Commencement Address given May 2010


Honored seniors, students, respected faculty, staff, and administration, fellow board members, friends, and most of all, parents, I am delighted to have the honor of addressing you on this important night when we celebrate the commencement of our latest senior class. I have enjoyed working with you seniors in Capstone all year, and in Theology III last year, and apart from two rather inexplicable attachments of yours, I am very proud of your accomplishments. The first is your attachment to the High School Musical movies, and second is to the name “The Great Hodge-Podge.”

Brevity is most certainly is the soul of wit, and while I am ordinarily reluctant to take any advice from Polonius, if there were an appropriate place to be brief, it would be when you are standing between a wild-eyed senior class and its stack of diplomas. I want to promise you that I will indeed be brief, to the point, time-conscious, brief, short-winded, timely, brief, and most of all, redundant.

Seniors, you have been told for years now WHAT a Classical/Christian education is, not only through the content of your classes, but in parent meetings and assemblies – some of you since kindergarten -- and you would probably rather have a root canal than hear it discussed in public again, and I can’t blame you. So, I’m going to make you a second promise, one that is even more daring: I am NOT going to tell you what Classical/Christian education is again…even if you beg. If you don’t know by now, there is really very little help for you, anyway.

However, I do want to tell you a secret. I want to tell you WHY we did it. We, that is, the faculty, staff, board, and most of all, your parents, who chose to put you through this peculiar education when you could have been sent to public and private schools already in existence. It would have been easier, less expensive, and just the thought of the extra free-time we’d all have had --- well, all I can say is that we would all have better golf games…

Why did we do it? Because we believe it is the best way we know to prepare you to be used by God. Make no mistake - this education is not for you. It is for God. The command to be fruitful and multiply given in Genesis was taken rather seriously by your parents, and you are the resultant fruit -- once they got over the initial shock of bringing you into the world, they found themselves in the somewhat Abrahamic position of knowing that you would one day have to be sacrificed. (don’t look so alarmed, Katie - I am speaking figuratively...) Your parents began to see their responsibility to train and teach you so that you would be able to accomplish whatever work God would have in store for you.

What I mean is that your life is not your own. You didn’t make yourselves, and you didn’t raise yourselves -- and you don’t give yourselves meaning. You were created for God’s purposes, and your parents, who have rightly taken the responsibility for your education, have turned to our school to help them prepare you in this life for the next. Yes - it is part of the medieval mind that the purpose of education is to prepare you for eternity. Of course, there are consequences in THIS life when you believe. Being prepared for eternity means that you will live the life you live BEFORE death DIFFERENTLY than others around you.

You have heard it said that the Classical/Christian education is the somewhat awkward combination of Greek reason and Christian revelation, and that this combination is the foundation of Western civilization. Actually neither of these statements is completely true. First, the only reason that the combination of reason and revelation is in any way awkward is that the two sides of reason and revelation have been rather brutally separated by our recent ancestors, and putting them back together is a little reminiscent of Humpty Dumpty. And secondly, the only reason we think of this hybrid as the foundation of Western civilization is that we have overlooked what really IS the foundation of Western civilization, a foundation that is at once more clear and more mysterious.

You will recall that God had to throw the Apostle Paul down to the ground and blind him in order to get his attention. What really interests me tonight in this story is that when Paul is led blind into Damascus, God speaks to a fellow called Ananias, and tells him to go heal Paul. Well, Paul’s motto was always “stone first and ask questions later,” and Ananias was understandably a bit reluctant to meet him. But God convinces him by telling him that he has chosen Paul to be the one to take God’s name to the gentiles. Why did He choose Paul?

Who can fathom the plans of God? But we can speculate a little -- Paul grew up in a Jewish home, learned his scriptures, knew the ways of temple worship, and by his own admission, kept the law perfectly. But in addition to being the consummate Pharisee, he had also been given a Greek education. He knew his revelation, but he also knew his rhetoric. He embodied the Athens/Jerusalem combination: reason and revelation, knowledge and belief, eloquence and wisdom. It should not surprise us that God chose this man to be the one to speak for him. He had been prepared for this job long before he had any idea what he was going to do. Think of how Paul used his rhetorical ability combined with the truth of God’s revelation to him!

A side bit of advice – it is not unusual NOT to know what you are going to be doing in life. Yes, we all like to have a plan, but God is in the business of changing your plans when it serves His purposes, and His purposes are always better for you than your original plans. What’s more, no authority figure above you can ever do anything to you that God doesn’t allow, so don’t ever be afraid of losing your job. Do what is right in all cases. This life is very short, and you want to be able to be proud of your decisions, so always make them in faith and trust that God has all things in His control. Hold those plans loosely.

So how did God’s chosen spokesman know where to preach? You will recall how in Theology III we discussed Acts chapter 16 about how Paul says he desires to turn east and preach to the eastern world but he is specifically stopped by the Holy Spirit, and given a dream of a man in Macedonia, that is in the west, calling him to come and preach the gospel to them. He interprets this dream as a command from God, and immediately obeys, traveling across the Aegean Sea to Macedonia, then south into Greece, and winds up in Acts 17 on Mars Hill in Athens, the center of the ancient Greek world, then returns to Jerusalem.

