Thinking Christianly about Work

So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth,” God said, “See I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food…”

Genesis 1: 27ff

‘For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.’

Ephesians 2:10   

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us.

2 Corinthians 5:18-20

Nathan has been preaching for weeks on Sabbath. So, I thought today I would do the other side of the coin… I want us to think about ‘work’. Lucky you… you get 15 or so minutes from me, a lazy and easily distractible person on the subject of “work.”

As many of you know this is quite personal for me as the future of my work is very uncertain, I’m thinking a lot about work … and then there is my Study Leave project that I shared about before – another exciting discernment about possible good work that has arisen in the last month or two.

But if we go back to the Sabbath for a moment.

It strikes me that when Jesus got in trouble about the Sabbath he did not apologise and move on. He went straight to the big picture. He said ‘My Father is working and so am I’ (John 5) He put work at the centre and sabbath around it. We are not created for Sabbath. We are created for work. God is not on Sabbatical, after having created the universe, now leaving it to tick on randomly (and us trying to prove ourselves by being the best at keeping the Sabbath). God is at work in everything. And so can we be. Sabbath is created for us, for our work, not us for the Sabbath. Sabbath exists to enable us as workers. “My Father is working and so am I”

My Father is working and so am I

John 5:17

So this morning I ask the question, how do we think Christianly about work… and of course about our own work?

So there are three key passages from the Bible I have taken a starting point from this morning.

1. Genesis – humans are created for work with and under God. In the Genesis story it’s the work of responsible care for animals and plants – Genesis locates humanity within a kind of ecological work – not some kind of new add-on
2. Ephesians – we are created in Jesus Christ. Jesus has somehow inspired in Paul and his communities an extraordinary sense that our work can be meaningful … (I want to say more about why it is so extraordinary in the context) … God’s ongoing creativity is being channelled through the life of Jesus, so we are being created for good works… it is the way of life for which we are created…
3. 2 Corinthians – again in Jesus the Messiah, we are created for a work (ministry, service) of reconciliation – a bringing together of what has been broken apart, people from one another, people from the natural world, living world, people from God.

So my big insight today is that it was extraordinary then that our work might be meaningful and it’s extraordinary now. Why so?

Jesus and Paul and their communities lived as peasants and slaves and crafts people on subsistence lifestyles in the midst of the Roman Empire at the height (you could say) of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was officially eternal (aionios). They were officially in heaven. God (aka the Emperor) was at the head of this massive military complex driving a massive system of publicity (with holidays and religious cults making sure you knew you were in heaven). It was one big pyramid but without much of a middle class. 90% of the population had next to no disposable income (subsistence living). Between 2 and 5% of the population consumed 65% of all that was produced. Wealth and power were indicators of virtue. Everyone else was constantly in fear of debt and prison and slavery (a short step from being crucified). How is it possible to imagine having any freedom to do good and meaningful work with the weight of such a system constraining their lives? They believed in the defeat of the powers of death, they saw the cracks in it all. They acted in hope.

In some ways we have a lot in common, in other ways so much has changed.

One thing that seems similar across the centuries is captured if we put that picture of Sisyphus carrying the rock up the hill again and again and we set it alongside a comment by songwriter Tom Petty

 “If I can make a person forget about their job for two hours then my job is done.”

“If I can make a person forget about their job for two hours then my job is done.”

Tom Petty

In Paul’s time, and in ours it seems really hard to think Christianly about work? Even to be positive about work. And a lot of the difficulty arises because we have difficulty we have getting a perspective on the system we work within.

In fact there are two areas of difficulty.

1. Theological/Philosophical difficulty: difficulty imagining that work is meaningful in the first place, the difficulty imaging that God is in fact at work, rather than just jumping in and fiddling with the universe at times from outside, the universe is the work of God all the time. As creator God is not just the kicker-off, but God is always drawing the universe towards its purpose… because it is created with purpose within it. It is flowing in a certain direction. It is not dead matter, but most profoundly alive. Our work can be meaningful because we can be part of a universe that is intrinsically meaningful. That’s hard to imagine. Largely because for a long time Newtonian physics shaped our thinking and we did think the universe was basically dead matter.
2. Historical Perspective: But the second difficulty I want to talk more about applies to both bible times and now… the difficulty of getting perspective on the system within history that we live and do our work in.

