After months of waiting for stone masons to finish repair work, a stone topped altar has been located in the chapel at ARK William Parker Academy.
The altar was originally in an Anglican monastery and was then passed to the Rev’d Colin Tolworthy, lately incumbent of Holy Trinity, Hastings. He used it in his home for weekday Eucharist until he retired and moved into more limited accommodation. He then entrusted the altar to the Rev’d Robert Featherstone of All Saints, Hastings Old Town. He used the altar in his church, where the Rev’d William Parker served in the early 1600s, until it was replaced by a more portable altar. Last summer Father Robert gave the altar to me as a personal gift with the understanding that it would used for Eucharist at the school.
At All Saints the stone was mysteriously, and seriously, damaged. It had been broken into several pieces and the fragile material was difficult to cement and required steel rods to keep it. But at last it arrived from the stone masons just in time for a brief visit paid to William Parker by the Rt Rev’d Martin Ward, Bishop of Chichester.
The edge of the stone is engraved in latin dating its dedication to Epiphany 1853. How appropriate that it should be placed in the school chapel in the first week of Epiphany. The top has four crosses in the corners symbolising the wounds of Christ in his hands and feet. In the centre there is a fifth cross. The stone is borne by a plain oak table. Such beautiful simplicity.
We have an altar of another kind too. It is even more beautiful. The writer to the Hebrews was probably addressing a situation in which Jewish converts were challenged by the taunt that as Jews they had an altar in the temple but as Christians they had nothing of the sort. But the writer protests, “We have an altar.” He was not thinking of any Eucharistic Table but of Calvary’s cross and all that happened there. Christ’s body was broken and his blood was shed. We have an altar with powerful significance for the human soul. We have an altar.

The striking thing about education is that everyone is an expert on the subject.  Everyone has his opinion.  Perhaps that is understandable because we have all been to school and have experienced education.  Nevertheless, we would do well for our philosophy of education to turn to God’s word.  In Proverbs 1⁷ we read, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge.

These words could be regarded as a summary of all the wisdom literature.  The same words or similar appear in one Scripture after another:  Proverbs 9¹⁰ The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight.  Proverbs 15³³  The fear of the Lord is instruction in wisdom.  Psalm 111¹⁰  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom; all those who practise it have a good understanding.  Job 28²⁸  Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to turn away from evil is understanding.

The text suggests two heads –

1. The fear of the Lord

Repeatedly I hear people say, “But we shouldn’t fear the Lord, should we?” as if the answer is obviously negative.  But surely we should fear Him.  If He is Almighty, our Creator, Sustainer and Judge He is awesome.  If we are totally dependent upon Him and at His mercy we must hold Him in great regard.  In one hymn after another we seem to express approval of fear of God.

How dread are Thine eternal years

O everlasting Lord,

by prostrate spirits day and night

incessantly adored!

O how I fear Thee living God,

with deepest tenderest fears,

and worship Thee with trembling hope

and penitential tears!

God is all powerful and utterly holy.  I am not.  He cannot abide un-holiness.  That makes me tremble.  It is right that we stand in awe of God.  It is amazing that he receives us, and yet we treat it as our right that He accepts us and gives us a place in heaven.  Come on, He is God almighty and I am a speck of dirt on the face of the planet.

Because Jesus has died I will be acquitted on judgment day and so I have peace with God and peace concerning my eternal destiny.  Yet even in that assurance I have to feel some awe and trembling before Him.

Now this is all about our relationship with God.  Let me propose that education is about relationships.  If someone on the street spits at me as I go by, I may well think, “What an uneducated person – what an ignorant person!”  An educated man will relate to people in a proper way.  Education is about relationships – relationships with the world about us, with people and society, and with ourselves; and a true education is about relationship with God too.

Everyone relates to God in some way or another.  There is the relationship that is warm and willingly submissive, so that I say, “How wonderful God is, how good to me, how great and how gracious – my God how wonderful Thou art!”  I relate to God in a particular way.  Another man may relate to God in a very different way – perhaps he ignores God, perhaps he rebels against God – even when he senses God prompting his conscience he kicks against God and refuses Him.  Perhaps he despises God.  He may even declares himself to be an atheist and says that he believes that there is no God.  This is an ignorant man – an uneducated man.  The context in which a genuine education takes place is the fear of the Lord – an appropriate relationship with God.

2. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Education

This does not mean that you need the fear of the Lord at the beginning and that you can then leave it behind once you have got going.  People used to send the young to Sunday School to give them a good start in life and learn some sound morals; then in their early teens they could leave behind Sunday School and church attendance, especially if they were boys.  Again in our primary schools hymns and perhaps Bible stories are used; then at secondary school those things are forgotten and Christianity may even be explicitly denied.  So belief in the Lord is regarded as the beginning in the sense of that which can be left behind.

This is not the kind of ‘beginning’ that is intended by the proverb; here we have the beginning in the sense of that which is foundational.   When you build a house you begin with the foundation, but you do not then leave that initial work and build the structure somewhere else!  The foundation is essential to what you go on to build.  With no proper foundation you will end up with a pile of bricks and sticks when the storm comes.

Without the beginning — the foundation — knowledge will turn out to be a worthless pile of information.  Mere information is not knowledge or education.  Go back to Genesis 3 and the fall.  The serpent said “If you just forget God and what He said about the fruit you will have knowledge – you will know good and evil.”  They took the fruit in disobedience to God; there was a sense in which what the serpent promised was fulfilled: they knew the difference between the experience of obedience and the experience of disobedience.  But this new knowledge was not to their advantage at all.  It was a disaster and the consequence was dreadful damage in every sphere.  Move on to Genesis 11 where we read of the great tower that was built at Babel.  People said that they would do something impressive and make a name for themselves as very clever, educated people.  When they had built it was an extraordinary feat, but what good was it?  They did it against God and He confused them and scattered them.  These accounts in the Old Testament narrative illustrate that all the information and cleverness apart from God is worthless.  A man may have exams and degrees to his name and be an academic authority and be a university professor, but without the fear of the Lord he does not even have the beginning of education.  Our world rewards with academic honours those who have no true education.

You see why I believe in Christian schooling, why I think it matters that children learn the stories of Jesus, why I am grieved by the undermining of Biblical Christianity in our education system?

Are you an educated person?  I do not mean to ask about your paper qualifications.  Paul spoke of Christ who has become our wisdom:  …Jesus Christ, whom God made our wisdom and  our righteousness and sanctification and redemption (1 Corinthians 1³⁰).  I mean to ask you, ‘do you have a respectful and loving relationship with God through the Lord Jesus Christ?’  To establish an appropriate relationship with God is to have the foundation of real education.

I have known Michael since he was born.  He has been in Sunday School and in our children’s clubs and youth groups;  I visited his family while they were in Switzerland with YWAM; I was kicked by him when he was in my care and did not want to do as he was told!  All the usual kind of stuff!  And I have seen him grow up and leave school.

This week it was so gratifying to have him with me at collective worship, playing his guitar and singing the praises of the Saviour before hundreds of boys.  Most of the lads will have little church experience outside of college.  Perhaps they think that Christianity is dull, old fashioned and only for the elderly – especially women.  Here a very credible young man affirmed, “In Christ alone I stand.”

Last week the Bishop of Lewis opened with a service of dedication a small college chapel.  At a moving ceremony, the Lord’s similitude of the wise man who built a house on a rock was read.  The image speaks to young and old alike.  The rock of the words of Christ are a solid foundation for an individual’s life; they are a basis for education.  The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.

If Christian theism is true and and the Triune God is the Lord of all creation, the secular model of education is folly. The fear of the Lord is only the beginning, but it is the beginning of wisdom.  Without the fear of the Lord, education is not really begun.

This means that for Christian believers the Bible in education is not a luxury but a necessity.

At the end of a week speaking to one group of boys after another about the cross, we located and fixed a 7 foot cross on the exterior wall of the new college chapel.  What a wonderful climax to a series of addresses.  Actually, we have had four weeks during which over a thousand students have repeatedly heard the message of the cross.  Now as staff and students make their way from one end of the site to the other they will have before them this reminder of the Lamb of God.

How relevantly Christ speaks to those who will hear Him:

•   When we are burdened with guilt and a conviction of sin, we hear the same voice that has spoken down the centuries: Father, forgive them…
• When we are wearied in well-doing and succumbing to the lure of the world and the temptation to ‘do something for yourself’, we see the compelling example of self sacrifice.
• When it feels as if everything is going wrong or the whole world is against us, Christ seems to say from the cross, “I know; I understand;  I have been there and done that.”

Here is an important observation: unlike what is pictured above, the way to the cross of Christ is not barred; it is open to all who will come to receive forgiveness and healing.