In his third journey, he repeats his trip to Greece and writes his epistle to the Roman Christians, showing that his eyes and heart were facing even further west. Of course, in his final missionary journey, Paul goes to Rome. You see, from the point of that miraculous dream, Paul never again looks east. Once God set him on this path, he never looked back. It can rightly be argued that THIS is the true founding of what is known as Western civilization – all the accomplishments of the Greeks were astonishing, but until their reasoning was teamed up with the revelation of Jesus in the Christian church, the West as we know it could not be born. That means that all the accomplishments of Augustine, Boethius, Bede, Anselm, Suger, Thomas, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Milton, Rembrandt, Handel, Bach, Pascal, Newton, Burke, Wilberforce, Mendelssohn, Rouault, Eliot, Chesterton, and even what’s-his-name who wrote the Narnia stories, all these people owe their accomplishments to one man who was prepared when God told him to preach the gospel to the west. And how many more in the future will be blessed by this event? How many in East Africa, East India, East China, SE Asia, and in the dense jungles of East Memphis owe their knowledge of the Savior to the Western culture that was born out of the combination of one man’s obedience and education? This is how Western civilization was born. Not simply through a forced combination of two competing schools of thought, Athens and Jerusalem, science and faith, reason and revelation, but through one unified thing: an obedient Christian who was educated to think well.

Do you see why your parents thought this was worthwhile? Why the board, faculty, staff, and administration would sacrifice their golf games to be sure this education was passed on? Do you see how you COULD have attended a school with excellent academics but didn’t teach the Faith? Or how you might go to a school that is thoroughly Christian but sees little value in teaching logic and rhetoric? We are part of a long history of faithful men and women who have passed on what they knew, regardless of the cost, and you are the next link in the chain. We are hoping that you will embody what is truly great about the West – that you will be a group of people with a command of language, and a command of the Scriptures. Then, armed with the indwelling Holy Spirit to guide you, you will be equipped to live out the truth, and be witnesses to God’s work of redemption in this world as long as your life lasts or He tarries. It is not by accident that you have been trained this way -- you have been chosen too, just like Paul – you have been educated for a reason. You are going to be ready when the Lord says, “not this way, that way” – and the result of your faithful choices will echo through the future generations just as Paul’s have.

But always remember that without the leading of the Holy Spirit, your education is of no value at all. In fact it could make you quite proud, which is deadly. It required a conversion, not a diploma, for Saul to become Paul. So in a way we are taking a big chance. An educated man who refuses God’s leading can do more damage than he could have done without the education. An educated man has the ability to lead - so you will be leaders, like it or not -- where will you lead us? Will you allow the Holy Spirit to lead you as He did Paul?

At this point in the speech, most commencement speakers tell you that this is an exciting time – the beginning of your careers, you can be anything you want to be, just believe in yourselves. But I am not going to say any of that. There are two good reasons why I won’t: first, it is a load of foolishness, and second, it is a load of foolishness. This IS an exciting time, but it is not because you can be anything you want to be – for example, I can say without too much fear of contradiction, that none of you will have much of a future in the NBA. You can’t be ANYTHING, but that’s a GOOD thing -- saves on loads of wasted time wondering! The point is, you weren’t built to be anything – you were built to do the specific work that God has called You to -- “you are God’s workmanship, created for good works in Christ.” You will embody the faith, communicating it to your watching pagan/barbaric neighbors -- and you’ll do it through your academic work, through the way you raise your children, through your writing, artwork, science, through the businesses you start, the churches you lead, through the way you spend your leisure time, through your carefully chosen words, and most of all, through the way you love one another and those pagan/barbaric neighbors – in short, the Lord will be made visible through the WAY you “do” culture.

Through you we hope to see a genuine turn back toward civilization again. It is a mighty burden to place on such a young and small group – and it may be that it will only be possible through your great-grandchildren -- but it will be accomplished, if it is accomplished, through a million little faithful decisions day-by-day, week by week by a growing community of believers who reveal the truth by their actions. By the way you look at the ways of the World, with its eyes on efficiency and “bottom line,” this-world benefits, and saying - NO. There is a goal others can’t see - a target we live for that they don’t know about - our decisions are made by aiming at eternal targets, not at a comfortable life of money and power in this world. As I told you in my one bit of advice, life is very short, and it will gone before you know it -- I know it doesn’t feel that way now, but ask your parents and grandparents and see if I am not right about this. Life is just a breath long when compared with eternity, and the only work that will stand is that which is done in faith. If we are each faithful in our own generations, God can and does use us to accomplish His work, and what better thing can there be than that?

May our Lord bless you each and keep you safe as you enter into the world of academics, and give you great joy as you stand with and for Him there. So -- I promised I’d be brief, and I promised I would not explain the Seven Liberal Arts again -- but now I want to ask YOU to promise ME something: promise that you will never apologize for faithfully holding fast to both these God-given gifts: revelation and reason – they are your inheritance as godly men and women of the West. Promise?