2003 Fall - Higher Things Magazine (with Bible Studies)

@ Have you been subjected to “vocational counseling” to help you choose your career path? @ Have you been pushed into “vocational training” because your grade point average is not the best? @ Are you considering a “vocational school” to make sure you get a job?

If so, then you’re familiar with the term “vocation,” which is technically a Lutheran term.

Like other words ripped off from theology by secularists—such as “creative,”“inspired,” “mission,” and “spiritual”—the word “vocation” has been drained of its true meaning. Now it just means “a job.” Actually, the term—from the Latin word for “calling”—refers to one of Luther’s greatest insights, a concept that gives meaning, value, and direction to everyday life and transfigures even the secular world with the presence of God. The doctrine of vocation is an application of the key Lutheran insight that God works through means. In His spiritual kingdom, He works through the means of grace: the Word and the Sacraments.These He brings to us by means of the vocation of “the called and ordained servant of the Word,” the pastor.

In God’s earthly kingdom, though, He also works through means, particularly through human beings in their various callings. He gives us this day our daily bread through the vocation of farmers, bakers, food processing workers, the stock boy at the grocery store, and the hamburger flipper. He brings new life into the world through the vocation of mothers and fathers. He protects us by means of police officers, fire fighters, soldiers, and government officials. He imparts the ability to read and write by means of teachers. He brings healing—not usually through miracles, though He can if He wants to—by means of doctors and nurses.

They are all, in Luther’s terms “masks of God,” human beings just doing their jobs, but God Himself is hiding behind these facades.

“Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights” (James 1:17). We are right to thank God for our food, for the recovery of a sick friend, for a beautiful work of art, since He is the source of them all.

In the medieval church—as well as in much of American religiosity today—only church workers were thought to have a “calling” from God, with only churchy kinds of activities being considered truly “spiritual.” Luther, though, insisted that every Christian has a calling and that God governs and leads His people into even allegedly secular activities.

Other Christians sometimes talk about “serving God” in whatever we do, but, as always, the Lutheran emphasis is on what God does through us. And just as we are blessed by how God is serving us through all of the H I G H E R T H I N G S __ 4