GOD AT WORK

What if someone at work walked up to you and, instead of wearing a name tag as seems to be the rule these days in the work place, wore a tag that said “God at Work”? Or what if the boss had that same phrase inscribe on a block of wood sitting on her desk facing towards you as you entered to speak to her? What would you think? Or, to make it more personal, what if your name tag read “God at Work?” What do you think your co-workers would think about you?

My suspicion is that I would judge my co-worker as some kind of religious not, my boss as someone on an ego trip, and myself as having one heck of a lot of chutzpah. No one of us would claim that we are God and that everything we say or do is what God would say or do. Well, I would hope no one would be so bold as to make such claims, certainly not so self-centered as to believe the claim.

Nevertheless, we should all wear such a tag on our person. Do we not believe that God works in and through us, that the only way God’s will gets done here on earth as it is done in heaven is in and through those who profess to believe in God? Thus, when we are at work, God is at work. When we are living out our faith in God, God’s work and God’s will is being done.

That is the honest-to-God truth whether we like it or not. Mostly, if honestly, we like it even as it scares us to death to think about the implications of that truth. When we do honestly, sincerely, deeply think about those implications, it becomes frightening. God has entrusted each one of us to carry out God’s work in our everyday lives no matter how mundane or how trivial or even how important it is that we are doing.

Yes, there is a certain amout of chutzpah in claiming to do God’s work but, again, it is tempered by the knowledge that we fail to do that work more than we would like to admit. Even worse, at times what we do is in direct contradiction to what we know God would have us do. Sometimes our actions give non-believers that right to say, “If that is how your God acts, I want nothing to do with your God.”

So we are wary as we are warned. We know what is expected of us but are wary of claiming that we are doing God’s work and that God is at work in us because we know ourselves, how selfish and sinful we sometimes are. And we are. No one of us is perfect. We know that. More importantly, God knows that. Yes, God would like perfection. So would we. But perfection only comes in the life to come.

In the meantime, it might do good were we, every morning as we finish getting dressed, to pull out a tag that says “God at Work” and pin it on our clothes for all to see. It would remind us of our calling and our responsibility as God’s worker here on earth. But do we have the chutzpah, let alone the guts and courage to do so?