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Ritual
Sermons from Commons Church. Intellectually honest. Spiritually passionate. Jesus at the centre. Since 2014.
Is your good works in Paul's imagination are far more than just religious. They are any way that you contribute to the story of God in the world including your career. Welcome to the Commons cast. We're glad to have you here. We hope you find something meaningful in our teaching this week.
Speaker 1:Head to commons.church for more information. Welcome. My name is Jeremy. I'm really glad to be back here because if we haven't met yet, I am one of the pastors here at Commons, but I've had the opportunity to be over in our Inglewood Parish teaching for the last few weeks. And this is one of the really exciting things that we are trying here at Commons is to plant new parish communities in different neighborhoods across the city.
Speaker 1:Also, what's really exciting is that I can leave for three weeks and we can have Bobby and the rest of the team lead us in such extraordinary ways while I'm away from here. We really are blessed to have a community that is just full of an amazing team, both staff and volunteers. Because all of you guys do an amazing job of making church happen every Sunday which reminds me, if you haven't signed up to help in three weeks from now at our stampede breakfast on Sunday, then you can pull out your phone right now. You can go to commons.life and you can sign up to register and help that way. Now, it's also Father's Day today and I know we've already talked about this, but to all of the men who have invested in all of us in all kinds of different ways.
Speaker 1:Fathers and stepfathers and mentors and teachers and coaches and neighbors and maybe even yes pastors, we really do want to extend our deep thanks. If my dad is listening online this week, thanks dad for everything. You're awesome. However, at the same time we do also recognize that for some of us the experience of father may have been less than we deserved. And perhaps less than what it was God imagined when God used the image of father to help us make sense of the divine.
Speaker 1:And so even as we honor those fathers who have extended their simple and frail best to us, we continue to take comfort in the multiplicity of images through which God makes God's self known. God redeems and heals our experience as a family no matter where we start from. Now, I also cannot leave Father's Day today without also taking a moment to lament those families that have been torn apart by our misguided politics. And whether that is migrant families separated by policies south of our border, whether that is in those internally displaced by war, or whether that is simply those who suffer under the weight of injustice that prevents families from flourishing. We lament lament such pain.
Speaker 1:We confess our complicity in it, and we pray for grace and peace. May love redeem even our darkest moments. Now, we have just come through a series in the Proverbs. Today, however, we want to change gears a bit as we begin shifting toward the summer. And this is because this is a natural time in our year for us to revisit some conversations around rhythm and ritual.
Speaker 1:And so what I wanna do over the next three weeks together is to talk about some of our patterns. And I wanna talk specifically about work and rest and play and why each of these are really important for us in our lives. These are some of our most deeply ingrained rituals and yet I think sometimes because they are so common to us, they get the least introspection and thought. And so today, we're gonna talk about work. Next week, rest, and then finally play, which will take us right up to our stampede breakfast and then into our summer series together.
Speaker 1:So let's talk about work. Because I've joked about this before, but I love work. And my work in particular, but sometimes really just work in general. That's just kind of who I am. And some of that obviously depends on who you are and what you do.
Speaker 1:I have a friend who reviews bags on YouTube for a living. Like, tries on backpacks professionally. He puts his stuff in a backpack, and then he takes his stuff out of a backpack, and he films it, and people watch it. And somehow, he makes money from this. I don't really understand.
Speaker 1:Although to be fair, they are very entertaining in backpack reviews. But not all of us get to do that. Me however, I just really enjoy the huge range of things I get to do as a pastor. I get to read and write for a lot of my week. I get to drink coffee and have conversations.
Speaker 1:I get to do organizational strategy and planning and fundraising. I get to play with a big espresso machine whenever I come to work in the morning, which honestly goes a long way towards workplace satisfaction. And if you have employees, you can should consider getting one of these. However, I do also realize that work can be a problem for me Because I'm not good at taking vacation. I don't like to be away.
Speaker 1:And we've talked about this before, but I like to feel deeply needed all the time. And my job is the kind of job where I can at least feel needed all the time if I want to. And so I wanna talk today about the beauty of work, finding ways to lean into it, and to derive a holy satisfaction in it. But we also need to keep in mind that rest and play are equally as important parts of this equation that we call life. We will be talking about those over the next couple weeks.
