One of the most encouraging truths of the Christian life is the simple fact that Jesus himself is always praying for his followers, continually interceding on our behalf. Consider John 17, for instance. Here, Jesus prays this awe-inspiring and beautiful prayer for his disciples, that they would have his joy complete in them, that they would be guarded from evil, that they would be sanctified in truth, and on and on it goes. And then in verse 20 he says, “I don’t ask this just for the sake of the disciples alone, but for all those who believe in me through their word.” As far as I can tell, he’s talking there about us, who believe. In other words, the night before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed for you and I, who believe in him, that we would be one with him and the Father, just as he and the Father are One. People sometimes use the term “Prayer Warrior” to describe a brother or sister in Christ who is particularly faithful, determined, insightful and passionate in their intercessory prayers. Sometimes just knowing that you have a prayer warrior in your corner can make all the difference. How much more difference can it make to know that in Christ we have the ultimate Prayer Warrior, praying to the Father for our unity and sanctification and joy? May each of us hear his prayers over us and for us and on our behalf today, as we go through whatever this day has in store.
The Theology of Work (Part 8): On Worship and Work
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The English word “liturgy,” a term used to describe the various acts of worship that happen in a traditional Christian worship service (responsive readings, corporate prayers, public reading of scripture, etc.) originally meant “the work of the people.” It comes from two Greek words, leitos (“people,” from which we get the term laity) and ergos (“work”). Most contemporary Christian worship services include very little liturgy, per se, and approach the whole experience of worship as an individualized emotive encounter rather than a literal “labor of love.” But originally that’s what worship was: leitourgia, the work of God’s people.
I point this out to help us see the very clear theological connections between work, on the one hand, and worship, on the other. Often Christian discussions of the theological significance of work include warnings about the danger of turning our work into an idol, of coming to worship it as a source of power, security, and meaning in itself. Work is a good gift from God, we will say, but if it becomes detached from God, an end in itself, it can become an idol. Usually the signs we look for, to determine if such idolatry is happening is: over-work, a poor work/life balance, depending on our work for our significance, and so on.
While such statements are true to an extent—there is something spiritual about our work, and an unhealthy relationship with it is a sign of something spiritually unhealthy in us—still, I am not sure the warnings against “making an idol out of our work” are theologically precise enough. If it’s true that worship itself, in the biblical sense, is a form of “work,” then it would probably be more accurate to say that our work—the way we undertake it, our motivations for doing it, and the relationship we have towards it—always reveals what it is we’re really worshiping.
Work can’t “become an idol,” strictly speaking, but it is all too easy to give our work to an idol, and end up serving idols through it.
This may seem like so much theological hair splitting to some, this distinction I’m making between “worshipping work as an idol” versus “worshipping idols through our work,” but it is, I would argue, a biblical understanding of the relationship between idolatry and work.
It goes all the way back at least as far as the Exodus story, where the children of Israel are in bondage to Egypt, forced to work for Pharaoh, the embodiment of Egyptian idolatry. The caveat, of course, is that Israel is not willfully serving Pharaoh, not willfully worshiping the idols of Egypt, but on that point, notice a) how the “Egyptian slavery” will become a metaphor for all kinds of spiritual bondage and sin-enslavement in later readings of the story, and b) in a biblical understanding of idolatry, idol worship is itself a form of slavery, a forced worship that, until we are redeemed of it, we are “trapped in” and “bound to give” whether deep down we want to or not (See Galatians 4:8).
So it’s fair game, hermeneutically speaking, to suggest that through their bondage to Pharaoh Israel was, in a theological sense, serving the idols of Egypt. And in that theological sense, it is all kinds of fascinating to me that when Moses comes to liberate the people, he says that the Lord wants Pharaoh to set Israel free, so they can go and “worship him” in the wilderness (Exodus 7:16). I call it fascinating because the word the Lord uses there, the word the NIV has translated as “worship” is the word ‛âbad in Hebrew. Rendering ‛âbad as “worship” is a fair enough translation, but it’s not as precise as it could be, because the word literally means “to serve” or “to work for.”
Literally what the Lord tells Pharaoh is: “Release my people from your service, so they can come and serve me instead.”
