A Job Retraining Program

A Job Retraining Program
John 21:1-19;
Isaiah 42:1-4; 49:1-4, 50:4-6; Acts 9:1-20

College graduation time will be here shortly with its eternal question: Will the graduate find a job? In our lifetimes job training has escalated. When your fathers came out of high school, they could get a job, stay with a company for forty or fifty years, and then retire. My parents were both fortunate enough to go to college in the 1930s. Even with a degree Dad started at the bottom in the open hearth of a steel mill and worked his way up to general foreman and later assistant to the plant’s general works manager. Many of my generation went on to graduate school for professional degrees – law, medicine, business, academics, and ministry. A master’s degree wasn’t enough for Elizabeth and Drew. They both got doctorates. I wonder what degrees Tabitha will attain three decades from now.

Not only is a baccalaureate degree not enough, but there aren’t even enough positions for people with advanced degrees. And even if a graduate gets a job, there is little expectation that it will be a forty year job. Today’s graduates will likely have eight to ten jobs spanning three or four different career tracks. It is a highly competitive world. Just read the “Ask Sam” column in the Sunday Dispatch to learn about all the ins and outs of presenting oneself in a resume in order to get in interview.

A number of years ago the Jerusalem Management Consultants looked at the resumes of twelve people being selected for a new organization. What they found after a battery of tests and in-depth interviews was that most of the candidates were lacking in background, education, and vocational aptitude for the type of enterprise being undertaken. The report also said that they should not be considered because they did not have a team concept.

• One was emotionally unstable and is given to fits of temper.
• One simply had no qualities of leadership.
• Two brothers were self-serving and boisterous.
• One demonstrated a questioning attitude that might undermine morale among the ranks.
• Another was blacklisted by the Greater Jerusalem Better Business Bureau for questionable business practices.
• Two definitely had radical leanings and showed attitude problems when in public settings.

There was one candidate who showed potential, a man of ability and resourcefulness, who met people well, and who had a keen business mind as well as contacts in important places. He was judged to be highly motivated, ambitious, responsible, and not afraid to take the initiative.

In case you haven’t figured it out by now, the management report was on the twelve that Jesus called to be disciples, and the one that was recommended was Judas Iscariot. In the words of Dr. Phil, “How’s that working for you?”

Jesus called them anyway. He trained them for three years in his way of thinking and his method of working with people in crowds and one on one. He instilled in them his philosophy of ministry. He even sent them out in pairs in a short course of ministry in context, with moderate success. Then came Jesus’ crucifixion. That it was their one-question final exam: What are you going to do now?

I guess you could say that their final grade wasn’t all that great. Most ran away. One denied he had ever taken the course. Another was a basket case left to Jesus’ mother. The women weren’t much better. And a couple of people not part of the inner circle had to take care of the final arrangements.

Three days later, after reports started arriving that Jesus was not in the tomb, that he had risen, the class met again in a locked room. Jesus appeared to them and, according to John, breathed on them and put his peace on them. By the skin of their teeth they had graduated, even the skeptical one, who came late.

What we have in today’s reading from John is a post-graduate seminar on the topic, “What Do You Do When the World Has Been Changed?” Or, if we follow Peter, the main focal point of the reading, then the session was a job retraining course. Peter’s response was to go back to what he knew best. Yes, he had experienced the risen Christ. Yes, he knew what had happened. But still, his world had been torn apart, the world had been changed, and he and his friends went back to what they knew best – fishing. After all, there is comfort in the familiar. At the lakeshore the risen Christ met them again. Sometimes you just can't escape the changed world. Peter may be the main actor of the group in the story, but the seminar topic is for all of them.

Jesus calls the disciples back to the subject matter that he had been pressing them on for three years. Only now, the context was radically different. They would be on their own; no supervision from him. Their support system would be the Holy Spirit and each other. While the question, “Do you love me?” has special importance for Peter, it is a question each of the disciples must answer for himself.

This job retraining course, this post-graduate seminar is around the topic of servanthood. The last and most poignant lesson that Jesus gave the twelve was in the upper room when he loved them by washing their feet. He poured out the final bits of pride, privilege, and presumption and knelt before each of the disciples and washed their feet. “So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet.”

That simple yet profound action set before them all the depth and breadth of the tradition of the Servant from the writings of the prophet Isaiah, arguably some of the most powerfully Spirit-filled words in all of scripture. And they become the syllabus for their last seminar – as well as our job retraining course as we live in the radically changed post-Easter world.

The Lord God has given me
the tongue of a teacher,
that I may know how to sustain
the weary with a word.
Morning by morning he wakens–
wakens my ear
to listen as those who are taught.
The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious,
I did not turn backward. (Isaiah 50:4-5)

Isaiah’s servant imagery offers us a three-step model for serving Christ in any time or place.

1.  God arouses the servant morning by morning. Not once a week, not Christmas and Easter. Not when other people are looking on. Not in worship only. Every day. Seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year, however many years are blessed to us.

The servant listens at the beginning of every day. In fact, we are not the subject of the sentence. It is not the alarm clock, or the trampling cat, or the sliver of sunlight through the curtain gap that wakes us up. It is God. “God wakens–God wakens my ear,” means just that. God wakes us up and prepares each of us for the day.

2.  Then the servant listens with the ear of a disciple (one under discipline), the ear of an eager learner, to receive God’s teaching. God teaches the servant. And when the servant gets up, the servant listens rather than speaks, receives God’s agenda rather than telling God what he or she is going to do. Listening is routine. Too often we only listen with half a brain because the other half if busy figuring out what we will say in arrogance or rebuttal.

3.  As with any training program, there is a goal for the servant, to sustain the weary with a word. The servant does not listen to gain insight in order to hold others spellbound by oratory or spiritual insight. Nor does the servant listen for flaming indictments in order to point fingers at the wrongdoing of others. The servant listens in order to learn how to support the weary. The servant knows that his or her hearers can’t be browbeaten, that they have been exhausted by years of exile from God, their energy sapped by sin and separation. They need to become acquainted again with the “everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth who does not grow weary or faint” (Isaiah 40:28). The servant awakens routinely, listens routinely, in order to be the source of routine encouragement.

The servant – nor God – is not mesmerized by utopian thoughts. Being the servant who awakens to God, listens to God, and encourages for God, is taking a bold step that flows against the tide of the world. The servant’s audacious vision of world wrapped in God’s love will result at some point in deep private pain.

The Lord God has opened my ear,
and I was not rebellious,
I did not turn backward.
I gave my back to those who struck me,
and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;
I did not hide my face
from insult and spitting. (Isaiah 50:5-6)

Servanthood is not a life of ease. It is often filled with self-doubt and the disquiet of unexpressed anguish.

“I have labored in vain,
I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity;
yet surely my cause is with the Lord,
and my reward with my God.”  (Isaiah 49:4)

The nations, to whom Isaiah’s servant is to be a light, will be persuaded rather than pursued, taught rather than trounced, by God’s vision.

That’s the message about authority which Jesus was giving in the final seminar, the job retraining course which he taught on the shore of the lake. “Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will not pass away” (Luke 21:33).

Be awakened by God. Listen to God. Encourage for God. Envision with God. You, too, can be retrained by Jesus as a servant, to do as he said to Peter, “Follow me.”


Sources:
http://www.aminatl.org/PDFArticles/TheJerusalemManagementConsultingFirm.pdf.

Jack Levison, Fresh Air: The Holy Spirit for an Inspired Life (Brewster MA: Paraclete Press, 2012)

Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Used by permission.