The Good In Which We Are Made

 

CALL TO WORSHIP | Psalm 27:4-6, 13-14

I'm asking GOD for one thing, only one thing:

To live with him in his house my whole life long.

I'll contemplate his beauty; I'll study at his feet.

That's the only quiet, secure place in a noisy world,

The perfect getaway, far from the buzz of traffic.

God holds me head and shoulders above all who try to pull me down.

I'm headed for his place to offer anthems that will raise the roof!

Already I'm singing God-songs; I'm making music to GOD…

I am sure now that I shall look upon GOD's goodness in the land of the living!

Stay with GOD! Take heart. Don’t quit. I will say it again: Stay with GOD.

 

Song #1 – I Believe by Jonathon and Melissa Hesler

Song #2 – My Heart Alone by

Dismiss Kids

 

INTRO

What if we believed that all the adversaries of our souls (within and without) have been destroyed by the finished work of Jesus on the cross? What if we believed that we are not alone, not meant just to figure life out, not left to wander through our days, but shown, taught, and guided into God’s profound design and destiny with Jesus, alive again and forever? What would such a life look like?  

In many ways, “such a life” is what we are encouraged to envision after Easter. A life that is as much a return to something (a resurrection of something) as it is experienced as new in our now.

We said our after-Easter life starts where all life began and is renewed, in a Sabbath, resting with God in His finished work. From within a place of peace, “the very good” of what God has already done, and from within time in which striving has ceased, comes our call to work, to join in what God does as participation in life good with God. Our good work comes from resting in God’s finished work. It did so in Genesis and does so in Jesus.

Over the years, our faith family has used this time after Easter to help one another reenter the whole and holy rhythm of the ordinary: Sabbathing into work and working into Sabbath. A rhythm of life resurrected even as we live resurrected lives.

At the heart of the matter, we believe we are made and remade to participate in the fullness of our days on earth by resting with God in His finished work and by joining with God in His continued work to bring goodness, wholeness, and holiness amid the struggles of being and becoming human. Sabbath and Work, rest and responsibility in relationship, are what make life.

“How we spend our days,” contends Annie Dillard, “is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” To me, the weight of this simple observation about reality is the energy propelling Paul’s exhortation in Ephesians 2. Let’s read it together:

 

PRE-SERMON READING |Ephesians 2:1-10

It wasn’t so long ago that you were mired in that old stagnant life of sin.

You let the world, which doesn’t know the first thing about living, tell you how to live. You filled your lungs with polluted unbelief, and then exhaled disobedience.

We all did it, all of us doing what we felt like doing, when we felt like doing it, all of us in the same boat. It’s a wonder God didn’t lose his temper and do away with the whole lot of us.

Instead, immense in mercy and with an incredible love, God embraced us. He took our sin-dead lives and made us alive in Christ. He did all this on his own, with no help from us! Then he picked us up and set us down in highest heaven in company with Jesus, our Messiah.

Now God has us where he wants us, with all the time in this world and the next to shower grace and kindness upon us in Christ Jesus. Saving is all his idea, and all his work. All we do is trust him enough to let him do it. It’s God’s gift from start to finish!

We don’t play the major role. If we did, we’d probably go around bragging that we’d done the whole thing!

No, we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing.

SERMON | Getting The Good Out of Work         

I know I have told this story before, so forgive the redundancy. I know, too, that you know our family is “Disney people.” We really do enjoy our time together in that “happiest place on earth.” We also know we are being economically exploited by the men and machines behind the fantastical façade. So at least we enjoy it, honestly!

While my skeptical and somewhat thoughtful self can overcome much of the two-sidedness of what we experience in this earthly kingdom’s magic and just have fun with the family, there is one particular “experience” that rakes my soul: The Carousel of Progress.

The Carousel of Progress was originally created for the New York World’s Fair in 1964 and later moved to Disney World in Orlando as a permanent exhibit. It’s a nearly ten-minute animatronic journey through humanity’s past, its present (at that moment), and our future. As the attraction’s title conveys, the unfolding scenes tell a story of progress, of humanity overcoming its environment, its limitations, and even itself, as we become happier and more fulfilled to the same measure that we become more efficient at harnessing the power of the mind and body, specifically in regard to our mastery of technologies. 

