Wanted: Real Teachers for Christ

(15-20 min)

Scripture

Then Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples: “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.

“Everything they do is done for people to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues; they love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and to be called ‘Rabbi’ by others.

But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah. The greatest among you will be your servant. For those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.

The nature of a teacher

As a teenager I had one goal in life. Fun. My parents, God bless them, were unwilling to fund it. The older I got, the more funding it took. If you wanted to drive somewhere, you had to put gas in the car. Hamburgers and bowling with friends required cash. My parents said if you want to have fun, keep your grades up and get a job. The fun could not end, so I had to find a job.

My buddy down the street worked at Friendly’s Ice Cream. I asked him if they had any openings. He warned me, “Oh Dave, you don’t want to work there.”

“Why not, you work there”.

“Because it’s unpleasant”, he said sagely.

“What do they pay?”, I queried wondering if it would be worth it.

“They pay pretty good”, he admitted. “Everybody splits the tips. The base pay’s not very good but if you add the tips in, its okay.”

“Alright. Who do I contact about getting a job there?”

He shook his head back and forth. “I think you’re making a mistake”, he said before giving me contact info.

I went to work there that summer under Spence the manager. Spence was a tall, imposing man who told me during our interview what the job would be to start. I would be a dishwasher. He warned me how important the job was. I had to be good and fast because if I wasn’t, the place would run out of dishes and the whole operation would screech to a halt.

I don’t know that I believed him until my first Saturday when the restaurant was packed. Large grey bins of dirty dishes began to pile up. My job was to keep those bins empty, so the cooks and servers had a ready source of clean dishes for sandwiches and ice cream. Even though another dishwasher had provided instruction, I was failing miserably. As the grey bins filled up to overflowing, Spence burst into the back room. “Dave, you have to be faster.” I told him I was going as fast as I could.

“Show me”, he said.

I did, putting one dirty glass or dish at a time into their respective racks and shoving a full one into the dishwasher which sat idle before the next rack was full.

“No, that won’t do”, he said urgently. “The dishwasher can’t stop. You must keep it going. Step aside and watch.”

The guy’s big hands reached into those gray bins and pulled four glasses out at a time which in a blur were inserted into the rack.

“Focus on one thing at a time”, he said. “Grab a gray bin and pull all the glasses out of it so you can fill up a glass rack first. Then shove that in and fill up a dish rack.”

I watched as he picked up a stack of about 5-10 plates. He held them in his left hand and fired them into the dish rack with his right hand filling the rack in about 15 seconds. He filled up another glass rack before the dishwasher stopped.

“Leave the silverware for last. Then you can grab a big bunch with one hand.” His left hand trolled the bottom of the gray bin like a backhoe and emerged with a fistful of silverware.

“Then sort them so you won’t have to do that after they’re clean.” His right hand plucked one piece of silverware after another firing them into their appropriate place in the dishwasher rack.

“Don’t wash just one silverware rack because you can fit three of them on top of this flat rack.” He grabbed a flat rack from under the dishwasher I didn’t know was there. “That way only one wash is necessary for a whole bunch of silverware. You got it?”

I shook my head.

He flew out of the door, and I started to do what he showed me. In 20 minutes or so I was just as fast as him. The grey bins quickly emptied, and clean dishes were stacked up where needed out on the floor.

Over the next several weeks Spence taught me how to cook everything on the grill and how to scoop ice cream with both hands so you could churn out banana splits five and six at a time. He even taught me how to wait tables and add whole numbers like $2.35 plus $3.50 quickly in your head so you didn’t have to pause to “carry a number” across columns. The guy was a grandmaster at every job in the place and at teaching people about it. So, when he said do the dishes faster, cook the food better, make customers feel wanted, and keep the ice cream counter clear of order pileups, you knew he could do exactly that. He could teach you how to do it too.

Where are the real teachers?

The teachers of the law and Pharisees were supposed to be Spence for the Jewish people. They were to sit in the seat of Moses and pass on the law. This was Spencer’s job too as the manager at Friendly’s Ice Cream. He took people like me and passed on the rules for running the place. My friend’s cautions should have included: “If you do come to work at Friendly’s, listen to everything Spence tells you”. The same counsel Jesus passes on to the Jewish people as they encounter their own law teachers. “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you.”

