Repentance and the life of vocation

This lecture was part of the 500th Anniversary Reformation Retreat at Holy Cross Lutheran Church, Maple Lake, Minnesota, which is served by a faithful, Confessional pastor, Culynn Curtis.

We’re going to operate a bit differently than we did the last hour. We’re going to be a little more active in our learning than we were with my lecture on the will. Call the 12^th person in your contacts (or the next one if not appropriate to call now). Tell them what you’re doing here today, and ask them to look around and tell you one thing they see. [Wait for calls. Ask what the contact said.] We’ll come back to these things in a bit.

The Latin word for what we’re dealing with is vocation. It means “calling.” It’s like when you’d be playing with the neighborhood kids on a summer evening and, as the twilight darkened, your mom would call out the back door: “Hoo-hoo!” You knew her call. It was different from the other parents. And you responded. Vocatio is calling. Luther never wrote anything specifically about vocation, although the idea is present all over the place wherever he talks about the Christian life: In Freedom of a Christian, in the Table of Duties in the Catechism, and in its descriptions of how life is lived faithfully under the Commandment in his Catechism explanations. For Luther, Christian vocation happens in the world your contacts told you something about – in all those places that the things they spotted exist. And even more, it happens within the relationship you have with your contacts or, as Luther (and Jesus) called them, “your neighbors.”

Let’s get some things out of the way before we go any further. Vocation isn’t your job or career. Grand View students who have to take a general education core seminar on vocation their senior year often make that mistake. There’s such pressure for them to get their act together and know how they’re going to live, eat, pay off school loans, and, if they’re smart, how they’ll have enough to retire on. If vocation isn’t your job, your job is still part of your vocation, but just a limited part. Frederic Buechner once defined vocation as “where your great passion meets the world’s great need.” That’s nice on the surface. But it leaves me open to thinking my vocation has to be fulfilling, something that gives me joy, pleasure, and goose bumps. And then I’m stuck back at the curved-in state with a bound will and an imagined deed to God’s throne. On top of that, Buechner’s definition leaves an important party out of the equation: God.

So let’s see if we can’t tackle what Luther’s doctrine of vocation is by coming at it from an angle most people, including theologians to approach it from. Vocation isn’t about your work in the world but your identity as someone who is dead and risen in Christ. Five hundred years ago this month, Martin Luther had had his fill of people in the church ignoring the fullness of what Christ did on the cross. In 1512 the university faculty had gotten permission from the chancellor to bestow a doctoral degree on him. As part of the ceremony they gave him an open and closed Bible, a doctoral cap called a biretta, and a gold ring. And he, in turn, made an oath to teach the truth and basically rat out others who didn’t.

Luther smelled a rat in the work of Johann Tetzel who’d been selling indulgences nearby, but he’d already question many of the main supports for the Scholastic theology he himself had been taught. Indulgence sellers like Tetzel preached that the pope would grant a reprieve from working off your sins in purgatory after you died if you’d just do a good work like, maybe, donating to the Go Fund Me page for St. Peter’s Basilica back in Rome. But in his classroom Luther had slowly become more direct in declaring that there wasn’t a single thing you could do to merit even a kind glance from God. The fact of capital-S Sin was too big. And Luther began to have the sense that that was true of the bait-and-switch tactics of indulgences: They pull you in with a sweet deal and take your money, but they can’t actually provide you with what they said. In this case, it was forgiveness of sins and merit before God.

So when Luther pulled together the set of statements, the Ninety-Five Theses, he wanted to debate about the issue, the one that started everything off assumed that truth: you can’t git ‘er done. Instead of trying to do something good little thing for God, God required every last bit of you: bone, sinew, muscle, and ear lobes. The first of the ninety-five theses that sparked the explosion we call the Reformation was this: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, bids us to repent, he intends an entire life of repentance.” In other words, because sin is about your having grabbed the gusto for yourself, turning away from sin is going to cost you your life.

