Work, justice and theology
by Richard W. Gillett

[Ed. note: Richard W. Gillett is minister for social justice for the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles. In 1996 he was involved in an effort by Los Angeles clergy to join in a coordinated community push for a living wage ordinance for the City of Los Angeles (it passed). Today the interfaith organization that resulted from that community campaign, Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE), is widely recognized -- not only in Los Angeles but throughout the country -- for its active involvement in the struggles of low-wage workers for dignity, justice, and the right to organize. Gillett is on CLUE's executive board. He was also involved in the production last August of a 30-minute video on worker justice called Let Justice Roll Down: Low Wage Workers Challenge the Religious Community. The film is introduced by Episcopal Church bishop Fred Borsch, who has spoken in support of worker justice many times both on the picket line and on the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times.]

In trying to live out my own particular calling as a Christian and as a priest, my strongest interest for over 30 years has been the subject of Work. Work as human activity: its roots in our Christian tradition, its relationship to the workings of the economic system, and to the life and perspective of working people themselves.

In 1966, six years after I was ordained, I went to England, to Manchester in the industrial north of the country for a year, to do an apprenticeship in "Industrial Mission." It consisted of visiting, and being all day on the shop floor of a number of factories, just to be among the workers. Not to do bible study or offer counseling, but simply to be a presence: to feel and taste the life of men and women at their workplace -- how it felt, what their outlook on their work and life was, what their aspirations were. My memories of that experience are still keen today, not only the many conversations I had with the workers, but recalling their work environment: the searing heat and the acrid smell of the steel furnaces at the Taylor Works in Manchester, the deafening clatter of the weaving machines and the cloudy air of cotton fibers in the textile mills in Bury, and the pure grime and grit of their workplaces.

The topic of work is enormous, of course, because work is a huge part of the everyday lives of every one of us. Whether it is paid or unpaid work that we do -- a job from which we draw a salary or a wage, or the work of parenting our children, or maintaining a house, or volunteering in the community -- work is central to the human experience. And -- ominously, I think -- in the age of laptop computers, cell phones and palm pads, our work starts spilling into every time segment of our lives if we let it.

Yet here is a paradox. We do not hear, in the churches, many sermons or find many Christian Education curricula exploring the religious or spiritual implications of work. But if God is the creator of all that is, if God is present in every aspect of our human lives, if God is the God of human history, how can we not say that the human experience of work in all of its ramifications has relevance for Christian belief, and Christian theology? How can we not say, furthermore, that we must engage with the critical issues of work that are right in our midst today? And more explicitly, how are we to evaluate the economic system to which work -- in any era -- is inextricably linked?

What do our scriptures and our tradition say about work?

The theme of work comes in the first pages of the book of Genesis, when God creates Adam and Eve, the prototype of human beings. Be fruitful; till the earth is the Creator's command. Our relationship with the earth (world) is thus central to why we are here. The creation story reflects a basic truth: It is largely through our work that we exercise the stewardship of God's Creation. And lest this be seen as an exegetical stretch, it is consistent with the assertion repeated over and over in both the prophets and the psalms, of work as an eminently noble and human enterprise . My favorite O.T. passage on work, one of several in Isaiah, is from Chapter 65 (vv.22-23):

My chosen ones will enjoy the fruit of their labor;

They will not toil to no purpose, or raise children for misfortune

Because they and their issue after them

Are a race blessed by the Lord.

Significantly, in the book of Exodus we read of Yahweh's great deliverance of the Israelites from their oppressive slavery under the Pharoah in Egypt -- an act which is a ringing statement of the divine action for justice in the workplace, and for the valuing of work.

In the New Testament, we remember that Jesus was a carpenter. He is the one who, being God, became like us in all things, including engaging in work. The parables of Jesus are overwhelmingly cast into themes of work, whose central characters are ordinary working people: the fisherman, the sower, the herdsman, the tax collector. "The worker deserves his pay", Jesus reminds his listeners. (I like the Spanish translation better, here: "El trabajador tiene derecho a su paga.")

When we turn to church history we immediately see that there is a strong continuity with the biblical record regarding the dignity of work and the need for the economic system to respond to justice for thef community. For instance, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote that "Those things which God had created, benefitted by the help of human work". Work, in other words, should be inherently meaningful. It should contribute to the overall building up of creation. Another early church theologian, St. John Chrysostom, linked the divine creation with the nobility of work, as did Augustine, but he further asserted that the crafts (ie the smith, the currier, the carpenter, etc.) must issue in something useful, something helpful, and not merely be good craftsmanship in and of itself.

These explications of work, and many like them, which are scattered about in the writings of the early church Fathers, are a bit hard to digest unless one takes time to think about their implications. One way to grasp their significance is to put some of them side by side with the current observations, say, of Studs Terkel. In his great book titled Working, Terkel says that modern work "is by its very nature about violence -- to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around." You begin to see that work in the modern world (even though, of course, not all work is about violence) has been, and continues to be, profoundly shaped by the Industrial Revolution of three centuries ago, when the assembly lines of mass production were first inaugurated.

The long shadow of the Industrial Revolution and its degrading work environment even today obscures the historical Christian view of work and its biblical link with justice and with building community. But this Christian perspective continued strongly right through the middle ages. In medieval Europe the Christian concept of the social order was seen as a unified whole: No part of life was to be excluded from the Divine domain. The church could, and did, speak to all of human experience, including things economic. For example, although Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, was a firm believer in the rigid hierarchical ordering of society, he nonetheless developed detailed views about what we would call "economic justice". He wrote extensively about the subject of usury. The medieval church roundly condemned usury as simply the desire to "make money with money." Connected with this topic was the "just price": How much should one charge for something? I.e., what is a fair profit?. And how about this, from Thomas Aquinas: "To keep back what is due another (e.g., a fair wage!) inflicts the same kind of injury as taking a thing unjustly."

So Aquinas' declarations happen to be highly relevant to some of what goes on in our modern economic life: the excess profit of many corporations and financial institutions; the huge returns possible, even just in overnight bank deposits, on massive amounts of money; low wages for workers.

I believe we need to pay much more attention to our own very rich historical tradition, especially through the first 17 centuries of the church's life, as it speaks powerfully to the issues of work and economic justice. There is a response from within our own tradition to the capitalist notion of "economic man (sic)" which appeared with Adam Smith and which is today being carried to global extremes!

So have our work cut out for us, both theologically, and more importantly, in the streets. And, in our time, the best theology may be generated by the stories and hopes of the working poor themselves. Interleaved with their own stories, our own sacred story and history should be devoured. It just may be the combustible combination for the church's return to a historic solidarity with working people, and a way to address the deep injustices of the economic system itself.

(For copies of the video, Let Justice Roll Down, which costs $10, write R. W. Gillett, 1281 E. Orange Grove Blvd., Pasadena CA 91104.)