Finding God in Our Work(2011Sep11)

Series: Thank God It’s Monday! M2 11 09 11
Speakers: Ken Shigematsu and Betty M
Title: Finding God in Our Work
Text: Colossians 3:23-24
BIG IDEA: We can find God in our work as we take time for Sabbath, pray and remember the Cross.

INTRODUCTION
The founder of McDonalds, Ray Kroc, was asked by a reporter about his priorities. "I believe in God, my family, and McDonald's," he said. Then he added, "When I get to the office, I reverse the order." Though he was likely speaking partly tongue in cheek, when people enter their work world their stated priorities often change and they become unconscious of God.
But does that have to be the case?
Do we need to compartmentalize our work or school life from the rest of our life?
Do we need to forget God or our family or what’s most important to us when we’re at work or school?
As we alluded to last week as we began our series on work, Thank God It’s Monday, because of sin and the radioactive effects of sin in our world, thorns and thistles grow from the ground and we experience frustration in our work: broken photo-copiers, computer servers that break down, office politics, gossip… but work itself is also a gift to us, a gift that was present in the Garden of Eden before Adam and Eve sinned and fell away from God.
And work can also serve as a primary place where we grow in our relationship with God.
Dallas Willard, respected author on the spiritual life, would say that the primary place of our spiritual formation is not in our church or small groups or 15 minutes of reading the Bible and praying through practicing the presence, but our work place or school or the work you do at home changing diapers.

In his book The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard says (this is a paraphrase),

If we restrict our discipleship (our becoming more like Jesus) to special religious times, the majority of our waking hours will be isolated from the conscious presence of God in our lives. To not find your job to be the primary place of discipleship is to automatically exclude a major part, if not the most, of your waking hours from life with him. The gospel turns your work into a spiritual formation training center.

As I’ve said before, work is not just the place where we get things done, but a place where God gets us done.

