WELCOME |
Mother’s Day Comments & Flowers
..I have calmed and quieted my soul. Like a child content in its mother’s arms, my soul is a child content. (Psalm 131:2)
Moms, by their God-given nature, are protective. Like a hen who covers her chicks when the weather sours, moms step in to ensure their children are able to grow up well, with every opportunity to experience a good and full life. Whether through spoken comfort, reassuring hugs, or aggressive defense, moms are always on the lookout for theirs, soaring high, keeping a watchful, ready eye! And while most moms will say they don’t want their children to grow up, the truth is, everything they do in word and deed is so their children actually do grow up. As much as Deedra refuses to linger too long on Cohen and Lily as drivers, or seniors, or college students, her heart desires to see both grow up whole and holy into who God has crafted them to be, while never forgetting that part of His crafting is the inescapable reality of always having her as their mother! Psalm 131 honors both the tremendous responsibility and loving desire of such mothering.
I am amazed by this psalm. It's one of my favorites, in part because it describes our relationship to God through one of the most freeing metaphors in our scriptures. In turn, it describes how God relates to us through one of the most assuring analogies. Even if we have not known good mothering, what we have known enables us to recognize the true, good, and beautiful when we see it, hear it, and even long for it in our souls.
The Jerusalem Bible, attempting to retain the literalism of the Hebrew metaphor, translates verse two this way:
“[It’s] Enough for me to keep my soul tranquil and quiet like a child in its mother’s arms, as content as a child that has been weaned.”
I think that’s every mother’s vision. For her child to grow up, to be weaned and to take appropriate responsibility, to become one who is whole and holy, yet never outgrows the relationship, even if the way we interact changes. We can admit that our human aspiration for this honorable desire can twist into helicopter parenting, passive-aggressiveness, constant meddling, or even a justification for being absentee-ish. Yet the truth is, the image of God mothering us is the vision of a complete and free life as it is meant to be, a life of relating to God as a growing-up kid.
What an honorable image and vision for mothers on this day. Your care, protection, affection, and embrace keep us growing up without becoming all grown up; the picture of our soul at peace and mature. What an honorable image and vision for the greatness of mothering others, our own or others. Your care, protection, affection, and embrace help our children live life as it really is, in relationship, free because of relationship. Mothering your child(ren) to be “impatient with mediocrity,” to develop dissatisfaction with the way the world is and a desire for it and us to be better, to develop “a hopeful striving for the best God has” for them, from a place of loving security, with calmed hearts and quieted souls, like children content in their mother’s arms. We honor this vision today as we honor all those here and those who are not. The delights (in & from) and difficulties (loss, in, of, of becoming) testify to the significance of mothering and this vision, and to why today is a worthy but too small a gesture of gratitude to the Maker of mothers and mothers (physical and spiritual, practically and truly) who make us.
Invite the kids up front to take flowers to their moms and the women of the church.
CALL TO WORSHIP | Psalm 100
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing! Know that the Lord, he is God! It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, and the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise! Give thanks to him; bless his name! For the Lord is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.
Song #1 – Jesus the Lord My Savior Is by Sandra McCracken
Song #2 – My Portion by Shane and Shane
Dismiss Kids
INTRO | Praying for the Ms
In the days after Easter, in the days of life new, resurrected, and participating in eternity now, we have been considering that for which we are made: work. Work, all that we do, in word and deed, to make life good. Whether paid for it or not, work, as we have been encouraged in the story of our Scriptures to understand it, is, in the words of Dorothy Sayers,
“[work is]…not a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but 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.”[1]
As we saw last week, we work because of who we are made to be, whom we belong to, and where our life is lived:
“…we neither make nor save ourselves. God does both the making and saving. He creates each of us in 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 2:9-10, MSG)
God crafted for the work that is our living, work from which we are meant to delight and find fulfillment to the glory (approval and brilliance) of God. God-gifted work, whether as mothers, engineers, fathers, nurses, administrators, executives, teachers, technicians, project managers, landscape architects, dancers, veterinary surgeons, radiologists, counselors, paralegals, organizers, or missionaries; we had better be doing, because that’s what Christ is doing!
