Sermon for March 24, 2019 
This week I want to turn our attention to possibly the least glamorous of the spiritual practices this Lent, the practice of work. Now, I’m not talking about employment here, that’s a different practice. Today I’m talking about work in the sense of manual labor. Yes, even the drudgery of physical labor can be a spiritual practice if looked at right.
As the calendar says we are now into spring, several of you may be turning your attention outdoors. For those of you who garden, or farm, or otherwise work the earth, you know that there is a particular sort of satisfaction from this kind of work. It is far from easy, but at the end of the day there is a satisfaction in seeing what you have done. In many ways this is going all the way back to our roots in Genesis. When we look at the Hebrew, the word we translate as man, adam, actually means "earthling," because God made him from adamah, the earth.
One of the reasons working the earth is so satisfying, is that it connects us to who we really were in the beginning. Taylor writes, "The earthling’s first divine job is to till the earth and keep it. If you have ever tilled a rose garden, much less a garden of Eden, then you know this is difficult to do without getting sore shoulders. Keeping the earth is hard work. You wear yourself out. You also remember where you came from and why. You touch the stuff your bones are made out of. You handle the decomposed bodies of trees, leaves, birds and fallen stars. Your body recognizes its kin."
Or to put it less poetically and more scientifically, we have discovered that working in the earth actually activates a set of serotonin-releasing neurons in the brain — the same neurons targeted by many antidepressants. Or maybe it’s both. After all, we are a combination of dust and divine breath. Humility, is our very being. Before the fall, before anything else, God told us to till the earth and keep it. Good, meaningful work can be a gift. Even the preacher in Ecclesiastes, after despairing about the futility of work, commends the satisfaction of work as one of life’s pleasures.
In our passage today, the man in Jesus’ parable knows the value of this work. "Give me a year to tend this tree. Let me put the work into it, and then see how it is doing." After all, Jesus was a carpenter and his disciples were fishermen. They had no cars, harvesters, dishwashers, or escalators. Their life was lived close to the earth, and we can assume that the ministry of teaching, healing, and feeding could be exhausting.
But the work had value because they didn’t just do it for itself. The did it for God and for other people. Feeding, healing, cleaning up is all communal labor. People need it to survive. Taylor writes: "If all life is holy, then anything that sustains life has holy dimensions too. The difference between washing windows and resting in God can be a simple decision: choose the work, and it becomes your spiritual practice."
The idea of chores as a spiritual practice has long been practiced in monasteries. Indeed, St. Benedict’s monastic practice can be summarized as ora et labora, prayer and work, contemplation and action. By engaging and tending the physical world we get in touch with our humus, our humanity, as well as the creation, which is the real, God-beloved reality around us. We should not look down on manual labor as beneath human dignity, for in fact it can be a spiritual practice.
In his book, The Practice of the Presence of God, a monk named Brother Lawrence, meditated on his task of washing the dishes. "[Brother Lawrence] thought it was a shame that some people pursued certain activities (which, he noted, they did rather imperfectly due to human shortcomings), mistaking the means for the end. He said that our sanctification does not depend as much on changing our activities as it does on doing them for God rather than for ourselves.
The most effective way Brother Lawrence had for communicating with God was to simply do his ordinary work. He did this obediently, out of a pure love of God, purifying it as much as was humanly possible. He believed it was a serious mistake to think of our prayer time as being different from any other. Our actions should unite us with God when we are involved in our daily activities, just as our prayers unite us with him in our quiet devotions"
Now, I don’t know about you, but there are some chores I like better than others. I actually enjoy cooking, for instance, and I’ve learned to find some satisfaction in washing dishes, but I have never been a fan of folding laundry. It’s mindless and in some ways never ending because there is always more laundry to do, more sheets to fold. And it requires a level of precision that I have never been very good at. But I have been working at turning the act into an offering to God. If I pray while I fold the corners together, if I offer thanks for the clean sheet I am folding, and the fact that I have a bed to put it on and a roof to sleep under, the task itself becomes an offering. I still hate folding sheets, but by turning them into a spiritual practice I no longer dread them. And more importantly, I’m inviting God into even the most mundane moments of my life.
Martin Luther once wrote, "The maid who sweeps her kitchen is doing the will of God just as much as the monk who prays -- not because she may sing a Christian hymn as she sweeps but because God loves clean floors. The Christian shoemaker does his Christian duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftsmanship." Do what you are given to do well, and that is it’s own offering to God.
And there is no limit to what counts as labor. If it is something you have to work to do, that counts, regardless of whether or not its work to someone else. When we are sick, the act of heating up soup becomes labor. Walking from one room to another can be work. All of it can be offered to God.
Work will happen one way or another. It is our decision to meet God there or not. "[Work] presents itself as drudgery, which you may turn into soul work by choosing the labor instead of resenting it." Sometimes work is just work, but by remembering the lives it helps sustain, even if it is only your own, you can turn that work into something holy.
So, whatever work you have to do this week, whatever you labors might be, offer them to God. Try to see them as a holy act. And if you get a chance, spend some time working in the dirt, remembering where you came from. Amen.
