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.