What Is Our Work?
Jeremiah 18:1-4; Psalm 139
September 4, 2016
I took some pottery classes a
few years back. I really enjoyed the way the clay felt and the way the wheel
spun, but what I mostly got out of it was that experience of “the clay spoiled
in the potter’s hands.” That is to say, I really wasn’t very good at it.
That was perfectly fine. We
don’t have to be good at everything we take on, and if I had free and ready
access to clay and a wheel I’d probably throw a lot of ugly pots and be
perfectly happy with working the clay even if I never got particularly good at
it.
A lot of times, it really is
about the journey and not the destination, about the process rather than the
outcome.
That’s good, because in the
larger work to which we are called the outcome is simply not up to us. That
larger work to which we are called, as followers of Jesus, as the church, is
the work of being faithful – fully and completely faithful in every aspect of
our lives.
What does that mean? What does
it look like in practice? Oh, and why the heck isn’t the outcome up to me?
That last question is the
easiest to answer, though it may be the hardest to accept. The outcome isn’t up
to me because I am not God. The outcome isn’t up to you because you are not
God.
Even working exclusively within
the metaphor of potter and clay, the outcome of what I attempted on the wheel
wasn’t entirely up to me. To be sure, I had a hand – two hands, in fact – in
it, but I did not build the wheel, much less the power grid on which it relied
to spin. I did not gather the clay. I did not grow the wheat that became the
bread that held the sandwich that powered my body as I sat at the wheel to
throw the pot. I did not build any of it all by myself, so why should I ever
assume that the outcome was up to me?
So what is the work that is mine
to do? What is the work of faith? Surely, it has a great deal to do with love,
and, just as surely, that’s where it gets even messier than the potter’s wheel.
Accepting, as best I am able,
that the outcome is not entirely up to me, I am confronted by a second,
powerful truth that is also difficult to accept. Not only is the outcome not up
to me, but there may be no good reason for what happens along the way.
That’s pretty easy to accept
when the work is throwing a pot, but it’s much more difficult to accept when
the work is loving another human being. That is to say, it was never that hard
to accept when the clay collapsed in my hands and the pot was spoiled. I never
searched for deep meanings in the ruined clay.
Yet something in most of us
wants to believe that there is purpose and deeper meaning to the most difficult
parts of our lives. We need to believe that tragedy happens for a reason, that
the deaths of loved ones, for example, have meaning and purpose.
Writer Tim Lawrence captures
this search for deeper meaning well in a simple story:
I’m listening to a man tell a story. A woman he knows was in a
devastating car accident; her life shattered in an instant. She now lives
in a state of near-permanent pain; a paraplegic; many of her hopes stolen.
He tells of how she had been a mess before the accident, but
that the tragedy had engendered positive changes in her life. That she was, as
a result of this devastation, living a wonderful life.
And then he utters the words. The words that are responsible for
nothing less than emotional, spiritual and psychological violence:
Everything happens for a reason. That this was
something that had to happen in order for her to grow.
That's the kind of bullshit that destroys lives. And it is
categorically untrue.[1]
How many times have you heard
that phrase? “Everything happens for a reason.” Or, its religious counterpart,
“it was God’s will.”
As Lawrence put it, those words,
and others much like them, “are responsible for nothing less than emotional,
spiritual and psychological violence.” Such words undermine the human need to
grieve, because rather than allow us to rest for a season with our deeply felt
sadness they short-circuit the sadness and cut short the season of grief. After
all, why be sad when the death of a loved one is just part of God’s plan
because – and you’ve no doubt heard this phrase – because God just needed
another angel to sing in the heavenly choirs.
What a load of theological
garbage to dump on grieving friends. God does not need more angels – whatever
the heck we think that means.
John Pavlovitz puts it this way:
Deep within the background operating system of my faith there’s a
buried, fiercely protected trust in a God who is good and in an
existence that matters. But this core truth doesn’t come with the assumption
that all things, (including all the horrors we might encounter here),
have a purpose. It doesn’t come with a hidden silver lining always knitted into
the fabric somewhere, if only we can uncover it.[2]
For one thing, if we hold on to
the notion that everything is part of God’s plan, then we’ve created an image
of a God who for whom the violent deaths of innocent children and women and men
is just another day at the heavenly office.
Pavlovitze goes on to say, “It’s exhausting enough to endure the dark hours
here and not lose our religion, without the addition of a Maker
who also makes us bleed. Instead, I prefer to understand God as One who bleeds
along with us; Who sits with us in our agony and weeps, not causing us our
distress but providing a steady, holy presence in it.”
That holy presence is the model
for our work of faith. We are not called to solve all of life’s challenges for
ourselves, our loved ones, our larger communities. We are, however, called to
be fully present through those challenges. More to the point, we are called to
be lovingly present, engaged in the work of love at every step of the way.
In ways both broad and social as
well as small and deeply personal, our labor is the same – to be faithful to
the One who knit us together in love and who calls us to live together in that
same love. So, friends, come labor on.
posted by David Ensign at
7:17 AM
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