Mark 8:27-38

Day-laborers. You know where they are. You probably don’t know who they are, but you know where you can find them. Every community has them. They gather on a street corner or parking lot before dawn. There they wait, watch, and hope that you will drive by and give them a day’s work.

Can you imagine what it must be life to live like this? Not knowing where you next paycheck is coming from, or if it’s coming at all. These are the earliest risers in any community. By the time the sun is up, so is the chance for earning a daily wage, making enough money to buy food for an evening meal, scratching together some funds to put towards the rent or to send toward the family back home. It is a hand-to-mouth, hardscrapple existence, a morning-to-morning crapshoot. It is a scrape-by living, not a livelihood.

Unemployment numbers are still on the rise. The most recent statistics are the highest they have been in 26 years. People are either moving in with family and forming extended families, or we are leaving dead and dying towns to search out work in some other part of the country . . . leaving behind bad mortgages, good schools, family memories. When you’re unemployed, the goal is not so much a better future; the goal is getting through today and getting to tomorrow.

Some of you here this morning make your living with your hands, your back, your flying fingertips; others of you with your shoe-leather, your gift of gab, or your brain matter. But however you make your living, you have developed key skills. Our work skills give us a sense of pride and purpose. Good skills should lead to a good job, a good paycheck, and a sense of independence and self-satisfaction.

It is precisely when our skills are rewarded and we’re doing well that we are most tempted to pull the old unemployment plug - not on some co-worker, or employee, but on God. This is our biggest, most critical unemployment crisis. An unemployed God, idled by our idol of self-sufficiency and self-help. The unemployment crisis is one we manufacture in our own life - an unemployed or at best a grossly under-employed reliance on God in our lives. When we hit a wall - when our finances fall apart, our family is in crisis, a serious illness develops, a hurricane bears down, a fire roars around - then we are eager to employ God.

(from http://www.sermons.com)