Sermon: Life Beyond Graduation

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Life Beyond Graduation

By Charles Rush

June 8, 2003

is morning I want to say something especially to our graduating Seniors, at least the ones who are here. The rest of them can read it on line when they wake up. I remember not that long ago having you all in you all in Confirmation. And now when I think on every one of you, how much you have come into your own, how musically talented some of you are, how accomplished you are academically, what interesting people you are becoming.

I wish I could simply offer you proverbial wisdom this morning that you could fit manageably inside a fortune cookie… The Great American critic Will Rogers had lots of proverbial advice. He told us, “ Never slap a man who's chewing tobacco.” Or this “The quickest way to double your money is to fold it and put it back in your pocket.” Or this “ If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.” There are three kinds of men The very, very few that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The great lot, the rest of them, who have to pee on the electric fence. “ Trust me, you will meet all three groups at college shortly. Unfortunately great wisdom doesn't come neatly packaged like that.

Right now, you are living through a great time of life. The work is all over and you are enjoying your accomplishments. I'm sure that part of you is also tired of hanging around boring old Summit, having your parents tell you every few days what you can't do, having all that reinforced by the Summit police. And you are yearning to be free, to start out on a new adventure.

Our texts this morning speak to starting out on new adventures and it is an fundamental spiritual theme in the scriptures. And starting out is not something that will happen to you once or twice in your life, but probably several times. In the Hebrew scriptures, Abraham was probably 70 years old when God appears to him and says to him, “Get up and go to a land that I will show you.” How is that for a vague, open-ended business plan? Where is this land that I will be show? And here is Abraham, probably pretty settled, thinking his best days are behind him. God opens before him the greatest adventure of his life, the most challenging adventure of his life.

And, soon enough, you will be off on your own adventure and you will be truly unsupervised for really the first time in your life. There is something wonderfully giddy about that first day at college. Your parents drop you off, they try to cram all their concerns and worries one more time, maybe they stuff $10 bucks in your pocket and then they are gone. You and your new roommates, sitting around boxes, with that first celebratory beer of freedom. Rock and Roll will never die. You can do whatever you want and there aren't even any classes to go to yet.

And every adventure has anxiety. It wouldn't be an adventure if it didn't require you to get outside your comfort zone. It would only be a vacation. At some point, probably on your first day at college, you will find yourself in a group of people and you will think to yourself. “Oh my God, all these people are smarter than me; they are better looking. Their families are richer and cooler. They all seem to laugh easier and everyone else seems to know other people. Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into.

The Dean of the College won't help much either. Back in the Middle Ages when I was in college, Provost Wilson spoke to us at the first orientation assembly at the Chapel at Wake Forest. He informed us that 92% of the freshman class had registered as Pre-Med or Pre-Law, not a very creative group. And then he assured us that 92% would not practice Law or Medicine. In fact, he said, “take a look at the person sitting next to you on your left and your right.” We all turned and smiled. He went on, “The chances are they won't be sitting there next semester as half our student body flunks out the first year.” That possibility had never entered my head. And it was sobering.

Right now, you think you know how to write. But first semester, you are likely to get some over earnest, underpaid assistant professor recently graduated from Yale who will fill your two pages with more red ink than the black you turned in, leaving only one half of one sentence unscrambled. And you will long for those nice, encouraging teachers at Summit High School that reminded you each week how much potential you have.

More than that, the really big challenge is the realm of ideas and values. It is here that we hope you stretch, twist, get out of your comfort zone, examine what you have been handed, and eventually make your values your own. That is, ultimately, the whole point.

We tried to give you a backboard to bounce your ball off here at Christ Church. Your family tried to teach you the values that they have lived, what they believe in. Your community of Summit has given you some values that have seeped into your life through sports, music, through drama, scouting. Some of them are profound and need to be held on to at all costs. But some of these values, you will need to shed if you are to grow. I can't tell you which are which, though I have my list. The task ahead is for you to figure this out on your own.

