I have come that you will have life and have it abundantly. John 10:10

 

My first job, at the age of fourteen, was to pack boxes and sell ice cream at Purdy’s chocolates in Arbutus Village.  I had the job for five years.  It paid for my tuition at UBC (that’s how long ago it was!!!).  I’m quite sure I was never given a job description.  The tasks simply were explained to me and the expectations made clear. Since that time, every job I’ve had or for which I’ve hired someone has come with a “job description”  - a lengthy to-do list of tasks and responsibilities.

 

If there is an inherent, over-arching rationale or purpose for doing the list of tasks it is seldom, if ever, articulated.    Job descriptions tend to take for granted that you know WHY you would be doing what you have been hired to do. They assume (or perhaps they have forgotten) the larger, prior question – Why? Why teach?  Why sell?  Why serve?  Why prosecute?  Why heal? 

 

The 17 words in verse 42 of the second chapter of Acts have served as the church’s job description for centuries.  The text lists what the early Christian community did and the ancient job description stuck: teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, and praying.

 

Study, food, prayer, community – that’s what they were about.  And when we’re not writing up a JNAC or doing a renovation, that’s what we’re about too.  According to your website, it’s certainly what you’re doing.  I read it there – commitment to biblical literacy, prayer, having fun together.

 

Despite both the changes and stagnations in our form over the centuries, despite the enormous diversity of style across the globe, even across the this city, we keep doing a few basic things in common  – learning, eating, praying and being together.

 

There is no question that what we DO matters, that our actions demonstrate our thoughts and commitments.  So at the very heart of the question of what we DO is the question of purpose.  What do we do it FOR? Why look after each other? Why pray? Why feed and be fed?

 

What was that early church doing those things FOR?  What do we do them for?  The word “purpose” at its root has to do with “sending out” or “putting forth.”  Our purpose, what we are FOR is not what we commit to inwardly but something we live outwardly.  It is literally something we “deliver.”

 

This question of the purpose in our lives is asked far less frequently and far more tentatively, it seems to me, than the question of the activity in our lives.  We even ask children what they intend to do with lives, but I don’t think I have ever heard anyone ask a child if they have any idea WHY they are here. 

 

I learned from a Catholic colleague, and many of you here may know this from experience, that the Catholic catechism book, offering questions and answers for the formation of faith, contains the question, “Why did God make you?”  In other words, “what are you for?” 

 

 The answer given to the question in the catechism is beautiful, “I am made to love and enjoy God forever.”  In other words, no matter what I find myself doing or not able to do, my life has a purpose.  I am made to live as if I belonged to God.  I am FOR God.

 

If our purpose is this – a life-long surrender and offering of ourselves to the holy wholeness of which we are a part, then our inherited purpose as children of God is one that connects us in and eternal embrace of Divine belonging.  We belong not to our skin and bones but to the holy wholeness of things.  We belong to God in whom we and all things have life. We are meant to deliver ourselves to this: this wholeness, this connection, this entirely, this “life in God,” as our tradition names it.   Our purpose, “what we are FOR”, belongs to something much larger than our own lives.

 

We in western societies are so immersed in individualism, it is extremely difficult for us to imagine that we are part of something larger than our own lives, bigger than our own plans, that there is a story unfolding that is infinitely longer than our own history, that we might be FOR something that transcends this time and place, that we might belong to the story, the life, of God.

 

I have told on several occasions of my first sense of the longer story to which I belong.  In the late 1980s I was visiting Guatemalan refugees in exile in Southern Mexico.  Like countless communities at countless other moments in human history the Guatemalan’s lives depended on telling their story and so the church went to hear it.  One afternoon as four of us were gathered around a table a gentle, intense man who must at one time have been a professor with a classroom and a blackboard told us his version of the story of his people.  As he spoke he drew lines and wrote place names and dates on a page in the middle of the table.  He began, “when the slaves were in bondage in Egypt . . . ” As the hours passed the page became filled with a seamless weaving of two stories – of the Guatemalan refugees and of the Exodus.  I had heard both stories before but I had never heard this version of the story.    On the table lay a manila paper criss-crossed with lines that collapsed history into one vast sweep of God’s relentless and redemptive promise of deliverance.  Somewhere on the page next to the words “Chiapas” and “wilderness” he had drawn a little cross and circled it.  It represented the solidarity of the international church.  I have never forgotten how we looked on that paper, written into the story of God, just a small mark, a moment in the eternal unfolding of God’s holy mission to love this world into the glorious wholeness for which it was created.

 

To see ourselves written into the life of God, is something that may happen only rarely but it is enough to remind us for a lifetime that we do not invent what we are for, we inherit it.  As children of God, made in the image of God, we inherit God’s purpose.  Our lives are one small mark on the page mapping the eternal Divine movement of creative, restorative, sustaining love; a connective movement that extends eternally beyond the few decades of one life.

