Head of School Message on Service
December 2, 2025
Happy Advent, everybody! The holiday season is upon us. This is a time of gift giving and receiving - whether it is Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa. It also anticipates our community’s other gift-giving traditions, whether it is the Muslim Eid or the Chinese New Year, and harkens to the recently celebrated Diwali. Giving and receiving gifts brings joy to those we love and to ourselves as we see the joy in those we love.
This is perhaps the most joyous and exciting time of the church year as we await the arrival of the incarnate God here on earth - the greatest gift that Christians believe mankind has ever received. If we are among those who celebrate, as children, we focus on the excitement of Christmas gifts. I can still remember being unable to sleep on Christmas Eve in anticipation of what awaited me the next morning under the tree. Some of my best memories of early fatherhood were seeing the excitement on my daughter’s face when she saw that Santa had arrived the night before. It was all magical.
We should pause at this time of year to remember, though, what we are celebrating - what this magic, this joy, this excitement is in service of. We are celebrating the fact that God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son to the Earth to walk among us, to be one of us, to experience everything we experience, that is to be human.
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”
So what does this mean exactly? What does it mean that the Word became flesh? What does it mean that Jesus (God) became human? What does it mean for us to be human?
Well, if we look at Jesus’s life - his time here on earth during which Christians believe that he was both fully God and fully human at the same time - what are the things that Jesus experienced that made him fully human?
First, he had the fully human relationship of growing up in a family. He was dearly loved by his father and mother, Joseph and Mary. If we look at the Bible passage in which, at the age of 12 or 13, Jesus wandered away from his parents at Passover, they were terrified about his safety. Even when they found him, Jesus had what we could consider a typically human adolescent response to his mom when she exclaimed in an exasperated tone, “We’ve been looking all over for you?” Jesus said, “You should have known where I would be.” Jesus as a middle schooler!
As Jesus grew older, we see that he liked a good party. He liked to socialize. At the wedding at Canaa, he made sure everybody had enough wine to drink to keep the party going. He was also there to bless the idea that we are at our most human when we find someone else to share our lives with. Relationships and marriage mattered to him.
Jesus also had deep friendships. An example was with his friend Lazarus and Lazarus’s sisters Martha and Mary. When Jesus found out about Lazarus’s death, he wept, not for his death but for the sadness it caused his sisters. Jesus performed a miracle and resurrected Lazarus.
But… Jesus also liked to spend time alone, meditating, in nature, praying. Jesus spends forty days in the desert, fasting - denying himself worldly pleasures, preparing himself for his work and ministry. Training, preparation, self-denial, and self-imposed hardships for improvement. These things, too, are fully human.
What is also fully human is to serve. Jesus’s ministry is our greatest example of self-sacrificial love - the love that compels us to make our lives about serving others - that should be our ultimate purpose and the purpose we are hoping to ignite in you. This type of love, this service, is exemplified in his washing of his disciples' feet before the Last Supper. He engaged in what was one of the most humbling acts possible to drive home the point that leadership is ultimately service to those you lead.
And lastly, of course, is his Passion and Resurrection - the ultimate comeback story about suffering and humiliation. This, too, is to be fully human. To go through very difficult things but come out on the other side better for it.
I have quoted St. Irenaeus before: “the greatest glory of God is to be a human fully alive. Being a human fully alive means experiencing all these types of things that Jesus experiences. It means developing deep relationships - family, friendships, lifetime romantic partnerships. It means engaging in hard training to prepare yourself to lead a fulfilling life. It means making your life about serving others, and lastly, it means that to be your best self, you may have your own crosses to bear at some point, some of your own failures and hardships to overcome. You may have to take risks that cause you suffering in the short term. It is how you are ultimately most fully alive.
As Head of School, I am often asked what I think about AI and the advent of the most modern technologies of the last twenty years. People are interested in my opinion about the impact it will have on young people and how ESD should prepare you for thriving in the next fifty years. Here is some advice for you.
These technologies are coming. You have to understand how they work and how you can use them as a tool in your life - a tool, not a crutch. You have to control them. They cannot control you.
And you have to understand this. These technologies have the potential to eliminate most of your opportunities to be a human fully alive. Look at the list I gave you from the example of Jesus’s life.
- Deep human relationships are developed face-to-face, not through a screen or with an AI-generated friend.
- Hard training and some self-denial become challenging to engage in when technological crutches are widely available - “everybody’s doing it! Why should I go through this hardship?”
- Our culture is screaming at you right now - “Life is about you. Get out of it what you want. Satisfy your needs first, make it easy on yourself, and here is the technology to make that happen.”
I am offering a different message. Your ultimate autonomy - your control over who you are and what you are to become as a human being will come not from satisfying your own pleasures and needs. You are what you worship. When satisfying your own material needs is the ultimate goal - money, power, fame, ultimately what you worship - that becomes a recipe for an inwardly directed, sad, and lonely life. You lose your autonomy, you are no longer a human fully alive when you become a consumer of the “attention economy” - scrolling the latest tech platform endlessly looking at what others are doing, maybe longing for their life rather than creating your own. It is empty. It is like junk food.
This Advent, we are reminded of the ultimate gift - the arrival of the Christian Savior and the example he set for us of what it means to be human. I ask you to consider how you might rededicate yourself to that project. Maybe get outside! Experience life! Get out in nature. Serve others! Have relationships! When you get older, maybe you'll fall in love! Break up and be devastated, and then fall in love again! Try to learn a new skill and fail miserably (or maybe not). Who knows? But more than anything, please be a human fully alive.
Amen
