I would like to speak about work.

It is not a subject that often enters the discourse of the church at worship This includes denominations like my own which are continuing to attract new adherents of all ages but are doing it particularly by offering solace and meaning in a fractured world. But for most of us the primary focus of this world is the private life of the individual and perhaps the community of faithful. Sometimes the challenge of a hurting neighbourhood is presented to the more mature in the faith, but rarely the WORLD OF WORK.

William Diehl, an American Lutheran business executive has written a book called "Thank God, It's Monday" ¹  in which he bemoans the fact that what is said and done on Sunday seems to have little connection with the world of daily work on Monday. He feels short changed, and in the years since this first cry of pain, he has discovered many others in the church who feel their pastors and programs have nothing to say to issues looming large in their working lives.

Baptists, for example, have had a tradition of strong lay leadership, but we have emphasised leadership within the church, not so much in the community. One Australian Baptist theologian, George Peck ²,  now resident in the U S has poignantly described his father's long years of service in the coal mines at Cessnock in N. S. W. and his contribution to mine procedures and safety; but concludes that his father and his church considered his contribution as a deacon in the local church of more significance that his contribution either to coal production or to the conditions under which the miners worked.

Bruce Wilson suggests in his "Can God survive in Australia?" that Australians believe that the true self only emerges outside the factory gates, when we are free agents, not under the control of a boss or a timetable. Authentic life begins in the family and leisure time, and so spirituality is seen as part of this life of the 'real' self; not the 'work' self.
Or to pick up on Conway's expression, in this land of the long weekend, religion is most significant in the part of our life we share with family and mates.

I have called this address "Spirituality at work" - a deliberately ambiguous expression. Firstly, because I want to us to hear again the call of Jesus in the public sphere of our lives-the arena of work - as well as in the private sphere. And because this requires us to encourage in those we are responsible for an ACTIVE, not a PASSIVE SPIRITUALITY that is not afraid to tackle the difficult issues that the secular world throws at us.

I want to start with Jesus' parable of the three servants;

THE PARABLE
In the passage of history this story has often been called the -Parable of the 'talents', and we have come to hear 5000,2000, 1000 'talents' not as a large weight of silver, but as abilities and skills. And then in line with our privatising of faith, we go on to talk about using our talents in the service of the church.
Jesus was first of all applying the parable to the bringing in of the Kingdom. Work for it, he says, do not be satisfied with the status quo represented by the Scribes and Pharisees.

We in our desire to have folk recognise their God-given abilities and Holy Spirit endowed gifts for service, and consistent with the privatising tendency of our age, use it to focus on the private sphere. And Jesus' parable about what God expects from us in the work of the Kingdom includes of course the call to a life of personal discipleship.

But that discipleship includes the world of work and that is our focus today. This is equally a parable about discipleship in the public sphere of work.

To those to whom an enormous amount (Jesus uses his usual hyperbole to make the point) has been entrusted, much is expected. Work hard, he says. And the reward for hard work will not be a well endowed retirement or even a justified pension, but more work!
However, the attention of the parable is on the third servant, the useless one. In fact he is labelled more than useless - wicked. His Sin is one of omission. He refused to work for the master.
Burying silver in the ground was not a purely reckless procedure as it would be for us. Rather it was laziness, or at very least, over caution. It was a normal practice to bury your valuables to preserve wealth in a country frequently over run by invaders and where there were no banks in the sense we know them as secure institutions.

THE WARNING OF THE PARABLE IS FOR THOSE WHO THINK THEY CANNOT ACHIEVE VERY MUCH! Neither how little we have to give nor how demanding the master are suitable excuses for not working for the Kingdom.

BUT WHAT IS WORK?
In emphasising that this challenge of Jesus to labour for the Kingdom applies also to the world of work, I am using a very wide definition of work. It is that sphere of activity beyond the purely personal and private. It is where we contribute to others.

These are problems in speaking about 'work' as it is narrowly construed -activity recompensed by payment. Not all of us have it!
Some don't want it, but for most, its absence leads to a loss of identity and participation in normal community life.

