Isaiah 65:17-25
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
There may be Canadians who do not like hockey. I’m not sure about that, for I’ve never met one as far as I know. And of course, there are people who like hockey who are not Canadian, though I confess to personally supporting a Canadian team, so I’m a bit iffy on all that. But if you did a Venn diagram of hockey fans and Canadians, I think we can all agree that there would be a whole lot of overlap.
If you are Canadian or a hockey fan, you have heard of Don Cherry. This past week, many people heard of Don Cherry who belonged to neither group, for he made the news. Even the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Guardian.
Cherry, known for his flamboyant suits among other things, is eminently Canadian, descended from a founding member of the Mounties and from one of the Home Children, the United Kingdom’s infamous child emigration scheme. He had a long career in minor league hockey as a player and a middling career as a coach in the minors and in the NHL. He’s done some laudable work for charitable causes over the years, including organ donation, children’s homes, and animal welfare. He is a Canadian patriot, as long as by patriot, you mean loudmouth bigot and worshipper of a glorious past that was glorious only for white males like Don Cherry.
He got very rich as a hockey analyst, including 37 seasons of a segment called “Coach’s Corner.” As Shireen Ahmed writes in the Guardian, “Cherry was appreciated for being brash and propagating a retrograde ‘rock’ em sock’ em’ type of hockey that glamorized fighting, peppered with unapologetic vitriol directed at “Francophones, newcomers, women, racialized minorities, and Indigenous peoples” and anyone with an appreciation for humanity and justice whom he labeled ‘left-wing pinkos’.”
He lost his job this week, resigned if you accept the official version, after criticizing Canadian immigrants for supposedly not wearing “Remembrance Day” poppies. And by Canadian immigrants, what he really meant was anyone not white like him.
Most Canadians take pride in their nation’s hospitality, diversity, immigration policies. They did not appreciate Cherry once again revealing his racism, creating division, and attaching it to Queen and Country. Social media exploded with images of “non-white” Canadians who have served in that nation’s military, who were and are proud Canadian patriots. The real kind. Of course, only in polite Canada can you lose your job for racism and have people still thank you for your contribution.
Cherry’s bigotry is actually pretty subtle compared to the racism I grew up with as a working class kid in the South, the son and grandson of firefighters, the grandson and great-grandson of cops. I was sent to “Christian” school for the first few years of elementary. That is “Christian” in quotation marks, for those schools were created as whites-only schools in response to the civil rights movement and integration. But with two sisters coming up behind me, private school was not affordable on a firefighter’s salary, so I was in an integrated public school soon enough, for the four years until we joined the “white flight” to the suburbs.
The “N-word” was all too common in my home, and like most kids, I repeated what I heard. I believed the lies and stereotypes, including the classic lie of the welfare mother in a Cadillac, the racist subtext to a general election when I was in high school.
I had no clue that the tropes about laziness went back a couple of centuries, to Africans ripped from their native land and culture, stripped of their right to self-determination, deprived of the fruit of their labors, brutally beaten and even killed at times, stolen labor working stolen land, went back to the efforts those of European descent made to dehumanize those they destroyed and enslaved.
I did not know about lynching and systemic racism, redlining and Jim Crow. I believed what I was told, never realizing that those supposedly lazy and shiftless people I was taught to revile were among the hardest working people I could ever hope to meet, forced to constant creativity, in a context where they were routinely denied a living wage and basic human dignity.
Decades later, with housing and childcare availability and costs destroying our middle class, we are a whole lot less willing to buy into the welfare mother stereotype, especially when drawn along racial lines, for plenty of white folks are struggling too. We’ve all seen how hard immigrants and minorities work, their dreams for their children no different than anyone else’s.
But we are not going to solve problems like housing, childcare, or income equality during the course of a twenty-minute sermon. These entangled topics are worth meaningful and faith-based discussion, about economic issues, the impact of automation, the scourge of speculation and market manipulation, but for now, let’s look at something simpler.
Work matters. Our animal selves are wired for it. It offers us dignity and a sense of accomplishment. Even as we get further and further from ancient agrarian and subsistence patterns, we still work. The happiest people I know are people who do stuff and have a sense of accomplishment. They might have been economically successful, always a bonus, but I’ve known lots of miserable rich people, and plenty of content and sometimes incredibly happy folks who just barely get by, but have their dignity, their self-respect.