Speaker 1:Because work is holy, but work on its own is hell. And so we need to work to find some kind of peace in that balance for ourselves. So let's pray, and then we'll dive into this new series together. God, as we begin our conversation today, and as we imagine our work and its place in our worship of you, as we begin to prepare ourselves for summer on the horizon, might we come to see our entire selves, our full being invested in the story of your grace. Might we come to understand that to be made in your image is to be modeled after the one who creates and cultivates and guides and works for good continually.
Speaker 1:So we find our place in that story. And as we begin to partner with you in the ongoing creation of the world around us, might we come to see our every step at work and rest and play as part of this larger kingdom. If we struggle with work today, might you help us to find peace in our rhythms, to uncover the meaning in our contributions, and to know that there is calling beneath the surface of every task. If we look for work today, might you help us to find challenges that satisfy us and opportunities that provide for our needs, but at the same time, might we understand that true work is more than a paycheck, and that if we can notice it, you are there bringing dignity to our offering. In all things God who creates, might we become more like you, and might our work contribute to the story of your world.
Speaker 1:In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen. Okay. Let's start with a story. You see, I used to run a lot, and I used to really enjoy it.
Speaker 1:And then I ran too much, and then I had some problems with my knees. And so I had to stop running seriously. Now, I still jog with the dog from time to time, but that's not really the same thing. However, there are always all kinds of new products that continue to pop up on the market and claim that they can fix me and make running better for me. And every once in a while, I fall for one of these things.
Speaker 1:And the last trend that I really bought into hard was barefoot running. Now, I'm not sure if you remember this, but, like, five or ten years ago, everyone was into barefoot running. And by barefoot running, what I mean is running with shoes that are designed to be like not wearing shoes. That's right. Someone decided that running barefoot was a good idea, and then a bunch of shoe companies said, well, is great, because we can make shoes that don't seem like shoes, and then we can sell more shoes to a lot of people who already own a lot of shoes.
Speaker 1:And this was a great idea. There was even one company that made shoes that had individual toes on them, just so they were as hard as possible to put on in the morning and you looked a little creepy throughout the day. But this whole idea of I wearing shoes so that you can pretend you're not wearing shoes, all kind of feels like how we talk about work at times. Let's work really hard for the majority of our lives so that maybe if we're lucky, one day we cannot work for some small part of our lives before we die. Now don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1:I wanna retire someday. And I am certainly doing my best to manage my resources in a healthy way. I have a long term imagination for my wage earning potential. But if what drives our imagination of work is the desperate hope that one day we won't have to, then I worry about how we're ever going to develop a healthy relationship with this idea of work that seems to be so deeply embedded in God's imagination of the world. Because you see, I think that work was actually intended to be good for us.
Speaker 1:So maybe if we go back to the beginning and we talk from Genesis, there we can start to build a foundation and a grounding from which we can move forward to talk about work today. You see our story starts this way. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And this is probably one of the most well known verses in, not just the Bible, but really all of literature. And there are, however, a couple things here already that are interesting.
Speaker 1:First, in the beginning is such a classic start. It's probably never going away in our English Bibles, except that most translators know it's actually not a great translation of the Hebrew. Now, first of all, the first word, Bereshit, that's the in the beginning part, appears to be in the construct state which subordinates it to what follows. And all that really means is that God's actions are the focus of the story, not the timing. So it's not in the beginning God did something.
Speaker 1:It's when God began. God created the heavens and the earth. And everything was formless and void and dark covered over the deep chaos, but divine breath was hovering over it all and God spoke light to it. Now, I happen to think that's more poetic, but why it's important is because this story isn't really about the beginning as much as it's about God. In other words, Genesis isn't trying to tell you something about history.
Speaker 1:It's trying to tell you something about the divine that God creates. And God imagines that God speaks and God works. And that's how the story plays out. Right? God says, let there be light, and there was light, and it's pure gift.
Speaker 1:In fact, there's nothing to earn that gift or deserve that gift. There's nothing even really to receive that gift. This is simply God creating for the sake of creativity. God says, let there be water, and sky, and land, and plants, and fish, and animals, and eventually human beings. And every step along the way, God is working, God is creating, God is making for no other reason than that God seems to want to.
Speaker 1:So God says, it's good. It's good. It's good. And then on the last day, God says, all of this is very good. And, just as soon as all of this very good work is done, God takes a break, and then God turns to humanity and God says, why don't you take over from here?
