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The word “wealth” comes from the Old English word “weal,” a word connected to the word “health.” Originally, the word “weal” referred to “our general well-being,” or the “common good.” These etymological origins are still reflected in the term “the commonweal,” an old fashioned word that connected our individual "wealth" with the floursihing of the "common good."
In his book The Doctrine of Humanity, Australian theologian Charles Sherlock makes a great deal of theological hay out of this semantic field. The word “wealth,” he argues, originally referred to the “commonweal,” that is, the general well-being of the community. Now adays, we understand “wealth” as a privatized source of individual power. Wealth itself may have functioned in this way in the olden days, too, make no mistake, but it is implicit in the terms we used to use to describe “wealth,” that it was understood to be something that exists for the “common good,” the “weal” of the community.
To unpack this idea, consider the way, ideally, “wealthy” individuals in a community contribute to everyone else’s well-being. The rich man who buys an expensive carriage at a fair price, for instance, employs the tradesmen and craftsmen who built it, whose businesses in turn support the work of lumberjacks and coalminers and what have you, and who use their income to purchase bread from the baker and bacon from the butcher, to feed families whose life-together employs teachers, or housekeepers, or nannies, or what have you.
This is a bit of an over-simplified flow-chart, but in broad strokes the picture is clear enough: wealth contributes to the commonweal, because in a healthy community, everyone is interconnected with everyone else, and the judicious use of one’s personal wealth contributes to the well-being of everyone else. I live in the city of Oshawa, home to one of Canada’s historically great philanthropists, R. Samuel McLaughlin, (1871-1972), the founder of the car-manufacturing company that eventually became General Motors Canada. McLaughlin is remembered especially for his prolific works of philanthropy, building libraries and hospitals, funding charities and schools, and generally using his vast wealth in ways that bettered the community he was part of. In Oshawa, McLaughlin is remembered as a man who saw how his personal wealth was connected to the well-being of his community.
Charles Sherlock argues that the modern world has largely lost this view of wealth. We have come to see the way we handle our wealth as an entirely privatized affair, something that affects "me" exclusively, and helps "me" attain my individual goals. We’ve lost a deep sense of how our wealth flows from and also contributes to the “commonweal” of the community we are part of.
I am a theologian not an economist, but my hunch is that Sherlock is right in his assessment. Especially these days, as “internet shopping” steadily replaces the human interaction that used to mediate our acquisition of goods and services, we have little awareness of the ways in which our personal spending is connected to the common well-being of the society. It is becoming more and more common for us to acquire our goods and services without even speaking to a real human being, let alone having some deep intuitive knowledge of how our acquisition of those goods and services deeply affects the lives of other people. This is likely to become even more common in a post-Covid world, as the various online shopping habits we’ve developed during the lockdown continue to “feel normal for us” long after we’re able safely to shop in person again.
As our shopping involves fewer and fewer human interactions, and is mediated increasingly by screens and robots, our sense of the “common weal” is likely to diminish even more.
This social shift has all sorts of implications for how we view our work in the modern world. In the afore-mentioned “olden days,” when wealth was understood to contribute to the “commonweal of society,” the work that generated it was also understood to contribute the general well-being of a society. The butcher’s work mattered, not because it padded his 401k, but because without it the carriage-maker’s family wouldn’t eat, and then carriages wouldn’t get made and the rich man (whose riches, remember, contributed to the general well-being of the community) wouldn’t have anywhere to spend those riches.
Again, this is a gross oversimplification, but the point is, just as our spending is interconnected with everyone else’s, so too is our work. The work of the surgeon is as necessary as the work of the factory worker who made the scalpel (as necessary as the work of the imports manager who arranged for it to be shipped to us from China, or wherever it was made; and the work of the truck driver who drove the shipment to the hospital, and so on).
Work is not a private activity that we do for our own individualized goals and purposes. That may be why we're doing the work (hence the saying, “find a way to monetize what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life)—but even if we think we’re just doing it for ourselves, work is always embedded in a community, and has an impact, positively or negatively on the commonweal of that community.
At least, it always has been like this in the past. One of the cultural crises we will face in the coming years, as the “post-Covid” economy continues to take shape, and the use of robotic automation in the work world accelerates, will be to retain a deep awareness of the ways in which our work is interconnected with everyone else.
As a blog post in a series on the theology of work, this post has not been especially theological. I’ve not drawn any lines yet between the incarnation of Christ, or the resurrection, or the theology of salvation, that might tie all these points about the commonweal to some deeper theological themes. We could do this, if we wanted to. In Christ’s incarnation, for instance, we discover the truth that our “embodied life” is spiritually interconnected with the “embodied lives” of others. In Christ’s resurrection, again, we hear God’s profound “yes” to this “embodied interconnectedness”; Christ, after all, did not rise as a disembodied ghost but in a gloriously resurrected body. Neither is our salvation a privatized affair; rather, in saving us God makes us one with him and one with each other, united in service to the world.
These are all theological dots that can easily be connected to what has largely been a philosophical discussion of work so far. But in the interests of keeping it concrete, let me simply remind us of the second-greatest commandment of all, the one that comes immediately after the command to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. It’s the command that we must also love our neighbor as ourselves. According to the teaching of our Lord, this second commandment is like that first one, so deeply connected to it that it seems you can’t really do the first without a commitment to the second.
