Thistle and Thorn, a song

When I was just a little boy
My father taught me how to work with him
Breathing life out of the dust
Till hands were bruised and fingers torn.
Somehow his love redeemed the curse
Because just so long as he was there with me
I didn’t notice it was thistle
Or that they were his thorns.

And then when I was twenty-one
I waited tables for my schooling
Serving life in smoky rooms
Till the wee hours of the morn.
Somehow a joy redeemed the curse
Because with all the laughter we had there
I never guessed that was my thistle
Or that they were my—

Thistle and thorns, thistle and thorns
Watered by the sweat of my brow.
It isn’t much to give,
The simple work of simple hands
But what I have I give to you now.

And then a child was on the way
So I stood up in a classroom
Learning life out of my books
Till the lessons were well-worn.
Somehow his call redeemed the curse
Because with all the lives that I touched there
I didn’t know that was my thistle
Or that those were my—

Thistle and thorns, thistle and thorns
Watered by the sweat of my brow
It isn’t much to give,
The simple work of simple hands
But what I have I give to you now.

And child, you’re almost all grown up
And the worlds spread out before you:
Will you build or will you heal?
What feats will you perform?
O, let his love redeem the curse
And just so long as it is done for him
He’ll make sure they’re never thistles
And they won’t just come up thorns.

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.

The Theology of Work (Part 7): Working for the Commonweal

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Theology of Work (Part 2): Bruce Springsteen Meets Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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There’s a hidden gem on one of Bruce Springsteen’s early albums, a song called “Factory.” It’s a poignant tune about the heartache of the working life in blue collar America. For the beaten-down laborer in the song, the drudgery of a monotonous factory job sustains his body but steals his soul. “Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,” sings the Boss, “It’s the work, just the work, just the working life.”

I’ve always found Springsteen’s handling of “the working life” intriguing. “Factory” isn’t the only Springsteen tune that explores this strange tension, between our profound need for work to do, on the one hand, and the soul-sucking drudgery work, on the other. The same tension is present for the poor souls in “Badlands,” and it’s there for the torn-asunder community in “My Hometown.” Work is one of our deepest needs and also one of our heaviest burdens, a bane and a blessing both.

I doubt Springsteen read much Bonhoeffer, but I see a parallel between the way Springsteen wrestled with the reality of work, and the theological reflection on work we find a in Dietrich Bonhoeffer book called Ethics. Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in 1940s Germany who was famously interned and eventually executed for his involvement in the Nazi Resistance efforts. An unfinished manuscript of Ethics was on his desk when he was arrested by the Nazis. Though incomplete, it was an effort to establish a theological framework for a system of ethics that might guide a Christian’s day-to-day living in a secular world.

The connection between Springsteen and Bonhoeffer may not seem immediately obvious, except that Bonhoeffer has an extended section in Ethics where he discusses something he calls “the four mandates.” He draws these from the Creation account as it is recorded in the first chapters of Genesis, the four mandates God gave Adam and Eve when he placed them in paradise on the day of their creation. These “mandates” were not commands, strictly speaking, divine rules that Adam and Eve might keep or contravene; rather they were directives, broad purposes that the human being was made to live into. They might be fulfilled in any number of ways, but generally speaking they were the aspects of life that, by pursuing them, humans could fulfill the divine command to live fully as human beings, Imaging God in the world.

The four mandates are: family, worship, government, and work. Bonhoeffer treats each of these mandates extensively in Ethics, but for our purposes here, it’s enough to notice that work sits squarely among the four mandates. On Bonhoeffer’s reading of Genesis, work was a divine mandate, given human beings in paradise before the Fall.

It’s how I read Genesis, too. In Genesis 2:15 it explains that after God had made the man, he took and placed him in the Garden of Eden, to cultivate it and tend it, that is to say, to work it. And before God does this, in Genesis 2:5, it explains that no plants of the field were yet growing because “there was no man [yet] to work the ground.”

There was work to do in Paradise, in other words, and except there were humans to do it, Paradise would not be paradisal. The divine mandate of work precedes the Fall.

This connects seamlessly with how Genesis 3 describes the effects of Adam and Eve’s sin. In Genesis 3:17, we learn that after discovering their sin, God cursed “the ground” because of them, so that it would now produce food for them “only by the sweat of their brow.”

