Send us out to do the work you have given us to do
This sermon was preached on 5th February 2023 and was part of a series at Restoration Anglican Church in Arlington, Virginia, USA, "Epiphany and Vocation." At the end of the sermon the "Prayer for Vocations" video was played, as a congregational prayer.
Arlington— the house on the hill it has been for more than 200 years. Born of vast estates established in the early days of the Commonwealth of Virginia, the name remembering the village in Gloustershire, England where the Custis family originated. In the next generations, there were Calverts and Randolphs and Washingtons and finally, Lees whose lives were twined together in the beautifully-columned home overlooking the Potomac River.
But of all those years, full of many days and many nights, there was one night in particular that is worth pondering.
In April 1861 President Abraham Lincoln sent a note by courier, across the river, up the hill, asking Robert E. Lee to come to see him in the White House— and that night changed the course of American history.
Perhaps the most able and distinguished of officers in the U.S. Army, Lee was offered the responsibility for leading the Union against the revolt of the Confederacy. With all his Virginia gentlemanly grace, Lee said “No,” maintaining that the son of the South he was his deeper loyalty was to Virginia and its future hope, which he saw as part of the Confederate protest.
A thousand things could be said here, and someday we should, but today I will only note that this was a conversation with consequences, a weighty conversation with weighty consequences.
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Restoration Anglican lives under the shadow of this hill, and Arlington we are and will be, its story shaping our story.
Iconic and tragic, Arlington is one story among many that tell the sad tale of the ideas and issues that brought into being America’s war against itself, the Civil War being a window into our national wound, a poison pill that keeps on keeping on… this week, this month, this year. And it is a story of terrible ache and sorrow, rippling its way through our nation’s hopes and dreams.
Yes, and yes again.
But brokenness is complex, isn’t it? As Dylan once plaintively said, “Everything is broken”— because it is. In the now-but-not-yet of this life and world, bowls are broken and hearts too, highways are broken, and laws of the universe too. And brokenness means sadness, and sometimes we cry out against heaven, wondering what happened? When we pay attention to the world around us, and to the world within our own hearts, we see and hear and feel suffering everywhere. Every room I walk into, wherever I go, I assume that everyone bears a wound of some kind. A slow, drip-by-drip disappointment sometimes, or a cataclysmic grief too often— but everyone and everything is broken.
And yet, and yet… we are in the season of Epiphany, a beautiful and rich image which reminds us that not all is lost, that after the great grace of Advent and the wonder of Christmas, we are called to see the world through the eyes of the Incarnation, able to know more completely what is and what isn’t, what matters and what doesn’t. And as a congregation we are remembering these weeks by focusing on work, which is most of your life and mine; and yes more deeply its meaning in the idea of vocation. For all of us that has been a great gift, an unusual gift because the Church as Church rarely thinks aloud about work, which is strange given that it is most of what the people of God do week after week. Yes, we rest, and yes we play, and yes we worship, but for as long as we have memory the word of the Lord is, “Six days you shall work”— and in all of our different ways, we do.
Human beings, sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, think about this, all day long. We cannot not.
In the middle years of the 19th century, two men gave years of their lives to wrestling with the question of work. Why is it? And what is it? What does it mean for our life together? With remarkable clarity Karl Marx saw into its burdensome challenge in industrializing Europe, writing his Das Kapital as a critique of what was, and of what should be. In the very same years in the very same city of London, Charles Dickens wrote about the same problem, seeing the same heartache— and because “the play’s always the thing to catch the conscience of the king” —offered us stories like A Christmas Carol, Oliver Twist, Hard Times. Yes, Marx and Dickens were contemporaries, telling the same tale.
Because I have listened to both, I am not a romantic about work either, and none of us should be. There is too much wound in the world, too much hurt in history, too much pain and sorrow in the days of our lives, some of it felt in the most profoundly personal ways, and some experienced because of the weight of the world, the principalities and powers of the universe bearing down onto the systemic and systematic brokenness that is history and economics and politics swirled together through centuries— all that and more becoming the issues of the day for us in our time and place. That is, if we have eyes to see.
