9.6.21 National Cathedral Morning Prayer

[Music] [Music] good morning my friends it is monday september 6th a holiday labor day i'm dana corsello and i'm happy to be with you and i hope that many of you are at home today resting and we will certainly pray for those who labor but let me begin if anyone is in christ there is a new creation and i'd like to share for you this call from worship from the website in fleshed the website in flesh and it begins the god of the exploited disrupts the lie that anyone is self-made or can pull themselves up by their bootstraps god knows such bootstraps don't exist that they never did the god of the oppressed dreams webs of mutual aid a free and accessible health care and communities of care of sharing the labors of the living so that we can take turns resting god is not impressed by trickle-down philanthropy they imagine a life of collective ground up flourishing come let us worship our god of solaire solidarity our god of solidarity and now let me begin with a prayer for labor day this is from our own book of common prayer almighty god you've so linked our lives one with another that all we do affects for good or ill all other lives so guide us in the work we do that we may do it not for self alone but for the common good and as we seek a proper return for our own labor make us mindful of the rightful aspirations of other workers and arouse our concern for those who are out of work through jesus christ our lord who lives and reigns with you in the holy spirit one god forever and ever it seems to me that the theology for labor day comes down to this very simple sentence god of justice we pray for all workers that they would receive fair compensation and treatment in their labor fair compensation and treatment in their labor before i get into the holiday of labor day and why we as a country celebrate it the first monday in september i want to share with you a reading from yesterday from sunday's lectionary this is james chapter 2 beginning at the first verse and the it's about the warning against partiality my brothers and sisters do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious lord jesus christ for if a person with gold rings and fine clothes comes into your assembly and if a poor person and dirty clothes also comes in and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say have a seat here please well to the one who is poor you say stand there or sit at my feet have you not made distinctions among yourselves and become judges with evil thoughts listen my beloved brothers and sisters has not god chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him but you have dishonored the poor it is not the rich excuse me is it not the rich who oppress you is it not they who drag you into court is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you you would do well if you really fulfilled the royal law according to the scripture you shall love your neighbor as yourself but if you show partiality you commit sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors for whoever keeps the whole law but fails in one point has become accountable for all of it for the one who said you shall not commit adultery also said you shall not commit murder now if you do not commit adultery but if you murder you have become a transgressor of the law so speak and so act as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty for judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy mercy triumphs over judgment and then it ends what good is it my brothers and sisters if you say you have faith but do not have works can faith save you if her brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them go in peace keep warm and eat your fill and you yet you do not supply their bodily needs what is the good of that so faith by itself if it has no works is dead this is a very heady and it's a hard it's a hard piece of scripture from the second chapter of james there's so much here that i could unpack um so i know you don't want to spend all morning with me on this labor day and just so you know i actually pre-recorded this so i could have today off mondays are my day off so i was able to pre-record this but let me just begin by sharing a few facts about labor day and how we came to where we are and how this relates i think it actually relates a great deal to this scripture the very first labor day was celebrated september 5th in 1882 september 5th in 1882 and of course it came about in a a way that um is not positive because people died it was a strike so what happened was the american railway union in 1894 in that june some union members voted to strike in solidarity with the pullman factory workers who were literally starving due to wage cuts within weeks workers had managed to bring railroad service to a near standstill anywhere west of chicago effectively bringing the u.s economy to a crisis point so with one hand president grover cleveland tried to appeal to union members by throwing his support behind a bill to declare a worker's holiday now known as labor day which was passed into law later that june but with on the other hand cleveland ordered national troops into chicago to break the strike massive unrest ensued and on july 7th national guardsmen fired into the crowd killing 30 people and injuring so much more so here's the the story behind the story there are invisible people in this story the majority of the porters serving the luxurious pullman sleeping cars were black and the pullman company was the singest single largest employer of black men in the united states at the turn of the century the american railway union however refused to extend membership to black workers and it wasn't until 1925 that the country's first black union the brotherhood of sleeping car porters was founded under the leadership of a philip randolph so what happened is is that with everything else there's always a story behind the story and i don't even know how to say this the powerful have long used divide and conquer strategies to maintain control over those with less power with less power so that's how we came that's how labor day came about now and you should read there i just touched on it i barely touched skim the surface so you should read more about this but i want to get back to this piece of scripture because it's really talking about the poor the poor and how we treat the poor and how we think about the poor and it because it says has not god chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he promised to those who love him but you who've dishonored the poor is it not the rich who oppress you is it not they who drag you into court is it not they who blaspheme the excellent name that was invoked over you you can almost see that the uh the parallels of the rich as the labor um excuse me those who owned the companies right and the poor as the late union workers as those who actually were the laborers so i read this pastor wrote that for the poor to inherit the kingdom of god wouldn't it be really interesting to think of it this way what if the door to the kingdom of god was really low rather than so big and broad so that everybody could get through but what if it was low so that those of us with privilege and i'm right there i'm of privilege that we wouldn't even notice it because we would just walk right over it or we would build have the resources to build a bridge over it but the poor the people who james is talking about in this passage those those who they're actually down at ground level they're already in the muck in the mess and so they know it's there i mean the door is low it's right for them to crawl even to crawl through it where as someone like me and someone maybe like you we wouldn't even notice it was there we wouldn't even notice it was there and so what is the privilege that we possess that causes us to not even notice the door or it causes us to not even notice the poor who is struggling or standing there so we need to ask what if so much more life is possible right now if we were able