The teacher, the doctor and the minister.
These were men – and in those days they mostly were men – who were understood to have a vocation. A calling to a particular role in society which involved academic rigour, a degree of selflessness, and a commitment to place and people which blurred the boundaries between the professional and the personal. They weren’t just doing a job, they had chosen a way of life.
And that’s still the case in some places in
And even on the mainland, where things have moved on a little, the word still has currency. We think of people with a vocation as those whose jobs tend to be particularly demanding in terms of time and dedication, and who aren’t just in it for the money. There’s some other motivation there that plays a big part in their work life.
I’d argue that farming’s a vocation. It’s a way of life. You’re always at your work, and your work’s never done. You don’t clock in and clock out, and you’re constantly on call especially in the springtime when you’re calving or lambing. And you have this deep connection with place and with people that goes back, in many cases, for generations.
Motherhood’s a vocation, although it’s a terribly undervalued one in a world where we seem to need either one good wage or two average ones to get by with some degree of comfort.
Mothers, you too, are always at your work. You’re constantly on call. Your labours are labours of love and most of the time you set about them with a remarkable selflessness.
We could go on. But for all that the definition has widened over the years to include other kinds of work and workers, we still have this idea of vocation. A demanding call that comes to some people with particular roles to play in society, often at considerable cost.
I remember being at a wedding a while back, not long after I’d decided to ditch Chemistry and train to be a minister. And we were sitting opposite a nice young couple and got into conversation with them, and the guy was really interested to hear my story. How had I decided to change direction? What were the signs that this was the right way to go?
And all the time I was chatting to him and enthusing about finally finding what I really wanted to do, I could see his girlfriend glowering at me. And it turned out, half an hour into the conversation, that these were live issues for him because he was a Catholic and he was beginning to wonder if he had a call to the priesthood!
Like I said – vocation often comes at a cost.
So that’s our entry-level understanding of the word. A job that in many ways becomes your life.
But I want us to get away from the idea of vocation as work for a moment, because there are other aspects to that word that are worth exploring.
I don’t know if any of you caught the Stargazing programmes that were on BBC2 a month or so ago, but they reminded me of a guy I read about a while back called Bob Evans.
Bob’s a retired Methodist minister in
A supernova is a star that’s reached the end of its lifespan, and when it does it explodes with the force of a trillion nuclear bombs. If you’re standing within 500 light years of a supernova when it explodes, you’re toast.
But seen from the other side of the galaxy, these enormous explosions generate a mere flicker in a night sky already laden with stars, and the flicker may only last a few weeks.
The author Bill Bryson puts it this way – imagine a standard dining room table covered in a black tablecloth and throwing a handful of salt across it. The scattered grains can be thought of as a galaxy.
Now imagine 1500 more tables like the first one, each with a random array of salt across it. Now add one grain of salt to any table and let Bob Evans walk among them. In time he’ll spot it. That new grain of salt is a supernova.
Up until 1980, when Bob started his search with a simple ten-inch telescope and no fancy computer technology – there had only been 60 supernovae found in the whole of astronomical history. After 30-odd years of looking, Bob’s identified a further 42 by himself.
He’s just made for this particular task.
And that, I think, is another way of looking at the question of vocation. What were you made for? What do you love to do?
What do you feel you must do? No-one else can answer that question for you – you have to work it out for yourself.
I’ve always loved these words of Rainer Maria Rilke, the German poet, penned to a young colleague starting out in his writing career and plagued with doubt. Rilke writes
"You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are upset when certain editors reject your work. I beg you to stop doing that sort of thing. You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depths of your heart.... This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of your night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer."
What must I do?
Given the person God has made me, what is it that I have to be about?
Have you ever asked that question of yourself, or have you let other people, or mere circumstance, answer it for you?
This isn’t to do with work, though it may be. It’s about what you – the person you are – love to do, whether it’s building, creating, crafting, organising, nurturing, caring, growing, mending. discovering. Whatever it is you can lose yourself in for hours without realising it.
Athletes and artists of different sorts talk about an experience called ‘flow’ when you find yourself doing something that seems to come naturally, and maybe even in a few blessed moments – effortlessly.
It’s in those moments when we feel most alive and most like ourselves. And there are good reasons for that.
The apostle Paul often uses the metaphor of a body to describe the church. We are all different, he says. Some are ears, some are eyes, some are hands, some are feet.
If you’re an eye, you were made for seeing, not walking. If you’re a foot, you’re designed to go places, not feed the brain with sound waves. We feel most at home when we’re doing that for which we were created. That’s why it’s so important for all of us to find out what that might be.
Some of us, by the grace of God, end up in careers that match our vocation. but that’s not essential. Square pegs can fit in round holes. What matters more is that you’re able to pursue your vocation at other times, if your work doesn’t encourage it. But you first have to find out what your vocation is.
God’s made you – but what has he made you for? What is your role in blessing the body of the church, and the world beyond? Dig down, says Rilke. That’s the only way you begin to find out.
Some folk have a call to a particular kind of work that expresses their vocation; but all of us need to find out what our vocation is, because that’s where our deepest happiness lies.
But that’s still not the heart of it, at least for a Christian.
Because for a Christian, there’s a vocation that comes before all others, and it’s that that Jesus spells out in our gospel passage this morning.
“What should we do in order to do what God wants us to do?” the people say, as they gather round Jesus looking for more bread or another miracle.
In other words – what is God wanting from us? What’s he calling us to do? Feed the poor, save the planet, keep our noses clean, fight the Romans? What’s the big picture?
Jesus answer? “The work God’s given you to do, is to believe in the one he has sent”.
And you’ve heard me say it often enough to know that ‘believe’ in that sentence isn’t about agreeing with a set of ideas about God; at least not just that. It’s about trust. The overarching work God’s given you to do, your main vocation in life before all others, is to learn to trust in the one he has sent.
Trust that the love which took him to the cross in self-surrender, is extravagantly, unconditionally yours without your earning it, working for it or even deserving it. It’s a thing we call grace. God’s inexplicable love aimed foursquare at every man and woman in the whole of creation, not because we merit it, but because he knows that kind of love is the only way to mend us.
Trust that to give your life into his hands with the kind of abandon he expects of disciples, isn’t going to mean the end of your life, but the beginning of it.
Trust that what seems like foolishness to the world – the way of Christ and the cross – is actually the wisdom of God for the salvation of the world.
Trust that there’s a place in his plan for you, in all your uniqueness, where all that you love and treasure and are enthused by, can be taken up and used by him as a sign and a blessing to the world. That vocation, set so deeply within you was put there by God, and he put it there for a purpose.
So whether it’s farming or flower arranging, teaching or caring, music or writing or painting, child-rearing or activism – whatever in life your vocation might be. Give thanks to God for it, but remember to give it back to God however you can, for his glory and for the sake of his Kingdom.
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