St. Augustine, FL, USA
The great Augustine of Hippo, author of the first-ever autobiography, wrote his magnum opus while Rome burned, literally burned, the eternal city coming to ruins— but we are still reading his book, every generation asking and asking again about The City of God. With insight that has graced the centuries, he saw clearly what makes for a good city, and what does not, what makes a city flourish, and what does not, understanding that the very center of life for selves and for societies is the ordering of our loves. We will love, homo adorans that we are, because we will adore. The great question is this: what do we adore? what do we love?
To press in. What do we adore the most? What do we love the most? Ordering our loves is extricably bound up with ordering our lives; when our loves are disordered, our lives are disordered— and there are consequences for history.
This was painfully true of the conversation between Lincoln and Lee that night 160 years ago. Lincoln set before Lee the question, “What do you love?” What matters most to you? As your president I plead with you to love the idea of America, more than that of Virginia, the United States more than a confederacy of states against our nation of states. I ask you to help me preserve the Union, not to work for its disunion.”
Yes, it was a conversation with consequences… the Civil War echoing into America’s history, ache after ache, sorrow upon sorrow, and one hundred years later we lived with and through the Civil Rights Movement, because though we were finished with the war, the war was not finished with us. And now 60 years later we are still reeling over the effects of this wound deep within our nation’s soul. If it was Memphis last week, and Minneapolis a year ago, what will it be tomorrow and next year?
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Again, the African theologian Augustine is our teacher, seeing that when we fail to order our loves rightly, formed by the love of God and the love of our neighbor, then what is meant to be meaningful becomes meaningless, and everyone suffers.
Lincoln and Lee were both employees of the federal government, the one a politician and the other a soldier. Those are occupations we understand in this city. They had work to do, and their work would be for the flourishing of the city, or not, for the flourishing of our society, or not.
But what does it mean to flourish? What does it mean to be well, and to do well— not only for “me” but for “us”? Not only for “my good” but for our “common good”? These are the hard questions of your life and mine.
What is it that forms the work of our lives? The visions of vocation that are ours?
One of most influential books in this past generation is Alisdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Once upon a time I spent a month of my life reading it as carefully as I could, underlining the text, writing notes in the margin, trying my best to hold together the forest and the trees of his analysis and argument. I took the book seriously because it required that; for us this morning there is one sentence I will offer:
“We cannot know what we are to do without knowing the story or stories of which we are part.”
This is true for people wherever we may be found. Hindu or Buddhist, Jew or Moslem, evolutionary materialist or street-level hedonist, and for Christians too.
But what is the story? And really, is there a story? A true story of human life under the sun? A true story of being human in the world? In the current issue of The Atlantic, an essay, “We’ve Lost the Plot” captures our moment in the early 21st-century. Analytical, insightful, perceptive, it is the kind of essay that we should read together as a congregation— and talk about it in our families and among our friends. While perhaps too much for most of our ten year olds, it is not too much for the 16 year-olds and the 28 year-olds and the 55 year-olds that we are.
The tagline sums up her argument.
“Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”
This is what Peter Berger called “the social construction of reality.” The centuries in which we live, the cultures that are ours, the cities and communities and circumstances of our lives, all these form us in ways that, more often than not, we don’t even think about, because it is the air we breathe. Beyond the creeds we confess, the books we read, the ideas we ponder, before we’ve even imagined that we’re thinking, our pre-theoretical commitments are there, shaping our souls, so deep because we hold them uncritically, seeing life and the world through them— for blessing and for curse.
I cannot be more serious about commending the essay to you. Yes, we’ve lost the plot.
But again, that begs the question of “the plot”? Is there one? One that is true for everyone everywhere? More than what I think and you think? More than what I want and you want?
What is the story which we inhabit? The story in and through which we live our lives? There are not many other questions that matter as much as this, because all of life is a response to what we believe is true about life. Our sense of self, yes, but also the meaning of love, of family and sexuality, of the arts and education, of economics and politics— and yes, the work of our lives too.
We work the way we do at the things we do because of the story or stories of which we are part. If we are with Marx in his far-reaching argument about the meaning of work within the marketplaces of history, or with Dickens in his artful accounts of ordinary life among ordinary people, all of us see the work of our lives within what we believe to be true about the story of our lives.
