Back to School
Thanks, Minter family for all the ways that you led us this week and thank you for the way that you all lead us every single week. This church has so many good qualities and near the top of the list is the marriage between the talent of all of you and also your willingness to share those talents with everyone.
I am very grateful to be your pastor.
If we haven’t met yet, my name is Michael LeBlanc and I am the pastor here. I am so grateful to be your pastor-- and if this is your first Sunday with us, thank you for giving us a shot.
This week we get to celebrate everyone’s favorite week-- the first week of school! Alright, of course this isn’t everyone’s favorite week since it also signals the end of summer vacation. For me personally, this signals that my daughter is entering kindergarten and I just don’t like that very much. I prefer to think of her as a tiny little baby and of course she is not.
I love the way that we celebrate the beginning of school here at Shepherd’s. I love that this is a set apart Sunday for us, because it should be. The beginning of things is a time to pause and take stock about what is most important to us as followers of Christ.
Our passage deals with the beginning of a lot of different things. Whenever you read the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, you are dealing with a few different genres all at once.You read history-- you’re reading about where God took the people of Israel and how God did that. This history is there, not to teach a class, but rather to help the children of Israel form their identity. This history is shared and taught because without it, the people of Israel wouldn’t have the Divine connection that is so important.
When we read the Pentateuch, we are reading law. This law helped the people of Israel have a society. These are the boundaries within which life was able to exist and flourish. These laws told people how they would own property and pay taxes. These laws also told the people of Israel would worship God--a very mixed bag when we read these laws. One moment you’re learning about what to do if your cow breaks your neighbors fence, the next you’re learning how to and why one sacrifices pigeons.
Now, I loved school. As I have shared before, I am a great big nerd. I loved the challenge of math class and I loved the gift it was to talk about books in classes. But as hard as it may be to believe-- I loved taking tests. I am pretty competitive but I have also never been fast on my feet. Taking a test meant that I would have a chance to beat my classmates while not moving anywhere.
School is the beginning of so many things for all of us, regardless of what stage of life we are in.
The main message I want you to hear from me today is that as followers of Christ, we always have something to learn, something to teach, and something to do.
The beginning of the school year brings so many different emotions. I know that for me, there was this veiled sense of relief that we were finally done with the overwhelming sense of freedom that came along with summer vacation. I know that when I entered summer vacation, it felt as if I spent the first 8 weeks thinking about what I would do on summer vacation and the last two weeks lamenting that summer vacation was about to be over.
And even as a young person, I would think that summer vacation was my chance to reinvent myself. To finally get better at basketball, to learn spanish, or work on my footspeed. Summer vacation was like training camp.
But the end of summer vacation always ultimately made me feel anxious about getting around friend groups again. I moved schools a lot when I was young and as some of you know I made a big move from Boston to Lake Wales and that transition was not easy! Later on in worship we will be celebrating some of the promotions our church family has in school and these transitions are so important. Life is full of these changes, even after we leave grade school. We move through all sorts of markers-- from working to retirement, being the children of a parent to being a caretaker for a parent. Job loss, new job training-- moving homes, moving towns, when Publix changes its layout-- all of these changes can cause us to pause and reflect and maybe a good dose of anxiety.
Our passage today steps into those anxious feelings. The people of Israel lived in a world of perpetual flux and transition. When they weren’t on the run from some sort of superpower, they were being held captive to the results of harvest, famine or drought. And so in the space of transition, what does God’s word say to us? To remember.
Place these words on your heart. Whenever we go through transition, it is vitally important that we allow the things we have been taught and the things we have read in the bible to be on our hearts. Our hearts are where we keep the things we know to be most true. In my heart is where I keep the knowledge that my wife loves me-- it is where I keep the knowledge that I am a father. When we find ourselves anxious or uncertain because of change, we should look at what is written on our hearts. Before school starts for all of our students, I want to make sure you know that the God you have learned about in church and we talk about every Sunday is going with you, you carry that great God of light and love in your heart.
Beyond that, our passage also tells us to carry what we learn in church and what we believe in our heads. I don’t know about you, but when I think about carrying things around in my head, it is usually quotes from movies or the Office or maybe a few useless facts. But when it comes to carrying around our knowledge of God, it requires a different posture, doesn’t it? When we carry love of God in our head, it is something that requires us to have logic, to question, to doubt, to work through.
You see, when we are instructed to carry around the commandments of God around in our head and our heart, we are being commanded to both feel God and to know God. There are times when it can feel like faith is the act of letting go of logic and agreeing with what is taught to you. To just sort of listen to whatever you hear on a microphone here in church and accept it without a second thought. I believe our passage today tells us that whenever we do that, we are not truly following what God has called us to do.
Our passage deals with what our parents teach us. My parents taught me how to speak. They showed me how to walk. My parents would sit with me and help me learn how to pass math class. I remember that a big part of weekends with my dad was to follow him and learn how to take care of our home. These were the days before YouTube or even google. When the sink began to leak or the lights began to flicker, we would go to the closest thing we had to YouTube--the local hardware store.
My dad would walk in, he would look around at different aisles and then eventually he would stand in the middle of the store and he would basically just say out loud “trying to make my sink stop leaking!” and folks would just come out of different aisles saying “oh yeah I know what to do for that.”
