I was first asked if I might consider training for ordination some eight years ago. I can remember clearly the strength of my reaction at the time: it was a mixture of astonishment and puzzlement – why would I do such a thing? And I continued to think this way for some time. The reason was quite simple. I couldn’t – and for that matter still can’t – imagine myself in the role of parish priest.

But when it dawned on me that I might do what I am doing now – continue in full time secular employment and be a priest – the idea of training for ordination gradually began to make some sense. Work is, after all, a dominant feature of most people’s lives.

Surely therefore I reasoned, the church must have a lot to say to the workplace and the workplace must have a lot to say to the church, for faith is only meaningful in so far as it is lived out in practice. The more I thought about this the more it dawned on me how little this dialogue between church and workplace had happened in practice for me. It was as if I’d lived my life in parallel worlds – there was the me who went to church on Sunday, who prayed and read the bible and earnest works of theology and there was the me who went to work during the weekdays and struggled to make a career for myself, pay the mortgage and clothe and feed the children.

Now, I didn’t absolve myself of responsibility for not working harder at making the connections between the two but I couldn’t avoid the conclusion that the church hadn’t done much to help me do so either. Looking back over the 25 years that I had been a Christian I couldn’t remember a single sermon that had said anything about faith and the workplace, precious few prayers for those at work in the secular world or any outreach designed to support those trying to live out their faith at work as well as at home and in church. How could this have been?

Well, it certainly hasn’t always been this way. During the middle ages the church and the world of business were much more in harmony. Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas thought very carefully about the workplace and produced a lot of theories to support it justifying private property for instance, whilst also highlighting the needs of the dispossessed, and creating the concept of a just price for goods which balanced the needs of buyers and sellers.

Public Christians were also practical business people – for instance, the Cistercians pioneered the wool industry here in Britain which was a key source of wealth in the middle ages.

But from the 16th C onwards all this started to change and the attempt to locate the world of work and business within an explicitly Christian moral framework came to be seen as an irrelevance. This ejection of theology from the world of business was best and most famously expressed by Adam Smith, the 18th C philosopher and apostle of the free market in his book The Wealth of Nations, one of the few books that can genuinely be said to have changed the world. In it he wrote this:

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages”
And that progressively has been the dominant view of the world of business ever since. It is interesting that the current financial crisis is causing many to question whether the world of business shouldn’t be guided by more explicit moral principles but it remains to be seen whether such questioning leads to any real change of heart.
It would be unfair however, to see the church as a mere victim of heartless economic forces. I don’t think there is any doubt that there is, within a lot of Christian thought, a disdain for the world of work.

This hails from our faith’s very earliest years when, although it owed its birth to the Jewish tradition, it drew its first breath in a world dominated by Greek philosophy and thought which, for all its wonders, took a very dualistic view of the world in which “pure spirit” was seen as superior to the grubby and decidedly second-rate world of the flesh. This maybe ironic for a faith that is at heart incarnational, but there it is. You see this reflected in the often unchallenged assumption that the priesthood is a “higher calling”, at the apex of a hierarchy that would see those of the caring professions – doctors, nurses, teachers and so on – at a level below it with those engaged in actually making money and trading some way below them.

While I have no doubt that the priesthood is a vitally important calling and one that is essential to the health and well-being of mankind, so too are those of the butcher, the baker, the banker, the broadcaster and whatever the modern day equivalent of the candlestick maker is.

I realise this may sound controversial but it really shouldn’t. Look around you and what do you see? Nothing other than the fruits of human labour. This church building, the clothes on your backs, the hymn books in your hands, the iPhone or Blackberry or whatever in your pockets - all this has come about by the work of human hands transforming matter from one thing into another.

And this is something quite glorious and wondrous to ponder, for at heart, we are creative because God is creative. We are, quite simply, according to the biblical account, made in his image and he is above all else, the great, creator God.

The bible reflects this point again and again. St. Paul tells us in his first letter to the Corinthians (3:9) that we are “God’s co-workers” in creation and it’s worth remembering that Paul made his living as a tent-maker whilst at the same time being an apostle of Christ.

In his teaching Jesus was always using images from the workaday world – he described farmers going out to sow (Mk 4:3-9), builders working out estimates (Lk 14:28-30), middle managers facing the sack (Lk 16:1-8) and in today’s gospel reading (Lk 13:6-9) a vineyard owner anxious to see a fig tree start bearing fruit. He took for granted a world of hard work, buying and selling. For sure, he called his disciples away from their workplaces for the brief period he was with them but he never once disparaged their occupations.

You see the workplace reflected in the Old Testament as well with God described with often workplace metaphors – he is variously composer, performer, metalworker, potter, gardener, wine-maker and so on.
And yet, as we all know, work can so often be a curse as well as a blessing. I’ll wager that many of you are just beginning to get that tightening in your stomachs that often seems to happen around midday on a Sunday as you begin to anticipate the week ahead. This aspect of work is also reflected in the bible, most notably in Genesis when, after the Fall God says these words to Adam (3:19):

“By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground”

In other words, while we should certainly see ourselves made in God’s image and his co-workers in creation, our work also – inevitably – partakes of the world’s fallenness and its sin, both that of ourselves and others.

This does not, however, mean that work has to be hell, though sadly that is precisely what it seems to be for so many people. I am struck – and deeply saddened – by the number of people I know both personally and professionally who loathe what they do. Now of course, there can be all sorts of reasons for this, some of them beyond their control. But in many cases it’s quite hard to conclude anything other than that people are, quite simply, in the wrong job.