One pastor colleague once put it like this: “Israel is not being liberated here, so much as they are having a change of management.” Of course, the Lord is a manager who is only always good, and merciful, and kind, and true, the only master really worth serving (which is why our willing work for him is indeed worship; that we delight in serving him the way we do declares his “worth-ship.”). While all this is true of the Lord, and more, still it stands out starkly to me that implied in the Exodus story is the idea that Yahweh is freeing Israel from working for the idols of Egypt, explicitly so that they can work for him instead.
This brings us back to the statement that started us off, that worship is work, and that who (or what) we’re working for is a sign of who (or what) we truly worship. Maintaining a healthy work-life balance doesn’t necessarily mean there’s no idolatry going on in my work. Discovering my significance in things other than my work doesn’t necessarily mean I’m not still worshipping an idol, either.
The real question to ask is simply: who am I really working for?
Am I working for the money? Am I working for someone else’s approval? For power? Security? Self-defined ambitions? “The Man?”
If the answer is “yes” to any of these things, it may be that I’m still slaving away for Pharaoh, however healthy my attitudes may be towards the work he has me doing.
The alternative, of course, is to experience what the children of Israel experienced in the Exodus Story, a redemptive change of management. To come to see what we do in the work world as (to quote Paul on the matter), “working for the Lord and not for human beings” (Colossians 3:23). This entails an entire change of heart, and motive, and attitude towards our work, coming to understand it—whether it’s writing sermons or swinging hammers—as something we’re doing for the glory of God and the joy of serving him.
What we will discover when we have this change of management, I think, is that He is still as good a master to work for as he was back in Moses’s day. He does not work us to the bone; he does not reward our best efforts grudgingly; he promises to provide for us, through it, from his bounty and in his wisdom. He is able to do what no idol can, and take whatever we may have to offer through our work and turn them into something that is satisfying for us and life-giving for others.
Labels: work
In a Little While, a devotional thought
In John's account of the Last Supper, Jesus has an extended discussion with his disciples about his coming Passion and what it will mean for them. Towards the end of this discourse, in 16:16, he makes this enigmatic statement: “In a little while you’ll see me no longer," he tells them, "and then again in a little while you will see me.” He’s talking, as far as I can tell, about his coming death and resurrection (i.e.: you won’t see me in a little while, because I’ll have died; but then you will see me in a little while, because 3 days later I’ll rise again).
What stands out to me, though, is how this “little while” becomes a running theme in the dialogue. The disciples say: what’s this ‘little while’ he’s talking about? And he mentions it again in verse 19, and then says: “Truly, you will weep and lament, but the world will rejoice; you will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy” (v.20).
The implication, of course, is that this turning of grief to joy will happen “in a little while.”
It got me thinking that there is sort of a “cruciform patience” required of all serious followers of Jesus. For Jesus, what made the agony of the cross endurable was the conviction that “in a little while” this agony would be transformed into joy inexpressible; and he seems to want that same conviction to sustain his followers as they go through their own cruciform (that is, cross-shaped) agonies.
The challenge, of course, is that even “a little while” seems an eternity when we’re in pain, grief, torment or anticipation. Sometimes “a little while more” still seems a long way off. But this brings us, actually, to the truest, most authentically Christian response to suffering in the world. When confronted with the hurt of this world, the Christian does not ask, with the philosopher, “Why does God ... ?” And he does not ask, with the cynic, “How could God ... ?” Rather the Christian asks with Psalmist, “How long, O Lord, How long?” And the answer God gives us in Christ is not easy, but it’s true: “Just a little while more. Hold on.”
Labels: devotionals, john
Oh, How He Loves, a devotional thought
Whenever I read the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead in John 11, it always strikes me just how deep, and rich and tender Jesus’ friendship was with Lazarus and his sisters. When Mary hears that Jesus has arrived, it says, she rushes out to meet him; when he sees her grief he’s deeply moved in his spirit; when he sees the place they laid Lazarus’ body he weeps. So profound is his feeling for his friends that those looking on say, “See how he loved him.”
Sometimes when we talk about the love of Jesus it can start to sound like this abstract thing, a law of nature or an ethical principle (and it is, actually, I think, both of those things in some ways). But what stands out here is how personal and intimate and human the friendship between these four—-Lazarus, Mary, Martha and Jesus—-was.
How he loves, indeed!
May we all have a deep awareness of his loving presence in our lives today, not as a cold abstraction, but as a vibrant, living friendship that leaves us, and anyone who catches a glimpse of it, leaves us marvelling like the mourners Lazarus’ grave that day, saying: “Just look at how He loves!”