what are we working for?

 

What Are We Working For? (Deut. 24.14-15, Matt. 20.1-16)

Jeremy Rutledge, Circular Congregational Church

September 2, 2018

 

In a favorite scene from George Cukoc’s 1938 film, “Holiday,” Cary Grant looks at Katharine Hepburn with a gleam in his eye.[1] “I’ve been working since I was ten,” he says. “I want to find out why.” She looks back at him quizzically.

The film was set in the high society of the time. Grant plays a young man of humble origins who worked his way up the ladder until becoming engaged to a debutante. Yet he sees through the trappings of wealth and privilege and decides he’d rather not be a part of it. He’d rather take some time away, a holiday, and sort out what life is really all about. His fiancée can’t stand this, but her sister, played by Hepburn, can. You can see it in her eyes as Grant explains. “The answer can’t be,” he says, “just to pay bills and pile up more money.” There’s got to be more to life. “I want to save part of my life for myself,” he continues, his voice quickening, “Come back and work when I know what I’m working for!” Hepburn leans in closer, nodding. She understands. So did the audience.

At the time of the film’s release, the country was mired in the Depression. People were suffering beyond anything they had known, and asking them to see a film about high society was a risky proposition. Yet the film, like many of the time, combined Grant’s existential questions with a populist soak-the-rich sensibility. It also had an undercurrent of weary humor. In his history of the time, Morris Dickstein cites the film’s title “Holiday” as an example; a holiday, in the 1930s was a euphemism for a strike or a bank suspension.[2] Grant was choosing to take a holiday because the system made no sense to him, but his audiences may have been forced into their holidays. Even so, their questions were the same: What was it all for, anyway?

I was always a lover of film, but I fell in love with an older era thanks, in part, to my first job. When I was fifteen years old, I began working at the Ritz Theater in Shawnee, Oklahoma. The theater had been built at the end of the 19^th Century and had a long history. The owner kept memorabilia from everything that had ever played there, and above the theater one could pore through old movie posters from Buster Keaton on. My job had no title, but since there were only two of us, including the cashier Clarice, who was locked inside a small ticket window and never came out, my role was that of combination lobby boy, concessionaire, and custodian. I spent a lot of time popping popcorn, carrying buckets of ice, and cleaning and polishing all the old brass and mahogany fixtures. The job paid little, $3.35 an hour, but offered as a perk free admission to any movie, anytime. Apart from this one, I think it was the best job I ever had.

Yet for me it was mostly a summer job. Once the school year began, I quit to focus on my homework. I’d show up at the movies on Fridays with my friends, buy tickets from Clarice, and then go inside, only later realizing that the pittance I had made during the summer was Clarice’s actual income. She was living off the low wage theater job; I had just been chipping in a few bucks for my family, who were saving for me to go to college. To this day, I can’t go to the movies without looking every person working there in the eye and thinking of him or her as a colleague.

It brings to mind, this Labor Day weekend, that we might think of every person, working anyplace, as a colleague. And we might ask ourselves whether they are making a living wage and whether the fact that so many are not is all right with us. It’s a variation on Cary Grant’s question about why we are working and what’s it all for. Implied in the question was the idea that once we have our basic needs met, anything beyond that is unnecessary. High society is a ruse. The rich getting richer is a sham. What about everybody else? Grant was asking what kind of person he wanted to be. But he was asking us all what kind of people we want to be, even what kind of country we want to have. This used to be an American question.

In his essay, “The American Scholar,” Ralph Waldo Emerson questioned the meaning of material success. “[People] such as they are,” he wrote:

very naturally seek money or power. . .the “spoils,” so called “of office.” And why not? for they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is highest. Wake them and they shall quit the false good and leap to the true. . .![3]

Yet how do we wake others and ourselves, Emerson wonders, in a culture that prizes the superficial over the spiritual, the material over the meaningful? In search of an answer, he arrives at a mindful appreciation of what is common to us all. “I ask not for the great,” he exclaims, his voice quickening as Cary Grant’s:

[I ask not] for the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy or Arabia. . .[but] I embrace the common, I explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into to-day, and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and gait of the body. . .[4]

In other words, Emerson celebrated the ordinary and the known, the simple gifts available to all of us when we are allowed the basics of life. And it’s refreshing to remember that there was a time in this country when our essayists and our filmmakers cast suspicious glances at the accumulation of too much wealth and at the flaunting of high social status. What’s the point of all that, they wanted to know, when what we most need to live meaningfully lies elsewhere?