While we could spend hours reflecting on this reality, please hear this again:
“We cannot know what we are to do without knowing the story or stories of which we are part.”
It is not possible to understand life or love or labor as they could be and should be, without beginning where the story begins, and ending where it ends. We will never know where we have come from, nor will we know where we are going. We do not watch films that way, nor do we read books that way, and we cannot live life that way. The bookends are there for a reason, and we will stumble and stumble again, if we imagine otherwise, falling into the dualism of our hearts and of history, a fragmenting of all that matters most.
As I have watched around the world, this is true: those who understands the meaning of our work with eagerness and enthusiasm, with seriousness and steadfastness, with the honest depth and breadth required to make good sense of the work of our hands, are people whose vocations are deepened and sustained because they are gripped by the biblical story, seeing the coherence and comprehensiveness of biblical revelation as foundational for everything. [Pause ]
We call this biblical theology, the story of redemptive history from beginning to end, the story of all stories from creation to consummation— of what was meant to be, of what is, of what could be, and of what someday will be, of creation and fall, of redemption and restoration, each chapter threaded through with the salvation of God promised and delivered in time and space.
If we are to understand our vocations as callings from God in service to the world, then we must ground ourselves here. This is what it means to be human because this is reality, the grand metanarrative making sense of every narrative— yes, the story of all stories.
What is the work of our lives?
Most simply said, to love what God loves. It is to see what God sees, to hear what God hears, to feel what God feels. It is to imitate Christ with heart and soul and mind and strength. It is the vocation of God forming our vocation, seeing ourselves implicated, for love’s sake in the way things are, and in the way things should be and someday will be.
Among my teachers is the Jewish scholar, Abraham Heschel, whose book The Prophets is at one and the same time a study of the prophetic tradition through the centuries, but also an analysis of each prophet, from Isaiah to Malachi, one by one entering into a particular vision of the God of Abraham, Issac and Jacob who feels what his people feel.
In the words of one of our best poets, Bono of Dublin, our reason-for-being is “to feel what you feel!” Walking into the work of our lives in the days of our lives, to feel what God feels— because we see what God sees and hear what God hears.
When the prophet Micah spoke into the generations, “This is what the Lord requires of you: do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with the Lord your God,” he set forth for history the very heart of human vocation. This-is-our-calling, this is what we are to do on the face of the earth. Butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers, this is the work of God in the world, and therefore it is our work in this city and this society.
One of the prophets we remember was Daniel, an unusual story in the history of redemption. Most of it is more narrative, the story of the years of his life as a Jewish exile in Babylon; for some of us it is a story we learned at our mother’s knees, which is a great grace.
Truth be told though, it is the story of vocation, of a boy-who-becomes-man in the court of Nebuchednezzar the Great, the king who was tyrant over an empire that spread throughout the Middle East. From the first words to the last, the book tells the tale of a man called by God into the public square of his day, over time serving in three different administrations because of the excellence and integrity of his work. Trusted by tyrants to tell the truth whatever the cost, his work was as the policy chief and senior advisor for three regimes, political orders that were the Iran and the Iraq and beyond of 2500 years ago. What did he do? What was the work of his life? To give counsel on economic policy, military strength, agricultural production, taxation, building highways and maintaining waterways, the stuff of politics in any time and place.
And because he lived his life so near to God, feeling what God felt, he also interpreted dreams, speaking the word of the Lord into the public places of his day.
All that is a more clearly-understood story. The second half of his life is harder. While only the very best among us will venture into giving the definitive meaning of goats with four horns, most of us read those chapters with Daniel himself, weighed down with mystery and perplexity. Dream by dream, night by night, Daniel is not able to sleep. He turns over in his sweat, unable to make any final sense of what he has heard in dreams given specifically to him. The very last time we hear his name is at the end of chapter 12, where Daniel says to God, “I don’t understand.”
That has been a grace to me, a hard grace but a good grace. I am willing to pour out my heart, to give myself away, to listen carefully, to do the work that is mine to do… and yet some days and sometimes I don’t understand. Yes, I see through a glass darkly.
