You Say You Want Everyone to Worship Jesus But…
Today I had lunch with a member of our congregation. who shared the bad news that he had been turned down for a job because he said he couldn’t work on Sundays. He’d even offered to work 6 days a week and work all the holidays everyone else tries to take off. It still wasn’t enough, he had to be willing to work on the Lord’s Day or he couldn’t have the job.
I wish I could say that this was the first person in our congregation whom this has happened to, but it’s not. Over the years I’ve seen more and more companies involved in non-essential business (especially retail and customer service) demand that their employees work on Sunday, and not care about objections that working on Sunday violates the religious beliefs of the employee and makes it impossible for them to attend worship. It doesn’t matter to them, Sunday is just another day in modern America and like the Israelites in Egypt, workers have to be available for work 24×7.
But before we lay sole blame at the feet of the companies, let’s stop and consider why they are doing this. The simple answer is because there is an ever-increasing demand for their services on Sunday. The Lord’s Day has become the second busiest day of the week for restaurants and retail and the people who pile out of church and head for Sunday brunch (lamenting the fact that Chick-Fil-A is closed) seldom stop to ask when the people who have been hard at work preparing their food will be able to worship themselves.
Do we ever consider when we pick up the phone to order tickets on Sunday or find out why our Amazon order was delayed that the call center employees have been answering calls like ours all day? The fact is we Christians SAY we want the world to worship Jesus Christ and become part of His Body, the Church, but we’d be furious if no one was there on Sunday to answer our customer service call, or deliver our Pizza, or serve us beer and hot dogs at the game, and we seldom stop to consider that on Sunday those employees can either serve us or serve the Lord but not both and the fact is we’ve been voting with our wallets for them to serve us for years now.
Isn’t it time we stopped? Or must we wait till only retired people can worship on Sunday?
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