Too Small to Fail

The fact that we celebrate the American worker by not working tells us something about our relationship with work — it is very complicated. Even Labor Day itself has an interesting background. When President Grover Cleveland signed the law that made Labor Day an official national holiday in 1894, he did so against a backdrop of social unrest in this country — much of it because of unjust work practices. Many laborers were working twelve-hour days, seven days a week, in unsanitary factories and unsafe places. It was not long ago that children as young as five or six years old were put to work in factories and mines in the United States. And so, against that backdrop, which led to riots and strikes, there was good legislation passed in Washington — good work done on behalf of people, treating them like the image bearers of God they are — so that they might be treated with dignity and respect in the workplace.

Fortunately, times have changed… somewhat. In professional situations, some still work seven days a week, twelve hours a day, but because they choose to. In other situations, particularly low wage environments, economic necessities require long work hours. Yet, even when things have improved in terms of work environment, our relationship with work remains complicated because (as a general rule) even if we love our work, daily work is hard. People are annoying. Co-workers are indifferent. Bosses and supervisors are selfish. Organizations and institutions are greedy. Our clients are demanding, and they do not call us simply to thank us for doing a great job today. Even if we love our jobs, we never love all of them. That’s just part of our complicated relationship with work.

And, truth be told, some of us really do not like our jobs. Some are just paying our dues until the next thing comes along. Some are just trying to pay the bills. For some, the job right now is studying in order to one day be employable. Any of us who have gone through school knows that that’s kind of an up-and-down affair, depending on the class and the subject and the teacher and the classmates in the school. For some, our job is looking for a job, something that is no fun. Work, of all these types, can be frustrating, disheartening, and discouraging.

For others, our job is now figuring out what our work will be now that we no longer have a job, because we are retired. The days involve thinking, “Now what do I do with myself for the decades ahead? People used to answer to me. People listened to what I said. I had influence on an organization. And now I’m just trying to find my place.”

Most of us are somewhere in between all of these, just blandly doing the thing in front of us. Despite all of those frustrations and all of those hindrances and barriers to joy, tomorrow morning, guess what? We’ll be back at it, showing up, in front of the screen, in precalculus class, dialing in, making a 45-minute commute, looking for a job again, trying to figure out what to do with ourselves.

Why? We have to pay the bills. We have to do something. We have to put one foot in front of the other.

There is nothing wrong with a sense of duty and responsibility. Yet, there remains something deeper inside of us when it comes to work. Even if we mainly work because we have to, we want something more out of our work, something that is a vocation, not simply a job. Deep down, all of us want our work to matter. We want our lives to matter, and we will never be able to get away from that, because it is how God made us. God made us in his image, put us to work, and gave us a day of rest — so that in his hands, our lives would matter. And since approximately 80% of our lives are work, that 80% of our lives matters as well.

So how do we know that our work matters, that we are not simply wasting our days? One option is ultimately subjective: to look at what the world would tell, to look at our record, to show others our resume, to list the really important things we have done.

But sometimes, we doubt ourselves. We ask, “Does what I have accomplished actually matter? Does it matter that I have built a good reputation in the sight of others? Does it matter that I have achieved a high-ranking position in my organization?” In the end, most come to realize with age, that what we have accomplished, the reputation we have built, and our rank are all poor measures of our actual value. And, as the author of Ecclesiastes suggests in chapter 12, if age alone does not bring such wisdom, ultimately death makes it unquestionable. Ultimately, our resume will not get it done. Doubt will always gnaw at us. So how do we know that our work matters?

In Matthew 13, Jesus tells a parable, one that reminds us of our value. Jesus tells us that God loves to do his work in the world by taking ordinary people and making an extraordinary difference.

He put another parable before them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed that a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is larger than all the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

He told them another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour, till it was all leavened.” (Matthew 13:31-33)

What does this parable tell us about ordinary people?

First, it reminds us that the kingdom seems small. Notice that the object lesson here has to do with two very small things. In fact, Jesus goes out of his way to note that the mustard seed was the smallest of all the seeds. The beginning of the parable contains a remarkable juxtaposition. Jesus begins, as he does in many of the parables in Matthew 13, with the words, “The kingdom of heaven is like….” An original Jewish audience would (just as a modern audience) hear “kingdom of heaven” and think of something immense, grand, large, and endless. The disciples’ minds might go to Daniel 7: Daniel’s vision of the throne of God and the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man; a vision that declares God’s kingdom as an everlasting dominion, a kingdom that shall not be destroyed.