If we saw our work in the world primarily as a way of expressing our obedience to the first commandment (loving God with all we got), by keeping the second (loving our neighbor as ourselves), it would probably profoundly change how we did it, and experienced it. Whether we’re the person in the coffee shop pouring a hot cup of joe for the weary factory worker on his way to his shift, or the person designing software for the computerized till that keeps track of all the cups of coffee she sold, or the manager at said factory, who will make sure that worker gets paid when he arrives—regardless the work—we would come to see it as deeply connected with everyone else. And we’d begin to perform it, as a grace-filled contribution to the commonweal of our community, and even more than that, as an expression of love to all those neighbors of ours whom the Lord has called us to love as we love ourselves.
The Theology of Work (Part 7): Working for the Commonweal
By the Tomb of Lazarus, a devotional thought
In John 11:35 we see Jesus’ response to the death of Lazarus, one of his closest friends. It is pictured for us vividly in what is famously called “the shortest verse in the Bible”: Jesus wept. (Though technically this is only true in the English Bible. In the original languages, the shortest verse is Job 3:2, “And Job said.”)
What struck me, though, is that Jesus is not weeping tears of grief here. Or, if he is (he may be) he is also quite agitated. In verse 33 and again in verse 38 it says that Jesus “groaned in his spirit.” The original word there is embrimaomai, which comes from the root word brimaomai and suggests a sigh or groan of indignation or anger. Jesus is not only weeping, he is groaning with, of all things, frustration. Which sort of leaves us scratching our heads. I understand the tears, Jesus, but what is there to be angry about?
The text suggests the cause, but it doesn’t help: when he saw Mary weeping and the mourners weeping with her, it says, that’s when he embrimaomai-ed.
I am not sure why the sight of their grief over Lazarus would elicit this response in our Lord ... unless... maybe he’s not indignant at them for weeping, rather he is angry at death itself for bringing them to such a moment as this. Maybe it’s this glimpse of the harm that death causes, in the sight of these his friends mourning their lost brother, that touches him so deeply. Maybe he is "groaning" over the indignity, the tragedy, the ugliness of death itself.
If so, it would underscore something that the New Testament consistently claims everywhere else: that death is not the way things should be, that it is an enemy of what is good and right in God’s creation, and that God intends in the end to defeat it in Christ.
The Theology of Work (Part 6): Take Me to the Volcano!
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One of my favorite movies of all time is an off-beat, 1990 Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan outing called Joe Vs. The Volcano. If you’ve never seen it, stop reading and go watch it now. I’ll wait.
If you don’t have time for the full Joe experience, let me share the crucial scene today, and the reason I’m mentioning it as part of this series on the theology of work. It’s the opening sequence, where Joe stumbles into work at his “lousy job” at a medical supply company, while Eric Burdon’s rendition of “Sixteen Tons” growls away in the background.
As the story unfolds from this bizarre opening, Joe discovers that he is suffering from an incurable illness called a “brain cloud.” The sudden realization of his imminent demise startles Joe awake, spiritually speaking, and launches him into a series of unlikely events. He quits his job (in one of the greatest job-quitting moments of film history, second maybe only to Tom Cruise’s resignation in Jerry Maguire).
The next morning a mysterious billionaire named Mr. Graynamore shows up at his door, offering Joe the chance to live like a hero at Graynamore’s expense, provided he will jump into an active volcano on a South Pacific Island called Waponi Woo. Joe accepts the offer and embarks on a journey of self-discovery and spiritual enlightenment, culminating in a death-defying leap into the smoldering mouth of the Great Woo.
It is, in Roger Ebert’s words, a film that “achieves a magnificent goofiness,” and I mean it unironically when I call it my second favorite film of all time.
The reason I’m mentioning it here, though, is still that opening sequence, where Joe stumbles along the path, a miserable sommambulist in a crowd of zombies, into the great gaping maw of the factory where he works. If you watched the clip you may have noticed that he stubs his toe on the way into work, tearing away the sole of his shoe. When he arrives at his desk his co-worker DeDe asks him, “what’s with the shoe,” to which Joe replies, in one of the most poignant puns of the movie: I’m losing my sole.
Torn shoes aside, Joe is indeed losing his soul, and it is the factory’s insatiable appetite for his life’s-blood that is slowly sucking it away.
Joe vs. the Volcano is about a lot of things, but one of the things it’s about is the soul-sucking nature of work. The ravenous factory sucking in worker after worker and cough up great clouds of greasy smoke as it does, is a symbol for the modern work world, the so-called “rat-race” that takes from us all we have to give and leaves us lifeless, empty, and soulless when it’s through with us.
Joe vs. the Volcano is a commentary, among other things, on the existential nihilism and spiritual vacuity of our work in the modern world. The image of Joe, throwing himself into the volcano in a death-defying act of courage is offered as a symbol, a metaphor to describe how we might transcend and escape it. Only the fortunate few who are brave enough to confront the “volcano god” and name it for what it is will ever escape its clutches. It’s notable that at the end of the film, Joe and his soul-mate Patricia—the only two who take the leap—survive the volcano’s eruption, whereas all the rest of the islanders go down in plumes of smoke and whimpering misery.
