Your reason for being. . .

Both who you are and your reason for being are, according to current culture, all tied in together with your feelings and particularly with your happiness.  Happiness has for a very long time been the goal and purpose of many lives but the fruits of this search have not exactly been positive.  We live in a time in which we have more material goods, more financial means, and more leisure time in which to enjoy it.  All around us we are confronted with the marks of progress and technology offers the promise of relieving us of the more mundane parts of our existence.  Still, depression and despair are rampant.  The fix for our many anxieties and fears will not come from navel gazing.  We cannot look inside and be inspired.  Our raison d'etre and our identity have to come from something other than getting in touch with our feelings or pursuing amusement and entertainment.

Lutheran theologian Gustaf Wingren points us to vocation and in particular to the First Article of the Creed before jumping to the Second.  Indeed, our baptismal identity is God's gift the fills out the identity already given to us in His creation.  In fact, vocation is God's gift of a reason for our being.  It is pretty hard to find meaning where everything is a choice or preference.  It is like a question being answered by another question -- an endless circle that leads nowhere.

Typically we have framed vocation in terms of birth (family), community (neighbor), work (formal and informal jobs), and church.  It is a slight expansion of Luther's own three states -- home, state, and church.  In Luther's division, work is part of the domain of the home and is included with the family.  State is both government and citizenship.  Church is both pastor and people.

Wingren warns us Lutherans against our rush to the Second Article of the Creed.  Indeed, Wingren calls the whole idea that creation does not matter because it is passing away a myth and falsehood.  From Romans 8 he reminds us that Christ came to restore creation and that the passing away of heaven and earth are replaced with a new heaven and a new earth.  Creation suffers under the weight of sin just as we do but just as God has not abandoned who He has made in flesh and blood, neither has He written off the world that is also the fruit of His creative power and love.  Our reason for being and vocation is framed within this creation and this world.  Our work defines us -- as it did from the beginning in Eden and still does, though not without sin having corrupted this work.  We are wired for work.  This is the work in the home and family and the work outside the home.  Sin has taught us to complain about it but it is like complaining about who we are and why we are here.

The topic of vocation is a particularly Lutheran one though we do not talk about it nearly enough.  It might be why we struggle to get a handle on and get out ahead of the culture and its fascination with self-expression as the sine qua non of human existence and progress.  We cannot win the philosophical battle by setting different boundaries on legitimate self-expression.  It has to be more than this far and no further.  It has to begin somewhere completely different than where culture begins.  For the Christian this begins not with redemption but with creation and with the vocation that gives meaning and purpose to who we are and why we are here as well as what we about.  The law is surely our guide in this -- both the formal law of commandment and the natural law that under girds the order of this world.  Of course, the law cannot change the desire of our heart but it illuminates the path.  For Lutherans this also means spending more time on such things as the Table of Duties in the Catechism.  

Enough for now... but this is one topic to continue.