How does discipleship or growing more like Jesus happen in our work or school?
How does work become, not only a meaningful part of our lives, but a significant part of our spiritual lives or our life with God?
Please turn to Colossians 3:23-24.
The apostle Paul says:
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.
How do we become people like this--people who work with all our heart, as working for the Lord and not for human masters?
One of the ways that we can become people who work with all our heart as we work and do our work unto God, ironically, is by not working… by learning to do what I hope we are doing today---taking Sabbath, taking a 24-hour period which ideally includes the practice of not working: unplugging from our computers and electronic gadgets, worshipping together in community, taking time for rest, recovery, and play.
I know we talked about Sabbath as a gateway to rest and worship, but Sabbath is also a gateway to work.
“Sabbath does as much for your other six days of work as it does for your one-day of worship,” says long time pastor and writer Eugene Peterson. (2X)
Sabbath is as important to our work as it is to worship. Without Sabbath, we will find work grinding us down. By honouring Sabbath we will have renewed energy for the other six days.
After a sermon series on the Sabbath a few years ago, Caitlyn, a university student who has been part of our community, approached me glowing and said, “For the first in my life I have started taking a 24-hour Sabbath. I feel great. I used to procrastinate. Now I find I can really focus on my studies. I have this surplus energy now, so I have decided to do some volunteer work on campus.”
Not only does Sabbath give us renewed energy for the work that we face, Sabbath also enables us to reflect on the meaning of our life and work. The rabbis taught that the Sabbath was given to us to contemplate the meaning of our work and our life beyond work. The rabbis observed that if we had one day of rest in seven, or 3640 days in seven years, that we have ten years of Sabbath rest in a lifetime which would help us reflect on the meaning of our life and the work that we do, as well.
So through Sabbath, unlike Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald's, we can become conscious about God during our other six days. By taking Sabbath we can on the one hand avoid overworking, but when we do work we can work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.
Another way we can become conscious of God as we work is by seeing our work as prayer.
The ancient monks viewed their everyday work as a form of prayer. They really sought to live out Saint Paul’s admonition in 1 Thessalonians 5:17 to pray continually, and literally tried to pray without ceasing. The Desert Father John Cassian encouraged the brothers under his care to engage in simple manual labour, such as weaving baskets in a cave, so that it was possible to engage in constant prayer while they were working. But this proved to be exhausting for most monks. Even Cassian would later admit that this method was harder than he expected.
In contrast, St. Benedict who lived in the 6th century had a slightly different perspective on how we pray in our work. As part of my graduate studies, I have been reading the rule of Benedict, and many have summarized Benedict’s approach to work with the famous dictum in Latin: “to work is to pray.” For Benedict, work, whether he and monks were farming, maintaining the buildings, preparing meals in the kitchen, scrubbing floors, in and of itself had value as a devotional act toward God and didn’t require literal unceasing prayers to be offered at the same time. Benedict believed that work done for the purpose of glorifying God was prayer, in and of itself.
Part of the way that his monks began to see their work as prayer was by having a rhythm of prayer throughout their day. This rhythm of prayer made them more conscious of God in their everyday work of harvesting the crops, repairing the roof of the monastery, placing books on the shelves of the library.
Unlike Benedictine monks, we are not going to be able to pause, in all likelihood, 5 or 7 times a day to engage in formal prayer. But, we can pray. We can have rhythms of prayer in our day that make us more conscious of God as we work, it can help us work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.
When I completed my undergraduate degree, I began working in my first corporate job with the Sony Corporation in Tokyo. After a simple breakfast of eggs and tofu, I would slip into my uniform---a gray or navy suit, and leave my apartment at about 7:00 am and catch the subway downtown. I would spend the day teaching English, Western culture and business protocols to salary-men, i.e., corporate soldiers, some of whom were being dispatched to North America or Europe. I would arrive home at about 11:10 pm, sometimes later if I was invited to socialize at a bar with some salary-men. Although I was making far more money than I had ever made before, I was unhappy and felt like my soul was withering.
Although I had never heard of monastic rhythms of life or rules of life, clumsily I began to throw one together out of sheer desperation more than anything else. I made a decision to not work on weekends, to have a kind of Sabbath, got involved in a small local church about a ten-minute walk from my apartment. And during my morning commute, although I was nodding off and half asleep, I would spend some time praying and offering my workday to God.
That rhythm of praying in the morning and offering my day to God slowly changed the way I worked. Over time, I began to focus less on the money I was making and my professional advancement, and came to see that I was doing my work not just for a company, but for God.
I had this energy, this motivation to do well, not just to advance my career, but to honour my Maker, I was able to work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.
After a couple of years working for the company, I was entering a time of change in my life, as I was preparing to go to Boston to go to divinity school. As I was cleaning out my desk getting ready to leave, my manager said, “If things don’t work out for you at school or in the ministry, we’d love you to come back. You would always a job here.” One of my younger sisters was visiting me in Tokyo at the time, and she had a chance to briefly talk with my manager Sasaki-san one-on-one. Afterwards, my younger sister said, “Your manager said you are his best guy and he is really going to miss you.”
I hadn’t been working just for a company, just for my career advancement, but working for the Lord, not for human masters.
And if we see our work life as a prayer, as an offering to God, and bring the same kind of discipline, energy and devotion to our work that we would to our relationship with God, we may not be the number one person in the company. We may not make CEO or partner. That kind of worldly success isn’t that important to God. But we will work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.
Keeping Sabbath rhythms will help prevent us from overworking. A rhythm of prayer, will help us see our work as prayer, as an offering to God. When this happens we can work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.
Brother Alphonsus was a doorkeeper in the seventeenth century at a Jesuit College in Majorca, Spain. Each time someone knocked that the door he would run toward the door and say, “I am coming, Lord!” This practice reminded him to treat each person with as much respect as if it were Jesus himself at the door.
A man named Howard I met while in seminary sat in a plane that was delayed for take off. After a long wait, the passengers became more and more irritated. Howard noticed how gracious one of the flight attendants was as she spoke with the passengers. After the plane finally took off, he told the flight attendant how amazed he was at her poise and self-control, and said he wanted to write a letter of commendation for her to the airline. The flight attendant replied that she didn't work for the airline company, but for Jesus Christ. She said that just before going to work she and her husband pray together that she would do her work for Christ.
Working for Christ makes a difference and helps us work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.
Last week, we heard from Leighton Cantrill who talked about how he experienced a sense of working for God as he worked as a day laborer on a construction site building houses.
At this time I am going to invite Betty M to come and share. Betty M is a member of our community and sits on the Board of Elders here. It has been a real gift to have her at Tenth. She has also served a key role for Olympic business development for a financial services company during and in the lead-up time to the Olympics. You may have seen her featured in the newspapers in that role.

