THE CATECHISM WAS/IS ONLY THE BEGINNING

When I was growing up and going to Sunday School (I had to because I did not go to parochial school, my punishment for that being twelve years of seminary [joke]) the curriculum was the Baltimore Catechism. It was a question-and-answer text with three sections and thirty-eight subsections. Boring.

My peers in the Lutheran Church had to memorize Luther’s Small Catechism that was twenty-eight pages long. My Presbyterian friends’ Sunday School text was the Westminster Catechism consisting of 107 questions and answers. I didn’t have any Episcopal friends back then but their text from the 1928 Book of Common Prayer was, and I quote, “A Catechism that is to say, an Instruction to be Learned by Every Person before he be brought to be Confirmed by the Bishop.” . It was six pages long. The Catechism in the latest Book of Common Prayer is eighteen pages long. I’ll say it for all of them: boring, boring, boring.

Now don’t get me wrong, the information about our faith in its many manifestations is important and it is important for any Christian or would-be Christian to know even if it is not memorized as was often demanded back then. But the lessons learned back then and even today were then and are now only the beginning. Learned lessons are only truly learned when they are lived out in the real world outside the Sunday School classes.

What all of us discovered back then and what we learn even today is that living the lesson is often very, very difficult. But that, again, is the only real way to learn. We can read a book on how to ride a bicycle, know it by heart even; but it is only when we get on that bike and ride it that we really know how to ride a bike. It is the same in every aspect of life. Book knowledge is only the beginning. It is necessary knowledge but it is not the end of learning.

Back in my day and even today the message given was that it is relatively easy to be a Christian, to follow Jesus. All we had and have to do is try it sometime and we quickly learned back then and learn today how difficult it often is. Yes, catechisms aside, it is a simple message: love as Jesus loved, love as Jesus commanded us to love. What does that love look like? Read the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel: fed the hungry, cloth the naked, visit the sick and imprisoned.

My Catechism called these actions the seven “corporeal works of mercy”.  In essence they are very simple commands. In practice they can be difficult to fulfill because they put demands on us that we often would rather avoid. They make us go out of our way, out of our comfort zone, and we don’t like to do that. Those catechisms told and continue to tell us what it means to be a follower of Jesus. But they are only for starters. To really know what it means and to really be a Christian we have to live what we have learned in our daily lives. There is no other way. But we already know that don’t we?