September 24, Ordinary 25A (Matthew 20:1–16)

The gig economy is often spiritually perilous, and the world needs a hard reset. The societal imperative to hustle until you hoard more than your neighbors has had a profoundly damaging impact on too many people. The prevalent idea that every waking moment should be spent creating, producing, working, and earning has created havoc in the souls and bodies of too many to count, and it only seems to be getting worse with cascading consumer costs, depressed incomes, and ever-increasing shiny new ways to gig and subcontract ourselves into oblivion.

Whether it’s finding the newest way to leverage currency trends, maximize social media monetization, flip property, rideshare, start a micro company, sell luxe real estate, deliver vittles, or even sell blood plasma and other corporeal commodities, every day huge swaths of young adults from the suburbs to Section 8 live their lives by rapper Rick Ross’s retro declaration, “Every day I’m hustlin’.” Sometimes it seems that passive income and multiple streams have replaced faith, hope, and love as the real theological virtues of modern American civil religion.

The interesting thing, though, is that as universal as the drive to hustle seems to be, there are still deep distinctions among the lived experiences of those who are on the daily grind, often driven by class stratification. Some, with plenty of start-up cash and/or the right pedigree, tend to find themselves rearranging digital products on various screens for huge paydays, while those with less education and often from historically disadvantaged groups find themselves adding backbreaking or mind-numbing labor to their often already torturous shifts and duties, making fractions of what their well-heeled counterparts make at much higher cost to their bodies. Everyone is looking for a payday, but the experiences of those who got an early head start couldn’t be more different from those who started with a major delay.