Some people tell the same jokes over and over. As a minister, I hear one particular
joke over and over. At some point,
you’ve probably made this joke.
I’ve heard it so many times I keep count, and have now heard it 17,684 times.
If I begin the joke, you can probably finish it – I sure wish I only worked…
…one day a week.
People seem to
enjoy joking that ministers only work one day a week (but if we work one minute
overtime on that day we hear about it!).
And though a few people might think there is only one day a week that ministers
work, the majority of people understand that there is much more to vocational
ministry than what happens on Sunday.
That being said, there are still many misconceptions about what
ministers do with their time. I
once had a young man come into my office and ask, I know what you do on Sunday, but what in the world do you do the rest
of the week?
It is also fair to say that many ministers fail
to understand what life is like in the workplace, especially in our modern age,
when so much change has taken place. I’m in my fourth decade of ministry, so I haven’t worked a
“real” job since I was in my 20s, with the exception of some experience gained
as Tanya and I had a small business of our own for some years. I understand that I live in a bubble
that is different from what many of you live in every day as you go to work and
deal with all the various issues that arise from being a member of the
marketplace of employment. I do know, however, that life in the workplace is
neither simple nor easy. It is,
among many things, competitive, demanding, stressful, and kind of crazy.
As we continue
our series of messages about Voices of
Faith, this week our topic is Voices
of Faith: In the Marketplace. Our Scripture text is from the book of
Acts and tells us of a time when Paul had traveled to the city of Athens. While in Athens, Paul went to the
marketplace, where he began to debate theological matters with those who had
gathered there. The ancient Greeks
loved to debate ideas, and that debate often took place in the marketplace,
where not only goods and services were exchanged, but also ideas. It is from this setting that we get our
term marketplace of ideas.
Listen to this
morning’s Scripture text from Acts 17:16-23 –
16 While Paul was waiting for them in
Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.
17 So he reasoned in the synagogue with
both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with
those who happened to be there.
18 A group of Epicurean and Stoic
philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this
babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign
gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and
the resurrection.
19 Then they took him and brought him to a
meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new
teaching is that you are presenting?
20 You are bringing some strange ideas to
our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.”
21 (All the Athenians and the foreigners
who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening
to the latest ideas.)
22 Paul then stood up in the meeting of the
Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very
religious.
23 For as I walked around and looked
carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this
inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you
worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.
1.
Allow your work to be a calling.
It’s very much
worth noting, I think, that the early church was led by people who were not at
all like me, in that they were not vocational ministers. They did not “do” minstry for a
living. They were not educated in
colleges and seminaries, they did not have libraries of helpful resources, and
they did not have conferences and workshops to attend that helped them to understand
how to do their work.
Peter and some
of the other disciples made their living as fishermen. Matthew was a tax collector. Does anyone know what Paul did for a
living? He was a tentmaker (Acts
18:3). Paul took no financial
support for himself as he conducted his ministry, While he wrote in I Corinthians 9:1-18 that it would be
perfectly proper for him to earn a living from his ministry work, he chose not
to do so, and in numerous passages he wrote of the fact that he supported not
only himself, but others as well (Acts 20:34 that these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my
companions. In I Corinthians
4:12 he again affirms that we work hard
with our own hands. In I Thessalonians 2:9 he writes, surely you remember, brothers, our toil and hardship; we worked night
and day in order not to be a burden to anyone while we preached the gospel of
God to you. And, in II
Thessalonians 3:7-9 he writes, for you
yourselves know how you ought to follow our example. We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat
anyone’s food without paying for it.
On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so that
we would not be a burden to any of you.
We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in
order to make ourselves a model for you to follow).
For Paul, his
work was a calling, and nothing stood between him and that calling. Whether or not his words were received
joyfully, or rejected with scorn, Paul continued his work and ministry without
hesitation. For the early
disciples, their work was a part of their calling. It was not only a means to support themselves and their
families; it also provided opportunities to interact with people and to
integrate the work of God’s kingdom with the work of their vocations.
I’m going to
assume that not everyone sees their work as a part of God’s calling, but it
is. It’s not just vocational
ministers, such as myself, who are called by God; every person has the call of
God upon their lives. We are part
of a church that believes very strongly in the idea of the priesthood of all belivers.
Every believer is, in a very real way, a minister, not just those who
are offocially set aside for the work of ministry.
Trust me, the
world does not need everyone to be a vocational minister. We need them, yes, but we need
teachers, and doctors, and factory workers, and electricians, and plumbers, and
bankers, and real estate agents, and farmers who see their work as a calling of
God. When I interact with people,
whatever I say, the reaction is often well,
he’s a minister, that’s what he’s supposed to say, and it may or may not be
heard. But when one person in the
marketplace talks to another person in the marketplace, it is heard. If one teacher tells another teacher
about the importance of their faith, that other teacher hears it in a way they
simply don’t hear from someone like me.
