Advice for Graduates
M13
1 Sam. 15:34-16:13
Ps. 20
2 Cor. 5:6-10, 14-17
Mk. 4:26-34
“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away see, everything has become new” (2 Cor. 5)!
Our first years at Christ Church were marked by an invisible anxiety. I arrived here without having written a single word of my dissertation. I secretly wondered if I would ever finish. After spending every summer constantly writing the faculty approved my work in the fall of 2004. Heidi and I were so excited about going back to the Harvard Commence exercises. We had never both been away from the children. Some of our friends thought that it would be a weekend of romance.
They could not have been more wrong. To save money and because I had always wondered what it would be like, we stayed at a monastery on the Charles River – in separate cells, without air conditioning, eating meals with the monks in silence. I have wonderful childhood memories of Cambridge and everything was beautiful. But still our high expectations for our time there meant that we almost couldn’t help but be disappointed.
Almost all graduations fail to live up to our expectations. At their heart is a moment abstracted from both the past and from the future. In that time we regard what has happened with nostalgia and imagine the infinite possibilities of the future. At that time we want to be reminded that we are creatures of both earth and heaven, that we are more than a collection of nerve impulses or the product of our historical circumstances. But we are not.
During Bishop Swing’s Maundy Thursday sermon to the clergy he spoke about how even at Episcopal High Schools our youth are not taught about holiness or the depth of the human soul. In this season of graduations we all can bear witness to the higher life that we experience in God. You may be called to do this and I want to share with you three pieces of advice to graduates in this time between past and future.
1. Not Conformed. The Apostle Paul wrote a series of letters to a congregation he had never visited in Rome. His advice to them is simple “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God” (Rom. 12:2). The world will distort who we are in order to sell us things and to manipulate our political judgments. It will shamelessly exploit our fears, faults, prejudices, our sense of superiority and our sexual desires in order to influence us. Billions of dollars will be spent each year and the most advanced technologies will be used to get your attention and to change who you are.
Advertisers will try to convince you that you can only be loved for your perfection. But Paul wants us to know that God calls to us in our brokenness. The novelist Harry Crew said, “Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”
One example of this in my life was a kid in my Junior High School confirmation class named Mike Franti. Mike’s birth father was African American and his mother was white. Our neighbors in this mostly white town had adopted him as a baby. On his way to being six foot six inches, in every way he stood out.
Back in those days most people only saw Mike as a basketball player and he did win an athletic scholarship to USF. But there was far more to him. He loved music. When I went to college in the Bay Area I saw posters for his band on telephone poles. Now all these years later Michael is part rock star, part poet, part hip hop artist and a major prophet. His band Spearhead is recognized around the world.
Michael’s music is impossible to characterize. It didn’t exist when we were kids. Instead of writing songs about love and breaking-up he sings about prison reform, racism, AIDS and peace. He criticizes the violence of Gangsta Rap and the death penalty. Michael is the one who said, “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace.” Twenty thousand people attend his Power to the Peaceful festival each year in San Francisco. Michael’s success comes from being most truly himself, letting his rough edges leave a mark on society.
The apostle Paul says, “if anyone is in Christ - there is a new creation: everything old has passed away” (2 Cor. 5). Our work as Christians begins as we discover the absolutely unique way that God will transform the world through us. You are unlike anyone in history or who will ever be. No one has been called to precisely your ministry except you.
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury describes every Christian alive as part of a global interpretation of the Bible (“billions of diverse Son-like, Father-directed lives… a vast living exegesis of the Bible”). If you want to understand what the Bible means look first at these people. Each is unique, each one transformed by God not conformed by the world.
2. A second piece of advice for graduates is, “learn to do it yourself.” My friend received a toolkit when she graduated from high school. She still uses it, but it is even more important as a symbol that she is the one who ultimately has responsibility for her life. It is important to acknowledge and benefit from the advice of experts. Doctors, plumbers, lawyers, engineers and priests can help you. But this expertise must be balanced against the passion of your interest. The high school guidance counselor may know a lot about different colleges, but you are the one who actually has to live your life. You are the one who decides what kind of person you will be and how to use your energies. God gives us freedom and it is tragically possible to waste our life.
