Where Are The Wise Men?

I’m sitting here coding this on python, writing this in Word, and just wanted to thank Mike for hosting. The thought that we might, on occasion, spend more time with each other in transit to work than we do with our spouses is not one I wish to expand upon!

It is true that ‘work’ has been on my mind quite a bit lately. Not in the sense where one thinks about the day even when at home, no, but more in a philosophical, meditative manner. What is work? Why do we work? Should I be doing what I do? Perhaps more than anything the question that has been burning lately has been; “Am I honoring God during the working week in the most effective manner I can?”

It was given out as a talking point, this past Tuesday, that work is by logical extension, an outworking of our personal world and life view. As human beings, our culture is a profound statement, on a collective level, of how it is we think the world should be. Our culture rewards entrepreneurial endeavor because we collectively think that this is something to be encouraged. It is a view of how the world ‘should’ work. Similarly, then, we censure murderers because our lifeview is one that says people should be able to live in relative peace and freedom from harm. Murderers upset this balance. Whether we get this sense from Judeo-Christian ethics or some sort of natural philosophical source is, largely, irrelevant. The point is, culture is the collective statement of what we think the world should be like.

Work, therefore, was postulated and being that which we do to produce culture.

This disturbed me. Work, for me, was something one did in order to be able to participate in creating culture. In other words, work was not creating culture, what I did outside of work was. And because of the fact that I have certain needs to meet, food, shelter, internet access, work was the necessary trade-off to allow me enough free time and resources to fund my non-work culture building.

Could it be that I had set up a false duality? Was the definition even a valid one? If these things were indeed true, does that mean I have a responsibility when selecting an employment that I had hitherto neglected?

I certainly agree with my brother that work is required as the covenant head of my household to ensure my obligations are met. But I find myself wondering exactly where the lines lay in this regard. It is my duty to ensure my wife and I are able to eat, but does that mean I need to make enough money to ensure we have three different flavored soda boxes in the fridge, each with 12 cans in them? Does it mean we need to have such a preponderance of food that I am able to choose whether to have A1, A1 thick-n-hearty, or A1 Tasty Garlic steak sauce with my dinner?

Does it mean that I must provide a house with an en-suite in the master bedroom and central air? Do I need to have a big old snow-blower for winter to spare me the trouble of digging out the sidewalk by hand? Do I need to provide the three TV sets we have, cable TV services, TiVo, internet access and movies on demand? Does my job, my work have to be such that I make enough to ensure my wife is bathed in luxury? (No, you can’t answer that, hon…)

Am I not, rather, if bound by the above understanding, responsible to select employment that contributes meaningfully to the advancement of the culture; not the culture at large, but the culture as an outworking of how Jesus Christ says the world should be? Is my working at BrandX bank in the IT department a matter of indifference or, as the Westminster Confession might phrase it, a circumstance of culture, or am I sinning in some measure by selecting employment based on whether or not I can afford to spend more, be that on potato chips or mission trips.

The fact is that Mike is correct when he says that God does provide for us. He is also correct when he says that we are to use our talents and gifts in a manner that pleases God. Where I go agley is when I think that my work is something I do to support my calling. Our culture is not just where we must work because ‘it’ thinks it is A Good Thing™, rather, we work because we are commanded to by God. By the sweat of your face shall you eat bread until you return to the ground, He tells me. It is His will that I work. And not ‘just’ because of the fall. We had a job prior to that. Eve was created as a ‘helper’ for Adam. Helper to what? A helper to exercise dominion over all the earth.

So, I have a cultural mandate (Gen 1:28), and I have a sin consequence (Gen 3:17-19). I’m not too sure where all the relationship stuff comes in, perhaps Mike will clear that up next. As for me, my goal is to look more closely at just how the Reformer’s saw the entire nature of work vs. vocation and see how that impacts on my thinking.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 3:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.