One of the great developments of my lifetime, hands down now, is the reduction in homework given to grade school children.  My son and daughter do way less homework than I did at grades well below where they are now.

And no, this isn’t a moment to brag about walking uphill both ways in the snow while doing quadratic equations on a stone tablet.

Less homework is a good—no—a great thing.

Unless.

Unless you are no longer a grade school child.

Somehow my children are fantastic at getting their homework done before engaging in other activities.  They did not inherit this from me.  Some of this stems from their solid work ethic—again, where did that come from?—and some of it stems from not being buried with hours of busy work.  Either way, I have hardly ever had to enforce the do-your-homework-before-you-have-screen-time rule.  I don’t even think they know this is a rule.

But we should know.

Know that it is a rule.

We should make sure that we are doing our homework before “having screen time”.  Before we watch Fox News, or CNN, or so-and-so’s talk show, or this-or-that’s youtube rant cast. And certainly before we head anywhere we are tempted to post that meme that came across our feed that has to be true because it seems and feels so true.

Let me say it again.

Do. Your. Homework.

Reading social media memes is not doing your homework.  Watching cable news, that has a financial incentive to scare you and rile you up, is not doing your homework.  Reading a two minute article online is not doing your homework.  Posting an article that agrees with you without paying attention to the reliability of the source is, yeah…

…not doing your homework.

I am shocked when I get into conversations with people about this-or-that subject how little research or reading or listening has actually been done.  Someone recently argued with me that the church needs to quit talking about justice and go back to the good old days of altar calls. I pointed out that the word for “justice” proliferates throughout the Hebrew and Greek texts. God is concerned about little else. I pointed out that the first altar calls didn’t happen until the 19th Century.  I pointed out that these altar calls were first and foremost inviting people to give up their slaves.  Which, I pointed out, is a justice issue.

He pointed out that Jesus gave altar calls.

Wha…

Where…

Please.

Do your homework.

Which reminds me that I need to, that’s right, do my homework.  What do I really know about gun violence in America?  About what it means to be LGBTQ?  About climate change?  About Bernie and Donald and COVID-19?

I need to do my homework.

This means cornering some real experts.  It is how I got over my irrational fear of flying.  I found a pilot waiting for a lift from the hotel to the airport, and I fire-hydranted him in the lobby: “You’re at 34000 feet and engine one goes…” 

“Now engine two goes…” 

“Now what?” 

“Huh?!”

They glide?

I had no idea.

And a week later a 747 lost all its four engines and glided to safety.

This means reading articles from reputable sources that are more than a blog post long.  I know.  This is hard.  There is a reason we are told not to write more than 500 words.  More than that is too much for people to stick with.  But this is mandatory. We need to know the facts behind the facts, the issues behind the issues, the stories and philosophies and histories that are part of the whole thing.

This means listening, listening to someone else who has had a different experience than you, education than you, grew up in a different country (or county!) than you, has a different set of credentials than you.

One of the ways the sacred Hebrew and Greek scriptures invited people to love God was with their minds.  Not to the exclusion of their intuitions, or feelings, or nudgings.  But rather in concert with.

In an age when people believe some facts are alternative, some news is fake, and some truths are relative, we need to be the kind of people that truly know the difference.

We don’t just need to know why those we disagree with believe what they believe; we need to know why we believe what we believe.

And if we really should.