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.