What a wonderful image we share. An image that I hope helps each of us see our unique selves in the wondrous expanse of Christ’s body and helps us see one another more clearly so that we might share in one another’s calling. Something we get to do now with J and Ma.
Next week, the Mantzels will depart for Marseille, France, on a vision trip. The trip is meant to help them see whether this is where they are meant to join in the work of Christ, given the work he has prepared them for. While I encourage you to ask about details after the Gathering, what I want to do now is simply pray with and for them and commit to doing so while they are away.
Pray for them, then have people return to their seats and open their Bibles to Colossians 3 before reading 3:15-24.
PRE-SERMON READING |Colossians 3:15-24
Let the peace of Christ keep you in tune with each other, in step with each other. None of this going off and doing your own thing. And cultivate thankfulness.
Let the Word of Christ—the Message—have the run of the house. Give it plenty of room in your lives. Instruct and direct one another using good common sense. And sing, sing your hearts out to God!
Let every detail in your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus, thanking God the Father every step of the way.
Wives, understand and support your husbands by submitting to them in ways that honor the Master. Husbands, go all out in love for your wives. Don’t take advantage of them. Children, do what your parents tell you. This delights the Master no end. Parents, don’t come down too hard on your children or you’ll crush their spirits.
Servants, do what you’re told by your earthly masters. And don’t just do the minimum that will get you by. Do your best.
Whatever you do, in word or deed, work from your soul for your real Master, for God, and not for humankind, confident that you’ll get paid in full when you come into your inheritance.
Keep in mind always that the ultimate Master you’re serving is Christ.
SERMON | Getting Joy Out of Work
If work, as we have been using the term, truly is “Our work, 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,”[2] and if our labors, our responsibilities in relationship, this ordinary work with God (in Christ) are the good in which we are made, then why do we, rather consistently, try to get out of work?
Whether literally, trying to find ways not to work, or trying to use work as a means to get something (mammon and all that entails), work has become for most in our society something that is done begrudgingly or only for the return of money and all that it brings. And so, if we are honest, as we recognized last week,
“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].”[3]
Rather than getting the good life out of work for which we are made, we make an enemy of our very purpose simply by the way we relate to (think about, understand) work. To live otherwise, be getting out of work the good for which we are made, firstly, we need to reframe work, as we have been trying to do, and as Sayers, in my opinion, so succinctly does when she said:
“…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.”[4]
But is that it? Is the solution just a transformation of the mind? Certainly not anything less, but if we are to work from the soul—that essence that makes us uniquely us in the image of Christ we share—then isn’t there more to the soul than the mind? Well, yes. If the soul were a singular matter of the mind, a consciousness of sorts, then if we thought rightly, we’d live rightly; but that’s not the whole picture.
The soul, as we have said before and as I believe it is described in the Scriptures and by some of our faith’s foundational thinkers, is a dynamic (spirited) relation of our mind, heart, and will. This embodied, spirited relation is what makes a human.
But my goal today is not to argue for a reframed tripartite soul, so be gracious with me and assume that my description of the soul is roughly accurate. If that is the case, then to enter into the essential goodness of our work—whatever we do in word or deed to make life good in partnership with our Maker—we need not only a renewal of the mind about what work is, but also a transformation of the will, that faculty by which we act, the faculty of our devotion. A redirecting of what we serve.
Now, our scriptures describe the transformation of the will in the language of submission. From the proverbial “in all your ways submit to him, and he will make straight your path” (Proverbs 3:6), exemplified in the earnest prayer of the founder and perfector of our faith, “not my will but yours be done” (Luke 22:24), we model our daily cross-bearing as we follow him,
“brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God… present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship [rational service].” (Romans 12:1)
For work to be a delight, as Sayers said, “…the thing in which one finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction…” work must be something we submit to, serving as, “… the medium in which one offers oneself to God.”[5] After all, isn’t that what Paul is saying in Colossians?
“Let every detail in your lives—words, actions, whatever—be done in the name of the Master, Jesus… Whatever you do, in word or deed, work from your soul for your real Master, for God, and not for humankind… Keep in mind always that the ultimate Master you’re serving is Christ.” (Colossians 3:17, 23-24)
Notice two things in Sayers’ application of and in Paul’s exhortation. First, we do not offer our work to God. We submit our wills to God through our work. Work is a medium of offering, not the offering itself. I don’t offer my work to the Lord today, but I offer myself, my whole self, through the work gifted and crafted specifically for me. I give myself to the work, for, as we saw in detail last week, this specific life I live in Christ is God’s will, God’s good, prepared for me in Christ to get in on.
To get out of work the proper exercise of our nature as a delight and fulfillment in and to the glory of God, we must offer, submit, our whole selves to God through our work, and in so doing serve the work, because in serving the work (crafted for us in Christ, work begun for us in Him) we are serving the Master, not the persons.
In one of the final quotes from Sayers’ last week, she concluded that when we are getting out of work the goodness of it, not just the goods from it, we are “no longer bargaining with our work, but serving it.” [6]
That idea of serving work felt weird, I know. After all, are we not meant to serve God? Yes, but as we just said, the means of serving God is to work from the soul. Still, serving work seems idolatrous (which it would be if our understanding of work remained a means of living rather than what we are made for) or at least the wrong objective. Aren’t we supposed to serve others, those we work with and work for? As Martin Luther once noted, “God does not need our good works, but our neighbors do.”[7]
Indeed, our neighbors (as well as ourselves) need the good work of others to experience a good life ourselves, but notice what Paul says to the faith family of Colosse. We’ll use the ESV this time:
“Whatever you do, work heartily, as for the Lord and not for men” (Colossians 3:23)
Why not work for men? After all, the exhortations leading up to this statement are about serving others with whom we are in relationship. Besides, are we not to love our neighbors as ourselves? Are we not to love one another as Christ loved us? Yes! Exactly! But how did Christ love us? By submitting Himself to the Father, giving His whole self to the work for which the Father sent Him, which indeed was of service to us.
“For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will but the will of him who sent me.” (John 6:38)
Serving the work, not the persons, is our spiritual worship, our rational service to Christ. Sayers herself thought that the notion “the worker’s first duty is to serve the work” would “sound to you the most revolutionary of all,” especially given the second commandment to love neighbor. But she wisely points out something we often unwittingly overlook:
“The catch in it, which nowadays the world has largely forgotten, is that the second commandment depends upon the first, and that without the first, it is a delusion and a snare. Much of our present trouble and disillusionment have come from putting the second commandment before the first. If we put our neighbor first, we are putting man above God, and that is what we have been doing ever since we began to worship humanity and make man the measure of all things. Whenever man is made the center of things, he becomes the storm-center of trouble – and that is precisely the catch about serving the community.
… There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.”[8]
While Sayers’ rhetorical hyperbolic exhortation to “forget the community and serve the work” serves its purpose by jolting us out of our encultured fog, she is not merely exaggerating for show, nor is she wrong. Indeed, the paradox of our human endeavor is that when we offer ourselves to one another, even for the other’s sake, we fail to see what the other truly needs and so serve something less than their good. Whenever, even in good intentions, we give ourselves to those with whom and for whom we work to make a life good, we are unwittingly unable to do the thing we will, precisely because it is our will and not our Father’s.
When we serve people rather than the work as our spiritual act of worship, our rational service, we end up in the chaos of human struggles, tossed by the ever-moving target of others' needs, drowning in the disillusionment and fatigue of ceaseless striving. But if, by submitting our will, we join Jesus and serve Jesus in the work we have been given (responsibility in relationship) with Jesus, we will find ourselves atop the waters.
Fortunately, like last week, the way to something different and better is rather simple and given to us.
“…your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this: ‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’” (Matthew 6:8-9)
REFLECTION |
Consider & Attend
·What would be different if I “forgot the community and served the work” tomorrow?
·Where have I experienced the goodness of someone “serving the work”?
CORPORATE CONFESSION & COMMUNION[9] |
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 – Sing Over Me by Porters Gate
Song #4 – Your Labor is Not in Vain by Porters Gate
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] Tom Nelson, Work Matters: connecting Sunday worship to Monday work, 24.
[3] Sayers in Schwehn and Bass, 201.
[4] Ibid., 200.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid., 200-201.
[7] Quoted in Nelson, 123.
[8] Sayers in Schwehn and Bass, 203.
[9] Adapted from Common Prayer: a liturgy for ordinary radicals, 554, & Every Moment Holy, Vol 3, xv.