This season of the year is punctuated with celebrations to mark the end of the school year, and for many, also the end of school, period. A few days ago I had a phone conversation with a childhood friend who was headed to our home town where he would be the speaker for the commencement exercises at our local high school. And yesterday the Baca family celebrated the graduation of our middle daughter from San Marcos State with her teaching degree and credential. Graduating from school means the end of tuition and tests and the like, but it also means the beginning of something that many students dread: real work. Erich Kastner said that “work is half one’s life—and the other half, too.” We know what he means, don’t we? According to my calculations, if a person lives 80 years he or she will have lived for 700,800 hours. And if he or she works an average 40-hour work week for 50 weeks a year, over a span of 40 years that will amount to 80,000 hours of work. The only single thing that we do more of over a lifetime is sleep, I suppose, which would total 233,600 hours. But if you take a nap during work hours, then both those figures need to be adjusted a bit. Work is a huge part of life, and not just “official” work for which you are paid. There is school work, house work, and even volunteer work. There is no way to calculate all the other things that could count as “work” for which we don’t, technically speaking, get paid. Work is a fact of life in the real world, and since our focus in worship during this season is on the impact of Christian faith in the real world, we have to deal with work.

I suspect that the topic of work is not necessarily everyone’s favorite. We would much rather think about things like play. Harry Wilson said, “Work is something you want to get done; play is something you just like to be doing.” Don Herold said that work is “the greatest thing in the world, so we should always save some of it for tomorrow.” From the faith perspective, what can we say about work? It should seem obvious, perhaps, but most of us don’t think in this way, that the first lines of scripture are about work! You know the story: God created. And if making the creation wasn’t one huge piece of work, I don’t know what was! Can you imagine the amount of work that went into making the universe? We think it’s hard to get the Rancho Santa Fe Art Jury and the County of San Diego and a multitude of architects and builders and engineers and to plan and scheme and dream just so we can put up a couple of little buildings here. Can you imagine the red tape God would have had to endure with the County? Genesis says that, “on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done.” Work is a part of the world because it took work to make the world in the first place. God did that first work, and as part of his work he built work into the very fabric of his creation. Whenever we complain about how much work there is to do, perhaps we need to remember how much effort our God expended just to get this whole enterprise of creation off the ground.

The very next thing that God did after he finished the amazing work of creation was to assign human beings to the task of work. Here is the key sentence from Genesis that drives our entire thinking on the topic of work: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” That is a hugely important sentence. The first eleven chapters of Genesis set forth a basic understanding of the nature of creation and the nature of humanity’s existence within this creation. There is a God who wills everything into being and who gives to everything its essential character and purpose. As for human beings, God gives them a home in a garden called Eden. This is a good place and humanity is meant to thrive there. As part of humanity’s existence there, God assigns the basic tasks of tilling and keeping, as one tills the ground in farming, or as one keeps a flock in raising sheep or cattle.

We sometimes like to think that before the business with the serpent and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil that Adam and Eve were just lounging around in the Garden of Eden as if it were an early version of Club Med. But that’s not an accurate picture. Adam and Eve had chores to do in the original Garden. Remember that everything in God’s creation God himself pronounced as being “good,” therefore work itself must be part of the goodness of creation. Work was not meant to punish us, or to be a burden for us. It is part of what we were meant to do. Ancient Israel understood this simple fact, and in fact it became part of the basic character of the people. When God gave his basic ten commandments—his ten essential directives for successful human life—one of them had to do with work: “You shall work six days, but on the seventh day you shall rest.” So often we look at the last phrase of the sixth commandment and focus on the rest part, but the first phrase is equally important: Sabbath comes after we have worked.

God worked and then he gave work as part of the essential character and purpose of humanity. And so we need to go on to say that a subsequent part of God’s design for human life is that we would find our work to be both fulfilling and enjoyable because work is one way that we express the image of God into which we were created. You see, another central affirmation of the early chapters of Genesis is that humanity was created in the image of God. By that we mean to say that something of God’s own nature and being can be seen in the highest of his creations: human beings. If God himself is a “working” God, then the best expression of his image must also be somehow involved in the business of work. Not to work is to stifle and suppress part of our own created nature, which is to short circuit one major avenue by which we experience our personal fulfillment and personal enjoyment of this life. In its original design, work was meant to be a good and positive thing, without any overtones of drudgery or compulsion or distaste.

In a sense, we can say that God meant for us to become part of his ongoing process of creating the world, and we do that as we work. There is an old story about a man who came upon a plot of ground that was covered with weeds and studded with rocks and more or less worthless. He began to work the land, clearing the weeds, removing the rocks, digging a well, amending the soil, and working in every way he could to make something of this land. After much time and sweat, the man had a beautiful garden, as pleasant a place as anyone could hope to find. One day a traveler passed by the garden and he stopped to admire it. He said to the man, “My, hasn’t God created a beautiful garden here.” And the man said, “God? You should have seen this place before I came along and made something of it!” And there is some truth in the man’s attitude. Yes, God does amazing work. But God expects that we will add some sweat equity of our own, using the raw materials he’s given us—including the raw materials of our imaginations and intellects—in order to continue the good work of making his creation into a beautiful and useful home for his creatures.

