First vocation...

Do you remember your first real job? It probably didn't pay well, was an imposition on your social schedule, and generally beneath the level of both your skills and your dignity (something abundantly obvious to everyone but your boss). For me: it was the local Sohio station...a pump jockey...back before there was an oil crisis...all this raw talent for about a buck an hour.

But how about your first vocation? Do you remember that? This is a trickier question because we tend to get these two terms confused. Our jobs are not necessarily our vocations...although hopefully the jobs we do give us occasion to live out our vocation...our calling. Our jobs have to do with what we do. Our vocation has, in a deeper sense, to do with who we are...who God has called us to be.

I find myself drawn again and again to the creation stories in Genesis 1 and 2. Here we meet a loving, powerful and purposeful God who stoops to shape a companion creature after the divine image. This creature will name things...will co-create things...will manage on God's behalf all that has been made...and will praise God for such abundance. This, it seems, is our first vocation. To borrow a phrase from Aidan Kavanaugh: we are homo adorans. More than homo sapiens...the thinking man...we are the "praising man"...called to be priests in the temple that is the universe for the purpose of the praise of God's greatness.

We Lutherans like to talk about "the priesthood of all believers"...a notion that links our shared work as Christians into our common baptism into Christ. But we haven't often been so clear as to what that shared work looks like. Let me suggest this: we are called to live the liturgy of life...gathering, orchestrating and offering the continual sacrifice of thanksgiving which rises from the earth and her creatures to the God from whom all things flow.

So...what does that liturgy look like in your daily routine? As you go about your job (or your school work or your play or your retirement), how is your vocation as priest in God's house evident?

I'm pretty sure I never asked that question of myself back when I was pumping gas and wiping windshields. Vocation (if I even knew what the word meant) was something for preachers and other religious types. Turns out, however, we're all religious types. It's built into us by the very nature of our creation...by the very nature of our Creator.