University Presbyterian Church - Chapel Hill, NC

A Sermon in Gratitude for

the Ministry of Sallie Verner

Mark 9:33-37

Robert E. Dunham

University Presbyterian Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

February 28, 2010

            Thursday morning I was listening to part of the acrimonious White House summit on health care reform and shaking my head.  The voice I kept hearing in my memory was that of my old high school history teacher Mr. Cantwell, and his reminder to our high school debate team that “Civil speech is the prerequisite for a civil society.”  I remember the context in which he spoke those words – just after a debate in which one of our debaters had lost his cool and had spoken angrily – and forty-some years later I still remember his words, which he spoke calmly and without criticism. I wish our leaders in Washington had been taught by Mr. Cantwell. You can never pay a good teacher enough.

            I’ve told you before about Victor Kazanjian, the dean of religious life at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, who is a friend of a friend. For more than a decade now he has been working on an informal research project that has had a remarkable impact on the college. Every time he visits with alumnae, every time he meets over coffee with faculty, every time he attends a committee meeting, he asks people to remember and describe for him a moment of brilliant teaching.  I learned about the study from my friend Rick Spalding, the dean of the chapel at Williams College, at the other end of Massachusetts. He says that Kazanjian’s little exercise has had the effect of increasing, not only “the repertoire of magic that is available to anyone who hears the stories,” but of reminding the hearer that “the purpose of education is not facts, or accumulation, or even mastery.”  The purpose of education is transformation, to help folks learn to see the world differently and to act on that new sight and insight.[1]

            In the life of the church, I would add, such education for transformation is aimed at the cultivation of wisdom.  What we learn here, if we give ourselves the chance, is how to put ourselves in the trajectory of the wisdom we have come to know in Jesus Christ. On this day when we mark the retirement of Sallie Verner and celebrate her ministry among us, it seems fitting for us to think together about the cultivation of godly wisdom.

            Of Sallie’s many gifts to this church, none has been more valuable than the way she has encouraged and supported and equipped those who have taught in our various educational forums for children and adults. I have admired the way she has created an environment of rich resources and steady support for our church school teachers, the way she has prepared and equipped our Vacation Bible School leaders to write and develop a yearly curriculum for that summer learning experience, and the way she has enabled our adult education classes and seminars to flourish.

            Thinking about Sallie and our teachers here got me thinking back this week to the teachers who first sparked in me a respect for scripture, who first helped me to put myself into some of the great biblical stories, who first helped me to grasp in word and song that God was far bigger and more gracious and more merciful than I had ever imagined.  Some of them I can still name: Esther Elam, my third-grade Sunday School teacher and the first woman ever elected as an elder in my home church in Florida and who later stood with me as I took the first steps toward ordained ministry … Marian Justice, the demanding, yet gracious director of our youth choir, who taught us about Jesus as she planted the seeds of my lifetime love of the music of the church … Margaret Scales, our director of Christian education, who first challenged me to hear a calling to vocation in the church.  There were others, too, whose names are more elusive in my memory, Sunday School teachers and Vacation Bible School leaders who loved the scriptures and patiently inspired me to love them, too… and who demonstrated for me that memorizing Scripture, while important, was less important than growing up into the wisdom that Scriptures could teach us… a kind of godly wisdom that is accessible to us all.  They never have paid such teachers for the wisdom they passed on to any number of us and never could pay them sufficiently, if they were to try, nor could any of us repay them for what they have meant to us … or for the wisdom they have embodied for us…across the years.

            I was pondering the kind of wisdom the church is called to cultivate and each when I came across Martin Copenhaver’s description of the way ministry in the church has helped him to grow toward wisdom.  Copenhaver is a Massachusetts pastor, and he writes of what he means by “wisdom.”

[Wisdom] has become the big wooly mammoth of ideas – big, shaggy, and elusive. Philosophers, theologians, and social scientists have all found wisdom notoriously difficult to define.  In part, this is because wisdom is more than a single attribute.  It is more like a cluster of attributes, including a clear-eyed view of human behavior, coupled with keen self-understanding; a certain tolerance for ambiguity and what might be called the messiness of life; emotional resiliency; an ability to think clearly in a circumstance of conflict or stress; a tendency to approach a crisis as an intriguing puzzle to be solved; an inclination to forgive and to move on; humility enough to know that it’s not all about you; a gift for seeing how smaller facts fit in within a larger picture; a mix of empathy and detachment; a knack for learning from lifetime experiences; a way of suspending judgment long enough to achieve greater clarity; an ability to act coupled with a willingness to embrace judicious inaction.[2]

I like that definition and I aspire to it. I would also want to add some other qualities, including a capacity for awe; an ability to laugh at oneself and acknowledge mistakes; a preference for kindness over critique; a deep valuing of human differences; and a tendency toward hope rather than cynicism in facing the future, for “hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.”[3]         

            It is toward such qualities that the church’s educational ministry presses us. Concerned less with mastery of the facts and more with the development of a way of wise and godly living, the church’s education presses us to be a bit counterintuitive and more than a little counter-cultural. It teaches us the ways of Christ, who always saw the world through different lenses and a higher wisdom, and who taught us some ways of seeing the world that have always been at odds with popular wisdom:

            Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth [he said].

            If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, then turn the other also.

            Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.