It’s common to gloss this passage by talking about how “God cursed Adam and Eve when they sinned,” but strictly speaking, that’s not accurate. God only uses the word “curse” here to describe the effects of their sin on the earth. Adam and Eve will experience the consequences of their sin, to be sure. Eve will have pain in childbearing and Adam’s work will be miserable for him. But the actual “curse” is not pronounced on the human creatures; rather it is pronounced on the rest of creation, as a result of their sin.

This distinction is important to make, because it reminds us that God did not “curse Adam” by giving him hard work to do. That we would have work to do was part of God’s good intention for his human creatures right from the start. The creation became cursed because of human sin, and under this curse the divine mandate to work becomes distorted, burdensome, laborious, but the work itself is of God.

“Factory takes his hearing,” sings the Boss, and yet, at the same time “Factory gives him life.”

This is the paradox of the human condition, when it comes to work. We were made to do it and without it, paradise can’t be paradise, neither can we be fully human before our God; yet because of sin, the mandate is experienced as a curse. The earth produces our food only by the sweat of our brow. The work we have to do inevitably sucks away the life it sustains.

As unlikely as the combination may seem, both Springsteen and Bonhoeffer have a helpful word to speak when it comes to developing a theological understanding of our work, Springsteen in articulating this paradox that we labor under, and Bonhoeffer by framing it biblically for us.

When we come to see work as one of the four creation mandates God gave human beings when he made them in his image in the beginning, two interrelated things start to happen that have the power to transform how we do our work in the world. First, we start to realize that work itself was intended as a good gift from God, something that, so long as it is kept in its right place and performed for its proper purpose, allows us to live into our creation mandate. But second, we are forced to acknowledge that work can only be this through the redemptive grace of God.

Unredeemed, work wrings every drop of sweat from our souls and rewards our best efforts with thistles and thorns. Put a little less metaphorically: until the Lord redeems us from our own sin nature—the sin that compels us to idolize the work of our hands, and leaves us never satisfied with the outcome of our best efforts, and keeps us toiling under a constant fear of loss and failure and death—until these inevitable effects of sin are healed and transformed, our work will always have a shadow of the curse in it, however necessary, and even life-giving it may be.

For the redeemed, though, for whom the Spirit of God has begun to heal our addiction to idols and transform our sin-fed fears of death and loss—for the follower of Jesus who is having the Image of God increasingly renewed in them, that is—work, too, becomes healed and healing. It finds its rightful place among the four mandates, and becomes—yes, even work can become this—a faint echo of paradise.

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The Theology of Work (Part 1): Working in a Post-Covid World

When the Covid-19 pandemic descended on the globe last March, it forced us, among other things, to reimagine what the work-world looks like. Stay-at-home orders required many of us to change dramatically the way we did our jobs, forcing us to work over the internet in ways we’d never done before. Business lock-downs put many of us on long-term layoffs with no viable alternatives for employment. Increased pressures on certain sectors of the work-world, especially in hospitals, medical clinics, nursing homes and schools, required many of us to work under a strain we'd never had to bear before. While all this was going on, the Government of Canada was providing wage-subsidies and financial assistance with such liberality that it made many wonder out loud if we were ready to test-run a universal basic income program for the country.

I have thought more than once during the last year that one of the long-range outcomes of the pandemic will be a dramatic restructuring of the role of work in our lives. This was already happening in nondescript and incremental ways. As automation pushes more and more human beings out of jobs, as A.I. begins to replace human brains in decision-making jobs, as the advent of self-driving cars threatens to put vast swaths of people who drive for a living out of work, as online-shopping and automated-home-delivery renders retail jobs obsolete—as our human ingenuity, that is, finds more and more ways to do the job without us, it’s already been forcing us to reimagine what work looks like in a robotic age. The pandemic has not caused all this, but it will accelerate it and intensify it. When we’ve finally come through Covid and we’ve started to rebuild all the things it toppled over, navigating the changes it has wrought to the nature of work will be one of primary social challenges we will have to face.

I call this a “social challenge” because having good work to do is essential to human flourishing and individual well-being, and the changes to our work that the pandemic is accelerating will inevitably cause corresponding changes to those things—our flourishing and well-being as people. Regardless all those times you woke up and went in wishing you didn’t have to, still, human beings need to have meaningful work to do, something that gives us a sense of purpose and allows us to make a positive contribution to the common weal of the community.

