Graduation address

It’s customary on an occasion such as this to extol the accomplishments of the graduating seniors, commend students and teachers for a job well done, and encourage you with a stirring speech about the open future that lies before you. ‘Tis the season for clichés, and you’ve heard them all: Reach for the stars, be all you can be, follow your dream, the future is yours, you are the future. ‘Tis also the season to mock clichés. But we shouldn’t mock. Cliches are ritualized forms of speech, and whenever we cross the threshold from one room of life to another, we reach for the comfort of familiar words. But we can’t say these cliches without irony unless we first lay some groundwork.

It’s been said that all education is an anticipation of experience (ERH). Studying a map anticipates the experience of visiting Tokyo or Timbuktu, and learning about Newton and Kepler and Einstein anticipates the experience of scientific discovery. Had we world enough and time, we could afford to wait for young people to acquire wide experience of life before we burdened them with adult responsibilities. We could actually send them to Tokyo and set them up in a lab to make Einstein’s discoveries on their own. But we don’t have time. They need to grow up fast. We have time for only a few books, a smattering of chemistry and algebra, basic rhetorical and linguistic skills. We thrust them out with all our best hopes, but we know they aren’t ready; we know they can’t be ready. Cynics say that learning is wasted on the young. But that’s unavoidable. Learning is always too early.

What experiences does education anticipate? We sometimes think about education through metaphors of strength. We wrestle with ideas and try to “pin down” what an author is saying. We set out on a quest to learn, we hunt down the truth, we bring what we learn under our control. When we fail to learn something, we say we’ve been defeated, that the material has overpowered us. Learning is a contest – the power of the student matched against the power of what he’s trying to learn, and education gives an experience of “mastering” the world that the student has not really earned by his own engagement with the world.

This gets at one dimension of education. Education is about taking dominion of God’s creation through learning its names and studying its qualities. But this gets only one part of education, and it’s not the most important part for Christians. For Christians, education also should anticipate the experience of limitation. Education goes from strength to strength; more profoundly, it grows from weakness to weakness. Your education should have left you students with a deep sense of the vastness of what you don’t know. Education for Christians must be education in humility. As T. S. Eliot said in his poem East Coker, “the only wisdom we can hope to acquire/ Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

We see the same double progress – progress in strength accompanied by progress in weakness – as we mature in Christian faithfulness. American Christians have unfortunately not always recognized the double-sidedness of the Christian life. During the nineteenth century, in response to the perceived “woman peril,” the threat that women were taking over the church, Americans marketed Christianity as a manly religion. A true Christian is a strong Christian, a muscular Christian.

Views of Jesus adjusted to fit this vision. Artists of the past, complained advertising executive and writer Bruce Barton, seemed to think they could “make our Christ with a woman’s face, and add a beard.” In his bestselling book, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus, Barton presented a Jesus who was no bearded lady. Barton’s Jesus was a “young man glowing with physical strength and the joy of living,” with muscles like “knots of iron,” broad shoulders, and well-defined pecs. He was a “man’s man,” and he oozed manliness in a way that also made him a “woman’s man” (from Stephen Prothero, American Jesus).

The muscular manly Jesus of Victorian America comes to striking expression in Stephen Sawyer’s 1999 painting, The Undefeated. A bearded man dressed in purple trunks leans against a corner post of a boxing ring. His right arm, triceps bulging, is extended, and his hand grasps the rope and holds the strings of two red boxing gloves that dangle outside the ring. Under his arm, a scar is barely visible in his side, and what appears to be a belt inscribed with the word “Savior” is draped behind him. He turns to look at the viewer, and a light – perhaps a spotlight – shines around his face and creates a naturalistic halo around his shoulder-length, shimmering, almost-certainly-conditioned hair. Relaxed as he is, Sawyer’s Christ, like Barton’s, is a pugnacious Christ, a muscular Christ for muscular Christians.

No doubt muscular Christianity was a needed response to a perversion of the Christian message. But one has the unsettling feeling that Jesus has been re-designed to fit pre-existing American notions of masculinity. It’s not clear how a muscular Christ is compatible with a crucified Christ. Stephen Sawyer’s boxing Christ shows no signs of exertion. Perhaps he’s placidly waiting to pummel his next victim, or perhaps he’s so masterful a fighter that he doesn’t even sweat, much less sweat blood.

Against this one-side muscular Christianity, the Bible shows that maturation is not only from strength to strength, but from weakness to weakness. Becoming perfect means being perfected in weakness. If your Mars Hill education has been successful at all, it has been successful not in teaching self-reliance, but in teaching self-distrust. It has taught you to recognize your impotence, and to rely on God’s infinite strength. And in this too it anticipates life experience, because the reality of your own helplessness will only become more obvious as you grow older.

Progress in weakness is not the whole story, though. God exposes our weakness so He can show His strength. But beyond this, God brings us to glory through death. This is one experience no education can ever quite anticipate. You can know death only by living it.

As Adam named the animals, he took mastery of the world, but he simultaneously learned what he lacked. As he discovered the animals had companions, he learned he too needed a helper suitable to him. He came to the conclusion that the Lord had already stated: It is not good for Adam to be alone. God solved Adam’s weakness, his lack, but He didn’t solve it in a straight-forward way. After the Lord convinced Adam of his weakness, He put him into a death-like sleep and tore him in two. Adam was created glorious; but he received his crown of glory, Eve, only through death and dismemberment.

