Teachable Moments: Times Set in Stone

Pastor Robarge’s Sermon

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Grace, mercy and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Throughout life, we have a lot of moments that are teachable moments but can we identify them?

This past week, I took a couple of days in the beginning of the week and was up in Minnesota with some of my family, and I believe I came across a teachable moment.  Let me tell you the story.

I was with my oldest daughter. Her whole family was there and we took a pontoon boat and we were out fishing. She grabbed her pole and she wanted the best spot on the boat so she went to the back of it and she kept moving further. So she jumped up on top of the little cushion in the back of the pontoon boat that sits over the engine area so there is not a lot of support underneath it. So she goes further and further and sits on the edge finally of that pontoon piece and it falls. She grabs herself, but the pole’s gone. So I’m glad. I mean, save yourself, not the pole. We’re not worried about the pole.

We should have taken that time and said, “Here’s a teachable moment.” We should say, “You know what, relax. Let’s probably not fish for the rest of the day.” But I didn’t. And later on, her husband said, “Laura, why don’t you grab another fishing pole that Tyson’s not using,” my son, “take that one and go back fishing?” So she grabbed the little pole that Tyson was using. She put it on the edge of the pontoon boat. She grabbed her bait, she put it on the hook and then she walked away. You can probably see where this is going. The waves and the wind were pushing all day, the boat rocked and there goes the fishing pole into the water, number two. So you’d think at this point in time, I would say, “Here is another teaching moment. Let’s not use fishing poles today.” But I still missed it. I still missed that opportunity to say, “Here is a moment that I can teach. Here’s a moment that we can understand that we don’t want to lose anymore fishing poles.” But I missed it.

How many times in your life have you seen some of these teachable moments, maybe that you’ve capitalized on, maybe that you haven’t? Maybe just like me, you saw it and you thought maybe that’s a good opportunity but then you let it slip by you. That’s what this series is all about as we head into it. It extends from the Listening to God series as we looked at listening, how we can more intently hear the word of God and be able to understand that message He has for us. And that leads us into the teachable moments because if we’re listening and being more in tune to God, then we’ll be more aware of these very teachable moments that He’s brining into our lives. Whether it is to teach ourselves or really to learn. Because even though I missed that teaching opportunity, I did learn not to take Laura fishing again.

But here it is, we learn a little bit more about teaching moments and the greatest teacher of all time, our master, Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ was the master at teachable moments. Throughout Scripture, He finds the right opportune times in order to teach the people He’s with. He finds the moments. He finds the places, the times. He knows the people in order to figure out for them what it is and how best they are going to be able to learn. He uses the things around Him. He uses the culture that’s there in order to teach them.

All of these things are important as we start to look at the very teachable moments that are happening everyday in our life. But we start to go through some of the routine, mundane things of our life and we start to do it. We wake up, we take a shower, we drive to work, we go to work, we might stay home, whatever it might be. You can see the checklist that’s happening. Everyday we go through it. So we can start to say it’s so mundane that we miss the opportunities God is even trying to reach into our world to teach us.

But as I said, we can learn a little bit about that today from Jesus, as first, before He did any teaching, before He said anything, He always knew about the learner. He knew about the person He was going to teach. We heard that in our lesson today when we first saw Jesus and this woman at the well, the Samaritan woman. And the Samaritans and the Jews, they don’t get along. But yet the Samaritan woman comes up and starts talking to Jesus and Jesus starts to identify things that are going on in this woman’s life. He said, “You have thirsted after the flesh. You have been going for things that you thought would satisfy you but currently, they haven’t.” Jesus has to know who He’s speaking to before He teaches.

He reveals to the woman the very nature of herself and she says, “You must be a prophet. You must be somebody special because nobody can know that much about a person.” But Jesus says, “I need to know you in order to teach you,” and that’s what He’s figuring out in this very Samaritan woman at the well. He says, “I have to know you in order to be able for you to understand where you’re at so you can understand where I’m coming from in my teaching.”

