A COMMUNITY OF SCHOLARSHIP
Sometimes when we talk about community, we leave out the main reason why we are here together, which is to learn theology. I want to say just a few words this morning not about community as fellowship in the spirit or community as friendship among like-minded folk or community as participation in the social and political life of the institution. My subject is the community of scholarship.
Why do we, why does the church, ask you to travel long distances, often at great sacrifice, to come to this specific place, to attend specific classes and discussions, work in a specific library, rather than allow you to do all this through the technology of distance-learning? Couldnât you simply download the curriculum, memorize it at home, pass your exams, and not so disrupt your lives?
Maybe you could if theology was simply about knowledge or scholarship was simply a matter of the mind.
In fact, all real scholarship is a matter of the body as much as the mind. Preparing for a game of jeopardy requires nothing more than a capacious memory and quick fingers. Preparing for a lifetime of thinking about real life --- not to mention the source of all life --- requires discipline that involves the mastering of practices and the formation of habits. It is a matter of transformation. And transformation is always painful. The Greeks had a saying, mathein pathein, "to learn is to suffer," or as we would render it, no pain no gain.
We learn these disciplines best in groups. They are too difficult to sustain by ourselves. Thatâs why people go to gyms if they are serious about physical transformation. They learn how to change through imitation and emulation. They see how others do it, and they seek to do it as well.
Our goal here is not that you become passive recipients of pre-packaged lore. That would be like taking diet pills. Our goal is that you become like a gymnastics instructor. Because you have the disciplines, the practices, the habits of scholarship, you can in turn teach others.
We come to this place and go through the same routines together because this process of transformation is one that we learn constantly from each other. Your teachers know how much they need you, your enthusiasm, your bright questions --- not the one, "Is this on the exam?"--- to re-ignite their love of learning. Ask them good questions. Seek them out in their offices. You may seek something from them, but you also thereby bring them the gift of new life. Regard your classmates as companions in intellectual transformation. Talk together, argue passionately together, about what you are learning. See your contextual education placement as an opportunity for the most intense form of learning on the ground with real people in a controlled environment! Regard your ConEd groups as the place where you not only talk about practices, but learn to practice theological scholarship together. Join in worship not as a gesture toward school spirit but as the joyful celebration of theological scholarship. Visit the library, touch the books, wander the stacks. Learn how many have thought about these things before you, learn how vast is the community of scholarship from whom and with whom you can learn. Be awed, but also be comforted.
If all scholarship is embodied and social, how much more is the scholarship devoted to the mystery of our shared life in Christ. The truth we seek to understand is the truth of God joining our embodied humanity and forming us into a people, and that truth points to an even deeper one of how the triune community of the living God finds ever richer life in a dance of gifting and being gifted by otherness, and how that living God strangely seeks still more otherness to love in the dance of creation. And if this is our subject matter, how can we learn it except by learning together and from each other the steps of the communal, reciprocal, ever-changing, ever-graceful dance?
Join the dance. Learn the steps together. Learn them well, because as you are excellent, so you can invite each other to excellence. This is not a matter of competition, but a matter of mutual edification.