To Sunday School or Not to Sunday School

Deuteronomy 11:18-21
Ephesians 6:10-18a


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

June 10, 2007

For those of us who like to say, about church life, “we’ve always done it that way,” it’s useful to remember that there has not always been a Sunday school! Since my church history books are still in the bottom of a box I’ll only hazard that something like Sunday school started in England in the 1840’s.

In America, in the mid-19th century, Connecticut’s own Horace Bushnell made the practice of Sunday school popular and successful. Bushnell was a Congregational minister in Hartford. He was also a landscape architect. He designed the University of California campus at Berkley. Bushnell took advantage of three cultural forces, in his time, to make Sunday school an established, if not eternal, part of Christian church life: women, psychology, and wealth. Bushnell had a lot of educated and under-recognized church women on his hands. He had the social and financial success of Christianity and America. Bushnell’s big book was called Christian Nurture. Nurture, not nature, was a place where religion could make more of a difference. Hard science about nature was getting more secular, so religion gravitated to the softer science of psychology and to its studies of human development. So, then with nurturing and readily available women within the church, Bushnell had a work force to implement programs of Christian nurturance: Sunday school. As the frontier closed and civilization got, well, more “civilized” and with Christians feeling pretty well-off and successful Bushnell had a situation wherein the raising of cultured, descent, mannerly and moral children was greatly to be desired. Women, psychology, social wealth and in the name of Christianity could do that!

Now all this was just a terrible conspiracy against Tom Sawyer. Tom Sawyer hated Sunday school. Washing his hands, his neck, under his nails, wearing his ‘Sunday go-to-meetin’ clothes, memorizing Bible verses, well that was just everything Aunt Polly wanted for Tom and everything Huckleberry Finn didn’t want either for Tom or for “hisself.”

Now Mark Twain and Horace Bushnell shared the same Hartford, Connecticut. But they had, seemingly, very different ideas about what made up the good life and goodness in life. Bushnell would’ve recruited Aunt Polly to teach Sunday school, but Twain would have paid Huck Finn a frog or two just to get Tom our on a raft on the mighty Mississippi River, or at least the beautiful Connecticut River.

And so as summer comes, what about you? And if not you, what about others in your family? Church school or river boats?
Clean finger nails or gardening? I know for myself, in my own life, even my Christian life of faith, it has been a tug of war, and not just in the summer, between Horace Bushnell and Mark Twain, between the church and the river, between the Bible and the raft, between Aunt Polly and Jim or Insun Joe

I love those opening lines in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick where Ishmael leaves a funereal New England November for the sea. The sea, he says, is his Harvard and his Yale.

Now as we rightly honor, this day, those who have applied themselves at school, and done well enough to graduate, and as we thank those here who willingly and with some joy take on the challenge of Sunday school and child care and enrichment, as we reflect upon our own adult education, and as we appreciate the thoughtful and caring work of Margo Williams, our Director, and the Christian Education Committee, let us be cautious about our intentions. In a word, let us not confuse Aunt Polly’s Sunday school with Jesus’ Christianity.

I have a minister friend of one of those “big steeple flag ship” churches out in suburban Chicago. He says he always keeps involved in the confirmation classes because it helps keep his Christianity from being too “sanitized.” Truly the famous motto “cleanliness is next to godliness” is not our Christian religion. It’s not even found in the Bible. Those words? We can find them where they belong from the pen of Benjamin Franklin. Not the “cleanest man in Paris!

There is a raging battle within our Holy Bible between, what one New Testament scholar (William Countryman) calls the purity code and the sweat, blood, tears, and sex of life in God. I believe that the spiritual testimony of child birth, for example, although I only know it as heard testimony, is bringing forth new life on the border between the pure and clean and the real and messy. Jesus, we remember, was born on cow hay. Jesus, we recall, was baptized by a wild man, John. And Jesus asked Thomas to touch his wounds if he needed to.

How far are we from the Jesus who spit in the dirt to put mud in the eyes of a blind man? Wouldn’t Jesus have wiped his hands on his own robe afterwards? Was that the same robe that was touched by the woman who had hemorrhaged for 12 years?

It is of course worthy to study and to graduate. Jesus himself was a master of scripture, an amazing student in the Temple, and a revolutionary teacher on the dusty road of life. Of course, it is honorable to teach our young our Christian way of life.

But our youth do not bring just their own Holy Spirit into church. They bring their hormones and their sexual fears and hopes. They bring their teched-out-psyches with its promises and illusions. They bring their strangeness, and their fear of strangers. Sex, security, and success, are on their minds and hearts, and bodies. And they bring their ever so fragile idealism. Certainly our creator God is up to the challenge! Clearly we have teacher and students up for the struggle!

Hopefully we are a congregation ready to offer the unique adventure of real life and the rare truth of a risen God of Love. Real Christianity, really, has always “done it that way!” Amen.

Prayer

In the quiet of these moments, O God, we would be open to your word. The Gospel of Peace. As we tumble in chaos may we land on our feet. Let us learn to stand for something lest we fall for anything. Let us gather in the strength that comes from silence. Let us know again that when we sit most alone your Spirit sits with us, so when we stand again we stand not for the truth but in your truth. Let us be united in that understanding, lest we kill our brother, harm our sister, betray you, our one true parent.

You have been our parent and our teacher all these years. Assure us that there are holy purposes to our life and a holy purpose to our lives. Bind us together in your word. Creative love! Lovely Creator! Stir our hands to work, lift our hearts to God. May we write your word upon our education. May we remember your love between each teacher and each student. May we all teach each other, speaking of the way we know you want us to be, speaking as we lie down as we rise up as we go away, as we come home. Let us live in the strength we know from generation to generation, the strength that we believe we will prevail against the evil of random killings, even in our schools, that we will prevail against the dislocations of storms and wars. That in your resurrection we are assured that, nevertheless, you love us anyway, you stay with us anyway, you help us build a better world, anyway, because against the power and the authorities of evil you arose and arise, neverthe- less, always, anyway. All this in your name you who taught us to pray saying...Amen.