What’s happening today at this well is that Jesus begins to teach then by first knowing who it is He’s speaking to. He knows the learner. And then what does He do? He starts to pull in the things that are going to help her learn. He says, “Look at the water of the well. You see this water? It’s not going to quench your thirst. I can give you water that’s going to quench your thirst fully.” You see how He’s pulling these things in from the outside and He’s pulling them in, in order to teach this woman about thirst and longing. When Jesus knows the learner and Jesus teaches the lesson, things change.

When He approaches this woman, nothing’s new about her. She’s going about her day. She’s going to get water. But when she leaves that place, she’s completely changed. She goes back to her village, the people still looking at her the same as they probably did before, treating her as an outcast. But this time, she says, “I’ve seen the Messiah, the one who can bring this water who’s going to quench all thirst.” She begins to spread the good news of this message from the Messiah. She brings it to them. Even though, before she was treated as an outcast, things have now changed.

This happens all the time when Jesus is talking to people. When Jesus is teaching people, when you start to reach the New Testament, you start to see these instances more and more where He comes across people and He first knows them. He talks to them about who they are and then they’re changed. This happened once again in a very familiar story in Luke. It was the wee little man, Zacchaeus, most of you probably know Zacchaeus, the wee little man. He was climbing in a sycamore tree so he could see Jesus. And it says that he ran ahead and climbed into that tree, for Jesus was about to pass that way. And when Jesus came to the place, He looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”

Zacchaeus walking along that road with probably 100 other people, all following, trying to hear, trying to touch, trying to understand what Jesus is talking about and, there it was, Jesus walked along the road, stopped in His steps, pointed up in the tree and said, “Zacchaeus, come down here because I’m going to your house.”

Jesus identified another learner. He identified him by name. Zacchaeus needed some more attention and so He called him by name, brought him down from the tree and said, “We’re going to your house today.” He identified that Zacchaeus was ready to learn. He was ready because he was running in order to hear, see, to understand who this Jesus was. So Christ pulled him out. But why did He choose this man, Zacchaeus, over the hundred others who were also there to see Him?

Zacchaeus was the chief tax collector. He was probably a very well known person amongst the villages in the area. He was well known but he was also very disliked. He stole money from people. He said, “When you pay your taxes, you owe the emperor 10 but you’re going to owe me 5 because I had to walk over here.” There’s this connection. He was always trying to get more and more and he was bringing more money in from the very people he was stealing from. It doesn’t make them very happy and so he was a very disliked man.

But when Jesus identified him as a learner, He said, “Now you can be better than what you were.” Look at the witness this man can make amongst this village. So it was, Jesus took him down out of that tree. They went to Zacchaeus’ house. They sat down. Jesus began to teach him and he was changed. You see what happens when Jesus comes into the situation, when He identifies that learner, when He begins to teach, things change.

Zacchaeus left there before Jesus left that day in his house and said, “You know what? I’m going to pay back four times what I stole.” Zacchaeus, being a very wealthy man, paying back four times what he had stolen probably would have made him a poor man. But he wasn’t concerned. He was more concerned about making the situation right, knowing and learning from the master, from the Messiah Himself. It’s important to know the learner.

Jesus identifies us today and He knows you. He sees you as a learner. We’re all learners. And if we ever try to get away from that fact that we have nothing to learn, then we’re in trouble. We’re always learning. And especially at the feet of the master, Jesus, our Savior, He always has something to teach. We hear in His word time and time again, a teaching, things that are happening, things that He’s saying that are completely applicable to us today.

He has entrusted to us the many people in our life. He’s entrusted our family and our friends and all the things He surrounds us with and He says, “Those people are there for us to also teach and learn from.” We take these moments in our day and we hear things that are said. We see things that are happening and we bring those in because they can be teachable moments for us to be both learner and teacher.

But we see how Jesus does it first. He identifies the learner but then once He identifies that learner, He uses some techniques in order to help them understand and learn a little bit better. So the first technique He uses, He pulls in physical things from the environment. We saw with the Samaritan woman with the water and the quenching of the thirst.

