Good Teaching

 

Today marks the beginning of our Sunday school program, and many of you are well into back-to-school mode as students, parents, and teachers.  How appropriate, then, that our scripture readings today are about the public role of teachers and teaching.  While you may not think of yourself as a “teacher” in the narrow sense, teaching is a responsibility that we all share.  In our baptismal vows, we promise to proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.  We all teach through our speech and our actions.  Our faith is written in our lives.  What do others read there?  Is it Good News?

 

That is a question that should give us all pause.  It certainly gives me pause.  My priestly vows include the promise to pattern my life in accordance with the teachings of Christ so as to be a wholesome example to others.  Thank goodness the Letter of James reminds us that “all of us make many mistakes” and “mercy triumphs over judgment.”[1]  Even so, those who have a public teaching role are “judged with greater strictness,” and that is as it should be.

 

So, what does it take to be a good teacher? 

The first quality that comes to mind is the capacity to pay attention.  “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher,” says the prophet Isaiah, “ so 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.”[2]  Teachers must be teachable.  The authority of a teacher is grounded in the practice of listening.  It isn’t enough to know your subject matter.  You must know your students.

My model in this was Betty Weber, my high school French teacher.  She paid attention.  She knew whose parents were getting divorced.  She knew who was suffering from an eating disorder.  She knew who dominated the room and who tried to disappear into the background.  Because she listened carefully to what was spoken and unspoken, she knew how to sustain the weary with a word.  And she invited us to listen carefully to each other with the same respect with which she listened to us, which is how you learn a language – or anything else. 

Looking back on my experience of her teaching, I realize that – although I was dealing with my own problems as an adolescent – she didn’t see me as a problem to be solved.  She saw me as a person with a story to be heard.  As she dignified that story with her attention, she created space in which the teaching of French could be woven.  French wasn’t something external to be stuffed into me, but more like another thread giving structure, texture, and depth to the fabric of my life.   That is what good teaching feels like – it helps us to become ourselves.  A number of years after I graduated from high school, Betty was the first person I came out to as a gay man. 

The moment I begin to see another person as a problem to be solved rather than as person with a story to be heard, I lose the ground of my authority as a teacher.  Until I have entered into the other’s story, I don’t have a clue about what they need to learn or whether I am the person to teach them.  Whether you are leading a team in a business, or directing a choir, or parenting children, or providing medical care, or pastoring a congregation, if you wish your life to be an expression of good news, if you would sustain the weary with a word, then you must pay attention.  That is the deepest form of prayer. 

And when we fail in any of the above – and we will, frequently – it will most likely be because, somewhere along the way, we stopped listening.

But even when we’ve listened long and hard, the discipline of listening only lays the groundwork for the discipline of speaking.   In an age of social media, in which many now feel obliged to instruct the public by expressing their every thought and feeling, to document every moment of their day, and to tally up the likes and dislikes garnered from others as if these were a measure of truth, we’ve lost the art of disciplining our speech.  The Letter of James reminds us that not many are called to be teachers (in a formal, public sense), and invokes over-the-top images to express how important it is to discipline our speech – and our posts, and our clicks and our swipes – because what we say and do has consequences.[3]  

James places honoring the dignity of the human person created in the image of God at the very center of his teaching ethic.  Our speech can yield blessing – it can nourish that which is life-giving – or it can curse.  Our speaking is good news when it is marked by respect, integrity, and honesty.  That doesn’t mean that we only say “nice” things or fail to hold people accountable for their behavior.  Difficult things can be said in a respectful way, but it requires discipline.  Respect is to speech as a bridle is to a horse or a rudder is to a boat.  Without it, we quickly go astray.  And we have gone very far astray in much of our public discourse. 

Not all speech is free; some of it comes at great cost.  Good teachers know this and so choose their words carefully.  We need to remember that calling attention to behavior and its consequences is not the same thing as impugning a person’s motives or denigrating their humanity.  Holding each other accountable to the standards of justice and the requirement for healing is an act of love.  Speech and action marked by respect and responsibility are the sine qua non of good teaching. 

