Lessons:
Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 116:1-8
James 3:1-12
Mark 8:27-38
I’m feeling a little strange so far this Fall, because this is the first Fall in thirty-five years that I haven’t been working in a school. I’m so used to the rhythm of school – of the school year and the school day. I realize that much of my identity is bound up in being a teacher. So now that I’m officially retired from teaching high school I’ve been doing a lot of reflection about teaching and learning, and what it means for me to be an educator at this point in my life.
It’s been discouraging in recent years to read about the various ways that the status of
teaching in this country has declined, which includes the low compensation that many teachers receive. Good education is expensive, but bad education is even more expensive, in terms of its negative impact on the potential of our young people.
But I suspect I don’t need to convince all of you of this – there are so many educators among us. What I’d like to do is to consider teaching and learning from a divine perspective and to suggest that education, the activity of teaching and learning, is essentially a divine activity and something that both reveals God’s nature and that draws us closer to God.
I’ve been thinking I would like to talk about education, so I was pleased that this week’s readings are all about teaching – did you notice that? Isaiah talking about the powerful gift of teaching that God has given him, and James talking about the powerful responsibility of teaching, since it can be used for both good and evil. And in the gospel lesson today we have a perfect example of Jesus as teacher – I want to come back to this.
The themes of teaching and learning are everywhere in the Hebrew scriptures and Jewish tradition. Torah, the Jewish law, is not law in the simple sense of “do this, don’t do this.” It’s really a guide for how people are meant to live their lives, in order that they, and the whole community, can come closer to God and understand God’s nature. At its heart is a process of dialogue, both with God and with one another, that leads to understanding and right action. The Jewish tradition of Wisdom (or Sophia) builds on this idea and focuses not so much on wisdom as an intellectual concept as on the everyday practices of life that draw one closer to God.
The ancient Greeks had a parallel understanding of education which, though it’s secular
rather than religious, has much the same goal. The Greeks called this paideia 1, and it meant the education of young people to be good citizens of society, focusing not just on intellectual growth but on all aspects of life (including, for example, the athletic). It was practical and community-oriented, as in the Jewish Wisdom tradition.
If there is a Christian Paideia, a divine education, what does it look like? In the first place, it is fundamentally relational – based on the relationship between teacher and learner, a relationship that reflect that between God and believer. If you think about your own education and teachers who had the greatest influence on you, they were probably those you had a strong, positive relationship with, built over time. Learning in the Jewish tradition is a process of dialogue, of conversation, of give and take among people who are searching for the truth together and are open to new understandings.
This divine education is also fundamentally challenging: it challenges our easy assumptions, our prejudices and narrow preconceptions in order to draw us to a broader vision of reality. It draws us out of our focus on self and opens us to seeing in new ways. In this way it aims to be transformative, to invite us to grow into the people that God wants us to become, and to help the community grow and change in the process.
And in this process, divine education is liberating: in freeing us from self-absorption, opening our eyes to a broader vision of things, helping us overcome our prejudices, it strengths our identity and gives us courage to undertake new challenges.
We can see this at work in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus’ engagement with his disciples is
built on friendship and trust. Most of the stories of Jesus teaching are not about him lecturing but telling stories and then inviting people to ponder what he says. In this episode, he draws his friends into conversation and asks questions. “Who do people say that I am,” he asks, and they respond – it’s clear they have been thinking about this. Then, in response to “Who do you say that I am,” they answer “the Messiah.” They have drawn their own conclusion, but they still don’t understand fully.
He challenges what seems like an obvious answer and points them to a more difficult truth: the path that lies ahead entails suffering and death. They don’t want to hear it, but he demands that they listen. This invites the process of transformation, of them becoming more the disciples that God is calling them to be. And we know they were transformed, to become a community of visionaries who could carry on the work of the Kingdom.
Okay, you’re thinking, that sounds great, but I’m not an educator. But if teaching and
learning is really a divine process, that leads us closer to God, then it’s something we should all be engaged in, one way or another.
There are those who are formally engaged in Christian Paideia – church school teachers and youth group leaders and Bible study teachers – but all of us have the opportunity to engage others in conversation, to help others reflect on their experience, or to introduce them to new practices we find helpful, or to help newcomers feel at home in the community. And each of us has the opportunity to take on the challenge of learning, of broadening our own understanding and being willing to try new practices, even when they are hard. God is calling us to continuous growth and transformation.
I’m not sure how I will continue to be an educator now that I’m retired from teaching, but I hope I will be open to new possibilities, to continue to deepen my own conversation with God.
The Rev. D. Corbet Clark