Out of Sight, Out of Mind

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Today’s Gospel is a difficult one to unpack. Scholars who have written on the parable of the landowner and the vineyard agree that it presents the story of Israel as one of human failure and divine grace.

The vineyard is said to be the people of Israel, the landowner God, and the servant messengers are the prophets, rejected, as always. The son—well, we know that this is Jesus.

The Russian historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

As I see it, this is the problem with the way the Islamic State (IS) views its mission: they know what is right; everyone who does not agree must be eliminated.

If only it were all so simple! 

Jesus counseled his followers, “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” (Matthew 5: 44-45).

This is the first difficulty, then, that we want to identify with those good servants who come to collect what belongs to the landowner, when the fact is, we are just as likely to be like those tenants who resented the landowner and wanted the vineyard for themselves.

A second difficulty has to do with the absurdity of some of the elements of the parable. If we think about it, the most bizarre thing about the whole story is that the landowner would send his own son, after the tenants had treated others so badly (recall that they stoned and even killed some).

Finally, there is the stupidity of the tenants who think they can get away with their plot to eliminate the heir and inherit the vineyard.

Have you heard the old saying, “Out of sight, out of mind.”?

By telling this parable, Jesus is saying that God the landowner, has planted the vineyard Israel and then gone off with very high expectations for them as moral and ethical leaders. God went off, probably to plant new vineyards, and expected that, in his absence, goodness would abound.

The dark side of the story is that, more often than not, we, like the tenants, think that with God away on other errands, we can do whatever we want and that the fruit of our labor does not belong to God but is our rightful inheritance.

Out of sight, out of mind is the delusion that our infinitely good and gracious God does not see the bad we do, and thus cannot hold us accountable.

Consider the recent example of the tens of thousands of people demonstrating peacefully for democracy in Hong Kong. Their displays of freedom are carefully kept out of sight and out of mind elsewhere in China.

Human rights groups may report that Chinese activists are being detained or intimidated for supporting the Hong Kong protests, but the media coverage is being limited to short, negative reports, in hopes that out of sight will mean out of world scrutiny.

Online, Chinese censors have even removed information and images about the protests.

This is not unlike the tenants who seized God’s messengers, beat one, killed another, and stoned another. They were hoping that God’s collective consciouness would not hear the real story.

But they were wrong.

God is persistent.

And God persists today. Although the old guard in China is trying to suppress what is going on in Hong Kong, there is an insatiable hunger for goodness and freedom driving students, professors, business leaders, intellectuals, and just common folk like you and me to have their voices heard. These good folks are trying to build vineyards in the fertile soil of opportunity without fear of punishment for God’s gift of free will.

There are other ways to interpret today’s gospel story. One analysis is that God was a fool to choose those particular tenants, and that God knew what they were going to do, and that while God expected that good would be done, God did not choose the best people for the job.

I wouldn’t say that God was foolish in his choice of tenants because I believe that God has given each of us the strength to be good and do good in this world.

One of history’s good tenants was commemorated in the church calendar yesterday.

The man who came to be known as Francis of Assisi was a rich young man who gave up all worldly possessions because he heard the voice of God calling him to a life of service to others. It is said that Francis heard a sermon from Matthew’s Gospel in which Christ tells his followers they should go forth and proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven was upon them, that they should take no money with them, not even a walking stick or shoes for the road. This experience inspired Francis to devote himself to a life of poverty and service. Through the gentle plains and into the rugged hillsides of Umbria in Italy, Francis would minister to the poor and needy, build and rebuild small churches, and preach to both rich and poor that they should follow in the footsteps of Jesus.

One by one, young men and women were drawn to Francis, and he instilled in them the ethic that following Jesus was not about commercial wealth or political control, but about doing God’s work, and cultivating and nurturing goodness in those around them.

I believe that today’s gospel is an important reminder that we are both the vinedressers and the fruit of God’s vineyard.

Tending a vineyard in the right way means sharing healthy food with others. A good tenant is one who understands that all beings are created by God to live in harmony with the divine source of their lives. Such a way of living depends on seeing ourselves and our points of view as part of a whole picture, not with ourselves as central like the tenants in the vineyard, or government leaders trying to silence protesters in Hong Kong.

Friends, today’s gospel message is clear: we are called inwardly and spiritually to be good tenants of God’s holy vineyard, reaching out to all whom we meet. Let us remember the words of Jesus: the landowner’s only son, who said, "What you do to the least of these, you do to me."  And let us remember other scriptures like the Qu'ran that say things like, “Whichever way you turn, there is the face of God.”  Isn't this what Francis said as well? Didn't Mother Theresa say something similar? 

