The Joy of Our Several Callings

Mark 6:31

July 22, 2012

This is one of the great summer Sabbath passages in scripture. Jesus says, “hey guys, we need to get away for a while. I know a great little place out on the lake where no one ever goes. Let’s take a week off.”

Sounds good, right? I was on vacation last week, and while I was away I read an article reporting on a study that found that, low and behold, vacation is good for you! For about the millionth time in my life I thought, “they did not need to spend money studying that; they could have just asked me and I would have told them.”

Yup, turns out that relaxing, getting away, chilling out for a stretch is good for you! And, in other breaking news, the sky is up, the sun is hot, and chocolate is delicious!

Other than the chocolate part, I’m pretty sure Jesus knew all of that, too. He also tried to get away, but the work followed him. Most of us do not have work that is nearly as important, as life sustaining, as world-changing as Jesus’ work, so most of us – OK, really, all of us – can get away from the work for a while and, as much as we hate to admit it, the work will go on without us.

Of course, Jesus’ vacation plans didn’t quite go as expected. As so often happens, work went with him and the disciples. Perhaps they made the classic mistake of taking their cell phones along, or checking the email every day, or calling back into the office to make sure the place wasn’t going all to hell in their absence.

Have you ever done that?

For those of us not named Jesus, it’s called a messiah complex – the belief that the world cannot get along without us for even just a little while.

Truth be told, many of us arrange our lives such that the people around us cannot get by without us. We engineer dependency, and elevate our own importance so that we can voice that classic American workaholic mantra: I just can’t get away.

Perhaps we do this to avoid the stark truth: none of us is indispensable; not only that, but at some point down the road, the world will go on just fine without us.

It’s true. The work – and, indeed, the world will go on just fine without us. That doesn’t mean that we don’t matter, it just means that we don’t matter as much as we like to think that we do.

And what all of that means is this: find the work that matters the most to you because, in the end, the work matters more to you than you do to the work. Unless people are following you on vacation to touch your cloak and be healed then the work matters more to you than you do to the work.

Again, this is not at all to say that we don’t matter. It is, however, to say that since you and I can each be replaced in our work then we ought to choose the work that matters the most to us. Choose the work that brings you the most joy. If you have the luxury of choosing, then choose work that fills your heart, not just your savings account.

Following the way and the example of Jesus, choose work that brings healing and wholeness to the world, not only because, as the news of last week underscores again, the world obviously needs healing and wholeness. But so does your life, and work that brings healing and wholeness to the world brings shalom to your heart – every time.

In my own experience, such work also brings deep joy. It is not always easy or fun, by any means, and work that brings healing and wholeness into the world will necessarily take us into places of cruel disease and deep brokenness. But participating in God’s healing and wholeness in precisely such places brings a deep and abiding joy.

Yesterday morning a group of us from Clarendon had the opportunity to serve our neighbors in need at AFAC. AFAC can be a place of pretty deep brokenness, but it is also a place of God’s healing and wholeness, and it has been for many of us a place of deep and abiding joy over the years. We’ll get another chance to do some work there in a couple of months. I hope you get a chance to participate.

Later on this afternoon I’ll be down in Fredericksburg for the quarterly meeting of the board of People of Faith for Equality Virginia. The work I’ve done with that organization over the past five years has been another source of deep and abiding joy in my life, and as we begin to focus on some activism in Northern Virginia around bullying and around marriage equality I hope that some more of you will be able to share in that joy.

I always hope that the work I’m privileged to do here, week in and week out, brings some healing and wholeness into the world, and I am excited about what God is doing in our midst as we work together to grow this ministry and make this congregation even more vibrant. Looking around over the past many months, it is a deep and abiding joy to see so many folks taking on so many aspects of the work, and I trust that this will continue and grow in the season just ahead.

Each of us has several callings in our lives: we are children, we are siblings, we are spouses, parents, uncles and aunts and grandparents. We are neighbors and we are citizens. We are workers in the world. We are students and we are teachers. In each and every one of our several callings we are also, first and foremost, followers of the way of Jesus.

The story from Mark this week, finding me, as it did, on vacation, reminds me that from our central vocation there is no vacation. We are always, in each of our several callings, followers of Jesus – even at the beach or the amusement park or the mountains. We are always followers of the way of Jesus because we have been claimed in the waters of baptism and fed at the table of grace.

It does not matter what you believe about creed or theology or Christology, about virgin birth or literal resurrection, about the “sonship” of Jesus. It really does not matter. What matters is simply this: follow the way of Jesus. Following the way of Jesus is our central calling.

To the extent that we live well and fully into that calling we will find deep and abiding joy in our several callings. Amen.