Three kinds of non-workers in the restricted sense come to mind:
1) Some are full time parents by choice and so not in the workforce. When you do not work, the simple getting to know you query "what do you do?" can be (the) end of a beautiful conversation!
2) Retired folk and invalids suffer then same stigma. I remember once as a former town planner (I was full time mothering) having to introduce to a national conference a man who had been the Secretary of the federal department of Social Security. Here was a former town planner introducing a former top public servant - what a pair of has beens! It said something about the values of our society that we both were still being defined by our previous work.
3) And of course, in a society where many people are unemployed for structural reasons, not working can imply failure as well as loss of identity and self respect. In the early days of the Zadok Institute for Christianity and Society we found ourselves, in order to not blame the victims, too easily accepting that it was O. K. to be unemployed for life. Some people just had to be - that was the nature of our changing society - so the argument went. It would have been an easier philosophical position to take but a fresh examination of what the Scriptures say about the nature of God and of human identity and purpose, convinced us that we needed to affirm the God-given right of all people created in God's image to make a useful contribution to society. The problem really was our narrow definition of work, in particular of what was productive in society. Work certainly shouldn't be confined to what is recognised by a pay packet at the end of the week.

So I am using here a definition of work closer to the root meaning of OCCUPATION - WHAT OCCUPIES OUR TIME.
This is much more helpful pastorally.
We all have an occupation - what we do beyond the minimal necessities of eating and sleeping and looking after ourselves. So the home maker, the full time parent, the neighbourhood resource person, the care giver, the church worker , the community volunteer, all have an occupation if it is undertaken intentionally and with a sense of call.

Our Scriptural foundation for this is in Genesis 1,2, the creation mandate. God worked and enjoyed the results of the labour. Then God entrusted the creation to us as agents. Genesis 2 reiterates this mandate - people are to share the task of maintaining the wonderful creation and enjoy it together. Only with the coming of self-seeking autonomy and defiance of the Creator did work become a burden. Work as unfulfilling toil is the result of disruption in the Creation. Genesis 3 (it) is not normative. It is descriptive of a dysfunctional world affected by sin.

This theme of God the worker in whose image we are made has been illustrated by Robert Banks. ³,  In the Old Testament imagery God is potter, metalworker, garment maker, shepherd, architect and many more. We are invited to join this creating God and act as agents in this world of work.

BUT IF WORK IS GOOD. EVEN THOUGH CORRUPTED, HOW
THEN DO WE WORK FOR THE KINGDOM?
The question is
DO WE WORK TO LIVE?
Work is good and necessary. In fact our desire should be for all people to have more than a subsistence level of support as that they can enjoy the other good things of God's creation - leisure, beauty, family life.

DO WE LIVE TO WORK?
This is how many pursuing a career think of work and it has often given work a bad press. Rest and enjoyment can be very easily pushed out on the climb to the top. Consider the indispensability principle: ⁴  Can someone else replace me? (For example, in my marriage, with my children, in a position of responsibility in the community or firm?) If not, that is my first priority in the juggling act of responsibilities.

DO WE WORK TO SERVE?
This is Jesus' call to all of us through this parable and it applies in all the dimensions of life. Whatever our occupation, we are called to serve in the way the Master did.

WHAT SHOULD THIS WORK IN THE KINGDOM LOOK LIKE?
In other words: WHAT 1S SPIRITUALITY AT WORK?

1) Our relationship to God rests on grace alone, not on our hard work
- our only starting point.

2) Working Christianly includes the traditional concerns about ETHICAL BEHAVIOUR, but it is more than that. The recent interest in the character of the executive as well as his or her efficiency is to be commended. The classical virtues are again a subject for radio programs and public debate. But if spirituality were restricted to this we would be again contracting it primarily to the private sphere.

3) Spirituality at work must include A SENSE OF CALL to the task of participating creatively in the maintenance of God's world as agents of the Creator. We are to be active in the place where God has placed us. William Diehl in his "In search of faithfulness" describes the results of interviews with 174 Lutheran CEO's in the US. His 8 indicators of maturity and effectiveness - were highest in those with a sense of call.