In retrospect it’s not so hard for us to get some perspective on the Roman system. But even in the midst of it Paul and his mates seemed to have less difficulty getting perspective than we seem to have on our world. Paul understood the empire as an amalgamation of “principalities and powers” of an evil age. The first Christians realised a spiritual dimension to the systems they lived in. Jesus himself had taught them how hard it was for the elite of the empire, the rich man, to enter the kingdom of heaven.

What about us? Are we able to get this kind of perspective on the world in which we work?

I’m just gonna go ahead and say the ‘c’ word in church. The system we have lived in for the last 200 years is what historians call ‘capitalism’ . (description from Jonathan Cornford) It too, interestingly, is regarded by many as the end of history , the best of all possible worlds (even if it is flawed) . We have reached, some think, a kind of eternal city. It is a trans-national system that links all the nations together . It too creates this ever-increasing gap between the uber-rich and the workers – rewards rise to the top . It is called capitalism because it is systematically structured towards the accumulation of capital (the very thing Jesus knew was a barrier to the kingdom of God). Of course, there has always been capital and there has always been greed. Now we have a system that links the two. Another characteristic is that it commodifies everything . Everything. The system is structured to draw everything into the system of exchange, with a monetary value, that can be bought and sold – from our labour, to our ideas, to our natural environment. Capitalism wants to commodify it so it can be bought and sold. Another aspect is sometimes described as a “great inversion”. Once upon a time the markets of exchange functioned within the constraints of society and human relations. Now it tends to work the other way round. Society and social life are controlled by the financial markets . Everything now has an abstract value (the dollar sign) . Capitalism is ecologically destructive – in simplifying everything into commodities that can be bought and sold it tends to dissolve ecologies, breaking down complexity.

Let’s be clear before we get distracted – particularly those who don’t like my definition. I’m not talking about capitalism as a philosophy, or as simply an economic thing… like with the Roman Empire we are talking about a ‘world-system’ which includes markets and increasingly everything else within it.

Some have called it ‘ungoverned governance’ … There’s no one at the top of the system (even though states and corporations might have people at the top in some sense), there’s no governor we can point the finger at like the Roman Emperor, but the system still governs us.

I think Paul would call it a ‘principality’ or a ‘power’ much as he did his own system. I think it’s an anti-Christian power… it’s not everywhere, it’s not omnipotent … there are pockets of life that are different, but it’s a system that affects everything… especially our work. We could say, we live within the power of anti-Christ. And it’s not going away anytime soon.

To work within our system tends to end up being all about money. We end up working, first of all for the money. It tends to prioritise economic practices of accumulation and commodification with rampant disregard for natural constraints and the natural world – which in our systems tends to be regarded as just another commodity. In our system our work tends to isolate us from others. For all these reasons, our work can feel meaningless – a way to earn money in order to be distracted in the weekend. Work can feel like its one step removed from reality and from humanity. Like we are all just cogs in a machine. Running around like mad things just to keep afloat – a sort of frantic version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

So where are the Christians who realise this is an anti-Christian system? Where are the alternative practices? The pockets of resistance? Isn’t that what church is for? A gathering to nurture pockets of resistance? Where is the awareness that the very system we work in is working against our Christian calling to nurture ecological systems of life, to reconcile human beings to one another and so on. Or do we as Christians let our work be controlled by the system just like most other people do?

To zoom out from our own capitalist system again… to the question that surrounds all of this. “Is God still at work? Can work be redeemed?

As far back as WW2 Archbishop William Temple wrote:

Some young [and we could add, older] people have the opportunity to choose the kind of work by which they will earn their living. To make that choice on selfish grounds is probably the greatest single sin that any young [or older] person can commit, for it is the deliberate withdrawal from allegiance to God of the greatest part of time and strength.

Questions

What does meaningful work feel like?

How often does my work feel meaningful?

Does our work control our time?

How does the cost of housing effect our work and our time?

Can we live with a lesser standard of living and open up new freedom for our time?

How important is household work in the hierarchy of things worth doing?

How connected is your work to the natural environment?

How does it feel if you don’t have paid work and someone asks: “What do you do?”?

How do we value unpaid work?

What space is there for volunteering in our life?

When looking for a job, which questions do you ask and which do you forget to ask?

`What am I good at?

              What do I enjoy?

              Is the work damaging in any way to people or creation?

              What contribution does this work make to the world? Serving who?

              Is there space in this work to challenge the powers (speak truth to power)?

Can I forego personal ambition in this work?

Can I stand up for the weak in this work?

Can this work be surrounded by Sabbath?

I invite you to take one question away from today as a focus for your prayer this week