I interview Betty


So we can become people who are conscious of God in our work, who work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters: by honoring Sabbath, having some kind of rhythm of prayer, by meditating on Jesus Christ and his work for us. We do can this as we prayerfully read the Gospels, or as we celebrate the Lord’s Supper:
When we honor Sabbath, pray and remember what Christ did for us, we can become conscious of God. We can work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.
There is a church here on the West Coast where I know some of the pastors.
One of the pastors is named Kevin Kim.
Listen to part of Kevin’s story:
“I remember my first job. When I was in high school I worked cleaning a motel with my parents, and I hated it! We had to start early every day, around 7:00 in the morning, and we had to clean around 20 rooms. My mom would go in and scrub the toilets and the bathtub. My job was to vacuum. I remember being so resentful about having to work with my mom, because none of my other friends had to work, and I wanted to be hanging out with them.

The last thing I wanted was to clean up someone else's mess with my mom, and my mom knew this, so whenever she could, she let me off the hook, and she would do the extra work. But there were times when she needed help, and she would ask me, and I would come with an attitude. I’d come begrudgingly… But when I was in college, something changed.

My mom thought I needed a car, and so she saved up some money to buy me one. We shopped around and found this beautiful used '89 black Acura Integra. It was stick shift and a hatchback. It had plastic, chrome rims, and it was $3,300. I knew our financial situation. I knew this was an incredible sacrifice on my mom's part, and so I was thankful. I was psyched about the car.

I sat there beaming in the seat, thinking, Man, I got my ride. And as we were finalizing the sale at that used car dealership and the salesman left to go get some paperwork, my mom reached over and grabbed my hand. She had tears in her eyes, and she said to me, ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t buy you a nicer car.’

As a kid, you always know your parents love you, but you just don't realize how much love and sacrifice there is behind the scenes, and I got a glimpse of it that day. I never looked at my work the same way again; it changed my perspective. From that point on, I looked for ways to help out at the motel. I’d ask my mom what I could do for her, because it wasn’t just a job anymore. The work wasn't just a job; it was a way for me to express my love and gratitude in response to my mom's sacrificial love to me.”

If you understand the gospel, if you get a glimpse of the sacrificial love of Christ, it will change and transform your job, because it won't just be a job or a paycheck or climbing a ladder. It will be a way for you to express our love and gratitude to a God who loves you enough to die for you.

Our work will be an avenue of worship. Your place of work, whether you’re working as a student or at a job or at home, will be a place of worship, where you work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.

When we know that Jesus Christ died as a sacrifice for us, died for us so that we might live, when we know how he literally worked to death for us to give us rest, to give us Sabbath in our souls, we can work for Christ while we work, and finally when we know that we will receive a reward for our work… Paul says…we can work with all our heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters… since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving.
The greatest reward we can receive in our work is not a huge salary or a prestigious job title, but a reward from Christ. He is the greatest person for whom anyone can work and he will reward those who work for him: this text speaks of an inheritance, other texts speak about a crown of life, but our greatest reward will be the knowledge that we are did our work for Jesus and hearing him say, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
When we know we are working for him, for this, we can work with all our heart, working for the Lord, not for human masters.

