“Who Do You Work For?”

Preached by John DeBevoise
At Palma Ceia Presbyterian Church
On September 6, 1998

           Now large crowds were traveling with him;  and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.  Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.  For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it?  Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’  Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand?  If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace.  So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

      Luke 14: 25-33

Who, here in this room, can claim to want to be a follower of Jesus Christ?  It helped me, over the summer when discussed this text at the Monday Bible Study at noon.  One of the folks who spoke to it was Father Sam, who has been at the St. John’s Greek Orthodox Church.  Father Sam had been coming with us to the Bible study.  He said that he thought that this text did not mean that we cannot have any possessions;  rather, that we cannot allow our possessions to possess us.  And there is truth in that.  It is helpful for me to remember that a part of what Jesus is saying here is that none of our possessions, including even our beloved families, can take such a role in our lives that they become the things that possess us.

But it looks to me like Luke even takes it a step further.  It seems that Luke calls for us to give away all of our possessions, and it’s a theme he carries on into the Book of Acts.  One of the fundamental signs of being the community of the church, as Luke saw it and experienced it, would be calling for people to take their possession and to be willing to pool them together so that they might achieve the common end.  This is Luke’s argument, not that we should be possessed by things, but rather we should possess things for God’s purposes.  In some way, to be a Christian means to live with our possessions so that we are always willing to give them away, to serve the Kingdom of God. 

This is hard.  And I can only confess that I am on the road to discipleship there, but I am not at the door.  At Labor Day, we remember that it is not just our wages that are to be given up.  We remember that we are supposed to give up our works to God, our whole vocational life is to be turned over to God.  Luke never settles for anything less than the whole.  It’s hard for me to get through the day without some possession.  I remember a member who said to me once, “We ought to just read the Bible and do what it says.”  Well, that’s true.   But here, it says that you can’t be a disciple unless you give away all your possessions.  What do you do with that?  This is not about salvation;  this is about following.  This is not about works of righteousness;  this is about trying to live the obedient life after having been saved by God’s grace.  This text is talking about seeking to be free of the loyalties that bind us here.  The qualification for being a disciple is to let go of the other things that you have trusted for security and purpose, to seek to possess obedience to Jesus Christ as the main ingredient in our life. 

Perhaps this includes letting go, even of the notion of family as the chief thing in our life.  I become concerned when I see so many movies in American culture today that lift up the notion of relationship as the chief source of our identity.  It’s clear to me that relationships are a wonderful thing, that God has given us human relationships to bless us.  But human relationships, this text says, ought not to become an idolatrous thing replacing our obedience to Christ.  Think about the movie, “As Good as It Gets.”    Or “While You Were Sleeping.”  Or “Sleepless in Seattle.”  All movies that I enjoyed thoroughly – three of my favorite movies.  The movies that in some way seem to lift up the notion that a good relationship is the thing that is going to save us.  Here in the fourteenth chapter, Luke says, “It will be nothing less than following Jesus.” 

So let us focus for a moment on the work portion, since it is Labor Day weekend.  We are supposed to give up our work to God, our whole vocational life is turned over to God.  How much do our jobs possess us, and how much are they an instrument to glorifying God, and instruments for serving God’s purposes in the world?  How much are our jobs things that we do in order to carry out God’s intentions for our lives?  To what extent are our jobs things that control us and possess us and become chief ends to themselves?

Lillian Freeman sent me a letter this week, and at the end of it she wrote me an affectionate note.  She said, “One question:  Why have I heard sermons my whole life about ‘keeping the Sabbath holy,’ and I have not yet heard one sermon about ‘six days shalt thy labor’?”  Well, she has a good point.  Certainly part of what it means to follow the Lord in the Christian life takes seriously the Christian doctrine of vocation.  I want to lift up some of my observations about what it means to be a Christian in the world wherein we are called to work. 

The first thing I would lift up is that it is a mistake in the Christian doctrine of vocation to suggest that work is not Christian work unless it is volunteer work in the church.  I don’t know that that’s a notion that anybody would embrace intentionally, but it sure looks to me like it’s a notion that we embrace explicitly.  We walk around with the assumption that only the things that we do in a volunteer capacity for charitable organizations in the church are really Christian works, and the other portions of our lives are somehow not Christian works.  On occasion I’ll have people say to me, “I’m looking forward to retirement, because I’m looking forward to the opportunity to do something for God.”  Actually, the witness made in secular employment may be far more significant and productive than service rendered apart from work.  The opportunity for witnessing through Christian faith with people we work with and in the things that we do may be the best opportunity we have to serve the Lord.  The Christian notion of vocation is that God calls us to a variety of kinds of activities, and that secular work done in a particular kind of way could be a very holy enterprise.

It’s a distortion from the Middle Ages to believe that there’s a sort of hierarchy of work.  It’s a distortion that I think the Reformation tried to throw off, this notion that there is a hierarchy of work with secular work down at the bottom of the ladder, and religious work – work of the church somehow in the middle, and the highest order is to be in some sort of monastic institution where one is devoted only to religious work.  One of the things that the Reformation did was to lead people to the understanding that God is at work in all of the tasks and labors the world presents before us, and that we could be at work serving God in those.  Carpentry, as well as preaching, can be a holy calling. 

Robert Calhoun was a great professor at Yale who may be the best known theologian out of Yale in this century.  He said, “Work is not something separate from religion any more than hands are separate from hearts and minds.  Devoted work is the very flesh and blood of religion without which worship cannot live and grow.” 

