|
Expressing Our Christian Faith in Work and Leisure
By Rev. Jonathan Gale 13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’ 15If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another. The Works of the Flesh 16 Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other, to prevent you from doing what you want. 18But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not subject to the law. 19Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, 20idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, 21envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22 By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, 23gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. 24And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. 25If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. 26Let us not become conceited, competing against one another, envying one another.
Luke 10: 38 - 42 Jesus Visits Martha and Mary 38 Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home. 39She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying. 40But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ 41But the Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; 42there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’
Three significant things today, none of which I’ll mention in my sermon: *It’s the 10th anniversary of the terrible events of 9/11 *We’re well into the Rugby World Cup *God loves you
We’ve been talking in the last few weeks about stewardship – how we manage the abundance that God has given us – and today we’re going to look at work and leisure and how we express our faith in these.
These days we spend a great deal of time both at work and in leisure activities. They take up almost all our waking hours, in other words most of our lifetime. It’s good therefore to spend a little time thinking about them.
I’m going to use some simple definitions of work and leisure. Work is what you do to earn a living; and leisure is a relaxing activity. Leisure is not necessarily an absence of work, it is recreation – anything that re-creates – that recharges your batteries.
Going to the Scriptures, we see that work gets off to a splendid start: out of the 6 days of the creation comes a stunningly beautiful and rich universe, fully reflecting the beauty and diversity of its Creator. And after each of these days of labour God looks over his handiwork and sees that it is good. God indicates that he’s pleased with what he has made and we get the sense that the activity (the work involved) has the seal of approval as well. i.e. Work is good.
Hard upon its heels comes the 7th day, a day on which God rests from his work. God seems to think that both rest and work are such good ideas, he includes something about them in the 10 Commandments.
Exodus 20: 8 – 11 Remember the sabbath (rest) day, and keep it holy (different/for a special purpose). 9For six days you shall labour and do all your work. 10But the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work
So God found it necessary to provide some guidance around work. As a result the people of Israel are given rules to keep. Work 6 days, and rest 1 day. That way they make progress, keep healthy and please God.
That’s the Old Testament. What about the New? Jesus is, if anything, a redeemer. Redemption is about paying a price to restore something. Work too was redeemed by Jesus. It has been made whole, and by that I mean it is no longer to be seen as a kind of punishment for, or general result of the Fall, nor a kind of legalistic obligation because of the Law of Moses. Jesus saw, for example, that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. He had a sensible view of these things. Work, integrated into lives that are in relationship with Christ, has its rightful and meaningful place.
Now – there are few traps we need to watch out for, and the first is making work too important.
Deification of Work In a time when work is often difficult to come by it might seem strange to say this, but we need to be careful in our concern for production and profit, that we don’t make a religion out of work. Some do, and in his book The Christian Use of Time, Niels-Erik Andreasen, President of Andrews University, notes that for some “Work has become a religion; its faith is ambition, its rewards are wealth, its liturgy is the gentle tapping of machines, its high priest is management, and its god is progress.”1
If we stray into this way of thinking we’ll begin to see leisure as unproductive, unfulfilling, a waste of precious time. Patently it is not. Leisure too, approached in the right way is good and pleasing to God.
At the opposite pole is the danger of living for leisure.
Deification of Leisure If some are tempted to deify work, others are inclined to make leisure their chief aspiration. In the West, the growing availability of free time, increased personal income, coupled with the dehumanizing effects of some mechanical and boring jobs; are some of the factors that have changed the attitude of many toward work. For these persons work is not an end in itself but a means to an end, a means necessary to pay for the thrills of leisure time. Their dislike for work is expressed by such quips as: “Thank God it’s Friday.” “Hard work may not kill you, but why take the chance.”
The church has not had a great deal to say over time on work and leisure, aside from a period in history when the Puritans tried to enforce their particular view of leisure. The result is that millions of Christians go to work each day unchallenged by a Biblical sense of calling to their profession. This leaves them confused about how their faith relates to their job. Some even believe that religion and work do not mix. At best they see religion as an antidote or compensation to boring and unfulfilling labour.
The same is true of leisure. If we make leisure an obsession in order to flee from the drudgery of work, we have a problem. I have to say I was once guilty of this. There was a time when I lived for nothing more than getting out on my mountain bike – what Faith reckoned was my midlife crisis.
Leisure can become another thing to consume. Whatever energies are left after working, are spent in pursuing pleasure with the help of an endless array of goods and services. When anything is out of kilter, what we think we are consuming eventually begins to consume us: our time, our energies, our relationships, our spirituality, even our physicality and intellectual development. It’s a sobering thought, especially in this consumer-driven society in which we live and where we can all too hastily assume that consumption satisfies real needs.
