Next Monday is Labor Day.

We think of this annual national holiday mostly as a “last hurrah” for summertime.  Gatherings centered on barbecue-and-beer, a final weekend at the beach, the day before school starts, etc.  The brief pause of Labor Day signals a segue’ in tempo: from long, lazy vacay-days to shorter, stricter school-days; a syncopated downbeat before the pace picks up double-quick.

This year there’s little chance of a “normal” Labor Day.  Gatherings are illegal in the midst of a pandemic; beaches are hot spots in more ways than one; and because so few schools will be starting in the traditional sense any time soon, it’s an anticlimax to pretend transition in what’s actually ongoing bummer-vacation mode.

Labor Day 2020? Bah, Humbug.

Or … maybe not.

Helping Hints from History …..

The actual, factual history of Labor Day offers us a shockingly relevant respite this year.

A legacy to us from the labor movement of the 19th century, Labor Day was inaugurated not to provide covering for another party but rather to honor the American workers whose sweat equity had fueled the Industrial Revolution.  

The point was to celebrate these anonymous heroes, authors of national prosperity, and to give them a break from their work … because 12-hour days, seven days a week, often began for them by age 6.  Factories, mills, and mines functioned as de facto prisons for them; they toiled in squalid, unsafe conditions for subsistence wages, without any legal protections.   Violent riots and  mass strikes over years created enough public outrage to finally grab the attention of Congress, and President Grover Cleveland signed Labor Day in to law in 1894.  It was a token victory, certainly; but it was a starting point for public consensus on justice, decency, and legislative protections for laborers.

These historic roots of Labor Day have much more to offer us today than do the recent iterations of Labor Day festivity.   Parties are great, but resting from labor is a fundamental need hard-wired into the human constitution.  

What We Really Need ….

At the most basic level, night-time and sleep are biologically essential for maintaining circadian rhythms, cellular repair, and brain health.  Our physiological hard-wiring renders us incapable of going around the clock, around the week, around the year.  Beyond basic physical health, our intellectual and emotional capacity requires resting from labor to sustain any ability to keep working productively.

Labor Day parallels the fourth commandment in both content and intention.   God specifies:

“Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work – you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but rested the seventh day; therefore the Lord blessed the sabbath day and consecrated it.”

Exodus 20:8-11

The carefully comprehensive nature of this edict – nobody left out, not slaves or livestock or foreigners – is source material for an American law whose purpose was to safeguard all those who lacked legal covering. Further, the implicit connection between humanity as being created in God’s image and humanity as mirroring God’s standards completes the picture: setting apart a day for not working is essential to human flourishing. We were made to work, yes; and we were made to rest from our work in obedience to the One who made us, and in concert with His own example.

It’s a grim truism that this Labor Day, 2020, we are wearier than at any time in recent memory. Our fatigue is multi-faceted, grinding us down from several angles simultaneously. We are collectively anxious, both exhausted by the ongoing toll of a virus no one understands and terrified by the ongoing manifestations of anarchy and hatred around the world.

Each of us has a concurrent set of losses and challenges to negotiate, too: jobs gone or at half-pay, children adrift, elderly loved ones in solitary confinement, the daily task of putting one foot in front of the other in circumstances we did not choose and cannot change.

The labor that drains us and drags us down is not paid work – professional, manual or otherwise. Our labor is, simply put, surviving the crises … and keeping our eyes on the Christ who continues to offer us hope and sustenance, even now.

Our modern Christian version of “keeping the Sabbath” has tended to focus on church attendance and shrug off rest … as though God emphasized the former and made the latter optional. This is irrational, because cessation of labor is the very means by which God says we remember the sabbath day and keep it holy! When we de-emphasize rest in our sabbath – keeping, we ironically distance ourselves from the pattern God is demonstrating to us and enjoining us to follow. In resting, we remember and imitate God’s rest from the labor of Creation … and draw close to the One who made us, knows us, and offers us not just survival but true Life.

This year can be an excellent opportunity to remind ourselves that the substance of the 4th commandment, like the purview of Labor Day, names “not working” as the whole, and holy point!

Shannon vowell

So … on Labor Day 2020, as the relentless nature of our laboring and the cumulative weight of our fatigue are extraordinary, I propose a true Sabbath: no work. Not the work of working, not the work of worrying, not the work of waiting. No working whatsoever.

Labor Day 2020 can be a true Sabbath, if we will do three simple things with our hearts and minds and hands, trusting. Trusting.

Rest in worship! Worship in rest! Leave the laboring to the Lord.

Resources for a Labor Day Sabbath

Rest in Jesus … “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”

Matthew 11:28

Rest in God’s promises … “Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.

He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.

Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted; but those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not be faint.

Isaiah 40: 28-31

Rest in the songs of God’s saints …

“Be at rest, my soul!” Oh! blessed secret of the true life that glorifies thy Lord; Not always doth the busiest soul best serve Him, but he who resteth on His faithful word.

“Be all at rest!” for rest is highest service; To still the heart God doth His secrets tell; Thus shalt thou learn to wait, and watch, and labor, strengthened to bear, since Christ in thee doth dwell.

“Be all at rest!” for rest alone becometh the soul that casts on Him its every care; “Be all at rest!” so shall thy life proclaim Him a God who worketh and who heareth prayer.

“Be all at rest!” so shalt thou be answer to those who question, “Who is God, and where?” For God is rest, and where He dwells is stillness, and they who dwell in Him that rest shall share.

Freda Hanbury Allen; 1900