Christ in the Workplace

This sermon was originally preached by Mr. Rome Hartman at The Falls Church on September 2, 2007.

Dear Lord, thank you for this beautiful day. Thank you for the reminder that it is, instantly, when we walk out our front doors today, the glory of your creation. Thanks for the gift of gathering in such numbers in your name and for giving us a chance to seek you. Bless our time together here and bless our lives beyond these walls. Amen.

Some people here will remember that when Ross Perot first ran for president in 1992, he chose as his running mate a man name James Stockdale. Stockdale was one of the most highly decorated veterans in the history of the US Navy. He had also spent eight years as a POW in North Vietnam. Unfortunately, James Stockdale will be remembered best by most people for the opening line in the vice presidential debate in 1992. He meant it rhetorically; unfortunately an awful lot of people took it quite literally. He stood up and said, “Who am I? Why am I here?” That’s how I feel today. When John Yates first asked me to do this, I thought he must have lost his mind. There are hundreds of people in this room right now who are better equipped to teach from the front of this church than I am. As Doug mentioned, there is something else that generally for John is an even bigger disqualification which is that I’m a Duke fan. So, I thought that he must be really hard up for a speaker on a holiday weekend. Then John explained, as Dean said, that he has a tradition of asking completely clueless laymen like me to speak on the Sunday before Labor Day. That made me feel just a tiny bit better. Really, he does like to use this day to have us reflect on the meaning and value of work to people of faith, or what it’s like to seek Christ in the marketplace.

Labor Day is, of course, an entirely secular holiday. It’s a product of the American union movement and was first marked unofficially with rallies and marches in the late 1880s…and it has been a federal holiday since 1894. As usual in Washington, there’s a political story behind the story of that federal holiday. Grover Cleveland was president and was running for reelection in 1894, and he had earlier in the year called out federal troops to put down a strike by workers at the Pullman Railway Company. In the violence that ensued, two people were killed, and it became a huge issue in the United States. Cleveland endorsed the idea of a federal holiday for Labor Day as a kind of a peace offering to working people. He still lost the election. Anyway, whatever you think of organized labor, I think it is an inspiring idea, a holiday to celebrate the efforts of the ordinary working man and woman. As I said, it’s a secular holiday, but the idea of honoring ordinary people is completely biblical as well. Who did Jesus choose to hang out with? Who did he choose as his apostles? Working people. People with calluses on their hands. People who got up before dawn to go to work. People who didn’t have much of a voice in the public life of their day and certainly didn’t have much respect or credibility among the religious leaders of the day. People with completely secular jobs. It’s not exactly an original insight to express the opinion that secular work can be a calling just as much as the priesthood, but I believe it’s true. I believe it’s pretty simple. I think God gives each of us gifts that equip us to do particular things on this earth. The first reading today talked about building on a foundation; another way of thinking about that is that we have to build on the foundation that God has given us. He’s given us these incredibly capable minds - in my case slightly less capable than the average - but incredibly capable minds. Brains that we generally only use one or two percent of their power. Bodies that are capable of doing amazing things. We have to build on the foundation that God has given us by figuring out what our gifts are and then if we do that, we can honor God in our work no matter what it is. Of course, some people are born to be preachers (not me). But more are born to fix cars or work with numbers or invent software or found businesses or play soccer or write or build houses.

One of the first stories I did as a producer for Sixty Minutes was a profile of a man named Thoralf Sundt, who was a neurosurgeon at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. He was a remarkable man, and his particular gift was that he was able to fix aneurisms in the brain that other doctors wouldn’t touch. People came from around the world for many years, decades really, to Dr. Sundt after their doctors had said to them, “I’m sorry. It’s in a place in your brain that we just can’t get to.” Dr. Sundt would routinely go there, fix them and save these lives. I remember thinking as I stood there in his operating room watching him do this, that this is a man who had truly found what it was God had equipped him to do and was honoring God by doing it day in and day out. Of course, your job doesn’t have to be an extraordinary or exotic one like neurosurgery, in order to honor God. One of my heroes is a man that some of you may know, whose name is Howard Butt. He knows the Bible inside and out and has been preaching God’s word for fifty years. He has spent most of that time championing an idea that he calls: The High Calling of Our Daily Work. You can actually find out more about it at a website that’s called thehighcalling.org or you could just Google “Howard Butt” and “higher calling” and it will come up. He said that he often hears God saying this to him: “Just do the next ordinary thing. Not your religious fantasy, not heroics or dramatics, but your everyday, common place duty.”

