A few years ago, apparently under cover of darkness and before the ACLU could get a court order to prevent it, a third grade teacher in Chula Vista, California gave her students a homework assignment entitled "Explain God." The following is what Danny Dutton, then age 8, submitted.
One of God's main jobs is making people. He makes them to replace the ones that die so there will be enough people to take care of things on earth. He doesn't make grown-ups, just babies. I think because they are smaller and easier to make. That way, He doesn't have to take up His valuable time.
God's second most important job is listening to prayers. An awful lot of this goes on, since some people, like preachers and things, pray at times besides bedtime. God doesn't have time to listen to the radio or TV because of this. Because He hears everything there must be a terrible lot of noise in His ears unless He has thought of a way to turn it off.
God sees everything and hears everything and is everywhere, which keeps him pretty busy. So you shouldn't go wasting His time by going over your mom and dad's head asking for something they said you couldn't have.
Atheists are people who don't believe in God. I don't think there are any in Chula Vista. At least there aren't any who come to our church.
Jesus is God's Son. He used to do all the hard work like walking on water and performing miracles and trying to teach the people who didn't want to learn about God.
They finally got tired of Him preaching to them and they crucified Him. But He was good and kind of like His Father and He told His Father that they didn't know what they were doing and to forgive them and God said OK. His Dad (God) appreciated everything that He had done and all His hard work on earth so He told Him He didn't have to go out on the road anymore, He could stay in heaven. So He did. And now He helps His Dad out by listening to prayers and seeing things which are important for God to take care of and which ones He can take care of Himself without having to bother God. Like a secretary only more important. You can pray anytime you want and they are sure to hear you because they got it worked out so one of them is on duty all the time.
You should always go to Church on Sunday because it makes God happy and if there's anybody you want to make happy, it's God. Don't skip church to do something you think will be more fun like going to the beach. This is wrong! And, besides, the sun doesn't come out at the beach until noon anyway. If you don't believe in God, besides being an atheist, you will be very lonely, because your parents can't go everywhere with you, like to camp, but God can. It is good to know He's around you when you're scared in the dark or when you can't swim very good and you get thrown into real deep water by big kids. But you shouldn't just always think of what God can do for you. I figure God put me here and He can take me back anytime He pleases. And that's why I believe in God.
That's pretty good stuff coming from a third grade student; it's pretty good stuff coming from any age student.
A lot of people think that you somehow cease being a student after you graduate from your highest level. It doesn't matter what that level is‹high school, college, graduate school or doctorate‹they have this attitude, "I'm done with being a student. Now I can get on with more productive areas of life, like learning how to download movies from the Internet."
I'm afraid, however, that if you are a Christian, you can't weasel your way out of this one. You can't be a Christian without being what Jesus called "a disciple" and you can't be a disciple without being a student because that's what the word in Greek literally means: a student, a learner, a pupil, someone who is constantly in the process of learning about God and herself.
One of the things that lingers in the state of slow burn inside me is something that the school system in Kanawha County West Virginia, where Jeanette and I are from, did back in the 60s and 70s. It was almost as if they lined up all the kids in the school system, walked down the line, and put each and every kid in a category. "You've got good test scores in English, so we're going to put you in the Honors program." Then they come to the next kid: "You had average grades, so we're going to put you in with the rest of the 'C' students." Then they come to the next kid, "You didn't do very well, so we're going to put you in a group called the boneheads."
And so each and every student went through school with this label that said, "I'm brilliant and I have to be brilliant at everything," even though very often it's tough for a person who is good at, say, science, to be good in a creative subject like English composition. Or the student would say, "I'm average. I can live with that. I'll try just hard enough to get by. It doesn't matter, because I'll never be a rocket scientist anyway." Or, the worst, "I'm dumb. I'm stupid. I might as well get it into my head that I'll be stuck in some mindless job the rest of my life and never amount to anything."
So there was always this reinforcement, for good or for ill, which lumped people together into these classes that, on top of everything else, reinforced the notion of their self-worth as individuals. It's like the school system either erected this pedestal that made it shameful if you were ever anywhere other than on the mountaintop, or, on the other hand, they handed you a shovel to dig your own grave.
It reminds me of the gravedigger, who must have been a kindred spirit of mine, who was all absorbed in thought as he was digging a grave. He keeps thinking and digging, thinking and digging. He thinks so hard and digs so deep that nighttime arrives and the gravedigger doesn't even know it. He looks up from his shovel and realizes he's dug a hole about 20 feet deep. He yells for help. The longer he yells, the colder he gets. He yells and yells. Finally, a drunk walks through the cemetery.
"Get me out of here," he says, "I'm cold."
The drunk looks down into the grave and finally gets the gravedigger into focus. The digger yells up again, "Get me out of here," he says, "I'm cold."
The wino looks down and says, "No wonder you're cold. You ain't got any dirt over you."
And so that's the way it is with people: we dig graves for ourselves or put ourselves into a rut, and it was that way until Jesus came along. Instead of saying, "Here's a bunch of laws: now DO them," Jesus took the laws, the Ten Commandments, and turned them upside down. He said, "Here is the teaching and here is the example. Simply listen to My words and follow My actions."
That's what it is to be a student of the Lord Jesus Christ, to be a disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ. It's not simply a matter of cramming a bunch of facts into your head: it's also a matter of DOING. It's not simply a matter of memorizing verses and being able to sight chapter and verse of scripture: it's a matter of BEING.
