Navigating the New Normal:Thoughts on Life After College

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I was thinking a couple days ago about the first quarter I started teaching regularly here at CL. The freshman girls that year had formed a special bond. As I was just kind of learning how to do this, giving my first, uneven messages, they all sat together every week, right across the front…and they all dressed alike…and wore their hair in identical side ponytails…and frankly, I found them mildly terrifying. And for the first few months there was only one freshman guy, a seemingly quiet, introverted boy who sat all the way in the back. Well, those women are graduating in a couple weeks…and so is Kiho. And they don’t wear side ponys any more (at least Kiho doesn’t)…and I’ve come to call many of them friends…my life, the life of my family, this ministry and this campus have all been substantially enriched by their years here. And that little core group has been joined over the years by a number of fine men and women who will also graduate this year and have also had remarkable runs. And we are genuinely thrilled for you. Graduation is a really fun, exciting time and you totally deserve to celebrate and be celebrated.


But graduation has always reminded me of friend who once told me about his last day in the Army. He and a handful of other guys who were also done that day went to a one hour seminar on how to integrate back into the civilian world…and then they simply weren’t in the army any more. Reflecting on that day, he looked at me in disbelief and said, ‘It takes 6 months to join the army and only 1 hour to unjoin.’ After 4 years of a rigorous but counter cultural lifestyle, they were going to face a new-normal, and the army thought that the least they could do is provide them an one-hour of thoughts on that process.

I have often thought about how finishing up college is a similar shocking experience of plunging into a new normal…except without the one hour exit seminar. You don’t even get an exit seminar. And that’s not ok. Now, we are way too late in the quarter for me to stand up here and talk for an hour…So I’m going to give you 25 minutes. These are a few of thoughts that I have compiled over last few years of watching people make the transition well and poorly and from over a dozen substantial responses I got from a request I sent out to last year’s seniors. As usual, I have a lot of thoughts and quotes from last year’s class that I couldn’t squeeze into the talk. So I have put them online.

You see, there are two big transitions in our culture where the church is just getting killed. The first and toughest, you have made it through. The transition from high school to college is strewn with carnage of faith. It is like the banks of Normandy…many just don’t make it...they walk away from Jesus for good. This is why Amanda and I do what we do. That’s why we have joined the effort on this front.

But the second big transition is more subtle. It is the transition from college to church. And here the losses are not to unbelief…but to ineffectiveness. Fewer people take themselves out of the faith, but many take themselves out of the game. So there are three big ideas I’d like to offer you about how to Navigate the New Normal. First…

I. Learn to Work with God

Many (maybe most) of my friends who were serious about their faith in college went into full time (usually support raising) ministry. There was a perception that only second class, materialistic Christians get ‘secular’ jobs. And while that is great, I soon realized that I had not been given any theological resources for how to do anything else without feeling like a spiritual failure. I had no theology of work.

Usually, if you hear work talked about in church it is an exhortation to not work too much. I have heard the value of work generally pitched in three ways in Christian circles (in order of increasing compellingness):

1. People Like to Eat: The verse you hear get kicked around is the one where Paul says: ‘Anyone who doesn’t provide for his family is worse than an unbeliever’ – So man up and go to work. It is an unfortunate consequence of the fall so push thorough it. It sucks, but the world is fallen and you need to keep your family in Top Ramen.

2. Pastors Like to Eat: You see, by working hard, you produce excess resources that you can use to fund full time ministers who can devote their energies full time to the work of the gospel (the real work). You have the responsibility and privilege to become silent partners in their ministry by getting out of bed and going to the cube farm year after year.

3. You are a Missionary: Full time Christian workers lose most of their connections outside of the Christian community pretty quickly. They have the training but no access. This is actually the primary frustration of most of my friends who are in full time ministry…they got into it to introduce people to Jesus, but their circle shifts so that they know very few people who don’t already know him. By getting a secular job you are a ‘secret agent,’ you ‘infiltrate’ the secular world, you have the access. Your work is a platform for ministry. By working with integrity and looking for opportunities for the gospel to take root, work provides you with spiritual opportunities.

Now, there is an element of truth to each of these, but they are all fundamentally flawed. Even together, they paint a fundamentally impoverished picture. That honestly sounds like a pretty terrible way to spend your life. These motivations are not going to do it. Just a couple weeks ago, I had a student ask me ‘how do you do it? How do you go to work?” You are going to have to find meaning in those 50 to 60 hours per week or it is going to diminish you. You need a theology of work.

Remember, Adam and Eve they had jobs in paradise and I believe we will have jobs after the resurrection. Our culture has adopted the Roman and Greek view of work: Leisure is good and work is bad. But the Hebrew, view of work could not be more different.

As I said earlier this year: Work is a pre-fall ordinance. It was part of God’s good creation BEFORE the fall. Work is normative…full time ministry is the exception. We were made to work. We were made to join God in bringing order out of chaos. To join God in his initiative of making things and caring for the people and earth he made. God made work, the fall made it hard. But good, useful, diligent work is part of God’s intent for human flourishing. So you have to learn to make your work into worship. What is it about aerospace engineering that brings order out of chaos? What is it about occupational therapy that rolls back the effects of the fall? What is it about working in a coffee shop while you look for something in your field that declares the coming kingdom?

You have to learn to work with God.

II. Become the Church

You’ve got to get in a church. The local church is the basic functional unit of Christian life and practice is the ‘missional community.’ Whether or not you flourish in this transition really depends on how soon and well you integrate into a missional community. As I mentioned, last year’s seniors had lots to say about this transition, and I am going to quote them throughout this talk, starting with Monica, who said:

“Find a church and get involved ASAP.”

