What is Our Work For? | Rev. Steven P. Gunther

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our family service here at the Barnathan Cathedral.

My name is Stephen Gunther, and I'm one of the pastors here at the Barnathan Church.

This morning I'd like to begin our service with our readings from the Lord's Word, both in the sacred scriptures and in the teachings for the new church.

Our first reading comes from the Gospel of Luke, chapter 19.

Luke 19 · chapter mention

Then Jesus entered and passed through Jericho.

Now behold, there was a man named Zacchaeus, who was a chief tax collector, and he was rich.

And he sought to see who Jesus was, but could not because of the crowd, for he was of short stature.

So he ran ahead and climbed up into a sycamore tree to see him, for he was going to pass that way.

And when Jesus came to the place, he looked up and saw him, and said to him, Zacchaeus, make haste and come down, for today I must stay at your house.

So he made haste and came down and received him joyfully, but when they saw it they all complained, saying, He has gone to be a guest with a man who is a sinner.

Then Zacchaeus stood and said to the Lord, Look, Lord, I give half of my goods to the poor, and if I have taken anything from any one by false accusation, I restore it fourfold.

And Jesus said to him, Today salvation has come to this house, because he also is a son of Abraham, for the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.

Turning now to the teachings of the new church, we read from the doctrine of faith, number twenty five.

Right from earliest childhood, we are eager to know things.

Because of this, we learn a great many things, some of which will be useful to us and some of which will not.

When we grow up, we get involved in some occupation and absorb information about it, and as we do, the occupation becomes a way for us to be useful, and we begin to love it.

This is how our love of being useful begins, and this love leads us to also love the means that allow us to do our occupation and make it effective.

This process applies to everyone in this world because we all have some occupation to which we progress, beginning from the service we envision as a goal, through the means to the actual service that is the result.

And finally, from the work True Christianity, number 422.

Charity itself is acting justly and faithfully in our position and our work and with the people with whom we interact.

Charity itself is acting justly and faithfully in our position and our work, because all the things we do in this way are useful to the community, and usefulness is goodness, and goodness in an impersonal sense is our neighbor.

As I've shown above, our neighbor is not only individual people, but also our community and the country as a whole.

For example, if monarchs lead the way for their subjects by setting an example of doing good, if they want their people to live by the laws of justice, if they reward people who live that way, if they give all people the consideration they deserve, if they keep their people safe from harm and invasion, if they act like parents to their countries, and take care for the general prosperity of their people, these monarchs have charity in their hearts.

The things they do are good actions.

Priests who teach truths from the word and use truths to lead to the goodness of life and therefore to heaven, are practicing charity in very important ways, because they are caring for the souls of the people in their church.

Judges who make decisions on the basis of justice and the law, and not because of bribery or because someone is their friend or relative, are caring for the community and for the individual, for the community because their decisions influence it, to stay obedient to the law and fearful of breaking it, and for the individual because their decisions allow justice to triumph over injustice.

Business people who act with honesty and without fraudulence are caring for the neighbor they do business with.

So are workers and craftspeople when they do their work uprightly and honestly, rather than falsely or deceptively.

The same goes for everyone else, for ship captains and sailors, for farm workers and servants.

Amen.

Here end our lessons.

Blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.

So here we are at the end of August.

Summer break is winding down.

For many of us, we might be getting back to school this week, or maybe we already got back to school a week or two ago, or maybe we're not even going to school anymore, but still, it feels like summer's coming to an end and we're getting sort of back into the swing of things.

And at these times of year, I think it's useful for us to take time and reflect on our goals and the things that we're working towards.

And so with that in mind, I want to begin by taking a look at one of the biggest questions that we all have to ask ourselves.

And that is, what do I want to be when I grow up?

This is a question that we always ask young children.

We say, What do you want to be when you grow up?

To get them thinking about the things that interest them.

But I bet there's even some adults in here who probably still wonder to themselves, what do I want to be when I grow up?

And it's an important question because we all have something that we dedicate our lives to.

Whether it's a job, whether it's being a stay-at-home parent, whatever it might be, there's this idea that at some point we will sort of find something and we will say, I want to dedicate the rest of my life to doing this.

And so what are the things that we consider when making that decision?

What are the things that we think about when we try to wonder, what should I dedicate my life to?

Well, maybe we think about the money involved.

Maybe we say, well, I want to live a comfortable lifestyle and I want to live in a nice house, so I gotta make sure I pursue something that's gonna pay me well.

Or maybe we focus on our interests.

We say, well, I don't really care how much money I make, I just want to do something that I'm interested in.

I want to do something that feels like I'm having fun every day, and that's what's really important to me.

Or maybe we make the decision based on use, based on our ability to do good for the community.

And we say, I want to have a job where I feel like every day I go to work and I'm making a difference for my community, and I feel like I'm helping other people.

And all of these are things that we can think about when we think of what we want to do with our lives.

In one of our lessons this morning from the teachings of the new church, from the doctrine of faith, gave us this sort of progression that we all go through that helps us determine what we're gonna dedicate our lives to.

It says that when we're young, we have this just general love of learning things.

We love to just understand how things work.

We ask questions, we learn about lots of different things.

But then as we grow older, at some point our interests kind of narrow.

And at some point, we dedicate ourselves to a use.

We dedicate ourselves to a career.

And then we learn all the things we have to know about that career.