Whatever else its merits, Joe vs. the Volcano’s take on work is profoundly stirring, if you can see it clearly through all the campy trappings with which it presents this theme. There is something about our work, as it’s experienced in the modern world, that has sucked the soul out of us. So much of it is devoid of meaning, lacking any real human contact or connection, artificial, superficial, and unnatural, and yet, because of the fear of death (our brain clouds), the fear of spiritual enlightenment, the fear of the unknown, we sell our souls to the “god of the volcano.” To paraphrase Joe: we’re too chickensh*t afraid to live our lives, so we’ve sold it to him for 300 lousy dollars a week.
Any robust theology of work, like the one I’m trying to assemble in this series, will have to wrestle honestly with the “work conundrum” that a movie like Joe vs. the Volcano presents us with. We’ve already seen how the Christian story provides the theological resources for understanding our work as good (it’s good because by doing it we fulfill our creation mandate as creatures made in the image of a creating God). The Christian story also provides a theological explanation for why, even though it is intrinsically good, most often our experience of work is like that of the staggering zombies in the opening scene of Joe vs. the Volcano (it’s like this because the ground has become cursed as a result of human sin).
These observations are all helpful as far as they go, but a deeper question remains. Where do we turn, from within the Christian tradition, for theological solutions to the problem of work, the fact that more often than not it’s soul-sucking and not life-giving? In previous posts I’ve suggested that as we are redeemed of sin through faith in Christ and the work of the Spirit, our experience of work can be redeemed, too.
But is there something more specific we can say about the redemption of work than this? Is it just that the Joy of our Salvation makes it so that we won’t “feel miserable anymore, while we’re doing it”? Or is there something about the Christian message that actually transforms work itself?
One of the most significant theological studies of work I’ve ever read was by a theologian named Miroslav Volf, called Work in the Spirit. His study is a bit more meaty than the film Joe vs. the Volcano, but he arrives at a similar conclusion. He argues that all modern theories of work, whether capitalist or Marxist, make it a means to strictly material ends. It’s only value is that 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, laboring 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.
Volf’s take on the eschatological meaning of work—not just “religious work,” but all the good work of human hands, from buildings well-built to businesses well-run, books well-written and trust-funds well-managed—has the power to transform our view of work. It is the theological alternative, I think, to simply jumping into the volcano and hoping it will spit you out, infusing all our work with rich, authentic, and especially eternal significance.
The promise of a renewed Heaven and Earth, restored and redeemed in Christ, assures us that our work really matters to God. Not because of the bread it will put on the table, not because of the identity we may 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.
Timing is Everything, a devotional thought
The time Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead is one of the best-known and most cherished stroies in the Gospel of John. It's the one that gave us Jesus's powerful statement about being "the Resurrection and the Life," and one of the best-known (and easily memorized) verses in the Bible, "Jesus wept." There's a subtext to the story, though, that often gets overlooked but is curcial to understanding the meaning of this miracle.
In John 11:3-6, they send word to Jesus that his friend Lazarus is dying, and in verse 6 it says, Jesus loved Lazarus, “yet when he heard that he was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.” Martha will bring this up with him, when Jesus finally comes to see them, after Lazarus has died. “Lord,” she says (v. 21) “if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” This is a difficult thing to wrap our heads around, but Jesus delayed his coming to Lazarus, even though, admittedly, that delay caused him and his friends great pain, because there was a deeper, greater glory to be revealed in his delay than could be revealed in his coming immediately. In v.14 he says specifically that it was for the disciples’ sake (and presumably we’re included in that) he didn’t go heal Lazarus immediately, "in order that they might believe." This is a reference, I think, to his raising of Lazarus from the dead, and the profound witness to His glory the resuscitated life of Lazarus will become (11:45, 12:17, etc.). In other words, he delayed, so that Lazarus might pass on, so that he might raise him from the dead, so that many would come to believe in response to this miracle.
There is a hard but beautiful truth here, I think, for anyone who is waiting on Jesus for something, and he is delaying. Hard, because it is sometimes difficult to hold tight to him through that delay (hear again Martha’s pain: “Lord, if you had only been here ....”). But beautiful because, if Lazarus’s story can be trusted, Jesus can bring deeper faith, greater witness, brighter glory out of the waiting, even the disappointment, if we’ll give it to him.
The Theology of Work (Part 5): But First We Rest
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The ancient rabbis liked to point out that the very first task God gave Adam and Eve to do was to rest.
This checks out when you track the creation account in Genesis closely. God creates the world in six days, topping it all off with his pièce de resistance on the final day: the making of human beings, creatures bearing the stamp of his likeness. Then there was evening, and morning, the sixth day.
If you’re familiar with the story, you’ll know that the very next thing that comes is verse 2:1-2, where God rests from all the creation work that he had been doing. In doing so, he sanctifies the Sabbath, making it holy and instituting it as a creation ordinance. From that point on, he invites us rest on the seventh day, too, just like he himself rested on that first Sabbath in the beginning (see Exodus 20:8-11 for more on how our observance of the Sabbath reflects God’s own resting on the seventh day of creation).
So essentially, you have God making humans at the end of the sixth day, and then leading them in sabbath rest at the start of the seventh day. And in pointing out this fascinating sequence, the ancient rabbis were drawing attention to the fact that Adam and Eve started their life as God’s creatures not with work, but with rest.
If you or I were telling the story, this side of Late Stage Capitalism, we’d never put the day of rest on day seven, immediately following the creation of human beings. Adam would have to have earned his rest first, we’d assume. So we'd have created him at the start of the work week, and got a good six days of use out of him. Only then would we have given him the day off, and that just so he’d be fresh and ready to go for the next six days.