Christianity simply cannot be done alone. It wasn’t deigned to be done alone. But getting in on the community and the mission is harder in the next phase. It is harder for a couple reasons. First, because there are a lot of weird churches out there:

Joey and Laura ‘Welcome the Birds’ video

You have to find a church that is serious about the Scriptures and the big ideas that have been important to the Church always and everywhere. And you have to find a church that translates these into action. Finding a church that believes true things, (that majors on the majors) and puts them into action is non-negotiable. But too many wander for too long looking for a sort of ‘College Life for grown ups…” Here’s what Natalia said about this process:

“It took me soooo long to find a church because I was being (obnoxiously?) picky. Don't get me wrong, I think it's important to find a church where you're being challenged, however, I had a bad habit of writing off most churches I went to because it was "too this" or "too that"... and then realized that the church is made up of imperfect human beings and I was looking for perfection.”

But once you find a good church, your job is not done. The harder part is to become part of that church. And that is surprisingly difficult. You see most local churches are pitched to the leading/giving generation…the forty and fifty something crowd. Here is the sad truth. Churches are run by middle age people with money to give, children to care for and limited energy for innovation. A 22 year old does not fit their paradigm…shoot, a 28 year old hardly fits that paradigm. So most churches are ignoring our most energetic and creative people leaving them on the sidelines until they make some money and make some babies and fit the paradigm.

The question is, do you have the discipleship level to make community and mission happen anyway? You have got to find a way to get in on 1) Community and 2) Mission. And so let me take those in turn.

1) Community: Finding and maintaining community will take more intentional effort on your part outside of the college environment. This frustrates a lot of people. But the #1 piece of advice from last year’s seniors was that you have GOT to make community happen…because dominant theme that emerged when people talked about their struggles transitioning to life after college was loneliness.

“…feeling lonely and wishing you were still in college…”
“… season of loneliness …”
“…extended loneliness…”
“…it seemed like I was wandering into the future alone, defenseless…”
“…I began to feel lonely “
“...In the loneliness…Sometimes if feels like you've fallen off the face of the earth…”

“…every single person in our class (yes, even the ones who are engaged and married!) has talked of feeling lonely post-college. I mean, even if you stay, everyone else leaves…I don’t think I have ever been as lonely or felt as much like a failure as I did in the 6 months immediately following senior year. ”

And this was my experience, and the experience of my friends when we graduated almost 15 years ago. Now, most of those quotes were followed with thoughts about how loneness was an opportunity of a new kind of spiritual growth…and it is, I also experienced that, but that is a special temporary sort of grace…God’s normative environment for our flourishing is community…

Now, this is kind of a downer. Why would I tell you this? 2 Reasons

1) It helps to know you are not weird when it happens…and…

2) To press upon you that you have GOT to make community happen

Listen, one of the reasons I am a Christian, is because Jesus seems to get me. He seems to understand what human beings need in a deep and insightful way. And one of those things is other people.

New York Times columnist David Brooks was surveying some recent psychological research in a column a few months ago and marshaled an impressive amount of evidence that significant relationships with ‘other people’ (of the non-digital variety) is the most important factor in human flourishing.

“According to one study, (he says) joining a group that meets even just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.” – David Brooks – New York Times

But here is the thing, until now, there has been a generational ministry set aside for you in the church…a structural mechanism in the church for grouping the other people like you together for natural community. Community was there, you just had to find it. That ends now. In college, we have urged you again and again…”Find Community.” But in the next life stage, community isn’t found. It’s forged.

Now as it turns out, I never had to learn to be very good at that…because I married someone who was amazing at it. We lived in 3 cities (slide - map) in the first 5 years after college…and we developed close friends in each place (not as close or ubiquitous as our college friends, but close enough for us to smile nostalgically every time we think of them – slide - pics). How did she do it…she was constantly inviting. Constantly taking risks of rejection. Constantly asking people to do stuff together. And here is the crazy thing. My wife is an introvert. She loves being alone. But she knows she needs people even if she doesn’t feel like being with people.

So she was constantly cooking meals, inviting friends to concerts, running around after church and inviting all of the people anywhere close to our life stage to lunch EVERY SUNDAY, creating every opportunity she could manufacture for connection. Because after college, community isn’t found, it’s forged.

But here’s the other thing about friendship. The very deepest friendships that we have had since college have not simply emerged from our desire to have friends…they have developed from sharing a common passionate purpose. Community emerges from mission. Which leads me to the second part of getting into the Church which is harder after college than it was in college:

2) Mission: You will probably have to start ‘at the bottom’ in ministry. When I was in undergrad I was the student leader of our campus ministry (that was roughly half the size of College Life). Junior year our campus pastor had a brain aneurism and the para-church staff worker was pulled from campus because he couldn’t raise enough support. When I came on as the student leader my Junior year, we suddenly went from 2 adult leaders, to zero. So for a year and a half I essentially ran a Christian ministry of over 100 students. But Amanda had the really distinguished college ministry. Amanda led small groups every single semester after her freshman year, most of them for spiritually curious students with no spiritual background and she walked with nearly a dozen people as they found faith in Jesus during her time in college. Then we graduated, got married, joined the church and looked for a ministry. We went to the leaders and asked them to put us to work. They looked at us, their eyes lit up, and they said, “You know what we really need, we need bodies to staff the nursery for the early service. We can’t seem find people willing to get up that early.”

