Faculty Eucharist 2020

The readings I’ve chosen for this morning are general readings “for Education,” not tied to any particular saint’s day or other occasion.

What immediately strikes me about them is the extent to which “education,” in the Biblical traditions, is not innovative. It is not novel; rather than having a “recency bias,” or privileging ideas and trends because they are new, Biblical education has what we might call an “anciency bias,” believing that the older the tradition, the better. Education in biblical contexts largely means “the handing down of teachings and traditions passed on from our elders.” Teaching had the goal of deepening communal ties, of socialization, of keeping children connected to the system of values and beliefs of their parents and grandparents as well as to all those extended networks of mutuality surrounding them.

In the reading from Deuteronomy, we hear the most important commandment, one echoed in the chapel services at the lower school every day. To love God with one’s heart, and soul, and fervently, with all one’s might, is the great and central teaching of the Old Testament, but we forget that this commandment is explicitly tied to God’s provision for the people of Israel in the past. The people are reminded in this teaching that all of the commandments of God, which may seem at times to be overly prescriptive and rigorous, are indeed “for our lasting good,” commandments “to keep us alive.”

Psalm 78 continues this theme, showing that this unbroken chain of wisdom that is meant to be passed on from grandparent to parent to child, in the hopes that that child then becomes a parent and a grandparent herself, and keeps the chain of wisdom and knowledge going forever.

The second letter of Paul to Timothy begins with Paul commending the faith of Timothy’s grandmother and mother, noting that it is because of their faith that he can have faith at all, and reminding Timothy that there is an essential connection between the content of what he has learned and the people from whom he learned those things.

In other words, education, or the passing on of wisdom, as the Bible might put it, is built upon trust, and that trust is able to help foster the kinds of relationships that make education work. We all know this. The content of a course could be exactly the same, but one teacher will have much more success than another because she has nurtured relationships of trust that make that essential connection.

These relationships of trust become even more essential now, as we might imagine. In a time of heightened anxiety and very real danger, we rely on each other and our students for safety and stability. Never before has the human dimension of education been more important, as we will be continually reminded this year--that education never exists in a vacuum, that we bring our souls and bodies to the task before us.

But of all the things that we can and will impart to our students this year, the greatest act of trust will be in the goodness and love of God. What the pandemic has stolen from us is legion: but primary among its thefts is any sense of certainty about what the future holds. On the one hand, we all know, instinctively and from experience, that the future is not certain. All of us have both suffered unexpected losses as well as unexpected joys. Nevertheless, the mental screen upon which we project the future is broken--nothing that has brought us the comfort of certainty in the past will be certain this year. While this loss is great, and extraordinarily difficult, it throws us back upon the three cardinal virtues that Paul gives us in First Corinthians: faith, hope, and love.

The one I am clinging to the most these days is hope. Hope is best defined not as an escape from reality, or a mere wish that things would be different than what they are. Hope is a transformative virtue, a gift from God, something we can’t achieve on our own. Hope is a means of enabling us to bear the weight of our present and future reality; a means of buttressing our spiritual vision and revealing the Mystery at the heart of Creation, the One who through Love, as the poet Dante says, turns the sun and all the other stars.

Perhaps this is what Jesus means in his somewhat cryptic phrasing in our Gospel reading for today. What is hidden from the wise and the intelligent? In our present context, it is the future. For most of us, we have simply taken for granted that the world will, more or less, go one as it has gone for most of our lives. There may be wars and pandemics in other places, but we will continue to do just about what we’ve always done.

But Jesus says, the future is in God’s hands. What is hidden from us is certainty about the future; and what has been revealed to small children is trust. They trust instinctively, and completely; and we seem to learn throughout the course of our lives to trust less and less, as we become more and more independent.

But a pandemic no less than a frightening diagnosis, no less than any unexpected event in our lives, reminds us that we are not in control of our own destiny. That all our lives are interwoven with one another’s lives and with the life of God.

This is what it means to take the yoke of Jesus upon us. In bearing his yoke, we allow him to take control, we trust in his goodness and provision for us--remembering that the word “provision” itself implies that he sees the way before us, even when we do not.

As Rowan Williams puts it, we are “swimming in an overwhelming current of divine loving activity,” “participat[ing] in the rhythm that sustains the universe.” No matter what the future holds, we are held by our loving, life-giving, and liberating God.

AMEN.