Not so with God. Whatever else we can say about the relationship between work and Sabbath, you can’t unsee it, once it’s been pointed out to you, that in the creation story of Genesis, the very first task God gave Adam and Eve to do—if you can even call it a "task" at all—was to rest. They did not have to prove they deserved it. They hadn’t even done any work yet to rest from. God just started them off with a long luxurious basking in his glory, at peace in his presence, awash in his blessing.
There are at least three interconnected points to make on the heels of this observation. First, it reminds us that our experience of Sabbath is modeled after the Creator’s own example of sabbath. He rested on the seventh day, not because he was tired, but because he was, in essence, “creating” the sabbath for us, blessing it, sanctifying it, and modeling it for his creatures. This is how Exodus 20:8-11 frames the Sabbath. We are called to do it so as to walk in step with the rhythms the Creator himself established when he made the world in six and rested on the seventh day.
The second point flows from this first, that the Creator gave the Sabbath to the Creation as a blessing, a rich and entirely unmerited gift. He is not a slave driver who won’t let his worker-bees punch the clock until they’ve good and earned a break and simply can’t go on without one. Rather: he blessed the seventh day as a day of rest, after he had finished the work of creation which he had been doing and before the man had done any work yet himself, to rest from.
This may be, in part, what Jesus meant when he said that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath. The Sabbath was meant to be an unmerited gift, a source of joy, delight, peace and nurture. It was not meant as a measure of our usefulness, marking the outer limit of how much we could work before we simply needed a break, a way to keep us in optimal working efficiency and so get the most out of us.
I say that in part because I think that’s often how the Sabbath is billed, this side of Late Stage Capitalism. The resting is needed, we assume, for the sake of the working. Yet this does not seem to be how the Bible views Sabbath. If anything, it reverses the story, suggesting that the Sabbath itself is primary, and the role of the work is simply to enrich our experience of rest when we have it.
But I say it more so because it leads to this third point. The fact that Adam’s very first day on earth was one of sabbath assures us that his worth, as one of God's creatures, is not measured by his productivity or predicated on his usefulness. That is to say: the humans in the Genesis story are of intrinsic value, regardless how much the produce, how much they can get done, how hard they are able to work.
God blessed them with sabbath before they ever answered any of these “how much” questions.
This is a revolutionary thought, I think, in a culture where we tend to have a strictly materialistic, mechanistic view of the world. For us, everything, when you reduce its to its simplest terms, is a machine. Machines, of course, are only made for the sake of the work they can accomplish. They are of value to the extent that they work, and when they don’t they need either to be fixed or replaced. This mechanistic thinking pervades our whole view of human life. We often approach people themselves as though they were nothing more than soft, warm, breath-and-bone machines, of value so long as they are useful, and useful only to the extent that they are productive.
To the extent that this really is how we think about human life—even if subconsciously—the Bible’s suggestion that sabbath rest was God’s unmerited gift to us completely turns our mechanistic view of life on its head, insisting that a human being is profoundly more than just a glorified machine.
The gift of Sabbath tells us that we are of worth to God for no other reason than that he created us. It tells us, further, that we were not made so that God could wring the most out of us, his cogs in the machinery of nature; rather we were made so that we could enjoy the restful peace of his presence, his blessed sons and daughters.
For a theology of work to be truly biblical, it will need to wrestle profoundly with the Bible’s teaching about Sabbath and its implications. Sabbath reorients us to work, and by reorienting us to work, it reorients us to all of life, allowing us to make “who we are” as God’s creature the sole measure of “what we do” in our work, rather than letting “what we do"—and how much of it, and how well—define who we really are.
The Apprenticeship of Nicodemus, a devotional thought
There's a story in John 7 about a guy named Nicodemus. He's most famous for his encounter with Jesus back in John 3, where he comes to Jesus secretly, at night, to ask him some sceptical questions about his message and ministry. It's the exchange that prompts Jesus to say one of the most famous of all his sayings, about how much God so loved the world (John 3:16). That's not Nicodemus's only appearance in the story, though. He shows up again in Chapter 7, where he gets “smack-talked” by the Pharisees for speaking up in defense of Jesus. In this scene, the Pharisees are running Jesus down (their big critique is that he can’t be the Messiah because he’s only a Galilean hick), and Nicodemus timidly suggests that “we shouldn’t condemn him without hearing him first and finding out what he’s doing...” He gets shut down pretty quickly, like I say, but if you keep tracking with old Nicodemus, you’ll see that, after the crucifixion, he’s the one who provides the spices and myrrh for Jesus’ burial (19:39).
What stands out to me here is the progressive emergence of Nicodemus as a fully devoted follower of Christ: it starts with some clandestine questions asked skeptically in the dead of night, and it ends with him offering 75 pounds of myrrh for Jesus burial (an amount fit only for a king—Nicodemus is saying something pretty direct here about who he thinks it is that they’ve executed).
So what does the “spiritual evolution” of Nicodemus tell us? 1) That we ought never to downplay the curious inquiries of the seekers in our midst. That could be a Nicodemus-in-the-making asking us the tough questions, and we should take them seriously as such; and 2) That we ought never to discount the first tentative steps people make in standing up for Jesus. Nicodemus’s timid suggestion to his peers that they shouldn’t condemn Jesus before hearing him out was hardly a bold line in the sand. But it was the sign of a heart in crisis, a heart agonizing over what side of history it wants to be found on, a heart that will eventually put 75 pounds of myrrh on the line for his crucified King. Who knows what we may end up putting on the line for Jesus, if our first feeble efforts to take a stand for him are nurtured and honoured?