It is important to take responsibility for your philosophical, religious and political ideas. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was probably the most important philosopher since the ancient Greeks. More important than all of his philosophical ideas, indeed perhaps the source of them, was his motto – Dare to think for yourself. Don’t leave it up to others to decide what you believe about God or to tell you what is in the Bible. Look at it yourself and form your own opinion.
Above all don’t let someone else be in charge of your prayer life. Don’t expect priests to “do” church for you. Make daily prayer a habit. Pray in the car, as you walk, in waiting rooms, before everyone wakes up or after they all go to sleep. Pray with your children. Pray when your faith feels strong and when God seems distant to you. Prayer is important when you take on the adventure of learning to do things for yourself.
3. My last advice is to pay attention to the little things. Who you are and what really matters arise out of small things. 13.7 billion years ago all the matter in the universe was compressed into a tiny spot so infinitesimally small that it had no dimensions at all. It wasn’t in space because space didn’t exist yet. In less than a minute the universe was a million billion miles across creating space and growing. Within three minutes, in the ten billion degree heat, 98% of the matter in the universe was created. My point is that everything started small.
Jesus says that the kingdom of God “is like a mustard seed… the smallest of all the seeds on earth…when it grows up [it] becomes the greatest of all shrubs…” (Mk. 4). Jesus repeats this point in various ways, but even a small amount of faith can generate extraordinary results. Perhaps you are thinking that this is an easy thing for the Son of God to say but it is also exactly how Jesus acted.
Every week for me is filled with tremendous disappointment. All the boundless possibility I feel on Monday with its to do lists is inevitably is frustrated. I can’t help all the poor people, visit everyone in the hospital, talk to all the lonely people or minister to all who need it. I don’t even make a dent in the suffering that I see. Who gets helped and who is passed by seems maddeningly unsystematic. I constantly regret not having done enough. My whole life of ministry is filled with a few small things.
For years this bothered me until I began to realize that this was not so different from Jesus’ own ministry. In the twenty-first century we set goals like the total eradication of polio or the elimination of poverty around the globe. Yesterday, there was an article in the New York Times about Jimmy Wales, a man my age who started Wikipedia and changed how we know about the world.
Jesus did not work like this. He healed a few people, cast out some demons. He talked to a few others about the love that God has for us. But Jesus did not go on television. He didn’t go to Rome or Corinth. In his life he wasn’t internationally recognized as an authority on religious matters. He simply did not act on that scale. He worked quietly in the obscure countryside with the people who just happened to be around him.
Jesus helped in small things. He taught a small number of people that the kingdom of God is a tiny seed within us, that only a little faith could result in extraordinary things. In doing this he changed the world.
I believe that it is the little things we do every day that matter most. I had only been a priest for about a year when a member of my church came up to me and told me that he was having an affair. He told me that his wife didn’t know it but that she was really a lesbian and that she didn’t satisfy him sexually. Since then dozens of people have told me about their extra-marital affairs.
Over all these years, I can’t help but think that by the time they have come to me it is too late. My experience leads me to believe that these large infidelities only follow from small, every day betrayals. We all have a thousand little opportunities each day to show our love or disrespect for our friends and family. John Lennon says, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” These little things that you teach your children and practice yourself are life.
In conclusion, through God do not be conformed by the world, take responsibility for yourself and live conscious of the little things.
Let us pray: “Give us grace o Lord, to work while it is day fulfilling diligently and patiently whatever duty thou appointest us, doing small things in the day of small things and great labours if thou summon us to any. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.”
_______________________________________
Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor June 7, 2006. http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2006/06/05/index.html
In review by Jason Byassee, The Christian Century, June 13, 2006, 36ff.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Everything (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), 9-10.
Katie Hafner, “Growing Wikipedia Changes its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy,” New York Times, 17 June 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=7f2dcfa9db8cc0ef&hp&ex=1150603200&adxnnl=0&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1150556959-kVQHxMQlrpjr1rugd/Q9Ig
Christina Rossetti wrote this prayer. This last section was influenced by Martha Sterne, “A Day of Small Things,” Day 1, 18 June 2006. http://www.day1.net/
1 Sam. 15:34-16:13
Ps. 20
2 Cor. 5:6-10, 14-17
Mk. 4:26-34
“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away see, everything has become new” (2 Cor. 5)!
