Dear Friends in Christ,
As we return from summertime to our regular work schedules, an essay that Ananda K. Coomaraswamy wrote many years ago comes to mind. In this article, Coomaraswamy grieves over the fact that for modern folk work has become exclusively about money. We work in order to pay the rent. But, he fears, we have lost our sense of vocation, where work is about who we are and want to be as persons. He says that modern people “play” to be happy, but they no longer think of work as a route to happiness and self-fulfillment. This is very sad, and, according to Coomaraswamy, “in this respect (our civilization) is notably inferior to even the most primitive of savage societies with which it can be contrasted.”
I think there are many at CTS who have been quite fortunate in this regard. We have many people who find real personal fulfillment in their work. I am one of these lucky people. But I think we need to recognize that there is another subset among us, and especially in society at large, that is not so fortunate. This terrible recession has made this even worse–people feel lucky to have any work at all. Millions of people put up with work that is not only not fulfilling, but also downright alienating, even degrading. They do work they hate to keep a roof over their heads and to feed their families.
Martin Luther also worried about these things. He stood at the beginning of our capitalist or “mercantile” era, where people were being required to do work they found disconnected from their lives, during the Industrial Revolution things got much worse and people began to feel an almost total disconnect between work and meaningful life. Luther urged people to look for a vocation, by which he meant us to ask “What is God calling me to do with my life? How can I serve God and neighbor in my work?”
We live in a world in crisis. The old economic, political, cultural, religious, and social paradigms are no longer working. The climate crisis all by itself is a wake-up call to rethink how we are going about our lives. I am hoping that we will respond to these multiple crises by looking to Luther’s concept of vocation. What is God calling us to do to address the needs of the human race in the 21st century, which must be in sync with the needs of the planet?
For us as Christians, this has to mean to rethink religion so it can assist in a revaluation of human life right down to our spiritual foundations. As you know from countless sermons over the years, I fear that institutional Christianity is too stuck in old formulas and old paradigms to be a real help so far. This is not to say that there are not exciting things going on in churches or in individual Christian thinkers, there are, but it is still way too much of a minority report and it tends to be too remedial. We try to help the suffering with our charity. This is important and great, but I think we have a far greater vocation: to be places of new vision for human life based on the love ethic of Jesus. We revere our Christian past–the apostolic era, the creedal period, the age of reform–but now it is time for us to be apostolic, for us to be saying what humans believe in a new age, for us to reform church and society again.
I hope you love your work. I hope it is a way for you to serve God and your neighbor and to find personal fulfillment as well. But I also want you too know that, as a member of CTS, you have another vocation. You and I together are tasked by our Lord to make this congregation a place of ferment for the spirit, a place where new yeast is being added to the human loaf. Our task is huge: what does it mean to be human beings in a new time? How can we, as humans, respond creatively and purposefully and joyfully to meet the needs of the world? The Church of the past gives us a foundation, but we must build for the future. This is the Great Work. The call of God goes forth. I pray that we at CS, in the Metro Synod, in the ELCA, will hear the call and join with people of every faith to dream again, as Joel promised, so that the world can be renewed.
Yours in Christ,
–Pastor Bastien
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