A sermon preached at Putnam United Presbyterian Church
Labor Day 2023
Texts: Isaiah 32:1–8; Luke 1:46–55
This holiday weekend holds a lot of personal meaning for me, and I feel it acutely these days. My dad just passed away last year. My dad was a Pennsylvania coal miner, and although he stopped working in the mines due to injury when I was still a boy—or maybe because of that traumatic moment in my family’s life—I have always associated Labor Day with my father. Too many of us treat Labor Day now as just another federal holiday, just another three-day weekend, one more chance to grill some hot dogs before the summer is over and schools begin in earnest. But our celebration of labor and the labor movement in this country should be much more profound. Labor Day is a day set aside to celebrate the American worker, all people whose work maintains this country’s productivity and vitality, but especially those who do the hard work, the physical work, the essential work few people want to do but must be done, the work that is never glamorous and seldom celebrated. Labor Day should be a day to honor that American worker.
It’s also a moment for us to reflect on the history of the labor movement and give thanks for the benefits from that struggle that we now take for granted. In order to reflect on that history, though, we have to know it, which fewer and fewer of us do. We need to remember collectively the brutalizing working conditions in coal mines, steel mills, and factories 100 years or so ago, and remember the ways that wealthy industry barons controlled every aspect of their workers’ lives, on and off the job. We need to revisit the ways industrialists and government leaders actually conspired to keep laborers from organizing, often violently. We need to remember the years it took for major industries in this country to unionize and for workers to get their seat at the negotiating table. Most of all, we need to give thanks for the employment protections that those negotiations yielded, benefits many of us take for granted: a minimum wage, a reasonable work week, restrictions on child labor, overtime pay, health benefits, disability protections, and more.
That history, and the improvements to millions of lives it achieved, is the real meaning of Labor Day. It’s a personal history to me. I have vague recollection of strike-talk in our household in the 1970s. I have better memories of my dad scooting off to union meetings on select Sunday afternoons, where he served as secretary of his local long after his back injury ended his active coal career. I also remember the impact of that injury on our home life—the numerous surgeries, the grimaces on the face of a man struggling to accept that he couldn’t be the physical force he once was, the penny pinching that was required with a reduced income, the disability checks that were our lifeline. More broadly, I remember the monthly magazines from the United Mine Workers Association that would arrive at out house, with their gripping black-and-white photos of dirty and exhausted miners, testifying to the union’s advocacy on behalf of its members, and giving me a glimpse of the hard life my parents insisted would not be my future. I sit with these memories regularly, in part because dad’s miner helmet sits in my office at Middlebury College. I sit with them more poignantly these days, in these first years without dad around. And I reflect on them annually each Labor Day weekend.
This weekend is important to me personally. And I think it ought to be important to all of us as Christians. For the themes of justice and fairness and concern for the well being of working members of our society are very similar to the themes that the prophetic tradition in the Bible hit time and again. This is a day to emphasize the importance of social justice and the common good, just as the prophets did.
The prophet Isaiah is hitting these themes in the passage we heard this morning. He begins with talking about the rule of a good king, but since we live in a society that does not have royalty, we can read him instead to be talking about a good and moral government. And how does he describe a good government? It is one in which leaders govern with righteousness, integrity, and justice. It is one that provides its people protection from the harsh realities of life—wind, storms, and drought in the prophet’s day, perhaps hunger, homelessness, and sickness in ours. According to Isaiah, a good society is one in which fools are not indulged as nobility, villainous personalities are seen for what they are, and the poor and hungry are provided for rather than ignored. A good society is one in which wisdom and thoughtfulness are honored, and the common good is the concern of citizens and leaders alike.
This is Isaiah’s vision of a good society, and it bears a striking similarity to the vision shared by the other prophet from whom we have heard today, Mary, the mother of Jesus. Today’s Gospel lesson is often called the Magnificat, and it is the song Mary purportedly sang when she met with her cousin Elizabeth to celebrate both women’s world-changing pregnancies. We usually read the Magnificat during Advent, treating it as if it is a sentimental song of motherly expectation. It is not. It is a prophet’s mantra. It reads just like the utterances of those prophets like Isaiah in the Old Testament. Mary sings out that her soul magnifies the Lord and that she is rejoicing from the depths of her spirit, but not just because she’s going to have a baby, but because the child she was carrying signaled God’s work in the world on behalf of those who cry out to God. She sings because the child she was carrying signaled that God is on the side of the hungry and the powerless, that God was promising to respond to the injustices perpetuated by the rich and powerful in kind. She sings to a God who loves justice and mercy, and she sings because she knows she has been called to play a decisive role in the Kingdom that her baby, the Messiah, will usher into the world. Mary is a prophet too, one who dreams of a world in which justice and right reign.
A world of justice and right. A society in which people’s basic needs are met and fairness is the order of the day. A society in which people are treated as people, not cogs in corporate machines meant to fatten the pockets of the one-percenters who run them. This is the vision of the prophets. It also was the endgame for the movements we celebrate on Labor Day. All those movements for workers’ rights in the last century, and those who struggle for the rights of employees in today’s economy, are aiming for values we Christians celebrate in our religious tradition—justice, fairness, dignity, and meeting the needs of people.
Justice, fairness, and the common good are Christian convictions as well as social values. Labor Day should not just be a secular holiday but arguably a Christian holy day, too.
My point is this: there is a long precedent in the Christian tradition for advocating for a just society and the well-being of working families as a matter of faith, inspired by the Bible, specifically by the vision of the prophets. Given that a just society and the well-being of working families is the original intent of Labor Day, I think we Christians should give special attention to this day. Too many of us treat Labor Day as just one last mini-vacation before summer is over. There certainly is nothing wrong with us getting some rest from our own labors on Labor Day weekend. But in the midst of all of the hot dogs and mattress sales, perhaps we can spend some time this weekend thinking about those for whom Labor Day was set aside. With all due respect to the “job creators” in this country, it is the working class that drives our collective well-being. This holiday ought to prompt us to recommit to the good of the American worker.
And as Christians committed to the biblical idea of a just society, I think we should be leading the renewal of the Labor Day pledge to a better society. Justice, fairness, and the common good are Christian convictions as well as social values. Labor Day should not just be a secular holiday but arguably a Christian holy day too. I like to say that Labor Day is the Christian Day-of-the-Prophets, the day on which we honor the vision of God’s reign we have from those biblical visionaries—
like Isaiah, and his picture of a society where integrity and fairness reign;
like Mary, who sang of a savior to lift up the lowly and fill the hungry;
like Amos, who dreamed of a world in which justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
We Christians should make Labor Day a holy day in the church, a day when we recommit to the Christ who came to proclaim good news to the poor and release to the captives. Labor Day should be for us Christians the renewal of our pledge to a just and fair world, especially for those whose backs carry the common good of us all. Amen.
James Calvin Davis 