Education Incarnate: Stewarded Learning (Luke 10:38-42)

WE DON’T NEED NO EDUCATION

“We don’t need no education”.  That bit of double negative from psychedelic philosopher Roger Waters in the 1970’s served as an anarchic and subversive protest against supposed education oppression in Britain’s post-war schools.  Waters’ use of another double negative immediately following the first offered a solution to that supposed oppression, “We don’t need no thought control”.  Use of the double negative serves Waters’ and Pink Floyd’s protest well.  If you think about what is being said in the double negative, we do need education.  We just don’t need the education currently being offered by the British crown.  We need thought control... but not the kind the establishment offers.  In the end, Waters’ solution to the education problem is the same as it has been since the early days of humanity.  He himself will provide his own education.  He himself will control his own thoughts. Nobody is going to tell me what to think.

Pink Floyd put children’s voices on that song on purpose. A children’s choir, singing a protest against the school that is forming them. And the thing they’re protesting isn’t learning. Nobody in that song is against knowing things. What they’re against is this particular teacher, this particular system, this particular curriculum that takes a child and produces something useful for someone else’s purposes. Brick by brick. Wall by wall.

Mankind has always been in need of education.  Life needs wisdom.  Someone must tell me what happens when I attempt to occupy the same space at the same time with a semi truck.  Someone must tell me that the word “OK”, spoken with a certain inflection and with a certain look, may not mean what I think it means.  More importantly, someone must tell me the meaning of life.  Someone must tell me how it is I am made right with the Creator and what pleases Him.  The question has never been whether or not we humans need an education. We do. All of us are being formed right now, by something. By someone. The question is always *who* will provide us with that education.  Are we left to educate ourselves?  Or do we need outside help? And just what is the curriculum?

We are in our summer series on stewardship. Today we’re looking at what the Bible says about the stewardship of learning. Education is an important piece of the Christian’s life.

The story of education begins in the Garden of Eden. Before there is a school, there is a garden. And in that garden, there is already a curriculum.

God has given Adam and Eve everything. The whole estate — every tree, every creature, every corner of creation — entrusted to their care. And one boundary. One thing not yet given. One thing held back, not because it is worthless, but because the taking of it would not be receiving. It would be grasping. It would be ownership. It would be the end of the stewarded life and the beginning of something else entirely.

And then the serpent arrives. The serpent is not anti-education. The serpent is pro-education. The serpent has a curriculum.

Genesis 3:5 “God knows that when you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

See what the serpent is offering. Not money. Not fame. Knowledge. Power. Autonomy. Eat this and you will know. Eat this and the knowing will make you like God. Eat this and you will no longer need to receive from outside yourself — you will be the source.

That is the serpent’s curriculum. And it has been running in every classroom, every culture, every institution that forgets who made the mind doing the thinking. Its operating slogan is “knowledge is power.” Its promise is: learn enough and you won’t need to depend on anyone. Know enough and you will be sufficient. Achieve enough and you will be secure.

Learn enough and you won’t need to depend on anyone. That is not just a cultural problem. That is the self-salvation project. Knowledge is power is another version of the theology of glory — and Christians believe it too.

Education has always been at the center between God and the serpent. Martin Luther recognized this… Luther saw parents pulling their kids out of school. Let the children work. Let them learn a trade. School is for priests and monks. Luther called it exactly what it was. That argument, he said, is the devil finishing what he started. The same enemy who used the monastery schools to produce all the anti-Gospel stuff in Rome was using anti-intellectualism to produce ignorance. Both are tools of the devil. Luther then wrote a famous essay for city officials throughout Germany… and his argument was this. Kids should be in school. The Gospel needs literacy. The Bible must be read. People who can’t read don’t have access to the Gospel. And the devil knows it.

But at the end of the day, it’s not about knowing Jesus. It’s about Jesus knowing you. Jesus embodies education. One of the first glimpses we have of Jesus as a teacher is in his childhood.

Jesus’ family goes to Jerusalem for the Passover. On the return trip, a full day into the journey, Mary and Joseph realize the boy is not with them. They go back to Jerusalem… after three days… which I find amazing… three days of looking for Jesus, they find him. In the temple. Sitting among the teachers. Listening to them. Asking them questions. Sitting. Listening. Asking.

And then Dr. Luke writes this:

Luke 2:52 “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and with people.”

Jesus increased in wisdom. Jesus learned. Jesus did not skip the classroom. The classroom is all part of the redemptive story.

Jesus teaches/we learn

Jesus grows up. Jesus himself becomes a rabbi, a teacher. And Luke relates that Jesus is teaching everywhere he goes. And that includes the home of some of his best friends… Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. Jesus shows up, and Luke sets the scene: Mary is sitting at Jesus’ feet and listening to his teaching. Martha is doing what a good host does — managing, working, making sure everything is ready for the guest. Martha complains about the arrangement… we’ve all been there… Jesus, tell Mary to help me out.

Jesus says this:

Luke 10:41–42 “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but one thing is necessary. Mary has made the right choice, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Look at what Mary is doing. She is sitting at his feet. The student’s posture. The posture Jesus himself took in Luke 2. And what she is receiving is not a lecture. It is a person. The content is Christ himself. Given to her by the one who is both the Teacher and the lesson.

Mary has found the one thing. And Jesus names it the better portion — What she has received is not information that increases her power. It is a person who increases her dependence. And that dependence — that restful, joyful, utter dependence on the one who gives himself to her — is precisely what the serpent has been trying to destroy since Genesis 3. Mary doesn’t produce it. She does not earn it. She does not curate it or manage it or control what she receives. She sits. She listens. She receives. Open hands. At his feet.

