Sunday, September 17, 2006

Year B, Proper 19: Tongue of a Teacher

my first sermon...

Tongue of a Teacher
by James Joiner
Preaching with St. Mary's House Episcopal Center
September 17th, 2006

Year B, Proper 19
Isaiah 50:4-9
Psalm 116
James 2:1-5, 8-10, 14-18
Mark 8:27-38



“The Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again...If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.”

-from the Gospel reading today, and from Isaiah:

“The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”

IN THE NAME OF GOD WHO MADE US, SAVES US, AND WILL NOT LEAVE US ALONE. AMEN.


Jesus and Isaiah would have us know today that the act of following the word and will of God can be an alienating experience, and our readings have colored that alienation with violence.

For the Isaiah that I know, the Lord God appeared, bearing the tongue of a teacher when she was seventeen, and a High School junior in Fayetteville, North Carolina. One day she was looking out the window of whatever classroom held her at the time, when she saw the AP Physics class walk outside. Apparently, whatever equations those students were tackling for the day had grown too large for the chalkboard of the classroom, so their instructor had turned to public chalking instead, transforming the sidewalks outside the school building into a vast expanse of page on which their problems could unfold. Something in that instructors innovation, something in the simple way he engaged his students with a quirky passion, awoke a new realm of possibility in my Isaiah. It enticed her with its participant learning and the level of trust it required of the other students to leave the school walls and enter the world scribbling with inquiry. The witness of this scene gave her the first pangs of a new love she would gradually fall into, one that resonated within her and within a need of the community. Morning by morning she woke, she woke with ears to listen as those who are taught. She listened intently to the world around her, and she followed her new love where it would allow, even when the first places where it led her seemed stifling. The University never could quite match up to her ideological expectations with its emphasis on methodology. Her love would have much rather explored the what’s and why’s of the learning relevant to the populations she would be entering, rather than the how’s- such as the all too common: how best do we engage students with the content deemed necessary by the state. She took the pragmatics for what they were worth, and kept her passion at bay. She was not rebellious, she did not turn away, she was faithful to her love in her compromise and her waiting, she jumped through the hoops, and picked up those things of value to be had- one eye always on graduation and a classroom of her own. She got hers right off the bat, in a high school not too far away from here. Despite some uneasiness and what she perceived to be a lack of support from her administration she was incredibly successful. She garnered the respect and love of her students with her own respect and love, she was lauded by superiors and peers alike for what seemed to be an innate ability to sustain the weary with a word. It was actually an innate ability to empower those students charged into her care with the worth and motivation intrinsic to their own experience. That was her word, the word within the weary that she served, which she could hear so clearly with her burning ears, for which she tasked herself simply to discover, refine, and present back to the souls she had been listening to. If it is the job of a prophet to speak truth to power, the Isaiah that I know spoke truth to one of the more frequently neglected powers around: poor kids in Greensboro, North Carolina. It may sound grand, but for her it was as simple as inviting participation, as simple as the trust it requires to send students outside of the school walls, scribbling with inquiry.

I have always had a hard time understanding how the Isaiah that I know, how a teacher so “with it”, so in touch with her surroundings, could be assaulted by her own students, in her own classroom, as she was one December afternoon, nearly two years ago. The whole incident erupted in a flash, the room had gotten out of hand as was typical for many other classrooms at this school, and before she knew it, six of the girls in the class rushed her at the front of the room, clawing and scratching, slamming her into the chalkboard and reopening a surgical wound in her back from a recent operation. She escaped the room crawling, sobbing in pain. Yes, it is as literal as that, the Isaiah that I know had her back ripped open, her cheeks clawed. But the difference between her and the Isaiah of our text this morning is that she did not give her back under the attack of adversaries, she did not give her back because it was what holding fast to her ideal required, she did not give her back because the message that she carried threatened or contradicted her aggressors- it was nothing so grand as any of that. The Isaiah I know was touched by violence in the pursuit of her love simply because it has become common in the places where that love has led her, simply because that kind of violence is the norm. I have asked her why this is so, and she has told me quite simply: “Apathy.” Apathy breeds violence, breeds it in our schools and from there breeds it in the nations that we occupy. If we do not give our children the respect, the support, and the resources they require to be instilled with the sense of capability, the sense of responsibility that must fuel all we require of them- and we must require so much of them if we are to survive!- how can we expect them to care? If our brothers and sisters are naked and lack daily food, and we say to them, “Go in peace, keep warm and eat your fill”, yet do not supply their bodily needs- what is the good of that? The Isaiah that I know tried as best as she could to give as much of that respect and support as she could, but she would often come to me frustrated, saying that if we weren’t treating these children with the dignity they deserved from their very first year among us, it was nearly impossible to do by the age she got them.