The good news of the Christian faith is that work and leisure do not need to be either boring, or consuming, or ultimately unfulfilling experiences. On the contrary they can provide joy, satisfaction and a sense of fulfilment. The secret is to be found in recovering the Biblical view of work and leisure: because they find their right place, their fruitful contribution to our lives; not just because we have a balance of both work and leisure. Because they come under the lordship of our life-giving God.
So, if it’s not simply about a balance of various activities in our lives: work, leisure, family, religion etc, what is it?
At the heart of a skewed view of work and leisure is a SECULAR perspective. The defining criterion for the secular is the absence of God . Now understand this: God is everywhere, but he doesn’t force himself upon us, and we can elbow him aside by accommodating him as simply one element amongst many in our lives. God is not satisfied by that. If we think he is, then we’re not talking about God. We’re talking about a religious experience which we think will add quality to our lifestyle.
God doesn’t fit into a box. He is Lord of everything, and I mean absolutely everything. Every thought, every experience, every particle of matter – everything. If we see work without God’s intimate involvement in every aspect of it, it becomes a purely secular pursuit that exists for its own sake.
There is nothing wrong in pursuing a successful career. There is certainly nothing wrong in earning a living, but we need to make sure that Jesus is Lord of all these activities and intimately involved in every aspect of them.
Here are a few cautions that speak to the spirit of our age:
· The 1st is a belief that the Ultimate Purpose of Work and Leisure are to Achieve Self-fulfillment
We live today in a self-centred society where, as Daniel Yankelovich notes, “the struggle for self-fulfilment in today’s world is the leading edge of a genuine cultural revolution.”2 He goes on to describe Abby, a woman who typifies today’s quest for self-fulfilment: “In talking about herself she refers to her ‘emotional needs,’ her ‘sexual needs,’ her ‘material needs,’ her ‘need to be challenged intellectually,’ her ‘need to assert herself.’ When she discusses her ‘unfulfilled potential’ and her ‘need to keep growing,’ she seems to take these metaphors literally—almost as if she believes the process of filling her unmet needs is like filling a set of wine glasses at a dinner party: the more needs filled, the greater the self-fulfillment.”3
To achieve the elusive goal of self-fulfilment some will endure considerable hardship. Motivational speakers and the self-help industry offer inspiring formulas (a humanistic gospel - good news that does not involve God) to help people find fulfilment by getting what they want. Their formula is rather simple. If you believe that you have what it takes, then go for “it.” If you want “it” badly enough and are willing to work hard enough, you will get “it.” Success and fulfilment depend on the intensity of your desire and efforts to achieve that elusive “it.”
The fundamental fallacy of this secular view is the assumption that human beings possess adequate inner mental, physical and emotional resources to achieve self-fulfilment in every area. This is an unrealistic expectation which fails to recognize the severe limitations of human life and work as a means for self-fulfilment. It also places unrealistic expectations and pressures upon individuals who, for a whole variety of reasons, may not be in a position to fulfil their expectations.
Self-fulfilment sounds great when one is climbing up the executive ladder and the financial scale. But how does self-fulfilment based on career attainments relate to the loss, for example, of both employment and financial security? Think about it. When your sense of identity is tied to work performance, and the very context of that performance (a job or economic growth) is removed, where does that leave you?
By seeking to save themselves through work, some loose themselves instead.
One of the most telling things about the modern consumer society is the idea that we are at the centre of the universe and that it (including God) is there to meet our needs. That is why relatively few people are committed to the Body of Christ, why relatively few Christians grow into spiritual maturity. Church becomes just another adjunct to supplement their lifestyle, to be attended to as and when they feel like it, not the all-important community of God – the central psychological turangawaewae (the place in which we stand) which shapes our identity, our sense of belonging and the point at which we are regularly resourced by God. This solipsism (for want of a better word) this sense that all revolves around me is what causes us to treat God as an idol – a spiritual force we try and manipulate to serve our purposes. And we know what God thinks of idolatry.
· This is closely tied to the second erroneous belief of our time; that
Success in Work Means Success in Life
Many people measure their success in life in terms of their success at work. Soon it‘s what you have and not what you are that’s important, and when an economic recession hits the job market, one’s sense of self-worth can be severely challenged. God does not judge us by the number of toys we have. As God said to the prophet Samuel when looking for new King for Israel, “the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” (1 Samuel 16: 7)
· Finally – and this is a particularly pernicious one - Secular work is Less Worthy than Religious Work
This is an attitude that goes back to the struggles of the Early Church and later the Middle Ages. Unfortunately it didn’t stay there. This view is based on the mistaken assumption that God is more interested in the soul than in the body. He’s not. He’s interested in both. God created a physical universe and proclaimed it good. He sent his Son in the flesh to share our world and where he suffered in the flesh on a cross in the most important act since creation.