This is not uncommon. Because of the insane pace and turnover in campus ministry, it provides students great opportunities to do REALLY significant ministry and many of you have developed fantastic ministry skill sets. Some of you have led small groups, developed kingdom projects, imagined exciting new initiatives, some of you have preached, others have led worship or…I mean, Tony, Alex, Deiter, Lenna and Kiki have made these events happen every week (and these events that are bigger and take more planning than 80% of American church services). But these skills and gifts are generally not recognized quickly by the local Church. They often look at you and see your age. So Amanda and I had a choice. We could do what needed to be done, or we could take our ball and go home.

So we staffed the nursery, and before long we ran the nursery, and after a couple years we were asked to lead a small group, and after a couple of years we were asked to run a ghetto youth ministry, and a full decade and a theology degree later we were asked to serve on an elder board and I started teaching sporadically in different ministries…and finally, a dozen years after college, Dan Seitz took a risk on us, and finally here we are in a great ministry, doing the kind of thing I pictured us doing right out of college. But it started with earning trust by playing blocks with Evan, a 3 year old who used to come to church so sleepy, dazed and confused, he was still holding his cold buttered toast…and would just stand there holding that toast watching me build block towers until he finally pulled it together enough to actually take a bite of the toast like 20 minutes later. But some of my college friends were offended by ‘starting over’ in ministry…and they never started. Most of them were taken out of the game.

The local church requires patience and humility…but I really believe that with all its flaws, it is God’s primary vehicle for his kingdom. So find a good local church (actually, forget that, it doesn’t exist, find a tolerable church and learn to love them), stay at it, and prove your value to them by doing whatever they need done as well as you can.

If you wait for the church to discover how productive, innovative and creative you can be…you will wait a long time. They will inadvertently waste your 20’s, unless you refuse to let them…so refuse to let them.

So you are going to have to forge a community AND a ministry (while lovingly submitting to, learning from and esteeming the leadership of that church). The sooner you stop seeing the old people in the church as your adversaries and start embracing them as mentors…the sooner they will embrace your contributions…Because you need the perspective and vision of the older generations But they need your energy and innovation. Win them to that understanding by your humility and eagerness. Finally…

III. Build or Venture

I remember one morning my senior year. I was walking to a final deeply sleep deprived (which, unfortunately, described most mornings of my undergraduate experience). And as I was trudging up the steep hill our little campus was built on I thought of all the people who told me to enjoy college because they would be the best days of my life. And I remember thinking “Shoot, I hope they are wrong.” And you know what, they were. Once we made it through those rough first couple of years transitioning to the church, ministry and marriage…our 20’s were better than our college years…and the ministry and family years of our 30’s have been better still.

I actually feel really bad for the people who told me that college would be the best days of my life. It means they got stuck. They failed to embrace and enjoy the blessings and challenges of each life stage for what they are…they just processed them through the lens of ‘less freedom’ ‘fewer friends’ ‘more hours in a cubicle’ ‘more poo on my shirt’ (which happens when you have kids, or before that if you are an agg major).

If college turns out to be the best days of your life…your life sucks. You need to get a life. But the transition between life stages whether it is HS-College, or College-after college or to suddenly becoming responsible for tiny human beings, it shakes you up and asks you what you’re really made of.

You don’t have to know where you are going to make ground. Who you become is a function of what you try. You won’t know where you are headed until you try a path.

“Be content with your season of life and maximize your time in it.”-Monica

And your post-college twenties are your chance to either set up future decades to be reliable foundational members of your community and church or to take on risky ventures that won’t be available later on. So don’t waste them. Whatever you choose to do, make sure you move forward. It doesn’t have to move you towards a particular goal, but this is either a time to build or it’s a time to venture. You either need to be building for the long term (save for a house even if you don’t have a girlfriend, get the hard degree you will need so you don’t have to go back when you have kids, build a career you love, get the theological development and skills you need for lifetime of fruitful lay ministry), or it’s a time for venturing (get in on a church plant, join a mission initiative, start a business)…venture on a risky, exciting initiative that could fail, but it’s ok if it does, because no one is counting on you to eat. But do something. It is a time to build or to venture. Which of those you choose has a lot to do with your personality and your gifting. But floating is not an option.

I don’t do long quotes often, but Shauna Niequist, an author from Chicago, put this pretty well:

This is the thing: When you hit 28 or 30, everything begins to divide. You can see very clearly two kinds of people. On one side, people who have used their 20s to learn and grow, to find God and themselves and their dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t, who have pushed through to become real live adults. Then there’s the other kind, who are hanging onto college…with all their might. They’ve stayed in jobs they hate, because they’re too scared to get another one. They’ve stayed with men or women who are good but not great, because they don’t want to be lonely. They mean to find a church, they mean to develop intimate friendships…But they don’t do those things, so they live in an extended adolescence, no closer to adulthood than when they graduated.
 Don’t be like that. Don’t get stuck. Move, travel, take a class, take a risk. There is a season for wildness and a season for settledness, and this is neither. This season is about becoming. Don’t lose yourself at happy hour, but don’t lose yourself on the corporate ladder either. Stop every once in a while…with your journal.

Ask yourself some good questions like: “Am I proud of the life I’m living? What have I tried this month? What have I learned about God this year?...Do the people I’m spending time with give me life, or make me feel small? Is there any brokenness in my life that’s keeping me from moving forward?”


Now is your time. Walk closely with people you love, and with people who believe God is good and life is a grand adventure. Don’t get stuck in the past, and don’t try to fast-forward yourself into a future you haven’t yet earned.

