Let me just say again how grateful I am for the invitation to be with you today. I should make two disclaimers at the outset, though: my wife is a Montessori teacher for adolescent students, and my four kids, ages 2 through 14, likewise all go to school every day, one at an Episcopal school, and they’re all of them resident experts on formation and remarkably perceptive about what happens in the community of a classroom. But you did not get any of them today. Instead, you got me. Better luck next time.
The second disclaimer is that the E in the acronym SAES of course stands for Episcopal. And Episcopalians are notoriously people of the lectionary, the cycle of readings assigned to each day and each week. The lectionary means that the same readings are given to everyone who prays today, whether they are on vacation at the beach or have the better luck of being here at the Teaching Learning Institute. I would have liked to have picked you out some happier readings.
Case in point, from Ecclesiastes this morning: Remember your creator in the days of your youth, before the days of trouble come, that is, before you get old. Before your knees begin to creak and a new layout at the grocery store counts in your life as major news. And terrors are in the road, and you call your kids to troubleshoot the newfangled devices they got you for Christmas, which are obviously defective, and your desire fails; because all must finally go to their eternal home. Remember your creator, before the silver cord is snapped, before the golden bowl is broken, and the breath returns to God who gave it. Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher; all is vanity.
As far as classroom motivational posters go, you might steer clear of Ecclesiastes. But it has a way of cutting through the fluff, amirite? What’s it all for? After the GPA. After admittance to the school of my dreams. After the six-figure job that my program’s completion either did or did not land me. After the promotion and the sacrifices that got me the promotion. After the unexpected life change that is as inevitable as it is unpredictable in the life of each of us, after, after, after, at the bottom of the well, when it’s all stripped away, what is it all, after all, for?
What is a good life? What makes a life good? It was Socrates who first said that life wasn’t enough, you didn’t make your life, it was given to you, it’s just the starting point: a good life should be the goal. He said it came through happiness which wasn’t an accumulation of fancy things but a right ordering of existing things toward worthwhile ends. But what makes an end worthwhile? How does a person come to learn that kind of thing? Where did you get your own ideas for it? Maybe this reading is not such a bad fit for a gathering of educators, after all.
As educators, where do you begin to look for an answer to the question when someone comes up to you, between classes, after hours, before meetings, at impossible moments, and asks about the ideal world you would like to see? And can you imagine the privilege of walking alongside a person asking these questions, forming their own answers, as informed in part by your presence and the ways you live your life. Of course you can. You do it every day. Your work is sacred work.
And I get it. Some days it doesn’t feel sacred. Some days it’s just managing challenging parents and figuring out what skibidi Ohio means. But even your patience in that moment is as much a part of the pedagogy you pass on as anything else your student remembers. Our New Testament, then, offers hints toward the good life possible for those whose ends Christ has shaped: marked my a spirit of gentleness, bearing the burdens of others, not growing weary of doing what is right, but imagining in the space of lives whose default setting in the year 2024 can’t help but be myopically individualistic the radical possibility of beloved community and shared belonging. What Montessori calls being citizens of the world. What the letter of Galatians calls living as the family of faith.
Pope John Paul II one time said that the feast of Pentecost, when Episcopalians all wear read, there's fire, languages, crazy stuff, St. Peter swearing he wasn’t drunk yet, JP said that that feast really belongs to the educators. To teachers. To you. Because the miracle wasn’t all the stuff and commotion. The miracle was that in a world of stuff commotion, in a world of my and mine, a new space was opened for deeper and mutual understanding. Each one understood in the language of each. A new community was born! And this, he says, is what you make possible, and as that great educator Fred Rogers might add, just by being you.
So if I am not an expert educator like many of you and literally every other member of my family, let me be a stand-in for the whole church today and simply say, Thank you. God bless you. Thank you for saying yes to your part in the miracle. And let me be your permission today to remember that this miracle is what your work, on less sexy days, is really all about. It’s what all the the work is for. For the fruit of this work in the lives of those you reach is nothing less than the life that really is life.
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