And as we learn the things involved in it and we start to do it, it says that that career becomes a way for us to be useful.

And so that's what our job is really all about.

Whatever our job is, it's about us being able to be useful to the world around us.

And we might think, okay, well, I can imagine some careers where it's really easy to see how doing that as your job is being useful.

We think of a stay-at-home parent who is raising their children and teaching them right from wrong and feeding them and clothing them and doing all this important work.

We think of teachers who teach children.

We think of firefighters who keep us safe when horrible emergencies come.

We think of all kinds of people who might, we might say, Oh, those are easy to tell, how those are being useful.

But I'm sure we could probably all think of some jobs that we'd look at and we would say, it might be kind of hard for me to feel useful if that's what I had to do every day.

Even if we're not sure what we want to be when we grow up, we probably all have some ideas of some of the things that we certainly would not want to do.

And we might fall into this kind of thinking that maybe some jobs are more useful than other jobs.

Maybe some jobs are more important, they're more, they're more worthy of honor than other jobs.

And so, how do we decide between these undesirable jobs and these desirable jobs?

So, in thinking about that, I want to talk about our story from this morning that came from the Gospel of Luke.

It was about a man named Zacchaeus.

And Zacchaeus had an important job, and he had a pretty prominent job.

He was a chief tax collector.

But tax collectors in those days were not a very honorable job.

That wasn't a job that people really looked up to.

That was probably a job that people would look at and say, it would be hard for me to feel useful if my job was a tax collector.

And what the tax collectors did was they collected taxes, they collected money and sent it back to the Roman government.

And so sometimes people felt like tax collectors felt kind of like thieves.

Because they would come to you and say, Well, I need you to give me this amount of money, and they would take it and it would get shipped off somewhere else.

And so they felt kind of like thieves.

And actually, a lot of tax collectors in those days were thieves.

A lot of them would be dishonest, and they would go to someone and say that they owed more money than they really did.

And that extra money that they charged, they would take and they would keep it for themselves.

And so tax collectors were not a glamorous job.

It was, they were people that we looked down on, that people didn't like them.

And so that was Zacchaeus' job, and he was a chief tax collector.

He was a guy who made a good living doing this work that people didn't like.

And so in the story, he knew that Jesus was coming into town and he wanted to see him.

But Zacchaeus wasn't very tall, and so he knew he wouldn't be able to see him through all the crowds.

So, in order to be able to see the Lord, Zacchaeus climbs up into a tree that overlooks the road.

And as Jesus is coming down the street, he looks up and he sees Zacchaeus, and he says, Zacchaeus, hurry up and come down from there, because I have to come stay at your house.

And it says Zacchaeus received him joyfully.

He was excited to bring the Lord to his house.

But it said everyone else around there kind of grumbled.

They said, Well, why is he gonna go stay at his house?

He's a sinner, he's a tax collector.

Why would the Lord go and see him?

And when Jesus goes into Zacchaeus' house, Zacchaeus talks to him, and what he shares with him is powerful.

He says, Lord, I give half of all of my goods to the poor.

And if I've ever taken anything that I wasn't supposed to, I have returned it fourfold.

I've paid back four times as much as I took.

And the Lord's response to him is, Today, salvation has come to this house.

So Zacchaeus was someone who had one of these, what we might consider an undesirable job.

Sure, he made a lot of money, but it didn't really seem like a useful job.

It didn't seem like a job where doing it well was going to be good for other people.

People didn't like him because of the job that he did.

But then when the Lord came into his house, the Lord was able to show him that what really matters isn't what kind of job that you have, it's what kind of person you are.

And Zacchaeus was able to show him, sure, I'm a tax collector, but look, I don't just take all of this money and keep it for myself.

Yeah, I make a lot of money with this, but that allows me to give half of it away and help other people with it.

And it's true that a lot of tax collectors might steal, they might be dishonest, but not me.

If I ever catch myself being dishonest, I make sure that I pay people back and I pay them extra for it.

And what he was demonstrating is that what really matters more than what kind of job we have, what matters in the eyes of the Lord is whether we do our job honestly, justly, and faithfully.

And that was from our reading in True Christianity, that said that charity itself is doing the work of our occupation honestly, justly, and faithfully.

And think about that.

It's not just saying an important part of being a charitable person is doing this.

No, it says charity itself, the life of loving our neighbor and loving the Lord, the central thing in that is whatever use we have, whatever job we are tasked with doing in our lives, if we do that honestly, justly, and faithfully, that's what matters.

That's how we can take any job that we have and turn it from just a job that maybe pays our bills and takes it from that into a means of us being useful.

And so this is what I would encourage all of us to do as we get ready to dive back into a new school year, and maybe we start thinking about what are the things I like learning about?

What are the things that maybe someday I might want to dedicate myself to and do for the rest of my life?

We can think about that, because that's an important thing for us to choose.

What are we gonna do with our lives?

But even more importantly than that, we can take a step back and say, not only should I think about what I want to be when I grow up, but I should think about who I want to be when I grow up.

And we should dedicate ourselves to learning from the Lord, following Him, so that whatever job we end up doing someday, we can do that job honestly, justly, and faithfully.

And then it's not just our work, it's not just our job.

It's a means of being useful, it's a means of being charitable, and it's how we can love the Lord and love our neighbors every day.

Amen.