Home Improvement

My arms are sore. We're renovating our house and I've spent the last week tearing out, scraping up, pulling off and painting over the various floor and wall coverings in our basement. I have no delusions of competency when I start projects like these, but I do love the excuse it gives me to walk around the house in work gloves and grubby pants, swinging hammers at things.

I don't get a lot of chances to swing hammers in my line of work. Alhough somewhere in Alberta there's a house with a red tin roof I put on 10 years ago that hasn't blown off yet, and there's another house with a hardwood floor I installed that people are still walking on, my experience with build-it jobs is not vast.

But I love the sweat and ache of physical work.

Bonhoeffer pointed out that work is one of the four mandates God gave humans in the Garden of Eden. The sweat and ache may not have been original, but the Bible affirms that work-- doing constructive things with our hands and minds--is a good that God planned for us in the beginning.

In his book Work in the Spirit, Miroslav Volf asks why. What is it about work that makes it good? He maintains that modern theories of work, capitalist or Marxist, make it a means to strictly material ends: it accomplishes our immediate goals. He argues that such instrumental perspectives offer no boundaries to prevent work from becoming dehumanizing, degrading, even demonic. And he points to things like sweat shops, monotonous assembly lines and workaholic burnouts to prove his point.

Volf holds that the key to finding meaning in our work lies, of all places, in Christian eschatology-- what we believe about Christ's return and the end of the age. He argues that the hope of New Creation allows Christians to value their work now as a participation in the future renewal of all things under the shalom Christ. God's Spirit is at work in and on behalf of the creation, labouring towards its final consummation. And the Spirit calls us to join him, working towards that day when the healed nations will bring their glory and honor into the heavenly Jerusalem.

Volf's not alone in ascribing eschatological significance to our work. Paul wrote some strong words to the Thessalonian church about some Christians who were using the hope of Christ's return as an excuse to stop working. "Keep away from these lazy busybodies," he says. "That's not the tradition you recieved from us." Christian communities with a genuine Second-Coming hope will be places where work is valued, not as an end in itself, not even as a means to an end, but as a participation now in God's good and coming future.

This has transformed how I view my work. Whether teaching, or writing, or scraping floors, my work really matters to God. Not because of the bread it will put on the table, not because of the identity I will derive from it,but because Spirit himself is at work in and on behalf of my little corner of the world. He's toiling for its future transformation in Christ. And if I have eyes to see him, I can join him in this with my faithful, earnest, sometimes sweaty, work.