Holy Sweat(Sep05,2011)

Series: Thank God It’s Monday M1 (11 09 04)

Ken Shigematsu with Leighton Cantrill

Title: Holy Sweat: Reflecting God in Our Work

Texts: Genesis 1: 1-4, 6, 9, 14, 24; 2:8-15; Matthew 13:55; 1 Corinthians 3:6-7

BIG IDEA: In our work we reflect a God who works.

During the 1960s primaries in the United States a senator named John Kennedy was campaigning. He was standing by a mine shaking hands with the miners. One miner came to him and said, “Is it true that you’re the son of the one of the richest people in the country? Kennedy said, “I guess so.” The man asked, “Is it true that you’ve never really done a day’s work with your hands?” Kennedy nodded his head. Then the miner said, “Let me tell you this. You haven’t missed a thing!”

Many people feel that work, particularly hard manual labor, is a kind of necessary evil—something that people would not choose to do if they didn’t have to.

Many people in white collar jobs can feel the same way about their work.

I had coffee with a friend who told me that when he was a university student he made it his goal to work as a stock broker and then retire when he was forty, or earlier. Now as a stock broker who’s approaching his forties, he says, “With the downturn (in the markets), I likely won’t be able to retire until I’m forty-five… I don’t like work. I’m looking forward to my life beyond work.” People talk about “Freedom 45 or 55,” meaning they hope to able to retire at 45 or 55 from work and be free.

People say, “I live for the weekend…” that is my real life occurs when I’m doing something other than my work.

But does work have to feel like a prison sentence, like some penitentiary where we “do our time” and from which we seek an early escape?

If we’re a typical person, we will spend most of the waking hours of our lives working.
Throughout history, people have usually viewed work as something unpleasant that has to be done.

If you look at the Eastern accounts of creation, like the Enuma Elish there is this great battle of the gods, and Marduk, the king of the victorious group of gods, creates the world from the body of a defeated god. Then the other gods say to Marduk, "Uh, don’t you realize how much maintenance it would take to run this place?” Marduk replies, "I will produce a lowly, primitive creature called Man to do the work."
But how does the living God view work?

Please turn to Genesis 1-2:
In the very first page of Genesis we see God the Father working. God gets his hands dirty creating human beings (soil). He blows into man’s nostrils the very breath of life (Genesis 2:7). Adam literally means “from the earth.” We also see in the opening pages of Scripture God working as a gardener, planting trees, and crops. (shovel) He’s engaged in what we would call blue collar labour.
We also see God working as an engineer designing the universe. He’s involved in what we would call white collar work.
God the Father engages in blue and white collar work. And so does God the Son.
Jesus spent most of his adult life on earth working as a carpenter. We don't know much about Jesus' life between the time he was age twelve and thirty. According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus followed his foster father into his trade as a tekton, which is usually translated "carpenter," but can also be rendered "craftsman." As Jesuit priest James Martin points out tekton may have also been used to refer to what we would today call "a day laborer." This could have meant that Jesus not only worked with wood, but also did day jobs: working on construction sites, hoeing fields, and harvesting crops.
During Jesus’ final three years as a human being on earth he, of course, worked as mentor and a teacher.
Because God only does what is good and because God engages in work—both manual and mental—we can know that work is intrinsically good.
White collar workers can look down on blue collar workers, believing they are employed in an inferior form of labor.
Conversely, blue collar workers can view those of us who with white collar jobs as having never put in a “real day’s work.” Someone spontaneously dropped in on me at home while I was working in the garden. When she saw me down on my knees pulling weeds, she blurted out, “It’s good to see you finally doing some real work!”
According to the Scriptures, we are made in God's image. We re-present in what we do. When we work, we re-present what God is like.
But specifically how do we re-present God?
In Genesis 1:1 we read:
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.
The expression “formless and empty” in Hebrew is tohu wabohu (sounds like a Japanese appetizer.)
It means formless and empty, something chaotic, disordered, something uninhabited and lifeless.
And we read also in verse one that darkness was over the face of the chaotic, primordial, wasteland.
Then we read God said,
“Let there be light,” and there was light and he separated the light from the darkness. (vs. 3)
6 And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” (vs.6)
9 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” (vs. 9)
14 And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years (vs. 14)
24 And God said, “Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.” (vs. 24),
So in these verses we see God separating light from darkness, water from ground, he’s creating order (rule of life).
In creating the stars, the sun, and moon and the land with trees and all kind of plants, he’s creating beauty.
He creates plants and animals and finally us he’s creating life.
Whenever we work and create order, beauty, and life we are re-presenting God.
Let’s take “order,” for example:
When create order, we re-present God.
Sometimes creating order is obvious.
When a carpenter builds the frame of the house, he or she is creating order from wood, steel, and concrete. They are re-presenting God.
When a teacher is teaching, she or he is creating order and coherence in the minds of the students. They re-present God.
When an accountant prepares a tax return for a person or prepares financial statements for company, he or she is creating order with numbers and re-presenting God.
When we bring order from the Tohu wabohu, we re-present God.
When we create beauty, we re-present God.
I was talking to someone recently about the fact that she left her secure well-paying job to become an artist, a photographer. It is not as secure as her previous job, but she loves what she does. She's creating beauty. She is re-presenting God.
A couple weeks ago my wife and I saw my brother Tetsuro act in an outdoor play in the Steveston, called Salmon Row. The play reenacted the experience of Japanese and Chinese immigrants and First Nations people who came to Steveston to fish during Salmon runs in the early part of the 20th century.