This is in line with what Gail, one of last year’s seniors said was the most helpful thing for her in the transition. She said that loosing the 10 week evaluation cycle left her drifting, overwhelmed by the new time scale of her ventures. She said that disciplining herself to set and revisit a series of short and long term goals that was really significant to help her get a handle on the life stage. So, you want to Navigate the New Normal of life after college? 1)Learn to work with God, 2) Become the church and 3) Build or Venture…
…and that is fine for seniors. But what about the rest of you? Well, we probably won’t give this talk again next year…so you should probably consider this your exit seminar. But there are a couple ways that these ideas can inform your college years.

Thoughts for Underclassmen
1. Hit the Summer hard.

Its good training. Get in a church, work hard, keep up the disciplines, set aside the video game console and find something useful to do whether or not you get paid, make intentional contact with CL friends in your area and practice making new friends outside of the campus environment.

2. Get Momentum into the transition.

Several people told me that having that next thing already lined up when they graduated was the most helpful thing for them in the transition. So, Juniors, spend THIS summer deciding what grad schools or internships you want to apply to (even if you have NO IDEA what you want to do or if grad school is even for you). Set aside a couple hours a week to prayerfully surf these web sites. Take initiative in the process of deciding. And find a vocational mentor early on who can help you think about it (btw Natalia, Michelle was just telling me how you are doing this for her). The deadline for many grad schools and missions opportunities is January 1 and it comes and goes before many seniors even notice. How might you want to build or venture...you need to think about this early if you are going to get momentum into the transition. Don’t give up on the year after undergrad until it is upon you because it seems overwhelming. Put intentional thought and energy into what you want to do...and then send out a variety of applications that will help you build or venture.

Because you will NEVER have more energy or capacity than you do right now. Seriously, I fall asleep most nights at 9:30 whether I want to or not...it is currently past my bed time...I am on the verge of falling asleep right now mid sentence...and I'm not even THAT old. Now is the time to do the ‘hard thing’ whether it is grad school, or peace corps, or missions, or to taking a REAL, sustained shot at an artistic dream, or to do a ministry internship in Wisconsin with Adam Darbonne (which is a possibility – if you’re interested come talk to me). Years in your early 20’s – before you have kids - are incredibly precious in retrospect. You WILL wish you did more with them. Get purposeful momentum into the transition.

Finally, undergrads…

3. Leave it on the Field at College.

I think the best predictor of how this transition will go for you is how you handle your senior year. If your senior year is largely spent looking ahead, you may be the kind of person who does a lot of ‘looking back’ once you are out of here.

I want to close with a quote from one of the funniest people I know…Bronwyn Murphy. I am convinced that the Murphy’s could be a sit com…I’d watch that. They are hilarious. And there would probably be so much sports talk in that sit com, that it could probably air on ESPN. But it would also be the one of the most insightful things on television. So Bronwyn weighed in on this transition for me, and it got real…listen to what she said.

One of the biggest tragedies I have witnessed is graduating seniors refusing to finish strong (classes, ministry, relationships) in the present because they are so focused on the future. Once they graduate, they become inefficient and frankly joy-less in the present as they long for what was in the past (roommates, fellowship, relationships, DC late night)…Both miss entirely the blessings of God in the present.

But if you embrace your senior year for all of its complexity and melancholy and ‘leave it on the field’ in your classes and ministry, then you are probably the kind of person who will find God’s best in a new, totally different situation. If you practice thankfulness, if you wage contentment…you will build the spiritual muscles that will help you through this transition…and the ones coming…the joys and boredoms of parenthood…the estrangement and grace of a difficult season of marriage…the terrors and beauty of adult children…the horror and adjustment of a serious illness…the melancholy and faithfulness of getting old.

It starts now…with embracing THIS season…like a grown up…balancing vocation, community, family and ministry when you come back in the Fall. I’ll see you then.


Note: I have accumulated footnotes and deleted sceens from this talk in a seperate post

“Packing the Parthenon with Powder”: Doing College in the Image of God

A couple years ago Cracked.com ran an article they called: The 6 Stupidest Things Ever Done with Historic Treasures. It was predictably hilarious and depressing. Apparently, a guy named Chester Arthur was the twenty-first president. Yeah, I didn’t know we had a president Chester either. Anyway President Chester fancied himself a fashionable guy and when he moved into the Whitehouse he found the furnishings and contents insufficiently fashionable. So he had…I kid you not…a garage sale. Now, just to be clear, this wasn’t a high end art auction it was a full on, garage sale. Countless priceless historical artifacts were sold for pennies to make room for the hottest fashions of 1880s. But I mean, to be fair, who can really resist those frilly frock coats thingys, the reverse goatee, and those dresses designed to make butts enormous.[1]

And the list goes on. It seems that, part of Stonehenge was ground up by some overzealous engineer and used to pave roads and some rich dude in California took priceless medieval art and ancient manuscripts, stretched them out and stitched them together to make… lampshades.

But the most devastating story is also the most well known. The Ottomans (who controlled Athens in the 17th century) found themselves at war with the Venetians in 1697 and thought that the Parthenon which, at the time was 2,000 years old and nearly intact, would make a good place to store gunpowder. Apparently, this went poorly. You’ll never guess what happened. The Venetians lobbed a few torches into it and it blew it up. I bet you didn’t see that coming. This great historic structure[2] is now a tattered shell of what it could have been.


The reasons these stories make us recoil is the thing they all have in common. They are stories of mis-assessed value. They are stories of someone taking something with enormous intrinsic value and damaging it by using it for something it was never intended for. In most cases they used these things for pragmatic purposes that ‘seemed like a good idea at the time’ because they underestimated the value of the object and misunderstood its purpose.