So who is Daniel? What is his story? Heroic figure? Perhaps, but only if we are first of all committed to the Bible as the unfolding of God’s redemptive history, and not as a collection of action figures who are not what we are called to be. The Bible is not that story. But Daniel is someone for us to think through in this modern day Babylon, the capitol city that is Washington DC. He knew who he was, he knew why he was, and therefore he knew what was his and what was not his. In Augustinian terms, his loves were ordered rightly, saying “yes” when he can and should, saying “no” when he must, at the cost of his own reputation and life because he knew what the story was that made sense of his story, and what it called him to be and do.
We cannot look to Daniel for glory after glory, wonder upon wonder. It is not that story. Rather it is one of vocation for all times and all places because it tells the truth about human beings, and about the world.
What might it mean for us?
If there is a great temptation for the people of God it is to compartmentalize our faith. To confess, “Yes, I believe, but I am first of all a son of the South…” But I am first of all a liberal, first of all a conservative, most of all a Republican, most of all a Democrat. Of course I am a good Baptist, yes… but. A good Catholic, yes… but. A good Presbyterian, yes… but. And even a good Anglican, yes… but.
How will we order our loves? How will we order our lives? What in truth will matter most to us?
What will be the ground of our being? What story are we written into?
Is it the one in which vocation is integral, not incidental, to the mission of God, to the work of God in the world? And if so, does our praying and preaching, even our singing, reflect our theology? What in fact do we hear, implicitly and explicitly, coming to worship as we do? Does work matter to us and to God? Think with me for a moment. I am guessing that in a congregation like this that we have pilgrims from many places. Some Episcopalian and Anglican. Some Presbyterian and Baptist. Some from Free Church and Bible Church backgrounds. Some Catholic and Orthodox too. And we come to worship together forming a life together under the shadow of Arlington, and then we go out into the world another week, with gladness and singleness of heart. But from all of our traditions, I know this to be true: for 2000 years the Church as Church has not had songs to sing that remember the meaning of our work, the hope of our work, the ache of our work, the longing of our work. Generation after generation, century upon century, we have divided our worship from our work, our work from our worship.
Because of who I am, of what I care about, I sigh over that.
But it does need to be that way forever. We are much graced at Restoration Anglican to have Issac Wardell among us. Our song writer? Our liturgist? I am not sure what we are to know him as; what I do know is that he understands this theology with remarkable and rare gifts which he gives to us and to the world. And we have now through the visions and vocations of the Porter’s Gate Project, songs to sing about all of that and more, with titles like, “Establish the Work of Our Hands,” “Wood and Nails,” “Your Labor is Not in Vain,” and many more, each one different, each one a musical remembering of what most of us do with the days of our lives. Not work as “secular,” not work as “worldly,” but work as integral to the work of God in the world— who sees through us, who hears through us, who feels through us, yes, who works through us.
Three stories for you, each one of someone trying to work out the ordering of life, the ordering of loves.
1. “A wound in my heart has been healed.”
A few years ago I was invited to speak at The Falls Church men’s retreat. We gathered for a weekend out in the Piedmont of Virginia, from Friday through Sunday. The question? The same question is ours today, and in this Epiphany season. After the Sunday morning, when all was done, a group of guys walked up to me, telling me that they had brought along a friend from New York City and that he had something to say.
A Brit by accent, he told me that he had come to a serious faith as an undergraduate, and had spent the past 30 years in business, the world of wonders where technology and business meet. He then said, “But I have always thought that that was second-class, a bit lower on the hierarchy of what a serious Christian should do with his life. Not very religious, as I have heard for years.
“I want you to know that this weekend a wound in my heart has been healed.”
2) One summer Meg and I were in Colorado for several weeks, enjoying the sunshine and breezes of its southwestern corner where Durango and Cortez meet Mesa Verde National Park. My first memories of life are from there, and I was working hard on a project, the wonderful place to work that it was. On a walk one morning, my phone buzzed, and I almost didn’t answer. But I picked it up, and heard the question, “Can I talk with you about work?” The man had spent his life on Wall Street, had become the industrial leader of a global corporation, and had now entered into another chapter, moving to a farm near Middleburg, into what he called “the mink and manure” neighborhood of Virginia.
