What Is Our Work?

Jeremiah 2:4-13; Luke 14: 1, 7-14

September 1, 2019

What is our work? That seems like a good question to ask on the Sunday of the Labor Day holiday. It’s a basic question, and one to ask over and over and over again throughout our lives. It’s a question foundational for each of us, as individuals, at every stage of life. It is also a crucial question for organizations and institutions to ask, and it is an essential – though oft-neglected – question for cities, states, and nations to ask themselves, as well.

What is our work?

Already, by naming the possessive “our” in various ways, we are also asking, “who am I?” and “who are we?” Depending on how we answer those questions, we’ll begin also to get at the other obvious preliminary question: what is work?

At its simplest, work is producing or accomplishing something. Neither the object nor the means is important in terms of the definition which is, I suppose, why we tend to modify the noun with adjectives: good work, hard work, busy work, school work, necessary work, homework, handiwork, art work, and so on.

This is nothing new under the sun. The Greek word, ergon, which drifted down through Old English to arrive in our vocabulary carrying the same essential meaning, shows up in the New Testament more than 150 times. That’s about half as many times as love shows up, but it’s definitely a lot, and with a frequency that might prompt one to consider the New Testament as an employee manual describing our work as followers of Jesus.

As I’ve noted here probably more than 150 times over the years, one of my favorite New Testament Greek words is liturgy, which means, literally, work of the people. You can hear the root ergon in the -urgy part of liturgy.

So, what is our work, as followers of Jesus? Liturgy, simply put.

The good, old Westminster Catechism, a document with a ton of problems, to be certain, begins with clear certainty about why we are here. In its 17^th-century language it asks, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer: “to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”

The work of the people is to glorify God. One might say that liturgy is our liturgy.

Jeremiah’s prophetic work begins with calling the people back to this work. The people have turned away from God. Turning away from living water, as Jeremiah puts it, will lead to a dry and barren land, and a people with unquenchable thirst. Having turned away from the source of this living water, Jeremiah observes, the people have begun trying to create their own wells.

In other words, the people have made the classic error: they have mistaken themselves for God.

Jesus, in the reading from Luke, decries that same human tendency, and invites his followers to humility. 

Our work is like that – marked by humility. The lectionary this morning also includes a passage from the book of Hebrews that we might just hear as a job description: “let mutual love continue; do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers; remember those who are in prison; keep your lives free from the love of money; do not neglect to do good and to share what you have; continually offer praise to God.”

Years ago Richard Rohr, a Franciscan spiritual writer whose work often nudges me deeper, said that the work of following Jesus amounts to “a way of being in the world.” I would say that is our work, our liturgy – to follow a way of being in the world that is, in Rohr’s words, “simple, non-violent, shared, and loving. However,” he went on to say, “we made it into a clever ‘religion,’ in order to avoid [the work] itself. One could be warlike, greedy, racist, selfish, and vain, and still believe that Jesus is their ‘personal Lord and Savior.’ The world has not time for such silliness anymore. The suffering on earth is too great.”

Our work is too alleviate the suffering where we can with what we’ve got, and to be present and compassionate – to be in solidarity with the suffering when we cannot, in fact, alleviate it.

Our work is not glorious, and it will rarely make any headlines. Our work will not save the world, but it will change it. And that’s OK, because our work doesn’t demand that we become saviors, but, rather, that we follow the way of the One who came that the world might know salvation and shalom – that is to say, wholeness, healing, communion.

For when we share communion we share a foretaste of that salvation, we participate in the in-breaking of the reign of God.

That, too, is part of our work.

We do that work – that liturgy – in part at this table. We do that in worship as we gather to break the bread of life and share the cup of salvation.

We can make of that just another piece of “clever religion.” We can make it formal and grand, if we like, but it’s not real that way. In real life, the work of the people is messy. It’s rarely linear, and it’s seldom efficient.

So, this morning, we’re going to live into that reality. Our table is messy. So we’re going to do the work of the people and clear it so that we may gather around it.

All of this stuff has been given so that kids at Bridges to Independence can begin the school year with some new supplies. It’s one of the ways we do our work – proclaiming good news to the poor, serving those with the least, giving from our table of plenty to our neighbors who have less.

Here’s how it’s going to work.

We’ve got seven bags or backpacks up here; each has a note card attached for listing what’s going in so the folks at Bridges can distribute it easily. We need several folks for each bag: one to hold open the bag; one to put items in carefully; one to write down what’s going in.

Meanwhile, on the tables in the rear of the sanctuary, we have a bunch of notecards. You’re invited to create your own, or use one that we made earlier this summer, and write a “back-to-school” note of encouragement. We’ll put those in the bags, as well.

What is our work?

This is our answer for the morning. Let us continue our liturgy. Amen.