We learn very early that our efforts are often rewarded.
We recognize a smile when we are about four months old. We learn to smile back at the person who smiles at us and we are rewarded with laughter and a hug. We crawl and there are oohs and ahs. Walking means hugs and clapping and possibly rewarding ourselves with an object from the newly-discovered coffee table.
Yes, we learn early that our efforts are often rewarded.
When we are playing outside on the playground at recess or in the neighborhood, there always came a time when someone suggested a game that required teams. Instinctively we want to be picked, some of us holler, “Pick me, pick me, I want to be first.” Others of us suffer a flash of childhood anxiety, wanting to “be worthy of being picked,” to be one that both leaders wanted. Others of us might have suffered anxiety because we knew we wouldn’t be picked first, but hopeful that something in us was worthy of being “team players.”
Whatever our response, we learn we have to do something to be a team player. We either have to be gifted in sports and games, or we have to have a friendly personality so others will want our good humor on the team, or if we lack ability and personality, we have to try extra hard to bring something of “value” to the team. However it happens, we learn early that it takes effort to be rewarded.
As we grow up, the lesson becomes internalized. We learn it well. Good grades, good behavior, rewards at school. Good grades, good behavior, even helpfulness around the house earns rewards from our parents—including a sense of worthiness.
Our culture is one of effort and reward – hard work, no fooling around, no time wasted is from the Puritan influence of the early settlers. We find their work ethic grounded in the Hebrew Scriptures. Most influential is Proverbs; it has a lot to say about hard work.
At Bible.org there is an entire study series on “Work” by theologian Greg Herrick. Most of the scriptural foundation for his study is from the Old Testament. He quotes from Proverbs:
“… a person should work hard because. . . Working hard is better than working in a lazy manner.”
“All hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty…”
“… As time passes, a person who has worked wisely and diligently will find themselves rewarded...”
Herrick could be a Congregational preacher from the seventeenth or eighteenth century writing a sermon on “The Puritan Work Ethic.”
We are a nation of workers, and while international studies show contradictory findings on “worker productivity,” no one disputes that the good old USA has one of the highest productivity rates in the world. We learned this Puritan work ethic well.
What else does internalizing this kind of work ethic do for us?
Well, it does not have anything to do with whether we are nice people or not. Nor does it ensure we will have lots of friends and loved ones. It alone does not make us rich or successful. These are determined by many others factors.
What it does do however, is give us a certain kind of attitude. We want recognition and rewards for our work. And corporations, businesses, government agencies, and even nonprofits do just that. Annual award conferences, employee of the year, annual achievement recognition, exotic trips for top marketing representatives, prizes for top sales, recognition dinners, and even the annual volunteer recognition are all part that attitude we internalize about work.
And if we do really good work and don’t get the recognition we deserve, we usually do something about it. We find another employer, we talk to the boss, we change our specialty, or any number of various ways to ensure that we’re rewarded and recognized.
Why? Because we learn very early that our efforts are rewarded, that our efforts are supposed to be rewarded.
Don’t misconstrue my words to say I am denigrating our heritage of hard work; I am not, what I am saying, is that we need to look at what our heritage means and does for us.
I read a story recently in a book of about a woman born in France in 1792. (All Saints Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time, by Robert Ellsberg, 1997)
Jeanne Jugan was born in Brittany, France, into a poor family. She was a servant and a kitchen maid. She did, however, believe that God had a special mission for her, some “larger purpose” for her life.
One of her biographers (on her website) wrote:
… Jeanne was 18 when she refused a first marriage proposal. Six years later, she asked the young sailor who renewed his request to no longer think of her. [She told her mother] “God wants me for Himself. He is keeping me for a work which is not yet known, for a work which is not yet founded,” …
When she was forty-five, she moved into an attic apartment in the town of Saint-Servan with an older woman and a teenage girl. The three women formed a prayer community and taught catechism to children and helped the poor. They supported themselves by spinning and doing laundry.
When she was forty-seven, she quit her jobs and began begging on the streets for money to help the old, homeless women in the town. Eventually, she organized a hospice to care for these abandoned women.
She asked the young priest of Saint-Servan, Father Le Pailleur, to be her spiritual director.
It turned out that Jugan was an excellent fundraiser. It wasn’t long before she purchased a building to house her charitable work. She was recognized by the French Academy and given money to support her ministry to the poor.
In 1843, only four years after she quit her “paying jobs,” Jugan and the women who joined her efforts formed a religious association. Along with vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Jeanne added a fourth vow of hospitality. They called themselves Little Sisters of the Poor.
