A More Excellent Way

 

I Corinthians 12:27-13:8                                                                                       September 14, 2003

 

In recent weeks we have had at least two prayer requests for students returning to school and college.  It is a bitter-sweet time especially when a young adult who is no longer a child, but is still our child, heads off to college for the first time.  For those among us who are already writing five figure checks, or anticipate doing that soon enough, I have some bad news, and some good news.  The bad news is that some observers at least, believe that we aren’t getting our money’s worth.  The good news is that our kids have begun to demand more.

 

Peter Gomes, chaplain at Harvard makes a stirring case in his book, The Good Life, that we are being short-changed.  (If you can call $30,000, change...)  Gomes argues that while virtually every college and university has a noble credo somewhere among its “founding documents,” such lofty ideals are now largely ignored.  Once education was aimed at preparing students to serve church, state and nation for the sake of the “public good.”  But, (Gomes claims), “in the last decades of the twentieth century American higher education has seemed to go out of its way to avoid any kind of moral claims upon the minds, hearts, and lives of its young constituents.”  (The Good Life, p.18)   One might have thought that “at least some private virtue and public good ought to be the result of the best education money can buy,” but Gomes is not so sure!  While students of his acquaintance complain about the case study method “which has an aversion to any hint of prescriptive or normative behavior,” and even though they “aspire to a moral education,” “the university is now loathe to give it.”  In his estimation, our education system is increasingly “designed to produce either the pursuit of private pleasure, or clones for the corporate state.”  (p.44)

 

While students of former generations were content to know the utilitarian value of their education, “How much is my degree worth, and how much will it get me of this world’s goods?”; a new generation is  concerned to know “about the moral use of their lives and their education.”  Instead of “potential net worth,” questions are now raised about “matters of moral value, public and private virtue,” and students profess “a desire to live a good life and not just earn a good living.” 

 

Reinforcing this point, an English professor wrote on the Times op-ed page this week, that “universities are steadily making the acquisition of skills the object of a liberal arts education.  More and more we try to give our ‘customers’ what they seem to want:  marketable knowledge, powers that will hold them in good stead in the work force.”  But in this shift, Mark Edmunson writes, universities have forgotten what Socrates once told his students: “What we’re engaged in here isn’t a chance conversation but a dialogue about the way we ought to live our lives.”  (Mark Edmunson, 8/9/03)

 

There must be a better way than chance conversations and the good news is that our young people are clamoring for it.  Gomes cites a study of students born after 1982, who are being called the “Millenial Generation.”  In an assessment so glowing, that our hope would be restored even if it were only half true, the authors of this study write:

 

As a group, Millennials are unlike any other youth generation in living memory.  They are more numerous, more affluent, better educated, and more ethnically diverse.  More important, they are beginning to manifest a wide array of positive social habits that older Americans no longer associate with youth, including a new focus on teamwork, achievement, modesty, and good conduct. 

 

Indeed, one young woman says of her generation, “We’re the kids who are going to change things.”  Described as “optimistic, cooperative, respectful of authority, rule-following, bright, progressive and engaged,” these may not seem to be the kind of kids you had planned (tried) to wake up today to get down here to wash cars for the mission trip!  But I can assure you that the advisors who worked with our young people in Lancaster last June found them this way, and these are certainly adjectives I could use to describe my encounters with them in confirmation class.  (Well maybe not fully engaged, but that’s at least 3/4's my fault!)  Those with no hope for the next generation may be wrong!  Indeed in the spirit of Paul, the Millenials may well be seeking a more excellent way.

 

An interesting phrase, that, “a more excellent way.”  “Strive for the greater gifts,” Paul instructs his audience.  Yes being an apostle, a prophet, a teacher or healer, can surely be a noble pursuit, but there is more.  And no, for those of you still silently arguing with Peter Gomes, there isn’t anything inherently wrong about your young adults developing job skills to support you in your old age, but there is more.  By implication, if there is a more excellent way, then there are a multiplicity of ways, a string of worthy goals, values and virtues in life.  But Paul suggests that they are not all of equal worth.  There is a more excellent way.  Paul goes out on a limb here.  He challenges us to raise our sights.  So sure, get an education which has some utility, but there is more to life than making a good living: one doesn’t want to ignore what is required to live a good life.

 

Christopher Reeves spoke from his wheel chair at a medical school graduation a few seasons back.  Reeves encouraged an audience of aspiring, young M.D.’s to raise their sights, to not lose touch with the noble aspiration of helping humanity.  Don’t let medicine become a business, he told them, the human touch is still a healing touch.  It also counts.  More than this he championed the cause of making medical care available to everyone, and not simply to provide the extra attention which only a relative few like himself could afford.  Christopher Reeve held before them, a more excellent way.

 

As central and even as important as the market place may be, it is only one place in our lives.  To focus solely on the worth of a degree, how many of the world’s goods it will bring, is to miss that we also live in other realms besides the economic one.  The wider material realm of this fragile earth and wonderful universe also take some skill to live in.  How do we best manage and protect the most basic resources of life:  water and air?  How can we co-exist more peacefully with the environment and tread more lightly on terra firma?

 

In addition to the market place, there is also public space, where communities, states and nations exist.  What ways of governing and organizing the political realm insure the greatest measure of justice, and yet still protect the foolish and the weak?  Some of us also need to learn the ways of state-craft and contribute to local governance.

 

We live furthermore in a close-knit realm of personal relations.  Besides computer and communication skills, in addition to knowing how to market good things we have to offer; isn’t it wise to cultivate interpersonal skills and to discover deeper sources of empathy and compassion?  How many successful people do we know at work, who are failures at home? 

 

In this shrinking world, where peoples and cultures are hurled at one another with the speed of bullet trains and passenger jets, isn’t it imperative that we learn how to negotiate our differences and appreciate the unique and special beauties of strange customs and foreign practices?

 

A new generation and an old prophet are calling us to strive after a more excellent way.  They are challenging one another and us to raise our sights.  Too often we settle for lesser ways, the cynical, the expedient, the comfortable, the selfish:  but let us seek higher things, faith, hope, love.  So make a living, but don’t forget to live a good life.