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I think most people often feel some type of disparity between what they do for a living...with all the expectations and perceptions that brings...and who they really are, as a person, deep inside. Now I'm pretty familiar with that potential conflict myself. Believe it or not...I used to work for a living!
For close to ten years, from my early twenties to my early thirties, I managed movie theaters for a living. And the whole time I was doing that, I remember I kept whining over and over: this is not who I am...this is not what I want to do. The tag on my soul does not say "theater manager." I believed...as I still do...that is says, "poet." So as a self-perceived poet, recording the "movie phone" coming attractions announcements...and calculating the oil to kernel consumption ratios on the concessions inventories and training 16-year-olds in the fine art of tearing and returning the stubs...just didn't satisfl my poet's soul.
It's funny, though, how much of what I learned during those ten years has come in awfully handy in working in the church...not the least of which is that I still deal with ushers!
But we all experience some type of conflict between who we are and what we do. That's why it's always so important to constantly return to Jesus. Jesus is the best example I can think of of a person who had the right balance between who he was and what he did. He had complete integrity - inner connectedness - between those internal and external parts of himself.
The reading we heard this morning is a very famous Biblical passage about Jesus' so-called "temptation in the wilderness." It's generally used to illustrate His complete obedience to God. But I think we can take that interpretation a little further by noticing that every temptation the Devil threw at Jesus included some version of, "If you're really who you're supposed to be, then you should be able to do this!" But Jesus refused to use or depend upon the works He could perform to be proof of who He was. The foremost way Jesus chose to prove who He was...was by obedience and service to God...not by choosing to show off and impress the Devil!
And we can look over and over to the life of Jesus as an example of being confident in who you are rather than dependant on what you do. Jesus was effective because he had internal anchors. He didn't get his approval from external means. His actions weren't based on what Peter, John, or James thought. He didn't come unglued when John the Baptist began to doubt him. He didn't care whether Caesar smiled or frowned. What about us? We often suffer a real disparity between what we do and who we are.
Work, whether in its presence or absence, is a pervasive part of everyday life. One of the first things we want to know about people is what they do. The waking time of most adults is taken up with work, and a person's passing is often noted in terms oftheir workplace achievements. Work and worth, industry and identity, are very closely related in our contemporary culture.
I think perhaps, for starters, we need to take a wider, more Biblical view of "work." Despite society's materialistic definition of work as what we are paid to do, work can include any positive productive activity. A helpful, wider Christian definition of work might be: "Work is the expenditure of energy (whether manual or mental or both) in the service of others, which brings fulfillment to the worker, benefit to the community and glory to God."
Unlike today, in biblical times work was not a separate sphere of life. Work was integrated with the home (which usually was the"workplace") and with worship (through sacrifice from God's gifts and one's produce). People weren't primarily valued or identified in terms of their jobs as they are today. We need to develop a more integrated biblical view of work that does justice to the value of all vital activities and relationships between people and the wholeness ofthe individual. Ephesians 6:7 says,"Render service with enthusiasm, as if working for God, not human beings...." Work can be an everyday offering of our whole selves, bodies and mind, to God. Unless we learn to see work in that way, we will either underestimate God's work and worship our secular "jobs" or we will underestimate the value of what we can contribute to the world through our work and think it worthless. Either one of those extremes is quite wrong.
Some of us place way too much importance on what we "do" for a living; we think that "what" we are - in terms of title, position, income or accomplishment defines who we are. I like what Lily Tomlin said: "Sometimes I worry about being a success in a mediocre world."
Another "successful" show business figure, Danny Thomas, put it this way: "All of us are born for a reason, but all of us don't discover why. Success in life has nothing to do with what you gain in life or accomplish for yourself. It's what you do for others."
Work that's done solely out of ambition and selfishness is done in vain. The truth is even good work done for good motives will often be ignored or wasted. We all die, and our work won't last; it's transient. While we have the opportunity, we should simply try to enjoy work, as well as the food and drink it puts on the table, as a gift from God. It's best to have modest expectations of what work can do for your life; don't spend your time trying to build lasting monuments to your great abilities. Here's a thought: "There is a danger of doing too much as well as too little. Life is not for work, but work for life; and when it is carried to the extent of undermining life or unduly absorbing it, work is not praiseworthy but blameworthy."
Besides...if our self-image and our value in the world is based solely on what we do...then what happens when we retire...or if we find ourselves temporarily unemployed...or permanently disabled? Are we ourselves then useless or value-less? Certainly not in God's eyes...but what about ours?
The opposite extreme of placing too much value in what we do is to undervalue what we do. To think that because we're not getting paid a lot or don't have a fancy title...or we don't make as much as someone else...or we're not saving lives every minute or discovering new species or launching rockets to Mars, then we must not be worth very much to the world. Well, let me tell you something: business people and service workers and manual laborers and volunteers can also serve God at work!
