What are people for? is the title of an essay and a book Berry published years
ago. I am posing the question as a
sermon title on Sunday as part of a series using the Season
of Creation lectionary
The topic for this Sunday is Humanity. I decided to use the “excitement” engendered
by the leaked video in which Governor Romney describes the 47% of the population
that is unlikely to vote for him to energize and inform worship this Sunday. I think the Governor is incorrect. Any number of “government dependent” folks:
retirees, disabled vets, folks on disability, etc. may well vote for him. Who knows?
But the Governor’s comments do invite us to practice the “division” into camps and groups that politicians and pundits and we preachers
enjoy. DavidBrooks, tongue in cheek I think, called it a nation of makers and moochers.
So to answer the question Wendell Berry posed we might
say: people are made to mooch. That answer does not sound correct. People are made to make. Is that better?
In the materials I made available in preparation for worship
this week I provided some quotations to generate thought. There are two creation stories in Genesis and
each has a different answer to the question.
Paul points toward not grasping power: power are made to empty
themselves. Jesus point to service. Berry himself
says we are made for “good work” and then wishes to talk not just about work
but the kind of work. Annie Dillard
steps a little sideways and calls us to practice looking in amazement.
Which of these readings would you affirm? Which do you think is mistaken or
inadequate? What is wrong or
lacking? What paragraph or sentence or summary
would you share as one or an answer to "What are People for?” Post your answers.
Worship this
Sunday: Humanity What are People For?
Genesis 1:” 27So God created humankind
in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created
them. 28God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and
multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of
the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves
upon the earth.”
Genesis 2: 15The Lord
God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
Philippians
2:5Let
the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, 6who, though he
was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be
exploited, 7but emptied himself
Mark 10: 42So
Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those
whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are
tyrants over them. 43But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes
to become great among you must be your servant, 44and whoever wishes
to be first among you must be slave of all. 45For the Son of Man
came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
. In "What Are People For?" Wendell Berry offers this
answer: people are for good work. In the book's new essays Berry expands that
answer and responds to the standard political solution to unemployment: to
create jobs and retrain people to work in a new economy.
What the standard political solution lacks, according to Berry, is
any sense of the importance of vocation and place in its understanding of what
people are for. "According to the industrial standard and point of view,
persons are needed only when they perform a service valuable to an
employer." This perspective ignores the fact that people might be needed
for reasons other than economic ones, or that there might be a kind of work to
which a person is uniquely suited, even called.
Annie
Dillard in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
The mockingbird took a single step into the air and dropped. His
wings were still folded against his sides as though he were singing from a limb
and not falling, accelerating thirty-two feet per second per second, through
empty air. Just a breath before he would have been dashed to the ground, he
unfurled his wings with exact, deliberate care, revealing the broad bars of
white, spread his elegant, white-banded tail, and so floated onto the grass. I
had just rounded a corner when his insouciant step caught my eye; there was no
one else in sight. The fact of his free fall was like the old philosophical
conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. The answer must be, I think,
that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The
least we can do is try to be there
Alan