And that is where all learning begins. Not because the other classrooms do not matter. They do. Jesus sat in one. He went home to Nazareth and learned a trade and grew in wisdom and stature. He did not skip the classroom. But he also kept coming back to this — to the Father, to the word, to the one thing necessary. Because every classroom in a student’s life, every desk and lab and kitchen table, is downstream of this one. You cannot steward what you have received from Jesus if you never sit down to receive it. The open hand in the classroom is the same hand that opens here on Sunday morning.

The Stewardship of Learning

You’ll note we’re talking about the stewardship of learning. Not the stewardship of education. Because we know what we do with education. We control it. We curate it. We build walls around it and call them curricula, and we approve the books that go inside and ban the ones that don’t, from both sides of every school board meeting that has ever been fought. And none of that is entirely wrong — parents should be involved, communities should care, not everything handed to a child deserves to be there.

But the stewardship of education has a way of becoming something much smaller than learning. It becomes management. Protection. The closed fist or scarcity mindset applied to the mind — deciding in advance what questions are allowed, what answers are already settled, what the child will encounter and what they will be shielded from. And the irony is that the serpent’s curriculum runs just as easily inside a protected system as outside one. Because the serpent’s curriculum is not primarily about content. It is about posture. It is about reaching for knowledge that makes you autonomous rather than receiving knowledge that makes you wise. You can be entirely inside an approved curriculum and still be grasping. You can be entirely outside an approved curriculum and still be receiving.

Mary did not ask Jesus for a curated experience. She sat down. She listened. She received what he gave. That is learning — open-handed, receptive, willing to be surprised by what the Teacher offers. Education we can control. Learning requires that we trust the Teacher enough to let him teach.

And here is what faithful stewardship of learning looks like in community. We are stewards of spaces where learning happens — where sitting at the feet of Jesus becomes possible. This room on Sunday mornings is one of those spaces. But it is not the only one. It is not supposed to be the only one. What happens here — receiving the word, receiving the body and blood, learning Jesus together — is meant to overflow into kitchens and living rooms and carpool lines and school hallways. Because Jesus was never confined to the temple. He moved. He taught in synagogues and at tables and on hillsides. He gave us a stewardship of learning that is both gathered and scattered, both here and out there.

Learning math is waging war

But there’s also this: when you sit down in algebra or history or chemistry on Tuesday morning — you are doing something with cosmic stakes attached to it. The serpent’s curriculum has one goal: convince the creature that knowledge is the path to self-sufficiency. Learn enough and you won’t need to depend on anyone. Your high schoolers are swimming in that premise every single day. Every college prep narrative is saturated with it. Get the grades. Get the scores. Get the school. Get the degree. Get the job. Get the life. The whole sequence is designed to produce a person who needs nothing from outside themselves. That is not education. That is the serpent’s graduation ceremony.

And into that — your kids sit down in chemistry. They open the periodic table. They work through a business model. And if Sunday has done its work — if they know whose classroom they are in and who made the thing they are studying — every single subject becomes an act of resistance. What does chemistry teach you, at its most fundamental level? That reality has a structure you did not invent. The elements were arranged before you arrived. You did not create the periodic table. You discovered it. Which means someone made it before you got there and left it to be found. What does mathematics teach you? That truth exists independent of the one calculating it. Two plus two equaled four before there were humans to add. What does history teach you? That you are not the first. That the story was underway before your chapter began. That you are a steward of something much longer than your own life.

Your high schooler doing chemistry homework on a Tuesday night is waging war on the serpent. Not because they have attached a Bible verse to the periodic table. But because they are a baptized child of God, sitting in a classroom the Logos consecrated, receiving a reality the Creator structured, with hands that were open at this Table last Sunday. And the serpent told Eve that knowledge would make her like God. Your kids are learning that knowledge makes you more aware of God — more aware of the one who made the thing you are studying, who structured the equation you are solving, who built the pattern of human flourishing into economics before anyone thought to write a textbook about it.

Stewarded learning

Now before anyone says this out loud… and makes claims about Bresson that aren’t true, LOL, if we send our kids into the classroom with open hands, aren't we leaving them defenseless? Isn't open-handed reception just naive surrender to whatever the culture is serving? And the answer is: only if they go alone. The open hand is not the unformed hand. It is not the empty hand. Mary did not arrive at the feet of Jesus as a blank slate — she arrived as a person who had been sitting in the community of Israel and in Jesus’ own community. That is exactly what this community is for. We are not sending our students into the classroom as isolated individuals, armed only with their own willpower and discernment, hoping they figure it out. We are sending them as members of a body that gathers every Sunday to receive from the Teacher who is also the lesson — a body that practices open-handed reception here, at this table, so that they know what genuine receiving looks like when the serpent offers a counterfeit version of it in the classroom. The community is the formation. The liturgy is the training. The Table is where we practice, week after week, the posture that distinguishes receiving from grasping, discovery from invention, learning from self-making. That’s Jesus stewarding learning for us… and that’s us stewarding learning for others. Let’s Pray.

The Table

We come to a table this morning where the same thing is happening that happened in Bethany. The Teacher sets bread and cup before you. He says: take this, eat this, drink this. This is my body. This is my blood. Given for you. He is not giving you information about himself. He is giving you himself. From outside you — extra nos — placed into your open hands by the one who is both the Teacher and the lesson and the school where all genuine learning begins. You do not produce what is given here. You do not earn it. You receive it. The posture is Mary’s posture. The posture of the student in the temple. Sitting. Listening. Open hands.

And what is given here will not be taken from you.