            Do not be anxious about tomorrow…let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.

            Judge not, that you be not judged.

            Whoever would be first of all, must be last of all and servant of all.

            The aim of Christian education is not the mastery of such Christian aphorisms, but rather the encouragement of the capacity to understand them in their context and to live into their truth and wisdom in ours. Take our Gospel lesson for today, for example.  In this story Jesus takes on the role, not of healer or prophet or Messiah, but of Teacher, and what he offers is a moment of brilliant, transformational, wisdom-shaping teaching.  Mark says Jesus “sat down and called the twelve,” suggesting that formal instruction is about to take place. Here Jesus is not the casual friend, but the Teacher.[4] And whereas Jesus often spoke with memorable teachings and pithy parables, here the eye-opening moment comes with a human object lesson.  Having discerned that they were arguing amongst themselves about greatness, Jesus says, in effect, “I want you to start seeing the world differently.”  Start seeing the world with my eyes.  Start seeing laterally instead of vertically.  He says, “If anyone would be first, that one must be last of all and servant of all” (9:35).

            Then he sets in their midst a child.  We don’t even know if it is a boy or a girl, but that’s the point.  This child is faceless. Now, this may be a bit difficult for us to catch, given the fact that we live in such a child-centered culture, but the culture of first century Galilee was anything but child-centered. Children in Jesus’ time were often cast to the margins, and not infrequently were abandoned. Jesus holds a child before them, not because the child is cute and adorable, but because the child doesn’t count for anything.  Without ridicule, yet unmistakably, Jesus discloses to his disciples the gap between their professed beliefs and their actions. The one who aspires to be first must serve, and must be the servant of all – servant, even, of society’s least powerful, least important members.[5] The disciples will remember the child. And if they remember the child, they will remember the teaching. And if they remember the teaching, they may begin to see what they have not seen before. And this is the teaching, lest they or we forget: that the greatest among us is the servant of all.

            Then Jesus says something else.  He says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me” (9:37). Whenever we welcome society’s least powerful, least important members, we actually welcome God into our midst. Now, part of godly wisdom is learning to take Jesus’ instruction in his context and to bring it into our own context.  Today, I believe, Jesus would not have chosen a child to illustrate society’s least important member… not here, in America.  Maybe elsewhere in this world, where children are still discounted and mistreated, he would choose a child.  But not here. Here he would choose someone we normally discount… someone largely invisible to us… someone we don’t normally see or notice. Figuring out who it would be is a step toward the kind of wisdom the church seeks to engender in us.

            Some years ago I joined two dozen Presbyterian pastors and educators on a trip to Africa.  It was a few months before our daughter Leah was born, and the trip represented the first time I had traveled into what geographers and sociologists call “the developing world.”  For a month we traveled across sub-Saharan Africa, meeting church leaders and mission partners, staying in schools and thatch huts and makeshift guest houses, and there I came face-to-face with a kind of poverty and deprivation I had never known before.  My colleagues and I started talking about ways we could be of help... thinking of funding and supplies and work crews and the like. But when we asked one of our hosts, a pastor and tribal leader in Ghana, what his people needed most, he said, “You have already provided it. You have done so by taking us seriously enough to come to visit us. From now on you will remember our faces.  You will not forget us. What we need most is for you to remember us, and to name us in your prayers. What we need most is for you to remember that we are your brothers and sisters, that we are children of God together.  What we need most is for you to remember us.” It was a surprising answer for those of us used to doing something, but I’ve never forgotten it.

            It was, I believe, an echo of the powerful teaching Jesus offered his disciples in our Gospel lesson for this morning – a teaching about kindness and hospitality, about seeing the invisible ones, as the key to true greatness…and as a step toward wisdom.         Whenever we encourage our children in Sunday School classes to think about children in other countries, or whenever we encourage you to think about the masses in Haiti or Chile or to discuss divisive issues of the day like health care reform civilly and faithfully, we are pressing the community of faith to remember the way God often comes to us in the faces of human vulnerability… in short, in disguise.  Mark scholar Joel Marcus tells of a well-known rabbi who had such a sense about God’s presence in the people who came to him.

Menachem Schneerson, the famous…rabbi from Brooklyn, used to stand every week for hours as thousands of people filed by to receive his blessing or his advice about matters great and small. Once someone asked him how he, who was in his 80s, could stand for so long without seeming to get tired.  The rabbi replied, “When you’re counting diamonds you don’t get tired.”

The abandoned [child] on the street, the stranger at the door, even our own [spouse] or child, is a diamond, and in receiving and treasuring these diamonds we are receiving the “pearl of great price” that once was hidden on earth….[6]

But only if we see them…. only if we open our eyes and allow ourselves to see them, will we gain such wisdom. So Jesus took a child… not because the child embodied innocence… not because the child was precious and highly valued… but precisely because the child was of no consequence.  The child was virtually invisible.  And he asked, “Do you see this child?”  The disciples wanted to know who among them was the greatest, and Jesus asked them, “Do you see this child?”  Do you see this child?

            And with the instruction, he offered them, and he offers us, the gift of vision.  He taught them to see.  He taught them to open their eyes.  When we are open to the church’s education, and when that education is at its best, what we learn is how to see… how to see as God sees… and in such seeing, to discover the path to transformation… and in being transformed, to connect to the Source of true wisdom.