The Boss From Hell
We had such a wonderful trip out to California to visit the kids that it seems whiny and ungrateful to spend time focusing on the one irritating part of it. But today’s reading from Romans discusses the topic of masters or bosses, and how they affect your life. Unfortunately, we ran into a prime example of this.
Our daughter works as a waitress at a restaurant to pay the bills as she pursues her career goals. The job requires her to work weekends and early mornings, and makes very little allowance for time off. Which is a problem when her family is visiting on vacation.
She resigned herself to work within the restrictions. She did not request any time off or any special treatment. She and Linda stayed behind in Los Angeles while the guys took a weekend road trip up the coast to San Simeon. She made plans to spend Monday and Tuesday with us, her precious two days off, after which we would go down to San Diego, where Maury had made arrangements for our time there.
On Sunday, the boss hit her with a bombshell. Without any warning, her work schedule was changed so that she would now have to work Monday and Tuesday. Her boss did this knowing full well that her family had come 2,000 miles to see her and that she had carefully orchestrated our plans to accommodate her work schedule. So with this new schedule, we would be in San Diego during her only two days off during the entire 12 days we were out there.
Rent is astronomical in LA; jobs are scarce. What do you do?
After some discussion as a family, we decided that she would simply inform her boss that she had not been given timely notice of the change, and that she was not coming in on Monday or Tuesday. He could fire her or not, but he would be liable for the consequences of a wrongful termination. Thankfully, the boss gave in, and our trip went smoothly.
I suspect some of you may have your own boss from hell story, and that we may hear some of those after the service.
I contrast that story with my experience during my internship year in seminary. My internship supervisor could not have been more helpful or accommodating. He said, basically, do whatever you feel you need to do while you are here to learn what you need to know. Don’t ask me for permission to do anything, just let me know what you are planning and I will see what I can do to help.
I may have been the only intern in seminary history who had Christmas Eve and Christmas off, because Will thought it would be better for me to spend that time with my family. He lined up a great internship committee for me to work with, he invited me on skiing and canoe trips. He never once took any credit for anything that happened, and seemed genuinely tickled with my successes, even when I was able to do something better than he could.
As a result of having this boss, I think I got a lot more out of my internship than most seminary students.
These contrasting stories illustrate the truth of research published in Psychology Today, that a rewarding job and good relations with coworkers cannot compensate for a negative relationship with the boss.
This is exactly what Paul is talking about in our reading from Romans.“Whom do you serve?” he asks. “Who is your master?” It’s an incredibly important question because it makes such a huge difference whom you serve. It is no exaggeration to say that your happiness and productivity depends entirely upon whom you serve.
In the world of employment, you can’t always choose your bosses. Can’t always choose whom you will serve. But unless you find a boss you can serve with some degree of mutual respect, you are not going to get the best out of life. If you are working for a boss from hell, you are going to be miserable.
Paul is speaking of life when he talks about serving bosses, and he paints the picture in such stark terms that he allows no room at all for debate. There are two masters in life. There is sin and there is righteousness. You can serve one or the other, and the consequences of that choice are staggering.
It seems like he’s oversimplifying the case. Is all of life really a choice between sin and righteousness? Between serving good and evil? Doesn’t most of life fall somewhere in between those two extremes? Deciding what to eat, how to decorate, how to spend free time, choosing a career. Those aren’t decisions between sin and righteousness, are they?
The key here is not to confuse overall purpose with the details of life. The Pharisee approach to life is to focus on details. Make every choice a decision between sin and righteousness. This is law-based theology.
Paul’s approach is to focus on the big picture. Who is your master? Who determines the direction of your life? Whom do you serve?
Even more so than in the employment world, your relationship with the boss is the key to happiness and productivity. And perhaps even more than in the employment world, we have a choice of which master we will serve. Paul insists that it is a simple choice: who is going to be your boss—sin or righteousness?
This line of thinking doesn’t really play well in the 21st century United States. We are a nation that takes pride in liberty, freedom, and rugged individualism. I don’t know if it is still true, but for years, during the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games, the United States was the only nation that refused to dip its flag to the host country as a sign of respect. We bow to no one for any reason.
That fierce independent spirit has served us well in many ways, but it makes it hard for us to swallow what Paul is saying.
Paul says we have no choice but to be servants, slaves even. The only real freedom we have is to decide whom we will obey.
That makes us bristle. We don’t like the idea of having to serve any masters but ourselves. We like to believe that every person is master of his own destiny. We are not slaves; we are no one’s servants.