That’s why it’s so important to understand that if you want someone to
talk to a friend, family member, or coworker about the importance of faith, I’m
probably not the best person to do that – you are. Your voice in important in the marketplace, and is, most
likely, heard in a way that mine is not.
2. The marketplace is not
only in need of faith, it is often looking for faith.
We live in a day and age when we are often presented with false
equivalencies. A false equivalency
presents something as a fact, when indeed it is not. An example would be the idea that faith and science is
incompatible. Often presented as a
fundamental truth by skeptics, it is simply not true. Also not true is the oft-presented idea that faith and the
marketplace are incompatible, when, in fact, the marketplace is not only
receptive to faith, it is often looking
for faith.
In March, Harvard University hosted a group of scholars who
participated in a meeting with the title of From
Wall Street to Main Street: The Search for a New Moral Compass for the New
Economy. The panelists involved
in the meeting came to the agreement that religious communities need to be
actively engaged in shaping both the nation’s economic reform policies as well
as its moral direction.
The World Bank has joined with a number of religious leaders to
bring their expertise on market and faith values to an effort to eradicate
extreme poverty by the year 2030.
These are but two examples of the ways in which the marketplace is
reaching out to faith to help find solutions to some of the most pressing
problems of our day. In spite of
the division that some people want to believe exists between faith and the
marketplace, the two can work together very effectively together, and often
do. Because we live in an era
where there seem to be so many lines of division drawn between different
groups, it’s easy to fall for the misnomer that there is, and ought to be, a
division between the marketplace and faith.
Having said that, we must also note that,
3. The marketplace is a great collective
of ideas that sometimes clash with one another.
Paul certainly
had mixed reactions when he spoke about God in the marketplace. Sometimes, he was very well received,
while at other times, he was jeered, run out of town, and even beaten and
arrested. Still, Paul
persevered. One certainly has to
give Paul an A+ for perseverance and diligence!
I think, in our present political and social context, it is
impossible to talk about the marketplace without speaking to one of the most
contentious debates in a long time, and that is the debate over religious
freedom and the marketplace, specifically the debate over whether or not
businesses ought to have legal protection if they choose to reject business
from individuals with whom they disagree. We could spend a lot of time on this topic, and we don’t all
have the same point of view – and I respect your right to your view whether or
not it is the same as mine.
But before I tell you what I think, let me say this: I think there is more grey than there
is black and white in most issues.
I wish I could see more issues in terms of black and white, but I mostly
see grey, and it’s because I think most issues are more complicated than we
make them out to be.
I have, for instance, a cell phone in my pocket. Like most of my electronics, it was
manufactured largely in China.
Last week, in my message about persecution, I talked about what
believers in China face, in terms of harassment and persecution. Recently, the president of China gave a
major speech in which he reaffirmed the Chinese Communist Party’s commitment to
atheism and signaled that there are increasingly difficult times ahead for
Chinese believers (http://time.com/4306179/china-religion-freedom-xi-jinping-muslim-christian-xinjiang-buddhist-tibet/). There was also a tragic example
recently of the manner in which the Chinese government continues to destroy
churches. A government-backed firm
bulldozed a church, and when the pastor and his wife attempted to stop that action,
the bulldozer operator ran over them, burying them under dirt. The pastor was able to dig himself out
of the dirt but could not save his wife, who suffocated to death (http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2016/04/19/wife-of-chinese-church-leader-reportedly-buried-alive-and-killed-after-protesting-churchs-demolition/). The question then becomes, should I use
a product, sold by an American company, but manufactured in China? I am spending money on a product that
helps to support a government that practices religious persecution and has a
terrible record on human rights. I
am, as a friend reminds me of us all, complicit in things that I neither want
to be, or should be, complicit in.
Having said that, we live in a nation very different from China,
thankfully, when it comes to human rights and the freedom of religion (but I
still must consider how I spend my money, certainly when that money supports
things with which I do not agree, such as the persecution of believers in other
parts of the world). So allow me
to offer a basic summation of what I believe, and it is this question: why would we want to do anything in the
marketplace other than treat people with kindness and love, whether or not we
agree with them about who they are, how they live, and what they believe? To be kind and loving to another human
being does not mean you have to violate your
conscience and beliefs, even if a political or religious leader is trying to
convince you that you are, in fact, violating your conscience and beliefs.
To read the gospels is to find Jesus in conflict with religious
leaders because of his associations with people; he associated with people that
the religious leaders and the pious of the day believed he should shun. I take one simple lesson from that and
it is this – if we do not offend someone by our willingness to associate with
others and to treat them with love and kindness we are missing an opportunity
to associate ourselves with Jesus in one of the most fundamental ways in which
he lived. As people of faith, if
we are going to have a voice in the marketplace, that is certainly what we
ought to be speaking.
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