Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church
The Work of Our Hands
August 24, 2014
John M. Buchanan
Joseph Sittler is not a name many, perhaps any, of you would know. He was a Lutheran pastor, and a scholar, and for years he taught theology at the University of Chicago. In the world of religious scholarship, Sittler was a major voice. It was my great privilege to have him as a teacher, and experience him as a human being, before he retired. He was remarkable – he had vision problems his entire life. At the end he was totally blind. When I had him as a professor, his sight had deteriorated to the degree that he could no longer see lecture notes. And so he lectured, and preached in chapel, without notes. And out of his mind and mouth came the most eloquent language, complete, complex sentences, and long passages of T.S. Eliot and Walt Whitman, ancient and modern theologians, and, sizeable chunks of book reviews and newspaper editorials. He loved his wife of many years and was her caregiver for decades, loves his family, the University, the church, the Chicago Symphony, and the Chicago White Sox. That is the other team in Chicago, the preference of South-siders. My team, in case you have not noticed, is the Cubs. North side. Neither team is much good this year. But the White Sox won the pennant my first year in Chicago and Sittler found a way to turn the team exploits, the mounting hopes for a pennant, the crushing defeats, the rhythm of despair and joy, into metaphors of religion, the life of faith, the journey of life toward its destiny, its end, its consummation. I never met anyone like Joseph Sittler. I’m telling you about him because I think of him a lot, particularly when Labor Day rolls around, which it will next weekend. I will not be here, so you will excuse me for a one-week premature Labor Day sermon. I think of Sittler at this time of year because he loved the 90th Psalm, used it a lot in his lectures, used to say that the entirety of our faith is summarized in that Psalm.
1. God’s eternity – “from everlasting to everlasting, you are God”
2. Life’s transience and brevity – “they are like grass – renewed in the morning, in the evening it withers”
3. The reality of God’s unconditional love – “Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,” 
4. In spite of life’s transience and brevity, joy, contentment…”Make us glad, so that we rejoice all our days”
“What more needs to be said?” Sittler used to ask.
There is one more thing, as it turns out – the last verse –
5. “Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us
 and prosper the work of our hands,
 O, prosper the work of our hands”
Work. The work of our hands. The Psalm comes to its climax by asking us to think about what we do with the years allotted to us. From sublime theology, the Psalmist turns to the mundane matter of our daily work, the work of our hands. The word for it, of course, is vocation.
Sittler said your vocation is to live fully, faithfully, following Jesus Christ in the world and to live, always, always, in hope. After he retired and was totally blind, he illustrated, expressed the work of his hands, by planting trees around the university campus, trees that he would never see in their maturity, but would grow and provide beauty and shade – a practical expression of his favorite Psalm.
“O, prosper the work of our hands.”
There is no more relevant topic than vocation, the work of our hands. Studs Terkel, another Chicago icon, NPR radio host, essayist, author, all around colorful character, wrote a book with the one word title, Working. It was a collection of interviews with a wide variety of working people about their work, their feelings about their work, which ranged from love to loathing. The book, Terkel said, is “about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash.” The book became a bestseller because it is a topic that we all think about and fret over – our work.
In a fine book, An Altar in the World, Barbara Brown Taylor, Episcopal Priest and then college professor, has an excellent chapter on work and vocation. She begins by listing all the jobs she has had in her life: “babysitter, Avon Lady, horseback riding instructor, cocktail waitress, hospital chaplain, pastor, college professor,” seventeen jobs in all. She say she hasn’t given up on her secret job goal: Cirque du Soleil – not as an acrobat, she hastens to add. She’d be happing selling tickets.
When I read that, I put the book down and made my own list. You could do that this week, celebrate Labor Day by remembering all the work you have ever done, including what you are doing now. On my list are twenty-seven jobs for which I have been paid money. I won’t bore you with the entire list, but it includes, not only Interim Preacher at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church – actually that’s number 28 – but delivering newspapers, bagging cookies at a local bakery, digging ditches and cleaning sewers for the City Water and Services Department, delivering U.S. mail at Christmas, waiting on tables, working in road construction, on the production line for Ford Motor Company, supply teaching. The shortest job I ever had lasted two hours: Children’s Activity Director at a Jewish Community Center. After my first two hours trying to occupy the attention of twenty hyper-active fifth graders, after a long day at school, and failing – rather dramatically – the Executive Director gently suggested that maybe I wasn’t right for the job. I wasn’t happy, but it forced me to become a night janitor in an office building, which was a lot simpler and much more lucrative.
My secret vocational goal is to drive a city bus. I marvel at the skill of city bus drivers maneuvering those behemoths in busy traffic. Before that it was to play center field for the Pittsburgh Pirates. That didn’t work out either.
The Work of Your Hands. Our faith tradition has always included the conviction that God has something to do with the matter of working, vocation – calling – which is what the word vocation means. But how? How does it happen? How do you know what you are meant to do and who God wants you to be?
Many people wait all their lives for a word from God, a moment of clear certainty about vocation. Barbara Brown Taylor says that she, like many people, used to think that there was one particular thing God wanted her to do with her life, that God had a singular and specific purpose for her and her job was to discern what it was. Like most of us, she wasn’t sure. She waited for a voice to tell her what to do. She went to seminary to discover the answer. She prayed every night for God to speak. And then one night, it happened. She say she heard a voice in her head and God said, “Do anything that pleases you…and belong to me.”
