I own a pretty fancy vacuum cleaner made by Dyson. It's called a V8 Animal which does sound rather aggressive and powerful. It certainly sucks pretty well. However, it's cordless and battery powered and the battery life has been really short of late.
My good fortune is that there is a bona fide Dyson repair specialist in Mairangi Bay who works from his basement. I ordered a replacement battery from him and went to collect it on Tuesday.
You might think being a vacuum cleaner repair guy is a rather humble vocation. Yet this man has a Lamborghini in his garage and was telling me that he was going to be spending the afternoon happily chasing Kingfish in the Hauraki Gulf out by Kawau Island. He said he was looking to sell the business and was I interested? Well....
The Greco-Roman thought world into which Christianity exploded considered that the intellectual work of philosophy and politics was superior to manual labour in the dust and dirt. This same thought world favoured the spiritual over the physical (dualism).
However, the biblical worldview disagrees with this. From the very beginning, the work of creation sees God getting God's hands dirty. God became physical in the person of Jesus with all the blood, sweat and tears that came with that. The New Testament teaches a physical, bodily resurrection.
Yet through the centuries the church has often been captured and confused by Greek philosophical ideas, making a kind of immovable, distant, museum God.
God is interested in the whole breadth of human life, work and experience. Remember Galatians 3:8; 'There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.'
Do our relationships and interactions with all, whether they are emptying bins in the street, or doing financial deals in a smart suit, reflect the human dignity that all are made in the image of the God? This is the God, who in Jesus was prepared to get down in the dirt and dust, and ultimately journey to the cross.