The story featured the plight of individuals and families who had immigrated to BC were facing discrimination and struggling to make ends meet as fishermen… and how they had to for low wages as fisherman.

The play retold an important part of our British Columbia history in a beautiful, poignant and poetic way.

If you're an actor or an artist and are creating beauty you are re-presenting God.
When we create life, we we re-present God.
In some cases it's obvious. If you work as a doctor or a nurse you’re supporting life.
Shirley works as a housekeeper at a 250-bed hospital. She says “If we don’t clean with a quality effort, we can’t keep the doctors and nurses in business; we can’t accommodate patients. This place would be closed if we didn’t have housekeeping.” Shirley has “connected the dots” and understands that her work of housekeeping is serving people—literally helping to keep them alive.

Have you “connected the dots” in your work (now think in terms of paid or unpaid work) so you can see how your work brings life?
In some cases it's less obvious, if you work as a farmer growing crops, it's obvious how you are working to support life. But if you work in a factory that creates the boxes for the food (prop) to be packaged it's not as obvious, but it's a necessary part of the process that helps feeds people because there is a time lag between what you do and when it directly benefits people. Look down the line – does your work support life? If so, you are re – presenting God?
(Now, if say you are working as a drug dealer, or you are working in the sex trade (I realize you may be doing this against your will and you may feel trapped), or you are in the gambling industry, as you trace your work forward, while you may say that it seems like my work creates pleasure for people or some entertainment, in the balance if your work seems to bring people more death rather than life, it may that you need to consider the possibility of changing your line of work if you can.)
When we work, we not only re-present God, but with co-create with him as well.
Co-creators with God
In Genesis 2:15 we read, “The LORD God then placed Adam in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Until this point in the history of the world, no shrub had yet appeared on the earth and no plant had yet sprung up, for the LORD God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no one to work the ground (Genesis 2:5, emphasis added).
God can create order, beauty, and life out of nothing, but in his mysterious providence he chose to create through us. According to Genesis, in the garden of Eden there were not certain shrubs and plants because there was no human being to help plant and raise them.
There are certain things in the world that simply wouldn't be in the world if there weren't human beings to create them or co-create them with God.
TESTIMONY: Leighton Cantril
For those of you who don’t know me I am a regular here at Tenth, arriving in the country from Melbourne in March 2010, just after the Olympics. My wife, Sarah, and I came here for the Easter service last year – and just decided to stay!

As those of you who were in the job market in the 6 months following the Olympics know, a combination of seemingly lots of extra people in the marketplace with VANOC or Vancouver 2010 on their resume, and a slump in the amount of available work made it difficult for us to find work in our “regular fields”. We put in much effort and energy put into our job search; however nothing was paying much dividends.

