This sermon was preached by Dan Harper at First Parish in Lexington, Massachusetts. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained ad libs, interjections, and other improvisation. Sermon copyright (c) 2001 Daniel Harper.
Reading
Now as he [Saul of Tarsus] was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.
— New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Acts 9.3
Sermon
Paul is my least favorite figure in the Christian scriptures. I don’t agree with his theology, I don’t like his attitudes towards homosexuality, and I don’t like the way he writes. But I find that I have become fascinated with who Paul was as a human being, his talents, his weaknesses, and how he became who he was.
When you start thinking about how Paul became the person he was, you inevitably come face to face with the story of his conversion. Let me remind you of the story. His original name was Saul of Tarsus. At first, he wasn’t a follower of Jesus, he was in fact someone who “breathed threats and murder against the disciples of Jesus,” and who “ravaged” the early church, “entering house after house, dragging off both men and women [and committing] them to prison.” Then one day he set out on a trip to Damascus, with authorization from the authorities to, if he could, capture some of these disciples of Jesus and “bring them bound to Jerusalem.”
But on the road to Damascus, he sees a flash of light, and hears the voice of God. God’s voice says to Saul of Tarsus, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” and proceeds to tell Saul to stop persecuting the Christians, the followers of Jesus. Then God leaves Saul blinded, and perhaps not fully convinced. Saul’s companions take him to Damascus, where three days later he is cured of his blindness by one of these very same followers of Jesus.
To make a long story short, Saul wound up becoming one of the leaders of the fledgling Christian movement, the religious group he once persecuted; and he gradually became known by the name Paul. A fascinating story — and since my ministry is centered around religious education, I tend to look at this story through the eyes of a religious educator.
Now in a common view of education, an individual starts his or her life with essentially no learning, at a zero point, and from that zero point you can graph that individual’s education as a more or less linear progression. At the end of a successful education, you wind up with a fully educated person. This is perhaps the dominant assumption of the Massachusetts public school system. You start with a kindergartner who knows next to nothing, and in ten or twelve years, you have a young man or woman who can pass the MCAS exams, which certifies him or her as fully educated.
But while linear progressions might work for the Massachusetts public schools, this idea of a well-defined path of education doesn’t work well in religious education. Saul of Tarsus’s religious growth and education is not measurable by a standardized test.
Liberal religious educator Gabriel Moran believes that we should use a different image when we visualize religious education. Moran suggests the image of a sphere that is defined in respect to its center. In his words:
“My image of [religious] life being ordered around the center of a sphere allows for some long-term circling, some shortcuts, and the permanent possibility until [one’s] death that one can become morally/religiously eccentric….
“In religious terms [says Moran], the center of the sphere is God, who is [always near] but never under our control. I think religions claim to offer help in reducing the eccentricity of our lives in relation to [God].”
So says religious educator Gabriel Moran. I suspect that many people in this room this morning might think of God (if indeed you think of God at all) in different terms than does Gabriel Moran. But substitute “spiritual center” for “God,” or whatever your theology requires, and the image remains a good one.
One consequence of thinking about religious education in this way is that you begin to break down the distinction between teacher and student. I may help a child stay oriented to his or her religious center, but I have also known times children have helped me to get pointed back at my own religious center. This is equally true when I lead adult religious education programs.
Through religious education, we help each other stay oriented to our religious center. Sometimes a class provides that help we need to reorient ourselves. But what interests me, as I continue in my ministerial internship here at First Parish, is how much of ministry is religious education. Or do I mean, how much of religious education is ministry? The distinction between religious education and ministry is not at all clear! When I talk to wedding couples, I might wind up doing a fair amount of religious education. When I spend time with children in the Sunday school, I usually find myself doing a good bit of ministry.
There just isn’t a neat division: this over here is religious education, and that over there is “real” ministry. Sometimes I feel the biggest difference between the ministry of religious education, and the parish ministry, is the context. The main difference between me as a (student) minister of religious education, and Helen and Ellen as parish ministers, is that they are in the pulpit more, and I am in the back rooms of the church more; on the whole, they do more pastoral visiting, and I spend more time with Sunday school classes and youth groups and adult religious education programs. Although in reality, we overlap each other a fair amount in our various ministries.
This takes me back to my fascination with Saul of Tarsus, later known as Paul. Paul has his amazing encounter with the flash of light and the voice of God, and it changes him, and he becomes a leader of the emerging Christian church. His ministry is a public ministry, that is, a ministry of preaching and public proclamation. But his ministry is also a back-room kind of ministry, that is, a ministry where he teaches and exhorts and works behind the scenes. The Massachusetts Bay Puritans, our religious forebears here in New England, used this distinction in the early 1600’s. They read their Christian scriptures, and based on the scriptures they decided the ideal was to have two ministers in every congregation, one who was a preacher and one who was a teacher.
From the Puritans, from Paul, and still further back: we come from a centuries-old tradition of Jewish and Christian religious education, a tradition that is always growing and changing and evolving. I just worry that today our ministry of religious education is not always as obvious as it could be. But today is Religious Growth and Learning Sunday, so today let’s make it obvious. I’ll end the spoken part of my sermon here. In a moment, after we sing a hymn, I’ll continue my sermon by leading us all downstairs to visit the Sunday school, to directly experience the behind-the-scenes ministry of this congregation.
And there’s a good chance that while we’re down with the children, someone here is going to learn something from them. For while children learn from adults, adults also learn from children. Religious education is a lifelong process — it is never over.