Work - its eternal significance.
Sermon preached at Redland Parish Church, 13th June 1999
Genesis 1:26-31
Revelation 21: 1-7;22-27
Pray
A policeman pulled a car over and told the driver he
had
won $5,000 dollars in the seatbelt award program.
"What are you going to do with the money?"
asked the
policeman.
"Well, I guess I'm going to get a drivers
license", he answered.
"Oh, don't listen to him," said the woman in
the passenger
seat, "He's a smart aleck when he's drunk."
Then the guy under the blankets in the backseat spoke
up,
"I knew we wouldn't get far in a stolen
car."
At that moment there was a knock from the trunk and a
voice said,
"Are we over the border
yet?"
'So I
hated life, because what is done under the sun was grievous to me, for all is
vanity and a chasing after wind. I hated all my toil in which I had toiled
under the sun, seeing that I must leave it to those who come after me.'
Describe Sunday evening
blues?
Sometimes going to work feels
pointless? What's it all for? Other day saw workmen digging hole and
filling it in....guy who plants the trees is off sick.
Just doing things for the
sake of it.
Or...Then I saw that all
toil and all skill in work come from one person's envy of another. This also is
vanity and a chasing after wind. (OHP)
We can get caught up in issues which ultimately seem meaningless.
In Gloucester Cathedral there
is a family tomb of a miserable looking man and wife and their equally
miserable looking children, and inscribed across it are the words "All is
vanity". Oh dear - is it really
all just dross around us? Are we just
meant to hang on by our fingernails?
Are we in effect twiddling our thumbs all the time we are not at church
listening to sermons? Or maybe we are
all sitting here twiddling our thumbs anyway!
Many people have recognised
that there must be a greater purpose to the work we do than just filling in
time, paying the mortgage or pursuing the next step up. Trad evang response has been to dignify work
by portraying it as a great opportunity for evangelism, a chance to build
relationships with those outside church.
Nothing wrong with these, but the Bible gives us a much meatier, hopeful
picture that the substance, the content, of what we do is given eternal
significance in the purposes of God.
It's all to do with what we
were created for in the first place, and what the ultimate destiny of humankind
and creation itself is. What I hope to
do this evening is give the big picture of the purposes of God in the life of
creation, and so in the stuff of our daily lives. We can't begin tonight to delve into the particular importance
of each of our daily work (whether it is paid or not), but we can in broad
strokes paint the backcloth against which our own vocations find their purpose.
I want you to imagine that
you are an actor in a play, and that your life is part of one huge improvised
drama with a fixed beginning and end.
How do you work out your role? I
want to suggest that everything you do or say in the play has to bear in mind
two things. First the beginning of the
play - how the whole story started off, what was the original direction of the
script, and secondly the climax of the play - where it is headed. In the Bible, the beginning of the story is
creation, when God brought everything into being, and placed man and woman in
the earth to fill it and subdue it. The
climax to which we look is found in the picture of New Creation - a new heaven
and a new earth, the holy City of the New Jerusalem - which is described to us
in Revelation. We find ourselves
between these two reference points. It
is by looking at the two questions What did God intend? and What will God bring
about? that we will discover the true meaning of our work.
Act one then - the beginning
of everything when God the director brings his stage, the universe, into being,
and places his leading man and lady in the spotlight. Everything God has made is good, from the minutest cell to the
furthest galaxy. It all belongs to him,
and all brings him praise. But what
does he want humankind to do on this stage?
Keep it as it is? Sit around
waiting for it all to end so that we can enter some higher non-material sphere
of existence? The truth is much
richer. God gives Adam and Eve a world
inherent with possibilities: Minerals wait to be mined for metal instruments;
plants grow to be cut for food or herbs; animal skins can be converted into
human clothes: trees to be made into furniture, houses, cities, books, musical
instruments. He places them on the
stage and says "Act!" Use
whatever you can to bring glory to my name." Fill the earth, not just with babies, but with music, creativity,
technology, learning, art, architecture, parks, photography. Make it interesting." We've made the mistake of thinking that
God's wanting us to be his stewards is a maintenance thing, keeping things
ticking over until he comes again. But
the task Adam and Eve got, and the role that we have inherited as a result is
one of building a civilisation which teases out of God's creation all that he
primed it to be able to do to the glory of his name. This dual relationship is
expressed in the Psalms: ““The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it”
(Ps24:1), but also: “the earth he has given to man” (Ps115:16) and “You made
him ruler over the works of your hands.” (Ps 8:6)”. We are not here just to evangelise until the Second Coming
(though I hope we have a burning desire to see others in the Kingdom), but to
continue in our daily work, in whatever small way, the task of working in God's
creation to unfold it's wonders. The
Bible has no sacred and secular split.
We can obey this command to develop the life of God's creation just as
much outside the church as within it, because the whole world belongs to God,
and he cares for every part of it.