In saying this, I am using a very broad definition of work, one that includes those important activities that are not usually remunerated materially—like child-rearing or managing a household—but are just as crucial to the flourishing of society as the more obvious ones like doctor or construction worker. Whether it is done for money or not, work allows us to express our God-given creativity, to gain a degree of self-determination while remaining connected to the communities we are part of. Work matures us, broadens our horizons, and helps us attain a healthy self-actualization. At least it can do that, at its best; and it is not immediately clear how it will continue to do so in a post-Covid world, where we’ve not yet figured out what exactly we’ll do or how exactly we’ll do it.

I may have overstated the problem somewhat in the preceding paragraph. Certainly many of the jobs that existed in the pre-Covid world will continue to need doing post-Covid; and the pandemic itself has created all sorts of new jobs that need doing now and will still need to be done long after the last lockdown order has been lifted. It’s not as though a jobless dystopia is looming on the horizon (or a work-free utopia, depending on your perspective).

But there is a change in the wind.

It had me thinking about the various jobs I’ve had over the course of my working life. I will turn 47 this month, and inasmuch as I entered the workforce, roughly, at age 15, I have been working more-or-less steadily for 32 years. In those 32 years I’ve had a variety of jobs, including: hardwood flooring installer, summer camp youth leader, waiter, schoolteacher (then substitute teacher), stay-at-home dad, and now pastor. 

With the exception, possibly, of the second last item on that list, none of jobs I’ve worked at over the years would have continued unchanged had I been working at them when the pandemic hit. Some would have ended abruptly, others would have continued in a dramatically different form than they’d previously had. The job I actually was working at when Covid came along—the work of a pastor—has changed in all kinds of ways, some of which I’m only now beginning to understand, and some of which I may never fully grasp. The basic duties of the work are the same, of course, but how I discharge those duties in an age of live-streamed worship services and online prayer meetings looks very different than it did a year and a half ago.

I offer this all by way of introduction to a series I will be presenting here at terra incognita over the next number of weeks, looking at the theological meaning and spiritual dimensions of work. Given the profound role that our jobs play in our lives, and given also the way that this role is in an unprecedented state of flux for many of us, it may be a far richer topic for theological reflection than it appears at first blush. Does the daily grind really have any theological meaning beyond the brute fact of the grind itself? Does it really matter if we move into a world where the lines between work and home are irreversibly blurred? Does it matter if our work looks different than it ever has before? Does it matter if we even have any work to do at all?

You may be surprised to learn that the Christian message actually offers concrete answers to many of these questions, and even those it doesn’t answer directly it certainly provides the theological raw material necessary to infer an answer to them. In the coming weeks we will examine that raw material closely and see if we can’t determine what posture a Christian should take towards his or her work, even as it takes new and hitherto unimagined forms in a post-Covid world. I hope you will check back in for coming installments of the series, as we do our best to look at our work from God's perspective, and develop some theological handles for managing our work well, for his glory, whatever shape it takes in the days to come.

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Thistle and Thorn, a poem

When I was just a little boy
My father taught me how to work with him
Breathing life out of the dust
Till my hands were bruised and torn.
Somehow his love redeemed the curse
Because just so long as he was there with me
I didn’t notice it was thistle
Or that they were his thorns.

And then when I was twenty-one
I waited tables for my schooling
Serving life in smoky rooms
Till the wee hours of the morn.
Somehow a joy redeemed the curse
Because with all the laughter we had there
I never guessed that was my thistle
Or that they were my—

     thistle and thorns, thistle and thorns
     Watered by the sweat of my brow.
     It isn’t much to give,
     The simple work of simple hands
     But what I have I give to you now.

And then a child was on the way
So I stood up in a classroom
Learning life out of my books
Till the lessons were well-worn.
Somehow his call redeemed the curse
Because with all the lives that I touched there
I didn’t know that was my thistle
Or that those were my—

     Thistle and thorns, thistle and thorns
     Watered by the sweat of my brow
     It isn’t much to give,
     The simple work of simple hands
     But what I have I give to you now.

Now child, you’re almost all grown up
And the world's spread out before you:
Will you build or will you heal?
What feats will you perform?
O, let his love redeem the curse
And just so long as it is done for him
He’ll make sure they’re never thistles
And they won’t just come up thorns.