But here is the thing. You are in the position to make a very similar decision. How you experience the years that you spend in this place depends on the assessment you make of your value and your purpose. If you make an accurate assessment of your value and purpose, these could be really fun and ennobling years that effectively set a wise and ennobling course f or the rest of your life…because we all want to look back on college and be happy about the way we did it. But if you mis-assess what you are worth and why you exist for, they could be frustrating and even degrading years.

So let me start out with a simple question: ‘Who do you think you are?’ It is a question usually reserved for angry moms, spurned lovers and mediocre Spice Girl lyrics, but it is a question you need to answer early in your college experience.

In fact Immanuel Kant one of the most important post enlightenment philosophers, thought the ultimate question of human thought is ‘Who am I?’

More recently, Mumford and Sons[3] got to the same idea:

Because I need freedom now
And I need to know how
To live my life as it's meant to be

Who you think you are and why you think you exist (whether you actively decide what you believe about these things or just absorb a default cultural narrative) will determine how you live…especially in college.

And that is what Genesis 1 and 2 are about. They are not scientific documents intended to walk us through the details of the physical origins of the universe, biodiversity and physical anthropology. These narratives were written to tell us who we are, to help us accurately assess our value and purpose. And answering the question ‘who am I’ is the first step in answering the question ‘how was life meant to be lived?’

The opening pages of the Hebrew Scriptures offer an answer to the question ‘who am I?’ They tell us that we are unique creatures fashioned ‘in the Image of God.’ I mean, it is easy to believe that humans were made in the image of God when you look at certain specimens (Dieter and Ryan - really really rediculously good looking) but others make it a little more difficult (stanford and Dan).


But the passage here is not talking about the fact that we are bipedal hominids with opposable thumbs regardless of our relative handsomeness. It is talking about how we are what Dan called, half way creatures that inhabit empirical and spiritual reality. How we are ‘dirtlings’ but with a special quality that reflects God in a way the other metazoan don’t.[4]

Now, much is made of the two creation accounts, and if you want to hear me talk about the technical details of that, you will have to come to the seminar tomorrow. But functionally, Genesis chapter 2 is like the zoom function on google earth. Gen 1 is cosmic – it is earth centered, but then Gen 2 zooms in on the human story and tells a story that expands and illustrates what it means that we were made in the image of God.

If you accept this answer to the question ‘Who am I?’…if you answer Kant’s question with ‘I am a creature made by God in his image,’ it will dramatically change your college experience. …and I’ll argue, for the better. Tonight we are going to look at Genesis 2 which make the case that recognizing that you bear the image of God will make two big differences that will dramatically change your experience of these years.

Recognizing that you were created in the image of God, will affect the way you think about your Purpose and your Dignity.

I. Purpose

The first thing we see about being created in the image of God is that it is on purpose. I’ll talk tomorrow about what the first two chapters of Genesis do and do not assert, but regardless of how you read them, they offer a definitive ‘no’ to the prevailing university narrative that we are trying to scrape together the illusion of a purposeful existence from an accidental and purposeless origin. The simple assertion that we were made on purpose means we were made with purpose. There are a lot of things I could talk about here, but let’s stick with the text and look at three aspects to the intended human purpose from these early chapters of Genesis. We were made for work, worship and community.

a. Work

The first really counter-cultural thing that this passage teaches is that work is good. We were made to participate in useful and ennobling labor. Look with me at v 15:

“The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”

To briefly use theological language, this story clearly shows that work is what we call a ‘pre-fall ordinance.’ Before things go horribly wrong in chapter 3, in the ultimate setting of human flourishing, humans are working.

All around us we are bombarded with this idea that work is bad and leisure is good and the goal of life is to gradually do less of the former and more of the latter.[5] We generally try to order our lives so we can work less and play more. Maybe this idea has even influenced some of you in the selection of your majors. But in the garden, where things conformed ideally to God’s plan for human flourishing, people worked. We were made to work. Now work is not our only purpose, and next week Liz will talk about how God commanded us to intentionally punctuate our work with rest to protect ourselves from it.

But we see in this narrative that Work is not just the absence of leisure, it is worshipful and purposeful activity. Being made in the image of God means that you have been made to be a maker.[6] You have been created to create. We will see in 2 weeks, the fall did not make work, it made work toilsome. Being made in the image of God means that part of our purpose is to create and to care for what he created.

This insight can breathe vitality into your studies. Christians have a mandate to curiosity. People like to say that I have a school addiction or that I collect degrees. During welcome week I was often introduced as the guy with X degrees, where X was an integer between 5 and 95. And the mockery is deserved…I am, in fact, strange. But I would argue that insatiable curiosity is a simple byproduct of Jesus following…well that and I’m a little strange.

Richard Dawkins, one of our faith’s most virulent modern detractors argues that “I am against religion because us to be satisfied with not understanding the world.” This is mistaken theologically and empirically. The premise that God made the world and can be seen in it makes both curiosity[7] and creativity a Christian mandates. The academic disciplines at their best are simply careful observation and reflection on the reality God has fashioned and the creative response to these observations. But it also means that your studies are an arena of worship

You see, the Hebrew word used for work in verse 15 is often used in the context of worship. It is used most often in the Scriptures to describe priests as they care for the temple.[8] This is a cool idea because it gives real dignity to caring for the earth and people. But it also means that whatever aspect of God’s world your work brings you to, your work is an opportunity to worship. When you look at a blank word document that has to become a paper on (specific absurd example) or sit down to do a problem set to re-derive principles of calculus discovered centuries ago, you get to reflect the activity of your creator by bringing order out of chaos. And that is an opportunity for worship. Which brings us to the second purpose we see in this passage:

b. Worship

You see, work can and should be worshipful, but we were for times set aside for undistracted worship. The picture painted in these first few chapters of Genesis of a world of ideal human flourishing is one where God and the humans he has made talk frequently, take walks together, enjoy being together. This picture is actually painted most vividly in the beginning of the next chapter.

