Vocation is more than we thought it was: A commencement address - part 1 of 2

After an abortive house search in Sharon’s and my newly re-adopted home base of the Twin Cities, Minneapolis (we’ll be renting for another year), I flew out the other day to a gem in Northern California: Chester Lake Almanor. Here 2,600 souls live by a crystal blue lake nestled near Lassen Peak (part of Lassen Volcanic National Park a few miles from the town). The town is sleepy and beautiful, a retreat for a small group of locals and vacationers who own second or third homes in its environs, which during the summer and winter tourist seasons explodes with some 70,000 visitors each year (as an alternative to Lake Tahoe, 2.5 hours away, which welcomes 15 million visitors annually!).

My host, native Northern Californian Rev. Brian Foos, serves as head of a twenty-seven-year-old K12 school called St Andrew’s Academy, which is classical and Anglican in character. The academy has also, over the past five years, birthed the small but mighty St Andrew’s College. Father Foos and his staff are in the process of purchasing more land and buildings in Chester to grow into their substantial vision for perhaps the only (orthodox) Anglican college in the country, serving students from across the nation.

After serving as part of the thesis defense committee for this year’s single graduate, a young woman of impressive scholarly and writerly skill whose thesis reflected on the transformative art of cinema, its consumerist travails, and the incursion of AI, I then witnessed a lively fencing tournament featuring the graduate and a young male colleague in a spirited match officiated by an impressive fencing teacher.

Then, amidst a packed schedule of feasting and conversation with my host’s lively family and visiting friends (a more dynamic group of bright and committed Christians I’ve rarely had the pleasure of meeting!), we trooped to St. Andrew’s Church (Reformed Episcopalian), which Father Foos serves as rector, for the college’s second-ever graduation ceremony.

Befitting the long history of university education as a phenomenon birthed “ex corde ecclesiae” (out of the heart of the church)—a phrase that applies well to the Academy and College too—the ceremony was essentially a high Anglican service, complete with incense, prayerbook scriptures and readings, and a small choir that punched well above its weight. And here I did my duty as the invited commencement speaker:

As you graduate, I suspect you have a particular thing on your mind. Our Christian tradition calls it vocation, even if the world often means by that only “getting a job.” I want to say a few words to you now about this subject.

I might be expected, as a Christian speaker in this setting, to dwell on vocational discernment, and even to suggest that God has one particular calling or vocation for you, and that you should seek him and ask him to reveal that one vocation to you directly. After all, God did directly call people in scripture.

Never mind that out of the thousands of people we meet in the Bible, by one count fewer than 100 experienced anything like a direct call from God to a specific work. And most of those he did call in this way were not terribly happy with those callings. I believe the typical response was, “You’ve got to be kidding, God! You’ve got the wrong person!”

But while I do believe God communicates vocational direction to us, I have also learned that he tends to do so through more ordinary means:

Through hearing what others tell us about the gifts they see in us, or through becoming aware of certain needs in the world, or through certain desires God seems to have put in our hearts from our early years.

Such ordinary clues to our vocations are certainly not infallible. But they can guide us just as strongly as an audible voice of God. Maybe you have experienced this in your own life already.

And that’s really about all I can say about vocational discernment!

But the concept of “vocation” itself is worth a few more words. Because in my experience it’s not an obvious concept to many Christians today. And it is complicated by some very un-Christian assumptions in the culture around us.

Maybe we can start with what vocation is clearly not. As a believer in the God who became human and lived among us, there’s at least one thing I know vocation is not and cannot be. It cannot be separate from God and your life in Him.

To talk about vocation in any way that would separate our work lives from some imagined “spiritual lives” is an insult to the Incarnation—to the God who took on flesh and walked and worked among us.

Nonetheless some think historic monasticism has practiced this separation. But that is just not true. The Benedictine tradition’s watchword has always been “ora et labora” – prayer and work, interwoven. And that seamless sort of life is deeply true to the gospel.

And yet, the world we live in insists on separating work and prayer. It insists that our public, everyday activities happen in a whole different reality than our supposedly inner, private religion.

This is because in the modern West, at least, the dominant belief is that our whole life on this earth takes place only within what Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor calls an “immanent frame.” That is, we live, at least publicly, in what is believed to be a merely material and social world, with no connection to transcendent reality.

Of course within the privacy of our hearts and minds, we’re grudgingly allowed to believe in God. But if we try to apply our religion publicly, that’s considered inappropriate and even dangerous.

After all, science has now proved (what a culturally freighted phrase that is!) that God can have nothing to do with the material and social realm! Thus by definition, our faith can not possibly speak to the public, earthly stuff of our work and relationships.

So where does that leave us? Our world interprets our lives in the marketplace and the public square as secular, and the sacred things of faith as exclusively private.

This is such a pervasive paradigm that even we Christ-followers, who also swim in these cultural waters, often behave in our vocational lives as if Christ had never come to earth, worked in his father’s shop, walked the dusty roads with us, eaten our food, experienced our temptations. And we behave as if Christ has nothing to say to us about our ordinary work.

Deeper than this, no matter what we may know in our heads, our secular culture messes us up on these two further questions about vocation:

First, how can we come to a true, full, and faithful vision of our work—that is, both our paid work, and the various other kinds of work involved in raising a family, being a good neighbor or a good citizen?

And second, how can this vision point us toward a “spirituality of everyday life” that sees all our public engagement as also an arena of Christian discipleship—even jobs or careers that may otherwise seem secular to us?

To get closer to that sort of vision of vocation, we must dive more deeply into Christian teachings on the subject – I’ll try to get us into the shallow end at least, in the few remaining minutes.

I want to speak for a moment first of the teachings of such Reformation leaders as Martin Luther. These Christian teachers recognized two categories of callings:

The first may be summarized as the general call to life in God – or simply, to holiness. All humans are called in this way, though many do not answer that call. But note that we almost never use the word “vocation” for this kind of calling any more. Nonetheless, the Bible did, and so did the Reformers.

The second is a set of particular callings that have to do with our particular situations, gifts, and modes of service to others; included here are the jobs and careers for which a college education is supposed to prepare us.

So first, our general callings. What might these include? Scripturally, we might identify at least three separate categories of general callings – these are areas of activity to which all human beings are called by God, even if we fail to heed that call. These are:

First, a creative vocation: Be fruitful and multiply; cultivate and keep the earth; exercise dominion in the earth – as Genesis teaches. By the way, the Hebrew word for “fruitful” here, Parah, is used throughout the Old Testament to mean not “have babies,” but “create culture.”

Second, a moral vocation: Keep the Ten Commandments – a vocation that is not superseded but fulfilled in the New Testament gospel, as the Lord taught.

And third, a “love vocation”: This is the Lord’s command to love God and neighbor; and to serve others both spiritually and practically, as in the medieval tradition of the seven corporal and seven spiritual mercies.

This list is incomplete of course. The historic church has understood “general callings” to include all the things everyone is called to by God. And Scripture is richly full of those callings.

I’ll just add: more of our conversations about vocation should start here, with these callings upon all of us!

But now let’s turn to our particular callings, which is almost always what we are referring to when we use the term “vocation”:

The Reformers used this term to point to the diversity of work, even “jobs,” that different people are called to.

The idea of particular callings is based on the theological insight that God seems to extend his gracious providence into the world through the exercise of human work across what we might call many “sectors.”

For example, God creates or provides for his human creations through agricultural or manufacturing jobs, restores or heals through medical or social sector jobs, and protects through people doing legal, law enforcement, and military jobs.

Luther, Calvin, and other early Protestant thus concluded that it is profitable to consider vocation in a way we don’t usually find in scripture – as a summons to any kind of meaningful work in service to others.

In this Reformation frame, vocation is also plural for each of us. It is not “One Big Mysterious Job God has for you to do, which he hides from you, but which, if you miss it, you anger him and lose his favor” (sadly, a common view among especially young Christians today). Nor is it even “one big thing he leads you to through clear signs.” It is not “one big thing” at all!

No, we have many vocations. Not just serially, as we move from one job and one relationship to others, as we all naturally do throughout a lifetime. But also simultaneously.

So, at this moment I am serving simultaneously in dozens of vocations – as son, brother, father, husband, tenant to my landlord, neighbor to my neighbor, citizen of my city. And even in my paying job, I have multiple vocations – to my organization’s constituents of course—those we serve—but also to my co-workers, to my supervisor, to our donors, and even to the board that oversees the good functioning of the center.

And in each of your own future jobs (which current research suggests will in your lifetime number at least a dozen, even in 4 to 6 different careers!), you will similarly have multiple vocations, to different groups and persons.

Continued and concluded in the next post.