We theologians and ministers have stolen the idea of call and confined it to ourselves. We need to rediscover with Luther the call to a whole range of occupations - to be a father or mother, a carpenter, a milk-maid.

If the focus of Jesus' story is on grasping the nettle and getting on with the task despite the risks, the question still remains, how do I know how to make 5000 coins into 10,000 or 2000 into 4000?

WHERE TO WORK, what should be our occupation at this point in our lives is a question for many, not just our young people. We have so many opportunities to change course, to refit the contours of our lives. This is not the time to explore the process of hearing the call. Let me offer just two quotations that apply to all seeking to do God's work:

In the Californian psychological language of Lloyd John Oglvie ⁵:
"What difference would it make in your life if you could see what God had in mind when he created you?"

And from Frederick Buechner in more traditional terms:
"'The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet." ⁶

The work to which I am called is at the conjunction of WHO I AM, GOD'S PURPOSES, AND OTHERS' NEED.

4) (And now for the crux of the matter): We are called in our work to LOVE LIKE JESUS, with AGAPE love.
But AGAPE love in the world of work is ambiguous. Let me give one example. Jesus describes in another parable the operating principle of the Kingdom - God's grace is like an employer who pays all workers the same
whether they have worked one hour at the end of the day or laboured for the whole 12 through the heat of the sun. Is that the principle that applies in the real world? Or to change the metaphor slightly, should the student who submits only one assignment receive in grace the same mark as the one who completes all expectations? Or if I gave way in the supermarket queue to all those who came after me looking tired and harassed, I would still be there at the end of the day waiting to be served.

It is not an easy task to work creatively in the tension between AGAPE love and worldly existence. It is, I believe why most of us prefer to see spirituality operating only in the private sphere. There are resistances to grace. There are also resistances to letting God challenge us about discipleship in the widest possible sense. We would rather not have to think how to live Christianly Monday to Friday if Sunday religion is already stretching us

Using this understanding (from Neibuhr) of the Christian in the world as a tension between love and worldly existence, Benne suggests a concept of "FITTING ACTION". This takes seriously the world AND stretches towards what AGAPE love requires.
"This calls for aiming at the FITTING ACTION - that which takes seriously what the world requires AND yet stretches toward what AGAPE requires. The deed emerges somewhere on the continuum between complete closure and complete openness. It is the creative work of the Christian person in the midst of the ambiguities of the world. It qualifies and enriches worldly morality." ⁷ .

Such fitting action includes structural concerns for justice as well as the individual acts of the Christian.

THE CHALLENGE FOR US HERE TODAY

1) GOD THE WORKER - WE ARE WORKERS TOO
(This includes those who are students - the work of studying is God-given and worthy in itself, not just as a means to a ministry which we are impatient to embrace.)

2) Those of us with a strong sense of call to ministry must also find ways to AFFIRM THE CALL of those whose occupations are not in the church but in the community.
As Luther said in his vigorous style: the milk-maid does more good for the
Kingdom of God than the monk in his cell!.

3) So preparation for ministry must include TRAINING PASTORS TO BE EQUIPPERS, not just performers and preachers. How to be God's people in their public occupation as well as in the private sphere of life must be part of what we teach our congregations.

3) The OFFERING OF THEOLOGY TO THOSE TRAINING FOR OTHER OCCUPATIONS is the great Murdoch advantage. We can help those at the other coal faces think Christianly about the work they will be doing. Our units to be taken as electives by these other students need to be fresh and relevant to the work outside the church program, not just watered down expectations of (the) what is offered to the theological 'specialists'.

4) Most of all, we have a responsibility to help them and our congregations work through what is AGAPE LOVE IN FITTING ACTION. We theologians and pastors won't be able to do thins by being the experts. We need to listen to those at the coal face and help them think through the issues, perhaps in the company of others facing similar situations. We need to be listeners in the workplace and then consultant theologians to those working with the REAL issues of life.

AND SO A PRAYER FOR YOU ALL IN THIS TASK:
I pray that out of His glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge --that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:l6-19 (NIV)

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