Jesus then cautions his listeners: “But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them”

The teachers of the law from Jesus’s day lacked the essential ingredient that made Spence such a good manager and educator. He too placed heavy loads on people which is why my friend cautioned me not to go to work there. But Spence lifted many fingers to carry the very same load his employees were to carry. Better yet and more to Jesus’s point, he helped us carry it by teaching us how. I think this is the kind of teacher Jesus expected and failed to see.

His disappointment with the teachers of the law went beyond this because they perverted their role in a way Spencer never did. They used their knowledge of the law to elevate themselves in the eyes of their followers by setting impossibly high standards and doing nothing, not even lifting one finger, to teach their people how to achieve those standards.

Consequently, the lawgivers of Jesus’s time failed the Jewish people in two ways. They delineated an extensive list of laws but taught them nothing about how to follow them. What’s worse, they exploited any failure they saw to promote themselves as pious and holy. It would be as if Spence never worked in the trenches with us, told us what we should do without ever doing tutorial sessions like I received, and then expected us to idolize him simply because he knew what to do. The Jewish people then, and our society now, need people like Spence to be their teachers of the law.

I’ve lived long enough to know the Spencer’s of the world are rare, and, apparently, they were during Christ’s time as well. Jesus begins to explain why in the very next section of today’s Scripture verse.

The lawgivers at the time of Jesus were not motivated to help the people who followed them draw closer to God. Instead, self-promotion and an insatiable need for respect and glory drove them.

I suspect the reason I still remember Spence is because his motivations were less mired in human sin than were the lawgivers of Jesus’s day. As a franchise owner, the more people we could cycle through our doors, the more money Spence made. You could argue this was his motivation, but it didn’t seem like it to me. Nor did it seem like he taught to make himself look good in the eyes of his employees. Instead, he seemed to genuinely want you to flourish at the job. Moreover, he wanted people eating at his restaurant to enjoy it

Jesus’s criticism of the Pharisees and lawgivers reveals they lacked the motivational qualities of Spencer who was doing something far less important than leading people to God. Jesus implies the best teachers of God’s ways are humble, Christ-inspired men and women motivated to help others in their faith while caring little about the status they may garner doing it. People like this were apparently in short supply, a reality we also appear to face. Child abusing priests, philandering pastors, embezzlers, and emerging leaders who enter the ministry to help/heal themselves rather than lead to God those they serve seem to be everywhere you look. We are in desperate need of teachers like Christ envisioned, but where are they?

More than you think

They are all around us. Because the greatest of our teachers and leaders are the humblest among us, they are easily overlooked. These followers of Christ care more about passing on the truth of the Lord than they do about human recognition. Consequently, they receive little of the latter, and that is exactly what Christ wants and expects:

We are brothers and sisters and there is no need to elevate ourselves with titles for there is but one source of the truth and it’s not humans. Giving honorific titles like Rabbi, Father and Instructor elevates people, is a temptation to arrogance and easily obscures the divine source of any truth taught. Indeed, what made Spencer special was not that he was called Manager. It was the truth he conveyed about running the business and his desire to help people learn and succeed.

If the essential attributes to being a purveyor of God’s truth is humility, knowledge of Christ’s teachings and a willingness to pass them on, then all who know the word and have the indwelling Spirit can effectively do so. Indeed, there are teachers of the word everywhere around you in our Christian community. They have no titles and are just living their lives willing to walk the Christian journey with you.

Given that brothers and sisters who want to learn the word and exchange it with others abound, why do we use the very titles Christ says we should not? I think we do it to distinguish those who devote their entire lives to the knowing the teachings of Christ and passing it on to others. These people will often possess greater knowledge than people who cannot devote their lives to the full-time study of the word and its proliferation. For this reason, they are a great help to us as purveyors of Christ’s truth and we distinguish them with the very names Jesus tells us we should not use. I suspect we believe that when these people are truly Christians, they will remain humble and remember the source of truth they teach despite their titles.

Those who convey the one true teacher

Are there people like this, and if so, how do we know it? I wanted to finish today with two examples that answer this question; a religious leader and a layman who both meet the spirit of Christ’s words in today’s Scripture verse. Both made or are making a difference in my life. Indeed, true emissaries of Christ’s words affect the people they encounter.

The pastor

The Pastor

My church had a wonderful pastor for many years. I liked his sermons because they were biblically based and always brought the Word back to our lives. If you thanked him for his sermon, he would always respond I am glad God spoke to you today through my words. He truly believed he had little to do with the success of his sermons. No, any success had to do with the word of God he used to write them. This man fully recognized there was nothing special about himself, but something very special about what he preached.