Time and time again in the biblical account the attitude that the heavenly is more important than the earthly, is seen to be based on a false dichotomy of body vs spirit. It is in fact a classical Greek idea and is the basis of one of the oldest heresies, Gnosticism, which over time has popped up in a variety of guises. A cornerstone of our faith is the physical resurrection, first Jesus’ and eventually ours. When Paul summons us to present our “bodies as a living sacrifice” to God (Rom 12:1), he means that we are to consecrate our total being to God. There is no superiority of the soul over the body.
When Paul in our reading from Galatians says, “17For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh;” he’s using Greek categories of thought to explain the need to crucify the old sinful nature. He’s by no means implying that our literal flesh as in our bodies are somehow evil. As a Pharisee schooled in Hebrew thought he would no more have thought that than fly to the moon, as my mother would say.
Consequently we are to understand that physical labour is not inferior to mental labour and neither are inferior to spiritual labour, for want of a better term. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were farmers, Moses was a herder, David a shepherd, Jesus a carpenter and Paul a tent-maker, and there are many other people of significance in God’s story who laboured physically. To think that God is less present in physical labour is to absent God from work and is simply another secular attitude to work.
THE BIBLICAL VIEW OF WORK So what can we say about God’s attitude to work? We could talk about how
· Work finds its origin and dignity in God himself, the First Worker,
especially in creation
We could point out how in the Proverbs
· God is portrayed as a Master Craftsman ; that God’s work did not stop
with the completion of the creation of this world, but has continued
throughout history.
· We could discuss how Christ dignified human work The divine Son of God came into this world in human flesh and worked as a carpenter until the age of thirty. “We must work the works of him who has sent me” Jesus says in John 9:4. And in John 5:17 “My father is working still and I am working”
· We could take on board what our response as Christians should be, the fact that when Christ restores us to a right relationship with himself, our attitude toward our work changes: our work becomes Christ’s work. This gives dignity and purpose to it and that we can trust God to accomplish something good through our work.
All these things are true and apply equally to our leisure.
But the crux of responsible stewardship of our time is this: When we see Christ as the centre of our lives and everything we do, then we have it right. There are no superior activities. There are activities that please God, and some that displease him, certainly, but the intrinsic nature of any activity is determined by whether we allow God to be present in it for us, or whether we ignore God in it. A good thing can become sterile and even cause harm if God is not at its centre. An inappropriate thing will be redeemed and transformed when God is at its centre.
This is the issue with Mary and Martha. This passage has so long been misunderstood as a lesson that spiritual matters are more important than practical matters, which is simply not true! The mistake Martha makes is to fuss around totally focussed upon an activity when God is in the next room, where Mary happens to be! When God in the flesh visits you, you don’t try and persuade others to leave his presence. Nor do you do so yourself. This is why Jesus says to Martha that Mary has chosen the better thing.
Recognising where God is at work and ensuring that we are right alongside is so important – just as important as not prejudicing some forms of activity as superior and others as inferior. It’s all about having God at the centre of both our leisure and our work. It’s about behaving consistently (i.e. with a consciousness that God is with us) wherever we are – not being one thing here (because we think ‘here’ is more godly) and being another there (because we think ‘there’ might be a lesser order of activity). We express our faith in our work and leisure by living and behaving in them as though they are part of the Kingdom of God, not something fenced off from the reign of God.
As stewards of the time God has given us, we need to balance work and leisure, but more importantly we need to make sure God is at the centre of both. So when you go out today, go with God. When you rest, rest with God. When you play, play with God. When you work, work with God. Whatever you do, don’t think there is anywhere where God has no business to be. In the Kingdom of God, he is the king!
The important thing is that we go out and be God’s people – people who walk hand in hand with God - everywhere we go.
God bless you.
ENDNOTES 1. Niels-Erik Andreasen, The Christian Use of Time (Nashville, 1978), p. 34. 2. Daniel Yankelovich, New Rules (Toronto, 1982), p. xix. 3. Ibid., pp. 50-51. 4. John R. W. Stott, “Reclaiming the Biblical Doctrine of Work,” Christianity Today (May 4, 1979), p. 36. |