These strangers would just come out and all of a sudden they would become the best experts we had at our disposal. They were our neighbors and our fellow students. He would listen intently and trust this stranger implicitly. Asking questions and following this new friend around the store, picking up all the parts we would need.
We would check out at the counter and thank the person and leave with notes in my dad’s head, maybe a few points written down on the back of a receipt. This knowledge would come with us to the leaking sink and we would get to work.
Well, my dad would get to work. I would take his wrenches and pretend they were baseball bats. Take his plumbers tape and wrap it around my head. I would ask him important questions like “are hot dogs sandwiches?” and occasionally I would look at what he was doing.
My dad would then say, “come here, look at this,” and I would learn the important lesson that plumbing goes righty loosey, lefty tighty…. And then I would go back to goofing off. Multiply these lessons by a thousand and that was a part of my education.
I learned some lessons in these experiences--first I learned basic home repair. Apparently I didn’t learn very much, because I constantly check YouTube when things go wrong at my house nowadays.
But I learned two other important things-- first it was that my dad was humble enough to ask questions. When I was a kid, my dad was a monolith of strength and knowledge. He knew how to work the VCR, how could anyone know more than him? But here was the strongest and smartest person I knew asking strangers how to fix a sink. The humility he would use to find the answer to his problems showed me that there was no shame in seeking knowledge that we didn’t hold.
We see this reflected in our passage. As we walked around, as we were around the house he would show me this tangible knowledge. We do this with the teaching of the faith. We see the works of our parents, other adults, and members of our church. We gain this knowledge by seeing it in action.
We do this in our own faith, don’t we? Well, we should at least. Next week we are starting a series on the Creed. These sets of beliefs that we have as a church. But here’s the thing: I didn’t come up with these sets of beliefs. I didn’t scribble them on a receipt and then pass them to Jude in the back. These beliefs are based on scripture but they are also built on the experiences of the saints who have gone before us. This creed is historic, which means when we are trying to compile our beliefs that define us for who we are as the church, we are looking around the hardware store saying “I need to know God,” and saints pop out from the aisles and show us how to do just that.
We live out our faith in front of one another, in front of our spouses, our kids-- everyone around us is knowing God through our actions, our words, and our attitudes.
The second thing I learned by going to the hardware store is that there are people we can listen to. I learned that there are other perspectives that I can know and learn from even if I don’t know their story or who they are. It expanded my neighborhood. It showed me that we were a community of folks all trying to fix our homes and that people I didn’t know also had knowledge.
Like I have already shared, when I was a kid I was convinced that my dad knew everything in the world. He was the smartest, strongest, most powerful being on the planet and he showed me that he needed the help of others.
As followers of Christ, we need community. We need community in order to know God better, to live life better and to make this world God’s kingdom. These sacred communities reflect the very nature of God-- God is 3 in one, which means God is a small group!
Of course relying on a small group takes humility. It also requires us to be vulnerable and share beyond ourselves. It requires trust to share our hurts, hang ups and doubts. It is within this vulnerability, trust, and honesty that we experience growth.
Can it go poorly? Absolutely! It is a risk and it is a risk that God calls us to make. As our students and teachers in the congregation head back to school this week, we will have a chance to learn from others. Other people that we agree with and people we do not agree with. Society will teach you to find those that you disagree with and to argue with them or to isolate yourself from them. I believe scripture is teaching us that if we are to learn more about God by walking around and experiencing life, that these people are a part of the curriculum. They are folks we can choose to learn from.
This is sort of the root of who we are as United Methodists. I want to share a phrase with all of you that is going to get you excited for your upcoming time in Trigonometry-- the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. It is the four sided way that we approach the world around us. We rely on scripture to know the world around us, but we use reason, tradition and experience to fully understand God’s word. Just like Deuteronomy calls us to the word of God to the growing generations by walking around and living out our faith, so too do we as United Methodists experience God’s presence in our lives.
So we use tradition to know more about God and God’s word. That means we rely on older generations to teach us and we have humility towards the teachings of our church. This isn’t a strict adherence to “the way things have always been,” but is rather the courageous choice to trust those who came before us to know what they are talking about. We are made brighter and stronger by knowing that those who have lived a bit longer have something to share. Those of us who have lived a bit longer, it is our responsibility to know that age doesn’t bring about perfection. It simply affords us more opportunities to mess up and to learn and share.
We use reason to know more about God. Reason is what we do with the stuff between our ears. Using our brain to reason out what God is teaching us through the Bible separates us from other traditions. Scripture may allow things but reason shows us that they are not in line with the heart of God’s word. Slavery is in the bible and reason lets us know that slavery is antithetical to all of what God teaches us.
We use experience to know more about God. This is what we gain from our lives-- all of our mistakes and successes all add up to more lessons on the infinite nature of God. It is in the living, in the failing and in the succeeding that we take the curriculum that teaches us the nature of God.
Deuteronomy tells us to teach the faith to our children. To wear God’s word on our hearts and on our minds. It is a perpetual work of showing and acting and living this life giving word to the world around us that helps us teach this Good News.
So as we enter into a new school year, whether or not this changes our day to day lives, may it be a chance for all of us to assess how we are teaching. What sort of class are our actions teaching? May we show the world who God really is through the way we live.
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Let’s pray
Good teacher, allow us to show the world your love through the way we teach your law. Help us to show the world how your Gospel has transformed us through our actions of love and peace. Make us different, that the world might know a better world is possible through your light and love. Amen.