And then he told me that even while being part of churches his whole life, he had never heard a sermon about work, about the kinds of responsibilities he had on Monday morning. He was not looking for a strange exegesis of Habakkuk, a word from the Lord about his deal the next week in Germany, but simply, with longing, for the sense that the pastor had thought about someone like him as he prepared the sermon that week. “The pastor seems to think I live in the church, because that’s where he sees me. But I go to work on Monday morning, and I long for a word from the Lord about the work of my life, about what I do with my life.”
3) And a few years ago I spent several days in Kentucky, speaking at a seminary. After one luncheon for the whole community, a man walked up to me who did not look like the typical professor or student. A long beard, a flannel shirt, and a carpenter, he told me that he wanted to hear more about vocation, that he had been reading something I’d written, and was intrigued because “it changes the way I understand what I do everyday— you see I finish my days with with sawdust in my beard, and to know that what I do matters to God, means everything.”
These are the stories that I hear, some from Virginia and a bit beyond— and many more from all over the world.
Do we have ears to hear? What will we do with this?
We can learn from history, standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, who in their own days wrestled with the same temptations, the same dispositions, the same heresies.
One of our most honored fathers in the faith is William Tyndale, a leader in the renewal of the church that became the Reformation 600 years ago, the man whose English translation of the Bible has given history words and language that have changed the way we think and live. His wisdom for then and for now is this,
“There is no work better than another to please God; to pour water, to wash dishes, to be a souter [cobbler], or an apostle, all are one, as touching the deed, to please God.”
And he was not alone. We could draw in Luther and Calvin and Perkins from the centuries that followed, each one with something worthy for our hearts and minds. In our own century, still alive among us, N.T. Wright, the good Anglican theologian of our best theology, puts it this way:
In the Lord your labor is not in vain. You are following Jesus and shaping our world in the power of the Spirit; and when the final consummation comes, the work that you have done, whether in Bible study or biochemistry, whether in preaching or in pure mathematics, whether in digging ditches or in composing symphonies, will stand, will last.
If we had time, we could listen to our truest teachers, the ones who listened most carefully to the word of God for the people of God, and we would hear them as a choir, singing the same song, reading the Bible for life in the world. This is mere Christianity. It is not an add-on, it is not incidental— no, no and no again. It is written into the meaning of true belief in the gospel of the kingdom. Integral, not incidental.
What can we do to deepen our discipleship here? For the faith and hope and love of our lives to form us, to shape us, so that we go further up and further into a richer and truer understanding of vocation?
Simply said.
1. Listen to all the Porter’s Gate “Work Songs” this week, and take them to heart, pondering before God what they could mean for you, for the life that is yours, for the labor that is yours.
2. There are good books to be read. Paul Stevens. Os Guinness, Tom Nelson, Amy Sherman, Daniel Doriani, Kara Martin, Matthew Kaemingk and Cory Willson. If you want to know more, ask me or Kate Harris, who will speak next week.
3. Everyone of you could go home today, and before the day is done, read a wonderfully-imagined tale told by Tolkien, the master storyteller. He called it, “Leaf By Niggle.” I promise you this: it will change the way you understand the continuity of this heaven and this earth to the new heaven and new earth, opening the eyes of your hearts to our longing for good work to be done, now and forever.
More could be said, but not today.
Dear brothers and sisters, week by week we pray together, longing for the kingdom to come, longing for the day when all sad things will become untrue. A broken world, but broken it will not always be. So today we pray again, “Send us out to do the work you have given us to do.” To do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with you, feeling the world as you do… because our work is written into your work.
Please, O Lord, hear our prayer.
Link to the prayer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn-raGdENTU
Note: That night the church had a debut concert for an album of new songs for another "Work Songs" album by Porter's Gate. The church congregation's liturgist is Isaac Wardell, the curator of the Porter's Gate Project. On this eventful night, new music was heard, digging away ever more deeply into the meaning of our work, and its integral relationship to our worship.
Link to the songs:
https://theportersgate.bandcamp.com/album/work-songs
