Perhaps
it is because I’m nearly half a year into a new vocation—that of husband (not
to mention uncle to a passel of nephews and nieces)—that I’ve been thinking
again about the idea of Christian Vocation. In regular conversations we use
“vocation” as synonymous with job, but what I’m talking about is all our
roles and relationships. As Christians the starting point for all these roles
and relationships is our baptism; God has graciously made us Children of God.
We don’t have to do anything, so what do we now do? An impulse might be
to try and “repay” this gift… well, God doesn’t need anything we have, none of
our work will make us more Child of God-ish… but you know where we could invest
that impulse to work and to give, to repay?
Our
neighbors! I mean this in the most inclusive way possible, anyone we connect to
via roles and relationships, everyone from our self to the earth.
The
first relationships we have is with ourselves. Being a person who inhabits a
body is something Christians (and humans in general) sometimes forget when
thinking about relationships… but that’s where it starts, have you seen a
3-month-old discover that their feet are in fact part of them? That’s
definitely the start of a new relationship!!! Jesus at one point says, “Love
your neighbor as yourself.” If you don’t love yourself, there is no way you can
love any of the other neighbors we have.
Part
of self-love is having a sense of purpose, if you don’t know what you are for
you won’t know when you’ve accomplished your calling. According to Luther we
are made to be in relationship with God, experiencing awe, love, and trust.
Sometimes this impulse to holiness gets misdirected, either by camouflaging our
own interests in “god talk” or idealizing people and things that are not God.
In both cases we have created idols. Additionally, we are made for praise and
thanksgiving. We often have an urge to focus on the negative, but for our own
health, if not for praise, it is imperative that we teach ourselves to recognize
the good moments and give thanks for them. Finally, we need to remember the
Sabbath, keeping it holy. On one hand, this means committing to Holy Time,
gathering together in worship of God and engagement with scripture. On the
other hand, this means taking time to rest—really rest. In our society where
everyone with a cell phone is responsible for every email and phone call, where
split shifts and on call work is the norm, this is no easy task, but it is still
a holy calling and one that respects the sanctity of the self.
Our
first neighbor we are aware of is often a parent or relative. In our vocation
as child we ought to honor these first relationships. They are incredibly
formative, fostering an environment of both safety and growth. On the flip
side, to various degrees based on our involvement in a child’s life, we find
ourselves the recipient of an amazing amount of trust from these kiddos. We are
called to raise loving and loved children!
We
also make friends. We ought to treat these relationships with care, for they
are precious. Our friends must be treated as ends, not means to some other end.
In
our romantic relationships, especially when they reach the seriousness of
marriage, we are called to love and honor our spouses and significant others.
We are also called to avoid pursuing romantic relationships that would make it
harder for other people to honor and love their spouse.
Then
there are our actual neighbors—not just the metaphor of neighbor to mean
“someone who is not me.” We are to help and support them as best we can. We are
to help keep their property and interpret their actions and words in the best
possible light. All these things are true about our friends as well, but
neighbors, unlike friends, are rarely chosen, thus we must be more aware of our
worse impulses when it comes to our neighbors. Additionally, as our country
grows more diverse, so too will our neighbors (and I certainly hope our friends
too). When someone is of a different race or religion than we are it can be
harder to empathize with them, this only means we must make an extra effort to
do so, to engage our neighbor with curious and kind eyes, not with suspicious or
malicious ones.
Then
we come to the more secular understanding of vocation—our job and those of
other people. How do we as a worker, a business person, and a consumer live out
our calling to be Children of God? Neither employer nor employee ought to steal
from one another or their customer. This can run the gamut from wage theft (employees
loose approximately 19 billion dollars a year to wage theft) to time theft
(costing employers approximately 11 billion dollars a year) to selling someone
an inferior product based on the color of their skin (for example, redlining). Then
there is being a consumer—so much of our economy feeds off of people desiring
things other people have, just watch a commercial, which is coveting… how do we
keep these desires subservient to love of neighbor and ensure we do not make
consumer products, and the lifestyles they sell us, into idols? This question
ought to be on our mind every time we take out our wallet or log onto Amazon to
make a purchase.
Then
there is that age old question of citizenship. We are citizens of heaven (Phil.
3:20) and yet we live in a particular nation. The question of how these two
identities intersect is a complicated one—for example St. Augustine wrote
415,280 words on the subject in his City of God. He faced a falling
Roman Empire that everyone identified as a Christian Nation, and had to
disentangle what was Christian and what was Roman, in order to assure his
people that God had not failed, even though Rome had. In fact, St. Augustine
goes so far as to describes the state as nothing more than a big band of
pirates! Luther was on the other end of things, the state was protecting him
from the Roman Catholic Church and he wanted to affirm the authority of the
state over against the authority of the church. So, Luther saw the state as a
parent figure; citizens had a duty to honor, serve, obey, love, and respect the
state. Then Luther goes on to insist that the state has only one job, to
distribute daily bread to both the just and the unjust, since God has already
provided it. Two very different visions for two very different situations… and
we find ourselves in a state categorically different than both the “Holy Roman
Empire”(aka Germany, which by Luther’s day was neither Holy, nor Roman) of Luther’s
day and the Roman Empire of Augustine’s day.
We
live in a democracy, where the state rules by “the consent of the governed.” So,
our vocation as citizen is a little more complicated than if we were peons
ruled by an Emperor. On one hand, our relationship to those in authority ought
to be that of respect. On the other hand, the way our system is set up we
ourselves participate in that authority and need to act as such. That means in
addition to respect and deference toward the state we also need to be informed
voters, the gentle voice of Christ among the many competing voices in our
society, and engaged with the state to ensure that it, “restrains evil,
protects from harm and upholds the common good.”[1]
We
are also, no matter how “cheesy” the phrase sounds, citizens of the world.
Between the normalization of global travel and the international reach of the
internet, it is no longer enough to consider our relationships with people
within our own country. Now we have neighbors everywhere; if we type a lie on the
internet in New Jersey it can make a man in Bangladesh lose his job, if we buy
products that are unjustly made overseas we are still acting unjustly, if we
cheat on our spouse while traveling internationally, we still cheat on our
spouse… even if it happened far away.
Finally,
we are earthlings residing on earth—if Genesis 2:7 means anything it means we
are intimately connected to this planet, we are called to keep it (Gen. 2:15). With
acidic oceans, widening holes in the ozone and shrinking polar ice caps, it
would serve us well if we cared and kept this sacred trust more fully.
Remember,
our vocations start from baptism—God has acted first, we are simply living into
what he has already done. God acted graciously, and will continue to do so.
Even when we fail, and we will, our relationship with God is still there, and
so is our neighbor. So when we fall, we are still Children of God and can get
back up again and continue to be kind neighbors to ourselves, to our family, to
neighbors and friends, in our jobs, as consumers and citizens, as earthlings.
In all things we can strive to love God and neighbor.
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