I don’t need to tell you that one of the greatest issues with the pandemic has been the loss of jobs. The pandemic brought our economy screeching to a halt. The initial fallout from the quarantine caused the economy to shed 30 million jobs. The recovery of those jobs has been slower than expected and the domino effect of that job loss has been grave. Some people have lost their cars. Some people started defaulting on loans and lost the ability to eat. Some have been evicted from their homes and have had to move back in with other family members or, even worse, they became homeless.

Both Dawn and Mike were fortunate that they didn’t lose their homes, but as you heard Dawn say, they need two incomes to survive. And the hard thing about her situation is that she had left her job for a better opportunity with better pay, which meant that she was the last one in the door. When the pandemic struck and the company had to start letting people go, sadly she was one of the first out. That type of situation is known as LIFO: Last In First Out.

A lot of people were in Dawn’s circumstance. Many had just gotten themselves into better paying jobs when those jobs were taken from them. I think her analogy of the carnival ride, which is better known as the Gravitron, where the cylinder spins around and the floor drops out is a perfect description for the situation. I remember going on that as a kid and it was a scary ride. Similar to the ride, losing your job makes you feel unsafe because you don’t have any a floor to land on.

Not having a safety net is often accompanied by a certain level of fear. Are you going to be able to make it financially until you find another job? What happens if the money runs out? Will you get kicked out of your housing? Will you be able to afford to eat? These are hard questions that weigh heavy on you all the time and take an emotional toll.

For Mike, he talked about how this was his first experience losing a job. Having been an engineer all of his life, his talents have always been in high demand. It is rather ironic that he worked in the medical industry, which was the one place where money was flowing like crazy during the pandemic, and yet his company could not stay afloat because that money was being spent on treatment rather than food.

As Mike said, this was a hit to his ego. But losing a job is often a deeper wound than just feeling unwanted by your company. Employment and work are one of the most important ways that we define value in our lives. To work is to create. To work is to contribute to something bigger than ourselves. It not only allows us to provide resources for ourselves and our families, but it is often how we find meaning in the world. For better or for worse, our jobs are integrally tied to our worth as humans.

Now that reality is a slippery slope. It works out great if you find a job you love that is meaningful to you and provides you with a good living. But what happens when your job is just a job? What happens when you do the work, not because you love it or because it’s meaningful to you, but simply because it pays the bills? What does that do to your sense of value and worth?

A Gallup poll taken in 2019 just before the pandemic found that 85% of people around the world hate their jobs. That means only 15% of people globally like what they do. In the United States that number is a little better with 30% finding satisfaction in their work and 70% disliking what they do. Still, 70% is a lot, which tells you something—most people are simply working so they can afford to live. Their work is not a reflection of their passion.

The average person will spend nearly 100,000 hours of their life working a job. That’s a lot of time spend doing something you dislike. Moreover, if your worth and value are tied up in your work, then doing a job that you hate is going make you feel like your life is meaningless. Do you remember in April when there 8.1 million job postings and employers were having trouble filling those positions? I heard a lot pundits making claims like, “The pandemic has made people lazy,” or “The labor shortage is due to too much money flooding economy so people can afford to stay home.”

I think it’s something deeper than either of those explanations. I think people who were laid off had time to think about their lives and their work. With that extended time off, I think many of them realized how unhappy they were in their jobs. So when that same job or something similar to it was finally available again, even at a higher pay, they said to themselves, “I don’t want to work a job that I hate. I want to do something that is meaningful to me rather than just work to live.”

And you’re actually seeing this in all sectors of the economy, especially among educated Millennials. They watched their parents work themselves to death at their jobs. Sure their parents provided a very comfortable living for their kids, but they were never home. They were always working, which resulted in 50% of those marriages ending in divorce. So when you see Millennials negotiating their contracts, many of them are saying they won’t work more than 40 hours a week. They won’t sacrifice their families or their relationships for a job.

This can be very frustrating for an employer who is used to their employees working 70-80 hours a week without question, but I get where they’re coming from. So does Solomon in the book of Ecclesiastes where he says, “I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with…I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.”

I love this scripture because Solomon acknowledges how we have to work hard to survive. But his belief is that God wants us to find enjoyment in the midst of our toil. In other words, if you’re going to have to constantly work to sustain yourself, you should take pleasure in that work. But what’s interesting is that the conclusion made by Solomon by the end of Ecclesiastes is that our meaning should not be derived the toil of our day to day lives. Indeed, he believes that’s a fool’s errand.