Our first years at Christ Church were marked by an invisible anxiety. I arrived here without having written a single word of my dissertation. I secretly wondered if I would ever finish. After spending every summer constantly writing the faculty approved my work in the fall of 2004. Heidi and I were so excited about going back to the Harvard Commence exercises. We had never both been away from the children. Some of our friends thought that it would be a weekend of romance.
They could not have been more wrong. To save money and because I had always wondered what it would be like, we stayed at a monastery on the Charles River – in separate cells, without air conditioning, eating meals with the monks in silence. I have wonderful childhood memories of Cambridge and everything was beautiful. But still our high expectations for our time there meant that we almost couldn’t help but be disappointed.
Almost all graduations fail to live up to our expectations. At their heart is a moment abstracted from both the past and from the future. In that time we regard what has happened with nostalgia and imagine the infinite possibilities of the future. At that time we want to be reminded that we are creatures of both earth and heaven, that we are more than a collection of nerve impulses or the product of our historical circumstances. But we are not.
During Bishop Swing’s Maundy Thursday sermon to the clergy he spoke about how even at Episcopal High Schools our youth are not taught about holiness or the depth of the human soul. In this season of graduations we all can bear witness to the higher life that we experience in God. You may be called to do this and I want to share with you three pieces of advice to graduates in this time between past and future.
1. Not Conformed. The Apostle Paul wrote a series of letters to a congregation he had never visited in Rome. His advice to them is simple “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God” (Rom. 12:2). The world will distort who we are in order to sell us things and to manipulate our political judgments. It will shamelessly exploit our fears, faults, prejudices, our sense of superiority and our sexual desires in order to influence us. Billions of dollars will be spent each year and the most advanced technologies will be used to get your attention and to change who you are.
Advertisers will try to convince you that you can only be loved for your perfection. But Paul wants us to know that God calls to us in our brokenness. The novelist Harry Crew said, “Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.”
One example of this in my life was a kid in my Junior High School confirmation class named Mike Franti. Mike’s birth father was African American and his mother was white. Our neighbors in this mostly white town had adopted him as a baby. On his way to being six foot six inches, in every way he stood out.
Back in those days most people only saw Mike as a basketball player and he did win an athletic scholarship to USF. But there was far more to him. He loved music. When I went to college in the Bay Area I saw posters for his band on telephone poles. Now all these years later Michael is part rock star, part poet, part hip hop artist and a major prophet. His band Spearhead is recognized around the world.
Michael’s music is impossible to characterize. It didn’t exist when we were kids. Instead of writing songs about love and breaking-up he sings about prison reform, racism, AIDS and peace. He criticizes the violence of Gangsta Rap and the death penalty. Michael is the one who said, “You can bomb the world to pieces, but you can’t bomb it into peace.” Twenty thousand people attend his Power to the Peaceful festival each year in San Francisco. Michael’s success comes from being most truly himself, letting his rough edges leave a mark on society.
The apostle Paul says, “if anyone is in Christ - there is a new creation: everything old has passed away” (2 Cor. 5). Our work as Christians begins as we discover the absolutely unique way that God will transform the world through us. You are unlike anyone in history or who will ever be. No one has been called to precisely your ministry except you.
Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury describes every Christian alive as part of a global interpretation of the Bible (“billions of diverse Son-like, Father-directed lives… a vast living exegesis of the Bible”). If you want to understand what the Bible means look first at these people. Each is unique, each one transformed by God not conformed by the world.
2. A second piece of advice for graduates is, “learn to do it yourself.” My friend received a toolkit when she graduated from high school. She still uses it, but it is even more important as a symbol that she is the one who ultimately has responsibility for her life. It is important to acknowledge and benefit from the advice of experts. Doctors, plumbers, lawyers, engineers and priests can help you. But this expertise must be balanced against the passion of your interest. The high school guidance counselor may know a lot about different colleges, but you are the one who actually has to live your life. You are the one who decides what kind of person you will be and how to use your energies. God gives us freedom and it is tragically possible to waste our life.
