Smart and Holy: Adventists and Education

Sermon for North Hill Adventist Fellowship, August 20, 2011


My alarm went off at 4:00 a.m. Friday morning. I groaned and crawled out of bed. I pulled on some clothes and hauled Shelley's (our younger daughter) suitcase and trunk out to the car. Karin (my wife) made her a sandwich and we drove off for the airport. I helped carry her bags through check-in, then she was on her own through security and off to college (Andrews University in Michigan) for another year of biology.

It's a story repeated in thousands of Adventist homes this fall. Adventists encourage their kids to go to college. Adventist families spend millions of dollars to send their kids to Adventist schools. The denomination spends millions of dollars on our elementary and high schools and on our colleges and universities.

Here at North Hill, we have quite a few young people who are pursuing higher education. Chris is headed back to Western Washington for another year of engineering. Lizzie is at the Portland campus of Walla Walla University taking nursing. On Monday of this week Johanna drove east in her new, blue Nissan, also headed for Andrews. Sarah is working on her degree in pharmacy at LLU. Eric Bing is at Union. Alex is working on her degree in journalism. Rachelle is working on graphic design. Travis is at the University of Puget Sound.

Why this obsession with education, especially higher education? Adventists believe it is one of the crucial ways we can carry forward in our world the values and ministry of Jesus.

Jesus lighted up people's lives. He improved the quality of their lives. He improved their health, their marriages, their personal finances. And it turns out that education does the same.

[For those who want chapter and verse for my assertion about the nature of Jesus' ministry:

Matthew once described Jesus ministry this way: Behold the people sitting in darkness have seen a great light. On those sitting in the shadow of death, a light has dawned. Matthew 4:16

In Luke, Jesus summarizes his mission in these words: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach the gospel to the poor, to proclaim freedom for captives, release for the oppressed. Luke 4:18

Jesus called people to the highest ideal of lifelong marriage. Matthew 19:6

Quoting Matthew again, “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom,and healing every disease and sickness among the people.” Matthew 4:23]

A simple description of Jesus' goal for people is this: well-being. Jesus aimed to give the people the highest quality of life. He worked to improve their well-being. In American society today, one of the ways we can most effectively cooperate with this purpose of Jesus is to help people get a college education. In our society, people who go to college do better in almost every area of life.

Social scientists have measured the effect of education on many different areas of life. Some of the benefits that show up in these studies are these:

Less divorce
Young people who get a college degree are times less likely to get a divorce than people who have only a high school degree or some college. People who completed a college education are happier in their marriages than people with only some college.

More church involvement and volunteering
People with college degrees are much, much more likely to go to church and to be involved in volunteering in the community.

More reading to their kids
Parents with advanced degrees are three times more likely to read to their kids every day than parents who haven’t finished high school, and twice as likely to participate in other educational activities like visiting museums and libraries. What all this means is that the children of people with advanced degrees are themselves much more likely to do well in school. Completing your education is a benefit not only for yourself. It is a benefit for your children. And thus for your grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Less smoking
Between 1998 and 2008, the smoking rate among college graduates declined from 14 percent to 9 percent. In that same period the smoking rate for high school grads barely budged, from 29 percent to 27 percent.
Of people with advanced degrees, 70 percent never smoked, only 3 percent choose to keep smoking, and the rest have quit or are trying to. Of people who didn’t finish high school, half have never smoked, a third have quit or are trying to, and 15 percent choose to maintain the habit.

Less obesity
Those with more education are more likely to exercise than those with less education. College-educated adults are also less likely than others to be obese or have obese children. These results hold for all age groups.

Do we want our kids to succeed in their marriages, to maintain healthy weight and avoid smoking, to read to their kids, and to be involved in church? Yes, of course. These are measures of quality of life. So in harmony with the mission of Jesus to make people whole, we do everything we can to help our young people acquire an education.

Sure a few exceptional individuals do very well without completing college. Bill Gates is an obvious example. If you believe you are exceptional, if you have plans to do something significant, something worth pouring your life into, and you can do it without going to school, go for it! Just don't fool yourself. If you're not getting somewhere, if you are not acquiring skills and experience that make you more useful, more powerful for doing good, then get yourself back in school. Paying your car loan or the rent on an apartment is not a large enough goal to organize your life around.

So, go to school. Do it because going to college and beyond is an important for your own quality of life. It is also the key to improving your skills for serving others and bringing glory to God.

There is another reason why we as a church promote education.

According to the gospels, three different times, in three different settings, Jesus addressed the question, “What is the greatest commandment?” What is the top priority in a holy and wise life?

The answer: Love God with all your heart, your soul and with all your mind.

Cultivation of the mind is one of the highest values promoted throughout the Bible. Being smart is useless unless you feed your mind valuable information. Like every other human capability, our minds reach their full potential only through discipline and practice.

You cannot do the mathematical work required for most science unless you've embraced the disciplines of doing math homework for multiple years. You cannot sit down for an afternoon with a Calculus for Dummies book and the next day start doing the calculations needed to figure the infiltration patterns of fracking fluids or the calculations needed to getting a lunar orbiter into position for its survey of the moon.

This is true in math and the sciences. It's true in literature and writing, in medicine and nursing, in diesel mechanics, in plumbing. These skills require structured learning and structured learning takes time.

The same is true in theology. Some people think they can figure out the hidden meanings of Hebrew and Greek words by using an interlinear or a Strong's Concordance. Real scholars struggle to keep a straight face when they encounter the discoveries people make using these short cuts. If you're going to work with the Hebrew or Greek text of the Bible, you need to spend years mastering the languages.The Bible is a staggeringly complex book. Unlike the Koran which was produced by a single person, the Bible was produced by multiple writers spread over a millennium and a half. The diversity and complexity of the Bible is part of the reason it is a superior revelation to the Koran. A single writer, a single point of view, cannot meet the needs of humanity across cultures and across time.

Given the complexity and diversity of the Bible, discerning its inner coherence and applying its wisdom to contemporary life requires not only years and decades of personal study of the text itself. It also requires familiarity with the understanding and insight of other students—scholars who have prayerfully and studiously devoted themselves to making sense of what God has said in the Bible.

Helping us master the Book (the Bible) and its books (commentaries written by devout scholars over the millennia) is one of the highest purposes of Adventist education. All students are required to take classes that expose them to the Bible itself and to the community of interpretation.

True religion needs to connect the truth of the Bible with the down-to-earth, nitty-gritty reality of everyday life. Adventist education holds together twin convictions: God has spoken in the Bible and in its pages we hear his voice. And God is the creator of the cosmos and creation is a reliable, trustworthy revelation of its maker. Adventist education works to bring together these two realms—the wisdom that comes from the Bible and the wisdom that comes from nature.

Adventist education aims to help young people (and all of us) love God with “all their minds.”

God created humans with a greater need for education than any other creature. No other animal comes close to requiring the amount of education that humans need for well-being. As a church committed fully to cooperating with God in his work to bring humans to their highest possible level of development, Adventists gladly pour enormous resources into education. We urge our kids, get all the education you can. The development of human capabilities that is the goal of education is just what God intended in creation. It is what God is working for in redemption.