Then something strange happened. Father Le Pailleur, her spiritual director, told her that it was God’s will that she give up leadership of the Little Sisters. Le Pailleur named one of Jugan’s associates as superior general of the group. The story is told that she remarked that he had stolen her work, but she … acquiesced…”
By 1852, nine years later, Father Le Pailleur had named himself the superior general of “Little Sisters” and had relegated Jugan to the duty of supervising the menial tasks of the new initiates of Little Sisters. She was totally secluded, hidden from the world. Le Pailleur had also, by then, rewritten the story to include himself as the founder. She died at the motherhouse, almost twenty-seven years later in obscurity. Almost no one knew she founded the “Little Sisters of the Poor.”
We turn to our Bible reading. The workers in the parable, they’re not that different from us.
They wanted to be paid for their work and rewarded for their efforts equitably. Those who came later in the day got the same pay as those who came early. No matter what time they went to work that day, they were all paid the same.
The workers, who were there all day, were indignant. It is not fair, they said, to pay us all the same. Why are you paying someone who worked an hour, the same as those of us who worked all day?
Their response was probably about the same as our response would be?
It was as inconceivable to these workers as it is for us today. Of all Jesus’ parables, this is one of the hardest to get.
But Jesus, the Mediterranean peasant, the revolutionary told an unconventional story.
Jesus turned everything upside down. He healed on the Sabbath; he ate with the poor, he walked with the beggars, and he was a friend to those on the margin of society. Jesus preached and lived the unconventional story.
Jesus wanted those listening, and I believe it is for our ears, too, to know that there is more to living and working than this single-minded pursuit of recognition and reward.
If we find ourselves living only
If we find ourselves living only to work for the rewards of work, then, according to Jesus, something is wrong with out lives. Jesus acknowledged that we needed to work, but we also need to feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and visit the prisoner.
He didn’t say,
a person should work hard because working hard is better than working in a lazy manner;
and he didn’t say,
hard work brings a profit, but mere talk leads only to poverty.
And he didn’t say,
Accumulate all the wealth you can accumulate
Work fifty and sixty hour weeks because it is good for your bank account
And he didn’t say,
Move up the corporate ladder and neglect your family
No, he does not follow the work ethic of the Hebrew Scriptures. And it leads us to question our own, sometimes obsessive, Puritan work ethic.
Jesus was shattering the societal view of working only for a reward. He challenges us to look at our personal view of “work and reward.”
And in the end of his story he brings closure by saying, and the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
We hear this several times in Jesus’ ministry, the last shall be first and the first shall be last.
There is a story in the Gospels of two disciples, brothers James and John, who asked, Jesus to choose them to sit beside him in glory—pick me, pick me—and Jesus said the same thing to them as he does in this story, whoever is great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be the one who serves all.
This brings us to questions like, “who is worthy?”
“Who will Jesus pick for his team?”
Jeanne Jugan, died in obscurity, in the motherhouse of the Little Sisters of the Poor, and no one around her knew she was the founder. Jugan knew God had a special mission for her, some “larger purpose” for her life and when Le Pailleur relegated her to the duty of supervising the menial tasks of the new initiates she did what she believed was God’s work.
What happened to this servant?
Right before she died in 1879, Pope Leo XIII officially recognized the Little Sisters of the Poor as an order. And, Jugan’s story was eventually re-discovered. In 1982, Pope John Paul II beatified Jeanne Jugan, she was declared a saint.
Are we doing the work we are called to do as Universalists, as Christians, as a religious people?
Are we serving our selves with our work or we serving others?
Are we doing the work we are called to do?
Reading
Matthew 20:1-16
A Story About Workers
1 "The kingdom of heaven is like a person who owned some land. One morning, he went out very early to hire some people to work in his vineyard. 2 The man agreed to pay the workers one coin[a] for working that day. Then he sent them into the vineyard to work.3 About nine o'clock the man went to the marketplace and saw some other people standing there, doing nothing.4 So he said to them, 'If you go and work in my vineyard, I will pay you what your work is worth.'5 So they went to work in the vineyard. The man went out again about twelve o'clock and three o'clock and did the same thing.6 About five o'clock the man went to the marketplace again and saw others standing there. He asked them, 'Why did you stand here all day doing nothing?' 7 They answered, 'No one gave us a job.' The man said to them, 'Then you can go and work in my vineyard.'
8 "At the end of the day, the owner of the vineyard said to the boss of all the workers, 'Call the workers and pay them. Start with the last people I hired and end with those I hired first.'
9 "When the workers who were hired at five o'clock came to get their pay, each received one coin. 10 When the workers who were hired first came to get their pay, they thought they would be paid more than the others. But each one of them also received one coin.11 When they got their coin, they complained to the man who owned the land.12 They said, 'Those people were hired last and worked only one hour. But you paid them the same as you paid us who worked hard all day in the hot sun.'13 But the man who owned the vineyard said to one of those workers, 'Friend, I am being fair to you. You agreed to work for one coin.14 So take your pay and go. I want to give the man who was hired last the same pay that I gave you. 15 I can do what I want with my own money. Are you jealous because I am good to those people?'
16 "So those who are last now will someday be first, and those who are first now will someday be last."