as preached at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston, August 30, 2026
You know what work is–if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
There are few poems that I love as much as Philip Levine’s “What Work Is.” It does not exactly speak to my experience. It has been almost thirty years since I have had a job involving intense physical labor. I have never worked in a factory, only once briefly in a warehouse, and I have never had to “shape up.” That is the old slang for standing around, in a line, clustered in a bunch of a street corner, “waiting, / shifting from one foot to another” with the “knowledge that somewhere ahead / a man is waiting who will say, ‘No, / we’re not hiring today,’ for any / reason he wants.”
Maybe you have done such a thing. Maybe you know what it is like to wake, before first light, and head out to a parking lot, a warehouse district, a spot by the docks, and wait, hope, that someone comes by to offer you work.
It is not an uncommon phenomenon. In truth, it has become more widespread in recent years than we care to admit. What Levine wrote about in “What Work Is” now gets called the gig economy. Not steady work, not a long-term contract, not a promise that tomorrow you will have a job and be able to put food on the table, but the constant hustle, the consistent struggle, to ensure you will find some manner of surviving.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
The closest I have ever come to shaping up was working as a temp right after college. Inspired by the Beat poets, I moved to San Francisco.
They didn’t hire him
so he ate his lunch alone
the noon whistle ~ Gary Snyder
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole ~ Diane di Prima
I arrived in the city without a job or lease. I had some savings and the promise of friends that I could stay in their spare room until I got myself settled. I found a temp agency in the phonebook–if you can imagine such a thing–called them up, took a typing test, and soon found myself in the world of sometimes having work and sometimes not.
Things went on like that for a while. Some days I would get sent to an office only to discover that the employee who was supposed to be out was back unexpectedly early or the project had been finished ahead of time and we know there is a four hour minimum so could you get me some coffee and try to put those files over there in order or something and alright your time is up you have to leave so we do not have to keep paying you. Other times, I would find myself with a job for two weeks, three weeks, entering data into a spreadsheet or taking dictation for a paralegal or …
The most memorable posting I had was answering phones for a mortuary that specialized in the foreign born. That was what it said right there on the marquee outside, “specializing in the foreign born.” Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, even Yiddish, the morticians were all polylingual. The game, or the challenge, or the difficulty, depending on your perspective, of answering the mortuary phone was figuring out which language the deceased’s loved ones spoke and then matching them with the appropriate mortician. They really liked me, those morticians. I was starting to think about seminary–though back then, while I temped, I had my eyes set on a Silicon Valley job. They spent some time trying to convince me to consider the mortuary sciences. One of them, the guy who spoke German, Russian, Yiddish, and I think Polish, had been a Unitarian Universalist seminarian. We went to the same church. He wanted me to know that the ministry was similar to what he did in the funeral home–lots of pastoral care, the occasional opportunity to lead a service, and you do not have to deal with congregational politics, thank you very much, he told me.
I politely declined the opportunity to spend my life caring for the dead. The posting ended after three weeks, or was it four? Soon I found myself on a temp-to-hire contract working in the secretarial pool for a group of marine insurance adjusters. One of them was one of the few genuinely horrible human beings I have ever met.
He had who knows what awful traumas in his background. A retired ship’s captain, he had spent the mid-1990s smuggling arms during the Bosnian War. I am certain he committed war crimes. When the Kosovo War broke out, he listened to the radio intently every day, all the time, waiting for news. Whenever a story came out that some Serbians had been killed, he would cheer, like his team had just scored a touchdown. And if the dead included civilians, it was like listening to someone celebrate the Superbowl, just awful.
You know what work is–if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
After about nine months I left that job. I found the position working as a database architect that I had been looking for when I moved to San Francisco. I did that for a few years before giving into the call to ministry. It turns out that, unlike my mortician friend, I do not find congregational politics unpleasant. Challenging, yes, we all have different ideas about what it means to be part of the shared story that is the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Houston. The congregation’s vision often rubs up against its resources. Someone inevitably finds my sermons boring–hey, we all have different tastes and while I am not sure I would agree with Philip Levine that Wagner is “the worst music ever invented” I really cannot stand most showtunes, as our former Associate Minister knows. That does not stop me from loving the people who love them.