It was a great moment. She realized that God gives each of us gifts that suggest an overall purpose, but the particulars are up to us: that God did not care if she became an Episcopal Priest or a ticket seller for Cirque de Soleil, that it was not what she did for a living but how she did it, and for whom. She was to live for God, to love God and love neighbors.
One of the great theological breakthroughs of the 16th century Protestant Reformation, perhaps the most significant, both Martin Luther and John Calvin taught it, is that everyone, not just clergy, has a vocation. Prior to Luther and Calvin, and still popular with many people, is the idea that God calls clergy, priests and ministers, that unlike most people, clergy have a vocation. The Reformation taught that everyone is called to love and glorify God, to love and serve neighbors, regardless of how he or she earns a living. It was a radical, breakthrough when Luther and Calvin taught that no job is more important, more essential, in God’s economy than any other job. God needs street cleaners and surgeons, school teachers and plumbers, software designers and seamstresses, parents and pediatricians, clerks and lawyers and social works and nuclear physicists. Regardless of what a person does to earn a living, God calls all of us to belong to God, to live for God and love our neighbor – our common vocation. Luther gave the idea a significant and memorable name – the Priesthood of All Believers.
St. Paul told the early Christians in Corinth that there are obviously a variety of gifts. Even in the church there are different needs and interests and skills, none more important than any other. Some can teach, some can play the organ, some can serve on the Finance Committee, some can prepare the food, some can sweep the floor, some can give money – actually everyone can do that. Some can preach sermons. Everyone has a job and all jobs are equal in God’s sight.
Since all jobs are of equal status in God’s eyes, no task is too small. Taylor says that a mother who spends every waking moment changing diapers and wiping applesauce off chins needs to be reminded that she is engaged in the absolutely essential, absolutely most critical job in the world – forming a human being. The school custodian is providing a clean and pleasant space for children to learn in the morning. The worker who turns the nuts on the bolts of the left front wheel of the car he is assembling is assuring that children will be driven to school in safety. [p. 115]
Now, the truth is – the reality is – that sometimes a job is not satisfying. Sometimes work feels deadly, boring, with no hint of joy, satisfaction or meaning. Sometimes your work is the way you earn a living and pay the bills in order to pursue your real vocation. My railroader father, until late in his life, hated his job. I understood later that it was regret more than hatred. He was the youngest in a large family – his father, also a railroader, saved enough money to send him to college. He didn’t study, had a great time and after a year flunked out. I asked him once what he wanted to be when he was young. “A doctor,” he said. He never mentioned it again. He became a railroader out of necessity, at the end of the Great Depression, a fireman , shoveling coal into the fire box of a steam engine, exhausting and dirty work. Happily, near the end he finally was promoted to Engineer. Diesel engines replaced steam and he finally found meaning as part of the American freight and transportation system. But his real joy, his real vocation, was as a gardener, creating from scratch a wonderful flower garden, planting, weeding, trading tulip and iris bulbs with neighbors. I still have several beautiful hybrid iris from his garden. Most important of all he made sure his sons followed their dreams whatever they were and never missed the opportunity he had.
Presbyterian minister and author Frederick Buechner says that “your vocation – your life’s work – is the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.”
Two tragic deaths haunted us last week. Robin Williams, supremely gifted actor, comedian, as gifted as anyone in the entertainment industry. We learned more about who he was: that he was a genuinely good and caring man, that he was addicted to alcohol and drugs, and that he struggled with clinical depression, that he was a Christian, an Episcopalian. He gave himself totally to his vocation – he used his gifts to their fullest, he died too soon, but he did what he loved and what God equipped him to do. He was blessed and he blessed us with joy.
James Foley, 40, journalist, brutally killed by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS: put himself in harm’s way because of his commitment to truth-telling and information. He, too, died long before he should have, but died doing what he loved, what God equipped him to do.
Both deaths are tragic. But both men died doing what they loved, what God called them to do. They were blessed by that. And they blessed us as well.
The vocational task for every one of us is to find that, to identify what we most dearly love, what excites us and compels us, what we are passionate about. That is your vocation. That is what God calls you to, and what God has equipped you, uniquely, to do. If you can earn your living doing it, you are profoundly blessed.
One day a young man was walking along the shore of the Sea of Galilee. His name was Jesus. He was from Nazareth. He saw two men working, fishing. “Follow me,” he said, and they did just that. Simon and Andrew dropped their nets and followed. A little later he encountered two more fishermen, sitting in their boat, working on their nets – “Follow me,” and James and John stepped out of the boat and followed. There was no job description for following jesus. There was just the invitation to walk along with him and then respond. Please notice that he did not ask them to stop being fishermen. In fact, they must have continued at their trade after they decided to follow him – earned a living the rest of their lives, fishing and following. We know that Paul made tents for a living and worked on and off the rest of his life as he followed Jesus. I love to think that Jesus didn’t stop working either, that he returned to Nazareth to work in his family’s shop as needed, in between teaching and healing. I like to think that when his mother and family needed money for food, he came home and produced a table or stool to sell, or dug a foundation and built a house for a customer.
The decision to follow him, then and now, may or may not mean a change of jobs. It is to embrace a vocation – to belong to him, to live for him, to be his man or woman for a long as we live.
O God, prosper the work of our hands.
 O, prosper the work of our hands.