Making Good Tables: The Soulfulness of Work
Indianapolis First Friends
Pastor Bob Henry
May 23, 2021
Isaiah 65:23-25 (MSG)
For my people will be as long-lived as trees,
my chosen ones will have satisfaction in their work.
They won’t work and have nothing come of it,
they won’t have children snatched out from under them.
For they themselves are plantings blessed by God,
with their children and grandchildren likewise God-blessed.
Before they call out, I’ll answer.
Before they’ve finished speaking, I’ll have heard.
Wolf and lamb will graze the same meadow,
lion and ox eat straw from the same trough,
but snakes—they’ll get a diet of dirt!
Neither animal nor human will hurt or kill
anywhere on my Holy Mountain,” says God.
Good morning Friends! Today, as we celebrate our graduates and as they head out into new opportunities, I want to take a moment to speak about the Soulfulness of Work.
I believe I have shared this story before, but when I was working at Huntington University, I had the opportunity to go hear Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson speak at Indiana University.
They happened to be talking about farming and the importance of being connected to the earth. Even though I was not a farmer, I gleaned so much from this lecture that I continue to return to every so often.
During the Q&A section, a student, who I believe was just trying to get some answers for a paper asked a not-so-well thought out question about “work.” It came almost immediately after Wes Jackson said the following about growing up. He said,
“People who impressed me were those who worked.”
To answer the student’s question, Wendell, and Wes both rose to their feet and began addressing the way our culture looks at work.
Things like:
People today think:
· Work is boring.
· Work is trivial.
· Work is what we have to do so we can have fun, or what Wendell summed up with the American phrase: Less work = more life, which is exactly what the student had assumed.
Wes then said, “Work doesn’t have to be fun – but rather satisfying.”
Wendell added satisfaction means you have done something - it is part of your being or life.
I found myself writing as fast as I could while thinking about how different this was than what our world says, or, even more, what the church told me growing up.
I realized that many people I knew hated work. Now, many were simply lazy or living for the weekend. Yet some took on two or three jobs to pay outstanding credit card
bills, while others did the same simply to purchase bigger toys, go on grander trips, live in more lucrative neighborhoods. And then there was those who worked simply to survive.
I think we must remember - each person has a completely different story when it comes to work.
For the past 25+ years as a pastor, I can’t count the number of people who have met with me struggling with their work, some who have considered their work-lives miserable or a dreaded task to complete.
And the big theme I continue to see is that they are simply not satisfied by what they do.
My friend John Pattison writes in his book, “Slow Church,”
Soulless work is one of the alienating effects of industrialization, along with unemployment, underemployment, low wages, child labor, the imposition of degraded work on degraded people and a ream of other consequences. But we can have a very different view of work, one that seeks a balance between taking work too seriously and not taking it seriously enough. Doing good work is one important way we respond as followers of Jesus to the work God is already doing around us.
Let’s be honest, most of us were not taught to value all types of work. I remember people telling me when I was young, “Well, you don’t want to grow up to be a garbage man or work at a gas station, do you?”
That view changed when the guy who pumped my gas each week in Silverton (when we lived in Oregon you could not pump your own gas) became a regular attender to Meeting for Worship. I began to value his work and who he was because I was able to get to know more of his story.
We would never say, “You don’t want to grow up to be a doctor or lawyer?” But I know doctors and lawyers who are miserable in their professions and are not satisfied.
And the same is true about people who are retired – because their work was so much a part of them that stopping work was an attack on their being.
Let’s be honest, we still categorize work by what we would be willing or unwilling to do. And that is creating negative perceptions of work.
For some people their work is not an option. They work for survival. They work at whatever job they can get. They are often grateful to simply have a job. But too often those type of jobs are ones that sadly exploit workers. Jobs that are not satisfying because they dehumanize people and they become estranged from their own being and the tasks that could engage their human potential and creativity.
Instead, they are forced to take jobs that are repetitive, uninteresting, and unsatisfying because the world has alienated them by saying things like I heard growing up about garbage men and gas station attendants.
Or too often we make professional athletics, celebrity status, and stardom the goal. For goodness sakes, just think about it, we have a long-standing show in our country called, “American Idol” and about 20 other reality shows that create a process to manufacture “stardom.”
What if we valued blue collar jobs as much as we valued a white-collar job? If we taught our children that ALL work is valuable and needed.
Those migrant farmers were just as important as the farmers, the garbage collectors were just as important as the doctors, the members just as important as the pastors – I think you might be getting this…what I am talking about is the Quaker distinctive of equality – that all people are equal in the eyes of God. No title or position should get in the way of how we treat others.
As well since we often identify so deeply with our vocations. We introduce ourselves by our work, we identify by our work, we even associate by our work.
For several years at Huntington University, I taught an upper-level class with a college counselor called, “Calling, Being, Doing: Rethinking the Rest of Your Life.”
The class proceeded through looking at one’s calling, to seeing one’s being, and then to what one would do with what they learned.
Many students found themselves in their junior or senior year fretting over what they were going to do with their lives. Maybe some of our graduates today are still at the place since they graduated during a pandemic.
Too often we found, especially at a Christian University, how much the church and its views negatively influenced the students and did not allow them to see and embrace their “being” and who they genuinely were – leaving them fearful and fretting the world outside the so-called “college bubble.”
Quaker Parker Palmer addressed this very thing in Yes! Magazine in an article titled, “Now, I become myself.” Just listen to what he had to say,
“I first learned about vocation growing up in the church. I value much about the religious tradition in which I was raised: its humility about its own convictions, its respect for the world's diversity, its concern for justice. But the idea of vocation I picked up in those circles created distortion until I grew strong enough to discard it. I mean the idea that vocation, or calling, comes from a voice external to ourselves, a voice of moral demand that asks us to become someone we are not yet—someone different, someone better, someone just beyond our reach.
That concept of vocation is rooted in a deep distrust of selfhood, in the belief that the sinful self will always be “selfish” unless corrected by external forces of virtue. It is a notion that made me feel inadequate to the task of living my own life, creating guilt about the distance between who I was and who I was supposed to be, leaving me exhausted as I labored to close the gap.
Today I understand vocation quite differently—not as a goal to be achieved but as a gift to be received. Discovering vocation does not mean scrambling toward some prize just beyond my reach but accepting the treasure of true self I already possess. Vocation does not come from a voice “out there” calling me to become something I am not. It comes from a voice “in here” calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given me at birth by God.”
I will be honest; I wish my pastor and church growing up would have quoted and share those very words of Parker Palmer with me. Because it has taken a long-time (actually, I would say I am still wrestling with it) to grasp that vocation comes from my inner voice calling me to be the person I was born to be, to fulfill the original selfhood given to me by the Divine.
I guess what I am trying to say in all of this, is that clearly, we need to have a paradigm shift in the way we look at work.
Author and storyteller, Dorothy Sayers put it rather succinctly speaking of a carpenter in the church:
How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life? The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be a drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables.
Graduates, members and attenders, virtual guests, and friends, as we go out into the world, I hope you are encouraged each day to listen to your inner voice, to fulfill your original selfhood, and go and make “good tables” or whatever your gifting and the Spirit of the Divine lead you to make, do, create, think, etc.
Go today and embrace becoming your TRUE SELF, find satisfaction in doing what is truly YOU, and you will find the soulfulness of work!
Now, for those of us who need to ponder on this and wrestle with this some more, here are some queries to lead us into Waiting Worship this morning:
Am I satisfied by my work?
Where do my views of good work need to change?
How can our Meeting effect change in the idea of work in our community?