And we were feeling the weight of living on our savings that we had brought from another country.

So I tried my luck with a temp agency called Labour Ready. As I found out, employers call Labour Ready at any time of day and you get work for a half or full day of work. It usually ends up being the hard work that no-one onsite wants to do – lifting, digging, cleaning etc. At the end of the shift you then trek back to the office to pick up your cheque for the day.

So I would wake up in the wee hours, catch public transport, and go and wait in a plain large office filled with enough plastic chairs for about half of those that turned up to sit on, and then everyone else sat on the floor.

The office opens at 6am, you put your name on the available list. I soon learned that if I am going to get up really early for work that I am definitely going to work that day – so may as well make sure I was in line by 5:30 or earlier - whatever it took!

Most days this plan worked, but I recall one day I arrived, and sat from 6 in the morning on the hard floor, one hour, two hours, three hours. Others were getting work,. But they stopped calling people’s names before they made it down the list to me. I left the office around 10:30... pretty discouraged. No work and no money that day.

My first “half day” of work was unloading truckloads of boxes of frozen seafood from New Zealand and ginger from China onto pallets in refrigerated storage near Holdom skytrain station. Thousands of boxes – at 10-15 pounds a box…gets very heavy. I was lucky that I got the job because I was tall (6ft or over they requested) – a lucky break. My first pay cheque in Canada was $38.07 (SHOW PHOTO) for that half day of work. But for some reason, in spite of the muscle pain, early morning, and smelling like seafood AND ginger, there was a sense of satisfaction. Getting my job done, being part of the system that sent NZ seafood to restaurants and people’s tables. It was a cool feeling to be a small part of helping perhaps a mum and dad and their 3 children sit around the table and ordering NZ muscles, the special of the day to celebrate a birthday. I was a (small) part of them celebrating that day.

A few days later working for Labour Ready, 4 of us started working on a construction site where townhouses were being built... (SHOW PHOTO) we arrived in the pouring rain, which (being Vancouver) continued for most of the day. We were shoveling heavy gravel that had been mixed with clay. One of my workmates said that there was a chance that we could be “called back” if we worked hard I decided that grueling work was better than no work and put a really solid effort in. I left the job site knowing that I was getting a call back to that site the next day as they had seen my commitment to work – it felt really, really good!

I ended up working on that job site for about 3 or 4 weeks – building townhouses at 33rd and Main. Being the “extra hands” on the site, any of the “heavy lifting” work would come my way.

And in the midst of the digging, the lifting and the cleaning up, there were some moments where I actually saw my (small) role in the bigger picture. When my lifting and shoveling and pushing dirt made more sense. I was helping to create order and structure and safety for someone to live there, a family, maybe a couple. . (IF THERE IS ONE—SHOW PHOTO)
There was a community of people who were going to be based there, using it as their base, their shelter against the world. Where they would wake up in the morning and head to work, and where they would invite friends to watch the big game or a movie
Although initially I was unsure of the meaning of my being employed as a labourer for this time, God was able to show me through the sweat and rain how exciting it is for me to be a piece of the piece of the puzzle – knowing that it was and is God’s business to use his people to create and re-create using our minds and bodies.

Towards the end of my time working on these townhouses, I remember stopping for a moment to look around and think – wow – how incredible it is to take a pile of timber, siding, shingles and pipes and turn them into a house – where people can live. To stack boxes on pallets and know that it helps families celebrating life together. It is great to be able to play a role with my mind and body – God celebrating our echo of His great work.

In my hammering and lifting and shoveling there was opportunity to mirror the work of my Father in heaven who created order out of nothing, to the world that we live in today.

Ken Shigematsu: We live in a modest home not far from here. Not a day goes by when I am not grateful for our home. I've never met them, but I'm grateful for the people who poured the concrete, built the frame of the house, laid the pipes and the dry wall….

