Commencement Address

Too Big for Our Breaches

Each of you graduates has been given a small piece of Velcro.
You know you want to. Go ahead. Pull it apart. I’ll give you a count of three…

What a strangely irritating and satisfying sound! Almost as good as bubble wrap. It’s irritating, because it sounds like something is tearing, even though you know it isn’t. And it’s satisfying, because you can do it again, repeatedly. No harm done.

Marvelous stuff, Velcro. It joins things together without binding them. It holds, and it releases; and when it works properly, it’s invisible. But once you start actually looking for it, it turns out that such snug, free, and resilient connections can be found in all kinds of places.  George De Mestral, the Swiss engineer who invented Velcro in 1948, first came up with the idea by examining the burrs that his dog had picked up on a mountain hike. More recent investigators have discovered that human skin is both strong and supple thanks to proteins called cadherins that work like…Velcro. Who knew?

To the graduating class of 2017, I want to say, congratulations! You are now human Velcro. If we, the faculty and staff of the Seminary, have done our jobs right, you will sometimes be an irritant, tearing things apart because they don’t work anymore or they need a closer look; sometimes you will join things together in ways that people haven’t seen before, or you will recognize hidden connections that were there all the time, but that nobody noticed, and you will make them plain. And in all of that, you will be stewards of the mysteries of God, the Maker of all things visible…and invisible.

To those of you, their families and friends, who have been privileged to share their joys and their drama, their exhilaration and consternation and caffeination and, now, their achievements: You are the unsung heroes of this piece, and I’m sure that more than once, during this process, you have asked the perfectly reasonable question, “What are they doing to you over there?”. That’s what we’ve been doing to them. Thank you for sharing them with us, and for companioning them with your love and support along the way; you can have them back now as, we hope, improved versions of themselves. And I hope they’ll take you someplace very nice for dinner tonight.

OK, let me expand a bit on what I hope we’ve done to you. You who are graduating today will be in the people fastening business, as you wed couples for life in a culture marked by transience and disposability, or help to mend lives that have been frayed by addiction, or trauma, or worry, or grief, or guilt; or listen with people to the deep whisperings of the Spirit, for those “God moments” we talk about so much; or as you forge congregations and communities of care and commitment; or teach or preach and evoke those “Aha!” moments when a new idea comes together for the first time. You will be weavers of meaning, and you will help people keep it together when meaning fails, and life makes no sense, and it all seems to be coming apart. And through it all, in an age that is tempted to whipsaw between an authoritarian compulsion to lock everything down and a disruptive impulse to blow everything up, you will witness to the unlikely but irresistible truth that the only things that last are those that grow and connect and change and stay resilient.

The Mission Statement of this seminary describes us as “centered in Jesus Christ.” Now to some folks, that could be a warning sign, an indication that this was a place that would, in the words of a young friend of mine, “sling Jesus” at them. But the first statement one sees upon opening our website is that we are “a Christian seminary that embraces students of Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, [let me add Hinduism], or even no faith tradition at all.” And to those of you who took us up on that, whose coming here required a particularly large leap of faith, or culture, or language, a special word of thanks. We’re glad you took the risk. You have enriched our community beyond measure, and we hope that we have done the same for you.

And I hope, whatever your tradition, that you have learned here that being centered in Jesus Christ doesn’t close things off; it opens things up. We try, I hope successfully, to embody the truth that to be Christ-centered is not to be part of an exclusive club, but to be in an expanding circle.  In fact, the 15th-century visionary Nicolas of Cusa described God as “a circle whose center is everywhere, whose circumference, nowhere.” And I hope that, as you prepare to leave us, we’re sending you out to be both deeply centered and boldly unbounded.

As Craig Atwood just read for us, in the words of the epistle to the Colossians, Christ is “all things and in all people.” In Greek, ta panta – “all things.” Imagine that. The point is not, as the saying goes, to “capture” or “claim” or “conquer” everything for Christ, but to recognize what the Jesuit mystic and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called “the Christic” in all things. Teilhard wrote, “Love is the only force which can make things one without destroying them. … Some day, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for the second time in the history of the world, [we] will have discovered fire.”

