We come together this morning for worship in the midst of a three-day holiday weekend, Memorial Day weekend. Despite its initial purpose, dating back to the Civil War, to honor those who died in times of war, Memorial Day has gained an additional meaning as the official start to the summer season. This newer meaning of Memorial Day has, for better or for worse, perhaps even surpassed original meaning in the public consciousness.

For example, with the exception of news on the President’s trip to spend Memorial Day on the beach at Normandy, during this past week The Today Show, that cultural measure of middle America, did not offer a single feature on war veterans or those lost to armed conflict. However, they did feature Matt Lauer in a Hawaiian shirt and Katie Couric in Capri pants standing on sand piles imported into Rockefeller Center, the backdrop for stories like, “Six Steps to Surviving Summer Vacation,” “Safety in the Surf and Sun,” “Great Books for the Beach,” and “Gearing Up for the Grilling Season.” While this year in particular I mean no slight to those men and women in the armed forces, with all this attention, my own thoughts this week also turned to summer. Summer always brings such high expectations-lazy days, long vacations, escape from the rigors of work and devotion to all things leisure. Summer is the season when hard work takes a back seat to hard play.

And this year, this particular Memorial Day holiday poised at the cusp of the leisure season, stands sharply between two major celebrations of work here at Old South. Last week we honored graduates for their work in school, and sent them our best wishes for the hard work they will continue in college. And of course, next week we will celebrate Jim Crawford’s retirement after a lifetime of service in ministry. With all this attention to summer leisure sandwiched between these two celebrations of work, it seemed only too appropriate that we stop and reflect on the meaning of work and leisure in our lives. And what better scripture to start with than the one Sven just read for us, the Genesis account describing the sixth and seventh days of God’s creation. This passage sets us up with the theological context for the whole of our earthly lives, showing that we are created for work and for rest.

We pick up with the scripture on the sixth day. The story is familiar to all of us: God makes humankind in God’s own image, blesses these male and female human creatures, and charges them to “be fruitful and multiply” and to “have dominion over the earth.” From the first day of our formation as humans, God set us out as working creatures-created to till the land, to care for the plants and animals, to raise our own offspring. In God’s plan, work is not an evil tyrant, but a piece of what makes us human beings. Something deep within us, something foundational to how we have been created, yearns to be useful, to produce, to be fruitful, to work. In God’s original design, work does not alienate us from God, but wraps us up in God’s creation, helping us to find purpose and meaning in our lives. On the sixth day, we learn that we were created by God to work, and that our work should bring us closer to God and fulfill us as human beings. Those strict adherents to that blessed Protestant Work Ethic shout an “Amen” to that one! Workaholics, those addicted to their work, even find theological justification for the overbearing role work plays in their lives. But why then, for so many people, does work feel more like, well, work? This understanding of work as the place of God’s fulfillment is grand for those folks who enjoy their work, but what about those who find their daily labor boring, frustrating, alienating, demeaning or just plain lousy? More and more people in the 21st century find their work unsatisfying. According to a recent survey, only 51% of all working Americans are happy and satisfied with their jobs, down from 59% five years earlier. Not surprisingly, of course, families earning less than $25,000 are the least satisfied workers, and those earning more than $50,000 are happiest with their jobs. So what happens when work is not the fulfillment God intended?

The most popular response by those who find their work draining rather than life-giving is to seek fulfillment instead in their leisure time. For all the strength of the Protestant Work Ethic, and all the kudos given to the achievements of workaholics, there are plenty of other cultural messages trying to convince us that the meaning of life is found in time off. That famous acronym T.G.I.F. comes first to mind-Thank Goodness it’s Friday. It is followed by the echoes of dozens of pop songs, most notably the immortal lyrics of 1980’s pop icon Loverboy, “everybody’s working for the weekend.” And so those who are working for the weekend turn to Day 7 of our creation story to find their solace. On the seventh day, even God rests. The scripture says, “God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that God had done in creation.” Being created in the image of God, we work, but also we need to rest. On the seventh day, we learn that God did not create us just as creatures of labor, but also as creatures of rest, taking time to appreciate the beauty of the work of creation and the fruits of our labor.

I imagine most of us, however, fall someplace in the middle between clinging to our work and simply working for the weekend. The lives of workaholics and TGIFers represent extremes, those who turn exclusively to either to work or leisure for meaning in their lives. Although we may see glimpses of ourselves in these portraits, most of us have at least some vision of our lives that matches the creation story, balancing meaningful work with Sabbath rest. Still, even though we make diligent efforts to juggle the pressures of work with time for family, rest and relaxation, it seems rare that things manage to come together just right. Often even rest seems like something we must ardently pursue.