They build and make and teach and repair and preach and protect and plow. And when the economically required work comes to an end and they retire, if they are so lucky, they find new ways to work, if retirement even sticks. My father retired three times, at least, the last time only because of a torn carotid artery when, at seventy, he was doing work he should have left to the younger employees he supervised. Dad carried the anxiety of an impoverished and unstable childhood in his bones, but many of you don’t, and are just as busy in retirement as you were when you worked for pay, albeit with more freedom.
Spondylarthropy, the auto-inflammatory condition I developed while serving in the Army, the reason I have a service-connected disability rating, causes almost constant discomfort and fatigue, yet I cannot sit still for very long before I need to be doing something, preferably something productive. Because I’ve bought into a set of expectations for myself, some cultural, some constructed by my bigoted but hard-working dad, some expectations of my own creation, I never seem to catch up, fall further and further behind, so there is always work to do… but that’s another sermon for another Sunday about sabbath-keeping.
Work is fundamentally and spiritually good. There is that old expression about idle hands, and it is hard to get into too much trouble when you are busy working or falling asleep in the armchair by the fourth inning.
Paul, in his writing to the church at Thessaloniki, specifically addressed the importance of work. We are to believe that Paul, the tentmaker and merchant, was still busy with his trade, even as he traveled throughout Asia-Minor and Greece sharing the good news of Christ. The Western Monastic tradition would come to understand work as essential to spiritual health, even where it was not necessary.
Thank goodness they did. Those Belgian monks were great brewers, and I don’t mean of the baseball variety.
Hard work was valued by our own faithful ancestors, for Puritans and Pilgrims became Congregationalists, became part of the United Church of Christ, and despite an unfair reputation as judgmental and harsh, they were pretty progressive, and they understood the spiritual value of hard work.
The German thinker Max Weber would coin the phrase “Protestant Work Ethic” in 1904, and tie Calvinist values to the development of modern capitalism, not universally understood as a moral good, but the simple truth is that the American ideal isn’t the lottery winner, but is the farmer coaxing fertility from a wild land, the obsessed inventor tinkering in the garage endless hours, the “Mom and Pop” opening a shop that feeds the family and grows. We call this hard work sweat equity.
Vocation and avocation, we pour effort into hobbies and art as well. We may think God’s grace in unearned and free, but we also think that you get out of life what you put into life.
And so many do the unrecognized hard work of giving care, not just for those toddlers in our childcare deserts, but for loved ones who struggle in body and spirit, for our elders.
The only truly shiftless person I ever personally met, the only one who had never done an honest days work in his life, mooching off of others in the way minorities are so often described, was white and older than me. There are, of course, shiftless people living off the labor of others. They don’t get food stamps or live in public housing. They have houses in the Hamptons and run hedge funds. Or they steal your social security number , or work for the Nigerian oil ministry but desperately need a retiree in the Midwest to help them transfer millions of dollars, because that’s how global finance works, right? All of these are about equal in dishonor.
I admit to some skepticism about our national values when teachers can barely afford the mortgage and athletes are making millions of dollars a day, though I concede that athletes work hard too, as do actors and writers and artists. They make our life better by entertaining us when we are not ourselves working.
You’ll have to get back to me on politicians, because… really? Though in truth, most of those we choose to govern us work very hard in a thankless job.
The Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh advises us to only do what we are doing, challenging with what Buddhists call our “monkey minds,” undisciplined and grasping. Work, especially hard work, helps narrow our focus, helps us to be fully present, and physical labor reminds us that we are embodied beings. Rene Descartes may exist in abstract thought, but the rest of us exist in bodies, the only existence we have every known, and that tired body can be a sign to us, a reminder in the deep down miracle that is this body. It may ache at times, but it has gotten you this far. Just take a look at that miraculous thumb for a second…
Let’s get to work, that we might hear the words of the parable, “well done, good and faithful servant.”
Let’s get to work making sure there is adequately compensated work with dignity and a sense of accomplishment for all of those who are capable, regardless of those things that make them unique and amazing, Punjabi and Francophone, Catholic and Muslim, those who fit in our little boxes and those who color outside the lines, and even those who wear touks and cheer for the Habs. This is something we can do if it is important to us.
Let’s get to work, because “thy will be done” ain’t gonna happen all by itself. Amen.