Loading...“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this; when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
I John 3:2
In this country, when you decide to become an educator, when you give yourself to the vocation of a teacher, it sort of sets you free. What it sets you free from…is the burden of material wealth. I’ve never sat in a Mercedes and had someone say, “That’s where the lesson plans go.”
When you decide to become an educator, when you give yourself to the vocation of a teacher, it gives you a different kind of burden, which, hopefully, is received as gift. What an educator, a true educator, receives in abundance is people. People, pupils, students, disciples, followers.
A teacher, a beloved teacher, does not simply convey information or facts to students. A teacher, a beloved teacher, conveys life to life. A beloved teacher fires the imaginations and hearts and minds of those who have gathered to learn.
Because no real price tag can be placed upon such an exchange, too often in this country we have decided it is of limited financial value. We have gotten it wrong. When an educator does their work, no amount of gold or silver can be adequately measured against it.
So, Mike was a teacher. Not simply a teacher of writing and rhetoric. He was not simply a teacher when he was on campus at UT. Mike understood that there are some vocations that swallow you whole. If you are a teacher, then every place you go is classroom, every one you meet has the potential to be a learner, a student, a colleague, or a teacher in return to the teacher.
In the Gospels, Jesus is given many names. Now I am biased, because my father was an English teacher, but I always like it when they call Jesus, “Teacher.” We also know Jesus to be the Word. So, when the Word decides to teach, you better have pencil and paper close at hand, because there is some serious learning about to be given out.
In the Gospels, when Jesus is addressed as Teacher, I always have the sense that not only is he being seen as wise, as worthy of giving wisdom to the person addressing him, but I also have the sense that when you address Jesus as Teacher, you are addressing him in the most intimate of ways. You are confessing I am a student, standing before the Teacher, so, here we are.
So, yes, it does need to be said that Mike was a university professor, a teacher of undergraduate and graduate students. Let’s call that his day job. In that place, surrounded by those students, Mike worked with words and ideas and reflected on how we communicate meaning.
There are too many people to count who could give testimony to Mike’s impact upon their work, on how the teacher prepared other teachers, how he formed students into teachers. If that was the sum of his teaching, we would already say it was a life well lived, it was a vocation well tended.
But there’s more. Mike was also a teacher at camp. First, in Wisconsin and then, for many years at Grace Point Camp here in East Tennessee, Mike taught in the classroom of the outdoors and the shaded porch on summer days. In those settings, it was less formal instruction as much as it was the sideways approach to education. He’s teaching you how to tie the Monkey’s Fist knot or the words to a song, but by the time the knot is completed and the song becomes the next day’s ear worm, you realize that you now know more than how to manipulate rope and commit words to melodic memory. You have learned a lesson about connection and communion. You may never need to use the Monkey’s Fist in your day-to-day existence, but you know better how to navigate God’s world because the man on the porch taught you how.
Along with UT and camp, along with Church School teaching, Mike also served as an Education for Ministry mentor in this Diocese for many, many years. I think they give EFM mentors a stipend of a few hundred dollars a year. If you took the number of hours Mike devoted to preparation in his teaching of Education for Ministry and the number of students he taught in that setting, those numbers would far outweigh any amount of dollars given to him for his work of teaching the faith of Christ Jesus to those who saw Mike as a teacher of the Teacher.
A teacher of the Teacher…in his work as an EfM mentor, Mike taught others about Jesus, who was sometimes named the Teacher.
In many ways, that is what all good educators do. They teach, not themselves, but the subject that has captured them. They gather you around them, they are prepared with lesson and story and topic and subject. But, while you as student look to them for instruction, the good teacher always points beyond themselves to something greater, to something more lasting and eternal.
Teachers retire and eventually they die. But the lessons they teach us do not die. Classroom notes can get yellowed, old books can be misplaced. But the true lessons that are conveyed from teacher to student never, ever truly leave us.
So, as an educator, Mike was burdened, rather gifted with many people who felt close to him. For his family, that meant a lifetime of having to share Mike with others. To Mike’s family, to those who knew him best, thank you for letting him be a teacher, even though that meant you had to share his life with others.
As a teacher with a family, that also meant you all (Mike’s family) experienced him teaching important lessons about how to be in relationship. Those lessons have to do with love and forgiveness, with grace and mercy, with joy and grief, with song and silliness, with redemption and relief.
These last few years of Mike’s life have been hard, as his body stopped cooperating with him. For an educator who taught others how to communicate well, it was incredibly cruel that communication became a daily challenge for Mike.
So, thankfully, there were still people.
Remember, all those people, all those students, all those folks whose life had been touched by Mike’s? Well, for some time now, Lay Eucharistic Visitors from St. Elizabeth’s came to see Mike each week. For you here today who are not Episcopalians, a lay Eucharistic visitor is Episcopal-code for Meals on Wheels with communion.
So, each week, faithful students brought the broken body of Christ to the body of a teacher who was increasingly broken. In doing so, they let Mike and Claire, and now you and me know that they had learned the right lessons from Mike about what it means to be the body and to hold the body and to bear the body and to eat the body.
“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this; when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”
Our presence here today is a witness to the belief that we are still learning that lesson given to us in a letter from John. We are children of God and we do not know all that is God. But what we know that is God is love and a body and a broken body and a resurrected body, given to us, given to Mike, given to all.
AMEN.
