On Labor Day, we celebrate two things that are dear to Christian theology: work and rest. We recognize that we are the creative creatures of a creative Creator, a God who shapes and forms us like a potter (that’s Jeremiah, this Sunday!) and who made us in his image so we, too, could create. We recognize that at times, there is nothing more satisfying than making something real and tangible, and that this can be done in many ways and in many stages of life. The child’s wobbly tower, the carpenter’s perfect joint, the crocheter’s new knot, the baker’s warm bread—in every one of these, we transform the world around us into something new, and we see that it is good. And it is! Work is good.

But work is easy to turn into an idol. Management has been measuring labor’s productivity for centuries, since the early days of crop-picking quotas and early-factory piecework, if not before then. But the digital age has only increased the pressure. And the rise of remote work has meant that the precise quantifications once reserved for assembly lines and Amazon warehouses are now being applied to white-collar workers, even to therapists and hospice chaplains, with equally-brutal results. (If you haven’t seen it, check out “The Rise of the Worker Productivity Score” in the New York Times.)

If we say that meaningful, creative work is a good thing in the Christian view, we have to acknowledge that rest is at least as good. Rest and work are, and always have been, interconnected: God spends six days creating the universe, and on the seventh day, he finishes the work and rests from all the work that she had done, and commands us to do the same. And yet it’s tempting to ignore that invitation to rest. The fruits of constant, productive labor are easy to measure and quantify. You can see them right in front of you. The benefits of rest are less tangible, but no less important.

There’s a delightful irony to Labor Day weekend: we celebrate labor by taking an extra day off work! But of course, it was the labor movement that won us the right to have two-day weekends, let alone three-day weekends, because labor loses its dignity if there’s no prospect of resting from it.

So I pray this Labor Day weekend that you find a way to create meaningful work in this world, paid or unpaid, at home or outside it. I pray that you see the loving work of God our Creator reflected in the work you love. And I pray that you can find that Sabbath time to rest from all your work, and enjoy it.

A Prayer for Commerce and Industry (BCP p. 259)
Almighty God, whose Son Jesus Christ in his earthly life shared our toil and hallowed our labor: Be present with your people where they work; make those who carry on the industries and commerce of this land responsive to your will; and give to us all a pride in what we do, and a just return for our labor; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

The great rabbi and writer Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972) called the Sabbath “a palace in time, which we build…made of soul, of joy and reticence.” “What is so luminous about a day?” he asks. The “seventh day”—Saturday, the Sabbath, Shabbat—is “a mine where spirit’s precious metal can be found with which the construct the palace in time, a dimension in which the human is at home with the divine.” (The Sabbath, 1951)

The Christian tradition has never observed the Sabbath in quite the same way as our Jewish cousins—and indeed the Episcopal Church has never observed Sunday “Sabbath” regulations with the strictness of Scottish Presbyterians or New England Puritans!—but we are just as deeply committed, at least in theory, to obeying the Fourth Commandment: “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” And to “keep it holy” isn’t just a list of negative prohibitions (“Don’t work, don’t shop, don’t play sports”) but a list of positive invitations (“Do spend time with family, or friends; do spend time with God”).

“The Sabbath” has always been reused as a metaphor in addition to being a literal day. Even in the Bible, there’s a “sabbath year” in which the land itself is allowed to rest, lying fallow, and all debts are forgiven. You’re probably familiar with the more recent concept of a “sabbatical,” a time of rest and refreshment between periods of work.

But whether it’s one day out of seven, or one year out of seven, or simply the scattered pockets of time you find in which you can laid down your work and your worries, the Sabbath is vital. And as work and news have colonized more and more of our lives—as the latest email and the latest tragedy have moved from our desks to our homes to our pockets—Sabbath is harder and harder to find, which makes it, ironically, even more urgent!

I’m happy to say that I’ve just returned from a wonderful vacation, which was a real Sabbath, of rest and time to spend with family and with friends. Perhaps you’re enjoying your own Sabbath right now. But even if your day-to-day schedule is more or less the same as usual, I want to invite you to look for the places of rest within it, and to “mine” the “precious metal” there, to take a little time just to fully rest, to be “at home with the divine.”