But instead, Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed.” It would not have been surprising if there were ripples of laughter through the crowd when Jesus spoke those words, almost the humorous dissonance of a Monty Python skit. People would have had to squint to even see if Jesus was really holding a mustard seed, or if he was just pretending to hold a mustard seed, because it is the smallest thing he could have picked, yet Jesus said, “This is what the kingdom of heaven is like.” It starts small. You can barely see it. It does not get a lot of recognition or applause. It appears just ordinary, like a mustard seed.

Second, the kingdom is not only small; it is also hidden. Notice the way Jesus tells the story &emdash; a man takes a mustard seed and adopts a somewhat curious and suspicious agricultural strategy. He takes a single mustard seed, and he walks out into his field and plants it. Most farmers would sow a lot of seed, trusting that some of it would actually take root. Yet, in this parable a single mustard seed, hidden, buried in the ground, is all it takes. Similarly, in verse 33, a woman takes leaven, or yeast, and hides it in three measures of flour. Three measures of flour equaled sixty pounds of flour, tremendously more than a single bit of leaven. And yet, Jesus is saying that these acts are just another day in the kingdom of God.

This is how God plans on taking over the world. Mustard seeds and leaven. Small, hidden, ordinary acts of faithfulness. Notice the extraordinary difference, the marvelous discrepancy between how the parable begins and how it ends.

Think of the expansive blessings described. A tiny mustard seed is planted in the ground, the smallest of all the seeds, but when it grows, it is larger than all the garden plants, a towering tree. Then birds come from all over to make their nest in this place, to be blessed by the presence of the tree and the branches. What starts off small and hidden explodes into expansive blessings. Similarly, if you have ever walked into a house or restaurant where fresh bread is coming out of the oven, you have enjoyed the blessings. But how did it start? Just a little bit of leaven.

Expansive blessings are not all Jesus has in view. The parable also highlights the yeast’s pervasive influence. This is how yeast works, slowly but pervasively spreading. This woman hid yeast in the flour, and all of it was changed, nothing left unaffected. Jesus’ point is that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed and like leaven—small and hidden. But in the end, it grows into an expansive and pervasive blessing upon the entire world.

Here we must understand the relationship between the kingdom of heaven and our work here on earth. The kingdom of heaven is bigger than our work, bigger than our vocation. It is God’s work. He brings the kingdom, in his time and in his way. One of the besetting sins of church history is to adopt purely human means to attempt to force the issue, to bring a Christendom that seems like it will be God’s kingdom &emdash; yet instead devolves into something far less. Jesus is the one who said, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” Christians must be exceptionally careful, then, to avoid conflating political power, business, education, or even social justice with the fullness of the kingdom.

And yet, those things are a piece of the kingdom, simply not its entirety. As John Stott reminded us in Christian Mission in the Modern World, gospel preaching must maintain its centrality in Christian mission. Yet, as Stott also reminded, the implications of that gospel proclamation spread to all of life. Here the doctrine of spiritual gifts helps parse out the question. In the narrow sense, spiritual gifts are the gifts God has given — and given differently — to each believer to build the church (1 Cor. 12:1-11). God gives every believer spiritual gifts, but differently, each in accord with our role in building the body of Christ.

Gospel proclamation is central to building the church, itself central to the work of God on earth, the work of his will being done on earth as it is in heaven. Further, some Christians work specifically in and for the church, called to a vocation of gospel ministry (Eph. 4:11-12). Is the work of other Christians, then, simply irrelevant, not part of God’s kingdom? Hardly! Instead, while gospel proclamation and the church are central to the kingdom, they are no more the full extent of the kingdom of God than are government, education, environmental protection, culture-making, and justice. Instead, Christians, equipped, discipled, and trained in the church, go out to take all those other aspects of the kingdom forward by their work in the world.

What’s this telling us about our lives? Over and over and over again, in every generation, God takes seemingly ordinary people like you and me and embeds us in ordinary places in ordinary jobs and ordinary schools and ordinary families. God calls us to ordinary families in ordinary communities in ordinary cities to write papers and design buildings and sell real estate and care for patients. Small hidden acts of faithfulness that in God’s hands make an extraordinary difference, because they are not simply a way to put food on the table but are instead manifestations — when done for God and his glory — of his kingdom spreading, imperceptibly but unstoppably.