Notes from the Ashes, Part VI: A Gift Wrapped in Barbed Wire

It was a dreary morning in December, only a few days after my doctor had put me on "reduced duties" because of symptoms related to work-place stress, and I was walking my then ten-year-old daughter to her bus stop.  I was miserable, with this weight of discouragement and defeat and despair hanging around my heart like a leaden albatross.  To paraphrase Augustine only a little bit: my soul was curved hopelessly in on itself.

As we walked, my daughter was saying something I was barely hearing about the song-writer's club at school. As I gradually came to and it sort of dawned on me that she was talking to me, I heard her say something about how she was looking forward to the day because the song-writer's club was happening at lunch. I asked a few questions and found out that her school had this group of kids that got together each week and, with the help of the teacher sponsors, learned how to write songs.

I write songs-- or I used to--but at that point, in the gloomy days right before Christmas 2013, it had been at least two years, maybe more, since I'd put pen to paper.  I never felt like I had the time. Or the energy.  Or the inspiration.  And anyways, what's the point?

One of the first things depression steals from you, I've since learned, is your ability to find joy in things that were, once-upon-a-time, joyful.  I've come to take this as a bit of a heart-barometer for me: when things that should be giving me joy feel like drudgery, it's time to take stock and/or a breather. But this is now, and that was then, and like I say, my daughter mentioned the songwriters club at school and I thought, "Man, it feels like ages since I've even wanted to write a song, let alone had something to write about."

And so I told my daughter that I'd be interested in volunteering at the club, if the teachers would let me.  She said she'd ask at school that day.

Things progressed for me pretty quickly from there, as far as my burnout was concerned.  My "reduced work duties" turned into a full-on stress leave. A lot of things came crashing down that I'd been clinging to, to keep me standing; some of my favorite masks to wear came off; and some of the emotional immaturity that I'd been trying hard to hide for a long time finally came out into the light.

But also: I started volunteering at the songwriter's club, where I found the energy, the time, and especially the inspiration to start writing songs again.  Not to sound too melodramatic, but in the midst of my defeat and despair--often because of my defeat and despair--I found something to sing about, and more importantly, the words to sing about it.

I didn't see it coming, but those three months, January to March, 2014, would turn out to be one of the most creative seasons of my life.  It was not a bright cheery kind of creativity, mind you.  It was often a raw, unpolished, haunted kind of creativity, but because of that, a more honest creativity than I'd ever really experienced before.  The songs didn't necessarily gush out of me--I was still very tired a lot of the time--but even so, I wrote at least twelve complete songs in three months, along with a number of arrangements that I worked on for the kids at my daughter's songwriter's club. Besides that, I also wrote a handful of poems, trying to process what I was going through, and, in the second half of my leave, as I felt my energy and optimism returning, four chapters of a novel that I'd been wanting to get to for years.

I'm sharing all this to illustrate one of the paradoxical truths I discovered about burnout.  I haven't done an quantitative study of it, of course, so I can't say if this is true for everyone who goes through it, but it was certainly true for me (and for the record, most of the books on pastoral burnout that I've read more or less bear out this simple observation):  burnout doesn't only steal; it also gives.

At least, if you take it seriously and get the help you need, it can. Burnout can be a profound gift-- a gift wrapped in barbed-wire, you might say, but a gift nonetheless.

I say this as someone who's been through it, and not at all to make light of the struggle, the darkness, the very real risk to your well-being that is burnout; but as someone who has been through it, I don't want to make light of the gift that's there, either.

What, in particular, did burnout give me?  I mentioned the renewed and deepened wells of creativity.  I'd add to that: greater authenticity and transparency in my ministry; better insight as a pastor into the spiritual and emotional struggles of others; greater wisdom in how to love and help and respond to people as they go through them; more real friendships; a deeper relationship with my wife; empirical evidence that God will be there still, on the other side of the dark night of the soul.

It may be that burnout is just a conceptual thing for you today, something you've only read about but never experienced.  It may be that you've come through burnout yourself, and what I'm saying is resonating with you here.  And, of course, it may be that you're right in the middle of something overwhelming today, like I was back in December 2013, and you're wondering if it could possibly get better.

If you're in that third place, let me say that it can.  It will mean taking it very seriously and getting the help you need, it will take honesty and discipline and, especially, God stepping in, but it can become, not just better, but, when you least expected it to be so, an unlikely and beautiful gift.