All the cares and occupations of the world will stay be there when you return, waiting for you. But bit by bit you might build up that palace, which you can enter any time.

I’ll leave you with the collect our Book of Common Prayer offers for Morning Prayer on Saturday, the Sabbath day. It’s one of my favorite prayers in the book. (You can find it, if you’d like, on page 99.)

A Collect for Saturdays

Almighty God, who after the creation of the world rested from all your works and sanctified a day of rest for all your creatures: Grant that we, putting away all earthly anxieties, may be duly prepared for the service of your sanctuary, and that our rest here upon earth may be a preparation for the eternal rest promised to your people in heaven; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

During my seminary years, I served at a parish whose founding families had famously been thrown into jail in the early 18^th century for refusing to pay taxes to support the local Congregational church, which was—and remained until 1818—the official, established church of Connecticut. This week’s events have reminded me of those early struggles over the relationship between church and state. First came Friday’s decision in which five Catholic justices voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, then Monday’s decision allowing a public-school football coach to lead players in prayer after games at the fifty yard line, then the Wednesday-morning quote from Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who—speaking at a church service on Sunday—said: “The church is supposed to direct the government. The government is not supposed to direct the church… I’m tired of this separation of church and state junk.”

It’s one thing to declare that “the church is supposed to direct the government.” The question is—as it has always been—“Which church?”

You know as well as I do that “The Church” doesn’t agree on much, let alone enough to “direct the government.” Boebert’s own religious views are… idiosyncratic, to say the least. (Only last week, for example, she joked that Jesus “didn’t have enough [AR-15s] to keep his government from killing him.” I’m not one to accuse people of heresy willy-nilly, but… yikes.) If my church directed the government, I imagine Lauren Boebert would hate it. Kids would learn in school that God makes some people queer, and loves them as they are. Coach Kennedy would be out there chanting Evensong after the Big Game. City Hall would be full of stained glass windows, and not one of them would show Jesus holding a gun! And if Lauren Boebert’s church directed the government, I’m thinking I would probably hate it, too. And that’s exactly why the First Amendment prohibits Congress from establishing a religion: because in a world in which no church can direct the government, many churches can flourish.

I found it particularly ironic that she made her remarks while speaking at Cornerstone Christian Center, which describes itself somewhat generically as a non-denominational Christian church. Like most non-denominational churches, it’s part of the broad tradition of Baptist and evangelical free churches with little structure or hierarchy beyond the local congregation. In other words: it’s exactly the kind of church that the New England Puritans would’ve banned, back when the church really did “direct the government” in these parts. (If you don’t believe me, just ask Roger Williams!)

We Episcopalians exist in a very funny place regarding the separation of church and state. On the one hand, we’re the close spiritual cousins of the still-established Church of England, whose Supreme Governor is Queen Elizabeth II, whose bishops sit in the House of Lords, and whose Book of Common Prayer can only be amended by an Act of Parliament. On the other hand, we are explicitly not the Church of England — our distinctive church structures of elected vestries and bishops and representative Diocesan and General Conventions originate from the post-Revolutionary effort to find some way of organizing a non-established church in an independent state. While disproportionately represented among the roster of presidents and the 20^th-century social elite, we are and have always been a minority religion in America.

The Church of England remains established. But even by the time of the Revolution, it had significantly scaled back its understanding of what its establishment meant. Religious dissent, at first punished, had become tolerated, and this was not a warm-hearted decision to embrace religious pluralism. It was the inevitable result of more than fifty years of civil war and strife, during which the English government was overthrown multiple times in multiple different religious conflicts between different groups of Christians struggle to exert their power over the government. A Puritan Parliament overthrew and executed King Charles I. Episcopalian royalists succeeded in restoring Charles II. A “Glorious Revolution” overthrew his Catholic son James II in favor of the Protestant William and Mary.

Even in a uniformly-Christian country, which ours is not, when “the Church” can’t agree on its own business, it has no business trying to exert its power over the government. And the attempt by one faction of Christians to codify their theology through the law can only end in violence and persecution.

Just go back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony and ask those Baptists what they thought.