Listen to or download Whose We Are, episode 1: Work: Divine and Human

God reaches out to us with unconditional love and sends us into the world to love our neighbors. In the world, we have more than six billion neighbors. The form that neighbor love takes in such a world is justice. According to the Bible, justice is what God loves. Justice is the harmony and wholeness that pulls all the pieces of God’s will together to make meaningful community out of the conflict and oppression that we manage to accomplish on our own. Fair and meaningful labor, especially as it is experienced through the principles of fair trade, is a key ingredient in the pursuit of justice, in the welfare of families, in the education of children, and in the potential for peace among us.

On Saturday, March 28, the Global Mission Committee of the Lower Susquehanna Synod of the ELCA sponsored a conference called “Faith and Fair Trade: What is God Doing in the Marketplace?”

The committee had invited me to deliver the keynote address called “Work: Divine and Human.” As I was preparing my lecture for that occasion, an article appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a fair trade moment my wife Jannine and I experienced in Pakistan almost five years ago. Eight months prior to our trip, we had purchased a rug from Ten Thousand Villages (the largest fair trade organization in North America and member of the World Fair Trade Organization) which distributes the hand-knotted rugs from an artisan group called Bunyaad (formerly JAKCISS). Bunyaad is an Urdu word meaning foundation. While we were visiting some villages in Pakistan in 2004, we were privileged to meet the woman who had tied the rug that lies on our foyer floor. A photo of Khalida in front of her loom rests on the table beside her rug. We celebrate that she has been paid fairly for the months of work she devoted to the intricate design: the tree of life. Buying through a fair trade organization brought us face to face with the artisan we would never have known. Human connectedness paves the road to peace.

“Work: Divine and Human”

“Like Breathing Out and Breathing In”
Receiving the message about God’s unconditional love for us in Jesus Christ nourishes us just as the air we inhale sustains us. Breathing in that message soon forces us to exhale. What we breathe out is the same love that we have taken in.

Loving the Neighbor
According to the Apostle Paul, our breathing out takes the form of loving of our neighbors (Romans 13:9; Galatians 5:14). Our neighbors are the persons we meet daily—family members, friends, checkout persons at the grocery store, and, of course, the people that live next door. Our neighbors are also the more than six billion people living in the world—people we do not see, people whose names we do not know—but people made in God’s image just as much as we are.

The Clothing that Love Wears in Public
In the world of six billion neighbors, love appears as justice. Justice in the Bible is an intimate relationship. God is a “lover of justice” (Ps. 99:4). Justice, along with righteousness, is the way God rules the whole creation (Ps. 97:2). Justice, along with kindness and humility, is what God requires for the wellbeing of human community (Mic. 6:8). Justice is what brings various pieces of human community together.

Health and Wholeness
The first two chapters of the Book of Genesis describe what God wills for the humanity community: living space, food, companionship with other humans and with the non-human world, reason and wisdom, and fruitful labor. The work, according to Genesis 1, is dominion, not domination, of the other creatures—responsible management, even stewardship. In Genesis 2, God assigned the first human to work and protect the garden. When God made each phenomenon throughout the first story, God evaluated it and declared it was “good.” When God finished the entire project, God saw that all the pieces worked together and declared it was “very good.” We could describe the integration as shalom, that is, wholeness, or as “justice.”

The sinfulness of humans caused the pieces to fall apart. Among the many ramifications is that labor became “toil.” The Hebrew word actually means anxiety, frustration, stress, anguish (2 Sam. 19:3; Prov. 15:13; Isa. 14:3; 54:6).

Work, Trade, and the Poor
In the Book of Proverbs, the wisdom teachers instructed their pupils that laziness takes food off the table, and only a fool would take that road (Prov. 10:5; 19:15). But they also taught that the poverty is often the result of injustice (Prov. 13:23). The prophet Amos also condemned the people of Israel for their injustice to the poor on the market place (Amos 2:6; 8:5-6), and Isaiah pointed to the oppression in courts of law (Isa. 3:9-15). (Jared Diamond’s book Guns, Germs, and Steel, identifies a major source of poverty as the latitude in which people lived for the last eleven millennia.) In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul teaches that work Paul urged work provides contact with the world. In the world, work can be a service to God and to needy neighbors while waiting for the day of the Lord. (Acts 20:34-35;1 Thess. 4:9-12; Eph. 4:28).

When the Pieces Fit Together
Stories from Thomas Friedman’s book Hot, Flat, and Crowded demonstrate that when people can find meaningful and fair labor, many opportunities can result. Where fair trade and its principles come into play, people can provide homes for their families, put food on the table, educate their children, and protect the environment for their own sakes and for the world’s benefit. My own experiences in Pakistan also show that when people have jobs that honor them and pay them fairly, families have appropriate living spaces, sufficient food and health care, education, and can live in peace.