As meaningful as work can be when we understand the order, beauty, and life that's generated through it, work can also be hard, frustrating, even degrading and dehumanizing.

In the book of Genesis we see that work was present in the garden in Eden before sin came into the world, work is not a punishment for sin, but as we later see in the book of Genesis the gift of work has also been tainted by sin and radioactive effects of sin.

When we are in a really mundane or hard job, sometimes we can lose sight of the order, beauty, and life we are helping to create in the end.Ken,

And we can create order, beauty, and life through our work itself, but we can also help foster order beauty and life in the people that we work with.

I’ve been blessed by the wisdom of the Jesuits. James Martin a Jesuit Priest in his excellent book The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything describes one of his summer jobs as university student.

He worked on an assembly line in a local packaging plant. It was one of the worst jobs he'd ever had. His job involved standing on conveyer belt line standing in front of the deafening, machine taking the smaller boxes that came down the conveyer belt and put them into bigger boxes, and cover them with plastic shrink wrap.

James said, "I hated it. Everyone hated it. Every 10 minutes I checked the clock on the wall to see how much closer lunchtime was. After lunch, I watched the clock and prayed for (or at least anticipated) the end of the shift at 4 PM. The high point of his week? At least once a week, someone threw a piece of wood into the machine to shut it down temporarily. Then everyone got to take a break while someone called the repair man. That was the highlight of the work week!”

But surprisingly, three women on the line laughed almost the entire day. They had worked at the plant for several years, and knew one another and spent the day chatting about their children, their husbands, their homes, their plans for the weekend. Gradually James says these women drew him into their circle. By summer's end, James says, "They were ribbing me about all sorts of things: how slow I was, how young I was, how skinny I was, how much dust got into my hair, especially how afraid I was of sticking my hand in the machine to fix it when it was jammed. "Is you a man or is you a mouse?" one would tease. They hated their jobs but they loved one another.”

Even if we hate our job, and forget how the work itself in the end is creating order, beauty, or life, we can relate to other people in our work in ways that bring order, beauty, and life to them, and thus re-present God.

Say you don't like your job, say you’ve forgotten that your work creates order, beauty and life from the tohu wabohu and you work all alone, if you are earning money from your job that money can help create order, beauty, and life for someone else. Work helps put bread or rice on your table.

When my wife Sakiko was a high school student in Japan, she had the opportunity to study in Chicago for a year as part of a student exchange program. She did her home stay with a family of four: the parents were Bob and Judy and they had two daughters Julie and Jeannie. Sakiko was struck by the fact that though this family had a modest home and didn't have a lot of money, they seemed really happy. Bob was a family man, a salt of the earth kind of guy. He ended up working his entire career-for 40 years or so as an account with the same company: one that made tractors and buses. You might think as I thought, he must have really loved his job to stay at his whole working life. But, if you asked Bob, “Do you love your job?” He would have said, “No not really. It's a job.” “Why did you stay at it for so long?” Then you have showed you photographs of his wife Judy and his daughters Julie and Jeannie.

Through our work we can help create order, beauty, and life through the work itself, in some cases for the poor people we work with, and in other cases for a work we can help create order, beauty, and life for love ones: we can pay rent, put on the food table, and may help a little bit school.

We can honor God in our work, but we can also honor God with what is achieved through our work for others.

Earlier in the message, we talked about how Jesus worked as carpenter and a teacher.
But his greatest work was as a convict. He was convicted for his claim to be the Son of God. They flogged him and crucified him. The result: through his death on the cross, which was mysteriously paying the penalty for our sins, our sins can be forgiven and we can be restored into a relationship with our Father in heaven—and we can experience an order, beauty, and a life we've never known

When we experience that we can do our work not only with meaning that comes from knowing that we are bringing order, beauty, life for others, but we can do our work with joy as a way of saying thank you to the one whose work involved dying so that we might live.

That's another sermon that will be the focus of next week: Finding God in our Work which I will present with Betty MacLeod a member of our church, former VP of Olympic Business at RBC.

Let’s pray.