[Friday in the Second Week of Lent] Turning the World Upside Down: Seeing the Face of God in the Worker
Read: 1 Corinthians 1:26-29
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.
Watch
Reflect
As we come to grips with the manifold issues of a consumerist society, it is tempting to be overly selfconscious and even smugly “guilty” in pondering our role in perpetuating what may appear to be a completely broken system. So again, the author Joerg Rieger suggests that “a deep logic of the Judeo-Christian traditions is anchored in such passages as 1 Corinthians.
Rieger writes in his book, No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future:
The ancient confession that Jesus Christ is both fully divine and fully human, which unites most Christian denominations, adds another wrinkle to this logic that is hardly considered by most contemporary Christians. In Jesus Christ, Godself not only takes the side of construction workers, but becomes a construction worker; this is the reality to which the often mystified term kenosis (God’s self-emptying in the incarnation) refers…Christ became flesh in a particular body, in a particular place and time, and in a particular social location…
Mainline Christian theology has had a hard time admitting to the particularity of the person of Jesus throughout its two-thousand year history…[B]oth Jesus’ humanity and his divinity were asserted in general terms, without reference to the kind of person Jesus was. The result of this oversight was not the affirmation of generic humanity, as is often believed; the result was the affirmation of dominant humanity at the time and of dominant humanity ever since…
For Christianity, it is the incarnation of God in the construction worker Jesus Christ, born in a stable rather than a palace, in the company of service workers who tended other people’s sheep (Luke 2:1-20), which turns things upside down. The typical religiosity which goes from the greatest to the least comes to a halt here and is turned around.
Pray
Grant, O God, that your holy and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
(The Book of Common Prayer, p. 823)
Author
Joe Burnett served as bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Nebraska and as an assistant bishop in the Diocese of Maryland.
February 26, 2016 @ 8:56 am
This notion, as above, is not self-evident as to our regular practices. The Baptismal Covenant asks us to affirm that we will see Jesus in every person and respect the
dignity of each one. But we can’t manage it much of the time. It seems to require too
much attention and purposeful focus. Living in MA and having just read thru a study of the 1912 “Bread & Roses” strike in Lawrence I am aware that we did not seem to
have anything much to say in that moment altho’ Vicki Black, “Welcome to Anglican Spiritual Traditions”, did include ( p. 141) a quote from Vida Scudder as to her support for the strikers. Black notes that the speech, from which the quote was taken, nearly cost Scudder her teaching job at Wellesley College. Not unlike the contention to insure civil rights for all people, the right to just compensation for people’s labor, is an
on-going matter !! Do we see Jesus in either of these areas of our common life ? Not
too readily, it seems.
February 26, 2016 @ 9:01 am
Thank you for the Reiger passage. It is the clearest model I have seen for ‘God in the Workplace’ and ‘Christ in the Workplace’ that I have believed in through my years at work.
February 26, 2016 @ 9:54 am
It is disturbing to see phrases like “deep logic of the Judeo-Christian traditions” make their way into these Lenten meditations, especially in the context of New Testament scripture. “Judeo-Christian” is relatively new. It made its first appearance in the 1820s. Since then, it has practically become an anthem, an expression of dogmatic loyalty to the Zionist experiment in Palestine (that has since declined into fascist apartheid and is a continual catalyst for violence and injustice throughout the region). It was a staple of the culture wars that men like James Dobson birthed in the 1990s. In the post-911 era of endless “wars of choice”, American neocons and their fundamentalist allies, all seemingly itching for imminent Apocalypse, have intentionally conflated “Judeo-Christian” with the founding of these United States, a skewed historical fiction that intentionally divides peoples, encourages a false-idol nationalism that masquerades as patriotism, and excludes Muslims and other non-conforming minorities from fully participating as equals in our society. Its use here is, at best, careless. Time to let it go…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judeo-Christian#Culture_wars
February 26, 2016 @ 3:07 pm
I love the reference to “construction worker Jesus…in the company of service workers”. So powerful!
February 27, 2016 @ 8:34 am
Our efforts to seek and serve Christ in all persons are also challenged by physical and regulatory barriers between us and our brothers and sisters. Health regulations mostly keep us from observing the lives of restaurant kitchen workers. Factories are usually impenetrable except to the most persistent journalists or advocates. As a port chaplain, I’ve learned that the lives of the seafarers who transport 90% of what we own are invisible to most consumers. Some have decent living conditions and food; some do not. Almost all contend with long hours and painful separation from their families (typically in Asia or Eastern Europe) for nine or ten months out of twelve, and with threats ranging from violent storms and work accidents to pirates and stowaways. Life out at sea is of course unobserved by most of us. Even during their few days or few hours in port, security rules and work schedules keep crews invisible to the general public. Seafarers’ center volunteers and I have been blessed by the privilege of visiting seafarers on board docked vessels, seeing the face of Christ in them, listening, assisting, praying with them, advocating for them. And this has taught me to remember other “invisible” workers around the world.