- Amid the old routines of getting back to classes and taking up the fight against the system again, it's about this time of year in the academic gross when most students are vaguely bothered as well as elated by the prospect of spring. Bothered because spring intrudes with hard questions of destiny and decision as well as gay promises of Bermuda shorts and picnics. Seniors look over the last hurdles and see next year coming. Interviewers begin to invade the campus. Get a job. What kind of a job? Graduate school? Or would this postpone the vocational choice? And underclassmen are haunted by the questions of what to major in, what courses to take. By what criterion do you choose as you wait in registration lines, like cattle feeding into the great IBM slaughter. (audience laughing) Do you choose by tossing a coin or by following the devices of Robert Benchley, who, as I recall, engineered his whole college curriculum by the rule that he take only those courses that met after 11:00 AM in the morning and below the third floor of any building with none on Saturday, (audience laughing) or you choose a major by following the path of least resistance and going into what your dad went into when you don't really know what you're cut out for. A university is a kind of limbo of vocational uncertainty where we grope around in the curricular dark looking for our professions and destiny. It's a rare student who has known he was going into chemical engineering from the age of nine. For the great bulk of us, we're always on the way before we know where we're going and we're pushed to choose before we're ready to choose. Goals emerge on the way if they emerge at all. Sometimes, they emerge too late. This question of vocational choice is a co-ed question too. Questions of destiny, career, marriage, are as urgent and close to east as to west. Perhaps, the second thing you may overhear a co-ed say in passing is I met the nicest guy, he is a junior, he is pre-med or he is a senior. He doesn't know what he wants to do. The dread quality of vocational choices thus show through even our dating and our romantic choices. But there is a religious dimension to this problem of choosing a life job as well. For here, in the secret place within and in the presence of the holy, I am confronted not just by the proximate issue of majors and schools and job, but by the ultimate question of responsible existence. In college, I hold in my hands in a sense the span of my life, the gift of my years to spend, fingering a decision about how it's to be used. Now, I suppose the question of vocation is decided as much for me as by me by forces beyond my freedom. But insofar as I do have a say, I know that it is an urgent and acute and sobering question to ask, what do I do with my life to justify displacing this much air in the universe for as long a time as I'll be around? What relevance does the Christian faith have to this problem of vocation. At first glance, not much. In figuring out what he's cut out for, a duke student would go to the bureau of testing and guidance or the bureau of appointments before he'd go to the chapel. And at the level of practical wisdom and technical choice, he'd probably be right. But the problem of vocation is much more than a technical one. Spiritual answers to it go way beyond what any battery of tests can catch or measure. Indeed, from a religious standpoint, if you try to answer the vocational question just on a technical basis, you may wake up to yourself years later going through the motions of living, doing a job but with the poignant realization that the meaning, the point of it has washed out, has vanished, and you are going through the motions of existence. The classical biblical doctrine of vocation is the fixed point from which we can best move into this problem to show how one can draw lines from the biblical doctrine of vocation to where we are in this anxious limbo of vocational uncertainty. What does the Bible offer? What does it say? Well, it's a book about work. It describes a working God. Significant that what he did on the six days of the week in creation is much more important than what he did on the Sabbath when he took off. This is a working God who calls men continually in whatever job they pursue to serve the needs of community. In the biblical frame, it is always a situation of confrontation and command. Man, Adam, Isaiah, Jesus, Paul, whoever addressed by the divine and commanded to serve a need in the world. One of the finest expressions of the biblical doctrine of vocation is just on the edge of being in the Bible out of the Apocrypha. It's our scripture of the morning. It describes the work of the smith, the engraver, the farmer and it closes, they maintain the fabric of the world, and in the handy work of their craft is their prayer. One of the great revolutions in the history of the west took place when Luther recover this biblical doctrine and associated it finally with the whole Protestant tradition. Luther was profoundly moved by the awareness of the call of God to men in the menial and the common place to a divine mission, not to leave the world to go into the church, but to reverse the traffic, to go from the church into the world, into the marketplace, and there, to live a life of faith, active in love. And for Luther, any job which maintains the fabric of community becomes the occasion to fulfill vocation. From this standpoint of the Christian doctrine of vocation, we can look quickly at two opposite misunderstandings about what it means. The first is fastidiousness, which is the point of view that concentrates on the what of a job and draws a neat line between religious and secular jobs. By this division, a religious calling then is taken to mean going into church work, becoming a minister, or a missionary. People speak of full-time Christian service, and this means church work. Or very pious serious people have experiences of being called or serving the Lord. And this means becoming a minister. In the name of the Bible and of Luther, this is all wrong even though it's common talk among us. It divides off the sacred and the secular in a way which misunderstands the biblical message. Luther sharply pointed out this great error which is an essential error of the medieval church by describing the divine irony of the incarnation, that the visitation of God came to man not in church, but outside of church, in a stable, in a way that the professional religionist, the clergy could not see or understand. It could be seen only by fisherman, tax collectors, riff-raff. Commenting on the verse in the Christmas story and the shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God, Luther says, "This is wrong. We should correct this passage to read, they went and shaved their heads and fasted and told their rosaries and put on cows. Instead, we read, the shepherds returned to their sheep." Oh, that can't be right. Did they not leave everything and follow Christ? No. The scripture says plainly that they returned and did exactly the same work as before. Though our immediate culture is Protestant in name, we have fallen into a bad perversion of the doctrine of vocation when we think of the minister as doing the religious job, and banker or the salesman or the lawyer doing the secular job. Maybe the best we can do by Luther is to have layman take up the collection on Sunday. But vocation has to do not with the what of