It is important to take responsibility for your philosophical, religious and political ideas. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was probably the most important philosopher since the ancient Greeks. More important than all of his philosophical ideas, indeed perhaps the source of them, was his motto – Dare to think for yourself. Don’t leave it up to others to decide what you believe about God or to tell you what is in the Bible. Look at it yourself and form your own opinion.
Above all don’t let someone else be in charge of your prayer life. Don’t expect priests to “do” church for you. Make daily prayer a habit. Pray in the car, as you walk, in waiting rooms, before everyone wakes up or after they all go to sleep. Pray with your children. Pray when your faith feels strong and when God seems distant to you. Prayer is important when you take on the adventure of learning to do things for yourself.
3. My last advice is to pay attention to the little things. Who you are and what really matters arise out of small things. 13.7 billion years ago all the matter in the universe was compressed into a tiny spot so infinitesimally small that it had no dimensions at all. It wasn’t in space because space didn’t exist yet. In less than a minute the universe was a million billion miles across creating space and growing. Within three minutes, in the ten billion degree heat, 98% of the matter in the universe was created. My point is that everything started small.
Jesus says that the kingdom of God “is like a mustard seed… the smallest of all the seeds on earth…when it grows up [it] becomes the greatest of all shrubs…” (Mk. 4). Jesus repeats this point in various ways, but even a small amount of faith can generate extraordinary results. Perhaps you are thinking that this is an easy thing for the Son of God to say but it is also exactly how Jesus acted.
Every week for me is filled with tremendous disappointment. All the boundless possibility I feel on Monday with its to do lists is inevitably is frustrated. I can’t help all the poor people, visit everyone in the hospital, talk to all the lonely people or minister to all who need it. I don’t even make a dent in the suffering that I see. Who gets helped and who is passed by seems maddeningly unsystematic. I constantly regret not having done enough. My whole life of ministry is filled with a few small things.
For years this bothered me until I began to realize that this was not so different from Jesus’ own ministry. In the twenty-first century we set goals like the total eradication of polio or the elimination of poverty around the globe. Yesterday, there was an article in the New York Times about Jimmy Wales, a man my age who started Wikipedia and changed how we know about the world.
Jesus did not work like this. He healed a few people, cast out some demons. He talked to a few others about the love that God has for us. But Jesus did not go on television. He didn’t go to Rome or Corinth. In his life he wasn’t internationally recognized as an authority on religious matters. He simply did not act on that scale. He worked quietly in the obscure countryside with the people who just happened to be around him.
Jesus helped in small things. He taught a small number of people that the kingdom of God is a tiny seed within us, that only a little faith could result in extraordinary things. In doing this he changed the world.
I believe that it is the little things we do every day that matter most. I had only been a priest for about a year when a member of my church came up to me and told me that he was having an affair. He told me that his wife didn’t know it but that she was really a lesbian and that she didn’t satisfy him sexually. Since then dozens of people have told me about their extra-marital affairs.
Over all these years, I can’t help but think that by the time they have come to me it is too late. My experience leads me to believe that these large infidelities only follow from small, every day betrayals. We all have a thousand little opportunities each day to show our love or disrespect for our friends and family. John Lennon says, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” These little things that you teach your children and practice yourself are life.
In conclusion, through God do not be conformed by the world, take responsibility for yourself and live conscious of the little things.
Let us pray: “Give us grace o Lord, to work while it is day fulfilling diligently and patiently whatever duty thou appointest us, doing small things in the day of small things and great labours if thou summon us to any. In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.”
_______________________________________
Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor June 7, 2006. http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/programs/2006/06/05/index.html
In review by Jason Byassee, The Christian Century, June 13, 2006, 36ff.
Bill Bryson, A Short History of Everything (NY: Broadway Books, 2003), 9-10.
Katie Hafner, “Growing Wikipedia Changes its ‘Anyone Can Edit’ Policy,” New York Times, 17 June 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/17/technology/17wiki.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=7f2dcfa9db8cc0ef&hp&ex=1150603200&adxnnl=0&partner=homepage&adxnnlx=1150556959-kVQHxMQlrpjr1rugd/Q9Ig
Christina Rossetti wrote this prayer. This last section was influenced by Martha Sterne, “A Day of Small Things,” Day 1, 18 June 2006. http://www.day1.net/
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