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Notes from the Ashes, Part III: The 4 R's of Burnout

In a previous post on pastoral burnout, I suggested in passing that burnout is sort of an occupational hazard in ministry.  I don’t have empirical evidence that this is so, but anecdotally, I can say that the number of pastors I met during my own burnout time who quietly admitted, “I’ve been there, too” when I shared what I was going through, was kind of surprising to me.

As I say, I’m not sure if burnout is a special risk in pastoral-work, over and above other kinds of people-leading-people-helping sorts of jobs, but early on in my recovery I came across some teaching that helped me understand, if it is, why that might be the case.

It has to do with what this article calls "The 4 R’s of Burnout."  The whole article is worth a read, but here’s the idea in a nutshell.  Burnout is not simply a function of one’s work load.  That is to say, one can work under a high degree of responsibility, demands and stress, without approaching burnout, so long as the work is meeting certain other, necessary conditions; and conversely, if these conditions are not being met, then even relatively low demands can put someone at risk of burn-out.  We can think of these “necessary conditions” as the “4-R’s,” and the point is: most people can shoulder a relatively high work load without the risk of burnout, so long as the 4 R’s are in place; and by implication, simply adjusting the workload, without addressing the 4 R’s, won’t, in and of itself, mitigate the risk.

The 4 R's are:  Recognition, Rewards, Results and Relief.

According to the article I cited above, “If, no matter what you say or do, results, rewards, recognition and relief are not forthcoming ... the groundwork is being laid for apathy, callousness and despair.”

In practical terms, what this means is that someone can work long, hard hours without burning out if they know that there is an end in sight, if it’s possible to see the tangible results of their work, if they are receiving compensation commensurate to the demands of their work, and if they are duly recognized for what they are doing.  If, on the other hand, they are working in demanding conditions, but not seeing results, receiving recognition or being rewarded in ways commensurate to their work, and there’s no end in sight, that’s when the perfect-storm clouds start brewing.

Now: what I am about to say is simply an observation.  I have worked through these things in my own experience and do not make this observation out of a spirit of resentment or grudge at all.  I love the work that Jesus has called me to do and as best I can I do it “with all my heart, as working for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23).  I wouldn’t trade it for the world, even a world of recognition and rewards.  That said, still, it’s my observation that there are things about pastoral ministry that make "the 4 R’s" hard to come by.

We are conditioned by our faith, for instance, not to think of ourselves more highly than we ought, to humble ourselves under God’s hand, to become, as Jesus was, the servant of all.  And, while this is certainly a biblical spirit for pastors to adopt, it makes the idea that we may need or want recognition for our work difficult to accept, let alone admit, or ask for.

Or take results.  I am convinced that of all the kinds of work people do, the work of proclaiming the Word of God is one of the few that will genuinely have eternal significance.  At the same time, however, pastors can put in 20 hours or more on a sermon (and many of the best preachers I know do), and yet they have to sit down in the study Monday morning, and start all over again as if last Sunday’s sermon hadn’t even happened.  The Bible teaches us, in fact, that we’ll have to wait until the other side of Heaven to see the real results of our work (1 Corinthians 3:11-15); and, while I believe that the results on that day will make every drop of blood, sweat or tears worth all the effort, still it makes it hard sometimes to see the more immediate results that keep burnout at bay in other kinds of work.

We’d see similar things if we thought about the rewards—the actual compensation for pastoral work—or the potential for relief—time off and time away from the demands of the work.  The unique nature of ministry as work—the steady pace of it, the spiritual nature of it, the ambiguity of so much of it—all these things make it difficult for pastors consistently to find the relief, results, rewards and recognition they need for what they do.  If burnout is a special occupational hazard of being a pastor, this is probably why.

Again, I share these things as an observation, not a complaint.  But if you are a pastor and this observation is resonating with you today, let me suggest a few lessons I've learned to help deal with the missing R's of pastoral work.

First:  do not under-estimate, low-ball or lose sight of the eternal significance of what you do.  This is not pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die kind of thinking, it's simply a matter of reminding yourself daily that the faithful, disciplined, ongoing proclamation of the Word of God in a well-led community of faith is of eternal importance, and we have Jesus' own word that he will reward it well (see Mark 10:29-30; 1 Corinthians 3:14; 2 Timothy 4:1-8).  The results may not always be evident but, unlike any other work, they are guaranteed.