The great preacher and church leader Martin Luther was a tremendous advocate of the idea of "vocation" or "divine calling" for ordinary Christians...be they homemakers or paid workers or just plain citizens. Luther saw all of those roles as opportunities for Christians to serve their neighbors and worship God. He said, in essence, that a good shoemaker serves God and answers that divine calling just as much as one who preaches the Word.
There was a young man who lived out in the country...and one day he went to his pastor and said, "I believe God wants me to quit my farm and go off and be a preacher. The minister asked, "What makes you think you were called to preach?" "Because," the young man said,"yesterday I was walking home from the fields and looked up, and plain as day, the clouds had formed the letters 'PC.'" "And what do you make of that?" the pastor asked."Why,'PC' could only mean preach Christ."' "Ah, well," the pastor said, "there's your problem. Sometimes 'PC' means preach Christ, but sometimes it means plow corn. "
Sometimes doing whatever we do - well and with joy and with an appreciation for what it can contribute to the world - is exactly what we're supposed to be doing. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said it beautifully: "If you are called to be a street sweeper, sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed, or Shakespeare wrote. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven will pause to say, there lives a street sweeper who serves the world well."
Above all, we must recognize that it's our relationships with other people and what we contribute to the people's lives, in whatever form it takes, that matters...whether its pastoring a church or managing a bank so that people can be secure in their monetary needs or building the furniture around which good friends can gather or maintaining the cars or phones or computers that keep us connected. Whether you're paid to work or you volunteer to serve or you quietly go about the business of caring for others in "unofficial" ways: it's what you ~ in your work that matters, not what you do to put bread on the table.
Please understand, though. While we should distinguish ourselves from what we do, we don't need to divorce the two completely. Rather what we need is to find a balance so that our interior being and exterior doing can compliment each other. We need to keep life in balance and work in perspective...and use them both to serve God by serving others.
Pastor and teacher, Tony Campolo, tells about a friend of his who made a career change. He says, "Some years ago, a friend of mine went to teach English literature at a state college. He was there for three weeks when he went into the dean's office to say that he was quitting.
"I'm not coming back next week, and I thought you ought to know," he said. The dean replied, "If you walk out on your contract, you're not going to teach here again. What's more, you won't teach anywhere, if I can help it."
Campolo goes on with the story, saying: After my friend left his job, his mother contacted me by phone and said I had to see him. She was sure he had gone crazy and hoped I could talk him into going back to his job.
I found my friend Charlie living in an attic apartment in Hamilton Square, New Jersey. I must admit that his apartment had a certain style: travel posters all over the walls, a good assortment ofbooks scattered around the room, and the stereo playing a Wagnerian opera. I sat down in a beanbag chair that swallowed me up. After we exchanged niceties, I came to the point.
'What have you done?" I asked.
"I quit," said Charlie. "I walked out. I don't want to teach anymore. Every time I walked into that classroom, I died a little bit."
Campolo says: I could understand him. I'm a teacher, and I know what it's like to go into a class and pour out your heart to students, to let every nerve inside you tingle with the excitement ofyour most profound insights. I know what it's like to passionately share the struggles of your existence, to lay your soul bare in an attempt to communicate your deepest feelings. Then, when it's all over, some student in the back ofthe room raises his hand and says, "Do we have to know this stuff for the final?" (We have some teachers here who know that feeling! I'm sure Jesus must have experienced that plenty when He was teaching!)
Anyway, Campolo goes on, saying: It wasn't long before I realized that Charlie was not about to go back into the classroom, so I asked him what he was doing with himselfthese days. He said, "l'm a mailman."
Reaching back into the value system provided by the Protestant work ethic, I said to him, "Charlie, if you're going to be a mailman, be the best mailman in the world!"
He said, "But I'm a lonely mailman. Everybody else who delivers mail gets back to the post office by about two o'clock. I never get back until six."
"What takes you so long?"
"I visit," said Charlie. "You'd never believe how many lonely people there are on my route who had never been visited until I became a mailman. What's more, now I can't sleep at night."
"Why can't you sleep at night?"
Charlie cried, "Have you ever tried to sleep after drinking fifteen cups of coffee?"
Campolo says: As I sat and looked at my friend Charlie, I envied him. He was alive with the excitement that comes to a person doing something meaningful with his life. Because he moved from being a college professor to being a mailman, he has lost status. But what difference does that make? As Charlie invests himself significantly in the lives of other people, his is finding fulfillment in, as Scripture says in James 1:27, 'visiting orphans and widows in their distress."
We need to develop a more integrated biblical view of work that does justice to the value of all vital activities and relationships between people and the wholeness of the individual. Work, in whatever form it takes, can be an everyday offering of our whole selves, bodies and mind, to God.
What we do is not who we are. But who we are - if we are following the example ofJesus - can be a tremendous enhancement to whatever it is that we do. May the perfect example of balance that Christ provides be our model for living...regardless of how the rent gets paid. Amen.
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