While the story of a happier life through technological advancement was neither created by Walt Disney nor is he, nor those who followed, the sole proprietors of such a view of living, the striking, unsettling, and, as Deedra will tell you, the thing that makes me hate the, ironically named, Carousel (or merry-go-round) of Progress is the presumption that life is better with technology because it gets us out of work. 

That’s right. Every advancement is a step toward doing less as a human, becoming more and more a consumer at leisure, not to think deeply or give of oneself more freely, but rather to be entertained. The story that unfolds as our seats rotate around the circle of life’s past, present, and future is that work is not our good, that work is something we should get out of, and that work is a part of life that needs to be advanced beyond to experience the good life. Though again, we end up where we started, which is nowhere! 

This vision of the good life, achieved by working our way out of work, has permeated the cellular substrate of our society and culture. Not a single one of us is immune to its cancerous incursion. Our vision of the good and the means of achieving it have been twisted in their very nature. 

And yet, contrary to our technological aspirations to lift us beyond the dirt of daily effort, and in contrast to our cultural emphasis and societal pressures to liberate us from our labor, we have come to see in our Scripture that work is an integral aspect of being truly human. Work is not a curse to be broken, an illness to be cured, an obstacle to overcome, or even an unfortunate necessity to just get through. 

Instead, the testimony of our faith is that our daily, ordinary work, whatever it is, whether it is our livelihood, duty, or pleasure, or some combination, is “the joyful privilege of contributing to the work” that God started, the good and very good work God continues to do, and which He has crafted us to participate in with Him.

For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. (Ephesians 2:10, ESV)

He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing. (Ephesians 2:10, MSG)

We are crafted to participate in something good. We are fashioned to contribute and expected by God, to do so. It is our nature, made in our Maker’s image and restored by the same Beginner (ing), to work. In other words, our daily, ordinary work with God (in Christ) is the good in which we are made.

Work is not a means to getting somewhere or getting to something good; it is our participation in what is already good: Life in Christ. To not work, or to not see the roles and responsibilities in our daily living as good work with God, is to live a diminished life, not an elevated or privileged one. The chief end of humanity is not, not-to-work, but to flourish where we are planted:

“planted in the house of the LORD; they flourish in the courts of our God…still bear fruit in old age…ever full of sap and green” (Psalm 92:13- 14)  

Bearing the fruit of life with God in every age and season, not merely in some future existence, but as the psalmist sings, in the land of the living.

“I am sure now that I shall look upon GOD's goodness in the land of the living!” (Psalm 27:13)

And so, Dorothy Sayers, the English novelist, playwright, and social commentator whose company included the likes of G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, and T.S. Eliot, can contend, challenging our accultured notion of work and twisted versions of good, that:  

“…work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he [or she] finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he [or she] offers [them]self to God.”[1]

Sayers goes on to point out the issue we face in such “work from the soul” (Col. 3:23).

“We have all got it fixed in our heads that the proper end of work is to be paid for—to produce a return in profits or payments to the worker which fully or more than compensates for the effort [they] put into it. But if our proposition is true, this does not follow at all.”[2]

How could it? If the end of work is some monetary or object of value, some-thing to be used or hoarded, then work could only be what you get paid for (which we have already argued is not the case), and such work would only be good if the compensation did indeed provide what was missing in the work. But, as Sayers continues, if,

“…work is the measure of [the worker’s] life, and [his/her] satisfaction is found in the fulfillment of [his/her] own nature, and in contemplation of the perfection of [his/her] work,” then, “His [or her] satisfaction comes, in the god-like manner, from looking upon what [they have] made and finding it very good. He [or she] is no longer bargaining with his [or her] work, but serving it.”[3]

Let that sink in for a moment. Sayers is not saying that we do not need resources to survive. Nor is she arguing that such resources may not be a product of our labor. What she is saying is that if we see work as a means to living, rather than as living itself, something we do for something else rather than something we do because of who we are, we will be in constant struggle, a bartering, a wrestle for life rather than a servant of life. 

