Lessons:
Isaiah 58:9b-14
Psalm 103:1-8
Hebrews 12:18-29
Luke 13:10-17
Well, it’s that time of year when we’re thinking about Back to School. That may not be
relevant to all of you, but I’m going to suggest that perhaps it should be.
After having retired from teaching a year ago, I find myself getting ready to go back to
the classroom once more. This will be the start of my 57th year in school, as either student or teacher.
I’ll be teaching high school Religion as an academic subject. I think there’s a strong
argument for the importance of studying religion – because of its central role in the world today as well as for the skills it can promote, like understanding different cultural perspectives.
But I think the ultimate purpose of studying religion – as is true for math or science or
English – is exploring the nature of reality and our own human nature.
From a Christian perspective, teaching and learning is a divine practice, because if God is the foundation of all reality, and if we humans are made in God’s image, then deepening our understanding of reality means coming closer to understanding the truth about God and about who we are in relationship to God. And this should be a joyful activity for all of us.
Education as divine practice is something that Jesus models throughout the Gospel, and we have a fine example in today’s lesson from Luke.
Consider the story: Jesus frees a woman from a crippling infirmity on the Sabbath. Some of the people present, based on their concept of honoring the Sabbath prohibition against work, object to this. Jesus responds to them by asking them to reflect on their own experience, and the crowd, having done this, seems to come to a new understanding. The story ends in the people rejoicing.
The story’s message seems to focus on two things: freedom and transformation. For the
woman, her new freedom and transformation are physically obvious. But the crowd is also freed – from an inadequate understanding of the Sabbath and of what God wants from them. They are also transformed, because they gain new insights, through Jesus’
questioning, into God’s truth – and this becomes a joyful experience.
I occasionally encounter former students of mine, now in their twenties or thirties, and as we talk they sometimes say that they don’t remember anything of what they have learned in my class. But as I listen to them talk about the meaningful work they do now, how they serve others, how committed they are to social concerns, the loving relationships they are in, I think – that’s okay. They have grown since high school, they have been freed from some of their narrow-mindedness and teenage anxiety, they are growing into the kind of mature and thoughtful people we need. If my teaching has contributed even the tiniest bit to that transformation, then I don’t really care if they can’t remember the significance of the 14th Amendment, or why the Council of Jerusalem was important in early Christianity.
Sometimes, as a teacher, you do get to see a moment when “the light comes on,” when a student struggling with a difficult concept – whether how to solve a quadratic equation or how to use the preterite tense in Spanish or whatever – they suddenly get it. It’s a joyful moment for both student and teacher. They’ve gained a little deeper understanding of the nature of reality, and they may have gained self-understanding as well.
True learning is not about repetitive drills, studying for tests or endless assessments.
None of these produces true joy. True learning is about pursuing a goal of what the Greeks called “Sophia” or “wisdom,” which is a deep understanding that comes from reflecting on everything we’ve learned and experienced, which pulls together and integrates everything, which enables us to become the people that God has called us to be. And that is deeply joyful.
And this is a goal for all of us, whether in school or not.
So my hope is for this coming year to be a year of deepened understanding and joyful
learning – not just for kids in school but for all of us, that we may be on the path to Sophia, or wisdom, as a way to draw closer to God and to the image of God that lies in each of us.
AMEN