a job but the how, the spirit with which it is done in faithful love, in obedient service. By this logic, the doctor in the duke hospital giving hours of compassionate time in the clinic, though his language may be a little peppery and religiously improper, is fulfilling a religious vocation more than the minister who preaches most properly in the pulpit, but mainly because he enjoys hearing the sound of his own voice. There are many divinity students incidentally, who would make better plumbers than ministers. I don't know whether it's the Christian doctrine of vocation that leads me to this comment, it's maybe because I've been reading blue books. (audience laughing) Now, if fastidiousness makes its mistake in concentrating on the hotness of jobs, the opposite error is a romantic indiscrimination which neglects entirely the hotness of a job and says, whatever job you're in, do it in the Christian spirit. But it's not as simple as all that. The normal vocation is, whatever work that maintains the fabric of community. There are some jobs certainly which by their very hotness are destructive of community. They tear and destroy human worth and dignity. It's difficult to see how one could be a Christian burglar however softly he may tread or a dope pusher in the Christian spirit. For that matter, it's difficult to see how one can be a spiritual dope pusher through TV advertising, drugging the minds of millions with delusions and nonsense. Now, there are moral ambiguities and compromises in every job. There's no pure job or an honest dollar purely earned to be sure, but discriminating choice about what job to go into is crucial. The Christian rule of thumb here is whatever job serves the fabric of community is the right occasion for the expression of obedience to God's call. Well, so what? How can one draw the line more sharply between this Christian doctrine and where we sit in the spirit of realism which steers between romantic idealism, which looks only at the stars and is oblivious to hard facts, or a kind of a hard cynicism, which sees only facts and will not look up at the stars. Let me suggest three lines or three leads which may be drawn in vocational choice. The first is a practical point. Vocational decision is in part a technical question to be answered on the basis of the best technical data you can get. And there are rich resources in this university that can help you. The problem here at the technical level is to match your special subjective talents and acknowledgement of limitations to the objective needs of community. It would be foolish for somebody who turns gray at a whiff of formaldehyde or has nightmares about dissecting a fetal pig, to think very long about pre-med, or for a girl who is generally lumpish in contour to apply as a model at Bergdorf Goodman. It would be wise on the other hand for someone who is naturally drawn to children, to go into teaching for recreation. Or for one who's a natural with quantities and design and structure to go into physics, engineering. The informal rule for answering this technical question about yourself, I suppose, is in the curriculum, what courses do you feel inside of absorbed in? Maybe, even to reading beyond the assigned chapter, rather than the courses you're outside of finding something strange and foreign. But the technical decision may do no more than indicate what I'm not cut out for, or give me an awareness of subjective talents and interests. The moral decision is the more crucial, for it looks out from the self to the human situation and hear the call of God to man comes through the human need to be met and matched by whatever one's best talents are. The call may not take a dramatic form as it did for a Schweitzer. It may come. Indeed, it most usually does in a prosaic, unspectacular way. But wherever a human need of body or spirit is sensed and answered, whether it be in business or in politics or in education, the professional decision becomes the vocational decision. All such jobs that serve to maintain man's common life, laying brick, teaching third grade, sanitary engineering, house wifing, these are all of equal status and dignity. There are no higher and lower professions. No grades between blue collar and white collar and backward collar jobs. The minister and the janitor are equidistant from the altar since their jobs are equally indispensable to community. They are all obedient to the perennial call of God to man, to maintain the fabric of the world. And in the handy work of their craft is their prayer. There is a third line to be drawn from the Christian doctrine of vocation to modern work. Though this line is oblique. One of the qualities of modern work life which puts us a long way away from the smith, the potter, the farmer of our scripture or even from the Christian craftsman of Luther's day is that the external conditions of work have been radically changed by the industrial and organizational revolutions. The machine and the system have come in between the spirit of man and the work of his hands. The exercise of creativity, of imagination, the experience of joy and magic in encounter with soil and wood, and class and word are almost gone. Our work life is a grind, a curse, because it's mechanical and external, meaningless, whether this is a factory job or the office job or the teacher's job or the plastic station wagon supermarket routines of suburbia. The dimension of depth and meaning is all but gone, lost in piles of triplicate memos and grade curves and personality inventories. We are thin men living in a flat universe, nameless faces, not knowing why we work. Like nothing so much, perhaps as the cattle in a rohol actor at Princeton, New Jersey, where the cows live their whole recognized existence antiseptically never setting foot on ground, never allowed to stand in a field of clover in the sunshine to chew their cuts. Now to talk of recovering vocation in this mechanical life of ours may sound romantic indeed. And yet to go back to the text, the fabric of the world, what is this fabric? If it's warp be the realm of things, objects outside, it's whoof is the realm of persons. This delicate yet resilient texture of interpersonal relations in which we always move no matter what kind of job we have. And even in the dreary anonymous situations of our workaday life, we can always detect if we are sensitive the call of God, as it requires of us the care of persons. Between the lines of whatever job, Christian vocation means then a certain how, a certain feel and style of choice that insists the will to care for persons as infinitely sacred and precious. For those who cherish the worth of persons whom life thrust into their keeping, there is restored even amid the drudgery, the dismo monotony of mechanical life. There is restored the magic, the mystery, the joy of finding an eternal purpose within a passing operation in all this fleshly dress, bright suits of everlastingness. Amen. Let us pray. Oh thou who just call us all to many laborers of hand and mind and heart in thy single kingdom, grant us by thy grace the vision without which thy people perish and the work of their hands idle, that we may have restored unto us the joy of thy salvation and establish thou the work of our hands upon us. Yay, the work of our hands established thou it. Now, may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the holy spirit be with you all now and evermore.