Daytime Moons, a book of poems
I'm excited to share that I've recently released a book of poems, based on poems that have appeared on this blog at one time or another over the years. It's called Daytime Moons and Other Celestial Anomalies, and it's illustrated by my amazingly talented son, Leland.
If you're interested, you can order it by clicking [here], or click the cover image to the left.
To pique your interest, this is the preface I wrote for the book, a reflection on the mysterious connections between pastoral work and poetry.
I find it both sobering and inspiring to think that whatever else he was, the first Christian theologian was a poet. It is sobering only because so little of the work I do in the discharge of my day-to-day duties as a pastor is actually poetic. There are plenty of God-words to be spoken, of course, but most of them are of the practical, pedagogical, pedantic kind, exhorting the wayward and edifying the seeker. I preach and I propound and I pray, and certainly there are opportunities in all these activities to wax poetical, but seldom does the moment seem to call for an unqualified, unapologetic poem per se.
This strikes me as especially curious, given the fact that such vast swaths of the Scripture were written in verse. From the vivid praise of the Psalter to the visionary oracles of the prophets, from the dark debates in the Book of Job to the sensual Song of Solomon, the authors of the Bible seemed to think that any season of the soul was an occasion for a good God-poem, so long as the Spirit was in it. Even the Master himself—the Living Word who gave us the Beatitudes and inspired Mary’s Magnificat—seems to have been perfectly at ease among the arresting rhythms and piercing imagery of a well-turned line of poetry.
It is not simply sobering, however, to realize how important a role good poetry played in the spiritual lives of those first Christians; it is also inspiring. Anyone who has agonized over the best way to say it precisely, what God was up to in a given moment of their lives—anyone who has stumbled unexpectedly across a metaphor so perfect it untangled a knot in their hearts they didn’t even know was there until it had opened—anyone who has had a line of verse flare suddenly in their spirits and so illuminate an otherwise impenetrably dark night of the soul—anyone, that is, who has ever had just the right words at just the right moment coalesce beautifully with something God was intimately doing in their lives, will be encouraged to know that the Christian faith has always made ample room for good poetry in its vision of the spiritual life.
If one or more of the poems in this small collection were to have something even close to that effect—easing some agony, untangling some knots, or flaring in some darkness—I would consider this book to have been well-used by God; they certainly did that and more for me as I wrote them. A handful of them date from the early days back when I was still an English teacher, and a handful more date from the heady days in seminary when I was training for the ministry. Most of them, however, were written between 2009 and 2021, in the nooks and crannies of a very full schedule as a pastor. When I couldn’t find my way through what I was trying to say in a sermon, for instance, or when an encounter in prayer, maybe, or with Scripture left me grasping for the best way to contain it, I would now and then reach for a scrap of paper and scratch it out as a poem instead. Over the years these accumulated, flotsam in the tidal undulations of one man’s spiritual journey, until there were enough worth sharing to fill the book you’re holding now.
In the following pages you will encounter prayers, laments, meditations on Scripture, reflections on spirituality, and every-day scenes from the life of a pastor recast as the stuff of revelation. My great hope is that you might find something here to inspire you in your own spiritual journey, and that you will find opening within yourself a deep well of refreshingly clear God-words as you do.
The Theology of Work (Part 4): The Holy Shoemaker
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There is a well-known quote attributed to Martin Luther which goes something like this: “The Christian shoemaker does his duty not by putting little crosses on the shoes, but by making good shoes, because God is interested in good craftmanship.” It’s an inspiring line, reminding us that all life is lived before God, and we can express our faith in Jesus as much through making shoes—or laying pipe, or performing brain surgery, or whatever your particular line of work happens to be—as much as we do through our specifically “religious” acts of worship.
It’s a far more radical thought than it appears, and some 550 years after he said it, some of the scandal of the notion he’s expressing here has sort of worn off for us. Martin Luther was pushing back against what the Catholic Church in his day had established as a distinct and impervious division between the sacred and the secular. “Religious things”—the stuff the God cares about—happen in church, under the auspices of ecclesiastical leaders well-trained in such matters. “Secular things”—the stuff the world is interested in—happen outside the church, for purely a-religious goals.
These two worlds touched. Skilled masons and sculptors, for instance, were needed to build cathedrals. But there work was “religious” only so far as it was employed to this end. The cathedral was the sacred space where the sacred things happened, and when the same mason was building, say, a villa or a fortress, his work was distinctly secular. In this model the Church was needed to sanctify mundane tasks; the Church was the steward and the dispenser of the sacred, and without its touch on a given activity, the activity itself remained mundane, profane, secular.
The Protestant Reformation, of which Luther was one of the primary instigators, dramatically shifted this view of the Christian life. “Salvation by grace alone through faith alone”—the battle cry of the Reformation—was as much as statement about the Church as it was a statement about the nature of salvation. According to the reformers, the Church was not the “dispenser” of the religious life; rather that life was offered to all through the grace of God, and appropriated, not through the indulgence of the Church, but by the faith of the individual believer. One of the sociological effects of this shift Protestant Reformation was to tear down, or at least render pervious, the divide between the sacred and the secular. If salvation really was by grace alone, then all of life was, and could be experienced as being, sacred in the eyes of God, and it did not need the Church’s “seal of approval” to sanctify it.