Hear one last thought from Sayers on the matter,

“It is when work has to be looked on as a means to gain that it becomes hateful; for then, instead of a friend, it becomes an enemy from whom tolls and contributions have to be extracted. What most of us demand from [work] is that we should always get out of it a little more than the value of the labor we give to it. By this process, we persuade ourselves that [work] is always in our debt—a conviction that not only piles up actual financial burdens, but leaves us with a grudge against [work].”[4]

The way we think about work, relate to work, as a means to live rather than as living itself, begrudges us to life, good. Work as income, as primarily a relation to mammon (Matt. 6:24) rather than as the good of our nature, keeps us trying to get out of work, rather than getting out of work, life in Christ.

The good thing about this is that such a view of reality means that the amplest and most fertile soil from which to be human, truly, and good is the very place, the very life—roles, responsibilities, relationships, which God has planted you to “work and keep” to cultivate and care for flourishing in the good with Him. That is why, as Sayers so boldly states, “The only Christian work is good work well done.”[5] But, do we believe it?

REFLECTION

[ON-STAGE SCREEN] “…work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be…the thing in which they find spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which they offer themself to God.”

Consider & Attend

  • Do you believe this? What keeps you from believing this?

  • What would be different tomorrow, if you entered your work not as something done to make a living, but something you are living to do?

  • Where have you seen the goodness of someone “serving” work rather than “bargaining” with it?

CORPORATE CONFESSION & COMMUNION[6]

By your ever-restful grace,

allow us to enter your Sabbath rest

as your Sabbath rest enters into us.

For...

Jesus has done good work for us.

The Holy Spirit is doing a good work in us.

And God our Father equips and calls each of us to go out and do good works, works he has prepared in advance for us to do, and that he alone,

by his power and his Spirit,

will bring to completion through us.

For all the promises of God find their Yes in Jesus.

That is why it is through Jesus we utter our Amen

to God for his glory.

Hallelujah! Amen.

Song #3 – Simple Kingdom by Brian / Katie Torwalt

Song #4 – Love You More by Harvest

BENEDICTION | 1 Thesselonians 4:11-12

As we rest in the day made for us, we prepare to enter into the work for which we are made [LIGHT THE CANDLE], praising and praying:  

Aspire to live quietly, resting from the labor that is not yours, attending to the work made for you. You’ve heard all this from us before, but a reminder never hurts. We want you living in a way that will command the respect of outsiders, able to live dependent on no one.

[1] Dorothy Sayers, quoted in, Schwehn and Bass, Leading Lives That Matter: what we should do and who we should be, 200.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., 200-201.

[4] Ibid. 201.

[5] Ibid., 203.

[6] Adapted from Common Prayer: a liturgy for ordinary radicals, 554, & Every Moment Holy, Vol 3, xv.

Submitting to Freedom

 

INTRO

Over the years, our faith family has used this time after Easter to help one another reenter the whole and holy rhythm of Sabbathing into work and working into Sabbath, which life resurrected makes both possible and compelling. At the heart of the matter, we believe we are made, remade, to participate in the fullness of our days on earth by resting with God in His finished work and by joining with God in His continued work. Sabbath and Work, rest and responsibility in relationship, are what make life. That indeed is how our story begins and is being reimaged in Jesus.
The story of our beginning is one in which God speaks all that is into existence, proclaiming its essential goodness. For six days, His Word brought forth very good life, and then our origin story says this, 

And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation.  (Genesis 2:2-3)

This special seventh day became known as Shabbat, meaning “to stop, to cease, to rest,” and was later translated as Sabbath.

Sabbath has been “called the historical anchor of a fundamental rhythm of time for the Christian life.” Sabbath was spoken, practiced, and set apart by the one who established our circadian rhythms. It was a day gifted to us, though it soon became one forgotten or mastered, clumped into and manipulated along with all the other perpetual dawns and dusks. And so, when God intervened to pull his chosen people, those blessed to be a blessing (Gen. 12:3), out of the oppression of squandered and abused time, he reset creation’s clock for them and for you and me, saying,

Remember the sabbath day, and keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female servant, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns. For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. (Exodus 20:8-11)

And so, God’s people throughout the generations and in a variety of expressions have sought to keep the Sabbath holy, not so that God might do something, but because God has and is continuing to do something.

It is that finished work, God’s work complete in the eternal now, as Saint Augustine describes it, and which we, on days like today, experience rest in memories of God’s work finished in the past, in expectation of His work’s fullness in the future, by our attentiveness to His sufficient work in the present. 

Will you pray with me, as we enter the Sabbath rest, praying that indeed, the Sabbath rest may enter us.