3:8 “And they heard the sound of Yahweh God walking in the garden in the cool of the day.”

Life and work were intended to be done in the presence of God. If you ignore this in college, you miss the point. If you want to do college ‘in the image of God’ order your days around a regular times of worship. Now, since the events of Genesis 3, worship is simply harder than it was in this text. But we have pretty good tools at our disposal in the form of prayer, reflective Scripture reading and joining a Jesus community that worships together. Which leads me to the third purpose:

c. Community

In verse 18 God says, ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’ which is a really stark statement, because until now everything he has made has he has declared good without qualification. The goodness of everything God made was not only the theme of Genesis 1, but it was a repeated refrain. But in chapter 2 God looks and sees solitary humanness…he sees loneliness…and he says, ‘This is not OK.’

Now this is a famous verse, and we know what comes next. You see, I know that some of you hear ‘it is not good for the man to be alone’ and immediately go to work on how you can turn that into a pickup line:

“You know, God said it’s not good for me to be alone…want to go for a walk in the arboretum.”

We immediately vest that verse with romantic implications. And we will get there…but not just yet. You see there is a more fundamental principle here. Christians believe in a Trinitarian God, a God who is one but is also intrinsically a community from eternity past. If that kind of God makes you in his image, he made you to be in the lives of other people who are also pursuing the presence of God

It is not good to be alone.

If you hang around this community long enough, you will hear me say ‘If you spend these years on the margins of Christian community, you are ripping yourself off – you are missing out on one of the great experiences your brief life offers.’ So let me formally invite you to do life with us. But if not with us, find a place in one of the several great Christian communities on campus here like InterVarsity, Crew or AIA.

But let me say, I really love this community. What you see here is a group of remarkable individuals who are passionately doing college and worship together. The up side of that is that it is a fantastic thing to be part of. The downside is that sometimes it can be difficult to break into particularly because it is so big.

Now I was talking to my friend Adam Darbone about this talk. Adam graduated last year and was part of the teaching team. And when we got to this part of the talk he said, ‘You should totally compare it to something that is hard to break into because it is so big but once you do, it’s awesome…like the Death Star.



So let me offer you this deal. We will work hard to make space in our lives and community for you, but you are going to have to make an effort to get to know us. The best way to move from the margins to the center of a community like this are to join a growth group and to go on retreat. If you only come on Tuesdays…particularly if you only come sporadically, you will join a club but you will not experience community.

OK, so the first thing we see in this text is being made in the image of God gives us purpose. It calls us to a life of work, worship and community. And if you take these mandates seriously, it will improve your college experience. But there is a second major implication of being made in the image of God. If it is true that we were made in God’s image then that means you have an enormous intrinsic dignity…and as with the dudes who made roads out of Stonehenge or blew up the Parthenon, you can do damage if you mis-asses your intrinsic value.

II. Dignity

Remember Dan’s story about Marduk last week on e of the alternative creation stories to Genesis. In this story our world was the result of sex and violence. And the sex was not the caring self giving of two kind and self respecting deities in the Plaza after a great meal magical evening of spiritual connection. This was a lewd skinemax encounter in one of those trashy west sac motels that charge by the hour and don't change the sheets."

The author was subverting the basic idea that our existence and consciousness were the result of violence, rape or seduction. But the contemporary naturalistic creation story essentially asserts the same thing. You and I exist because our ancestors were the winners…the managed to get genetic material into future generations by power and seduction.

The Genesis account of Yahweh’s making stands in contrast to this. We were not a cosmic accident or the product of lewd or violent means. It is a story about our dignity as the loving making of a good, kind and wise artist. It is a deconstruction of the ancient and contemporary stories of power and seduction. And it continues to deconstruct prevailing world views.

This informs the way we live on this campus, because you do not have to spend more than a few days on this campus to realize that many people negotiate this place either by power or seduction (which, are also the primeval forces behind the materialist creation story). Genesis 1 offered them and offers us a better way. By asserting your dignity and the dignity of others, it argues that you can do these years well in the space of self-giving creativity. You can reject the programs of power and seduction and go for beauty and the mandate to find order in chaos. You can be a gatherer rather than a scatterer.

The first implication of -If we recognize that humans are all made in God’s image, each one immediately takes on infinite value. It makes us a people who love justice.

a. Justice (social and environmental)

You see, if we take seriously that humans were made in God’s image and are not just gene propagation machines each involved in a subversive struggle to get more of their genes into future generations, it allows us to use words like “justice” with intellectual honesty and personal consistency. If you are a materialist, you have to do some philosophical gymnastics to get to a place where you can assert what we all fundamentally know, that people matter. And that is why Jesus and the NT spend a lot of time calling us to be a people of justice. (something about Kingdom projects?)

But one of the really interesting things about this passage is that it is not just people who matter. The rest of the world that God made matters. You see, there is a common misconception about this passage, that it tells a story about how God made the world for humans. But if you look carefully, it is pretty clear ‘creation was not made for us’, it was made for God. It’s not our house; we just get to care for it. We are not the king of this castle, we are the butler. (CLer as buttler and king)

Check out the really interesting comment in verse 9.