So we reject what Paul says. We don’t have any boss. We live our lives the way we want to live them. Yes, we will acknowledge God as Creator of the universe and many of us may accept Jesus as our Savior. Some of us will pay respect and honor to the Triune God by becoming part of a church. Yes, we will play by the moral rules of society and religion because you have to have rules for an orderly society. But we do that because we choose to and we do it on our own terms. We bow to no one.
I think that one of the main reasons why people in our country shun being part of a faith community is because they reject Paul’s statement that we have to choose between serving sin and serving righteousness. They insist that there is a third choice. Self-employment. We don’t need a boss. We don’t have to serve any one. We will bow to no one.
But here’s the problem with that attitude. It’s an illusion. There is no way to avoid the choice between serving sin and serving righteousness. Because when I choose to not serve anyone else, I am choosing to serve myself. I have made myself my own boss.
And what is the definition of sin? Sin is taking the gift of life and acting as though we were the only thing that matters. Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your strength and with all your soul, and your neighbor as yourself.” Do this and you are doing all that God requires of you.
Choosing to serve only ourselves is as direct a violation of that simple commandment as you can get. Choosing to serve only ourselves is sin. Making ourselves the master of our lives is the very definition of sin.
So Paul was right when he says, in the words of a Bob Dylan song, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody. It may be the devil or it may be the Lord.” It may be sin or it may be righteousness. But you’re going to have to serve somebody.
Choosing to serve the self means choosing to serve sin. It sets us up as the master. And it turns out we are the boss from hell.
We can never satisfy that boss. As a boss we demand more and more from ourselves all the time. More things, more riches, more entertainment, more pleasure, more security, more status, more power.
That boss does not promote a good work environment, is not concerned with fairness, or justice. That boss is a terrible manager. In seeking its own good, it ignores the needs of the community, of the work environment, of the solid foundation upon which to build a prosperous future.
There is no way around it. As Paul writes, “We are slaves to the one we obey.” You’re going to have to serve somebody. And there are only two possibilities. We can serve righteousness or we can serve sin. That means the choice is between serving God or serving anything else, be it ideology, career, material wants, what have you. We can serve God or the boss from hell. And that boss from hell pays ridiculously low wages.
“The wages of sin is death,” writes Paul.
Paul’s imagery of the master and the boss from hell shines new light for me on the basic distinction between law and gospel. It shows us very clearly why we cannot earn our way to heaven.
Although I’m obviously biased, all the evidence indicates to me that Mikhaila is an outstanding waitress. She brings in more business than anyone else at that place. There are people who come into the restaurant to eat and then leave when they discover she is not scheduled to work that day. There are customers who call her when she misses a day to make sure she is still employed there. She is respectful and gets along well with fellow staff.
In short, I don’t think there is a single thing she could have done to make her work situation better. I honestly think she was doing it as well as it could be done. I am sure that she is at least as good a waitress as I was an intern pastor.
None of that made any difference. Through no effort of my own, I was in a great, life-giving position that allowed me to prosper and grow. Through no fault of her own, she was not.
And it had nothing to do with performance. Nothing to do with good works. It had everything to do with the boss that we served.
So it is with our lives. The Pharisees act as if they were the masters. That they have control. That if they adhere to all the rules and rites and regulations and rituals, they can achieve righteousness. And that all those who don’t match there performance are damned.
They’ve got it backwards. You can do everything right, but if you’re serving the wrong master, it won’t get you anywhere. If you are serving sin, if you are serving yourself, it doesn’t matter how well you do it. It will end in death no matter what you do. If you are serving God, if the primary goal of your existence is to work for the best boss you can imagine, then you will experience life beyond what you can imagine. You will know what salvation is.
I was heartsick to learn while on vacation that Flossie Mosman passed away and that I was unable to be here for her funeral. I had so wished that I could participate in that celebration of life.
But at least these verses from Romans allow me to add something to our remembrance of that dear woman.
I have in the past described some people, uncharitably, as black holes of emotional need. There is no filling them up. If you get too close to them, they will pull you in and suck the empathy and compassion and joy right out of you and they will keep going into they consume every last spark of life in you.
Flossie was the exact opposite. I always walked away from a visit with her feeling better than when I arrived. You could not come within her orbit without feeling that life is good. She radiated gentleness and good will and accepted what came to her with a smile. She thrived wherever she was planted.
And it wasn’t because of her piety. In fact, she would get a little impish gleam in her eye when confessing something she did that wasn’t quite within the rules.
The secret to her amazing life was simple. She was who she was because, pure and simple, she enjoyed serving the best boss you could ever imagine. A master who gave her the freedom to thrive in his grace.
Choose this day whom you will serve. The boss from hell, who brings despair and death, or the one who brings light and life and love.