Jesus is out to have you, body and soul, and once he has you your life won’t be yours anymore. You will belong to him, and he will give you a mission: to unbend and look to him for your life. Did you think your baptism was just something sweet where Norwegian grandmas says, “Oh, for cute” when the baby squirms? Luther stood with Paul in Romans, knowing that even while you were a sinner Christ died for you, and having been baptized into his death you’ve been raised to new life. Already. Today. When you begin looking at the world, your neighbors, and your life through that lens, everything changes. The way you thought the world functioned gets turned upside-down.

There are two stories at play in your life: the story of this world and its powers and the story of Jesus crucified and risen. In the first story you’re taught to understand everything in terms of cause and effect, like Newtonian physics or Aristotle’s chain of causation. Everything is caused by something else. You get what you pay for. There’s no such things as a free lunch. You need to look out for number one. Just do it. Become an army of one. Every advertising spot you’ve ever seen has this story at its core. Every action movie that’s come across your screen and nearly every novel has it as the thing that moves the plot. You have to move forward and make your life happen. And all those things your contacts told you they saw? Those bits and pieces of the world are just tools to help you advance yourself into your desired future. Worse yet, so are your contacts – if you’re lucky. Because if they’re not tools to use to your advantage, then they’re either competition for the goods you want to acquire or a threat to your plan or to your very existence.

As a character in this story, then, along with Adam and Eve in the Garden, you can’t help regarding yourself as the centerpiece – a Copernican sun around which everything and everyone else revolves. And you spend your days building on sand, advancing your career for who knows what, mowing the grass every week only to mow again next week, wrinkles deepening, flesh bulbs sagging, waist expanding, and one day you’re done. All that’s left will be the set of experiences and unnecessary plastic objects you’ve accumulated. The plastic will be around forever, but the experiences that formed you will be gone. As the psalmist says, the grass flourisheth and dieth. Vanity of vanities, all is vanities, says the preacher in Ecclesiastes, or as another paraphrase puts it, it’s all just smoke.

The most earthly good you’ll have been, as Luther once called himself, will to serve as a stinking pile of manure. It such a hopeless, nihilistic story the world is writing for you. Even the creation itself, which God made as a blessing, rots and dies. In spite of rainbows and fall colors and funny kitten memes, it all feels like it’s spinning down as evil ascends and the good loses ground each day. Like Paul, the good that we would do, we don’t do. The bad we wouldn’t do, we wind up doing. And we look to God and wonder when he’ll finally deal with it. It’s an apocalyptic story, less of a zombie disaster than the slow inexorable grind until things can’t possibly go any further.

But Jesus’ story offers something different. It’s the story where you don’t have to wait for the end of the world or the end of your life to know how the plot resolves. In his cross and empty tomb, Christ is the end of all things, that is, the goal that everything has been headed toward and the one who breaks in to say, “Enough, already! I’m in charge now.” Where the first story is all about meeting life’s demands, this second story is all about God’s promise from the foundation of the world coming to fulfillment for you in this person Jesus. In him the plot twists, so that nothing functions the same way ever again. For he announces the kingdom of heaven at hand, where the evidence of the end of the world’s death spiral has come: the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the dead are raised – imperishable, at the last trumpet, so that we can look even death in the face and say, “Where is your sting? Where is your power? My Lord is raised, and he’s promised to make the resurrection mine.”

At this point you may be thinking we’ve driven off the vocation map, but we’re closer than ever. That’s because now you are a citizen of a new realm where Jesus’ beatitudes are true. Those who mourn, who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and who lose their lives for Christ’s sake are blessed. This is a realm where the first are last and the last first. This is a divine government where justice comes as a gift, where control is regarded as overvalued, and service is the currency of the kingdom. Your story is not one of endless dreck to slog through, the world around you isn’t a series of Australian poisonous snakes and deadly jellyfish.

In fact, as Luther said in Freedom of a Christian, in this story you’ve been written into you are a perfectly free lord of all, subject to no one else. And at the same time you’ve been given a life of real meaning where you are completely in service to others. And all you can do is look around in wonder that you were caught up in it, that it was here all along, and that what looked like demands and disaster were really blessings and life. All you can do is continually repent, turn around, turn your back on the sterile old black-and-white meaninglessness. When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ bids you to repent, you can say, “I’m already with you. I’ve had enough of that other stuff.”