“Love is the only force which can make things one without destroying them.” Again and again, in this place, we have seen this claim turn out to be, not just an agreeable possibility, but a demonstrable fact. In life, as in physics, we’re learning that it’s all about relationships. It’s all about fields and forces, actions and reactions that push and pull, and form and inform, and deform and reform, in all kinds of unpredictable and often spooky ways.

All of which sounds a lot like seminary education, where you have been thrown together with fellow students whose life experiences and beliefs have often been jarringly different from you own, and where you have negotiated your way through that in classes and supervision groups and practicums and  placements and informal conversation over pizza, and you have been changed – not destroyed, but somehow made one, and stronger.  And, in you, we have tried to package that for export.

In all of this, we have tried to follow the admonition of the seminary’s spiritual grandfather Jan Amos Comenius, who wrote, in his book The Great Didactic,

Let the main object of this, our Didactic, be as follows: To seek and to find a method of instruction, by which teachers may teach less, but learners may learn more; by which schools may be the scene of less noise, aversion, and useless labor, but more of leisure, enjoyment, and solid progress; and through which the Christian community may have less darkness, perplexity, and dissension, but on the other hand more light, orderliness, peace, and rest.

It’s worth noting that Comenius lived at a time of radical dislocation when Christians all over Europe were murdering each other at a furious clip in the name of “true religion,” and when he himself was being hounded all over the map for preaching the way of peace and mutual forbearance. The prophet we know as Second Isaiah wrote when Jerusalem lay in pieces, seemingly destroyed forever by the imperial ambitions of Babylon. But it’s the words of Comenius and Isaiah that we have read today, not the edicts of Nebuchadnezzar or of the crowned heads of 17th century Europe. And it is Comenius’s statue that stands across the street.  And those comfortable words, all about light, orderliness, peace, and rest, and about light rising in the darkness and gloom being like the noonday, were not penned in moments of calm and leisurely reflection, but in the midst of conflict and confusion and chaos. And they remind us how often it is not by trying to make themselves the center of it all, but by standing with those on the margins, that our forebears found the cutting edge of the future.

After all, putting oneself at the center easily leads, as my grandparents would have said, to getting too big for one’s britches, getting an inflated sense of one’s importance in the overall scheme of the world. And what inflates, deflates.

But to put love at the heart of things is to discover that the spirit of truth, and justice, and compassion, and mercy that has drawn us together here is too big for the breaches that threaten to sunder us.

Isaiah, of course, nails it. Let me share his words with you again:
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
 if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
 The Lord will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
 Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.

In a world that, like Comenius’s, is afflicted with too much of what he called darkness, perplexity, and dissension, our task remains, to be repairers of the breach, restorers of streets for people to live in. Not streets in some imaginary utopia, or streets that are mere grids to be technocratically managed down to the last nickel in the last parking meter, or streets that are little more than drive throughs on the way to somewhere else, but streets in which kids can play (that’s biblical – see Zechariah 8:5), streets in which cars and delivery trucks are sometimes double parked and the music is often too loud, streets with actual sidewalks in which you meet all kinds of people face to face, streets in which we have to make room for each other and that are wide enough to allow us to do so. Streets that have some give built into them, where there’s room for life, but none for gridlock or road rage.

So, off you go. Be well, be strong, be of good courage. Connect, and reconnect, collaborate, partner up; there are companions on the way that you have met, and others that are waiting for you to meet them. Be fervent and constant in prayer and meditation and practice. Hold the truth you know, with conviction and humility and gentleness. And may God bless your going out and your coming in, your fastenings and unfastenings and refastenings, today and in all the days ahead. Amen.

Isaiah 58:6 – 12 (NRSV)
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
 if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
 The Lord will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
 Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.

Colossians 3: 9b – 14 (Common English Bible)
Take off the old human nature with its practices and put on the new nature, which is renewed in knowledge by conforming to the image of the one who created it. In this image there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcised nor uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free, but Christ is all things and in all people.

Therefore, as God’s choice, holy and loved, put on compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, and patience. Be tolerant with each other and, if someone has a complaint against anyone, forgive each other. As the Lord forgave you, so also forgive each other. And over all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.