Life-Long Learning
Isaiah 2:1-5

November 28, 2004

Before there was “Jeopardy” there were the real quiz game shows on TV. There was “Twenty One.” Its big star was Charles Van Doren, a 30 year old Columbia University English professor with a blue blood academic and literary family background. Van Doren won $139,000 before he was finally defeated. I remember still the night he lost.

Charles Van Doren possessed knowledge that seemed marvelous to me. Alas, the knowledge was not quite it seemed to be. Charles did know a lot, but he was as much an actor and entertainer on that program as one who knew stuff from Baudelaire to Broadway.

The producers had been rehearsing the questions with him, and feeding him the answers. It was a scandal that ended up eventually in Congressional hearings, and Van Doren finally confessed. He resigned his resigned his teaching position at Columbia and went into hiding for over 25 years, writing under a pen name.

In 1991, however, he published A History of Knowledge. A rather strange thing - don’t we all have the same knowledge? The lesson Doren taught is that not every culture, not every age, knows what is worth knowing in the very same way we know it now.

Christians, Jews, Muslims and so on all have at the top of our spiritual agenda the desire for the knowledge of God. Since God, however, is the ground of being, the source of all we might know, to know God is to know it all.

But God is infinite, beyond measure. God is too big for us to know and comprehend anything except around the edges. Our usual misstep is to render our God too small.

The Hebrew poets and prophets wrote about the joy of studying, the elation of learning and knowledge. Psalm 1 assures us that “their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.” The longest Psalm, number 119, is a hyper-extended meditation on the person who faithfully studies the law or scriptures.

One often hears how music transforms the mere spoken prose words into a poetry of the soul unattainable by simple talk. Studying the knowledge of God accomplishes somewhat the same effect, compelling us relentlessly towards a personal acquaintance with the truth that makes us free.

Isaiah supplies the prophetic word of Advent. He’s the fellow who keeps proclaiming the Good News in the Old Testament. The contexts Isaiah finds himself in are never positive: Israel is being threatened by foreign military powers and then actually conquered and its leadership dragged off in exile to faraway Babylon. Isaiah transmits the Word of the Lord insisting upon justice, but more than any other prophet declaring a light in the midst of a deep darkness.

He looks forward to a time not faraway when the way we do things gets turned upside down on its head. One of them is that we will study war no more. How can we ever do that?

History, after all, is the description of humanity’s wars, interspersed by nothing happening! The greatest of all Christian thinkers, Augustine of Hippo, promulgated already in the fifth century the circumstances for a just war, and thoughtful Christians have been trying to apply his formulas ever since, from the halting of the Nazi menace in World War II to George Bush’s reputed “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. War is now built into our theology. How do we unlearn war when almost all the terms of reference of our education are struck in its language?

When someone defaults on their bank loan, the resolution is simple, though brutal. The bank sends people to repossess the automobile, the house, the tractor. A comedy troupe once tried to reenact what happened when someone defaulted against their student loan. What do you repossess? The person has already had his education and learned lots of stuff.

Quickly, a small commando group is sent to the person’s house. They confront him and tell him, “We are going to repossess your education.” The poor fellow laughs, “And just how are you going to do that?” Just like the movies, they sit him at a table with a single bright light bulb hanging overhead, and all members of the repossession team standing around him. “All right, 2 + 2 equals what?” “4, of course.” “No, it’s 3! Again, 2 + 2 equals...?” “4!” “No, it’s 5!”

We have to do something of the same order to rewire our brains and our hearts. No longer is war the measure of our history - it is the decadent absence of our humanity.

Who would think of taking our agricultural equipment used to dig up and cultivate the earth for food to nourish a world of people and using that equipment to physically harm people? Who would think of those pruning hooks for dressing fruit trees to skewer the life out of people? If we render it unthinkable in the synapses of our brains, it cannot be thought.

When there is an explosion of the learning of mathematics, when there is an incarnation of God among human beings, when a Renaissance and Reformation reorder our minds and society, when there was an Enlightenment that enables us to think scientifically, to discover vaccines and penicillin for diseases, to understand the atom and the Big Bang and black holes, why would one ever think of wasting our time on inhuman machinations of war that undo every human accomplishment?

It seems impossible to avoid thinking about war, particularly when it surrounds us more and more. War seems to come naturally to our minds. It takes a Gospel to make us rethink and rewire the way the world operates. Today we hear the Gospel coming, requiring you and me to start thinking and living in reality, the only reality that matters, in which we are going to study war no more.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan