Eat, Drink, and Find Enjoyment in Your Work

Scripture: Ecclesiastes 2: 22-23; 1 Corinthians 15:58

Sermon: Eat, Drink, and Find Enjoyment in Your Work

Topics: work, labor, education, gift, balance

Preached: September 5, 2010

Rev. Mike Abma

Ecclesiastes 2:22-25

²²What do mortals get from all the toil and strain with which they toil under the sun? ²³For all their days are full of pain, and their work is a vexation; even at night their minds do not rest. This also is vanity.

24 There is nothing better for mortals than to eat and drink, and find enjoyment in their toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God; ²⁵for apart from him^* who can eat or who can have enjoyment?

1 Corinthians 15: 58

58 Therefore, my beloved,^* be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labour is not in

vain.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

INTRODUCTION — OUR COMPLICATED VIEWS ON WORK

I grew up in a Protestant family of the Calvinist persuasion. In our home, there were 3 great commandments: love God, love your neighbor, and work hard; on these 3 commandments hung all the law and the prophets.

I also grew up on a farm. Work on a farm never ends. I would be lying if I told you I always loved the work. The truth is, my brothers and I never came back from the barns like the 7 dwarves, happily singing, “Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho, its home from work we go.”

I grew up thinking I would enjoy work much more if I got paid for it. In fact, I dreamed of making a wage. When I was in the 9^th grade, a neighbor phoned and asked if I wanted a job. He ran a big greenhouse operation. I said, “Sure,” and thought “This is a dream come true.” I went. He led me into a huge warehouse. He showed me one mountain of topsoil (I think it was about the height of these organ pipes) and another smaller mountain of peat-moss. He then gave me a shovel, pointed to a machine with a gaping mouth, and said, “You’ll be mixing potting soil in this soil mixer: 2 shovels of soil for every 1 shovel of peat-moss.” So I shoveled dirt into that machine all day. I came home with blistered hands, an aching body, and $2.45 an hour. I realized that earning a wage didn’t suddenly make work fun.

Like so many, I thought education was the answer.

Get excellent grades,

get into excellent schools,

land an excellent job,

and lead an excellent life.

Excellent!

I ended up in graduate school at the University of Toronto. One of my friends and fellow grad students was super bright but also super anxious. He was always working, studying. He hardly ate. He hardly slept. The tips of his fingers bled because he bit his nails so much. The odd thing was, even though he was always studying, he never seemed to get any of the assignments done.

So there I was, 22 years old, and already Ecclesiastes made total sense to me:

What do we gain from all our toil and strain? Our days are full of pain, our work is a vexation; and even at night our minds do not rest.

Now that Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Eat, Pray, Love is a movie, it is getting a fair bit of attention. One of the more keen observations she makes in her book is that we have a complicated relationship with work. We are both obsessed by it and yet deeply resentful of it. It is like we have only 2 speeds: overdrive and neutral. We work all week, burn ourselves out, then spend the weekend in our pajamas eating cereal and watching TV.

We Protestants of the Calvinist persuasion have to admit some responsibility for our culture’s obsession and even idolatry of work.

A line can be drawn from John Calvin,

who stressed the blessing of work,

to John Wesley,

who told his Methodists to work as hard as they could,

to make as much as they could

to give away as much as they could (they excelled at 2 out of 3);

to Henry Ford, who said, “Work is the salvation of the human race morally, physically, socially.”

Somehow our identity, our sense of worth, even our salvation has become tied to our work or our lack of it. Production has become our noblest achievement.^[1]

In one of his essays, Gilbert Meilaender points out that in the old, old days of Greek culture, work was looked down upon. The most important thing in life was family and friendships. Now we have elevated work to a central place in our lives. We are what we do. Work has eclipsed family and friendships.

A WORD FROM THE PREACHER OF ECCLESIASTES

The book of Ecclesiastes is a great reality check.

Over and over, it reduces work down to size.

Work isn’t so great. It really can’t save us.

Ecclesiastes says, again and again,

that every task, every job, when looked at long and hard,

has its meaningless side. Every job.

Once it has torn down work as an idol, Ecclesiastes does say a number of very helpful things:

1. BALANCE

For one thing, it says we can find joy and fulfillment

in both eating and drinking, and our work.

You have to remember that in the Biblical context, eating and drinking are social activities. You do not do these alone. You do these with family, with friends, with invited guests.

So what Ecclesiastes is saying is that the very best of life is in finding that balance between enjoying our family and friends on the one hand, and our work on the other. It shouldn’t be an either/or. There is a beauty in finding that often elusive balance between nurturing those relationships and excelling at our work.

2. GIFT

Ecclesiastes also lets us know “how” we can find that balance, and how we can enjoy both our family and friends and our work. We need to keep things in perspective. Ecclesiastes asks the rhetorical question: “Apart from God, where is the joy?”

We really can enjoy family and friends.

We really can enjoy our work.

But the best way, in fact the only way, to really enjoy them is to see them as gifts from God — as gifts from the hand of God.

Working at our jobs and investing in our family and friends – these are not simply duties we must perform. If they are only duties, at some point they will become drudgery.

But if we first see them as gifts, we can begin to delight in them.

Gratitude is a prelude to joy.

Work is much more enjoyable when we are thankful for it.

You will have a much better experience at college

if you start your freshman year thankful

simply for the opportunity to continue your education.

Our work, our family, our friends — these are gifts from the hand of God.

There is nothing better than finding joy in these gifts.

A FINAL WORD — WORK AND THE NEW CREATION

There is one more thing I want to say about work that goes beyond Ecclesiastes. I want to end talking about Paul. Paul was a hard worker, both as a tent-maker and a missionary. Some people in Corinth were doing an Ecclesiastes-type thing with Paul. They were saying, “Hey Paul, ever think that all your work is pretty useless, pretty meaningless?”

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul gives his answer.

In this chapter, he lets people know what makes him tick,

what gets him up in the morning,

what keeps him going.

He writes that the key to his life is the death and resurrection of Jesus.

For Paul, the economy he worked in is the economy of God.

He, and all Christians, are all co-workers with Christ.

And the great enterprise everyone is working towards is the New Creation.

Paul says that God cares about how we live.

God cares less about how we make a living.

But he cares deeply about how we live.

He cares that the work we do and the life we lead anticipates the new creation:

that our life is filled with justice and compassion;

that our life is filled with generosity and hospitality;

that our life is filled with sacrifice — a willingness to put others before ourselves.

The wonderful thing about the economy of God,

is that God is able to take our seemingly ordinary lives

of planting gardens and teaching students,

of fixing cars and cutting hair,

of doing dishes and raising kids,

and bless them with extraordinary significance.

He takes our mundane tasks

and makes them building blocks of the new creation.

He takes us ordinary workers,

and he clothes us with the eternal weight of his glory.

That is where the joy comes in.

It is not all up to us.

The heavy labor, the heavy lifting has already been done

in the death and resurrection of Jesus.

When our work,

no matter how humble, how imperfect,

is in the Lord,

in his death and resurrection,

it is never useless, never in vain, never meaningless.

It has eternal value.

In the economy of God

whether work is paid or unpaid means nothing.

Whether it resonates with a resurrection life means everything.

Amen

1. Quote is from the writer Ayn Rand. ↑