All this talk is important for us, so we don’t treat a conversation about vocation as just jotting down a list of things we’re good at doing. Your new story of life in Christ is one of relationships. That’s what God was doing when he expressed himself with his word at the beginning: God was creating and forming relationships with the creation and with his creatures. In the narrative of God and God’s chosen people, we see the shape of God’s plot where the promiser keeps making a covenant happen in spite of the faithlessness of the Israelites. And now for us, our vocation is also tied up in the kinds of relationships that grow as fruit when we’re trees planted by eternal waters. The way you know what your vocation, your callings, and your stations in life are is to look at your relationships in this new light.

Here’s what I’d like you to do. I’d like you to take your paper and put your name in the middle of it. Now you’re going to create a map, a web of your many relationships. We’re going to see the geography of your vocation is yours alone. No one has one exactly like yours. And it’s the context for your life of faith. You’ve established who’s in your web, identify the relationships: I’d label mine husband, father, teacher, citizen, neighbor, etc.

Now think about the tasks that these relationships call you to carry out. I need to grade papers. I need to attend faculty meetings. I needs to share household chores fairly. I need to drive safely on Highway 55 on my way to Maple Lake. I need to pay my taxes. I need to preach and teach. What are your tasks?

Finally, consider what qualities and characteristics would allow to carry out those duties well. I need diligence, fairness, and generosity to grade papers. I need patience with other drivers. I need grit to go to faculty meetings. I need the willingness to have the word claim my will whenever I preach and teach. What kind of person do you need to be to do your tasks within your vocational relationships?

When you look at your set of lists, now you can hear what Luther said about our Christian lives. Since we don’t have to do anything for our salvation and God doesn’t require our good works, now you’ve got bushels of good works you can aim at more useful places. You have neighbors around you who need your works for their lives, just as you need theirs. You all need me to drive safely on highway 55 so that you can arrive home in one piece. My neighbors in Puerto Rico and Florida and the Texas gulf need my help to recover, my dollars, my votes, my political pressure. Future inhabitants of this planet need me to care for the creation. And my dog Millie needs me to give her food and water every morning after I’ve gotten the paper from our front stoop.

In Freedom of a Christian, Luther argued that our neighbors’ needs are the first reason to do good works. But your last list of qualities needed to serve is connected to the second reason Luther said we do good works: to control the old person in us who still suspects the story may be fiction and who still thinks they need to follow the old path. If you did what AA calls a fearless and searching moral inventory and then compared it with your last list, you’ll find yourself wanting.

The only way for those qualities to become part of you is for the old person to be put down. We need to keep finding ourselves in places where we say, “This stuff is killing me.” This is what baptism means for daily living. “It means that our old sinful selves, with all their evil deeds and desires, should be drowned through daily repentance, so that a new self can arise to live with God in righteousness and purity forever.”

When your bound will is freed by the gospel and you’re pulled away from your days constructing yourself, then you won’t have it any other way. You’ll begin to cherish the new story. You’ll want to bear the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and all those other qualities on your list. And you’ll look for opportunities to let yourself go a little, a little more, and still more, for the sake of your neighbor. You’ll feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned and sick.

Think of what a radically different view Luther gave us is from the one he was handed in the church of his day. True vocations were only those with religious qualities to them – especially the calling to be a priest, monk, or nun. And even there, there was a hierarchy that stretched all the way to the pope in Rome. But this new narrative grounded in the gospel was like those video clips of color-blind people putting on those special sunglasses that let them see the full range of colors around them. Where before the question was “What do I need to do to be saved”, now the question was, “Given all that Christ has already done to free you, what do you want to do with your life?”

Isn’t this a vision the world sorely needs today? We’re steeped in a world of empty celebrities, demands to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps, and life whose goodness is judged by how many toys you’ve accumulated, whether you’re clothed in the proper style, and whether you have the latest rendition of your handheld gadget. In a life of faithful vocation, though, you’ve have so very much more. You have neighbors. You have gifts. You have opportunities to turn from your old self. You have a Lord who sees fit to give you everything need for this life and its many days of service.