The Protestant Reformation gave us a renewed understanding of that deeply-biblical idea about the “priesthood of all believers.” It is not only the clergy in their cathedrals who could mediate God’s ministry of grace among his people. That happened by the Spirit, through the Gospel, and everyone, shoemaker or pastor, could be part of it.
The Protestant Reformation also gave us the traditional “Protestant Work Ethic.” This is a term that political economist Max Weber coined in 1905 to describe the diligence, discipline, frugality and sense of duty that he believed characterized the cultures that were shaped by the Protestant Reformation. In Weber’s view, the theological underpinnings of the Protestant Reformation, in particular the notion of predestination, encouraged “hard work and frugality” among protestants, because such virtues could be taken as a sign that one was numbered among the elect.
Max Weber’s thesis was controversial when it was released, and the stereotypes it rests on—both of protestant values and of Northern European/North American cultures—need far more unpacking than we can give it here, but there is a seed at its core that is very helpful, I think, in building a theology of work.
The theological vision of the Protestant Reformation discouraged a sacred-secular divide, and encouraged all believers, not just the priests, to see their life and work as playing a role in the ministration of God’s grace and blessing to the world. It was the protestants, for instance, who developed the theological idea of the “vocation,” and extended it beyond the clergy, to include work done by the shoemaker, the stone mason, the surgeon, and so on.
Now adays we use the term “vocation” generally, to describe any work one takes on as part of their career path. When we call one’s work a “vocation,” we are signaling that the work being done is somehow more than just a paycheck. When I worked at a convenience-store as a teenager, I’d taken a part-time-job; when I landed my first job as a teacher, I was following my “vocation.” Part-time convenience-store work can also be one’s “vocation,” of course, but for it to be so, the worker will have to approach it in such a way that draws out its intrinsic value, and allows him to express something of his identity through it.
To the extent that we still think about our work in terms of our “vocation,” we are enjoying the legacy of the Protestant Reformation. The term itself comes from the Latin, “vocare,” which means “to call.” Your “work” was a “vocation,” to the extent you were “called” to do it; and of course, to be called, implies there is someone doing the calling.
In this secular age, we might say something vague about how the work itself “calls” to the worker, but implicit in the term “vocation” is the belief that it’s God who is the “caller.” To see your work as your “vocation,” is to be called of God – asked by him—to do it. Originally, the term could only be applied to religious work. You could be “called” to the ministry, for instance, “called” to be a priest. But shoemakers weren’t “called” to make shoes, in that sense. At least, not until the reformers, following their theological convictions to their logical conclusion, started poking holes in the sacred/secular divide, and suggesting that God actually cared about well-made shoes.
In a world where so-called “secular” life could be spaces of sacred experience, all work, if done with a sense of duty and as an expression of faith in God, could be understood as one’s “calling.” The shoemaker didn’t need to “put little crosses” on his shoes as a way of “sanctifying his work,” rather, he could do it well, and diligently, as his “calling from God.” So long as it was done sola fide and soli deo gloria, it was as much a calling as the work of the preacher in the pulpit.
This vision of work is not without its pitfalls. It can be misused, for instance, to bind people to their work in unhealthy ways. If shoemaking is my calling, so to speak, then not to make shoes would be to disobey God, and to make shoes poorly would be sin. This can lead to all kinds of unhealthy views of work, even an idolatry of work (if I’m divinely “called” to do such-and-such a job, it’s only a hop-ski-and-jump into assuming there is something “divine” about the job itself. It’s no accident that most pastors are also work addicts.)
Those caveats notwithstanding, though, I believe there is something profoundly empowering and in the understanding of work you find among Reformers like Luther, and something profoundly liberating in the theological convictions it rests on. All of life has “sacred potential”—not just the life that happens in the cloister, monastery, or cathedral—and any Christian who does their work as an expression of their faith in God, whatever that work may be, it can be something beautiful, and life-giving, and sacred: a response to his call on our lives.
Witness Exhibit A, a devotional thought
There's a famous scene in John 9, where Jesus heals a man who had been born blind from birth. The whole story is packed with drama and tension, but I especially love the exchange between the healed man and the Pharisees, immediately following Jesus' healing miracle. For their part, the Pharisees insist that this healing couldn’t have been of God, because Jesus did it on a Sabbath day, ergo Jesus must be “a sinner” (9:24). The man’s reply to this logic is priceless: “Whether he’s a sinner or not, I don’t know. But one thing do I know: I was once blind and now I see!”
In the face of hard questions about who Jesus is and where he came from, the healed man points to the empirical facts of his encounter with Jesus, and lets Jesus’ healing miracle speak for itself.
This observation sends my thoughts in two different directions. On the one hand, it encourages me to know that in response to the hard questions I may get asked about my faith, it is enough simply to point to the transformation that the Lord has accomplished in my life, as the evidence of what I believe. But on the other hand, it challenges me to ask: am I pursuing after Jesus in such a way that I am experiencing life-transformation and healing (in all the different ways that healing occurs, not simply physical, but emotional, spiritual and so on). Is there anything actually going on in my life with Jesus that I could point to, if I needed empirical evidence that he is, in fact, the Son of God?