Second: overcome the ingrained hesitancy to advocate for yourself. We are not being "super-spiritual" or "servant-hearted" when we pretend that we do not actually have the very natural needs that other human beings have.  Often that hesitancy to say "I need..." is not spiritual at all, but simply pride or fear or both; and to be blunt, if we kill ourselves because we're not willing to advocate for ourselves, we haven't served anybody in the end.  This does not mean we approach our work with a demanding self-interest, but it does mean we practice humble self-care; and part of self care is being honest about our own needs.

Third: develop rhythms of rest and retreat.  I'm still learning on this one, but the more consistently you can work sabbath, retreat and rest into your daily, weekly and yearly routines, the more likely you'll be getting at least one of those 4 R's—relief—on a regular basis.

These weren't the only lessons I learned about pastoral burnout, or even the most important, but I've found the 4 R's very useful as a practical framework for understanding why it happens.  And, while I don't think this was exactly what Paul had in mind when he said he'd "fought the good fight and finished the course" in his ministry (2 Timothy 4:7); still, we're more likely to be able to say the same when we reach the end of our ministries, if we're mindful of the 4 R's.

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every day (a poem)

and is this my work to love:
that every day I hear the call
to make of the ineffable
the everyday,
and speak the everyday, ineffable,
and every day to fall, and move,
and lift my eyes to the silent blue
above
and get to laugh for trying?

Occupied

The other day we were filling out some forms for some changes we're making to an insurance policy, when the helpful representative from the brokerage asked me this innocuous question: "Occupation?"

He'd already run through the questionaire with my wife, so I knew what was coming next. Because after I answered: "Pastor," he asked: "And the description of your work?"

He just wanted hard data. He just wanted to be able to assure the insurance company that I'm not at any special risk of death or dismemberment because of the nature of my occupation. But I have to admit, my mind sprinted a couple of laps before I answered.

Mostly because I've been asked this question before, usually out of genuine curiosity, always out real interest and only once out of vague suspicion towards the role in general: "So, what does a pastor do?" And I always hesitate.

When I was in seminary, one of the courses I took had us write a "vision statement" that would help us define our future roles in ministry. My own "vision statement for ministry" is: "To use my gifts as a teacher, preacher and leader to point others to the revelation of God's grace and faithfulness in Jesus Christ, and to fully participate by the power of the Holy Spirit in the redemptive work that Christ is accomplishing in my community and in the lives of those around me. " But I knew that if I told the polite, helpful insurance broker sitting across the table from me that in my line of work I use my gifts as a teacher, preacher and leader to point others to the revelation of God's grace and faithfulness in Jesus Christ and to fully participate by the power of the Holy Spirit in the redemptive work of Christ... it wouldn't have got me very far.

He just wanted hard data, after all.

Of course, thanks to the unlimited storage-and-retrieval powers of modern technology, hard data isn't that hard to come by. A few clicks on the computer this evening and I found out that in my first full year as a pastor I:

preached... 138,318 words

received ... 1,774 emails

sent ... 1,228 emails

read ... 781 pages for denominational ordination

played ... 348 songs

posted ... 108 blog posts

wrote ... 43 pages of papers for denominational ordination

baked... 22 loaves of communion bread

tabled ... 10 pastor reports to the board

taught .... 7 introductory sessions on the Christian Faith

submitted... 1 annual report

And participated in... innumerable meetings. (I once heard a pastor say that he "didn't do meetings" and I thought: How? That's like a high steel worker saying he didn't do rivets.)

But it turns out that all this hard data is actually rather soft. Because none of these numbers really express what it is I "do" as a pastor; and there is no number you could write down to quantify what it means to be invited to walk alongside God's people as Christ does his new-creation work in our life together. No number could express the honour it is to invite others to discover the grace of God in Jesus Christ, or the privilege it is to help others see the love and goodness of Jesus in the Book he inspired, or the joy it is to encourage God's people to use the gifts God's given them to be part of God's redemptive mission in the world.

None of this, I suppose, entails special risk of dismemberment, but there is a special risk of death in there; a death to self and a daily resurrection into a life of measuring all things-- work, meaning, worth, success, life itself-- by the measuring stick of the cross, and by the scandalous death of the crucified King.

And how do you quantify that beautiful risk?

When I Grow Up

Maybe it's the two week holiday I took at the start of July, or maybe it's just the fact that this is the first time in eleven years I haven't had the whole summer vacation off, but I'm thinking a lot about work and meaning these days. As my recent vacation back "home" (i.e. out west) has reminded me, in many ways I'm still learning what it means to be a "Pastor" for a living.

