disruptive grace

I’ve been thinking about vocation recently. I would say ‘calling’ but I find that word often gets used in a way which has more to do with an obsession with self. Having said that, I have this phrase ‘calling is context’ spinning round my mind at the moment, and I’m going to explore what that could mean.

Peterson reminds use (in ‘Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places’) to remember our primary context is God and his action and intention.

“Most of the Christian life involves paying attention to who God is and what he does; but not only the who and the what but the how and the means God employs to accomplish his ends. If we get too interested in what wedo and are, we go off the rails badly”

As I’ve been thinking about this I’m exploring who the story God instigates is then our first context. As a designer and being slightly geeky I’ve been playing around with a diagram to help me think through this.

vocation and context

The story starts with God and his intention for the cosmos. With in the cosmos humans are formed and given the task to “fill, subdue, rule, work” or as Andy Crouch (in ‘Culture Making’) puts it “MAKE SOMETHING OF THE WORLD”. This is the first vocation, this is a significant part of what I believe it is to be human, and in fact to be ‘made in the Image-of-God’. With in humanity, God calls Abraham (and his descendants) with the vocation to ‘be blessed… to be a blessing’, or as I will phrase it here, “LIVE IN CO-OPERATION WITH ME FOR THE BENEFIT OF OTHERS”. As the people of Israel seek to live this out they are benefited by the Law — which we’ll summarize here as “Love God, love your neighbour”, and following that they are encouraged and challenged by the prophets to “act justly, love mercy and walk humbly” (I realize I summarizing a lot here!). Then along comes Jesus of Nazareth who embodies this all perfectly, “responding to what the Father is doing” and as the gospel of Luke likes to remind us “in the power of the Holy Spirit”. Jesus brings this vocation to people “Follow me in this way of life” and [paraphrase] ‘invite others to this life which you are learning from me’. As Todd Hunter puts it this is a life of embodied love and “love is to will the good of others”.

Now the vocation from this telling of the story becomes something like: “Make something of the world, in co-operation with me [God], for the benefit of others, as embodied (lived-out) by Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit”

So that is our primary context for vocation, and we can do it in what ever state of employment we’re in or any location. We could be a carpenter from a back water town in Palestine, or a designer in the middle of England.

Our secondary context is the substance of our actual lives, which takes place in the larger context of the story. The This substance of our actual lives includes:

• a specific location and time
• specific relationships and community
• our character/personality
• our resources
• commitments to others (eg: job and family)
• passions, hopes and concerns
• skills, abilities and ‘gifts’
• personal borkenness

So with this I think vocation (correctly understood) is not an add on to the Christian life. As if we can hold opinion-like-beliefs about God and Jesus and then wonder what to do. The vocation of embodied love is what it means to be a follower of Jesus – it is the Christian life. It does involve belief but not merely opinions, but belief as in trust — as in “trust me this way of life is what it means to be human.”

So I don’t think I’m called to my job as such, but I’m called to work and I called to things which I am able to express in my job and of course my whole life. Primarily this is to be a follow of Jesus — learning to be humanity as God intended, and to express that in specific ways, such as: creative communication (particularly in visual terms), to treat others well, to make time for people, to teach, to make something of the world, to make beauty possible in the world, to ‘add to the stock of available reality’… etc.

Now thinking on where I take this (particularly in a less personal way) next I read this today: ‘Everything you need is already there’.