 

The religious life is a life of purpose, a life built on what it is FOR.  The church has not always done what it is FOR flawlessly; far from it and worse.  But as far as I can tell, the church for the most part, has remembered what it is for.  Over two thousand years we have not forgotten that we are FOR life – God’s holy, unending gift, an intricate pattern of flourishing and belonging. 

 

At the centre of the story of God is the story of life itself  – its totality, its mystery, its promise.  At the centre of the story of God is someone who said, “I have come that you will have life and life in abundance.”  You will have not just any life, you will not have just your life, but ABUNDANT life – not simply being, but belonging; not simply growing but flourishing; not simply one by one but as a whole – one vast sweep of embodied eternity – this exquisite abundance belongs to us and we belong to it.  Another name for this holy wholeness is “God.”  I have come that you will have God; you will have life and love, you will have beauty, you will have wholeness.  I have come that you will, by whatever name, “love and enjoy God forever.”  At the centre of the story of God is the promise that we belong in that story.  Each one of us …

 

Because each of us, and those sitting beside us on the pews, those at Starbucks and those sleeping on the street outside Chapters, each of us was designed to belong to something larger than our own lives.  If we are designed to belong; if our life’s breath is connection, our death is isolation.  And is this not so very, very evident?   You don’t need me to remind you that people die of loneliness everyday in this city and cities like it -– die because alienation leads to drugs, violence, and debilitating depression.  Social workers and ministers know this.  Parents and teachers know this.  Last week we had a pastoral emergency call to our home from a child (a child who lives the wealthiest community in Canada, West Vancouver). The fabric of belonging is torn and lives are falling through – whole families, whole communities are falling through.

 

If there is a saving word to be spoken, it is the word “belonging.”

 

So yes, it matters what we do.  And it matters why.  Eating, praying, teaching, caring – why?  Because they remind us of the truth of our belonging.  We come to the table because there is always room; we do it together because we were not made to be alone; we ask tell stories because they are large enough to hold all of us; we pray because we belong to something larger and more beautiful than ourselves – eating, gathering, teaching, and praying – we do all these things for a single  purpose – we do them because we belong to God.  We do them because we take seriously the promise of abundant life, here and now, for everyone.  A promise of flourishing.  A promise of belonging.

 

The story of abundant life is not the only version of the story – but a saving story nonetheless – a story of redemptive belonging.  Tell it however you like; use historical criticism and contemporary cosmology, if you choose, But whatever we do, we should remember how to tell it and why.  That others might want to hear it, we’re not sure.  That we need to hear it, that we are sure of.  We need to remind ourselves why we are here, what our lives are FOR  – we are not born to buy or sell or survive or make-do.  No, we are born into the promise of abundant life – of flourishing and belonging. Born “to love and enjoy God forever.”  In other words, born to live in and with the world as if it were holy, as if we belonged to God and God belonged to us, as if you belonged to me and I belonged to you, as if our lives were worthy of the story of God and the story of God were worthy of our lives.

 

Clearly the church does not have a corner on siding with life, of honouring, caring and defending it and of trusting in all things that the giver of life is eternally making, restoring and pulling life in the direction of wholeness and joy.  No, we don’t have the corner on this.  But we have a place in it, I think.  At least I recognized it once on a manila piece of paper and I have not forgotten it. 

 

Eating, praying, teaching, being together -   We are not held together by doing these things, but I believe we are in some way held together by what they are FOR.  They are for the promise of abundant life, the life-saving promise that we belong to God and because of that, to each other – belong to the one beside you, to the people at Starbucks, to the guys outside of Chapters, to the young monks in Tibet, to the children in Afghanistan.  An unending circle of belonging – the promise of flourishing in the divine purpose of abundant life.

 

Some people find the ancient job description we carry out in communities like this one worthy of their lives … not because it offers something to DO but because it is the way we practice what we are FOR.

 

Every human life longs to be spent on something worthy of it – something beautiful, demanding, and larger than the length of a single life.  We bring our lives to a place like this one with a question resting deep within us, “Because I belong to the wholeness of God’s abundant life, to what piece of God’s glorious gift of life will I attend? Who will receive what my life is labouring to deliver?  Is there something here that would allow me the privilege to practice what I am for?  To practice belonging to God?” And if we stay long enough, someone may scribble something on a page, or cook something in the kitchen, or sing something in the sanctuary that will remind us – this; it is this; this is what I am for.  I belong to nothing less than all of this.  Belonging to all of this is what I am for.

 

Thanks be to God.  Amen.