My Useless Work

When I went to school, they pressed a handful of seeds into my hand, taught me how to scatter them, and told me to do it faithfully. Then someone pointed me in the direction of dry, hardened, thorny ground, and told me to scatter over that bit.

I scattered my seeds, and watched them blow away.

The next week, I scattered my seeds, and watched them blow away

And the week after that, I scattered my seeds, and watched them blow away.

And I did this almost three hundred times.

Finally, I hung up my bag of seeds, and walked away from that patch of useless ground and my useless work there. I left to pursue my studies of ancient farming practices.

Now, I've never fancied myself much of a farmer. I'm a much better student than I am a farmer, and I am making it my mission in life to help people to see why ancient farming practices matter. But I believe that every Christian has those seeds in their hand, and I believe that we are all supposed to scatter our seeds faithfully. I believed that then, and I still do. But it just seemed so often like wasted time, like useless, fruitless work. And I've spent a lot of time wondering what any of it meant, if any of it mattered.

Tonight, though, I was reminded that I judge too quickly. I am very human, and I have a very short view of things. And those three hundred nights that I sat and watched seeds blow away, what I did not, and could not, account for was every seed. There were a few that stuck. And today if you walked past that hard and thorny patch of ground, you would see a place that has blossomed into bright and beautiful flower. A place that is unmistakably, undeniably alive. Dozens of people have come along and watered and weeded and nurtured and pruned.

There are times that it's more complicated than “I planted; Apollos watered; God gave growth.” Sometimes it's “I planted and planted and planted and planted, and then months and months of watering and nurturing happened thanks to a whole team of crop specialists, and God gave growth.

And some people never get to see it. Some people die, never seeing any fruit for labour much longer and more invested than was mine. I'm one of the lucky ones, to see it as I have. But that flower, that growth, that oasis in a desert place – that is why we scatter seeds. That is the “why” behind the world's most useful, seemingly useless work.

Throw Out the Instruction Manual

Imagine that you have just bought a Widget 2000. You bring it home, plug it in, hit the power button...and it doesn't work. No lights. No sound. None of the good stuff you were promised. You pull the instruction manual out of the box. You flip through pages and pages that tell you how to use it to get the lights and the sounds, but none of it works. Knowing how to use a widget is great, but it would have to be a working widget. Yours is defective. Also in the box is another manual entitled, “How to Use a Defective Widget.” You follow those instructions very carefully. You now have some of the lights, and some of the sounds, but it's still not all that a Widget 2000 was advertised to be. No matter the work you put in, the tinkering and jimmying and jury-rigging, the instruction manual can't change the fact that your widget is defective.

All too often, I hear Christians talk about the Bible as an owners manual, or an instruction manual. It isn't, really. The instructions in it are more of the “How to Use a Defective Widget” variety: they show us what we ought to do in the midst of the wreckage of sin-sick world. This is what the Law that God gave to Moses was meant to do: show people how best to live in the midst of their mess, and even that didn't work. The prophets and the New Testament writers tell us repeatedly that the Law couldn't be kept by defective widgets like us.

What we have in the Bible is not a rule book, not an instruction manual, but a story. A story that tells us we were created as the representatives of God on earth, to care for and steward it as he would. A story that tells that we chose to rebel. A story of the king who takes the punishment due these wicked rebels, frees them from their slavery to sin, and adopts them as his sons and daughters. Humanity is incapable of following the instructions, and so we have been called to participate in this story of rebellion, redemption, and adoption. This is what we mean – what we should mean – when we speak of the gospel. And it changes who we are. It changes how we live. There are things we ought to do and a standard to which we are called, but these are the fruit of the gospel's work in our lives, not the gospel itself.

If your Bible is a rule book, throw it away. Trying harder is not the answer. You'll never measure up. You're not good enough; no one is. But if your Bible is the story of the God who loves his creation, who loves you, beyond all measure, then drink deeply of that story that speaks salvation to us all.

Our Lord, Who is Alive

You may recall that last year I had some reflections on Morning Prayer at Trinity College's research conference. (If not, you can find that post here.) It is a beautiful practice, and I was once more struck by its deep rooting in the breadth of scripture.

But this year, what really got me was the end of the collect (pronounced COLL-ect), which is a concluding prayer near the end of the service, and one of the few statements in the entire service that is not directly from scripture. The collect differs day to day, but always ends, "through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who is alive and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever."

Here's the part that kept getting me: "Jesus...our Lord who is alive." I kept finding myself unable to keep from smiling as that was prayed. Jesus is alive! Jesus is alive, and that is no little point to make. These prayers are ancient. Most of them were translated by Thomas Cranmer during the Reformation out of the prayers of the Roman Catholic Church. These prayers were written at a time that almost no one (as far as I can tell) doubted the resurrection of Jesus. There were nearly no atheists. There was no theological liberalism as we conceive of it. To speak of "our Lord who is alive" would have been very nearly redundant.

But not now. Not today. That little piece of prayer that for centuries was unchallenged is now one of the most counter-cultural statements that you can make. Almost no one doubts that a man named Jesus existed. Almost no one, Muslims excepted, doubts that he was crucified by the Romans. But the question is, where is he now? Or more to the point, how is he feeling?

Our Lord Jesus is alive. There is no statement more central to our faith. Without it, you are in no way a Christian. Maybe the first writer of that prayer understood that the resurrection was of such importance that it that ought never to be assumed. I may not intend to take up the practice of Anglican daily prayer, but we could do a lot worse than to confess each day to ourselves, than to confess to each other and to our world, that Jesus is alive. And that is something to smile about.