One day he spoke on pride. The Bible addresses pride in so many places I can’t remember the individual Scripture verse. He laid a firm biblical foundation for why pride was deleterious to us as followers of Christ. Point by point he laid out how being prideful was antithetical to the teachings of Christ and that of Bible in general. I thought he was about to wrap up when he added a personal experience.

His daughter ran cross-country, and she was good at it. Because he loved to run himself, the two of them had a long tradition of running and talking together. He deeply loved his daughter and when she soared to success during a particular track meet, he was overwhelmed with pride. But that night it began to dawn on him that not one bit of that pride resided in thanksgiving to God for her accomplishment.

Bottom lip trembling, this gentle preacher conveyed his experience of walking the ways of Christ. His emotion revealed the difficulty of that journey. Even the natural, healthy pride of a father for his daughter could become a stumbling block if God is forgotten in the process. His call was for us to be proud of our children and the things we do in life, but always remember they are gifts from God. Keep this in your mind he told us and pride in your children will stay healthy and in its proper context.

To give this sermon my pastor squashed any desire to look holy in the eyes of his congregation. He humbled himself by admitting he had fallen short and the emotion which almost took him revealed his admission was honest. He did this so that we might know how to confront pride in our own lives.

I left that sermon deeply moved because my pastor didn’t just convey the letter of the scriptural law. He also shared his wisdom on how to diminish the impact of pride on a Christian life. That Sunday he was a religious Spencer. He substituted his own experience for Spencer’s request, “show me”. In humility, my pastor used that information to convey the teachings of Christ. In short, he is the kind of teacher Christ desires. A humble messenger of the teachings of God who walks side-by-side with us on our journey of faith.

This despite our reverence for him as Pastor. His faith prevented the pitfalls of titles that concerned Christ and his humility made him one of the best messengers of Christ’s truth I have yet experienced.

The layman

The Layman

I have a friend who many years ago became an avid reader of the Bible. Long before I knew him, and still ongoing today, he spent/spends time reading and learning the word. His knowledge of the Bible is extraordinary, but you can only glean this by spending time with him. It’s not something he wears on his sleeve like a Pharisee’s phylactery.

Together with two other guys he is a member of a Bible study/small group to which I belong. Each week we spend time catching up on each other’s lives and inevitably discuss how our faith impacts the issues of the week. Sometimes we will have a Scripture verse to discuss. Other times it’s more freewheeling. Regardless, if one of us wonders what the Bible has to say about a topic, most of the time he knows where. Sometimes it includes book, chapter and verse.

Never does he make his profound knowledge of the Scriptures a central point of our discussion, and there are weeks when he doesn’t seem to use it at all. But when we need it, he contributes and fully participates in the ongoing discussion of how to apply that passage to our lives. If somebody expresses their amazement at this mastery, he simply pushes it off as well I had time during a period of my life to read it. Never once has he sought recognition for being so conversant in the biblical text we revere so much.

Once again, we have a religious Spencer. This time he is not a pastor and carries no title Christ advised against. Instead, he’s just a guy who studies the Bible and uses his knowledge to help himself and his fellow followers in Christ. With great humility, he hears what we say, contributes what he knows and works shoulder to shoulder with us to apply the lessons of the one true teacher. No broad phylacteries worn or places at the table of honor sought. Just one man who follows Christ and decides to pass on what he learns.

His impact on me is twofold. I want to emulate his mastery of the word because I see how helpful facile knowledge of God’s lessons are in life. To have them at your fingertips is a wonderful blessing. Secondly, much like Spence taught his employees because he wanted them to flourish, so does my friend want to bring the word to our discussion so we all will benefit from God’s wisdom. I want to do this too simply from being in this good man’s presence.

Conclusion

The media likes to isolate the Pharisees of our day especially when they stumble because hypocrisy attracts viewers. But far more abundant are the religious leaders and lay followers of Christ who fulfill the Lord’s desire for those who teach his words. When you get despondent and think there are no good Christian leaders left besides your pastor, try looking to the left or right in the pew where you’re sitting on Sunday. Likely right there sits exactly the kind of leader/teacher Christ had in mind. In fact, maybe someone is already looking to their left and right and found you.

May each of us be humble pursuers of Christ’s teaching and willing to pass on his teaching to another for no other reason but that we love that person. May God bless you in your faith journey this and every day.

Dave