Adam’s story is the story of Israel: Over centuries, the Lord removed every prop of strength from his people – temple, king, prophet. Even after He had displayed Israel’s weakness, He was not done until he tossed her into Babylonian exile, scattering her like dry bones in a barren landscape. And Israel became surpassingly glorious only after the Lord called her from the grave. Adam’s story is also the story of the true Israel, the Last Adam, Jesus: Though the strong man, He was bound, tortured, cursed, rejected, and when He had lost all strength, He died. And He was fully glorified, glorified in receiving a bride, only after He was called from the tomb.

A little more than month before his death, the poet and preacher John Donne ascended the pulpit at Saint Paul’s in London on the first Friday of Lent, already ashen due to the stomach cancer

that would shortly kill him, to deliver his farewell sermon, entitled “Death’s Duel.” In that sermon, he characterized life as a series of deaths: “all our periods and transitions in this life, are so many passages from death to death.”

At birth, Donne said, we emerge from the death-like sleep of the womb: “our very birth and entrance into this life is exitus à morte, an issue from death.” We emerge from the death of the womb only to enter into death: “this deliverance, from that death, the death of the womb, is an entrance, a delivering over to another death, the manifold deaths of this world.” Infants come into the world wrapped like corpses. As Donne put it, “we have a winding?sheet in our mother’s womb which grows with us from our conception, and we come into the world wound up in that winding?sheet, for we come to seek a grave.”

Donne had it right. Death doesn’t only come at the end of life. Death punctuates life. Death is the secret of life. We die to childhood, die to youth, die to singlehood, die to parenthood, die to a career, die as we are torn from dying friends and family members, die to high school. Perhaps we even have the privilege of dying through slander or persecution. Life is a series of transitions through death, and these deaths are the only possible passage to maturity. If we don’t die to childhood, we remain children forever; nothing is more pathetic than the middle-aged former sports star who has never died to high school football. Through these deaths, and only on the other side of these deaths, is the glory that God brings, a glory that is ever new.

In another part of East Coker, Eliot writes of the Great Physician who heals the sick only by first intensifying sickness to the point of death:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer’s art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.

As the seeds of your Mars Hill education germinate in life, you will face death as well as weakness. There will be moments when your sense of powerlessness will be overwhelming. And when God has removed every prop, if He has left you powerless in the dust, if He leaves you like Job without family, riches, or health, even when He has done all that, yet He is not done. He is not done until He kills you.

This sounds terribly pessimistic, I know. It may not seem especially inspiring. But Paul, who spent a lot of time talking about weakness and death, didn’t find it depressing. He found it exhilarating. When Paul boasted, he didn’t boast of his strength or his accomplishments. “If I have to boast,” he said, “I will boast of what pertains to my weakness.” He boasted in his weakness because he knew that he had the treasure of the gospel in an earthen vessel, and because he knew that he was strongest when the strength of God burst through his weakness. For Solomon, this joy-in-weakness, this joy-in-death is the heart of wisdom: Wisdom is knowing we’re placed in a world we cannot control and knowing we’re heading to death, and then spending our lives in eating, drinking, and rejoicing before the Lord.

But what about the world around us? We want to have some effect on the world, to leave the world a different and better place than we found it. We want our lives to count for something. And we think that the history of the world is carried by the strong. We instinctively think that the muscular inherit the earth.

It’s not hard to see why we believe that. From the earliest chapters of the Bible, cities are built on the blood of victims. Cain the strong murders his weaker brother Abel, and then goes off to build a city. And the strong have been building cities on the blood of the weak ever since.

Cities are built on blood, but there are two cities are built on two different sorts of blood. Cain built his city on the blood of a victim he killed, and so did Romulus and so did Augustus and so did Stalin and Idi Amin and Hitler and Pol Pot. There is a Cainite city, the city of the strong, the city erected on the corpses of the weak whose blood the merciless strong have shed.

But there is another city. It is the city of Abel, of the wanderer Abraham, of persecuted Joseph, of Elijah and Elisha, of Daniel and Jesus and Paul, of Ignatius and Polycarp and Justin. It is the city built by oppressed innocents, those who quenched the power of fire, escaped the sword, endured mockings and scourgings, chains and imprisonments, who were stoned, sawn in two, tempted, afflicted, ill-treated, who wandered in deserts and mountains and caves and holes in the ground. This city too is erected on blood, but it is the blood of those who “from weakness were made strong,” whose blood, like the blood of Jesus, speaks better than the blood of Abel. And it is this city that will endure.

Paradoxical it may be, but it’s a fact. God has designed the world, and rules the world, so that those who are weak with the weakness of God will end up ruling the world in His strength. God has designed the world so that those who embrace death in all its forms with faith and hope will inherit all things.

You want to change the world? Ask youself: What changed the world more, the conquests of a hundred minor-league Alexanders, or the one cross of Jesus? Who left a deeper mark on the human race, the nameless Romans who slaughtered Christians, or the slaughtered Christians celebrated in stone, song, and story down the centuries? Who really determined the future of the Roman empire, the manly Roman soldiers who locked up the unimpressive Jewish preacher, or the joyful prisoner, armed with nothing but a Psalm and a sermon, who sang until his song burst the prison doors and who preached until he had turned the Roman empire upside down?

Once we grasp all this, all those graduation clichés come flooding back. They are all true. The world really is yours for the taking. You really are the future. You can change the world. But these clichés will be true only as you grow from strength to strength and from weakness to weakness; only as you grow in the strength of God by a deepening sense of your own need and helplessness. The clichés are only true if you don’t shrink away from the knife and the fire, the instruments of the wounded surgeon who restores by turning sickness to death, and death to resurrection glory.

For we have it on the highest authority: It is not the muscular who inherit the earth; but the meek.