To listen to this sermon, click here.
New Testament Reading: 1 John 3: 17-21
A number of years ago there was a study at the University of Wisconsin in which subjects were to place a bare foot in a bucket of ice water. The researchers timed how long each subject could keep his or her foot in the bucket. What the researchers noticed was that the amount of time doubled when there was someone else present in the room. In reflecting on this experiment in relation to the real life experiences of people, the famous rabbi Harold Kushner once said that it is “the presence of another caring person” that can double “the amount of pain a person can endure.” He added that this “is what God does when God sends us people to be with us in our grief.” We could expand upon this and say that this is what God does whenever people enter into our lives in hard times.
When I think of workers who have lost their job or been denied their full wages or been forced to work overtime when their child needs to be picked up at school, I think of someone who has been plunged into ice water against their own choosing. Unlike the test subjects in Wisconsin, they didn’t volunteer for this study, but like those test subjects, you can bet they are able to cope and endure all the better when they have got someone standing in their corner.
When a worker gets plunged into the ice water, we could ask ourselves, “Who is most likely to stand in his or her corner?” As a pastor, I like to think churches have a lot of potential, but when you think of all the businesses and workers in Vancouver, and when you think about how many of us never really know much about what goes on in a workplace unless we either work there or have a family member who works there, then I begin to have my doubts about churches playing this specific role. Perhaps, an even more critical question is who is most likely to not only be there but to be there first? Who is most likely to respond right away reaching out their hand before the worker goes under? As a church, we might eventually make it there, but more than likely we won’t be there first. I think the honest answer is that it is another worker who is the most likely to be there. And, what that first worker on the scene might discover is that he or she can’t pull the worker out of the ice water alone. That’s when there is a call for help. That’s when the person in the ice water needs a whole team of people working to pull them out. We call that team a union, and regardless of what ideologues say about unions as institutions, we can’t forget the basic role and purpose of unions.
Last year a principal at a nationally renowned science and technology high school in Philadelphia named Chris Lehmann put the matter another way in an op-ed. He considered three questions: First, “Are unions perfect?” To which he said, “No. Ask anyone involved with one.” (We could say the same thing about churches.) Second, Lehmann asked, “Do you believe that people have the right to a say in their workplace?” And, third, “If so, do you believe that their voice will be stronger collectively or alone?” He then said that if your answer to this last question is yes, then you believe in unions. He emphasized, “Whatever frustrations, whatever issues, whatever problems you have with the manner in which a specific union may or may not have acted…so be it. You believe in unions.”
I think the real question for us as Christians isn’t whether we believe in unions but whether we believe God can work through unions. Can God work through unions in a way that is similar to the way God can work through a friend to help someone in grief? When a union is standing in the corner of a worker who has been unjustly treated, can we say that this is a way in which God can enter the life of someone going through a hard time?
Our scripture gives us some criteria for telling whether or not God’s love is present in a situation. First, it questions whether God’s love can be present in those who turn their back on the person sinking into the ice water. It says, “How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help?” Next the scripture tells us where we can look for God’s love. It’s not in words or grand declarations. It’s in action. In another words, it doesn’t count to simply say we care about the person slipping into the ice water when we are not doing anything to reach out to them. In discerning where God’s love abides in the world, it’s like the old distinction between love as a noun and love as a verb. When you’re in the state of having fallen in love, that’s love as a noun. There is the emotional high of the first kiss. Love is blissful, exciting, easy. Years later when you’re married and one of you wears ear plugs to bed because the other one snores, then that’s when love becomes a verb. It becomes something that you have to live out day by day in your actions. You love by being actively present, actively committed, actively caring. Some would say that you know you have found true love when it is love as a verb. By the way, neither Eunita nor I have to wear earplugs. Just wanted to set the record straight on that.
Still, the question for us is how do we embody in our lives that kind of active love that’s willing to wear earplugs all night? Earlier I said that as a church we are not likely to be the first person on the scene when a worker gets plunged into ice water, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have an important role to play. Because I grew up among the corn and soybean fields of Illinois, I don’t have a lot of stories about people falling into ice water. In fifth grade, Brian Scott fell through the ice at a local pond, but I can’t say his best friend and I did much to help him. Before we even got there, he jumped out of the water and ran all the way home yelling at the top of his lungs. There is another type of rescue, however, that I think has some parallels to what we are talking about.
In the Midwest, there are these huge corn and soybean silos, and sometimes you have these workers whose job is to go into the silos and get the corn and the soybeans unstuck so that it falls through a hole at the bottom. Earlier this year near a small town in Indiana, one of these workers was in a soybean silo. It had about 1,000 bushels of wet, soggy soybeans in it. A guy named Gary Smith was in there with a scraper trying to shake the soybeans loose so they wouldn’t clog up the silo, when all of the sudden the hole down at the bottom became unplugged and sucked him right down until his boot got caught in this 18-inch opening. Soybeans fell around him leaving him about two feet of his body above the soybeans. The thing about soggy soybeans is that they are heavy, so there was no way he was going to be able to climb out of there by himself. First his co-workers tried to get him out, but after an hour and half, they had to call the local fire department. After a couple more hours, the local fire department wasn’t able to get him out. Eventually, there were about 200 local people at the silo as part of this effort to get him out. After they exhausted all their options, the local fire department called a fire department in another county, and they sent out a special team.
Meanwhile, Smith is looking up from the bottom of the silo, and he has plenty of time to consider all of the clusters of soybeans above him that could be potential avalanches. As he looked around, Smith thought to himself, “That’ll cover me up. That’ll cover me up. Oh, that one is going to kill me.” So eventually, the team from the other fire department gets there, and they send in one of their firemen who happens to be my cousin Craig. By the time I heard the story, I was told that Craig had to maneuver his rather large, athletic body through a one by one foot square in order to get into the silo. Four hours later Craig along with his team of firefighters eventually got Smith out, so that he could be flown immediately by helicopter to the hospital. If you talk with the firefighters who helped save Smith’s life, they’ll insist it was “just part of their jobs.”
I think the lesson in relating this story to unions and churches is that sometimes the union can’t do everything that needs to be done to pull a worker out of harms way. Sometimes they have to call upon people in the community to help them out. I’d like to think that we can be those people and that when we are able to play a small part in pulling a worker to safety, we can simply say, “It’s just part of our job. It’s part of being a Christian who believes that true love is love in action.” Amen.