Homily for Labor Day
1 September 2014
Thank
God for this day!
It
is a day of rest from our labors. It is a day to thank God that many of us have
the opportunity to be employed or to be retired from employment. It is a day
for some of us to continue to ask God to help us find employment. It is a day
to reflect upon this noble gift and universal right that the Lord has bestowed
upon us.
And
while it is a day of rest, it is still a day of labor. I’m not talking about
preparing for the picnic we’ll have today, or cleaning up from the party we had
yesterday. While we may physically rest, we never stop laboring for the Lord.
Each
day is an invitation from the Lord to labor and to rest. We see this quite
profoundly in our First Reading from the Book of Genesis (1:26-2:3).
Our Triune God, in the midst of creating everything from nothing, creates
humanity, tells us what to do, then rests.
Think
about that for a second: God took a break. Our God rested
from laboring. But even in that rest, He labored.
In
our Second Reading from Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians (4:1b-2, 9-12),
the great Apostle reminds us that we should work with our own hands, so that we
may conduct ourselves properly in all things. In this way, we depend on
ourselves for our own well-being, and, in this way, we allow the work that we
do to become our contribution towards the building up of the Kingdom of God. In
our charity, we labor.
In
our Gospel from Saint Matthew (6:31-34),
Jesus reminds us to rest, to relax; that we should not worry about what we are to
eat or what we are to drink or what we are to wear. Our worry brings us undue
labor; our trusting in God brings us a labor beset in the mercy and love of Him
who loved us first.
And
so, if we are at work, we labor. If we are at rest, we labor. No matter what we
do – or try not to do – we labor. We labor constantly in our lives because we are alive. We labor ceaselessly
because we cannot cease loving. We labor in restlessness, for our hearts are
restless until they are able to rest in God alone.
In
thinking, reflecting and praying about our celebration and its readings today,
two people kept coming to mind who never ceased in their labors, despite
difficulties, and who provide for us today a unique witness to the call of
Christian witness and evangelization.
The
first person is Sister Thea Bowman. As an African-American Franciscan religious,
born in Mississippi in the 1930s, this great woman of faith overcame stereotypes
of race, gender and religion simply because she knew how to labor and rest in
the Lord. Diagnosed with cancer in the early- to mid-1980s, Sister Thea was
able to, in her own words modified, “live until [she died],” passing from this
life in 1990. One of her great quotes, borrowed from her culture, was, “Keep on
keeping on.” How fitting to think of these words, and of
this woman, as we reflect on the gift of labor. Sister Thea kept on through the
midst of discrimination and illness, never ceasing to do the work of the Lord
in her life. Even when her cancer began to overtake her physical life and she
was forced to rest, she never stopped to “keep on keeping on” through the great
spiritual labors that she worked on. Through her years as a Franciscan Sister
of Perpetual Adoration, Sister Thea Bowman allowed herself to witness to the
labors of Christian charity by working with her own hands to bring peoples
together, so that may experience the boundlessness of God’s love. And though
now resting in the arms of our God, we know that Sister Thea continues to labor
for the Kingdom of God not only by the memory of her example, but through her
intercessions for the Body of Christ, as well.
The
second person is someone whose name you should be more immediately aware of:
James Foley. As a hostage, we know of the hell he suffered in captivity; we
know of the savage way his life ended. And though it’s not our job right now to
debate whether in the realm of theology he is to be considered a martyr, we
know that his faith – specifically his Catholic faith – was something that
helped him to rest when he could no longer labor. Yet, even in his captivity,
as we have read in the biographical and autobiographical accounts that have
surfaced recently, he invoked those ancient prayers of our faith – those prayers
which helped him labor so that he and the others he was with could find some
spiritual, emotional, and, yes, even physical rest. In an open letter published
by Marquette University, James Foley concluded his thoughts by saying: If nothing
else, prayer was the glue that enabled my freedom, an inner freedom first and
later the miracle of being released during a war in which the regime had no
real incentive to free us. It didn’t make sense, but faith did.
His character during his captivity by the Libyans and his captivity and
eventual execution by ISIS present us with an example, albeit extreme, of how
the labor we participate in may not be of our choosing, yet our God walks with
us to offer us rest.
Yet
the example of both Sister Thea Bowman and James Foley offer to us an understanding
of what Jesus presents to us in the Gospel: the labors which we undertake in
this life are not to satisfy the needs of this world; rather, they are to
prepare us for the rest in the next. Our labors – be they physical, spiritual,
psychological, or emotional – work so that we can be assured that our God
provides for all of our needs. Yes, we need the physical labors to assure that
we can provide for ourselves and our families; yes, we need the spiritual
labors to assure that we are always in right relationship with God; yes, we need
the psychological labors so that we may continue to integrate the gifts of
faith and reason to truly understand the workings and will of God; and, yes, we
need the emotional labors so that, through the ecstasy of joy and the agony of
suffering, we may know the height and depth and breadth of the love of our God.
Our
God calls us to labor and to rest, just as He, Himself, did; just as He,
Himself, does. We labor in this life so that we may rest in the next. We rest
in this life to prepare us for the great labors of the next. Yet we labor because
we are alive, because we cannot cease loving, for our hearts are restless until
they are able to rest in God alone.
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Enjoy the journey . . .
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