The Theology of Work (Part 3): Working as the Image of God
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For all its being just a few short lines Genesis 1:27 exerts a far greater influence over the trajectory of the Bible than you would expect of its 13 simple, seemingly innocuous Hebrew words. It stands at the start of the Good Book as kind of a summary of what it means to be a human being in relationship with God, what God’s purpose was in making us in the first place, and (as we will discover when we get to Christ) what was after in sending Jesus, the Image of the Unseen God, to be our savior. It is one of the go-to verses for building a biblical understanding of what makes a human being a human being, it is one of the foundational texts for a Christian understanding of human rights and human dignity, it is one of the core themes in any robust discussion of who Christ is and what God was really doing when he became a man in him.
And it is, or should be, a key verse for developing a Christian understanding of the theology of work. What is “work,” from a theological perspective, and how should human beings think about it, biblically speaking?
Genesis 1:27 isn’t the only verse we need to answer those questions well, but we won’t be able to answer them at all unless we spend some time reflecting on it.
Because in Genesis 1:27 it says that God created human beings in his own image, male and female, he made them in his own image.
This truth has to be one of the foundation stones for building a theology of work: human beings were made in God’s image, in order that they might, in some concrete way, “image God” to the rest of the creation.
Untold gallons of ink have been spilled over this one small verse, trying to exegete and exposit what Genesis is really trying to say when it insists that humans were made in God’s image, and there’s far more to be said than we can squeeze into a short blog post here.
There is, for starters the general consensus among theologians that it is not meant physically, as though God has two arms and two legs the same as us. That said, many theologians, from the Middle Ages onwards, have argued that the Image of God has to do with ways in which the “structure” of the human being “reflects” something of the personhood of God. We are rational beings, with a spiritual life and a moral nature, and in these ways we “image” God, who is also a rational, moral, Spirit. This is sometimes called the “structural view,” or the “substantive view” of the Image of God, and although it’s fraught with problem, it is still a commonly-held understanding of the Image of God today.
Many theologians have argued that the Image of God has to do with the fact that human beings are relational creatures, made to be in relationship with God and capable of forming deep, loving relationships between each other. Christians, of course, believe that there exists a perfect, harmonious relationship within God’s-self, as the Father begets the Son and the Son does the Father’s Will, while the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, perfecting the bond of love between them. At the same time, Genesis 1-3 clearly implies that humans were made to be in community with each other, in relationship with God. To be “the image of God,” then, we must be in relationship with him, and as we form, spiritual relationships with each other, so we reflect his likeness in the world.
A final view has to do with the fact that the New Testament repeatedly refers to Jesus Christ as the “image of God,” and argues that through faith in him, we are being shaped into his “likeness,” and so having the image of God restored in us. That’s a paraphrase of the key verses, but you can look up Colossians 1:15, 2 Corinthians 4:4, Romans 8:29 if you want the deep dive. The point here is that the Image of God has to do with Christlikeness; the life-before God that we were intended to have but lost through sin, and which God “recapitulated” for us in Jesus, who showed us what the Image of God really looks like and then, by his spirit, shapes our lives so they start to reflect his life. In this sense, it’s not so much something we have now, but something we lost and are being given back, something that will only be fully revealed on the last day, when we are fully made to be like Jesus is.
Each of these views have something helpful to add to the discussion. My personally theological predilections lean towards the last view. I understand the Image of God as Christlikeness, something that God is restoring in us as we follow Christ, shaping our lives to look like his. I sprinkle this understanding with the best of the other two as well.
But there are other approaches to this verse that are helpful. I particularly like Richard Middleton’s argument (in The Liberating Image) that in the ancient world of Genesis, it was understood that the King—whoever the King happened to be of the nation or people group in question—was the “divine image of god” on the earth—the representative of the gods, who mediated the divine blessing to the creation. In ancient near eastern culture, only the king had this mediatory role, and only the king functioned in this way, imaging the divine for the creation. In Genesis 1:27, then, we see a radical, subversive, and divinely inspired “democratization” of the image of god. It’s not just the “king” who images god, but all human beings (men and women!). The verse then underscores the fundamental, divinely granted dignity of all human beings, as mediators of the divine blessing to the creation.
This last idea brings me close to the real point of this post, because I started by claiming that Genesis 1:27, and its claim that we are made in God’s Image, has to be the starting point for developing a theological understanding of the nature of human work. It may not be self-evident how this is so, but when we reflect more deeply on how this language may have been understood in the ancient world, it stands out almost immediately.
Because the Hebrew word Genesis 1:27 uses when it says that humans are God’s image is zelem. In the ancient world a zelem was the statue of a king—his literal “image”—that he would erect in a country that he had conquered. The king would defeat his enemies, that is, and then he would set up his image—his zelem—in that region. The idea was that the zelem of the king spiritually extended and maintained the rule of the king, even though the king was not necessarily present.
It was a literal and effectual extension of the king’s reign in the land that he had conquered.
This understanding of the zelem meshes well with one of the subtexts of the Creation account of Genesis 1. In most ancient near eastern creation cosmogonies, like Genesis 1, the world begins in a state of chaos and dissolution, a primeval chaos symbolized by the sea, where water covers everything (cf. the Spirit of God hovering over the surface of the waters in Genesis 1:2). Genesis 1:1-2 imagines the world in exactly the same way, covered over by un-creation chaos. In most ancient near eastern creation stories, creation itself results from a battle that the divines fight against chaos. Usually its personified by some monster or other, like Tiamat in the Babylonian creation myth. The gods conquer the chaos-monster, and creation emerges in the wake of their conquest.