“God made to spring up every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.”

Genesis 2 argues that the natural world has functional as well as intrinsic value. It turns out that biodiversity is ennobling to humans – and our first two jobs were to worshipfully care for creation and to catalogue biodiversity. (maybe a riff on how we are not ‘sell outs’ – that taking the bible seriously sometimes leads us into what the rest of the community believes. In fact, Christians should care more about the environment and justice than their non-Christian counterparts, not less.)[9]

b. Boundaries

So social and environmental justice are themes from this passage that play well on a University. And that is cool because it means that we could potentially partner with people in the larger UCD community to work for these things. But the next implication of being made with dignity is less popular. Because, this passage teaches that God protects our dignity, he safeguard his image in us by giving us boundaries: he gives permissions and prohibitions. Look with me at verses 16 and 17:

16And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die."

You need to recognize that God commands stuff. What I want you to see from these verses is that being made in the image of God means that you have too much value and dignity to waste it experimenting with things that God can already tell you will diminish you. He protects your dignity with generous boundaries. And the point of the story is that God’s prohibitions are always for our good. Boundaries are an affectionate act of love, not a capricious act of restriction.

Like God, we were meant to know the difference between good and evil without having to experience both.

God’s prohibitions are simply an extension of his generosity – they are guardrails for our dignity
-and ignoring prohibitions can leave spiritual wreckage…like blowing up the Parthenon or selling priceless, irreplaceable insights into our country’s history at a garage sale.

But, I want you to notice that there is an asymmetry to the permissions and prohibitions. There is way more permission than prohibition. Is God not generous, because he kept one tree from them for their own good? If you read these verses and come away with a picture of a God who is not generous, it says more about you than him. But that is precisely the way most people read this passage and it is precisely what you will find here at UCD.

God is extremely generous with you here with the things he permits. There are piles of joy available to you in friendship, academic discovery, artistic expression, and athletic enjoyment both on the field and in the stands just for starters. But when he asks you to trust him and live in counter cultural ways wrt substances, value structures and sexuality…that is also part of his generosity.

Which leads us to the final topic that the passage deals with regarding dignity and being made in the image of God…which is nakedness

Yup, it’s my first talk of the year, and I’m already talking about Nakedness. (Krage) But because it is only my first talk of the year, I’ll spare you the other picture where he uses a fluids text as a fig leaf.

c. Nakedness

You see Genesis 2 suggests that the dignity that comes to you by being an image bearer of God extends to the questions of when, where, how and with whom you take your cloths off.

One of the things I love about the middle part of chapter 2 Adam is in the same position many of you find yourself find yourself in. He is doing his work with God, looking for a companion, and not finding one. Ladies?? He is unsuccessfully seeking romantic companionship. Can anyone here identify with that? The story turns into a flat out comedy. Adam does a bunch of biological field work. He explores and classifies the biodiversity of this highly productive patch of the Mesopotamian floodplain that God has selected for his home. I can imagine him alive with the sense of discovery and wonder. But there is a longing that all the science in the world cannot satisfy. So Adam essentially says, “Um, the Mesopotamian gerbil is adorable, but it isn’t exactly what I am looking for.” I kind of like bigger boned woman. [10]

But then he sees the naked woman and literally breaks out into song like he’s the straight dude from glee. I mean, this is pretty funny – and honestly kind of sweet.

The whole passage is something of a sexy romantic comedy. If this were a movie it would be rated R and not because of the F-bombs…it unashamedly celebrates sexuality…but bounds it with a protective prohibition. Look at verses 24 and 25 with me:

24“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his WIFE, and they shall become one flesh. 25And the man and his WIFE were both naked and were not ashamed.”[11]

You see, Genesis 2 gives us a lot of clues about things that are intrinsic to our humanness: curiosity, creativity, productivity, justice, and, it turns out…monogamy.

If you are going to do romance in accordance with the image of God - before you get to see her naked, you leave your immaturity and childhood behind, man up and pledge to her in front of God and your community that she will always and forever be the only one. Genesis 2 argues that marriage is not an arbitrarily social convention, it is intrinsic to who were made to be. It is fundamental to our dignity and purpose and it is part of God’s generosity towards us.[12] And to play at nakedness, to experiment with sexuality as if it were some sort of simple pleasure inducing drug …well that is like packing the Parthenon with gun powder. It demonstrates a misunderstanding of the intrinsic value of what you are dealing with[13], and it is going to do damage.

You will have many opportunities to get naked in college. Now, admittedly, some of you will have more opportunities than others. In college, I liked to think that the ladies general indifference towards me was God’s special grace protecting me from temptation…but maybe it was just the mullet. In my defense, I grew up 20 miles from Canada where the mullet is still cool.



But campus life is sexually supercharged. If you accept the proposition that you were created in the image of God it will affect the way you negotiate that

There is a reason that the passage moves from God commanding permissions and prohibitions and setting boundaries to talking about nakedness, shame and sexuality. It is because God’s commands about sexuality are counter-intuitive. Especially on a college campus, God’s commands about sexuality don’t make a lot of sense to those of us raised on sit coms, pop songs and romantic comedies until after experimentation has done its damage.

Most of the best secular artists have the same basic approach to reality: Try to sustain a credible illusion of belonging, dignity and purpose on the ontological backdrop of total cosmic indifference. The opening notes of the Christian lyric offer something better. They suggest that we have this intrinsic hunger for belonging, dignity and purpose because we were made for these things.



