Your Life, Your Vocation

Luke 14:25-33

I want to talk today about something that is a problem and a challenge for every single person.  The challenge is – how do we find an honest, balanced, wise view of the work we do in the wider context of our lives?  That is, how can we develop an accurate and healthy view of ourselves that isn’t distorted in some way by our feelings about our jobs and careers?

I really do think this is a challenge for everyone.  It’s a challenge for young people who are still in school.  Young people, you have to make sure your dreams about adulthood don’t fixate only on career choices.  Your life will be much richer than your job.  I hope you like what you do.  But it’s even more important to like who you become, and to develop a life rich and satisfying in love and friendship.

It’s a challenge for people retired or nearing retirement.  Whether you had one job or twenty; whether you are proud of your work life or not; whether you made lots of money or barely enough to get by; whether you were fired from your last job or sent off with a retirement celebration – it’s difficult to avoid linking our identity, our worth and value to our success or failure in the workplace.  It’s difficult to see the paid work we’ve done as only a small part of the wide range of commitments that make up a full and satisfying life.

It’s a challenge for those of us who are working right now.  How do you spend a majority of your time and energy each week at your job and NOT identify yourself with that work?  This unbalanced, over-identification with work can happen whether you love your job or hate it.  If you love it, you likely let its importance swell and crowd out other parts of who you are.  If you hate it, you likely judge yourself much too harshly and fail to see all the other ways you are a blessing to others.

But I don’t want to talk to you about your jobs, the jobs you plan to have, the jobs you’re doing, or the jobs from which you retired.  I want to talk to you about your “vocation.”  Did you know you have a “vocation”?  Maybe that’s not a word you use much.  But it’s actually a very helpful word.  And so if it’s a word you’ve never heard or never used, I’d like to offer it to you today.  And if it’s a word that sounds familiar but is a little vague or musty, I’d like to help you dust it off and put it to use.

In our culture, “vocational” education is education aimed at career training.  Vo-tech is short for a very specific, very practical form of education that aims at job preparedness.  So “vocation” has become simply a synonym for a job or a career path.  But that is to pare down a wonderful, rich and beautiful word into a very small thing.

“Vocation” is a very old word.  It’s the Latin word that translates into English as “calling.”  You can hear that sense of voice or calling in the Latin root “vocatio” in words like vocal cords, or when we speak of someone who is “equivocating” (saying two things).  If something is “evocative,” it “speaks” to me.

Now let me get to what really matters about “vocation” or being “called”.  You live your life as a person who is addressed and called.  You came into the world as a person with a “call” on your life.  It’s sort of like you live your daily life within the context of an ever-present invitation.  So what is the “call”?  What is this “invitation”?  It’s the call and invitation to be God’s friend.

That is your calling, your vocation – to be God’s friend.  The good news first: it is a wonderful thing to be God’s friend.  It is the best possible life.  It is a life that is deeply satisfying and richly rewarding.  It makes possible joy in the midst of pain, resilience in the midst of hardship, hope in the midst of despair.  Plus, by being God’s friends, we’re friends with other friends of God. 

Now there’s really no bad news.  Only some news that is harder to hear.  You might call this the “cost” side of the equation.  And this is where today’s gospel reading comes in.  Our reading is one of Jesus’ sharpest articulations of the call to become his disciples.  And as you can tell, Jesus has high expectations for following him and becoming friends of God.  It will cost us something.  And it’s worth taking a few minutes, or a few days or years, to do the calculations on whether the benefits of being God’s friends is worth the cost.

Jesus says to the large crowds following him, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters – yes, even life itself – such a person cannot be my disciple” (v. 26).  This might sound shocking to us, since we live in a culture that has equated godliness with “family values.”  But it won’t be surprising if you listen to Luke’s gospel. 

Jesus warns us to invite the poor and the disabled to our banquets, not just our “brothers” and “relatives” (ch. 14).  When he is sought by his mother and siblings, he dismisses the importance of bloodlines and says that his new family are “those who hear the Word of God and do it” (ch. 8).  And he promises that those who have given up “wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God” will receive “very much more in this age, and in the age to come, eternal life” (ch. 18).

