Pentecost 20 / Industrial Sunday (Labour Sunday)
Everyone that calls upon the Lord will be saved. That’s the promise of all four of our readings this morning. It is, I hope you’ll agree, a theme so recurrent throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures that it is a worthy candidate for being thought of as a ‘Major Theme of Our Faith’.
What do you think it means in practice?
There’s argument about what Joel was talking about, as you may imagine for a document that was compiled anywhere between 24 and 27 centuries ago. Perhaps Joel was speaking about deliverance from the devastating economic consequences of a real locust plague. Or perhaps he was writing about political rescue and recovery from the effects of a military invasion – or both. In any case, Joel certainly goes on to elevate his message to one of salvation from death on “the day of the Lord”.
In Joel’s estimation, one of the truths about this mercy is that it will be extraordinary. Another is that although God’s mercy to those that call out may have an impact in the reality of their everyday lives, it will also have an impact on eternal concerns that transcend their day-to-day struggles – an impact on the Day of the Lord.
The psalmist tells us plainly that what we can expect deliverance from are the consequences of our sin and transgressions. And like Joel, the divine goodness we are assured of is extraordinarily generous – not a mere reprieve or a debt written off, but something full of abundance and excess.
Paul’s message from prison to Timothy is much more circumspect, but just as triumphant. He writes that he is assured of deliverance from jail and his death sentence – but we are left understanding that he doesn’t mean that he will literally be released from jail or given a stay of execution. Rather, he tells Timothy that he has sure faith that his death will not be the end and that everything is in God’s hands. This is another take on the impact of God’s mercy which places it well beyond the immediate, yet, it would seem, with power to impact on the here-and-now of Paul’s thoughts and feelings and sense of hope.
The story Luke records from Jesus is like the psalm in that it focuses on deliverance from sin and its consequences. But in this text, rather than reaching out into real-world events or forward to the future of the Kingdom to come, this redemption reaches inward. Deep inside to our secret self that no-one sees but God and – when we are able to be at our most honest, ourselves.
The message from all four of these readings was so important to the early Christians that Paul quotes the Joel passage in this way in his letter to the Romans: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved”.
Where do you place your faith, in terms of this repeated promise of God’s deliverance to those that call out? Perhaps, like Paul, your faith is that God will save you, but in the future, albeit a future that gives hope and meaning to the present. Perhaps your faith is in Dr Luther King’s ‘long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice’? Or on an eternal heavenly existence after this all-to-brief sojourn in earth’s shadowed vales? Perhaps your hope is in some kind of eventual incorporation back into the Great All-in-All? Or perhaps it is on leaving loving strands within the great weave of life that, although they are small and will eventually be forgotten, will remain a permanent part of the human story because they were real?
These hopes in things to come are all good. Nevertheless, humans are embodied and bodies exist in the here-and-now. Where do you put your faith right now in relation to this repeated biblical promised of God’s rescue?
To do so is to be daring, to stretch our faith, and to run directly counter to the things our rationalist culture and life’s repeated disappointments seem to teach us.
Our four readings today are part of a tradition that repeatedly, stubbornly insists that God will provide what we need, and more than this, that God accepts us, and in ways that go against what society’s prevailing messages have conditioned us to believe and expect.
Will you be saved from disease and infirmity? Maybe not.
Will you be saved from homelessness and times of profound economic hardship? Maybe not.
Will you be saved from profound anxiety and self-doubt? Maybe not.
Will you be saved from a time of political crisis, even war? Maybe not.
Will you be saved from argument and the animosity of others, even with your family and friends? Maybe not.
Will you be saved from being judged and stigmatised by society? Almost certainly not!
Will you be saved from dying? Maybe, at some future moment when death looms large, but certainly not in the end.
But we are saved from disconnection from the divine. We are saved from being alone, and from dying only to vanish without a trace. We are saved from working alone, from labouring solely from our own stores of energy, and from toiling for no purpose. And we are saved (amazing grace!) from having to justify ourselves before God.
So can we place our faith in – can we believe in and ‘be-love in’ – these claims of Joel, the psalmist, Paul, and Jesus’ wretched tax collector, that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved? Even me. Even in this situation.
If we can hold on to this surety, may I offer a gentle reminder that even our capacity to hold on will be a gift from God. When we try to stump up with such faith and find ourselves desperately impoverished, even then God gives us what we need.
For Methodists, there’s something in our heritage that inevitably results from those moments when we, like John Wesley at the Aldersgate meeting, do find ourselves discovering that kind of faith within us. It is as a direct result of these moments that we commit ourselves again and again to labouring for God’s Commonwealth – the sacred mahi to make the Earth “as it is in heaven”.
It’s Labour Sunday today, or Industrial Sunday as it is also known. This tradition is one of the ways our community of faith reminds itself of the channels in which our forebears chose to set flowing their responses to God’s mercy.
On this day, we remember that Te Hahi Weteriana o Aotearoa says that our collective reaction to the grace of God, and our personal reaction, should be guided by these Methodist Social Principles:
- The human person is sacred and all people are of equal value in the sight of God.
- Adequate opportunities of employment should be provided for all those willing and able to work, and reasonable standards of living for those, who because of age, disability or other reasons outside of their control, are not able to work.
- Employers and employees should cooperate for benefit of the community.
- Everyone has a duty to render conscientious service and deplore scamped work (careless and poor-quality working). Sweated labour (unfair and unhealthy pressure on workers) and consumer exploitation are condemned.
- Everyone has the right to a just return for services rendered, the right to good housing, and to a healthy environment in which to live.
- The world’s physical resources are to be wisely used and carefully conserved.
- The root causes of poverty, unemployment and war must be removed.
- Social, employment and industrial reforms must be promoted by lawful means.
- Everyone has the right to freedom of conscience, constitutional liberty, secrecy of the ballot and access to the Courts.
- Christian influence in politics and civic affairs should be promoted.
- We share a conviction that the Gospel of Jesus Christ contains messages that will effectively promote the regeneration and reconstruction of society.
These are our social principles. Our response to everyone being saved who calls on the name of the Lord flows through those channels into the world.
Faced with the enormous injustices so clearly evident around us, it is good to remind ourselves that not only do we start right where we are, right where God has placed us, but we start with ourselves.
Friends, everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. So first, let us call on the name of the Lord.
On this Labour Sunday, I pray that we may be given the grace we need to repent, turn away from the ways we’ve been doing things if the Spirit of God leads us to do so, and seek the Lord’s mercy. Because it is me, it’s me, it’s me O Lord, that is standing in the need of such prayer.
On this Labour Sunday, I pray that we may be granted the gift of faith to live an increasingly saved, progressively redeemed, more rescued & more restored life as individuals – and as a community of faith at Durham Street.
On this Labour Sunday, I pray that we may call on the name of the Lord, and in response to God’s saving grace, pour out the aroha that arises within us in a principled way, just as our Methodist forerunners did.
Amen