Let us see the face of God in all we meet, even the animals we bless in services on October 4. Let us recall that whatever we do to another creature, we do to God, for we are all connected, each to one another.

We may think we are out of God’s sight, be we are never out of God’s mind, God’s heart, or God’s love. Amen.

Why Grades Don't Matter

About a year ago, I read a blog post by a college student who wrote, “I want ‘grades don't matter’ tattooed on my forehead.” The student went on to say that too much focus on grades can distract a willing learner from the real purpose of education, which should be about one’s willingness to grow as a contributor to society and not about how society measures one’s mastery of facts and abilities.

In response to this college student’s very fine observation, I would like to add that college professors and high school teachers like me are also guilty of placing too much emphasis on grades, not because we want to, but because we are asked to by those who are currently in positions of leadership in our high schools, colleges and universities.

What good does it do to attend workshops on the value of teaching as a formative experience when the tools used to measure student growth and the value added from a semester or year in a class is measured in summative ways? What does it mean that L. got a 93 on her semester exam, while J. made a 65? How does one measure the value added when classes are taught in such a way that each student is allowed to explore in her or his own way?

Imagine a school where students discuss ideas and problem-solving approaches with peers every day, a school where students interview adults in the working world to ask about their jobs, create music videos connecting mathematical concepts like sinusoidal functions to the chromatic scale, write history papers about what the world would have been like had Archduke Ferdinand of Austria not been assassinated on June 28, 1914. In short, imagine a school where students are expected to grow in mind and spirit.

More and more these days, teachers are plagued with accusations of grade inflation, and in many cases it is a true criticism; but I wonder if the criticism isn’t unfair, or, at least, misplaced? Perhaps teachers inflate grades because, as my young college student noted, grades really don’t matter. Teachers know it. Students know it too. In a perfect world, students would seek to know more about everything. They would want to go to class. They would want to achieve at the highest levels.

So why are we still basing success in college and "life in the real world" (whatever that means) on grades?

Maybe it is time to come up with something better.

But what? How?

While searching through the college decision website cappex.com, I came across some interesting alternatives to grading by letters or numbers.

At Goddard College in Vermont, each student has a file full of narrative evaluations documenting student learning and growth. These evaluations are written by individual advisors and students. When students request a transcript, these records are compiled into a document that tells the reader far more than a list of courses and grades ever could. A Goddard transcript tells the reader something about who the student is as a learner and as a person, what the student’s academic interests and passions are, what they learned, and even how they learn best.

Antioch University offers narrative assessments, which, they claim, provide far better understanding of a student’s strengths as a learner and those areas that might need improvement.

At the completion of each course at New College of Florida, students receive an evaluation written by the instructor critiquing their performance and course work, along with a satisfactory, unsatisfactory, or incomplete designation. No letter grades. No grade point averages.

And, finally, for first-year students in their first semester of residence at Harvey Mudd College, all courses numbered below 50 are graded on the High Pass, Pass and No Credit scale. All courses numbered 50 and above are graded on the letter grade scale, except when noted. First-year courses are those numbered below 50. Lower division courses are those numbered 50 to 99. Upper division courses are those numbered 100 and above. Unlike the colleges listed above, at Harvey Mudd this only applies to first-year students.

Aside from wanting to take some pressure off myself as a teacher, I maintain that grades really aren't that important because the goal is to help students succeed in whatever their chosen passion or field of study. I agree with the young blogger who wrote: “I think that education is about better knowing yourself, better knowing the world around you, and attempting to figure out your place in the world. Understanding reality and your role in it (‘Knowing thyself,’ as the ancient Greeks said), is infinitely more valuable than any material consequences of a diploma. Education is about self-improvement, not about the number of zeros on the end of a paycheck.”

At St. Andrew’s, a coeducational residential school in Delaware, I teach mathematics classes, am one of two school chaplains, and, among other duties, I coach baseball. I have been teaching for 35 years. Over time I have come to appreciate how a new wave of young teachers has come to favor narrative assessments over number grades. While my colleagues and I still work hard to satisfy those who need and want number grades, we also strive to capture each student’s individual gifts, passions, and creative effort through the use of narrative assessments. These are written several times during the year, and they really do capture some amazing student achievement and growth.

