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.