Paul says, "Be not conformed to this world, but rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2)." The Beatitudes are teachings that go on in the cranium, probing, provoking and causing all kinds of mental kinesis, and while all that is going on, the Beatitudes are engaging the hands, legs, and feet at the same time. Christianity is thinking and doing, doing and thinking, always hand-in-hand.
Here's the way Luke describes it:
He came down with them and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear Him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from Him and healed all of them. Then He looked up at His disciples and said:
In Matthew, it's known as the Sermon on the Mount. In Luke, it's known as the Sermon on the Plain. I like to call it the Life's Lessons for the Highs and the Lows, the mountains and the valleys. Jesus begins with eight beatitudes.
What is a beatitude? It is a be attitude. It is a state of mind, a frame of thinking coupled with the being thereof. It is thinking something and then practicing it.
Certain editions of the Bible insert italicized words in the text. When reading the beatitudes, you may read blessed are the poor in spirit; blessed are the meek, etc. An italicized word in the King James Version, for example, indicates that, in the Greek or Hebrew language, there is no equivalent word. The editors added that word in italics to bring out the meaning of the sentence.
In the beatitudes, there are no ares. Why not? Even though the New Testament is written in Greek, Jesus Himself didn't speak Greek. He spoke what everybody else in Israel spoke at that time, a language derived from Hebrew called Aramaic.
Hebrew and Aramaic have a saying that goes, "Oh the blessedness of such and such." Psalm 1 begins, literally, "The blessedness of being somebody who doesn't walk in the counsel of the ungodly." "The beatitudes aren't just statements," William Barclay says, "they are exclamations: O the blessedness of being poor in spirit."
Now, something else to think about when Jesus says, "Blessed:" those who practice the beatitudes are doing them, according to the Greek, in the present tense. The blessedness that belongs to a Christian is not solely a pie-in-the-sky, sweet-by-and-by, walk the streets of gold in that great gettin' up in the morning. Neither is it merely looking back at the grand ol' yesteryear when taxes were low and bread cost a nickel a loaf and gas was 20 cents a gallon and there was no welfare. To be a Christian is to live in the present tense. It exists here and now. It's not like pulling your fishhouse out onto the lake when it freezes and then pulling it off next Spring. It's something into which a Christian has already entered.
Something else to think about when Jesus says, "Blessed:" the word blessed is the Greek word makarios. In Greek mythology, makarios is the word that describes the state of being of the gods. Jesus uses is saying that those who follow Him and practice His ways have a godlike joy about them.
Off the coast of Greece is the island of Cyprus. The Greeks called Cyprus the Isle of Bliss because they believed the island is so lovely, so rich, so fertile; that its flowers and climate and ocean contains all the materials for perfect contentment.
When Jesus says, "Blessed are," He is describing a joy that is so serene and so self contained and so untouchable that it is not unalterably changed by the ups and downs of life. To be blessed is not to be happy. Happiness contains the root "hap" which means chance. Happiness is like the roll of the dice or a marble on the roulette table. Sometimes you get it. Sometimes you don't. It all depends on circumstance.
A Cub Scout leader was teaching her pack about the importance of the Declaration of Independence. She says, "Now boys, I am giving each of you three ordinary patches. I want you to think of the first one as representing Life, the second patch representing Liberty, and the third patch representing the Pursuit of Happiness. Next Monday, I'm going to ask you to show me these three patches and tell me what they represent."
On Monday the teacher says to the youngest member, "Now Billy, show me your three patches and tell me what they stand for."
Billy starts crying and holds out two of the patches. "I can only stand for two of them. Here's Life. Here's Liberty, but my mommy sewed the Pursuit of Happiness on my pants."
"No one," says Jesus, "will take your joy away from you." Even though we are often sad and depressed; even though life does get us down, Jesus says there is a joy that nothing in life or death can take away.
I've become really interested lately in the nation of Portugal because my presbytery has just gotten involved in an exchange program with the Presbyterian Church of Portugal. They will be sending people over to the States and we will be sending people to Portugal to do missionary work, and there's a likelihood that Jeanette and I will be going over there this Spring to do some missionary work.
The Presbyterian Church in Portugal was founded by a Scotsman named Dr. McLeod, who was this fascinating combination of a preacher, a missionary and a physician. And there have been a number of British missionaries in Portugal throughout the years, but none of them fascinate me quite as much as Erik Barker.
Erik Barker was a British missionary spent 50 years in Portugal. During World War II, things got so bad there that he put his wife, eight kids, his sister and her three children on a ship to England. Rev. Barker stayed in Portugal.
The Sunday after his loved ones had left, he stood before the congregation and said, "I've just received word that my family has arrived safely home." He then proceeded with the service as he had for many years. Later, the full meaning of his words became known to his congregation. He had been handed a wire before the meeting, informing him that a submarine had torpedoed the ship. Everyone on board had drowned. Yet Rev. Barker knew the blessings of the Christian Life do not depend on circumstance.
It's something we're always in the process of learning. And the more you realize that you'll always be a student who is never completely satisfied, where your hunger is never fully satisfied, where your thirst is never completely slaked, that the blessedness comes not so much from your abundance of things but from your poverty of spirit, that's when you come to know just some of the advantages of being a poor student.
© Rev. Duane Brown, 2003
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