Preached by Winton Boyd on Sunday, August 29, 2010
Phoenix Affirmation for today: We celebrate the love of God by acting on the faith that we are born with a meaning and purpose; a vocation and ministry that serves to strengthen and extend God’s realm of love.
Romans 12
1-2 So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
We’ve been exploring the Phoenix Affirmations this summer, and we’re coming near the end. We explored important aspects of our life of faith – the inclusiveness of it, the role of doubt, the pursuit of justice, the commitment to the poor…
And now, we may be coming to one of the hardest affirmations for progressive Christians – an affirmation that we are born with a meaning and purpose, a vocation and a ministry…
Vocation – comes from the Latin, which means “to call.” Traditionally, it meant to be “called” to a life of ministry – usually professionally. Catholic priests and nuns have a “vocation” to serve God by serving the church. This use minimizes its full meaning, and as a result religious language like ‘vocation’ often creates a two tiered understanding of spirituality - people paid to do religious work have a “calling,” while people who are not paid have a job or a career.
In truth, this affirmation suggests, we all have a vocation, and we all have a meaning and purpose in life. It is a disservice to our God and our faith to suggest that that professional religious people have a full time spiritual life, but those who aren’t paid have a sometime spiritual life, or a part time spiritual life; or that the life of the spirit is somehow separate from our work or daily life.
Bemoaning this separation, former pastor, and author Brian McLaren decries what he calls the ‘religious extraction industry’ engaged in by many churches. By this, he means that we (pastors) make a living by extracting time, energy, and money for the benefit of our enterprise, our ministry, rather than mobilizing and deploying agents of ethical responsibility and goodwill in the community and for the common good.
Reflecting on recent disasters like a coal mine collapse and an oil rig explosion, he notes that “both disasters represent failures on multiple levels. Political leaders failed to provide adequate regulatory oversight. News directors and journalists failed to investigate corporate threats to public safety and health. Boards of directors and accountants failed to provide due diligence in risk management. Chief executives failed to create a culture of safety and responsibility in their organizations. Mid-level managers failed to stand up as whistle-blowers when they saw corners being cut and risks being taken. And engineers failed to build sufficient structural strength and fail-safe back-ups for emergencies.
He continues, “ many of the politicians, news directors, journalists, directors, accountants, executives, managers, and engineers in question attend church on a regular basis. Whether they go to a traditional Catholic mass, a high-intensity charismatic megachurch, a staid evangelical chapel, or a quaint Protestant high-steeple congregation, they apparently did not hear a challenge to integrate their faith with their professional lives.”
This same could be said about any of our careers or fields of work. The failure to integrate faith and our daily life has real consequences not only for us, but for many others.
But, many of us may find the notion that God has a specific purpose for us either quaint or outrageous; we simply don’t experience God as one who manipulates or micromanages life to that level of detail. However, this affirmation isn’t suggesting that God micromanages a purpose for our lives for our sake alone – focused on our satisfaction, our success, our glorification. Rather, a life purpose is to “strengthen and extend God’s realm of love.” The failure of this church, or any church, to help us connect the strengthening and extending of God’s realm of love with ANY life work is a failure of imagination, courage, and devotion.
As a pastor, I often resonate with a comment made to me by a friend who is a pastor in the Church of Scotland. When I asked him if his small, urban church in Glasgow had many weeknight programs for his members, he said “the people in my congregation are out doing God’s work every day, morning to night. They are living the gospel each day. They don’t need me to create a program for them to live the gospel.” I often feel the same way about this congregation. As I listen to your stories, see your hard work, witness your ethical and moral dilemmas, and note your compassion and imagination week in and week out, I’m profoundly aware that you are living out the gospel.
At the same time, I often sense that you don’t see it that way; that many of you struggle with the gap between your life of faith and your daily work (be it paid or unpaid). I sense that together we have an important, if challenging ministry to and with one another to bridge the gaps, to re-ignite the connection between faith and work, Sunday and Monday, daily life and a sense of vocation.
1-2 So here’s what I want you to do, the letter to the Romans says, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for God…
Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out… Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
Take your everyday life and place it before God as an offering…
“I’m entering this classroom God, may my teaching extend your realm. I’m meeting with a client, may my work and my creativity extend your realm. I’m studying for a test – not just to learn a topic but to build the capacity within myself to live your love. I just heard my child scamper down the hall, another day of activity, energy, fighting, whining, and love is starting; may this house and these relationships embody your love.”
Such a simple prayer – offering our day to God – helps acknowledges that we are not in control, but rather are blessed with a mind and heart and relationships that can impact others.
Embrace what God does for you…
In the course of a tense meeting with our boss, a strategy session with an overburdened co-worker, a conference call with loved ones facing lifestyle decisions, or as we read an email from a young adult child three states away – it is easy to focus on the challenges, the problems, the hassles, the injustices. The pastoral word from Romans suggests that we first embrace how we have been gifted and how grace abounds. That slightly altered perspective frees our mind and heart to see and hear how we are, or are not, extending the grace of God.
Fix your attention on God…you’ll be changed from the inside out.
“We are what we attend to,” one writer said. Romans invites us to fix our attention on God, and to expend a moment, even a second or two on a prayer for courage, a prayer for clarity – opening our hearts and minds for the wisdom of Spirit in a given day or situation.
God brings out the best in you…
If we are really going to extend God’s love and grace, it will only happen because we are at our best more often than not. That, Romans suggests, is a worthy prayer. “May your love bring out the best in me right now.”
In addition to this daily offering of ourselves, another way the church helps us imagine our vocation and purpose is through the experience of community; a community among those who seek to follow God, sometimes nobly, sometimes not. Author Ann Lamont knows of the power of community. She writes in her book, Plan B, about why she takes her teenage son to church:
… We live in bewildering, drastic times, and a little spiritual guidance never killed anyone. I think it’s a fair compromise that every other week he has to come to the place that has been the tap for me: I want him to see the people who loved me when I felt most unlovable, who have loved him since I first told them that I was pregnant, even though he might not want to be with them. I want him to see their faces. He gets the most valuable things I know through osmosis.
Also, he has no job, no car, no income. He needs to stay in my good graces.
… And there are worse things for kids than to have to spend time with people who love God. Teenagers who do not go to church are adored by God, but they don’t get to meet some of the people who love God back. Learning to love back is the hardest part of being alive. ..
For her, taking her child to church is about more than the acquisition of values or behavior norms, more than having good role models. It is about an authentic and engaged community that pushes her to an ever deeper level of reflection and prayer.
In a slightly more conventional manner, author of the book, Real Kids, Real Faith, author Karen Yust invites us to consider larger dreams for our children and their church. She wonders if we haven’t set our sights too low; asking:
Do our children, or do we, discover in this church a safe place to belong; but also a community that challenges us all to discern their purpose and vocation in life as children of God?
Do our children, or do we, learn how to resist those aspects of our American culture that have already disappointed us with their empty promises and stress inducing side effects?
Can we, alongside our children, work together toward understanding how we are to live our lives as spiritual beings?
How many of us equate a spirituality we don’t like with being ‘too’ spiritual? How many of us diminish ourselves, our sense of grace and our belief in mystery because we think others will think we are strange?
Rather than downplaying how our spirituality informs and shapes our daily lives, might we commit ourselves to bold, audacious, and creative lives of faith? Might we hear in the gospel an invitation to live a more pronounced wholeness so that in all we do, in all that we are, we seek to extend the realm and love of God. Is this not a vocation worthy of our energy and our lives?