Speaker 1:I mean, literally in the story, humanity is created in God's divine image. But the very first thing that humanity is tasked with doing is more of what God had already been doing. So humans are told to make more humans. The plants are told to make more plants, and fish make more fish, and birds make more birds, and then humanity is told to get creative and name the world because everything would be better if we could tell stories about it. And so the very first story in our bible is about this creative God who creates creative things in God's infinitely creative image.
Speaker 1:But there's something really important that the ancient Hebrews took from this story, and it was the deep conviction that work was holy. Work isn't just what you do to survive. It wasn't just what you did to earn a living. Work wasn't just what you did to participate in some monetary structure that valued productivity above all else. Work was somehow first and foremost about our participation with God in the ongoing creation of the world.
Speaker 1:And this is one of the real problems sometimes when it comes to our relationship to work today. Because often, the only value that we see in our work is the value that we get paid to do it, and not the value in the doing itself. Now, hear me here. I'm not against getting paid. And so if there are board members here paying attention tonight, please don't stop paying me.
Speaker 1:I like that part. In fact, get paid to do something that I absolutely love to do, and I feel very blessed to do it. But somehow, what's happened is we've taken something that was always meant to be infused with meaning and partnership and purpose, and we replaced that with just value. Now again, the ancient Hebrews had a monetary system. They got paid.
Speaker 1:And the bible talks about the worker deserving her wages. And at one point, exasperated by the people in Thessalonica who are too spiritual to work, even says, you don't work, you don't eat. So the value of work was always an important part of it. I'm just not sure that money is ever going to be a satisfying exchange for something that was meant to be so deeply embedded in us. The philosopher, Slazov Zizek, tells a story about diet coke.
Speaker 1:See, back in the day, Coca Cola began as a drink that was literally made with cocaine. And it didn't taste great, but people liked it because it was full of cocaine And also a lot of sugar and caffeine, and so it was a pretty potent cocktail. And people liked it because it was a stimulant. Now fairly quickly, people realized that cocaine was not gonna be a good choice, and so they removed that. And Coke, as we know it, was now born.
Speaker 1:But over time, sugar fell out of favor and that was removed. And then caffeine became suspect and that was removed. And so now we sell sugar free, caffeine free, cocaine free Coke. And we all keep buying it even though it serves none of the stimulant functions that originally Coca Cola was meant to do. I don't drink pop at all but all kind of that sounds like how we talk about work at times.
Speaker 1:It was supposed to be our contribution to God's story and an outlet for our creativity, and a way to come to understand the divine through our labor even as we made a living for ourselves in the world around us. And slowly, over time, we emptied work of everything but the paycheck. And then we wonder why it's unsatisfying. Now, some of you are gonna say, okay, yeah, but I'm not a pastor. I work on spreadsheets, or I teach kids or I manage rental properties.
Speaker 1:I'm an electrician, but this I think is the problem. Because somehow we have dulled the imagination that it takes to see the true and deep meaning that's hidden in our work. John Van Sloten is an author that lives here in Calgary and he's connected to our community. He was actually here at one of the earlier services today. And he wrote a book called Every Job, A Parable.
Speaker 1:What Walmart Greeters, Nurses and Astronauts Tell Us About God. There's some copies on the lending bookshelf out there. If you wanna read it, can pick one up. But the premise of the book is this, that buried in every job is an image of the divine just waiting to be uncovered. That perhaps if Jesus tells parables about farmers and fishermen and tax collectors and landowners, then maybe the point of those parables is not just that farm workers image the divine, but that maybe we all do in some way through our work.
Speaker 1:And I really like that. That maybe part of our work isn't just our work. It's the work of discovering God in the midst of it. That just like any parable, that means going back and looking for the divine in spaces where we have missed it a thousand times before. Paul actually writes something very similar in his letter to the Ephesians.
Speaker 1:In chapter two, he says, for it is by grace that you've been saved through faith. This is not from yourself, it is the gift of God. Not by works so that no one can boast, for we are the handiwork of God, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us. Now, I realize here that if you have been around church for any length of time, you have probably been prepared and conditioned to hear this conversation of the relationship between faith and works as completely disconnected from your career. Like, works in this context means, like, serving the poor, donating money, or just generally being an all around nice person most of the time.