Probably a better example comes from Matthew as we look at the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is a very famous sermon, as a lot of people were following after Christ and they wanted to hear Him teach and Jesus found that this would be an opportune time to teach so He pulled them up on a mountainside and He said, “Have a seat.” And He went up towards the top and He was able to then teach to all the people who were in the area. And these are some of the things that He brought in. As they were sitting outside, sitting on the mountainside, later in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount, this is what He says, “Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, about your body, about what you will put on. Is not life more than food and body more than clothing?” You see, He has a teaching there but then this is what He brings in. This is His example from the environment around them. He says, “Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not more valuable than they?” And then he has another example from the physical surroundings. Later on, He says, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” You see, He’s taking the things they’re looking at. They see the birds of the air. They see the lilies of the field. And Jesus draws them in and helps them learn by pulling those things they see with their eyes, that they’re experiencing in the now.

So look at the birds of the air. Look at the lilies of the field. Those are physical remembrances, reminders for those people that God loves them. And so when He’s pointing these things out for these people as they are ready to learn, He’s pulling all those things in.

So what is it in our environments? What are some of the things we can start to pull in as we look at our everyday surroundings, things we’re going through, things around the house, in our workplace, in our drive, whatever it might be. We start to identify the things that are happening, the physical things in our world that we’re starting to pull in and saying, “These can be used as teachable moments.”

Part of the idea for the beginning of this message series is for us to start thinking of those ideas, become more aware of the things that are around us, become aware of the learners, become aware of the environment so we can start to identify the very teachable moments that are happening in our own life.

But Jesus also used another technique. He used a technique of talking about the cultural needs of people. So He used people in talking about the culture they were in and He took some of those and brought them into the teaching. We see a lot of this happening, specifically in the stories He tells. We find a lot of these and let me read a couple of these snippets for you from Matthew. Matthew 7:16, “By the fruits, you will recognize them.” He’s not talking about fruit growing from our fingertips or from our hair. He’s not talking about the actual fruit from our body but He’s relating what they know about fruit, about how it blossoms, about how it grows and about how it can be used in the life of a person. And they can understand that. They know what fruit is. The people Jesus was talking to are people who were in those small villages. They know about farming. They know about seeds. They know about watering. They know about shepherds and sheep. They know about fishing. All those things, when we start to look at Jesus’ teachings closer and closer, we start to see how all of those pieces are being used in what He’s teaching.

So it continues in Matthew 9, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” They know about how many people it takes to bring in the harvest, about how, in the opportune time, if they don’t pull the fruits, or whatever the harvest in, it might die and be useless. And so He relates a lot of these teachings to what people are experiencing in their very culture.

He goes on, “If a man owns 100 sheep and one of them wanders away, will he not leave the 99 on the hill and go look for the one who wandered off?” Jesus knows the people He is talking to are not sheep. But they understand sheep. They understand shepherds. Even the very Jewish people He is speaking to knew a culture of shepherds going back to King David. But what Jesus has done with the sheep and the shepherds is He said, “Here’s a shepherd. We know this shepherd watches over His sheep. But I have to tell you, one is greater than all the shepherds that you have seen.” And then He points to Himself as The Good Shepherd. People can identify with that. People can say, “Yeah, I understand the cultural references that are brought in.”

And sometimes those are lost for us today. We can bring them out. We can understand because, partly, Jesus does explain them but we have to start looking into our own culture, into our own times and start to say, “How is it that we can use our culture to help spread the Good News of the gospel?” What is it that’s happening in your lives today, everyday life, that we start to pull in and say, “These are teachable moments for us.”

I am a recent convert to the Facebook community. I don’t know how many of you are but it’s like a small nation. I always said, “I’m never going to join it unless I figure out a time and a way that it won’t waste my time.” And for a long time, I avoided it because I saw a lot of people I knew who did waste their time on it. But I said, “If I can’t find a way to make it useful for me and a useful tool, then I’m never going to use it.” But I started to look more and more and I read some books on it and found that this Facebook can be a useful tool looking at our own culture, looking at our own settings for people today to spread the good news of the gospel.

So how is it that we can start to see in our own lives? We can start to identify the learners in our lives. We can start to identify that we are ourselves learners and we can start to bring in the environmental physical things of our world, that we can start speaking to our own culture and how that can better teach and better learn what’s happening in our world and how we can better spread the good news of the gospel. You see, this is all about awareness, becoming aware of the things we see everyday and how they can become teachable moments. Amen.

Copyright 2010 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church