It's perhaps inevitable, and not necessarily unbilical that we should draw so much self-identity from our work. In his book Ethics, Bonhoeffer points out that work (along with family, worship, and governance) is one of the four original mandates for the Adam in Paradise. The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes would probably agree; after all, he reminds us, to be happy in one's work, this too is a gift from God. And having work that humanizes us-- that puts us into honest and reciprocal relation with the people around us, that connects us to the earth that feeds us, and helps us understand ourselves in terms of a meaningful contribution to the common weal of society-- this, too, surely, is from the hand of God.

Don't believe me? Well ask a child what she wants to be when she grows up. Better than a Rorschach test, that. It is, in many ways, one of a child's first acts of self-definition, one of their first efforts to consider their own contribution to the social fabric and to understand who they are, or might be, in relation to the world outside.

For interest sake, here's how I answered it at various stages in my life (and for the record, you can click here if you want to see how life really panned out):

1. Writer (age ?5). I'm not sure how clearly defined this ambition was, but I still remember my first two works of fiction: Fuzzy the Bear (a gripping adventure story about an astronaut bear named Fuzzy and his rocket journey to the moon), and Mr. Who (a suspenseful thriller about a hooded murder named Mr. Who that I dictated to my Dad).

2. Scuba diving instructor (age ?9). My Dad did scuba diving when I was a kid, and this is back before it became a relatively straight forward recreation activity. Once in a while we'd get him to bring his scuba gear to school for show-and-tell, and maybe it was watching my class sit mesmerised as he explained things like the regulator and the weight belt that I first decided this would be an ideal career.

3. Professional wrestler (age ?11). Seriously (no: seriously). My wrestler's name was going to be something like "The Mongoose" and my finishing move involved a back flip off the top rope. Luckily as I aged, my body-mass grew considerably less than my ambition.

4. Archaeologist (age 13). The Indiana Jones movies had made "archeology" synonymous in my mind with exotic treasure hunts and adventurous quests for lost civilizations, and the Egyptology books in our school library added mysticism and esoterica to the mix, making "archaeologist" a tantalizing career choice for an imaginative 13-year-old. They told me, when I asked about it, that a real archaeologist uses a sieve and brush more than a bull-whip, but I just didn't believe them.

5. Comic book Artist (age 14). The margins of almost every notebook I had in Junior High were crammed with doodles of ninjas, knights and random superheros. I even went to a comic book fair, with a portfolio stuffed with drawings of my own superhero designs. I asked one of the famous artists there how I might go about becoming a comic book artist. His answer was blunt, a bit deflating, and, looking back, rather obvious: "First you have to learn how to draw."

6. Teacher (age 14). Wouldn't you know it: career day in grade 9, and neither comic book artist nor archaeologist was on the list of careers for us to chose from for our career-day research project, so I picked what seemed at the time the next best thing.

7. Novelist (age 22). I actually stuck with teacher, more-or-less, right through the rest of high school and into university. For a short stint between the end of my time at university before starting my first job as an English teacher, I toyed with the dream of becoming a novelist. I even tried my hand at it, and got all the way to the twenty-some-rejection-slips in the mail-box-stage before shelving it. Oh well, there's always teaching.

Rest

I took the day off Tuesday: played squash with a good friend, ate a peaceful plate of pad Thai in the mall food-court, took a nap, spent some time with my wife, spent the evening blogging, with the kids building Lego at the table. It was very restful, rejuvenating, re-energizing.

But not, I think, Sabbath.

When I started pastoring, my church board very wisely asked me to set aside a day for rest in lieu of Sunday. I heard a report recently that on average pastors are spending about 55 hours a week at work, and 42% work 60 or more hours a week (LifeWay Research). And in ministry roles in the past, I've stood pretty close to the edge of that deep abyss called burn-out and looked down. The vertigo alone was enough to teach me to appreciate the wisdom of taking a day to rest.

So a day like Tuesday was wise, necessary, healthy and really, a gracious gift from God. But I hesitate to talk about it, necessary as it was, in terms of Sabbath.

I was recently at a pastor’s conference where the speaker told us, in no uncertain or gentle terms, that not to take a day off for Sabbath was to be in "dereliction of duty." And it's that sentiment-- Sabbath is a duty we daren't ignore-- that makes me hesitate to talk about my time off Tuesday as a Sabbath day.

