Monday Morning Quarterback

Along the lines of a Monday morning quarterback, this is a Monday morning reflection on yesterday’s sermon, only the quarterback is not an armchair fan but the man who threw the ball. If you weren’t in church yesterday — and being the Labor Day Weekend there is good chance your feet were on a sandy beach or some such holiday place — the title of my sermon was “Learning to Sit on a Stump”. As a way of observing the Sabbath, my premise was “we all need to learn to sit on stump”. I began by telling of a retired minister who some thirty years ago began his ministry during the summer months as a student pastor in rural New Hampshire. Reflecting back, he recalls jogging most mornings from his home, through the town square, to the church where he has been assigned. Each morning, he would pass a boy of about nine years old sitting on a stump. The young pastor would wave, and the boy would ever so slightly follow him with the turn of his head, a slight smile creasing his lips. Throughout the next two weeks, something of a relationship built between the two, and one morning the boy shouted to him as he scurried by, “You, I’m going to teach you how to sit on a stump.” Looking back, the old preacher wishes he had taken the boy up on his offer.

The Sabbath, I noted, was a commandment, one given to us by God. No longer slaves, we are God’s children and He commands that we take a day off. It would do us all good if we learned to sit still on a stump. It’s a decent topic for a Labor Day sermon, and I’d say that the congregation was generally with me. I felt good about the morning, the worship service, the preaching; I went home and took my rest.

Then this morning, Labor Day, I opened the newspaper and found myself convicted. The Local section of the Observer ran an article with the lead “This Labor Day, many debate living wage.” Honestly the article didn’t inform me of much I hadn’t already known, but I found myself called to task when preaching that people need to learn to sit on stumps. A living wage in our city is about $16 per hour. About 35 percent of employees in the Carolinas earn less, a good many of them significantly less. As has become common practice in retail, full time employment can be elusive, and so a good many work more than one job. The working poor, who comprise the majority of the poor here in Charlotte, do not have the privilege of sitting on a stump.

It’s ironic that Labor Day was a hard-fought battle among the working class in the late 1800s, and today it is the working class who punch the time clock. The cashiers at most big box retailers in town are at work. Lawn maintenance crews, construction workers, waitresses and the garbage collectors are at work. That Labor Day would be a paid holiday for the vast majority of them is only a dream. Back in the 1800s, while the railroad executives and the management of textile mills opposed the idea, President Grover Cleveland, faced with national boycotts and striking workers, signed a bill into law and Labor Day was born. Of course today it is management that takes the day off, while the working class continues to serve.

Perhaps the pulpit on Labor Day would have been better used to call these thoughts to mind. Some would call this the church meddling in politics, but Scripture reminds us that it is instead justice.

Once again, yesterday’s Scripture: “But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work- you or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey…or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male or female slaves shall rest as well as you.” (Deut. 5:12)

Advertisement