Song #1 - Come and Rest by Mission House

Song #2 - Son of God by Nathan Partain


SERMONNETTE | Submitting To Freedom

No working on the Sabbath; keep it holy just as God, your God, commanded you. Work six days, doing everything you have to do, but the seventh day is a Sabbath, a Rest Day—no work: not you, your son, your daughter, your servant, your maid, your ox, your donkey (or any of your animals), and not even the foreigner visiting your town. That way your servants and maids will get the same rest as you. Don’t ever forget that you were slaves in Egypt and God, your God, got you out of there in a powerful show of strength. That’s why God, your God, commands you to observe the day of Sabbath rest. (Deuteronomy 5:12-15, MSG)

As simple as the rhythm of Sabbath into work and work into Sabbath may be, we have had to acknowledge our struggles in keeping step. Restless hearts are, after all, notoriously elusive, evading capture and quieting. And so, Sabbath remains foreign or feigned to many of us. Rest, after all, is subjective, dependent upon the person’s preference. Besides, we are not bound by the law but by grace, so why keep an old statute? Well, like work, such perceptions of Sabbath are just wrong. They fail to see in the story that our resting with God in His finished work is the good, not merely a means to it. And so, Sabbathing is actually a defiant act of freedom. 

“Don’t ever forget that you were slaves in Egypt and God, your God, got you out of there in a powerful show of strength. That’s why God, your God, commands you to observe the day of Sabbath rest.” That’s how The Message translates Deuteronomy 5:15.

Don’t forget that life, having forgotten God with you and God for you, was a life of confinement, restricted by the demands of the authorities, oppressed by the economy of producing for others’ prosperity, and trapped by the demands of the culture. And don’t forget that God got you out of that life! He got you out in a powerful show of strength, his strength over the most powerful force known to humanity, a force that we have yet, in all of our histories, been able to conquer: death. But God conquered death and got you out of death’s sting, the confinement, oppression, and trappings of enslavement to sin. 

Remember, that is why you keep the Sabbath, because you are free by God’s power and by his compassion. Remember, that is why he commands you to rest…not labor…for your God is not like the ones who enslaved you in Egypt…who continue to enslave us today. 

The text we just read was addressed to the generation of Israelites who had wandered through the wilderness with their parents and grandparents for some 40 years. The command to Sabbath rest was both a memory and an expectation that was becoming their present reality.

The generation before them had walked out of Egypt, leaving behind slavery and oppression under the systems and rulers of the age. That generation had never known a day without work, with no weekends off and no liberty from the demands of the culture. And yet, as they marched across the dry bottoms of a parted sea, they found themselves wedded to God, who commanded not their labor but their rest. And here, their daughters and sons stood on the footsteps of the land of promise, the land of abundance, a place of rest.

Our God speaks creation into existence, gives it purpose and peace, and rescues his creation from self-destruction. That’s how the story of our faith begins. Sabbath, then, is a submission to the power and compassion of God, to his unceasing good purposes and his unabating restorative presence. Sabbath was not a routine or ritual done to appease a demanding deity, but rather a rhythm established to ensure our freedom, as the very expression of our freedom. This is why Jesus said, “The Sabbath was made for humanity, not humanity for the Sabbath.”  (Mark 2:27). Or to put it another way,

“The Sabbath was established in service to humanity, to ensure humanity's flourishing. The Sabbath was not established to entrap humanity, but to keep it from slavery.”

To Sabbath is to be free, is indeed the free choice of grace. For Sabbath is, “the time set aside to do nothing so that we can receive everything.”[1]


Song #3 - Slow Me Down by Porters Gate


CORPORATE CONFESSION & COMMUNION

Keeping a rhythm of Sabbath is about submitting to freedom under the authority and kindness of our Creator. It’s a reminder that we are created with a purpose, to live and work in ways that bring goodness into the world. Not on our own, but with others in the grace and power of our heavenly Father, through our resurrected life in Christ Jesus. 

This is the confession we make when we receive the broken body and shed blood of Jesus on our behalf this morning around the table. In Jesus, his life, death, resurrection, and ascension, we have all that we need to live a full and abundant life now and forever. Will you freely choose to receive what he offers?