My everyday commonplace duty, the thing that I think God gave me the gifts to do is journalism. As Doug said, I spent most of my career as a producer at CBS News and have very recently joined the BBC here in the U.S. Now around here, being a working journalist sometimes translates into being considered an official card carrying member of the godless-commie-pinko-press (Laughing). The question that I think I’ve heard more often than any other over the years here is, “How do you manage to be a believer in the mainstream media?” I guess it’s a good question, but the honest answer I think is that it’s hard to be God’s person or a follower of Christ no matter what your profession. I know that I fail to live up to God’s commandments and to Christ’s teachings on a very regular basis, but I also think that that question betrays a naiveté that we need to be careful about here. And I think it points out a danger that we ought to be alerted to as well. First the naiveté. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but there is no vast left-wing conspiracy in American media. Honest. We never had a secret meeting in the basement of Black Rock where we plotted how to convert the world for liberalism. Really.

It’s also true, I believe, that the great majority of people who work at CBS, ABC, NBC and the BBC are genuinely devoted to fairness, to getting it right, to honesty, and to balance. Frankly, in my short couple of months at the BBC, I’ve really been inspired by how much time and money the BBC devotes to making sure that its journalism is not tainted by bias or prejudice. When there is evidence or there are allegations of such, they really do take quite seriously looking into it and trying to figure out how and teach people how to bring fairness to their work. It may be tempting to believe that all the good people in journalism in this town work for FOX or the Washington Times and everyone else is working for the devil (Laughing). I’m here to tell you that that’s not right, and it’s unfair, and it’s close-minded. Is there bias? Of course there is bias. Does one network lean left and another lean right? Yes. But the institutions that I have worked with and the individuals that I have worked with have really tried hard over the years to make that less so rather than more so.

Now, the naiveté that I mentioned does go in both directions, of course. The mainstream media are profoundly secular, and a lot of people working for newspapers and television networks simply just don’t know much about you or about any other people of faith. And they do sometimes succumb to stereotyping or pigeon-holing or caricature. Prejudice and ignorance run in both directions. John’s pastor’s note in this morning’s bulletin talks about bad experiences that he has had and others have had with the press. I once had a theory that the whole media universe would collapse in on itself when every single individual in America had a bad experience with a reporter. But, when stories turn out wrong, it’s usually because of ignorance rather than malice or a political agenda. We would never allow our reporters or editors to be ignorant or ill informed about politics or business or sports, and we can’t do our jobs well if we are ignorant about religion. There’s a very simple way to address that, of course, make the newsroom a place that welcomes people who know something about faith, not just Christian faith, because they themselves believe. Another time I was doing a story out in the field. I was in a rural school district in Kentucky. There was a woman who was the public relations officer for this school district, very competent person, extremely helpful. She just had one strange quirk in her speaking. When she said words or came to words she was kind of uncomfortable with, she would whisper. So she’d be talking to me, and she’d say, “There’s this person that I really want you to meet. The one thing you should know is he’s a (whispering) democrat.” Or, “This school principle we are going to see, I really like her, but she’s a (whispering) Yankee.” (Laughing) Now I have sometimes felt over the years, maybe walking the halls at CBS, that some of my colleagues might be saying, “There’s Rome, he’s a pretty good producer, nice guy, did you know he’s (whispering) religious?” (Laughing) So there is that naiveté, but I think the good news is that mainstream news organizations have identified that as a weakness, and they now see that having staffs that better reflect and understand America including the area of religion will make them better.

Now the danger I mentioned before…the danger I think we all ought to be alert to: it is a fact that if we choose we can construct our lives now in such a way as to almost never see or hear or read anything that we disagree with. We can find television shows and radio shows and newspapers and commentators and websites and blogs - especially websites and blogs - that all pretty much reinforce our view of the world. This is what we might call the atomization of information. It’s a function both of technology and of the marketplace. There’s an explosion of media outlets of all kinds. But fewer and fewer of them aspire to offer diverse points of view or inspire to balance and objectivity. Instead, they pursue a niche strategy. They pick a target audience and try to please it. Preach to the choir. Reinforcing the viewpoints and sometimes the prejudices of that core audience, and demonizing the other side. I think we need to resist the temptation to retreat into these information bubbles, where we only listen to those who reinforce our own point of view and tell us what we want to hear. We have the ultimate role model here: Jesus. Did he hang around with his disciples all day listening to them say,

“Oh, you are so right, Jesus. O my gosh, what a good point. You’re the man.” No, he went into the temple and he talked to and he listened to elders and the Pharisees and the Samaritans and the sinners and the tax collectors. He engaged the world and he exposed himself to radically different positions and points of view and types of people, and I think he calls us to do the same. Now when he disagreed with them or found them to be doing wrong, did he say so? Of course. He spoke truth, and he dispensed justice. But, he also gave grace and displayed mercy. I think during his public ministry there were many more times when Jesus displayed mercy and forgiveness than there were temple clearings> And that example, I think, is something for this church to aspire to. Yes, we want to proclaim truth, and yes, we want to embrace orthodoxy. But, I believe we must avoid arrogance and condemnation even as we do. God is the judge, not us. Another quote from Howard Butt: He talks about the orthodoxy of love. “If someone claims orthodoxy but is not loving, beware.”