Good teaching requires the discipline of listening, and the discipline of speaking.  What is more, it requires the discipline of letting go.  This is what the prophet Isaiah is getting at when he willingly endures insult and spitting.  It is what Jesus is talking about when he says he must undergo great suffering, rejection, and death.[4]   The result of our teaching – its success or failure – is not under our control.  Teaching is always an act of faith, entrusting the work to the mercy of God.  It is God, finally, who vindicates us; sometimes, at a time and in a manner that is not of our choosing.  We may never know the result. 

This letting go is an act of sacrificial love.  Jesus did not try to control how his teaching was received.  He didn’t demand that people get it right.  He was curious about how people understood or misunderstood him; all the better to gauge and adapt his teaching.  But he didn’t try to force anything.  He even forbade his disciples from telling people the correct answer about his identity.[5]  No cheating!  Trust the process.  Trust the student.  And always, trust God to bring something genuinely new and life-giving out what seems like failure.  

 Listen.  Then speak.  Then let go.  All the best teachers, like dear Betty, are doing it.  Rabbi Jesus, our Teacher, showed us the way. 

 

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[1] James 3:2a; 2:13b.

[2] Isaiah 50:4.

[3] James 3:1-12.

[4] Isaiah 50:6; Mark 8:31.

[5] Mark 8:27-30.

Bread Memories

 

Sharing the Bread of Like at St. James

One of my son’s favorite books as a child was Norah Dooley’s Everybody Bakes Bread – part storybook and part cookbook.  Young Carrie and her baby brother are at each other, driving their mother crazy as she tries to prepare a loaf of bread one rainy Saturday morning.  Finally, Mom gets a twinkle in her eye, and sends Carrie off to the neighbor’s house to borrow a “three-handled rolling pin.”  Mom gets some relief, and Carrie begins a culinary adventure around her neighborhood, in which she samples Barbadian coconut bread, Indian chapatis, Southern cornbread, pita, challah, pupusas, and finally her own mother's Italian bread.  She never does find a three-handled rolling pin, but she does discover a multicultural community in which all people, however diverse they may be, share the same human hunger for bread and belonging. 

 

Bread is a universal symbol of life, and it runs through the biblical stories like Carrie moving from house to house in her neighborhood; each context is different, but the basic hunger is the same: the hunger for freedom, the hunger for community, the hunger for meaning.  Beyond our physical hunger there is a spiritual hunger, and it is the combination of our need for physical and spiritual sustenance that makes our hunger human, and our meals a celebration rather than just a biological necessity. 

 

I can still smell the bread my grandfather baked filling the whole house.  It was satisfying and delicious, filling up my senses, my belly, and my heart.  The love that it communicated: the sense of safety, the sense of home, satisfied a hunger that I didn’t even know I had.  I just took these things for granted at the time.  I pray God that all children can take such things for granted.  Just the memory of that bread has sustained me through a lifetime’s journey. 

 

I hope you all have such personal bread memories.  Our scriptures carry these bread memories for us collectively:  the bread Sarah served the visitors bringing news of her long-awaited pregnancy; the bread Joseph shared with his brothers during the famine in Egypt; the bread hastily made by Jewish slaves preparing to escape from Egypt; the bread God provided those former slaves in the wilderness; the shewbread kept in the Temple; the miraculous bread that fed Elijah, the exhausted prophet, and that he prepared to feed a starving widow; the miraculous bread that fed the crowds following Jesus;  the bread at the last supper Jesus shared with this friends.  The Bread of Life.  Bread, bread, bread.

 

Different times, different places, different bread, but one hunger.  The Biblical stories remind us that God knows our hunger and continually provides the bread we need.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus offers a discourse on the bread of life that bears within it all of these bread memories.  But he goes a step further.  He declares that he is the Bread of Life incarnate, and that God does not wish to feed us with bread alone, but with God’s own life.  The bread which God gives for the life of the world is Jesus’ flesh; and not for life only, but for eternal life. 