Yet, if this is the truth of the kingdom coming in our world, we must admit that most of us don’t see this happening. We relate to parts of the parable, like the idea of being buried under work, or being hidden where no one notices what we are doing. We get that part of the parable, but we don’t see what Jesus is talking about after that.

But that is Jesus’ point. If we don’t see it happening, we must know that most of the time, we won’t see it happening. As a friend of mine reminded me, we do not watch plants grow. Yes, we can do the cool time lapse thing on our phones and watch videos of things growing over nine months. Then we can see something small become something beautiful. But most of the time in ordinary life, we do not see the growth. It is just another day at the office, another day in the classroom, another day at home, folding laundry and changing diapers and raising kids just another day… another day… another day.

But Jesus says we need to have eyes to see how the kingdom of heaven works. This parable can instill confidence in us that our work matters, even when it seems like it must not. This can also encourage those of us who feel a bit lost in life, like we do not have it figured out right now. Here is the encouragement from the parable — we do not need to have it all figured out. We can have confidence that where God has us now is where he wants us now so that through ordinary acts of faithfulness, we can place our work in his hands, our study in his hands, and he will use it in his wisdom. We know the One who has planted us where we are for this season that we might do the work he has called us to do.

Seeing this spiritual truth gives us a great contentment with simply being us. Some years back, Ross Douthat editorialized in the New York Times that it is “easier to be remarkable and unusual” than it used to be. But, Douthat said, this ease of becoming remarkable has come at a cost—that it is now “harder to be ordinary.” He writes that it has become harder “to be the kind of person who doesn’t want to write his own life script or invent her own idiosyncratic career path. To enjoy the stability and comfort of inherited obligations and expectations, rather than constantly having to strike out on your own. To follow a ‘little way’ rather than a path of great ambition.”

Now far be it for me, writing from the Washington, DC metro area, to start criticizing those who are ambitious. There is nothing wrong with ambition, per se. There is nothing wrong with a big path or striking out on your own or finding yourself in places of influence. It can be a great blessing (and responsibility) to do important things, to make a difference, to be in an important place, to grow into an important job, or to be assigned important and significant responsibility. Jesus is not scorning those things. What Jesus is saying, however, is that those things must not lead us to scorn the ordinary, everyday stuff, because even the important jobs ultimately come down to ordinary, everyday stuff: treating people with respect, doing your job well, being an ethical person, and being responsible.

In fact, if our work is, at least by worldly standards, not that important, we must know that our work probably is blessing more people than you think.

For example, imagine that you are a software designer. Specifically, imagine that you design software for pharmaceutical companies. Normally, when you tell people what you do, you notice that they start falling asleep just a little bit. Why? Because it is really not that interesting to them on paper. But suppose your job on Wednesday afternoon will be debugging the latest version of your software. What does not sound like a great time to others is actually quite important. Your willingness to work hard to make a good product enables people to get their medicine in the right place at the right time with the right directions printed on the label, likely people you will never know living in places you will never visit.

As Christians, we need to let our redemptive imaginations go a bit and recognize that our work is a way of blessing people, even if we don’t see it, because we trust that God is a God who cares for those in need. And, one of the ways he cares for those in need is by using the vocations of his people to bring blessing.

Now imagine that you are currently an intern or staffer on Capitol Hill. Your Wednesday afternoon will consist of taking calls from constituents in the congressman or senator’s home state. These constituents are probably not calling to tell you that your representative is doing a great job; they have ideas of what needs to change. They likely do not even know the complexities of the issue about which they are calling, much less the difficulty of actually making change through Washington, DC. And yet, your job at that moment is to listen, take notes, be present, be polite, and report the information. Now, your being polite and respectful may not influence that person in any way. But it may. Or it may influence the people around you. When you treat a person as a real person with real needs, not like a robot that doesn’t know what he or she is talking about, you show others how to respect other human beings made in the image of God.

We do not always see our impact. And yet, we can have confidence that God uses our ordinary faithfulness to make an extraordinary difference. As we step from Labor Day back into the fall, we can know that our day-to-day is worth it, that it has impact both in this world and in the world to come. May the Lord bless the work of each of our hands.