Snippets from a book

God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life
By Gene Edward Veith, Jr.
Chapter 1 - Introduction

When we pray the Lord's Prayer, observed Luther, we ask God to give us this day our daily bread. And He does give us our daily bread. He does it by means of the farmer who planted and harvested the grain, the baker who made the flour into bread, the person who prepared our meal.

Though He could give it to us directly, by a miraculous provision, as He once did for the children of Israel when He fed them daily with manna, God has chosen to work through human beings, who, in their different capacities and according to their different talents, serve each other. This is the doctrine of vocation.

To use another of Luther's examples, God could have decided to populate the earth by creating each new person from the dust, as He did Adam. Instead, He chose to create new life through the vocation of husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. This is the doctrine of vocation.

Vocation comes from the Latin word for "calling." The Scripture is full of passages that describe how we have been called to faith through the Gospel, how God calls us to a particular office or way of life.

In scrutinizing the existing ecclesiastical system in light of the Gospel and the Scriptures, the Reformers insisted that priests and nuns and monastics did not have a special claim to God's favor, but that laypeople too could live the Christian life tot the fullest. "The priesthood of all believers" did not make everyone into church workers; rather it turned every kind of work into a sacred calling.

Luther emphasizes what God does in and through our vocations. That is to say, for Luther, vocation is no just a matter of Law - though this is a part of vocation that neither Luther nor this book will neglect; rather, above all, vocation is a matter of Gospel, a manifestation of God's action, not our own. In this sense, vocation is not another burden placed upon us, something else to fail at, but a realm in which we can experience God's love and grace, both in the blessings we receive from others and in the way God is working through us despite our failures.

Luther goes so far as to say that vocation is a mask of God. That is, God hides Himself in the workplace, the family, the Church, and the seemingly secular society.