Vocation to worship. . .

Worship is often presumed to be an act of the conscious reason, mostly for the mind and only secondarily for the rest of the body.  How odd it is that we think this way.  All creation worships God not by reasoned conclusion or even by experiencing God's Word but simply doing what they were created to do.  So from the birds of the air to every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth to the creatures of the watery deep to the plants, they worship God not by reason but simply by being who they are as God created them to be.  If we would learn anything from them, what we ought to learn is to be who God has created us to be and redeemed us to be.  It is not simply a matter of words, though words are always a part of who we are, but it is also a matter of vocation.

When we reject the divinely ordered pattern of creation as male and female, husband and wife, mother and father to children, we are refusing to worship God as God has made us to be.  It is one thing when a person longs to be married and the right person or time does not come along or a couple longs for a child who does not come to them.  We cannot fault them for the longing that is left unfulfilled.  In their want, they still can acknowledge that these gifts come from God even though they are not realized in them.  We can also lament that this is what sin has done -- it has robbed us of the opportunity to fulfill God's order and left us subject to the broken nature of things since the Fall in Eden.

As much as we acknowledge that sometimes through no fault of our own, we are left without the opportunity to fulfill the vocation God intended for us in creation, we should not dismiss this vocation as of no importance.  It is precisely by living within the vocation of God's design that we worship Him and not simply by the meditation of the mind or the devotion of the heart or the sound of our voices.  The point of vocation is not to find our place in the world but to live out within the places in which we live the lives God intended.  Sin can certainly affect these lives and our ability to live within them in peace and joy but even in this God has provided forgiveness as the key grace to make love like His own.

The birds of the air or the fish of the sea or the animals of the land along with all the plants have been created by God and worship Him by living out their lives within the order God has made.  We sometimes dismiss this as nothing all that important.  In truth it is at least as important as conscious worship of mind and heart and the worship of mind and heart do not replace the worship of vocation but complement this worship that flows from fulfilling our vocation.  Sin has made this elusive and even caused us to dismiss God's order as something less or less noble than the worship of a mind to comprehend God and His ways or the heart to rejoice in them.  I fear we have forgotten this.  Even Christians succumb to the temptation to believe that there is a more noble way to live out our lives as God's people than to live as husband to wife or wife to husband, father to child or mother to child, or child to our parents.  This seem rather mundane to the imagined loftiness of a contemplative life, for example.  But they are not mundane at all.  In fact, it is to our poverty that our sin conspires to dismiss the shape of God's order and our place within that order as something of little consequence.  We must stop doing this.

A few days ago I wrote of how our children got the idea that parenthood was a terrible burden to be avoided.  When I wrote those words, I was also thinking of the other part of that.  By so labeling marriage as a patriarchal or antiquated shape of our lives together and by so dismissing parenthood as something that constrains who we are instead of fulfilling who we are, we have shown the ultimate hubris.  The rejection of God's order is the refusal to worship Him who made us and who redeemed us by His grace so that we might fulfill our places within His order.  Fulfilling our vocations is part of our worship of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.