Working Man Takes Time To Give Thanks 0?

A Prayer For Labor Day

Rev. Robert Livingston

"If the Lord does not build the house, poor builder, why go on working? If the Lord does not guard the town. Poor watchman, your watch Is in vain. Why. then, should you get up early — and toil on into the night. Your bread will still taste of sorrow. Happiness can never be made — the Lord gives it to his friends, just like that, in their sleep." — Psalm 127, a translation by Huub Oosterhuis, Fifty Psalms.

We call you with many names, the names of centuries — God. Lord, Eternal Being. Creator.

You breathe into us the spirit and power of creation, and make us your partners in knitting a universe which will reflect your love.

You fill us with freedom, for praise

comes only from those who can acknowledge that work itself is your grace to us.

Help us to realize. Lord, that true creation. a real building-up, springs only from those who give themselves in a sense of freedom, leisure, grace.

Free us from the slavery that chains us to our jobs so that nothing else matters.

Free us from a compulsion to work that erodes our health and our friendships.

Free us from the yoke of standards which value our work only in terms of quantity, numbers, statistics.

And free our co-workers around the world from all those conditions which make them into drones and machines, barely distinguishable from the mechanical giants that engulf them.

Deliver us from the curse that pushes us to value ourselves and each other only in terms-of productivity and dollar value.

Deliver us from the drive to exploit water, air and land in the name of a cheap paradise on this earth.

Deliver us from the urge that makes of our ingenuity, energy and technology a blind force that consumes rather than edifies, that corrupts rather than creates.

You tell us, Lord, that we are made in your image.

You join us in your work of creating the world.

Forgive us Lord, for we forget that work is grace, given in freedom to be used in freedom.

Help us to remember that only to the extent our toil is seen as gift, not as commodity, do we create a world worthy of you; only'to the extent our work springs from freedom, and not as a desperate measure for economic survival, do we fashion a world humane and divine.

Amen.