That being the case, it seems to me that there are some things to be said about the way in which Christians can work.  It is true that work, I believe, can be given to us by God for a blessing.  No doubt about it, there are times in which work can be a curse.  In the Christian doctrine of vocation, work that is dehumanizing, or oppressive, or destructive of human health, is not work that we are called to.  I do not think that we ought to give a holy sanction to just any work.  I think of the places in the world where there are people who spend their entire lives at work, chained to machines, working in oppressive factories, or in sweat shops.  When I think of the thousands, perhaps millions of children in the world who work at child labor to produce goods, some of which we consume even in our society, it is clear that it is wrong for us simply to baptize all work as being the second sanction of God.  Work that is dehumanizing, or oppressive, or destructive of the human self, is not work that God is calling us to. 

Nor ought we to be idolatrous about work.  If we find ourselves engaged in work in such a way where it is the thing that drives us, and where we are unable to detach ourselves from work, then we have to ask if perhaps work has become our god.  Karl Barth said (and this is one of my favorite quotes), “He who will not rest from the work, he who will not set aside work for a while to relax and enjoy the other fruits of creation, that person despises God and has made an idol out of his work.”  Work ought not to be idolatrous and work ought not to be dehumanizing.  In its best sense, work ought to be constructive.  Christian work ought to be something that in some way builds up the community and builds up the world and builds up God’s purposes in the world.  Don’t you think so?  Don’t you think that work, as we encounter it as Christians, ought to be something in our sense of calling that makes the world a better place?

I remember a good friend in my seminary named Marie Buffalo.  She came from North Carolina.  Her family were farmers there.  For all of her life, while growing up, her parents had been tobacco farmers.  I remember when she came home from Christmas break and shared the fact that her parents had decided to move from being tobacco farmers to raising hogs.  It was a momentous family decision.  It meant changing vastly the capital that they had invested into their farm, and of course, in North Carolina, it was a very socially difficult statement to make because there is such enormous investment in tobacco in the economy there.  Marie told me that her parents, who were members of a Presbyterian church in their community, had finally gotten to the place where they no longer felt that they could be raising tobacco because of what they thought it was doing to people who were on the end of that food chain.  I thought it was a sign of the way in which Christians are called to seriously consider what we do, and to seek to be about things that are constructive in society and constructive in the faith. 

In the best case scenario, work ought to give us the opportunity to be creative, and it ought to give us the opportunity to be productive, to do something not only good in the world, but something creative in the world.  Work ought to be a place that provides us with the opportunity to make some use of the gifts that God has given us and the talents that God has given us.  This is not to suggest that all jobs can provide us with this opportunity.  Certainly, some jobs are that kind of a calling and provide us with a chance to use our creative vocational gifts.  But it would be naïve of me, wouldn’t it, to believe that all jobs are going to give us that opportunity.  Perhaps it’s fair to say that some jobs are a means of earning income so that we can be about our vocation. 

My father-in-law was a tile mason for most of his working life.  He was good at it.  I thought he was sort of an artisan at the work that he did.  He was good at the way he made things with his hands.  In the latter years of his working life, the work became harder for him because it’s hard physical labor, laying tile all day.  What he began to do when he came home from work was to raise roses.  You know, he was good with his hands raising roses, too.  He had the most beautiful rose garden.  He had every kind of rose imaginable.  Over the course of the last five years of his working life, I thought his vocation moved.  Moved from being somebody who glorified God by seeking to make beautiful things with tile to being somebody who glorified God by raising roses.  He laid tile in order to make money so that he could come home to raise roses.  I thought that was a kind of Christian calling.

All work may not provide us the opportunity to use the gifts that has given us, but certainly Christians ought to be engaged in the task of seeking to discern what it is that God is calling us to.  Finding the means in the world that allows us to seek this calling.  I believe that a part of what it means to be a Christian community is to seek to do this not only for ourselves, but in some way to try to seek to do it for others.  To try to create a network of support and care where we are helping others to discern their call, to find the opportunities for them to glorify God with their gifts, with their talents, with their labor. 

I want to end with an illustration about a chair.  It would be a wonderful thing, wouldn’t it, if over this Labor Day weekend we picked up the paper on Monday and saw in the paper a story about a discovery in the Middle East.  If we saw a story that an archeologist there in one of their digs in the city, perhaps in a city near Nazareth, that uncovered a chair.  What if they told us in this article that this particular chair was able to be dated right about the year 30, perhaps even 20 A.D.?  And what if, as they talked about this chair, they were able to see that there was carved in the wood on the bottom of the chair, the name of a craftsman.  What if it said there, “Jesus Bar Joseph”?  Then there would exist the possibility that we had found a chair actually made by Jesus, the carpenter.  We would be very excited by that, wouldn’t we, to have in our midst some part of the workmanship of Jesus Christ.  Imagine how we would treasure it, and how people would line up to see it, to see the curves of it, the carving of it.  And I bet we would expect that it would be a beautiful thing.

In the fullest sense, we have the workmanship of Jesus Christ here with us today.  You are the work of Jesus Christ.  Each one of you.  In a more real sense than a chair.  It’s the object of Jesus’ endeavors.  Jesus is working on us.  Shaping us.  Loving us.  Challenging us.  Calling us.  Convicting us.  Trying to make us into the people that God intends for us to be.  It is a better way to glorify God, to seek to follow Christ in that call and to turn our lives towards serving Christ with our vocation in the fullest sense, than it would be to even possess a chair that Jesus had made.  Let us be about that work even as God is about the work of shaping us.