Rector’s Note: Labor Day and the Gospel-9.3.2026

I marched in my first Labor Day parade shortly after starting my first job as a newspaper reporter for the Rochester Times Union in 1988. I was 21 years old, had just graduated from journalism school and was getting my first taste of the power of organized labor. In the four years that followed, I would encounter my first experience with contract negotiations. I would become a grievance chair at a time when the fast and constant typing required of newspaper staff was causing debilitating repetitive strain injuries. I would learn the power of collective action, not just to raise wages but to protect fellow reporters from unfair treatment by the corporation that owned the paper. It was a heady time.

After my husband Jess and I moved home to Cleveland so he could go to grad school, I began working for faith-based organizations and churches, which I’ve done ever since. Interestingly, while the theology of the Catholic and Episcopal churches that employed me upheld and promoted the dignity of labor and the rights of workers to organize, they also leaned into the federal laws that exempted them from recognizing unions in most of their own institutions. To be sure, many Episcopal parishes and organizations are too small to work within the structure of bargaining units and contract negotiations. But they are still morally accountable to using just labor practices. We are never exempted from that.

The Episcopal Church blesses Labor Day with its own collect and lections. And since we pray what we believe, the components of this prayer give us something to reflect on as people of faith this Labor Day weekend. It is not merely the end of the summer, or the last Sunday before our Homecoming Celebration (Sept. 13 – come get your ministry blessed), or the last chance for a three-day weekend and cookout before school begins. It’s a time to consider the importance and the vulnerabilities of paid laborers in our economic system and to ask ourselves how God is calling us to create just conditions for all.

Almighty God, you have so linked our lives one with another that all we do affects, for good or ill, all other lives.  Probably the best lesson I learned from my time in a union was the power of community, gathered in common cause for a collective good. This resonated with the communal nature of the faith tradition I was raised in.  I grew up among people of faith who looked out for one another, prayed for one another, showed up when people were hurting and stood up for each other. Collective work, communal care and organized effort are at the heart of church life.

So guide us in the work we do, that we may do it not for self alone, but for the common good… One thing I learned as a laborer in the Catholic vineyard was the social teaching about the common good. It’s a lens that we look through to determine if the conditions of those around us are just and fair. It casts that circle of concern widely and globally.  Does everyone have what they need to thrive?  Are all gifts activated and received? Do we value those who are on the receiving end of our giving? Another word for this is solidarity, which is also a concept of labor organizing. As an act of faith, it casts an even wider net.

and, as we seek a proper return for our own labor, make us mindful of the rightful aspirations of other workers… the biblical story of the Workers in the Vineyard (Matthew 20:1-16) reminds us that the common good that the Gospel envisions extends well beyond the typical contract negotiation. In God’s Vineyard, the ones who arrive last still receive a full day’s pay from a generous employer. They get not what they deserve by human standards, but what they need to feed their families that day. That is God’s standard of care for God’s workers. The generosity of God makes not only the typical employer uncomfortable, but also the fellow worker who uses a “zero-sum game” to measure what they have and deserve to get.

through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever…. Jesus also lived among his fellow humans in first-century Palestine, and he himself had an interesting relationship to labor. An itinerant preacher during his years of public ministry, he relied upon the generosity of others for his room and board, especially the band of women who supported him by their means. (See Luke 8:2-3). The community of faith that developed soon after was known to hold their wealth in common. The Apostle Paul, a tentmaker, kept at his trade even as he preached, and called upon the members of the interdependent communities that he founded to understand the importance of their shared labor, and not shirk their economic responsibility to one another. ( Check out 2 Thessalonians 3.)

All of which to say on this Labor Day weekend is that we depend on one another still. The Gospel calls us to foster just economic structures that maintain a common good, meet people’s needs to thrive, and bless people’s desire to work in just and sustainable enterprises, and to care for those who can’t work and yet have economic need. Our faith tradition gives us helpful and challenging guidance where this is concerned. Labor Day reminds us of the call to put it into practice.