I’ve had the privilege in recent years to occupy a series leadership positions in my profession, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how to be God’s man in those positions and in the secular workplace. I have failed in that effort, and I know I will fail again and again, but the formula that I aspire to is fairly simple yet hard to achieve. First, I think it’s really important that whatever our profession, we be good at what we do. Use your gifts. Earn the right to be heard and to lead by doing your job right and doing it well. I think this ought to be particularly relevant to young people who are early in their careers. If you want a chance to win your co-workers at the law firm or the congressional office or wherever for Christ, you will never get a single convert if you’re crummy at your job. Or, even if you’re mediocre. Who’s going to listen to you about one thing if they see you failing at another? Excellence in one area earns us chances to influential in others. Second, even if you’re really good at your job, be humble. Easy for me because I screw up so much. As David Glade reminded us in his sermon last week on the Ten Commandments, it’s tempting to covet status and title and fame and prestige, and in the workplace, a symptom of that covetousness can be to toot your own horn, boast about your accomplishments, be a little too political in trying to advance or get promoted. I believe that the act of NOT seeking or coveting acclaim and prestige actually produces it. The best way to practice humility, as I indicated, is to admit mistakes, and I get lots and lots of opportunity to do that. Third, in trying to find the balance in justice and mercy, favor mercy. Don’t be a wimp, don’t excuse or ignore a breach of honor or integrity, but practice compassion and help people get through and learn from their mistakes….even as you confess your own.

About six moths ago, I was fired from a job. I’d never been fired before. It was an interesting experience. I don’t really recommend it (Laughing). What I really, really don’t recommend is getting fired on the front page of the New York Times. I had to time to let my immediate family and my parents know that night before the first edition came out, but that’s about all. Most of my staff found out about it when they picked up the Thursday morning paper. That was not a lot of fun, but I also discovered that there can be something good about being fired on the front of the New York Times: you hear from absolutely everybody you’ve ever worked with, or at least I did. And in those first twenty-four hours, something happened that turned a really tough time into a really gratifying time. I was deluged by emails and notes and calls from people that I’ve worked with and gotten to know over the years. I think I received something like 500 emails in that first day. I really felt during that time, which was obviously a time of professional loss, that I was reaping what I had sown in another way over my years of work. There’s one note that rang through a lot of those emails. People said that they felt that I cared about them, that I tried to help them to be better, that I had served them in some way. And that’s my last word about living our faith at work. Try to be a servant.

I know there are a million books about servant leadership. It’s almost become a cliché, but it’s really true. There are so many ways in which you can practice this. You can serve from the top. You can serve from the bottom. The one thing you can’t do is fail to serve all the way through your career and then decide you’re going to become a servant once you’re the boss. It doesn’t work that way. You have to practice it as you go. It’s simple sometimes, a note, a two-lined note to someone that either celebrates a joy with them or let’s them know that you’re thinking about them, and yes, praying for them in a time that’s difficult, is unbelievably powerful to people. It means so much to them. You can serve in ways that are almost so simple that you wouldn’t even remember them. As Doug said, Amy and I have been involved in the Fellows Program over the years. Amy actually ran it for five or six years, and every year we would go to the graduation dinner where the Fellows were leaving. At that dinner they try to have a Fellow and a person speak from each piece of the program. So a Fellow and their mentor, a Fellow and the student that they’d been looking after, and a Fellow and their workplace sponsor. There was a guy named Brad Beckham who was a Fellow a couple of years ago who was working with a very prominent surgeon in the area. This guy is not from this church, not a particularly religious fellow, the surgeon I mean. He got up and spoke at that dinner and really brought tears to everybody’s eyes in that room downstairs because he talked bout the way in which Brad, this young man who didn’t know much about medicine, did know how to serve. He told one little anecdote. He said at first it seemed almost trivial, and then he realized the power of it. He said he used to come into work and he would have an early surgery almost every day. He would take off his sweater and throw it in the corner of the room, and after surgery, he would come back to his office and the sweater would be neatly folded on his chair. Brad was doing that just because it was an instinct, a sweet little way to serve. This comes straight from the gospel, Matthew 20:26, Whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant.

So, I end where I began, who am I? A sinner, a servant trying to follow Christ as a man, a husband, a father and a journalist. And why am I here in this church? Because this, I think, is a wonderful vibrant community of faith that helps all of us on that journey and in our work. Happy Labor Day. Amen.

You can purchase a recording of this sermon from The Falls Church for $4.