by James Kubal-Komoto, Intern Minister

A sermon given November 29, 1998

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

            I remember one summer Sunday morning when I was about 13 years old. I was sitting at the kitchen table, wearing a terrycloth bath robe my mother had made me for Christmas. I was looking out the window at the grass in the backyard. My father walked into the room and said, “When are you going to get dressed and mow the grass?” My response was something along the lines of “Later.”

            “You are so lazy,” he said, half-jokingly. “What kind of a job do you think you’ll get being so lazy?” I looked at my father and said, “I want a job where I can walk around in my robe all day.”

            Well, all I can say is, be careful what you wish for.

            Hard work is a virtue that I think most parents try to instill in their children, and it is usually a virtue that takes in most of us, usually sometime after we leave our parents’ homes. We Americans are a hard working people, especially these days. More of us are working than ever before. Jobs are being created by the thousands and unemployment rates are low. More women are participating in the workforce than ever. Many people are waiting longer until they retire. We’re working longer days and longer weeks. Gone is the eight-hour day for which unionists fought so hard a century ago. We are, on average, working 163 hours longer per year than we did a generation ago. That’s about one extra-month per year.

            And the pace of our work is faster. Thanks to voice-mail, pagers, cell-phones, the fax and e-mail, we communicate with one another more quickly, and decisions are made more quickly. The only downtime we have in our days occurs when we run Windows 95 on a computer with less than 16MB of RAM. After the Japanese, we have the least vacation time of any industrialized country, but we’re working more productively than they are, as I recently told my Japanese spouse. A recent newspaper article stated that productivity among American workers was higher than productivity among Japanese workers. If any of you want a copy of this article, I have it in my office in a file labeled, “Articles not to share gleefully with spouse at dinner.”

            But why are we working so hard? Are we doing it because our jobs make us happy? Are our jobs that fulfilling? Research on this question shows mixed results. On average, people who work report being happier than people who do not work—by choice or because they are unemployed. On the other hand, between about a quarter and a half of us say that we are dissatisfied with our current job, that we wonder if we are in the right line of work, that work drains us emotionally, that work is physically exhausting, that we experience significant stress at our jobs at least once a week, or that we have experienced burnout in the past year.

            And work is not as satisfying as some other areas of our lives. A Princeton University Study showed that the sources of fulfillment that best predict differences in individual’s level of happiness are, in rank order, fulfillment from family, fulfillment from leisure activities, fulfillment from religion, fulfillment from being good to themselves, fulfillment from doing things for others, and fulfillment from work. Work ranks at the bottom. In other words, the study suggests that spending more time with your family, taking up bowling or painting, going to church, taking long, hot baths or doing volunteer work will be more likely to make you feel more fulfilled than spending time at work.

            So why are we working so hard if work is not as fulfilling as other activities in our lives? Perhaps it’s not the work itself, but the money we earn from work. After all, as Alan Alda said, “It isn’t necessary to be rich and famous to be happy. It’s only necessary to be rich,” and most people, if asked, think that the one thing that would make them happier would be more money.

            I thought of this as I looked through the newspaper on Thursday. It was a heavy newspaper, filled with all of advertisements for the Day-After-Thanksgiving sales. A cornucopia of consumerist choices. TVs, stereos, computers with more than 16MB of RAM, clothing, and something called “Furby.” This must be why we are working so hard, because surely all of these things we can buy with the money we earn working will bring happiness and satisfaction to ourselves and our children. Otherwise, why would thousands of parents and grandparents have lined up at 3 a.m. on Friday morning at stores across the country to buy their children a $30 toy called a Furby instead of spending these hours in some mundane activity like reading their children a book. Otherwise, why would millions of Americans spend one particular Thursday saying how grateful they are for all of the blessings in their lives, but then spend the next four weeks in an orgiastic $200 billion consumer spree that says, in effect, “But these blessings aren’t enough. We want new, better ones!”

            But they are enough. Studies shows, however, that once our basic needs are met—once we’re over the poverty line—making what economists call a living wage—making or having more money or the things money can buy—doesn’t make us happier. Among industrialized countries, once above the poverty line, the correlation between income and happiness is modest and is nearly zero in the United States. A survey of the 49 wealthiest people in the United States showed that they were just slightly happier than average. Furthermore, since the 1950s, the buying power of people in the United States has more than doubled, but the number of people who claim to be very happy has remained the same. Happiness, it turns out, is not about what we have but about our perspective on what we have.

            There is a Jewish fable that tells us of a farmer who seeks a rabbi’s counsel because his wife nags him, his children fight, and his surroundings are in chaos. The good rabbi tells him to go home and move the chickens into the house. “Into the house!” cries the farmer. “But what good will that do?” Nevertheless, he complies and two days later returns, more frantic than before. “Now my wife nags me, the children fight, and the chickens are everywhere, laying eggs, dropping feathers, and eating our food. What am I to do?” The rabbi tells him to go home and bring the cow into the house. “The cow!” cries the distraught man. “That can only worsen things!” Again, the rabbi insists, the man complies, and then returns a few days later more harried than ever. “Nothing is helping. The chickens are into everything and the cow is knocking over the furniture. Rabbi, you have made things worse.” The rabbi sends the frantic man home to bring in the horse as well. The next day the man returns in despair. “Everything is knocked over. There is no room for my family. Our lives are in shambles. What shall we do?” Now the rabbi instructs, “Go home and take out the horse and cow and chickens.” The man does so and returns the next day smiling. “Rabbi, our lives are now so calm and peaceful. With the animals gone, we are a family again. How can I thank you?” The rabbi smiles. (I bet some of you who just had guest for Thanksgiving can relate. But the point is that it’s all about perspective!)