From Solomon’s perspective, your work is not the place you should be looking for meaning in your life. Rather his belief was that your meaning comes from your connection with God, which is fascinating isn’t it. It’s like Solomon was 3000 years ahead of the Gallup poll. But if this is true, that we should enjoy our work, but not derive our meaning from it, then pretty much the whole of Western civilization has missed the mark on this one, because as I said earlier, so much of our worth and value is tied up in our jobs.

I think Solomon’s distinction is an important one. You should take pride in your work. You should take pleasure from what you do. But don’t think that your job is going to bring you meaning. Whenever I do funerals, I can tell you that, as I walk through the narrative of their lives, I have noticed again and again, that what they did for a living mattered far less than the relationships they formed with other people.

So where did this belief come from that our jobs create our meaning in our lives? Well, interestingly enough, the Presbyterian Church is somewhat responsible for this. The theological underpinnings of our denomination come from a man named John Calvin. Calvin said that you can serve God through your job. He referred to this type of calling as a vocation.

The idea was that every person has been given a certain set of gifts and that by using those gifts in the world, you are praising God because that’s what God designed you to do. In theory, it’s a wonderful concept. By going to your job and using your gifts, you are fulfilling God’s purpose for your life. When Calvin married those two ideas together—your job and God’s calling—this is where the notion began that we should find our meaning from our work.

As beautiful as this idea is in theory, it is not our reality. One major assumption of Calvin’s theology of vocation is that everyone is perfectly fit for a certain job. The problem is that most people have no idea what they want to do for a living. I had an inclination I wanted to be a pastor from the time I was six years old. But what I have discovered is that I am the exception, not the rule.

Most people randomly fall into a line of work. When I talk to people about how they ended up in their particular profession, usually it’s a series of haphazard events. I met this person who introduced me to this guy, who hired me and set me on this career. Or my father knew someone who was willing to give me a shot in his business. Or I inherited my job from my father and became part of the family business. This is exactly what happened with Zacchaeus.

Zacchaeus was a tax collector, a chief tax collector to be exact. We might complain about taxation levels today, but they are nothing compared to the taxation structure in the Roman Empire. As I’ve told you all in the past, the taxation levels could range anywhere from 40-90% of your income depending on the situation. The reason the taxation levels could be so astronomical is because of the way they collected taxes.

The provincial leaders would gather together the chief tax collectors, men like Zacchaeus, who oversaw all the local tax collectors. The provincial leaders would give the chief tax collectors an inflated amount that needed to be collected from every region so they could take a little off the top for themselves. Then Zacchaeus would give his quota to all the local tax collectors and would inflate his number so that he could take a little bit off the top for himself. Then the local tax collectors would inflate the number even further so they could take a little off the top for themselves.

When Jesus goes to have dinner at Zacchaeus’ house, Jesus is well aware of how much a man like Zacchaeus would have benefited from this taxation structure. In the story, Zacchaeus is called a sinner because he was a traitor. Zacchaeus had turned his back on his own people to serve the Roman government, gouging his fellow Jews so that he could live a luxurious lifestyle.

But it’s important to understand that Zacchaeus didn’t choose to be a tax collector. It was a family business. Your father had to be a tax collector in order for you to be one. God didn’t give him the gift of ripping people off. This wasn’t the vocation he was born to perform. He fell into this line of work and he does it because it’s all he knows. But once Zacchaeus is in the presence of Jesus, he has a remarkable change of heart. Zacchaeus tells Jesus that he will give half of his possessions to the poor and for those he has defrauded, he will pay back four times as much.

So why the sudden change of heart? Because his job does not define his meaning. He realizes that by giving away this money to those who are in need, he will be restoring the relationships that have been damaged by his job. For Zacchaeus, he understands that people matter more than a profession. The point of the story being: relationships and supporting each other is the most important thing we can do as a Christian community.

So my prayer for you this morning is that you would realize that you should take pride in your work. You should take pleasure from what you do. But don’t make the mistake of thinking your job is the place where you will derive your worth and value. That comes from your relationships; from your relationship with God, and from the people who love and care for you. If you make relationships the focus of your life, then you will never be at a loss for meaning and purpose. Amen!