It is very easy to sit here on a Sunday and talk about the nobility and beauty of work as a gift from God that you and I need to exercise in order to be fulfilled. But tomorrow morning, most of you are going to wake up with perhaps mixed feelings about the joys of work. Work is not always fun. Some studies have shown that over half of the working population is unhappy in their jobs. We often use the term “work” to indicate something that is anything but easy, fun, or fulfilling. In the popular mind, we simply gut it out to get through Monday through Friday in order to enjoy the weekend. Most people, perhaps, if given the chance, would like to quit working so they could get on with enjoying their lives. How can work be a good thing?

Like everything else in human life, work needs to be redeemed, directed, and transformed by God so that the work we do is done in the presence and power of God, if it is to become and be the good thing that God intended it to be. Let me say that in another way. If work is to be the blessing for us that God intended it to be, we have to learn a new attitude about work and a new practice of work, placing all of our work within the reality of God’s activity in our lives. And that is where the good news is for today: if the work you do in your life is all about suffering and boredom and struggle, then God has a new plan for your work to become something wonderful and fulfilling and even fun.

As we continue reading Genesis we discover that the Man and the Woman who first live in the Garden decide to go against the will and design of the Creator. One result is that their work becomes something other than the joy and fulfillment it was meant to be: “By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground….” On this side of heaven, I suppose, there will always be an element of our work that will be something less than enjoyable and satisfying. But we also believe that heaven is available to us right here and right now, which is what Jesus was all about. And if that’s true, then God can redeem that part of our lives that has to do with work.

Part of that redemption has to do with our understanding and attitude about work. For many centuries the Christian church taught that there were two kinds of work, one of which was very special and holy, and the other which was not as special. The one kind, the better kind, had to do with church work, the work of priests and monks and nuns. The other kind was everything else, the work of normal people in the everyday world. This other kind was seen as less than godly, less than holy. But people like Martin Luther helped us see that this attitude about the holiness of work needed to change and was in fact, not what God had in mind at all. Luther wrote that, “…the works of monks and priests, however holy and arduous they may be, do not differ one whit in the sight of God from the works of the rustic laborer in the field or the woman going about her household tasks, but that all works are measured before God by faith alone.” Any kind of work that serves to enable good and wholesome human life is holy work. Baking bread is as good as breaking bread to serve communion. Sweeping floors is just as good as saying prayers.

The holiness of normal work in the world is grounded in the reality of a God who is present with us in every aspect of life on this good earth. Paul counseled the Christians in Ephesus to “render service with enthusiasm as to the Lord and not to men and women, knowing that whatever good we do, we will receive the same again from the Lord, whether we are slaves or free.” In other words, when we work, we are to work as if we are working for God and for God’s purposes. And in fact, we are, if we are doing work that is worthy. Some forms of human work are not worthy of God and not worthy of human effort. Working at something that clearly goes against God’s will for us cannot be blessed by God. But any form of work that supports and enables the good of men and women is work that we can do for God himself, and when we work in that way, we can work with great joy and purpose.

There is a very popular television show on the Discovery Channel right now called Dirty Jobs. In a recent interview with Time Magazine, Mike Rowe, the host of the show, talked about what motivates some people to keep working at the dirtiest, grossest, hardest, most dangerous jobs in the world, like cleaning bird guano from buoys or testing shark suits. When asked, “Why do people do dirty jobs?” here is what he answered: “Personal gratification. The evidence that they’ve made a contribution. These people take great pride in what they do. Everyone I’ve met who has a dirty job knows that if you removed them from the chain, then the whole thing falls in on itself. You’ll see a lot of optimism and cheerfulness. These are happy people.ⁱ"

If we see and understand that our work is contributing to the world in some positive way, and that this is part of God’s plan for how the world itself is designed to operate, then we are beginning to understand how God redeems and transforms our work into that which is holy and good, and that which gives us much personal satisfaction and enjoyment. When we are contributing to the overall good of the world through our work, then we are contributing to God’s very own plan and purpose for creation. In a sense, we are co-creators with God, helping to continue to bring the creation into being. Therefore, in an ultimate sense, all the work we do is not for ourselves, or for other people, but only for God. God gave us work in the first place, and when we work in worthy ways, we work for God’s purposes and pleasure.

Michelangelo knew that. Michelangelo began his artistic career as a sculptor. By the time he was thirty years old he had sculpted both the Pieta and David. When he was in his early thirties, Pope Julius II asked him to sculpt a papal tomb but then the plans were changed and Michelangelo found himself painting figures on the ceiling of a Vatican chapel. Michelangelo was not really a painter, and his rivals were eager to see him fail at something and perhaps fall out of favor. But Michelangelo did what he was asked. Over a period of four years, he painted four hundred figures and nine scenes. And his work on the Sistine Chapel totally changed the course of European painting, not to mention creating a masterpiece of art appreciated around the world. An observer once asked Michelangelo why he focused so much of his energy and attention on the details in the corners of the chapel. “No one will ever see them,” the observer commented. To which Michelangelo replied, “God will.”

God will see the corners. A Christian approach to the everyday world of work is an approach that understands the holiness of worthy work well done. A Christian attitude to the everyday world of work is an attitude that appreciates the fact that we are privileged to participate with God in his continuing act of creation. Christians work as if they are working for God, because we are, and God will see the corners.

Amen.

ⁱApril 9, 2007.