Here are a few examples:

A Student taking Studio Art

K. has had an excellent spring in the art major studio. For her project series, she chose to revisit the style and process she employed in her imaginative self-portrait and, in her words, "build my compositions." K. chose to juxtapose opposite thematic elements as a way to generate creative possibilities for herself, and she succeeded in making two jubilant, dynamic paintings. The first was a beautiful mash-up between the old and new, employing elements of modern, urban nightlife and old fashion sartorial style. In both this work and the one that followed, K. demonstrated what a great colorist she has become and how fearlessly she has learned to approach pictorial problem solving. She deserves to be proud of her accomplishments this year, and I encourage K. to keep this artistic spirit alive for herself in the future.

A Student taking a course in History

From our very first meeting to our final discussion this spring, J. immersed herself joyfully and rigorously in the challenging work of this course; she came to class every single day eager to wrestle with the most complex questions raised by the texts we were studying. Her leadership was absolutely essential in building a deeply collaborative and scholarly class culture – unsurprisingly, her peers consistently looked to her to set an intellectual agenda for the discussion, and to offer the synthesis that would illuminate what they had collectively discovered over the course of the conversation. Likewise, she totally embraced and took full ownership of the senior exhibition project, achieving a deep understanding of Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. We were particularly impressed with the ways in which she contextualized the novel, really considering the issues of historical memory that Díaz engages. As a result, J.'s exhibition paper was deeply interdisciplinary in ways that really embodied what we hope students can accomplish with this course. J. also did incredibly compelling work in the project that concluded our unit on Angels in America; she and Louise wrote a truly remarkable song to reflect on the romantic relationships between characters in the play. They used some of Kushner's own words, but the way in which they wove them together was new and illuminating, and the original music was both sad and beautiful – perfect for the relationships the song explored. It has been such a joy to teach J. this year; her mind is so alive, and she is so authentically passionate about the world of ideas that she absolutely lights up the classroom. We can't wait to hear about everything she does in the years to come!

A Student taking a course in Latin

A. has worked very hard in Latin Lyric this year and has made great strides in his understanding of Latin poetry. His final paper focused on Horace 2.13 and, in particular, the influence of the Greek poet Alcaeus throughout Horace's body of work. A. was at his strongest in describing Horace's manipulation of the Alcaic stanza. He has learned not only to notice, but to feel the epigrammatic precision of a deftly-turned stanza and the headlong momentum of a well-judged enjambment. He hears and feels, too, the subtle modulations of longs and shorts in Horatian metric and has a connoisseur's taste for Horace's expert integration of thought and form. In the exhibition, A. found a bit of uncharacteristic difficulty in looking closely at Horace's text, but eventually came to see the value of Horace's achievement in assimilating for a Roman audience the poetic virtues of his primary models, Alcaeus and Sappho. In his writing, A. still has room to improve as an architect of arguments. He will continue to hone his ability to build a broad claim from observations of local detail, and to scaffold his ideas with clarity and economy. I also hope A. comes in time to appreciate the rhetorical pungency and emotional openness of Catullus as much as he now enjoys Horace's philosophical gravity and witty remove. It has been a great pleasure to teach A. and I wish him all the best in his continued study of literature and the Classics, in college and beyond. Ave atque vale, and keep in touch!

A Student taking a course in Calculus

I occasionally reflect on the sheer number of people to whom R. has taught mathematics, and that number is staggering. R's hard work and willingness to share his time and mathematical passion broadly is a testament to his deep compassion and mathematical skill. During his project presentation, R's multivariable economic model of the true costs and benefits of a college education was wonderfully prepared. Forever serving his peers, R's presentation primarily focused on the concerns of his friends, who would be financing a part of their college education. I was particularly impressed by the ease with which R. employed multiple mathematical tools to create his economic model. I look forward to hearing from R. as he continues his scholarship in college next year, and I hope he will continue to study mathematics.

As my year in the classroom winds down, I am already thinking about next year and how my teaching can be improved. If you are still reading this blog, then you are probably thinking in a similar way. As we ponder what our assessments will look like this summer or what we can do to prepare for next fall, perhaps we can remember that assigning grades does not have to drive how we teach. My young college blogger thinks that valuing education for its personal return instead of its what-will-a-good–grade-do-for-me return, helps students live up to that sage wisdom, “Know thyself.”

Grades have been a necessary part of education for decades, but working to obtain good grades is not the goal of education. Knowing who you are and how you can best contribute to society, following your passion, and maintaining a steady pace along that fascinating road to discovery—these are life-long goals. How can one assign a grade or even know how to assign a grade to any student who has begun to live with such passion?