It’s a tonic, I think, for the times we are living in, after the Great Recession and into a deepening economic inequality. It’s a function of what scholars call neoliberal economics, which both of our political parties have embraced, but which deviate from Cary Grant and Ralph Waldo Emerson and entrust questions of meaning and value to an old economist named Friedrich Hayek, who was once considered something of a hack before his idea took over the world.

Neoliberalism, as Stephen Metcalf explains, conceived of the ideal society as a kind of universal market.[5] It places its faith in the market, and ultimately believes that market forces of profit and loss will sort out society. It is fundamentally competitive and impersonal, and a great many people fall through the cracks of this system or, we might say, slip through the fingers of old Adam Smith’s invisible hand. Yet Hayek kept pushing his view that the market was the be-all and end-all, and eventually everyone from Ronald Reagan to Margaret Thatcher bought into it.

What neoliberalism displaced, in essence, was the view of John Maynard Keynes and other economists, that the market couldn’t meet every human need and that we needed governments to do that by stepping in and ensuring the basics of health and well-being for every citizen. Some of us still think that, although our reasons are not only political, they’re religious.

Earlier we heard two readings from the Bible. One, from Deuteronomy, was as plain a legal code as can be found in the Hebrew text. “You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers,” it says, “whether other Israelites or aliens [immigrants] who reside in your land. . .”[6] The text adds that people are counting on their wages to get by, they need their pay in order to provide the basics. And no one should deny anyone else the basics. While there are other legal codes that we no longer follow (e.g. ancient cultic proscriptions against eating shellfish or wearing clothes with mixed fibers), it seems clear that we should go with this one. First, because it is just and fair. Second, because the Bible is overwhelmingly concerned with the needs of the poor, mentioning them more than any other group. And third, because it squares with the Golden Rule and the teachings of Jesus. One of which was our second reading.

In the parable of the laborers in the vineyard, Jesus tells a story about workers. Many of us have heard the story before. A vineyard owner hires workers to help him with the maintenance of his crops or perhaps the harvest of the grapes. Throughout the day, he keeps adding workers and at the end of the day he pays them all the same, the ones who have worked all day and the ones who have just worked the final hours. Those who worked the longest, of course, complain. To which the landowner asks, basically, what do you care? I paid you what I promised. If I’m generous to others, what’s it to you? Put another way, if everyone has what they need, then where is the problem?

The parable is an affront to conventional wisdom and a retort to Friedrich Hayek’s market god. What seems to matter in the story is much more than material compensation. It’s a story of generosity.

Rick Moody writes of why, as a novelist, he loves reading the parables of Jesus. The parables, he says, are “intervention[s] against the idea that you [have] to wait for heaven, that heaven [is] somewhere else. It’s right here, and if you can’t see it, perhaps with signs, symbols, stories [like this], you might feel it.”[7]

Which is one of the reasons we come to church. With signs, symbols, and stories, we feel our relatedness to each other. And our obligation. We feel answers to Cary Grant’s old question about what we are working for. Here we are working for a world where everyone has what they need and the basics are available to all. This is a political vision, to be sure: health care for all, a good education, affordable housing, and nutritious food. Yet it is grounded in a deeper religious and spiritual vision, that we are all members of one another, sisters and brothers in a common family, none of us better than the others, but all of us equal in dignity and value.

That is, of course, a value based not on the god of the market, but on the God of the people, the one in whose image we say everybody is made. “The answer can’t be,” says Cary Grant, “just to pay bills and pile up more money.” The answer can be, says Jesus, found in the countercultural story of radical generosity, sharing, and love.

If we follow this wisdom, it will put us out of step with the order of things. And wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Amen.

 

 

[1] Holiday. DVD, dir. George Cukocs (1938; Culver City: Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 2006).

[2] See Caleb Crain, “It Happened One Decade: What the Great Depression Did to Culture,” The New Yorker, Sept. 21, 2009, accessed online at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/21/it-happened-one-decade

[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), 55.

[4] Ibid., 57.

[5] Stephen Metcalf, “Neoliberalism: The Idea that Swallowed the World,” The Guardian, February 9, 2018, accessed online at https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-the-idea-that-changed-the-world

[6] Deut. 24.14, New Revised Standard Version.

[7] Rick Moody, “The Parables of Jesus of Nazareth” in The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages, ed. by Andrew Blauner (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2017), 229.