That, and the fact that when we interpret the Biblical idea of Sabbath in terms of simply taking a day off so that we can work harder, better, stronger on the six we have left, a number of ungracious things start to happen.

First, we actually, inadvertently put the focus on the 6 days of work rather than the 1 day of rest, since implicit in the idea of "re-charging" is the idea that the charge is necessary so that we can spend it on the work alone.

Then there's the problem of picking and choosing. What is it about the Sabbath day in particular that must be carried over from the Law, when things like making a woman drink bitter water to test her marital fidelity can be discretely swept under the Tabernacle's welcome mat? And what is it about the Sabbath day that must be carried over when the actual rules about the Sabbath can be discretely ignored (e.g. we don't execute Sabbath breakers like the Law says we must); and what is it about the Sabbath Day that can be carried over when the Law's directives about Sabbath years, and the Sabbath Sabbath (i.e. the Jubilee Year) can be left discretely on the shelf of OT esoteria? (I have yet to leave a field fallow or return any property to its former owner).

And then there's the problem of missing how the Sabbath itself is actually part of the bigger "Sabbath" through which God wants to bless the creation. The Law said: Once a week take a day to rest-- to remember and actually participate in the 7-day rhythm pulsing deep down in the heart of creation, a rhythm God himself counted out when he created the world in 6 days and sabbathed on the 7th-- and this day of rest feeds in to the bigger rhythm of the Sabbath year, where the land is given rest-- and these Sabbath years fit in to the bigger rhythm of the Sabbath Sabbath-- the Year of Jubilee--when the creation itself is given rest, and people find themselves truly in harmony with its deepest rhythms, and Shalom obtains. (Read the end of Leviticus and look at how naturally and directly it connects our keeping of the Sabbath to the deep, rich, verdant flourishing of creation.)

My point here is that the Sabbath day is just one part of a bigger, gracious picture of Shalom for the whole Creation, a reality that the Old Testament is trying to speak into existence through the Law, and that the New Testament is pretty insistent has drawn near, already and not yet, in the person and work of Jesus Christ.

So to talk about my day off in terms of keeping my Sabbath-duty before God seems to trivalize the grand, gracious drama of what Sabbath was supposed to be: the metronome whereby we find ourselves keeping time with the rhythms of creation as the mysterious symphony pulses towards its climax in Christ.

So it was wise to take some time off Tuesday.

But it wasn't my Sabbath.

Or, since the Scriptures say unapologetically that this symphony's climax is played in the key of Christ, better to say: Tuesday was no more a Sabbath than Monday, when I worked on next week's sermon, had a mentorship meeting, met with one of our ministry leaders, composed some ministry emails, met with the vice-chair of our church board and finally dragged myself to bed around 11:00 at night.

Because my faith in Christ is my Sabbath rest.

Paul puts this well. In Romans 14:5, while he's talking to a group of Jewish and Gentile Christians trying to figure out how to do life together, he says: "One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike." At least, that's what the NIV says he said. But this has always left me with the impression that our two options are: to keep one day as a day of rest, or keep them all "alike" and work straight through. There I go putting the emphasis on the 6 days of work, again; and there I go missing the grander drama again.

Because it's not exactly what Paul says. Exactly, he says something like: one man "judges" [as sacred?; lit. krino] one day, the other "judges" [as sacred?; lit. krino] them all. Romans 14:5 seems to be saying: either we still keep one day as Sabbath (out of genuine appreciation for the deep-down beauty of the Law and the high-up wisdom of the God who gave it), or we keep them all as Sabbath.

Since the Shalom which the Law's Sabbath rhythms were speaking about has now drawn near to us in Jesus, since the life-in-tune-with-the-Creator-and-in-step-with-his-plan-for-his-Creation that the Sabbath rules were asking us to live is now lived through faith in Jesus, since the people that the Law was trying to create-- a people who show the world how wise and gracious their god really is-- are now being created in and through and around Jesus, since all this, the meaning of Sabbath has now spilled out into all of life.

One or all. Those are the options Paul offers us.

And because Jesus is slowly showing me that my whole life has to be covered over and caught up by his good will for his world; and because he's slowly teaching me that I can be in rhythm with his plan for the creation only when I continually keep time with him, and because I really believe him when he said things like "The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath," and "man was not made for the Sabbath but the Sabbath for man," I'd gladly choose the "all" over the "one."