 

Our deepest hungers – for freedom, for belonging, for meaning – can only be satisfied by God.  And God gives Godself to us freely in Jesus, so that we may become like God and share in God’s eternal life.  God shared our human nature, so that we might share God’s divine nature.  Jesus is the lure that draws us to God, to the satisfaction of our deepest hunger, exercising a kind of gravitational pull that keeps us orbiting around the divine center of our being.  

 

We can resist that gravitational pull, or become mesmerized by the false promises of transient things that never quite satisfy our craving: a political savior, an ideology, a lover, a job, a drug.  Such things leave us complaining for more.  Jesus echoes the Word of the Lord spoken through the prophet Isaiah:

 

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
    and your labor for that which does not satisfy?
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
    and delight yourselves in rich food.
Incline your ear, and come to me;
    listen, so that you may live.
I will make with you an everlasting covenant,
    my steadfast, sure love for David.  – Isaiah 55:2-3

 

It is only in relationship with God, in the steadfast, sure love that God bears for us, that we find the bread of life.  Jesus embodies this very love and shares it with us freely.   The sacrament of Holy Communion carries this bread memory for us, such that when we receive it, we are united with Jesus in God’s mission to satisfy the world’s hunger.  “Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice for God.”  - Ephesians 5:1-2

 

May our lives, like fresh baked bread, become fragrant offerings to feed the world’s hunger for love.  In the name of the True Bread, who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.  Amen.

Let Us Pray

 

 

As we move through this tumultuous time, when we feel overwhelmed by events and weighed down by grief and fear, it is easy to feel helpless and hopeless.  While “thoughts and prayers” have gotten a bad name in recent years, and while it is not a sufficient response to the challenges of our day, it is a necessary one.  There is power in prayer!

 

Walter Wink, goes so far as to declare that  

 

history belongs to the intercessors, who believe the future into being . . . The future belongs to whoever can envision in the manifold of its potentials a new and desirable possibility, which faith then fixes upon as inevitable.

 

This is the politics of hope.  Hope envisages its future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible, thus helping to create the reality for which it longs.  The future is not closed.  There are fields of forces whose interactions are somewhat predictable.  But how they will interact is not.  Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes.  These shapers of the future are the intercessors, who call out of the future the longed-for new present.  In the New Testament, the name and texture and aura of that future is God’s dominion-free order, the reign of God. (Engaging the Powers, p. 298-299)

 

In our prayer, we place ourselves in vulnerable trust before God and seek to articulate God’s desire, God’s dream for the world.  We name it so that we can claim it!  Intercessory prayer isn’t simply a projection of our own wishes and fantasies, but rather a bold attempt to reflect back to God the prayer that God already is praying in and through us.  God, ultimately, is the intercessor!  

 

This is good news, because the pain and hope of the world are too much for us to bear alone.  As Wink reminds us,

 

We human beings are too frail and tiny to bear all this pain.  The solution is not avoidance, however.  Refusal to read the papers or listen to the news is no protection.  I am convinced that our solidarity with all of life is somatic, and that we sense the universal suffering whether we wish to or not.  What we need is a portable form of the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where we can unburden ourselves of this accumulated suffering.  We need to experience it; it is a part of reality.  Our task in praying is precisely that of giving speech to the Spirit’s groanings within us.  But we must not try to bear the sufferings of the creation ourselves.  We are to articulate these agonizing longings and let them pass through us to God.  Only the heart at the center of the universe can endure such a weight of suffering.  Our attempts to bear them (and our depressions are evidence that we try) are masochistic, falsely messianic, and finally idolatrous, as if there were no God, as if we had to carry this burden all by ourselves.  (Engaging the Powers, p. 305)

 

God is with us.  In our prayer, we act as a two-way transmitter connected to the Source.  We take in the suffering of the world and pass it on to God, who, in the alchemy of love, transfigures it into hope, and passes it back through us into the world.  Prayer is how we work with the energy of love to make God’s intention our reality.  “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  

 

As one of my teachers once put it, the difference is not between contemplation and action, but between action with or without awareness.  We cannot afford a church in which some pray while others act.  We need a church of people who act rooted in prayer.  We need intercessors, not for the sake of the church, but for the sake of the world that the church is meant to serve.  

 

Let us pray.