Jesus and Isaiah would have us know today that the act of following the word and will of God can be an alienating experience, and our readings have colored that alienation with violence. Where Isaiah is a prophet of possibility, her back is struck and her face is pulled by hands reaching out out from places where that possibility has yet to materialize a reality. But I would dare say that finding a cross to bear in the world where we live is the easy part. I would dare say that our culture and our age have taken the Gospel question, “Who do you say that I am?” further than ever before, with the individualism that we have afforded ourselves branching us out into our troubled world in a myriad of crises and causes that seem intent on increasing, intent on dividing and deepening, intent on loosing each of us in their need. Anyone who listens to the world with burning ears, anyone who has found the Word of God there and taken it upon themselves to cherish it, to heal it from the pain where it is defined, will find a cross to bear, will find a point of tension between the wounded world where our love is born and the world our love would have us establish. But I wonder if we haven’t left one another alone in the process. Love calls to us from the Gospel saying, “Follow me, deny yourself for this! The path will ruin you, reject you, and kill you in the end, and it is there where you will have to rise again.” The most idealistic among us take the first steps with enthusiasm, forging out ahead of all the rest, confident that we are fighting the right fight, confident that it will be worth the cost, confident that the one who vindicates us is near. But then we find ourselves alone, we find ourselves worn away beneath the tension, and in our weakest moments we, like Peter, crushed by fear, ask Jesus, “Does it really have to be this way?” At which point Jesus says, not for the first time or the last, “No- I don’t think you were listening.” Jesus has no intention of setting out alone. Time and time again Jesus cries, “Follow me!” time and time again Jesus begs us for our company, time and time again God gives us the opportunity to understand that we are not to be without the camaraderie that will save us. Maybe we, like Jesus, can learn to say: Come with me where I am going. Do not leave me there alone. For we must not take up the cross alone, we must not let the world alienate us in the work we have to do, we must be bound there together, we must not forget the company of our busy, wearied kin, and we must not follow Jesus to the cross without the hope that we will follow him into the sky as well. We must not take up a cross without taking up its resurrection, a resurrection that is a promise, yes, but a job to do as well, a resurrection that demands the work of learning, progression, and resiliency, and demands it only in the context of community which is baptized into that work together. A resurrection whose faith demands to be worked out together. Isaiah does not intend to speak the word of God alone, but rises with her face set like flint and cries: “Who will contend with me? Let us stand up together! Who are my adversaries? Let them confront me. It is the Lord God who helps me; who will declare me guilty? All of them will wear out like a garment; the moth will eat them up!”

Unfortunately, for Greensboro, that is exactly what the Isaiah that I know did. But when she cried for help to come, it did not come from here. When she sought recompense for her injuries she was treated with suspicion by her own administration. Even if she hadn’t given her back she had already given her spirit a hundred times. I know for a fact that some classrooms in this city are wonderful places for children to be valued in their learning, that there are some schools who can afford to give their teachers the support they need, but for this story, when the Isaiah that I know sought camaraderie in her dream and love of a learning that belonged to the students she came to serve, she found none. She found a system that saw her school as a liability of poor test scores and behavior problems, and treated it as such, rather than as a wealth of opportunity, rather than a community of souls who clearly needed something more. The Isaiah that I know would not be compromised in such a way again. When she called for kindred to contend with her love, the answer came from another city, another state, and Greensboro lost another amazing teacher. For this story, Greensboro is the garment that has been cast off to wear away.

Jesus and Isaiah would have us know today that the act of following the word and will of God can be an alienating experience, and it will continue to be if we do not call on those we know to be our kindred for their help. It will continue to be alienating if we do not hear the loud shouts and nursed whimpers of those prophets in our midst who are calling on our own.

AMEN.