But what of the eternal
significance of this process? Here we
come to the Final Act of the drama. New
Creation. The new Jerusalem. In the history of the church the ultimate
destiny of human beings has often been portrayed like this - eternal worship of
God, our gazes fixed upon him in an immaterial, spiritual, heavenly realm. "All in white shall stand around"
as the hymn says. But this picture is
utterly destructive - it castrates the hope that we are given in the
Bible. I'd like to show you this
picture which to my mind gives a far more accurate portrayal of God's
intentions for his creation. You can
see that it's very much a real place, with people talking to each other,
enjoying their environment, continuing to be creative, and within it all still
living and loving to the glory of God.
I prefer this because it reflects a future for us where we have a
redeemed physical existence in a New Creation which is a transformation of this
present one, but still recognisably continuous with it. We are not just "passing
through". We will walk, talk,
feel, touch, hear, sing, yes, and even work (though that's a different
story). God hasn't got rid of the good
creation of the beginning of the play, but he has redeemed it, fulfilled it,
brought it to its climax. Think of the
imagery in the Bible that describes our future - the lion will lie down with
the lamb...the earth will be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover
the sea...the meek will inherit the earth...the creation itself will be
liberated from its bondage to decay...
God says, "See, I am making all things new!", not just all
people...there will be food, there will
be music, there will be mountains, there will be animals. People will build houses and inhabit
them...They will plant vineyards and eat the fruit. And the New Jerusalem will
come down to earth - we won't be taken off to it. And you know that story of Jesus where "one will be taken
and one will be left"? It will be
the Christian who is left to enjoy the creation as God always intended
it to be. What a hope! A fully redeemed, resurrected, creation -
the fulfilment of God's plan. A
physical resurrection where we not only rest in peace, but we rise in glory.
But what of our work
now? Will that all be eradicated in
this new creation? This for me is the
really exciting bit. God will take
whatever we do now and he will purify it and in some mysterious way he will
make it part of the New Jerusalem. That
is why Creation starts with a beautiful garden, but New Creation ends with a
city. Civilisation, and our small part
in tending it, developing it, creating within it, collaborating with human
beings to work in it, will be included.
Tom Wright, a prominent Anglican theologian, puts it like this:
“God has prepared a larger
selfhood which is the true fulfilment of all that we are at the moment, which
will be the final, glorious enriching of it. Everything that humans, at their
deepest and best moments, are reaching out for, struggling after, longing for,
and dreaming of, will finally be fulfilled. Not necessarily, of course, in the
ways we would currently imagine; rather, in the ways that God knows will be
truly fulfilling for us.” “What we do in the present existence matters. We are
not simply oiling the wheels of a machine that will one day fall off the edge
of a cliff. The great transformation is
still to come. But when it does come, the holiness that we now strive to
attain, the Christian work we struggle to achieve, the acts of justice and
mercy that we try to accomplish - all our deeds of love and goodness,
creativity and beauty—all these will be enhanced, transformed in the new world
that God is going to make.” “... every
act of faith and love, of justice and mercy, of beauty and truth in this
present world will be part of God’s eventual new world. In the Lord, your labour is not in vain:
what you do here in faith will stand, will last.”
I want to look specifically
at Revelation 21: 24: "and the kings of earth will bring their glory into
it." This, more explicitly than anything
else, tells us that God will allow what glorifies him in human work to be part
of his new heaven and new earth. The
glory of the kings is whatever in every culture has been formed out of human
obedience to God's original command to "fill the earth" and "be
fruitful". That could mean the
work that you and I wake up every Monday morning to do. It's true that the images of Revelation are
metaphors, and that we can't work out the literal details of the future from
them. But the nature of this vision is
one that says to us, "The truth about your future is down this road, and
not down any other."
What a vision. It's something that as I said at the
beginning, we need to work out in the details of what we do. I don't believe that all work will be included. Some of our work, for example, may be more
about healing, or restraining the effects of sin in society, building up the
body of Christ, all of which is affirmed by the work of Jesus and the apostles. But there hopefully won't be any need for
doctors, policemen or even vicars in the age to come! And it is certainly true that what exists now, and what we do,
will be smelted and purified in the fire of God's judgement. But our vision of God's original and
ultimate purpose can assure us that what we do from Monday to Friday is not a
chasing after the wind.
As we come to the table we
see the symbols of bread and wine, which speak to us of the feast that is being
prepared for us. Bread and wine are the
fruit of human hands. They have been
harvested, kneaded, pummelled baked, tools have been made to produce them, they
have been fermented, shaped, bottled, stored.
The grape and the grain given by God has been transformed by human
ingenuity. Jesus takes what we have
made out of God's gift and includes it in the life of the kingdom. As we eat
and drink tonight, we can know that the work we do, no matter how insignificant
it may seem to us, will someday be part of the city that God is preparing, and
I invite you to offer your working life as part of that kingdom. To do so, it may help to think over these
two questions over the next few minutes:
How can my work unfold the
goodness of God's creation?
Does my vision of God's
future make my work now less or more important?
Someone once asked Martin Luther
what he would do if Jesus was coming back tomorrow. "I'd plant a tree" he said. Perhaps those workmen we met at the beginning were onto
something...