Theologian Tilden Edwards, writing in his famous book, Sabbath Time: Understanding and Practice for Contemporary Christians, describes the rhythm of life for contemporary people not as the back and forth between work and rest, but between “driven achievement time and compensatory escape time.” In other words, we go and go and go to produce and achieve, only to be compensated for our exhaustion by brief escapes through passive pleasures like movies and TV or exhilarating thrills that catapult our minds and/or bodies away from our work life. I can’t help but think that some popular TV shows-like ER, 24, Fear Factor, Survivor-try their best to give us both: passive pleasure while watching exhilarating escapades that take us away from real life.

The problem rests not with our lack of work or lack of leisure, but with our relationship to both. What happens in this frantic vacillation between achievement and escape is that we stake our identity on it. Edwards goes on to describe the shift in modern societies from an identity that is given, either by family, religion or community membership, to a self-definition through what we do, either for work or for leisure. Instead of just knowing who we are by virtue of our birth or position, we need to create an identity, and we do so through our work and our leisure. Who we are is wrapped up in what we do. Consequently, to cease from doing is to lose our very identity. So we fill every moment with something-whether it be, in Edwards’ words, “achievement” or “escape.”

Think first about the ways in which we try to establish our identity through our work and production. Just as an example, have you noticed that our pattern of greeting one another has changed? Two friends meet: “Hi, How are you?,” says the first. The traditional mediocre response, “fine”, has been replaced by many of us by another one-word answer: “busy.” Wayne Muller writes, “It becomes the standard greeting everywhere: I am so busy. We say this to one another with no small degree of pride, as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character. The busier we are, the more important we seem to ourselves, and we imagine, to others.” I do not know anyone, myself included, who is innocent of whining about the amount of tasks to be done, the exhaustion of the previous week, the long hours of a particular day. What Muller points out, however, is that those whinings are also boastings, as we try to build ourselves up: “Look how busy I am, how much I have to do, how much I produce, how much I am needed, how important I am.”

But assessing our worth and importance by the yardstick of our busyness proves not only exhausting but unsatisfying. Not only does it make us addicted to our own self-importance through our work, but it places us in competition with one another, so that the one with the most jam-packed day-planner wins.

The same is true of efforts to establish our identity through our leisure activities. Think back to that opening image of the high expectations for the summer season and this week’s stories on the Today Show. The vision of Katie, Matt and Al hanging out on imported sand dunes surrounded by beachwear is a carefully constructed picture of joy, bounty and fulfillment, so that the cast appears to have every desire fulfilled and to be content with themselves and all the world. The feature stories on the show then offer ways for you too to establish such a contented self. Take “Gearing up for Grilling Season.” So you like to cook out. With a little help, you can make a name for yourself, establish part of your identity around this leisure activity. First, do you prefer propane or charcoal? Do you make burgers and dogs, shish-kabob, or something more gourmet? What brand of grill do you prefer? Add each component up to make a unique and happy you. It’s even easier with the story “Great Books for the Beach.” What kind of escape do you prefer: mystery, sci-fi, biography?

While there is nothing inherently wrong with reading or with cooking out, or with summer vacations, movie-going or television watching, none is sufficient to pin our identity on. No product we can buy based on a Today Show promotion can help us attain the perfect summer vacation, day at the beach or backyard barbecue, much less an entire feeling of self-worth. In the end, efforts to establish our worth and identity through our leisure activities prove unsatisfactory as well.

You see, when we start letting our leisure define who we are, we become consumers-our worth is determined by the quality of our vacation, the kind of products we enjoy shopping for, the music or movies we select to entertain ourselves, the clothes we choose to express our personality or the ability to indulge our every desire and act on our every impulse. When we start letting our work tell us who we are, we become producers-our worth is determined by the size of our salary, the social status accorded to our profession, the amount of hours we can work in a week or the importance attached to us by how much the company needs us. Our work measures the value of our life by the amount of goods we produce; our leisure measures the value of our life by the amount of pleasure we can experience. And worst of all, we get caught in an endless and exhausting need to produce and consume, to stay busy, to be doing all the time, in order to feel like we matter at all.

But this creation story, these sixth and seventh days, tells us that is not God’s intention for us. The creation story reminds us that our lives have already been measured, and God has pronounced us as good. The creation story tells us who we are-children of God created in God’s image, loved by God before we have ever produced or consumed anything. Yes, we will continue constructing the pattern of our earthly lives by the things we do for labor and for leisure, but we do not need to pin all our yearnings on our own earthly efforts. As people of faith, we see things from a different perspective. We believe that first of all, God created us in God’s own image, and called us good. That is where we must stake our identity-the meaning of our lives comes not from the things we do, but from God. We are God’s children, and all that we are is an outpouring of God’s love. Our work and our play, our living and our loving need not be ardent strivings after identity satisfaction, for when we stake our fundamental identity in God’s love, all our efforts become instead the flowering of God’s creation, our outpouring of love in return to God. And that, my friends, is a fulfilling life of labor and leisure. So as another summer approaches, and we think again about our work and our play, we can let go of our need to produce and consume, to have the busiest calendar at work or the perfect summer vacation, and instead turn to God, renewing our connection to the one who truly gives our lives meaning, our Creator.

Let us pray: