Dear Faith Family,
Jesus' death and resurrection -- God-In-Flesh, dying upon the apparatus designated for traitors and slaves, and alive again three days later -- truly revolutionized the world.
Christians believe this to be theologically true and doctrinally accurate as a spiritual reality. The world of God and the world of humanity, or at least God and human beings' spirits or souls, reconciled. But what if Jesus' work not only made a way for the salvation of our souls, but also revolutionized all the other facets of what it means to be human, saving us wholly.
Secular historians like the late Rodney Stark and Thomas Cahill, and more recently Tom Holland, argue that the world is evidentially and fundamentally different after the death and resurrection of Jesus. What changed? These historians and others contend that the world after Jesus began to become more humane.
Not instantly and not perfectly, but by both measurement and virtue, in practice and in ideal; the world we inhabit today is radically different than the world two thousand plus years ago. Those truths "we hold to be self-evident" and the values we take for granted as "unalienable rights" were in the millennia before Christ, neither obvious to human civilizations nor impossible to take away. For instance, Aristotle argued that some people were to rule and others to be ruled, which is a far cry from "all men are created equal." What are for us presumed universals, like the dignity of every life and the right to pursue a good life, were but underrealized aspirations of a landless and relatively obscure people before the cross and resurrection.
After the cross and resurrection, fundamentally, the world changed as people of every tribe, tongue, and nation began to be drawn to the One who died and rose, and began to shape their lives together on His life with us. From the first century into the early Enlightenment, at least in the Western world, the revolution of God-With-Us, dead and alive for us, reshaped the very fabric of society.
Only in the late 1800s, when we put God to death again -- in the words of Nietzsche, "God is dead, and we killed him," -- did the humaneness of life become replaced with the productiveness of life (once again). It is this productivity, this view of humanity as obstacles or objects of use, which Easter raises us to revolt against. A revolution that starts, as we'll see over the next few weeks, by resurrecting the rhythm of Sabbath and work.
To help us better recognize the revolution we are caught up in and pray ourselves into it, I've reproduced an email I sent a few years ago below. While the information may not be new, it is still needed. So I encourage you to keep reading!
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Our family enjoys Disney World; that's no secret. Due largely to Deedra's savvy planning, we have had several opportunities to spend time as a family immersed in a world of stories and thrill rides. Inevitably, we find ourselves wandering the park waiting for our next adventure but needing some cool place to slow down, and that's when we make our way to Walt's Carousel of Progress.
The "ride" is a slowly rotating theater with audio-animatronics on the stage showing a family's "progress" from the first days of electricity into the future of a technological utopia. The attraction was the central feature of the 1964 New York World's Fair, and while its tech is dated (and its song annoyingly sticky!), the vision for humanity it foretells is sadly accurate. In Walt's eyes, humanity is advanced the further it is removed from the daily tasks of living. The more machines can do for us, the less we have to do for ourselves. And the assumption in the "progressing" theater is the better we are for it all.
What Walt saw way back then is what most of the modern, especially our Western world, has arrived at. Like Disney's carousel, we go around and around under the assumption that what makes life better is working less, rather than good work done well.
Maybe because in the cultivation of life, all those responsibilities, roles, and relationships that require our daily efforts are entangled with thistles and thorns, we wrestle to work less. Maybe because leisure is marketed as a luxury and luxury is for the elite, we long for less labor. Maybe because we don't see the value of our daily efforts, unable to imagine our daily grind as a part of something more than surviving, we save our hearts for something else. Maybe because we don't rhythmically cease striving for life with God, we strive for the god-like disconnection from the efforts to live, to be human (though admittedly, that is unlike the God we know in Jesus).
Contrary to Walt and our cultural perception and (if we're honest) our feelings toward it, work is not something that we overcome, but the means for overcoming, the way of living with God in partnership with His "deep design." Work is cultivating good in life that God has made, and doing so amid the seeming chaos that surrounds (see Gen. 2:5-15). If work was anything less, could the apostle Paul, with integrity to his calling as 'a servant of Christ Jesus...set apart for the gospel of God,' say to wives and husbands, children and parents, servants and masters,
Whatever you do, work from the soul as for the Lord and not for mankind, knowing that from the Lord you will receive the inheritance as your reward. You are serving the Lord Christ.
(Colossians 3:23-24)
Our goal is not to get through work, get out of work, or work less, but to experience the wholeness of being (re)made to work in Jesus. For to be human is to work with God. And doing that for which we are fashioned, well, from the essence of our being. To that end, I invite you to pray with me (and for one another).
Father, help us live into the gift of your beautiful, never-ending grace.
Holy Spirit, help us see that in you we are enough,
formed and fashioned in your good design for your good destiny.
Wonderful is your work; may our souls know it very well!
May our work be a beautiful, generous offering of love to you, Father.
May it spill over to the people and the world you made.
May we flourish in our work,
because we are always resting
in the finished work of Jesus and His ever-presence.
Amen.
Love you, faith family! God bless.