Let me apologize in advance that the faculty at college will not make this easy for you. Back in the Middle Ages, when I went to school, we had a block of courses called “Introduction to Western Civilization” that gave you an overview of philosophy, art, history, literature and socio/political movements starting with the Iliad, written in Greece about 1800 b.c. walking you through the Roman Empire, the rise of the Dark Ages in Europe, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the age of Imperialism, the rise of Industrial society, closing off with World War 2. It gave you the broad outlines of great ideas in Western Civilization and how they were formed and introduced you to the greatest literature. At a minimum, it made you more interesting at Fraternity parties. But the point of the overview is so you could understand how you derived the values that have seeped into you from your family, your nation, your Church. You can see where the idea of the priority of the individual came from, why political freedom is so important and how fragile it really is, how economic prosperity comes to pass, where sexism and racism took root and why, how it is that nations regularly overreach the bounds of their success and implode on the very things that made them successful in the first place. You learn about the origins of economic theory, about the value of the rise of scientific medicine, about the profound importance of the beginning of the science of psychology on understanding human nature.

You will still wrestle with all of those ideas but a couple decades ago, the faculties of almost all universities decided to stop teaching Western Civilization in the broad outlines and empowered you to pick and choose what you want to take in school. It sounds like a great idea, but trust me, you won't know what to take. You will just luck into some good finds on courses.

Our hope for you is that you will take the values that you have been given and that you will test them, challenge them, turn them over by looking at them critically. Certainly I hope you take World Religion courses, find out what Buddhism has to offer, understand Islam, critique your own religious heritage vis-à-vis other religious traditions and sometimes they will win. Hinduism, you will discover, has more tolerance for other traditions built into its very fabric than any other practiced faith today. That is a good challenge for Christians.

Understand Freud's critique of religion. Read Nietzche's critique of Christinianity and Western bourgeois culture. I hope you read Machiavelli's cynical advice on how to advance power through personal duplicity. Understand and critique.

Someone told me last week that when they were at Vanderbilt, one philosophy professor said in a lecture that when you go to college you take all your inherited values and you blow them up like balloons and put them on a back board. And your job is to throw darts at them and pop them. You have to throw from a pretty good distance and most of us are not all that skilled at throwing. He said, you will hit a few and burst them, but not many. That is about right.

The point of education is that you make your values your own, not because someone else told you that was what you should treasure or believe. But that, understanding all the alternatives, understanding the deficits, you treasure them as your own because you decided to keep them.

Abraham and Sarah started out on a journey, to a land, God said that I will show you. Open-ended. But one day on the journey Abraham had a vision of God and he realized that he was in the land that God would show him and he built an altar and he worshipped. He made a commitment to God. He owned his faith for himself, not because anyone told him to do it, not having all the answers, but he owned it for himself. That is the point of growing and maturing, of critique and discovery. You are setting out on a great adventure, and there will be some great parties on the way too. And if you are lucky, you will travel to some new places and meet some interesting fellow-travelers and you will become a better person for it.

You will need it. Because we will have to start out again, and again, and again… Probably some significant new starts in your life as an adult. The world is a shifting sand that demands new starts by all of us.

At the end of World War 2, just after the Allies liberated the camps at Auschwitz and Birkenwald, all across Poland and Germany, those images of emaciated, tortured Jews in numb disbelief were captured on film. Back in those days, most of the world watched them at the movies, just before the feature presentation on Saturday because television was a brand new medium. But all across Europe, all across the States and Canada there was a collective moment of hush as we watched these films. It was one of those moments in history when people of every nation asks themselves, how did this come to pass? How could we, with all our sophistication, our erudition, our history, how could we let this come to pass? What does it mean? Where do we go from here? This is what everyone was thinking in their silent observance of the films of the emaciated prisoners climbing up to receive some bread from the soldiers.

Hannah Arendt, probably the greatest political philosopher of the 20th Century, was watching those films too, as a woman, a Jew, an intellectual who had fled Germany and come to our country losing her boyfriend in the escape. She was watching those films and she remembered something she read for her dissertation from St. Augustine. She quoted him. “Initium ut esset, homoe creatus est”. That we make a new beginning. For that we were created.

I can fairly well guarantee you that you will be forced to start out again, later in life, and it will probably not be comfortable either. The world is a shifting sand. Revolutions happen, terrorism happens, death interrupts us, markets suddenly collapse. And sometimes, like Abraham, God might even call you from the comfortable things you have known and send you on a new journey to unnamed places. And how will you build? What will guide you? What will be in here (your head)? What will be in here (your heart)? What will you pass on once you are asked to lead? Understand, critique, develop your own code, taking the best of the rich tradition we all stand on. Make it your own. You will need it.

Amen.