Speaker 1:And that's great, but I'm not actually convinced that's the whole story here. And there's a couple reasons for that. First, Paul talks about God's handiwork created to do good works. And this language of handiwork and creation and preparation and work, all of this seems very intentionally designed to pull us back to the beginning to where we started. In fact, all of Ephesians two is really about how we've broken things.
Speaker 1:And now God is at work fixing things. Maybe we could even say that God is at work returning things to the way they were meant to be. And so I really like the way that Eugene Peterson has translated this passage in The Message because there it says, God does both the making and the saving. God recreates each of us by Christ Jesus to join God in the work that God does. This good work that God has gotten ready for us from the very beginning.
Speaker 1:Work that we had better be about. And I feel like for me, Peterson helps to draw these connections between what's going on in Ephesians and Genesis more tightly together. That the good work that comes from our faith includes all of the guiding and the cultivating and the planting and the harvesting and the naming and the reproducing of Genesis. And if you've never thought of your baby making as part of your good works, well now you can, so you're welcome. Because your good works, in Paul's imagination, are far more than just religious.
Speaker 1:They are any way that you contribute to the story of God in the world, including your career. But there's another piece here as well, because Paul uses this term poiema. And this is what ends up getting translated handiwork in the NIV. And I think handiwork is an awful translation, but we'll talk about that in a second here. First, what's interesting is that Paul uses this term only one other time in his letters.
Speaker 1:And it's in Romans one where Paul is talking about God's attributes being seen in the world around us. He says, since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities, God's eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made. And there, made is this word, poiema. So God is clearly seen in poiema, and we are God's poiema. And when we do good work, we join God in this poiema.
Speaker 1:Okay. So what is poiema? Well, poiema is actually this really interesting word. At its root, what it means is that which has been created. But in Greek literature, it was reserved almost exclusively for artistic endeavors.
Speaker 1:So in Aesop's fables, for example, it is only ever used of divine creation. And in Plato and Aristotle, it is used exclusively for the works of an artist. And that actually makes a lot of sense when we see how Paul uses it in the New Testament. In Romans, he's specifically talking about creation. In Ephesians, he's drawing us back to our purpose in the story of creation.
Speaker 1:So handiwork is fine, and what is made is fine, but this is probably something more like the craftsmanship of God or maybe the artistry of the divine, perhaps the painstaking hand drawn details of God reflected in the world around us everywhere. But that's harder to say, so handiwork is okay. But poiema is what you give yourself to. Not just what you get paid to do, but what you give yourself over to. And I am in love with this idea that the reason God is so clearly seen in the world around us is because God has given God's self to the world around us.
Speaker 1:And, fact, poiema is where we get our English word poem from. That divine voice that communicates in and through what we make in the world. But what this all means is that your good work in Paul's imagination as an expression of the artistry of God and in response to the grace of God extends far beyond religious or sacred or Sunday bound activities into anything and everything that you pour yourself into, including your career. This is your spreadsheet as holy as prayer and your staff meeting as sacred as Sunday generosity. This is Paul saying that your good works will never save you no matter how much you love your job, but that everything you do, including your career, can become a reflection of the grace that has sought you out and brought you home.
Speaker 1:And that's nice. But what do we do with that when we go back to work in our normal job where we don't tell stories about Jesus for a living? Where things often do not feel sacred or special, certainly not poetic. They just feel like work. And this is where I wanna encourage you to begin to develop the spiritual discipline of expanding your imagination.
Speaker 1:To begin to consciously look for parables around you. To intentionally search for grace, and not just once, but to continually, purposefully seek out the divine in your ordinary rituals. Because you see, I've always had this sneaking suspicion that in the course of eternity, it will become painfully obvious that jobs like mine that seemed sacred at the time were somehow the least holy of all. Because if I honestly believe that all things are really to be repaired, and that one day the world will be as it should be, I know that I'll find myself at work, but teachers electricians and artists and engineers will certainly still be needed if God and God's kingdom are half as creative as I hope they are. And so what I wanna do quickly here with the time we have left is give you at least six categories for God's work in the world.