The Christological Turn: So in Genesis 2 we see a picture of the purpose and dignity that God meant for us when he made us ‘in his image.’ But this is the end of the first act of a three act story of Creation-Fall-Redemption. This picture of Purpose and Dignity was the original design. But as we will see two weeks when we talk about Genesis 3, our current existence is just a pale reflection of the original intent. When we really try to live a life in accordance with our created dignity and purpose it turns out to be waaayy harder than it seems like it should be. So where does this leave us? Well this is where we have to use a name we have not used a lot yet. This is where we need to talk about Jesus.

You see, the image of God in us has been so badly damaged by our misuse of God’s generosity and our indifference to his boundaries, that we can no longer ‘just do it.’ The new testament teaches that we still bear the image of God but that it is distorted in us. But there is somewhere we can look to see God’s undistorted image…Jesus

Colossians 1:15
He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.

The image of God is corrupted on this canvas, but we can look to Jesus to see it. But the gospel takes one additional step. Not only can we look to Jesus to see God’s original intent, the prototype of intended humanness, but through the cosmic victory of the cross and resurrection, we can invite Jesus to undertake a program of re-creation in us, patiently restoring God’s image in us.

2 Cor 5 – new creation – The Biblical narrative of creation-fall-redemption means that our legacy of the first creation was squandered, but Jesus came to restore it.

It points to a second creation. A personal re-creation. God made us in his image, and we have lost it, but Jesus came to rehabilitate that image in us. Paul uses ‘new-creation’ language to describe coming into relationship with him. The key to maximizing purpose and dignity in college, despite all of the inertia built up against it in our culture and in our hearts, is to do college with and for Jesus.

My favorite illustration of this comes from a really old book, called “The Incarnation of the Son of God”[14] written by a man named Athanasius in the fourth (?) century. He describes us as a damaged self portrait which the painter goes to work restoring.

You know what happens when a portrait that has been painted on a panel becomes obliterated through external stains. The artist does' not throw away the panel, but the subject of the portrait has to come and sit for it again, and then the likeness is re-drawn on the same material. Even so was it with the All-holy Son of God. He, the Image of the Father, came and dwelt in our midst, in order that He might renew mankind made after Himself – Incarnation of the Son of God - 14

This is an amazing picture of how this all points to Jesus. Imagine that there is this sublime painting that all the scholars agree is the greatest work of all time. And it turns out that if you look really carefully, it is a self portrait of the great artist. But there is a fire or a flood in the gallery, or the Visigoths come through and just tear the thing up…leaving the painting violated and the image of the artist unrecognizable. Scholars and artists get together to try to restore it, but it is too deeply damaged. They can patch it up but they can’t recover the image of the artist that made the painting so special. So finally the artist comes back. He looks at his damaged masterpiece. And what does he do. Does he shrug and move on? Does he decide it would be easier to just repaint it on a new canvas? No. He goes to work on the damaged masterpiece, painstakingly restoring it so it imperfectly but undeniably reflects his image. This is what the Jesus story is all about. God who created space and time, entered it to restore us to his image.

Jesus and the Spirit are the restorers who carefully rediscover the unrecognizable visage of the creator. They can take the rubble of a glorious creation, devastated by misuse, and restore it to its original dignity and purpose.

And that is what we are about here. We are broken people in a broken world who are doing life together with and for Jesus as he patiently rehabilitates God’s image on our scarred canvas. So I’d encourage you to dive in to one of the great Christian communities on this campus. And I’d like to personally invite you to join this one. And stand with us as Jesus re-teaches us our intended purpose and dignity and works on us individually and collectively to God’s image in us.

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[1] Sight Gag: President Chester with bubble “I like big butts and I cannot lie”
[2] Interesting, unrelated story. My parent’s first kiss was on the acropolis of the Parthenon. My Dad had waaaayy more game than my brother or I ever did.

[3] That’s right, I listen to music that is less than 10 years old, though you wouldn’t know it by my ‘worst of the 80’s and 90’s references so far in the intro.
[4] Adam: “And for evidence of that, I’d like to direct your attention to Kiho Song.” You could also use Ryan B., Peter, or a number of other guys I’d throw a good picture up of someone too.
[5] There are several historical reasons we believe this but you can trace this distortion back to our intellectual roots in ancient Greece and our cultural roots in the 1920s. And some have argued that the monastic movement and the advent of vocational ministry ‘Christianized’ this idea that spiritual activities (especially prayer and reflection) are good and the business of other activities are bad. This idea is absent from the pre-fall paradise. We were made to work.
[6] Sayers Quote
[7] and this isn’t a post scientific reconstruction…many historians credit this perspective with the very birth of science in the Western world
[8] In his commentary on Genesis John Walton unpacks this a little: “The verbs abed (‘serve’) and smr (‘keep’) do not indicate what people are to do to provide for themselves but what they are to do for God…Adam’s duty in the garden was to maintain sacred space…The significant thing about these words is that they describe actions undertaken not primarily for the sake of the doer, but for the sake of the object of the action.” 185
[9] UCD has one of the two largest biological sciences departments in the world. There might be a tie in here.
[10] Zach, “…What I need is someone to cook that gerbil for me!”
[11] “May we unfashionably suggest/the unmarried not undress.” – (mewithoutyou - Bullet to Binary pt 2)
[12] Louie CK consistently amazes me with his honest and insightful analysis of our nature and our time.
[13] You miss the intrinsic value of both you and her.
[14] Visual gag: “I like ancient texts and I cannot lie.”