Ritröð Guðfræðistofnunar - 01.01.2011, Page 17

do is stay alive on camera, maybe it’s time to pick a new role model. Jesus
said, “Go forth into all the world' - not just into the Australian Outback,
by yourself, to prove a point.
Preaching is arduous, yes. But it is not a survival contest. You do not have
to prove that you can do it totally alone. In fact, you do not have to do it
alone at all. My husband is a Presbyterian minister who now teaches in a
Waldorf School. Waldorf education is based on the philosophy of Rudolf
Steiner, and one of its hallmarks is that teachers offer each main lesson in
narrative form. Every teacher starts with a “text,” so to speak: the particular
concept or skill or myth or historical period that the students are going to
learn, and then the teacher strives to create a story which will present the
lesson in a way that is particular to the class. The key word, here, is “strive.”
Waldorf teachers believe it is just as important for their students to see them
striving as it is for the students to strive, themselves. They also do not try
to reinvent the wheel every day. They share ideas. They share wisdom. They
tell one another what worked and what didn’t. But they don’t tell the same
story. They don’t teach in the same way, because they are different, and their
students are different, and if they don’t strive, their students won’t, either.
I couldn’t preach if I had to do it in isolation. I couldn’t preach without
sharing ideas; I doubt any of us could. And that’s one of the blessings of
the internet: the way it connects us. The way it weaves us together in webs
of information and resources and possibilities that feed our preaching and
strengthen it. And that is a wonderful gift. But. When the ideas become a
substitute for our own interpretation, week after week - well, we’ve stopped
striving, and our people see it. Even worse, I think they stop striving to read
and interpret the text themselves. Why should they? We’ve shown them
that we prefer the quick fix, ourselves. And there’s a sermon dealer on every
corner. There is nothing you can’t buy, not even gospel.
I tell my students that the internet is heroin: do it once on a Saturday
night, and you won’t be able to stop yourself from doing it again. Pretty
soon, you’ll be a crack baby preacher, living from one fix to the next. I
can say that kind of thing in seminary; it’s my job to scare the hell out of
them, so they don’t miss the heaven all around them. But in their student
context, they think I’m just another teacher trying to keep them from
downloading a sermon the way you can download a term paper. They’re
trying to survive the semester: Just get me through mid-terms, and I’ll never
do it again! But this isn’t about one semester. This is about your life, and
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