Because of Jesus, we choose:

To set aside our anxious attempts to make ourselves useful

            To set aside our tense restlessness

            To set aside our media-saturated boredom

Because of Jesus, we choose:

            To receive silence and let it deepen into gratitude,

            To receive quiet into which forgotten faces and voices unobtrusively make themselves present

To receive days of the just-completed week

absorbing the wonder and miracle still reverberating from each

            To receive our LORD’s amazing grace.[2]

In Jesus name…and through His life in us, we rest.


BRUNCH

We take a month or so every year to consider, together, the rhythm of creation according to God's design: ⁠Sabbath & Work⁠ This sermonette was a recorded during one of our regular Sabbath meals, where we gather together, around a table, to rest in Jesus,

[1] Eugene Peterson, Tell It Slant, 82.

[2] Adapted from Peterson, 82.

Mis-Loving Work

 

CALL TO WORSHIP | Psalm 90:14-17

Surprise us with love at daybreak; then we’ll skip and dance all the day long. Make up for the bad times with some good times; we’ve seen enough evil to last a lifetime. Let your servants see what you’re best at— the ways you rule and bless your children. And let the loveliness of our Lord, our God, rest on us, confirming the work that we do. Oh, yes. Affirm the work that we do!



Song #1 – A Day for Singing by Mission House

Song #2 – Let Your Heart Sing by Young Oceans

Dismiss Kids



INTRO

Where do we go after Easter? After the long Lenten pilgrimage has led us through the depths of our own brokenness and Christ's on our behalf. After we have remembered the weight Jesus carried for us and witnessed the wonder of His shedding it for us, too. Where do we go when the new day has dawned, and the celebration is over? Well, like true pilgrims, we return home, to the ordinary rhythms of living, to the relationships of work and prayer, play and rest. 

Over the years, our faith family has used this time after Easter to help one another reenter the whole and holy rhythm of the ordinary, Sabbathing into work and working into Sabbath, a rhythm that life resurrected makes both possible and compelling.

At the heart of the matter, we believe we are made, and remade, to participate in the fullness of our days on earth by resting with God in His finished work and by joining with God in His continued work to bring goodness, wholeness, and holiness in the struggles of being and becoming human. Sabbath and Work, rest and responsibility in relationship, are what make life. For, as Annie Dillard is fond of saying, “How we spend our days, is how we spend our lives.”

And so, after Easter, we go back to our beginnings to see what is being renewed in Christ, for as it was in the beginning, it is again in Jesus:

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and made it holy because on it God rested from all his work that he had done in creation. (Genesis 2:1-3)

The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. (Genesis 2:15)

As we have come to see and say over the years:

God’s work leads us into restful (secure, nonanxious, peaceful) worship and, from there, into our worshipful (confident, nonanxious, peacemaking) work. It did so in Genesis and does so in Jesus. Our good work comes from resting in God’s finished work.

Of course, we know that in the beginning there was a breaking of the beat, a disharmony among the was good and very good.

And to Adam he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”(Genesis 3:17-19)

Yet, as our faith story tells it, the first Easter morning was a mending. What was broken is being restored, resurrected, so, as the former bishop NT Wright contends,

“Let us then remind ourselves of the starting point. The created order, which God has begun to redeem in the resurrection of Jesus, is a world in which heaven and earth are designed not to be separated but to come together. In that coming together, ‘the very good’ that God spoke over creation at the beginning will be enhanced, not abolished…taken up into God’s larger purposes, no doubt, but certainly not abandoned.”[1]

So, if the whole and holy rhythm of Sabbathing into work and working into Sabbath is our good, and if work indeed is our good, then why do we want out of work? Where does this desire come from, and what does it miss?

Those are the questions we began to answer last week and, Lord willing, will finish today. So again, let us “remind ourselves of the starting point,” of our story’s beginning, and see whether it can help us see what we can truly get out of work and why we want to. 

Similar to last week, we’ll take a brisk walk through the opening chapter of Genesis and see if we can connect the dots of what is happening in relation to our place in the making, breaking, and mending.



PRE-SERMON READING

Genesis 4:22-23; 5:28-29; 6:5-18; 8:20-22; 9:1-17; 20-25

[We said last week, we are caught between two Lamechs. The first…] Lamech said to his wives: “Adah and Zillah, hear my voice; you wives of Lamech, listen to what I say: I have killed a man for wounding me, a young man for striking me. If Cain’s revenge is sevenfold, then Lamech’s is seventy-sevenfold.”[Calling what is evil good, twisting grace because of fear and power. The second…]

When Lamech had lived 182 years, he fathered a son and called his name Noah, saying, “Out of the ground that the Lord has cursed, this one shall bring us relief from our work and from the painful toil of our hands.” [Calling what is good evil, twisting grace because of pain and longing. Neither line could escape itself, nor the ultimate end of soul (will, mind, and heart) which twists grace.]

“The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the Lord regretted that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry that I have made them.” But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord...  And God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth is filled with violence through them. Behold, I will destroy them with the earth... But I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall come into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons’ wives with you.” [This total twisting leads to total destruction, but again to just mercy, to grace in continued partnership, covenant. A grace, when acknowledged as working well, restores.]

“Then Noah built an altar to the Lord and took some of every clean animal and some of every clean bird and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And when the Lord smelled the pleasing [resting] aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”[The rhythm of life restored, the curse of the ground lifted, but not because man was justified or God naïve, but because He was gracious, and able to reestablish our rhythms, though with a bit of a different beat. Life good would now be bound by life given, experienced in the midst of pain and promise. Keep reading in Genesis 9.]

“And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it.’’Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him, ‘Behold, I establish my covenant with you and your offspring after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the livestock, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark; it is for every beast of the earth. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of the flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.’ And God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh. And the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh. When the bow is in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is on the earth.’ God said to Noah, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I have established between me and all flesh that is on the earth.’” [While the ground would no longer be cursed, and the partnership and rhythm renewed, something fundamentally changed with humanity's relationship to the living – the animals now feared us and became food – and we became ones under a law…why is that? Maybe it is because what had not changed, the intentions of the thoughts of humanity's heart. Let’s keep reading.]

“Noah began to be a man of the soil, and he planted a vineyard. He drank of the wine and became drunk and lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brothers outside. Then Shem and Japheth took a garment, laid it on both their shoulders, and walked backward and covered the nakedness of their father. Their faces were turned backward, and they did not see their father’s nakedness. When Noah awoke from his wine and knew what his youngest son had done to him, he said, ‘Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be to his brothers.’” [The next curse is not a curse from God but from man; man to man because of the shamefulness of two men… Noah and his son. Ironically, it would be the supposed “servants,” more appropriately translated “slaves of slaves,” from which the opposition of God’s people (Shem’s line) would arise. From a curse, not just mercy, curses came.]



SERMON | Mis-Loving Work        

While that is significant for how we view the other, it is not the point. The point of looking at the story the way we are is to see the reality of our world, where we rest and work. Irenaeus, the second-century church father who helped establish the connection between what we now call the Old Testament and what we now know as the New Testament, said it best, 

“…truth brings about faith, for faith is established upon things truly real, that we may believe what really is, as it is, and believing what really is, as it is, we may always keep our conviction firm.”[2] (Irenaeus)

What we see in the story is a world of continued partnership in mediated mercy, because of the twistedness not of work itself but of those who do the work. Work is not cursed, it seems, but rather we are the cursers. The intentions of hearts twist what is good in one form or another. The tension, pain, and struggle we have in our work are real, but not because of work; they are because of those who do the work.

Now I am not saying that all work is good work, but I am saying that work is good, not just a means to the good. Let me explain it this way.

What is work? We can say that work is partnering with God to bless others for the flourishing of the world. At least that is how it is described in the Beginning. Another way to phrase it is like this:

“Our work, whatever it is, whether we are paid for it [or not], is our specific human contribution to God’s ongoing creation [re-creation] and to the common good.”[3] (Tom Nelson)

Whatever box we tend to put work in, work, according to our scriptures, is the labor for which we are made, our purpose of cultivating (making & keeping) life that is good, a part of the good, and very good, as in creation’s beginning and again in its resurrection. Therefore,

“work…should be looked upon—not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of [humanity] should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That [work] should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that [humanity], made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing….For [a person’s] work is the measure of [a person’s life], and [a person’s] satisfaction is found in the fulfillment of [the person’s] own nature….”[4]

Work is our good, not just a means to getting good things. If work is the good, not just a means to it, what would it take to work not for something but in something, from something? What would that something be?

