May Day 2007 -
Welcome to the May Day chapel service sponsored by the Council of the Community Association of our seminary. Today, we are hosting this chapel service to thank the staff and faculty who make this institution what it is. We want to honor their work here, as a spiritual contribution to our world.
Today is May Day, a day that has traditionally been celebrated by pagans as Beltane, the beginning of spring. Since the 19th century, however, May Day has also been the international Labor Day. In May 1886, workers organizing in Chicago were faced with police violence, in what came to be known as the Haymarket Riot. The holiday now celebrates the social and economic achievements of the labor movement and all the working classes.
On this May Day, with marches around the country, and recalling the mobilizations last year, we celebrate the current labor movement that is drawing attention to the ethics of our economic system, and its impact on political, social, and religious life, in the experience of immigration. We offer this chapel service to honor work as an act of solidarity with all those marching and striking and educating today in support of rights for immigrants, and we carry the lessons of this modern May Day mobilizing into our service today.
We have learned that honoring labor is not just a question of interpersonal relations, or even relationships within an institution, but that it is a call to reanalyze the very fabric of our societies: to reconsider political-economic policy globally that fosters disparities of resources among G*d’s children, and to reconsider our relationship to work itself.
As Christians, we know that we are much more than the jobs we do, but we also know that one of the primary ways we embody our spiritual and physical interconnections is through the ways we serve one another. The labor movements of past and present teach us that the work we do is central to who we are in relation to our world, and so every worker, all work, deserves respect and dignity. All the work we do can be ‘labors of love,’ and the most respectful way to honor that labor is through just compensation: a living wage, fair benefits, and the assurance that our work is appreciated by all those we serve. We as Christian leaders honor the call in Ephesians 5:21 to serve one another, out of reverence for the Christ in each of us; we honor this call by recognizing the interdependent systems of mutual service we perform for our daily bread, by feeling G*d’s spirit empowering all the work we do, for our livings. We as Christians have the awesome ability and responsibility to help infuse the labor movement with an understanding of the spirituality of work – to make it not just a labor movement, but a labor of love movement.
Today, in this service, we seek to honor a specific part of this ‘labor of love’ movement: the people who work in the institution where we find our educational home. We wish to thank all who create and sustain the physical spaces here, all who nourish our bodies and minds, all who facilitate this community into being the Body of Christ gathered here in this place, in this time. We want to add our blessing to G*d’s, for the work you all do for the world and for us.
