The Masks of God

✠ 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 people around us—parents, teachers, cops, the factory workers who made our clothes, the lady at the checkout counter—God is working through us.

The purpose of vocation, according to Luther, is loving and serving our neighbors. Not so much “serving God,” as if He needed our works, but serving the actual human beings whom God brings into our lives.

Christians have multiple vocations. We have a calling in the family. We have a calling in our work. We have a calling as citizens in our society. Each of these entails particular neighbors whom we are to love and serve.

In the family, a husband is to love and serve the neighbor who is his wife, and she him; parents love and serve their children, and vice versa. Workers love and serve their customers, as well as the boss and fellow employees. In the society, rulers love and serve their subjects (not tyrannize them), and citizens love and serve each other by agitating for the common good. In the church, pastors love and serve their parishioners, who, in turn, love and serve each other by singing in the choir, passing out bulletins, and mowing the church lawn. Everybody loves and serves each other.

Of course, it doesn’t always work that way. So we keep coming back to the Divine Service to confess the sins that we have committed in our vocations, whereupon Christ absolves us through the vocation of the pastor (see “The Office of the Keys and Confession” and the “Table of Duties” in the catechism).

So what about somebody who is still in school and isn’t married and isn’t old enough to vote? What is a teenager’s vocation? Well, being a child, according to Luther, is a vocation, so the same must hold for someone on the verge of adulthood. See who your neighbors are. Love and serve the members of your family, the members of your church, the members of your society, including your friends.

One of your vocations is doubtless that of a student. The proper work of a student is to study. Love and serve William Shakespeare, the American founders, the person who came up with the Pythagorean theorem, and the rest of those through whom God has blessed our civilization, by studying them.

And you may have a job, miserable though it may be. That is a vocation too. If you weren’t doing something to help someone else, the company would be out of business. God is hidden there too.

In the meantime, realize that in the course of your life, as it unfolds, God will be calling you—through the gifts He has given you, your interests, and your opportunities—to other avenues of service throughout your life. He may call you to a family of your own, to a spouse and maybe to parenthood. To a career or lots of careers. To congregations and to opportunities to get involved with your community. Watch where He will be hiding.

Dr. Gene Edward Veith is Dean of Arts and Sciences at Concordia University in Mequon, Wisconsin. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Higher Things.