By Chris Armstrong, reprinted from Humanism as a Way of Life. Part one of a series.
Ordinary Work
Author Michael Horton says,
“Ordinary” has to be one of the loneliest words in our vocabulary today. . . . Who wants to be that ordinary person who lives in an ordinary town, is a member of an ordinary church, and has ordinary friends and works an ordinary job? Our life has to count! We have to leave our mark, have a legacy, and make a difference. . . . We have to live up to our Facebook profile.
Have you ever felt this temptation to belittle ordinary, quiet, neighbor-serving pursuits, or heard the cultural voices telling you that ordinary work, well done, is not enough?
C S Lewis, in his war-time talk to a group of Oxford students about the vocation of being a student, contradicts this modern tendency to dismiss the ordinary. “It is clear,” he says,
that Christianity does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities. St. Paul tells people to get on with their jobs. . . . Christianity does not simply replace our natural life and substitute a new one; it is rather a new organization which exploits, to its own supernatural ends, these natural materials. . . . All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not.
So, all work can be good if offered to God. That sounds like a nice holy motive and mode in which to do our work. But what about that basic reality about our work and our vocations – we need a way to make a living! What does our faith tell us about that? Surely the ordinary motive of bringing home the bacon is not worthy to be called a Christian vocation!
In his essay “Christianity and Culture,” as Lewis reflects on how after his conversion to Christ as a young man, he slowly came to the conclusion that it was good and proper for him to be involved in the particular, culture-making job of scholar and professor, he considers this simple matter of making a living:
On earning one’s living I was relieved to note that Christianity, in spite of its revolutionary and apocalyptic elements, can be delightfully humdrum. The Baptist did not give the tax-gatherers and soldiers lectures on the immediate necessity of turning the economic and military system of the ancient world upside down; he told them to obey the moral law – as they had presumably learned it from their mothers and nurses – and sent them back to their jobs. St. Paul advised the Thessalonians to stick to their work (1 Thessalonians 4:11) and not to become busybodies (2 Thessalonians 3:11). The need for money is therefore . . . an innocent, though by no means a splendid, motive for any occupation.
If doing whatever work we’re suited to, even just to make a living, can be affirmed on Scriptural grounds, then why do we as Christians have such trouble finding a spiritual dimension in our work? Why do we find it so hard to think of ordinary work as a primary and indeed holy way we can love our neighbor and even God himself?
And what temptations may lie in wait if we dismiss any possible spiritual value of ordinary work?
The Babel Temptation
The Tower of Babel story in Genesis 11 tells us that the people of the world had one language and a common speech. And they decided to build a city the likes of which had never been seen, with “a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves.” The Lord saw this going on and decided to “confuse their language,” to put a halt to their self-aggrandizing work.
Whatever is going on in this text, the image of the Tower of Babel has been used ever since to stand for people who, through their work, are trying to make a big splash in the world—or as we say it, “make a name for themselves”; and the result of this, confusion, is taken to indicate that this was a bad impulse, and that God is not entirely excited by this impulse. . .
In our earthly work, we are faced with temptations to various kinds of selfish ambition—as symbolized in the story of the Tower of Babel. It may be significant that the result of the people’s self-aggrandizing motives in that story is confusion and dispersion—it may thus stand for the ways that self-aggrandizing motives in our work lives can turn us into forces for chaos rather than forces for the kingdom.
So I want to ask—how can we experience work not as a platform on which to “make a name for ourselves,” but instead, according to a longstanding Christian understanding of vocation, as a place of service to neighbor and God—and indeed, as unlikely as this may be seen, as something joy-giving both for others and for ourselves?
Work as Arena for Discipleship
Some estimates suggest that the average American will spend 100,000 of our waking hours in working for a paycheck. Over the past few decades, a whole movement has arisen to help Christians understand how to find God-given vocational identities and motivations in that work.
One of the important observations I’ve learned from the faith-and-work movement is this: if we spend such a high percentage of our waking hours at work, then work must be an important arena of discipleship for us. Though our time in church is crucial, and our whole lives must in a real sense be grounded in worship, church is not the primary arena of our growth as Christians, since we spend at most a few hours a week here. No, that Christian growth has got to happen to a great degree in the arena of our work.
Ordinary work is and must be the place where the rubber meets the road in our faith—where growth in holiness must take place—progress in sanctification. How we approach our work will determine, in large part, what kind of Christian, and what kind of human being, we will become. And this process won’t be easy. Just as in the Roman arenas where the gladiators fought, we’re going to experience conflict, and very likely some pain as well.
The Green Room 