You've Got A Lot To Learn

For those of you not currently in school, when was the last time you calculated the area of a rhombus?  Or determined the specific density of an object?  Or spent the night reading about American History?  When was the last time you read a book on the same subject in which you majored in college? Probably quite a while.  For many of us, graduation was like being released from prison.  They let us out and we never looked back.  On some level, it was as if we thought we had learned everything we needed to know, if we really needed to know it all, and never need to learn anything again.

There was a time when one could get away with that kind of thinking.  In earlier generations the expectation was that once one graduated either high school or college, that was it.  You were done.  Sure there were special people who did extra time at medical or law school and got to get bigger houses, but for most people you went to school, graduated and got a career.  You stayed in that career for your whole working life.  Not only did you stay in the same career, you also stayed with the same company.  In the end, they gave you a nice retirement party, a watch and a pension.

Needless to say, those days are gone.  Few of us stay with the same career  our whole adult lives anymore and fewer still stay with the same employer.  For those who do work for the same company their entire career, there is precious little guarantee of security at the end of the road.  More likely, the road ends with a “package” that contains not a gold watch but a forced early retirement.

Consequently, most of us have either willingly or unwillingly change careers a few times in our adult life.  That presents a challenge both in education and in having to explain to your parents who are from that previous generation, that people do this now.  There is a popular factoid that gets repeated in the media over and over again which says on average an adult will switch careers seven times over the course of their working life. Additionally, between the ages of 18 and 38, a worker will change jobs ten times.  There is some dispute about the accuracy of these numbers and how one distinguishes a career change from a job change, but regardless of the specific numbers, the world has changed.

Many of us have switched careers.  Some of us have done it a few times.  When we did, it always involved risk and induced some fear.  If you have ever willfully changed careers you know there is always some insecurity as to whether you have made the right choice, or should have just stayed where you were. 

Also there is a component of re-education.  When you change fields you may have had to get retrained or re-certified in a new area.  You may have had to go back to school for a new degree.  After many years, you find yourself again where you thought you would never be - strolling a campus with a backpack full of books, staying up late reading and studying, and actually caring about what grade you get on a paper.

The world has changed.  Education was once viewed as something one did at a particular time in one’s life.  Schooling had a definitive beginning and end.  Now we have moved from that mindset, to one of being a lifelong learner - always learning new skills, new hobbies,and far too often, new software.  It is common to think of ourselves as students who never graduate and are always in the process of learning something new.

So then, what’s the deal with the church?  Why has so much of the church missed this sea change in how we think about learning?  Too many of us view our spiritual lives the way people used to think of their education and careers.  We learn something about God once and then we stick with it until we die, regardless of whether it still makes sense.  No matter what happens in our lives or in the world around us, we never learn anything more about God or dig any deeper.

In some Christian traditions, this parallel is pretty obvious.  This year, Vision is beginning its first Confirmation classes.  Confirmation was something I was hesitant to do here for a long time because I have seen it misunderstood so often, especially by parents.  Many parents, and kids, confuse Confirmation with graduation.  For them it’s like some Christian certification course in which you learn a bunch of useless information, but you get your hand stamped so you can get into heaven.  If you don’t believe in heaven, at the very least it’s a ticket to being allowed to get married in an ornate church someday when the time comes, and get your kids baptized there to keep Grandma happy, and then get your kids confirmed there so that the whole meaningless cycle can begin again.

That may sound overly cynical to you, but trust me, it isn’t that far from the truth.  When a teenager is confirmed, it doesn’t mean they don’t have to go to church anymore.  Confirmation is the beginning of one’s spiritual journey and involvement in the life of our faith community, not the end of it. 

In other Christian traditions, the attitude is not much different.  One “gets saved” “born again” or “makes a decision for Christ” and after that, not only is there little intellectual growth, the intellect seems to get thrown away completely.  Education, intellectuals and knowledge often get portrayed as the enemy.  Better to just be saved and stupid, rather than risk having one’s beliefs grow and develop.  Sure in this tradition, one may go to small groups and Bible studies, but the teaching leans more toward quantity than quality.  More Bible verses, more fill in the blank questions with just one right answer, more time spent shielding oneself from new ideas.  Seldom is there an emphasis on rethinking theological concepts. The same ideas that one encountered the night they got saved are merely repackaged for different demographics, be they youth, women or men.  Often the emphasis on learning is not so much for personal growth, but so that the students will have ammunition with which to defend their faith against any new challenge.  It would be like going to medical school and upon graduation, not actually practicing medicine or discovering cures for new diseases, but going around defending medical techniques from the last century.

In either case, I believe we in the church often fall far short of our calling as found in the ancient Book of Proverbs, to seek out knowledge as if it were a treasure.  We are not to think, “Well, I was confirmed so now I’m done learning about God.”  Or, “I was saved and now I have to be wary of intellectuals.”  Instead we are to seek knowledge because when we do, we have the promise that God comes to us.  The life of the mind is not separate from the life of the spirit.  They are intertwined and holistically connected.  God is not afraid of smart people. 

This is not a new concept.  There was time when the world’s greatest minds were Christian - Augustine, Aquinas, Newton, Lewis, the list goes on.  Can we honestly say that Christians can claim the greatest intellectual voices in the public arena today?  In fact wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that  the loudest Christian voices in our culture today, are most likely to say something ignorant, stupid or uneducated?  Great Christians leaders like John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement once said, “Any irrational religion is a false religion.”

Continuing in that tradition, God wants us to be smart well-rounded people who are lifelong learners.  Our vision for this church has always been one of a learning culture, not merely a fortress that defends old knowledge.  As disciples or literally students of Jesus, we should always be learning.  So in the midst of all our our other education, whether you’re still in school, going back to school, switching careers or retraining for your job, we must also make an effort to keep learning about God. 

That learning can take many forms.  In a few weeks, we’ll begin a new semester of Vision Groups.  Some of those groups will be focused more on support.  Some will be centered around activities.  And some will enrich your mind.  So I encourage all of you, when we have our sign up Sunday, to consider going back to school here and learn more about God.  Or host a gruop in your home or even lead one.  You don’t have to be an expert to do that.  You just hae to ove God and love people.

In the coming months and years, we will also be bringing in speakers to educate us and to challenge us.  Some ideas you may agree with and some you may disagree with, but in the process we will always be learning and growing in God.

Why is that so important?  Are we being a lifelong learners just because we are emulating our culture?  No.  We must be lifelong learners because just like our careers, our spiritual lives occasionally undergo huge changes.  These spiritual career changes are spurred on by events like the death of a loved one, a sickness, a divorce, the birth of a child, an intellectual crisis, even a change in or loss of  a job. Sometimes when we encounter those crossroads in life, we turn to our faith.  If we haven’t learned anything since confirmation or since the day we we we decided to follow Jesus, when we turn to that faith there won’t be much there.  Sometimes the stuff we learned in Sunday School or CCD doesn’t quite cut it when we’re facing adult problems, does it?  So we just turn our back on our faith.  It’s the equivalent of when facing a career change just deciding to never work again.  That’s not a good idea for your career and it’s not a good idea for your life in God.   

Likewise, learning about God doesn’t mean you have all the answers.  It means you have questions and you might not get simple answers.  Following Jesus is not a fill-in-the-blank test where you give the one right answer and are done with it.  Following Jesus is an essay question that is always answered in your own voice, in the context of your own life, where you and I can always be learning, always growing in knowledge of our God and always going back to school

.