The Benedictine monk John Main – a man whose books have taught me so much about prayer and meditation – draws a very useful distinction between “being” and “doing”, between who we are and what we do.
Who we are is integral to us. We are who we are by virtue of our God-given talents, our passions, energies and innate values. What we do is a matter of how we fill our days and for most of us that means work that earns us a living. The vital question here is whether who we are and what we do are in alignment.

To see someone for whom their work is a perfect expression of who they are is truly inspiring. Whenever I see this I’m reminded of that famous quotation of the second century theologian Irenaeus of Lyons: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive”. But by the same token, when what somebody does is out of alignment with who they are there is despair and – in a spiritual sense – death. While work may inevitably partake of fallenness it is emphatically not God’s will that we should be unhappy in what we do.

How could it be so when Jesus declared that he came that we might “have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10)? There is a real challenge here. For if, as Christians, we find that we are in the wrong job it is our duty to ourselves, to those whom we love and to God to do something about it. Quite simply, we will not fulfil our role as God’s co-workers in building the kingdom of God if we are miserable and unhappy.

Happily of course, many of us are in the right job. It may not be perfect but it’s good enough and we can genuinely thank God for it. So how should our faith guide us in going about this work with all its inevitable difficulties and challenges? What does Christian discipleship actually mean in these circumstances?

I’d like to answer that question by outlining four values which, though similar to their secular equivalents, are all informed by Jesus’ requirement that we should be the salt of the earth, that what we do and what we say should have a distinctive flavour that is informed by the gospel.

Firstly, it goes without saying that we should be honest in all our dealings at work. Telling lies destroys trust and trust is one of the essential foundations of working life. But for a Christian honesty is about more than not telling lies – it should be a positive virtue, that of telling the truth. In biblical terms this means being “prophetic” – telling the truth of a situation, however uncomfortable that may be. You see Jesus doing this time and again in the New Testament both about individuals and the state of Jewish society as a whole and of course, this is ultimately what led him to the cross.
In my experience one of the truths that is so often evaded in the workplace is that of poor performance by individuals. Rather than tell the truth managers too often let others shoulder the burden of someone’s poor performance or even promote them to remove the immediate problem. It is often painful and always difficult to confront poor performance but there are few things that poison the working atmosphere than letting it go unchecked. That just breeds resentment and ill will. Not telling lies is easy. Telling the truth requires courage and leadership.

Secondly, fairness and justice. It goes without saying that we should be fair to people. I could bore you with the myriad ways in which I have to show I’m being fair – fair selection, fair pay, fair appraisals and so on. But the biblical injunction to act justly requires much more than fairness. For Christians justice involves a bias to the poor and vulnerable.

It’s easy to show how this plays out here in Church, our recent commitment to the Camden Cold Weather Shelter being a case in point but in the workplace it’s far more challenging for this runs against the free market view that we should simply obey the laws of supply and demand. In this times of hardship and cutbacks we should be asking ourselves what we can do to speak up for those at the bottom of the heap – what can we do to make sure that the weakest and most vulnerable are afforded a measure of protection and don’t bear an undue burden?

Thirdly, love as opposed to care – though I realise that the word “love” needs to be used with some care in the workplace! We are all expected to be caring employers these days. We must attend to people’s development needs, include them in decision-making, make sure they get their allotted share of time off and so on. In reality, all these things often get forgotten in the press of events.

I am fortunate to have an Executive Coach who is a very eminent person in her field. She tells me that repeated surveys show that while many rate their bosses highly for managing them in their tasks they are pretty hopeless at showing any interest in them as people – their hopes, their desires, their needs and their development which is what they crave above all.

As Christians we are enjoined to love other people and that means seeing them as whole people – giving time to them, supporting them in difficulty, forgiving their mistakes, celebrating their successes and above all helping them to develop their skills and abilities, even if this means that they end up leaving for another company or organisation.

Fourthly and finally, balance as opposed to commitment. Of course it goes without saying that we should be committed and wholly reliable in the workplace. But in my lifetime expectations of the commitment that people are expected to show to their employers have grown significantly leading to a very unhealthy long hours culture that affects the public sector as well as the private. This is destructive of health and well-being and something that we really should resist as Christians.

It’s worth remembering that of the 10 Commandments only one involves a duty to ourselves – and that is the duty of rest. We forget at our peril that in Genesis God rested on the seventh day after his mighty labour of creation. For it is only by rest that we regain perspective, that our energy is recharged and our vision and creativity are renewed.

Quite simply, an effective balance between work and the rest of life is essential to us all if we are to be creative beings made in God’s image and not dull slaves to mammon. For Christians in the workplace this means modelling this balanced behaviour ourselves and giving permission to those who work for us not to work all hours. This may well cost us preferment and promotion but surely the cost of not challenging this insidious development will ultimately be the greater?
So, four discipleship values to live by in the workplace: truthfulness, justice, love and balance. These aren’t exhaustive – I’m sure you can think of others and you may well disagree with some of what I’ve said. But I think the crucial point here is that the gospel does have something distinctive and important to say to us about how we should go about our working lives. How could it be otherwise?

For in so far as we are made in the image of God we are creative because he is creative and as such we are his co-workers in creation. And the sooner we, as the Church of Christ start living and acting on this truth, then the sooner those who regard the Church as an obscure Sunday alternative to DIY or shopping may have cause to pause and think again.

Amen

Amen