Well, our faith has contended from the Beginning, that something is Love (with a capital “L”). Love, as we were reminded in the final stretches of our Lenten descent, is the only force that can free our will from our self-imposed bindings, breaking the chain of our willing dragged around by the enemy. Love is what clears the fog of lust – of wanting wrongly, not just wanting the wrong thing. Love is what gives sight to the blindness of our minds, allowing us to know whose and who we are as we see that which is.[5]

As one traditional catechism begins, “If man exists, it is because God created him through love, and through love continues to hold him in existence.”[6] Even more so, as the fourteenth-century anchoress, Julian of Norwich, came to discover all that is, even “a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand… It lasts, and always will, because God loves it; and in the way everything has its beginning through the love of God.”[7]

Only Love, as we say in Lent and on Easter, can transform the intentions of the thoughts of the heart, the soul, just as it does the body… by putting to death the old and resurrecting (birthing again) something new.

Here is how Paul puts it:

put on the new self [resurrected self], which is being renewed [made new] in knowledge after the image of its creator [in getting back in the rhythm of the peace and purpose of Genesis]...put on love, which binds everything [not just everyone] together in perfect harmony [in sync w/o losing distinction]. (Colossians 3:10, 14)

Only when we put on love, love not for a thing or even an outcome per se, but as something essential to us as our skin, our nature, our self, can we work well, in whatever we do to make a life, do so in loyalty and in the manner of Love himself. Only when we put on love can we

Whatever you do, work from the soul, as for the Lord and not for humanity…. (Colossians 3:23)

You can’t work from the soul if work is something you are trying to avoid, escape, overcome, or merely get through. You can’t work from the soul if what you are working for is little more than the product or pay you receive. You can’t work from the soul if who you are working with is a mere means to an end, an obstacle to that end, an aid to that end, or a replaceable part in the chain (i.e., if they are anything less than God’s starting and continuing in God’s love).

Good work, work that is the goodness in which you exist, requires genuine love. A loving the work you’ve been given—notice the primary assumption that most of whatever we do is not necessarily by choice—most of our work at creating, making, cultivating a life good—is not by choice but within the relational, birth, and cultural limitations which we exist, and under authority rather than in authority (4:1). Yet, the charge is not to merely love what you like but love where and with whom you are “binding everything together in harmony.” For if you do love that for which you labor and those you labor with, then your working with your soul as unto the Lord and not humanity—your working for something more than it or they—for only such a love can compel you toward peace, the wholeness of relationship and work done well in the way of Jesus; for indeed you are working in (within) Love itself.



REFLECTION

Consider & Attend

·       What are we missing in our love(lessness) of work?

·       Where (from whom) have I witnessed love at work, work from the soul?



CORPORATE CONFESSION & COMMUNION[8] |

By your ever-restful grace,

allow us to enter your Sabbath rest

as your Sabbath rest enters into us.

For...

Jesus has done good work for us.

The Holy Spirit is doing a good work in us.

And God our Father equips and calls each of us to go out and do good works, works he has prepared in advance for us to do, and that he alone,

by his power and his Spirit,

will bring to completion through us.

For all the promises of God find their Yes in Jesus.

That is why it is through Jesus we utter our Amen

to God for his glory.

Hallelujah! Amen.



Song #3 – Breastplate of St. Patrick by Porters Gate

Song #4 – Everything With You by Nathan Partain



BENEDICTION | Colossians 3:17, 23

As we rest in the day made for us, we prepare to enter into the work for which we are made [LIGHT THE CANDLE], praising and praying:  

And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, [acknowledging God's grace works well through Jesus]... Whatever you do, work from the soul, as for the Lord and not for men...

[1] N.T. Wright, Surprised By Hope: rethinking heaven, the resurrection, & the mission of the church, 259.

[2] St. Irenaeus of Lyons, On The Apostolic Preaching, 41.

[3] Tom Nelson, Work Matters: connecting Sunday worship to Monday work, 24. 

[4] Dorothy Sayers, quoted in, Schwehn and Bass, Leading Lives That Matter: what we should do and who we should be, 200.

[5] Augustine, The Confessions, 7.10.16, 179.

[6] Catechism of the Catholic Church

[7] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, 7.

[8] Adapted from Common Prayer: a liturgy for ordinary radicals, 554, & Every Moment Holy, Vol 3, xv.