            But then why are we working so hard if work isn’t that fulfilling and even the things that money can buy, despite the claims of Madison Avenue, won’t make us happier?  Why are we working so hard? I wonder if it’s because we are living our lives according to a Gospel of Work rather than a Gospel of Worth. Let me explain.

            At this time of Thanksgiving time, think back to those European settlers who, for better or worse, first celebrated Thanksgiving on these shores. Most of these settlers and the European immigrants that came during the next century practiced some form of Calvinism, a form of Protestantism based on the teachings of John Calvin, a leader of the Protestant reformation in Europe in the 1500s. These Calvinist were rather severe in their theology. Believing all human beings permanently marred by original sin, they believed human nature to be rather inherently depraved, and they though if people really got what they had coming to them, all souls would burn in everlasting hell. However, they believed that God was somewhat merciful and would save some souls from eternal damnation. And believing that God was all knowing, they believed God had already determined which souls would be saved and which souls would be damned, and had even set the number, which many thought to be 44,000.

            Now imagine the Rose Garden at a sold out Trailblazer’s game. Yes, basketball fans, I know this requires us to remember a while back. That’s 21,300 people. So the Calvinists believed that Heaven was about twice that size, or maybe even just about that size if Heaven had two services. When you think about, there’s not too many season ticket holders, huh?

            Now most Calvinists believed they were among the elect, those that would be saved, but even the staunchest of believers had his or her internal doubts, knowing the sinful thoughts that each thought he or she alone had, and this created quite a degree of anxiety among many folks, which is easy to understand you when you realize that people heard the torments of hell vividly described from the pulpit each Sunday morning.

            People sought to relieve this anxiety. They sought a sign from God that they were among the elect, the chosen, the saved, the season-ticket holders. Since they believed that God also rewarded the saved with success and material wealth as an outward sign of inner salvation, they sought to prove their virtue to themselves through their pursuit of success and wealth. Their religion and their lives became based on a Gospel of Work. Constantly unsure of their own salvation, their lives became a ceaseless striving after success and wealth in an effort to prove to themselves that they were okay.

            Now the early Unitarians and the early Universalists eventually broke with the Calvinists. The Unitarians, in opposition to the Calvinists, believed God was one and not three, but more importantly, these Boston Brahmin—who it was said believed, “In the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of man, and the neighborhood of Boston”—found the Calvinist’s implication that they, among the most prestigious of Boston society, were tainted with original sin and were inherently depraved, not only to be in error but to be distasteful as well. The early Universalists, on the other hand, were a slightly more humble lot. They believed firmly in sin, but simply found the Calvinist notion that a loving God would damn any soul to eternal damnation to be a rather perverse idea. For both the early Unitarians and the early Universalists, especially the Universalists, their lives became based on a Gospel of Worth. They saw themselves as fallible but worthy people, worthy of God’s love. Already knowing they were saved, they did not feel as much that inner need to constantly strive and prove their own worth to themselves. This is not to say that they were not hard-working people. They were. But their work was an expression of their goodness, not a test of it.

            But my question is, nearly 200 years later, which side has really won out, in our own lives, in our churches, and in mainstream society, the Gospel of Work or the Gospel of Worth? In mainstream culture—and here I am excluding the Religious Right—today one hears little talk about the divine wrath of an angry God or anxiety about the torment of ever-lasting hell-fire, but have these ideas been really abandoned, or do they linger on, having just been translated into terms that seem more plausible to our 20th century ears? Just as the Calvinists tried to calm their own anxieties about their own salvation, is the over-emphasis on success and achievement in American middle-class culture is an effort to calm our own anxieties our own self-worth? Is this why some of us are working so hard? Do we see our own outward successes as a sign of our inner salvation, our own inner goodness, and our failures as a sign that we are somehow damned?

            Consider the following.

            Sociologist Michele Lamont interviewed middle-class men about their perception of themselves and others admitted “they felt they were better than other people because they had more money and did not like to associate with people who had less money than they did.”

            A Lutheran pastor of a middle-class church recently said that he has trouble convincing members of his congregation that their successes are not “just because they’re so damned good themselves.”

            A 37-year-old man who lost his job in a California manufacturing plant talked about the affect on himself and his friends. “My friends...I just watch them, see all this anxiety and frustration and anger and self-blame build up. Don’t really know why guys blame themselves when the plant’s laid off 2,000 other, but they do; they feel terrible.”

            A man at a Unitarian Universalist church in the Chicago area lost his job. Downsized from a corporate middle-management position. And he stopped coming to church—at the time when he and his family could have used the support of a religious community the most, he stopped coming to be with the other people in his congregation. When he was later asked why, he said, “I was just so ashamed.”

            Each of us has a choice in the gospel we choose to live our lives by. If we live our lives according to the Gospel of Work, we live in constant self-doubt, constant striving, and constant judging of ourselves and others. If we live our lives according to the Gospel of Worth, we let love into our lives, love from ourselves, love from another, and love from the Holy, however we may conceive it. Accepting this love, we accept ourselves and others for the sacred creations that each of us is. We don’t have to stop working hard, though we might. But our work becomes an expression of our worth and goodness, never a test or measure of it, because we already know that we are loved and good enough.

            In this age of consumerist choice, which Gospel do you choose?

Prayer

Will you pray with me?

Spirit of life,

Deep within each of us,

Amidst us all,

Teach us to respect the sacred goodness of each person,

Of others and ourselves,

And teach us that we are loved,

Not for what we have or haven’t done,

But always for who we are.

Amen

Benediction

As you leave this place of worship, in your work, in your rest, and in your play, know that each of you carries within you a goodness that is unearned and can never be taken away.

Copyright 2000, James Kubal-Komoto. All rights reserved.