Sermon: The Days of a Tree – Labor Not in Vain

Honea Path, resurrection, and the work whose meaning exceeds visible success

Yesterday afternoon, a remarkable thunderstorm moved across Spartanburg as we gathered for the UCC Progressive Christian service at the Unitarian Universalist Church. Rain fell hard enough to make driving difficult, while thunder rolled over the sanctuary, and lightning kept plenty of sensible people at home. The congregation in the room was small. Another, more sizable congregation gathered through the livestream.

In a strange way, the weather belonged to the service. We had come to speak about labor and Sabbath, land and water, and what it means to trust that work given to the life of the world is never finally empty. Outside, water moved over roofs, parking lots, red clay, and roots. Inside, the call to worship named rest as both gift and justice: belonging, renewal, fair wages, and Sabbaths that everyone deserves.

September 6 also marked the ninety-second anniversary of the Chiquola Mill massacre at Honea Path. On that morning in 1934, seven striking textile workers were killed while seeking better wages and hours, union recognition, and relief from the “stretch-out” that forced fewer people to tend faster machinery. When local churches would not open their doors for the funerals, around ten thousand people gathered in a field.

That history became the difficult center of the meditation. Paul’s assurance that “in the Lord your labor is not in vain” can become another pious instruction to keep working, especially when it is separated from the resurrection argument that precedes it. Honea Path will not permit that easy reading. What can Paul’s words mean when the workers were killed, the strike was broken, the union disappeared, and the churches refused to make room?

Isaiah 65 gave us another way of imagining the promise. The prophet describes renewed creation through houses people are allowed to inhabit, vineyards whose planters eat the fruit, and lives that endure “like the days of a tree.” Justice appears as the closing of the distance between our hands and our bread. Paul places that creaturely hope within resurrection. Resurrection keeps the losses honest while refusing to grant violence, exploitation, or death authority over the final meaning of a life.

The service moved from a call to Sabbath through Psalm 90, Isaiah 65, and 1 Corinthians 15; from “God of Grace and God of Glory” and “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” to “Come, Labor On”; from the sermon to an open table and finally Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (one of my favs that has found its way into a good many services with my sermons over the last decade). That final song carried us out with longing instead of easy triumph.

The full service is below, beginning at the point linked in the video (though I encourage you to watch all of it, as the music and Merianna’s meditations are incredible. The prepared meditation text follows.

The Days of a Tree

“Labor Not in Vain”
UCC Progressive Christian Service · Unitarian Universalist Church of Spartanburg
September 6, 2026

Isaiah 65:17–25 · 1 Corinthians 15:51–58

Six miles east of here, Lawson’s Fork drops over the old dam at Glendale and runs on toward the Pacolet. Brick towers and smokestacks remain from the cotton mill begun there in the 1830s. The machinery stopped in 1961, and a fire took most of the building in 2004. Now hardwood roots work down among bricks laid by human hands.

Before we say anything about labor that is not in vain, I want us to stand somewhere specific, on a particular morning, with particular people.

About an hour southwest of Glendale, the Chiquola Mill stood at the center of Honea Path. On September 6, 1934, ninety-two years ago today, roughly three hundred workers gathered outside its gate. They were part of the largest textile strike in American history, seeking better wages and hours, union recognition, and relief from the “stretch-out,” which required fewer people to tend faster machinery.

The mill superintendent was Dan Beacham. He was also the mayor and exercised the authority of a local magistrate. The mill, the town, and the law had gathered into the hands of one man.

When the governor declined Beacham’s request for the National Guard, more than a hundred local men and anti-union mill workers were deputized and armed. A First World War machine gun was placed on the mill roof. When a scuffle broke out at the gate, gunfire came from the mill. The machine gun jammed, yet the rifles did not.

Six workers died that day. A seventh died from his wounds soon afterward. Most were shot from behind as they fled. Around thirty more people were wounded, including women. Eleven strikebreakers were charged with murder. No one was convicted.

Workers who supported the strike were fired and evicted from company houses. The strike ended with few tangible gains, and union organizing in Honea Path never recovered.

Survivors remembered that the churches would not open their doors for the funerals. About ten thousand people gathered in a field instead. One man later said, “It just tore the churches up.”

A memorial was finally placed in Dogwood Park in 1995. These are the names cut into it:

Claude Cannon
E. M. Knight
Lee Crawford
Maxie Peterson
Ira Davis
C. L. Rucker
Thomas Yarborough

The words above them read: “They Died for the Rights of the Working Man.”

We have called this service Labor Not in Vain. Those seven names make the phrase difficult, and they should.

The strike was broken. The dead left families behind. Their neighbors mourned them in a field because the churches were afraid to make room. The mill eventually closed, and the town carried its silence for generations.

What can “labor not in vain” possibly mean in front of a history like that?

We could turn Paul’s words into a religious version of “work harder.” Employers have always been happy for preachers to praise the endurance of exhausted people. Honea Path closes off that easy reading. If Paul’s claim has any truth, it must be true where work failed by every measurement the world knows how to take.

Scripture has no fear of that question. Ecclesiastes asks, “What do people gain from all the toil at which they toil under the sun?” The word repeated through the book is hevel. Our Bibles often translate it as “vanity.” It means vapor, mist, breath on a cold morning. It is entirely real, and you cannot make it stay.

