1 post from July 2009

I realized today, in examining why I would ever show up late and unprepared for my duties at the City’s worship center, that I still haven’t gotten over the shame of my calling. I was able to make it work while my wife was away at her job and I had hired out my parenting duties for $1000 a month from her paycheck, but now that she’s home on sick leave I’m too ashamed to demonstrate in front of her exactly how much of my week I spend praying, practicing, and pursuing worship. So my ability to worship has dried up like an unwatered houseplant.

How can a worshiper, particularly a male one, do the expected and support a family? The conventional answer is to find someone to provide a salary for one’s calling.

“What!?” is my immediate response. “Demand pay for the privilege of praising my King?” Most callings, whether making widgets or music, allow one to collect on people’s appreciation. Pay is antithetical to worship because we are in fact the “consumer.” The word “worship” comes from “worth-ship.” How can I demonstrate God’s worth other than paying it? If I demand that He pay, whom do I really think is God?

We see also from Biblical example that God’s servants never worked for pay. At best, they would (quickly) accept housing, food, and logistical support (often from women). They basically depended in faith on God as expressed through the charity of others. This is a subtle but important difference from employment. In employment, one’s duties are directly tied to one’s pay. We may hope, with our current convention of hiring church workers, that their functional loyalties remain with the Father, but I can’t help but remember the prophet Balaam, one that the Bible presents as powerful and completely accurate. Might a person conclude that the main difference between Balaam and Elijah was precisely that the one sought pay and the other depended on God and several scrawny ravens?

The term “spiritual Levite” sounds SO glamorous, when in fact the historical variety depended on handouts—handouts that weren’t even given in recognition of value but that had to be mandated by God. For Levites not only lived by faith and abandoned their families to faith but required faith of the rest of the Chosen, faith that having Levites pray and wave incense and practice plunking on their proto-guitars was worth spending the tithe of wealth that every family in Israel gave up.

The human tendency, I would say, is to lack such faith. So the shame of the Levite, stuck between his or her calling not to work (at least in a conventional sense) and his or her family’s needs, never marrying, living at age 40 out of his or her parent’s basement, scrounging for multiple low-paying jobs just to do his or her one real one, smiling at the daily jibes of hard-working neighbors and dreading those of family, wondering the entire time what the HELL is wrong with himself or herself.