2021.08.15 | Come to the Banquet
“Come to the Banquet”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, CA
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday, August 15, 2021
It’s that time of the year again. It’s back-to-school time. Back before the pandemic unfurled, the mothers here in Cherryland called the first day of school “The Happiest Day of the Year.” Maybe you used to celebrate that holiday in your community, too. My mother always had the first day of school indelibly marked in her memory, and didn’t mind announcing how many days were left before school opened--especially the closer it got to that day.
I remember Mother saying about this time of year, especially when my sister and I were complaining about being bored or we were fighting over something stupid: “It’s about time for you kids to go back to school.” (That was her nice way of saying, “You two have gotten on my last nerve.”) That comment usually stopped us in our tracks, and improved our attitudes and prompted our comportment.
Back in the day, my twin sister and I regularly reported that we “hated school,” but I think we had more of a love-hate relationship with school, particularly this time of the year. On the one hand, we hated the thought of trading the unstructured, long sunny days, in the great outdoors for highly-structured, indoor classes, “literally stuck to our desks.” And, on the other hand, we missed our friends, and we generally enjoyed learning new things.
II
If you’re my age or older, you likely remember those all-in-one metal and wood student desks that were ubiquitous in elementary classrooms in the 1950s. Well, I wasn’t born until 1963, but my school was still using them in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
One of my least favorite things about school was literally sticking to those desks. The weather was always hot and humid. Our classrooms weren’t air conditioned, and there was a dress code. Girls were required to wear dresses. So our legs and arms literally stuck to the varnish on the wooden surfaces of the desks, until the weather turned cooler in the fall, it was time to wear tights and long sleeves.
I was not a fan of the student desks in my school, but I was a big fan of new school supplies, and school clothes. I remember lingering over the aisle in our local grocery store, perusing the school supplies, and developing a mental inventory of the things that I needed most.
I also worked on my speech for Mom, so that I could quickly make the case for what I deemed to be “essential school supplies,” once she arrived in the school supply aisle.
We never bought all of the things that I wanted to buy at the store, but I was fortunate to have the essentials, and I managed to get promoted each year and to matriculate on to higher education.
If I had it to do over--or if I had raised children myself--I think I would have approached back-to-school time similarly to the way that my mother did, with one exception. I think I would have allowed my kids to have a new box of crayons every year--maybe not the box of 64 that my classmate Jean Westmorland had--but at least the box of 8 that most preschoolers are given.
I also think I would have allowed myself to have a new box of colors every year, especially in college and graduate school. And I would have allowed this small indulgence because the further I got in my schooling, the more important it became to have an activity or two in my life that did not involve burning the midnight oil, or wracking my brain over how best dismantle certain orthodox Christian doctrines that I thought were a perversion of the Gospel.
There’s nothing quite like spending too much time contemplating the fine points of St. Augustine or Thomas Acquinas to know that you need a “brain break,” and long for a box of Crayola crayons!
III
As it turns out, it isn’t just the early church fathers whose ideas could benefit from a refresh. We live in a time and a context aching for a fresh look at old problems from a morally grounded and creative approach. Consider for example, the effects of climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, 400 years of racism in North America, the ever increasing political polarities between left and right, and the widening gap between rich and poor.
None of these “monster problems” will be solved unless an increasing number of people can approach them with the type of wonder and optimism of school children who have been given a new box of crayons that look good enough to eat.
You may recall theories about the left side of the brain being the logical and reasoning side, and the right, being the artistic and creative side. Well, news flash, that isn’t the direction that recent neuroscience research is pointing.
Instead, according to Carl Sherman, a science writer for the Dana Foundation, which funds neuroscience research, the human brain is not nearly as divided in its functions as has been previously touted. Rather than the two sides working separately, they need to work together.
In order for the brain to problem-solve, particularly to solve new or stubborn problems and to invent new things that improve our lives, both sides of the brain must work together. And--here’s the kicker--it’s looking like it’s the right side (the artistic and creative side) of the brain that launches this process of getting both sides working together.
So, with science writer Carl Shermon as my witness, this is why it’s a good idea for all of us to get a new box of crayons once in a while, even if we think we’re too old to color. We need crayons in our lives to inspire us to examine the beauty and symmetry of the colors. We need crayons to inspire us to close our eyes and smell the unique smells of the primary colors and all of their variants. We also need crayons to open us up to the possibilities that God has in store for us.
Carl Shermon asserts that the right brain is the side of the brain in charge of memory. Let’s do a little memory work and see how your right brain is doing today. Do you remember your first day of school as a child? If so, was it fun for you to go back to school, even if you never admitted it to your peers?
If your answer is yes, or you were even slightly enticed by the rituals of procuring school supplies and school attire, then God (who is personified as Wisdom in today’s passage), has you right where she wants you.
Wisdom has built her school house. She has prepared her banquet. She has gone into the highways and hedges to invite you and everyone else to her table, and she is serving up more than a middle eastern wedding banquet. Wisdom was, and is, serving up a banquet for the brain, and a smorgasbord for the soul.
She was, and is, striving to entice students of all ages to come to her banquet. Wisdom wants everyone to feast on her words--not just words in a grade school primer, but more importantly, she offers us wisdom for life.
The Divine Femine, Sophia, the Holy Spirit--she has many names here in the Wisdom Literature of the Hebrew Bible--teaches us that God wants us to not only be book smart, but world wise. She’s encouraging us to learn our lessons well, and to remember that we can get all A’s in school and still flunk life. Because life requires the application of theory to practice, and life circumstances extract moral decisions from us whether we like it or not. So it’s good to hit the books, it’s helpful to earn good grades, but it’s even more important to develop a strong moral compass and to use it wisely.
IV
As students around the Northern Hemisphere prepare to resume their studies this month, the pandemic has complicated matters. It’s not just business as usual. The pandemic has made everything more complicated. For example, not every parent who was doing the “happy dance” a couple of years ago at this time is doing so now.
In fact, many are trying to discern--not the right decisions about school for their children--but the least bad decision: 1) do I send my child to school and risk that school might be a super-spreader event for the delta variant, or 2) do I keep my kid(s) at home and try to guide them through an independent study program that would be even more socially remote than last-year’s online classes?
For most parents there are no good choices. Some will choose option 1--to send their kids to school, in spite of the risks, or because they have no choice but to go to work, in order to provide for their family.
Some will choose option 2--to keep their kids at home, because their kid(s) has been living their best life and doing their best academic work in a small or one-to-one learning environment, with no negative peer interactions. Alternatively, parents may feel compelled to keep their kids at home from school, because someone in the family has a very compromised immune system, and the risk of exposure to the virus is far more risky for their family.
None of these choices are easy for parents, and these challenges do not present a cake walk either for teachers, staff, or administrators, whose jobs were hard enough before the pandemic unfurled. And, now they are heading back to do their “regular jobs” in anything but a “regular” environment, mindful that they could get exposed to COVID-19 and get, or that they have to reinvent their lesson plans if we revert to a hybrid or remote learning environment again.
V
Given all of these back-to-school challenges, it is clear to me that we cannot do this teaching and learning work or wade through this pandemic on our own! And, the good news is that we don’t have to. We can get out your crayons and color so that our right brain will reach out to our left brain, and help us remember God’s promises to care for us and all creation, and so that we can better learn our intellectual and moral lessons in order to create a healthier society. Thanks be to God. Amen.