Another person wishes we spent more time on this social justice issue than that one. Occasionally it feels like we make more work for ourselves administratively than we need to. Other times it seems like we do not spend enough energy on administration. And so, it goes. Ministry is, after all, a job and while there lots of wonderful moments–the blessings of hospital visits, lunches with congregants, time together at vigils, the life shaping rhythm of worship–it is also, well, a form of work.
it is whole, it is a whole, it always was whole
Next week I start my twentieth year in the parish ministry. After more than five hundred sermons, this has me in a reflective mood. What have you done for twenty years? Or for longer? Whatever, you’ve done I am sure that it has shaped you. For if this sermon has a hidden message, it is that we are what we do. Not in some sort of negative Augustinian, Lutheran, or Pauline sense in which human depravity is so overwhelming that we can never escape it and that the only hope to be found is through divine grace. Nor in some kind of old Puritan Calvinist sense whereby God’s elect are known by all of the good works that they do. No, what I mean is rather more simple and I suspect more profound. How we spend our time forms who we are. Work is one of the most religious things we do.
Religion, I have shared in the past, can be understood as what binds us together. We are surely bound together by our shared endeavors. One of my favorite phrases from our tradition is Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s insistence, “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.” Though this is the annual Sunday where we celebrate the labor movement and working people, I do not want to be accused of reducing work to waged labor. Instead, I would flip things around and argue that work is anything we do that forms who we are, either as individuals or as a community, that sustains us and connects us to something greater than ourselves.
Tina Morris’s poem “Tree” provides a warning of how we might become severed from those things that are greater than ourselves if we come to rely too much on machines for our work. Though not a Luddite, there is something that will be lost if creativity, if work, if the labor of connecting ourselves to each other, is turned over to artificial intelligence. As she writes:
Nobody imagined
that the whispering of leaves
would grow silent
or the vibrant jade of spring
pale to grey death.
And now we pile
rubbish on rubbish
in this dusty landscape–
struggling to create
a tree
The sounds, the work of finding the tree, which is to say of discovering something real, can be encountered in what we do. It might be in the 9 to 5 for sure (and I am sorry that this week we could not pivot quickly enough to offer a tribute to Dolly Parton). But it is also housework, gardening, the daily tasks of creating and forming relationships. Dolly Parton understood this. While she devoted herself to her paid work—a master craftswoman when it came to songwriting and musicianship—where she really shone was in the work of encouraging people to be themselves. Loving drag queens and the queer community, loving children who needed access to books, loving people who had experienced disasters, loving us all through her support for medical research, Dolly Parton knew what work is. It has something to do with those lines in Levine’s poem that run:
You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
Work has something to do with love. We say that we put love at the center of our faith. I think that means we also put work at the center of our faith. Not just the things we do to make money, but the work of caring, the work of parenting, the work of community organizing, and the work of connecting one to another–of binding together. This is something we can do no matter the age and stage of our lives. When we give someone a hug, say I love you, we are doing a form of work.
Friday, I found myself thinking about love at the intersections of many kinds of work. Along with some members of the congregation, I attended the vigil put on by Migration with Dignity for Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. There was a call for his brother to be released from detention so he could serve as a witness to the killing. His sons were there. I imagine most of the people present were not getting paid to pray.
Yet they certainly were doing work. They were testifying to the life of a man who died while laboring to support his family. I am sure that he spent much of his life shaping up. He loved his wife, sons, and brother, so he likely spent time waiting for waged labor, waiting to hear yes or no to a job today. So, the community was there, some of you were there, doing the work of mourning, the work of witnessing, the work of solidarity, and the work of binding together.
This leads to questions that I have asked myself almost every day for the last twenty years of my ministry. What will you bind yourself to today? What connections will you seek, create, or maintain? When I consider my early work life, I realize that one of the things that I was trying to figure out as I went from job to job was what I wanted to be connected to. Not a mortuary or Silicon Valley, it turned out. Certainly not a genocidal former ship captain, but some form of work that felt like it bound me to something larger than myself.
I know that I am blessed. Not everyone finds waged labor that connects closely to Diane di Prima’s insight:
there is no part of yourself you can separate out
saying, this is memory, this is sensation
this is the work I care about, this is how I
make a living
Choice is over imagined in our society. Sometimes we think that people have more options than they do. Not every gets to choose the kinds of work that they do. There are jobs that are just awful or turn us into horrible people. It is possible that the former ship captain had been a loving soul before he started smuggling arm. War does dreadful things to people.
True that might be, but I believe that each and every day, no matter our situation, we have the opportunity do some of the work of love. We can always care for each other. We can always try to connect. Parent, child, grandparent, living alone or in a household, to be human is to be bound to a greater whole.
Such an observation leaves us with more questions than answers.
What work will you do?
What does love invite you to connect to?
How shall the labor of your hands and the beat of your heart be intertwined?
To what will you bind yourself today?
it is whole, it is a whole, it is always whole
Amen