Qoheleth has watched people build what someone else will own and plant what someone else will eat. He refuses to lie about the arithmetic. Labor can be wasted and stolen. Some work wounds the worker, exhausts the land, and enriches people who never touch either one.

Paul offers no blessing for every demand placed upon a human body. Human dignity comes before productivity. The Sabbath declares that people, animals, and land possess value beyond what can be extracted from them. Even God rests. Faithful labor includes refusing arrangements that consume people and call that consumption necessary.

Then Isaiah gives us a picture of the world such work seeks.

Isaiah speaks to people trying to make a life among ruins. He describes renewed creation through ordinary things. People build houses and live in them. They plant vineyards and eat their fruit. Labor and life belong together again.

Growing up in my Southern Baptist church in the Pee Dee, I heard passages like this directed toward heaven. Isaiah puts the vision on the ground: “They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat.” The hands that build are allowed to dwell. The hands that plant are allowed to harvest.

And then Isaiah says, “For like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be.”

I have a black walnut in my backyard, and lately I’ve begun keeping a deliberate journal of time spent beneath it. This summer it began dropping walnuts in late July, earlier than I expected. The tree was carrying our dry weather in ways I was only beginning to notice.

The walnut was there before we came, and it will likely remain after we are gone. Its roots reach into soil I cannot see. It makes walnuts it will never gather. It works in a time I do not control and cannot complete.

When Isaiah imagines people released from futile labor, he reaches for the life of a tree. Justice takes arboreal time. It means remaining long enough to inhabit what your hands have made while giving yourself to a future whose harvest you may never see.

The next verse says, “They shall not labor in vain.” Its ancient Greek words come remarkably close to Paul’s language in First Corinthians. Whether Paul intended the echo or whether we simply hear the passages together, Isaiah gives Paul’s promise houses, vineyards, children, and trees.

Paul places that creaturely hope inside resurrection.

That is why the first word of Paul’s conclusion matters so much: “Therefore.”

Paul has spent the chapter talking about bodies raised, creation changed, and death swallowed up in victory. Therefore, he says, be steadfast, because your labor is not in vain. The word he uses for labor carries toil and weariness within it. Paul can say that such labor is not empty because resurrection grounds the claim.

Resurrection leaves the losses honest. The strike still broke. The families still grieved. The church doors remained shut. The violence never becomes useful or secretly good.

Then resurrection makes a claim beyond the reach of any mill owner, mayor, market, or gun. The powers that break a life do not possess its final meaning.

Dan Beacham could close the gates. He could fire workers and remove families from company houses. He could help keep their bodies outside the churches of their own town. He could not decide what their lives were worth.

Their deaths were never a price that had to be paid for progress. Their lives possessed a worth no defeat could cancel. Resurrection refuses to surrender that worth to the people who killed them or to the silence that followed.

This story belongs to 1934. The question it asks belongs to us.

Here in Spartanburg, we are living through another rearrangement of labor, land, water, and power. A data center is taking shape at the former Kohler site on South Pine Street. It will require immense amounts of electricity and water while employing a fraction of the people the old mills employed. Three days from now, County Council’s Public Safety Committee will hold a special hearing about data centers.

I have written about that project, and I do not stand outside it. I use these technologies. My research, writing, and daily life move through servers somewhere. The electricity and water serve me too. It is easier to see the machine gun on the roof from ninety-two years away than to see whose labor, land, air, and water support the convenience in my own hand.

Isaiah gives us questions for Wednesday’s hearing. Do those whose lives bear the cost share in the good being built? Can the worker inhabit the house? Can the planter eat the fruit? Will children inherit a place in which they can live?

The machinery changes. The moral stakes remain recognizable.

So I want to leave us with the tree.

The promise of resurrection offers no guarantee that we will finish the work, control the outcome, or live to see the harvest. Isaiah’s first hearers still knew ruins. Paul was executed by an empire. Seven workers at Honea Path received a field instead of a sanctuary, and their families inherited decades of silence.

The promise is arboreal: “Like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be.”

One of my heroes, Wendell Berry, died this week. In his “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” he wrote:

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Faithful work enters a life larger than our own. We cannot command its fruit. We can give ourselves to the life within it. The God who raises the dead holds its meaning beyond the mill, the market, visible success, and the silence afterward.

And one more thing.

Ninety-two years ago, the churches of Honea Path would not make room for the bodies of seven workers.

This morning, on September 6, in a Unitarian Universalist sanctuary, at a progressive Christian service, with a Baptist standing before you, we have spoken their names beneath a church roof.

This is a small act. It comes very late. It cannot repair what happened in that field.

It can break the inherited silence.

Claude Cannon.
E. M. Knight.
Lee Crawford.
Maxie Peterson.
Ira Davis.
C. L. Rucker.
Thomas Yarborough.

“Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain.”

Amen.

Sources and Further Reading

• “Massacre in Honea Path,” Southern Exposure / Facing South
• “They Died for the Rights of the Working Man,” Historical Marker Database
• “Welcome to Glendale Shoals,” Historical Marker Database
• “Water, Closed-Loops, and Lawsuits,” Carolina Ecology
• Spartanburg County Council: September 9 data-center hearing notice