require you to suddenly become independently wealthy. Doesn't require uh a revolution. Political revolution. Doesn't require the overhaul of the American economy. Doesn't require that. There's a way to live even within this. And that's a lot of what we're going to be talking about. It's how to live even within society the way it is in a way that will produce some better some better results. And for this talk, the only part of that I'm going to say is that St. Paul gives us part of that model when he talks to people living in pagan Roman cities about how to live there and still serve God. And it has a lot to do with the Christian communities that they were a part of. So, those are theses about where at least my talk will go.