The Genesis 1 creation account shares this mythic vision when it discusses creation. God is clearly overcoming chaos in Genesis 1, conquering it in such a way that creation can emerge and flourish, though with one important difference. Unlike all the other ancient near eastern creation accounts, the God of the Hebrew Bible does not subdue chaos with violence, fighting some monster or other, rather he does it simply through the creative power of his Word. “God said, ‘Let there be light,’” and the darkness of chaos was scattered.
Having pointed out that all important difference, it remains to connect all the dots. Like an ancient near eastern king conquering a country, God creates the world by defeating chaos, subduing it with the power of his word. This creation work culminates on Day 6 when the chaos is fully subdued and God creates the human creature, placing him in his newly-created world, to serve as his zelem, the image of the conquering king, victorious over chaos, to function as a literal and effectual extension of God’s reign over the chaos.
This is implicit in the actual charge God gives humans in the next verse. In Genesis 1:28, God directs his zelem to “fill the earth and ‘subdue it’ and ‘rule’ over the creatures of the earth.” This is another verse that’s spilled more than its fair share of ink, often being misinterpreted to imply that the earth “belongs” to humans and we can “use it” for our own ends, as we see fit. The language of “subdue” there does not apply to the earth generally, though. That a reference to the idea common in the ancient world, that creation itself happened when the gods “subdued chaos” so that creation could come into existence. We are being told, in Genesis 1:28, that humans have a role in extending the “chaos-subduing” work that God began when he got things started in the beginning.
As his zelem in the creation, human beings were called to extend God’s “rule” over the creation (a loving, life-giving, blessing kind of rule, not an exploitative dominion), by continuing to work to subdue chaos, and mediating both the divine blessing to the rest of the creation, and the rest of the creation’s praise back to God.
This is, in part, what it means to be made in his image and likeness.
And here is where, at last, the fact that you and I are made in the Image of God helps us understand our work. Because I argued in the last post that work existed in Paradise before the fall. We were made with a divine mandate to work.
This discussion of the Image of God tells us why. Because our purpose in the world was in part to extend and carry on the creation work that God himself had started when he made the world in six days and then rested from his work on the seventh.
Let me say what this doesn’t mean before I say what it does. It doesn’t mean that God couldn’t have got the world done without us, that he is somehow dependent on us. It also doesn’t mean that God got the universe started and is now standing back to see where we’ll take it from here. Nor does it mean that it’s up to us to keep the chaos at bay, that we’re on our own when it comes to “saving the planet.”
What it does mean is that we have a divinely-ordained role in the world, a function that God had in mind when he created us. It is, in fact, an irreplaceable function, something that, without us performing this function, the world will not be what God intended it to be. Worse, if we reject this function and deny our God-ordained purpose, the world is in all kinds of danger of sliding back into the chaos that God created it out of.
This is, in part, what Paul was hinting at when he said in Romans 8 that the whole creation is groaning, waiting in eager expectation for the children of God’s glory to be revealed. When humans are not properly imaging God in the world, the creation itself suffers the consequences.
Suddenly the theological significance of human work stands in sharp relief. Our work was intended to be expressions of our role as God’s zelem in the creation, the things we do to keep the chaos subdued and continue to extend his reign in the world. We were given this work to do so we could mediate God’s blessing to the rest of the creation, and by doing it well, the creation itself would continue to thrive, fruitfully and flourishing.
As his Image in the creation, our work was an extension, in fact, of his own creative work in the world.
I’ve written the last two paragraphs in the past tense, because I’m talking about the primeval history of Genesis 1, and sadly, the millennia of human history that have flowed under the bridge since that chapter of the Good Book was written have shown how frequently and how disastrously humans have rejected their call to Image the Creator in the world.
The consequences of this sinful rejection of our role as his zelem has caused all kinds of chaos to bubble up and sweep over God’s world, from war, to environmental exploitation, to gross economic disparity, killing, looting, hording, you name it. It’s also brought all kinds of chaos into the work we do, and the way we experience it, and what comes of it as we’re doing it.
Few nine-to-five jobs are done these days, I think, with a clear sense that by doing it, I am, in fact, Imaging the Creator, extending his creation work in the world and contributing to the ongoing subjugation of chaos in the world so that the whole of creation can flourish.
But they can be understood in this way. A tree can’t be planted unless there are well-made shovels to dig the hole, and the shovel can’t be fashioned except its steel be refined, and someone has been taught the art of shovel-making, and someone sold the tree-planter his shovel. Teaching, and child-care, mining and forestry, engineering and retail, every job, actually, if done well and with a view of mediating God’s creation blessing on the earth, can function as an expression of our identity as his image-bearers.
Of course, it may be that our work won’t fully mediate God’s blessing to the world until the Image of God is fully restored in us, and we are finally redeemed to full Christ-likeness. But even before that final day, we all have opportunities to make our work—whether it be waiting on tables or biomedical research—modest expressions of our creation purpose, extensions of the chaos-subduing work of the Creator.
The better we understand who we are as men and women made in His Divine Image, the more likely we will be to make the most of those opportunities as they arise.