to divest of whatever obscures this reality and join with others who are right down there at ground level this is the person who walks into church you know disheveled or the person we all make judgments about people we everybody does i'm i'm right there with you but it just it's another way to reframe who god is and the other question is what if god were poor what maybe that and i love how they called the kin kingdom not kingdom but ken k i endem of god is inaccessible to the wealthy because god doesn't have the connections if god is poor god so rarely gets invited to the wine and cheese soirees and the stockholders meetings what if god can't afford a 100 a plate fundraiser ticket and is escorted out of the hotel after being accused of sneaking in to use the restroom um you know god has never been you could name it the bohemian grove i mean that's in california you can name all these fancy places that maybe god himself or herself would not be able to become a member um what if what if god is truly one of the poor we know god shows partiality to the poor but what if god is really there at the bottom kind of crawling through the muck to get through the door it it just it gives us i just think it gives us a different reference about this piece of scripture and especially about labor and about labor day and who we're supposed to honor today um i love this verse 13. for judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy mercy triumphs over judgment so in every workplace and every kind of it doesn't matter every kind of venue every kind of especially in church we have to remember mercy triumphs over judgment mercy triumphs over judgment now i want to end let me find my notes here just one more thing um okay one of the deeper realities of this passage in james is if we see a hungry person and we or we send if we send a hungry person away with a blessing but no material help help this person says it's not just morally wrong it threatens our own salvation in other words our ability to be to be part of a greater miraculous self-sustaining interdependent reign of love now this is hard for me i had a spirit you know i went to seminary in new york city and i just would see so many poor people begging on the subway i mean you see them everywhere you go people with a handout or a cap or you you can't even go to cvs here in washington where we live by the cathedral and there's someone there you know asking for money and it's just so overwhelming and i had a spiritual director say to me once um just pray to god just ask god to bless them to provide for them to be somehow another give abundance to this person and that's what i've been doing for all these years but i think what's happened is that we've conflated that these poor people that they're bad they're morally wrong or something they're just not worthy of our help we judge them it's it's um you know people say oh you're supposed to give money to an organization rather than to an individual because the individual just use it for alcohol or drugs or whatever and um the flip side of that and there's tension here my friends and i don't have the answer but the tension is that no one ever questions a millionaire's right to numb his or her pain with drugs alcohol or haagen-dazs you know but we judge a poor person if they would dare spend that money that we give them you know when we see them outside of a restaurant or cvs oh my gosh they're just going to go spend it on alcohol or drugs we just need to rethink that i guess i'm what i'm trying to get say to you is that sometimes that translate is into hatred of the poor because it's just annoying to us they're just always there jesus said they would always be there so i need to shift my perspective i think we all need to shift our perspective and figure out how it is that we can um empower how we can love how we can do our part against judgment and partiality when it comes to people who are no better or no worse you know um we're all in this together so i'm probably not making sense this is a hard hard issue it's a really hard issue but in james i'm going to stop now but at the very end it says if a brother or sister is naked and lacks daily food and one of you says to them go in peace keep warm and eat your fill and yet you do not supply their bodily needs what is the good of that so faith by itself if it has no works is dead it's incumbent upon us to figure out what our role is in that works part in that works equation we're just not making disciples we have to feed them and close them and house them in and do our part to supply their bodily needs so i've given you probably too much to think about there's so much tension here but we have to do our part and we have to at the very least take the judgment out of our hearts against the poor um and so i think that's a it's a perfect theme for monday labor day because there are many people who are poor and underpaid or um who just can't make ends meet and they're out laboring today on our behalf so let's keep all of them in mind and i'm going to continue with our confession or confession we confess that we have considered the earth to be our own believing god gave us dominion and thus absolute control over it we affirm that the earth is the lord's and that all that is in it and that he has founded it on the seas and established it on the rivers we repent we know we need to change our understanding of creation taking our share of responsibility for its care and protection we believe that the spirit god's recreating power is active in us and in the world god creator of all may humankind be freed from greed which is destroying the earth and may your courageous churches take up causes against the forces that threaten life amen in our assurance of pardon god does not deal with us according to our sins nor repay us by the measure of our failings as vast as the distance from one end of creation to another god's love for us is even greater as far as the east is from the west and greater than this distance does god remove our sin from us thanks be to god now let's pray oh holy one we pray you for the wonders of your creation make us joyful and faithful stewards as the day grows long bless us with the gift of laying down our burdens and not ours only help us lift the weights we have placed on others and on your creation we offer these our prayers of our hearts what is it my friends that you need on this monday morning what is it going to take for you to get through this week broken-hearted insecure feeling insecure about what's going on in our nation there's just almost too much going on to name right now in the world and in and in this united states create in us again and always your heart of grace may we rest on the sure foundation of your love my friends i want to share this ending doxology with you spirit of the living god may our collected offerings flow without impediment to the people and places who need them none of us would have our needs met without the care of many we honor those who have cared for us by offering our resources back into the flow of interdependence amen and may you go forth co-creating the kingdom of god through your marching striking resting and playing through your weeping and taking one day at a time through your protest songs imagination and showing up may you go forth co-creating the kingdom of god so i ask god to give us strength to understand and eyes to see teach us to walk the soft earth as related to all that lives my friends may you be blessed this labor day may you find rest may you keep in mind all those who labor behind the scenes and are invisible especially during this pandemic please hold them as i will hold you tight in my heart may god bless you this day and always amen [Music] you

Channel: Washington National Cathedral

Views: 3,007

Keywords: Washington National Cathedral, Washington DC, cathedral, music, architecture, choir, organ, singing, tourism, tourist destination, united states

Id: 7bXjHHsixew

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 06 2021