Speaker 1:And this might serve as a starting point for you as you try to engage the spiritual discipline of uncovering that touch point between your work and God's work in the world. Now, as I do this, please understand, this list is by no means exhaustive. That's not the point. God works in infinite ways. And part of the real beauty in life is that you will see the divine and images of God in places I haven't yet imagined.
Speaker 1:But my intent here is to give you a starting point where you can begin to search out new parables. So maybe tomorrow, you will return to your redemptive work. And this is counselors and mediators, writers, producers, maybe singers and songwriters, any poets who uncover and incorporate stories of return and homecoming in their work. Because by showing us stories of healing and repair, not only do you remind us that it's possible, you actually make healing possible for us. Oftentimes, we have to see it and hear it before we can ever feel it and experience it.
Speaker 1:Maybe yours is creative work. And this is not just those that we often associate with creativity, musicians and sculptors and actors and such. For me, this is more like potters and weavers and interior designers and metal workers, carpenters and framers and builders and architects and urban planners and anyone who brings new shapes, and forms, and concepts to life around us. Because ideas are beautiful, and that's what I traffic in. But when we actually make things, and our ideas come to occupy physical space in the world around us, what happens is we image the God who is tangible in more ways than we often realize.
Speaker 1:Maybe what you do is about sustaining the world. Paul says at one point that in Christ all things hold together. And around us, have bureaucrats and public utility workers, policymakers and firefighters, repairmen and bankers and brokers, civil servants, building inspectors, plumbers, welders, and janitors that maintain and sustain all kinds of things that most of us take for granted. And if it's not beneath God to go unnoticed, holding together the magnetic forces that bind my atoms together, then maybe the three one one operator and made sure I got a new compost bin when mine broke, before my waste piled up and my neighbor got upset and we got in a fight was far more divine than I imagined on the phone that day. Maybe what you do is about justice.
Speaker 1:And this is judges and lawyers, paralegals and regulators, sure, but also city managers and policy researchers and diplomats, administrators, law enforcement personnel who work for a more just imagination of the world around us. Maybe your work is driven by compassion, doctors, nurses, paramedics, psychologists, therapists, social workers, pharmacists, community advocates, welfare agents, anyone who takes on the stories of hurt and injury in the world in order to bring healing and guidance to us. And then maybe, finally, your work is defined by revelation. And when I say this in a context like this, oftentimes, we might immediately think of things like preachers and prophets, but really that's not what I'm on about. I'm I'm thinking about scientists and scholars and educators and journalists who help us to understand the world around us in new and better ways.
Speaker 1:Because the truth is, if God is, as Paul claims, clearly seen in creation, And we've got to admit that geologists and biologists and physicists sometimes have a closer view of the divine than the rest of us in a lot of ways. And maybe it is that none of these categories shed any light specifically for you on your work right now, and that's okay. Because your job isn't my parable to uncover, it's yours. A part of the spiritual discipline of making our work holy is to take this ritual of work. We get up and we go and we work and we come home and we cash this paycheck and we do it over and over and over again and we begin to search in and through and we sift through that rhythm in order to find the ways that God is hidden waiting there for us.
Speaker 1:And maybe it's just a sliver. But when you uncover that touch point between what you do and the story of God in the world, it will give you courage and strength to expand. Because my conviction is that when you look for the divine, you find it, particularly in something that you give so much of yourself to. And so my prayer for you today is that you might work hard to find God in your work, and that in this, your work might become a blessing to you. Let's pray.
Speaker 1:God, for all the ways that you are present to us in our work, in our rest, in our play, we pray that you would be present by your spirit, expanding our imagination so that we might notice you. If we struggle with work, then we pray that we would expand our imagination to search out the parables that are hidden there. The ways in which our contribution mirrors your action and grace, your love in this world. And if we find at the end of that exercise that we need to make a change because the work that we do doesn't feed us, it doesn't draw us closer to you, it doesn't connect us to your story in some small way, then perhaps you would give us the courage and clarity to move and make a change. But for most of us, God, there is a parable hidden to be uncovered.
Speaker 1:And so we ask your spirit to bring imagination, expanded curiosity, creativity to how we think about our place in the world. Because for every touchpoint with the divine, we will find ourselves expanded in grace and peace and love that we can extend in how we do our work in the world, how we interact with those near us, how we share space with coworkers, how we bring light and peace into every opportunity to work. In the strong name of the risen Christ, we pray. Amen.