Jesus helps us recognize that loyalty to his way will run deeper even than our family ties.  It will be a commitment far deeper than our patriotic loyalty to country and our political views about how the economy should work.  The teaching seems harsh because one of our deepest hopes is that we can just add a little religious faith to the lives we’ve already built.  We’ve spent all this time weaving a life, and one of our greatest fears is that he will ask us to unweave it and start over.  We had already arranged the furniture just how we like it.  But now he is going to rearrange it.

Jesus says to the large crowds following him, “And whoever does not carry their cross and follow me cannot be my disciple” (v. 27).  Jesus says to the large crowds following him, “those of you who do not give up everything you have cannot be my disciples” (v. 33).  In other words, if we cannot get past our fear of pain, our fear of suffering and hardship, our fear of conflict, we will have a hard time following Jesus.  And if we are attached to our things, our income, our savings, our possessions, our standard of living in a way that traps us, we will have a very hard time following Jesus.

These are hard things to hear.  Perhaps the two mini-stories that Jesus tells us can help us sort it out.  Both stories involve the need for thoughtful decision making before beginning a large project.  Whether you’re building a tower or planning to go to war, there should be a period of analyzing the costs of the project.  And in these particular examples, we can easily grant what Jesus says.  It would be a silly thing to break ground on a new building and then to stop after laying the foundation because we ran out of money.  And it would be a silly thing to go into battle with only a meager little band of cowards riding sickly mules and carrying butter knives.

And yet we often fail to see that following Jesus, and becoming God’s friend, presents us with the very same dilemma.  There will be a cost to the project.  The kind of loyalty he expects will bring us into conflict with many of our other, precious and cherished loyalties -- like family, patriotism, possessions and lifestyle.  Not everyone in that large crowd following Jesus kept following him.  Perhaps not everyone who is here this morning will want to keep following him.  But even those of us who want to stay with him will have to come to grips with the cost of being God’s friends. 

Your vocation – your calling - is to love the world extravagantly, as Jesus does. 

Now I hope you can see that your “vocation” or your “calling” is much larger than your job or your career.  It is your way of sharing in God’s ongoing project of blessing, reconciling, healing, and renewing the whole world.  But if you want to be God’s friend, you do have to agree to a way of life whose first commitment and organizing focus is God’s kingdom.

Now let me try to explain why your job or career is sort of important, but sort of not.  Our economy isn’t very helpful when it comes to the task of seeing ourselves as whole human beings, with a wide variety of abilities and commitments.  When we are young and when we are old, we aren’t usually doing paid work.  The economy really has no way to value those periods of life.  Nor does it value unpaid work, like caring for children or caring for aging parents or friends.  It calls into question the dignity and worth of those who are paid very little, and casts serious question on those who cannot find work or who are disabled.  And even when we are working, our work usually only draws on a very small fraction of who we are and what we’re capable of.  And there are large areas of our lives that are of little use to the economy – and these areas of life are usually dismissed and belittled.

Now what if you could have a larger sense of your life’s importance?  What if not just the productive parts of you mattered?  What if all of you mattered?  All your ranges of capabilities and powers?  All the wide spectrum of your emotional life and your passions and interests?  What if your life had an abiding and constant worth and dignity no matter your age?  What if you felt equally valued all through the various phases of life - as a young child, as an adolescent, an adult, and as a retired person?

That’s what it feels like to have a “vocation.”   That’s what it feels like to wake every day into the invitation to live as God’s friends.  Now of course, your job or career matters, in the sense that it’s what you do with a good chunk of your day for the middle portion of your life.  But it doesn’t define you.  A successful career doesn’t define you.  Nor does a disappointing career.  You weren’t created for a career.  You were created to be God’s friends.

Our calling isn’t “going to church” or being “religious.”  Our calling is to share in God’s work of healing and blessing everything.  Going to church is just a helpful way to find friendships with others who can encourage us to stay focused and disciplined in the hard work of being God’s friends.