What do I Think I Think? Practical Reconcilaition, Pt. 2
Our topic today is part 3 in a series and deals, as promised, with more of “Practical Reconciliation.”
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Secondly (the first was “Reconciling to yourself”), I want to suggest that we work at discarding the binary way of thinking on all kinds of things. In the church, binary thinking can narrow everything down to a point where people begin to assume that if they can’t preach, teach and proselytize, they’re letting the Kingdom down. If the gospels and epistles were making the point that a “born again” ceremony was preparation for a life after death and all that mattered, then binary thinking would be satisfied if we did nothing but cajole people heavenward.
But taken as a whole, the Bible presents a spectrum of messages relative to this life, far more than the next, in fact. In Zechariah 8, the prophet describes a world that deserves God’s blessing: children playing in the street, old men and women walking with canes. To bring this world into being, God promises to send the rain, the sun, and the earth’s fertility so that the peaceful world can come to be.
The rest is up to us.
It’s a broad, a very broad application of talents that’s needed to make this happen in our day as it was then. In our time, it takes farmers, teachers, artists, writers, doctors, nurses, drivers, manufacturers, retailers, clerks, politicians, police persons, counselors, singers and musicians, technicians, plumbers, carpenters, care workers, etc., etc., for a community to thrive peacefully.
Assuming that all of these workers have the vision of such a community firmly in mind, their reconciling contribution may primarily be to do their work really well.
The thinking that we do our jobs to make a living but that witnessing is our career hinges again on a binary viewpoint. The clerk at my pharmacy who competently, courteously and with good humour serves customers is witnessing to the peaceable Kingdom. If she has neither the language skill nor the confidence to engage customers in a verbally delivered persuasion that they should follow Christ, it isn’t right for her companions in the faith to depress her with the explicit, or implicit, message that she’s failing in her “great commission.” How much her “witness” achieves in doing her job well will probably never make it into a data base, but how much she’s contributing to a future “where children play in the streets without fear and many elderly walk with canes at the autumn of peaceful lives” is immeasurable.
Similarly, the farmer who has an Old Testament reverence for land, and who uses the best possible techniques to ensure the future of the land is witness to the peaceable Kingdom. Creation doesn’t give us manna that falls from heaven as it did the Children of Israel in the desert, but his promise in Zechariah 8 is that he has given and will continue to provide sun, and rain, and earth and ability to apply these gifts in the feeding of the people. (I might add, with better-tasting food and greater variety than manna could provide. And let’s not make the mistake of thinking that God’s provision of manna in the desert was any more of a gracious gift of creation than is the loaf of bread you just baked . . . or bought.)
And then there are all those of us with clean fingernails who preach, teach, sing, play instruments, write poetry, plan houses and developments for living, accommodate travelers or sit at desks in offices and input and download data and wish we could be elsewhere. There is hardly a task that, done well, doesn’t witness to the peaceable Kingdom. Many of us, of course, will find ourselves being asked to contribute our skills to enterprises that seem to have nothing of service to mankind at heart. But even there, the presence of one who thinks of him/herself as a child of Creation with a vision for humanity can feel that the way he/she approaches his/her daily work is nudging even the corporate machinery in the direction of the Kingdom.
I need hardly draw our attention to the enormous uplift in the spirit of humanity that artists, poets and musicians are able to achieve. I almost wept with joy to be in the “Group of Seven” room in the National Gallery in Ottawa to see there the brilliant landscapes Creation has provided for me. The by-now-old recording of Art Garfunkel singing “Bridge over Troubled Water,” well, what better expression of the love that is at the heart of Kingdom could there ever be?
(As an adult education teacher, I was required to do considerable “career counseling,” an experience that gave me a vivid impression of how people think about vocation choosing. Everything from “I want to make a lot of money,” to “I think I’ll learn welding; my cousin does that and he likes it” would emerge. Why doesn’t the church have a career counseling program geared to determining aptitudes (talents included) and opportunities for serving humanity that are in synch with those aptitudes and talents? Keeping in mind, of course, that there’s hardly a vocation that isn’t required in the peaceable Kingdom.)
N.T. Wright, in an address I watched recently, gave as a main point that the Enlightenment (Age of Reason, Renaissance, Humanism movements) had co-opted the goals of Christ for the betterment of humanity . . . and made a mess of it. But when I think of those minds and hands in those labs applying the scientific method of discovery to develop vaccines and treatments that would potentially wipe measles, mumps, scarlet fever, polio, bubonic plague, cholera, small pox, whooping cough, tetanus, COVID-19, etc. off the face of the earth, I find myself grateful to them even if their work was motivated by the Enlightenment philosophy of discovery and not by the Gospel. It’s a better world where 98% of children survive infancy than that of even a century ago when 4 or 5 out of 7 survived . . . if lucky.
Mind you, the atomic bomb also resulted from application of the scientific method, part of the “mess” Wright was talking about, no doubt; we ought to consider both the value to humanity of our work as well as the skill and dedication we bring to it, obviously.
Praise be for the people who have honed their talents as a gift to their world . . . daily. They are all bringers of the Kingdom.
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