Remembering MLK

There are some really disturbing ads on TV these days. I wonder if you know the ones I’m talking about? If you have cable and your picture freezes, you get irritable. When you get irritable, your work suffers. When your work suffers, wrong things happen, and so on, until …, your house explodes!

Disturbing as those commercials might be, they do make a point. And the point is that to understand something in the present, we need to understand the past. A leads to B, and B depends upon A.

When we come to church and hear the lessons, sometimes we tune out. They can seem boring because, taken out of context, they have little value or meaning in today’s culture. I believe that the old stories still have great value and meaning, but what is lacking is an understanding of the first thing—the assumption, the bases of the stories.

The earliest stories in Scripture are the ones about good and bad. The serpent disobeyed. Cain killed his brother and then lied about it. God was irritable. And when God is irritable, your house explodes.

Another major story is about Moses, a Hebrew, who led the Israelite people out of Egypt and across the Red Sea in hopes of finding a promised land. If you are going to understand the stories you hear in church on Sundays, you have got to understand the story of Moses and the Exodus. Without it, nothing is going to make real sense.

Basically the story is this: About 3000 years ago, a Hebrew nation had been growing in Egypt where they worked alongside Egyptians. They were industrious, smart, hard-working, clever, and happy. At the same time, they were becoming numerous. And this was upsetting to the Egyptian leadership, who had been enjoying all the prosperity, innovation, and forward thinking by the Hebrew people. And the leadership grew fearful because the Hebrew people were outnumbering the Egyptian people. Rather than include them, the Egyptians tried every way they knew to oppress them. They enslaved them, worked them to death, and even murdered their babies.

This is what happens when leadership lacks vision. Failure to adapt and to be inclusive leads to suppression in a desperate attempt to maintain control, to protect the status quo and calm your own fears.

So the Hebrew people in Egypt, under the leadership of two brothers, Moses and his older brother Aaron, fought hard to win freedom for the suppressed, enduring great hardships as they tried, over and over again, to negotiate with Pharaoh and his ministers. When negotiations broke down, Moses and Aaron led an exodus out of Egypt. And thus began a new era in the ongoing story of the people of Israel.

The story of the Exodus is a defining story. Whether or not it is true as an historical fact or not, it is fundamental to everything that a Jewish person is, what he says, what she does, how they think.

In a way, we are all descendents of those early freedom seekers. And as their descendents, we are defined by the Exodus story as well. Our constitution is based on fundamental rights to life and liberty. We embrace freedom as the highest ideal, and will die to protect and preserve it. The quest for freedom, equal rights, and equal opportunity are fundamental and inalienable. That means they cannot be taken away. By anybody!

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was no stranger to the Exodus story. To understand him, to understand his stirring speeches, to appreciate his leadership, we must see his words through the lens of the Exodus.

All children, said Dr. King, all men and women, regardless of skin color, …, all are God’s children. To believe otherwise is silly and stupid, as silly, said Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as classifying one’s worthiness by the size of his nose.

Freedom, the right to love and marry the person you want to, the right to get a good education, earn enough money to have a decent life, the right to live where you want to and go to school there, to study, to learn, to grow—These are fundamental to our identity as citizens of the world.

The idea that you can be boxed in by prejudice, hatred, deceptions—these are learned values. But we are born with certain values. As King was to say, in a 1965 speech in Alabama, “the end we seek is a society at peace with itself, a society that can live with its conscience.” And we cannot do that when we are at unrest with our differences, when we know that our cultural values are in conflict with our inward sense of truth.

When I visited the King Memorial in Washington, DC over Christmas, I was struck by the images there. The mountain of stone behind Dr. King’s massive form is split in two, with a huge channel between the divided mountain. People were walking through this rift, and all I could think of was the Exodus.

As one walks around the monument, one gets a clear view of the Jefferson Memorial. That view reminds us that we are all children of the ages, and that our past comes forward with us through stories of courage and vision of people like Moses, and Jesus, and the founding fathers of our nation, the leaders of the Civil Rights movement, and the young people fighting for freedom and equal rights today in the Middle East, Russia, Africa, Brazil, and everywhere that freedom is denied.

The third Monday of February is a national holiday, a day when we are called to remember The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If I were writing to Dr. King today, I would say something like this:

Dear Dr. King,

Thank you for your dedication to the principles of freedom and liberty, those same principles which brought the Hebrew people into the Promised Land, and the same principles which gave birth to our nation. Your holiday gives us a day to remember our history and ancestry, and your sacrifice teaches us never to deny that we are marvelously made and that we are not free until everyone is free.