Commencement 2007

You are our newest graduates and I congratulate you most warmly.

Most of you came here with me. I know many of you. This is a place of which to be proud and you have earned demanding and universally admired qualifications. I congratulate you and greet you as new alums of this great school.

I salute Dr. Gray, your distinguished fellow alum, who is one of the most significant and honored Americans alive.

King College has honored me today with a degree. I am deeply grateful for that recognition of my commitment to both the church and the liberal arts. I liked King College the moment I set foot on its campus in 2006. Its mountains reminded me of home. Dr. Jordan, I am proud to be an alumnus of King College.

Dr. Gray is the recipient of some eighty honorary degrees, so let’s have no illusions over who is the most distinguished person here today. One of our trustees, in a recent conversation, said to me that there are some persons who come to an illustrious institution and say: “I must be wonderful because I am here!” There are others who say: “Because I am here this school’s reputation is going to be sustained.” Dr. Gray is that latter kind of person. He always brings more than he receives. He is someone who creates a new future, not someone who basks in the warm glow of yesterday.

I ask you, the new graduates, to be that kind of person. The future will never be the same as the past, be sure of that. The glow of yesterday is a deceptive light.

Let me offer a few random thoughts.

Last August I gave a convocation speech at King College. I spoke about the philosophy of the Enlightenment, Shakespeare, art, and our Christian faith. In the context of a liberal arts school I wanted students to see that progress most probably lies in unexpected directions and that ambiguity and depth are allies not foes as we seek to discern the future. Ready acceptance of easy or literal answers is a denial of our history, and today’s is a very literal culture. Schools like King provide the core knowledge and awareness that makes our work here, at Master’s level, possible.

Very many of you, our new graduates, will enter some form of service to the church. That service may be teaching, pastoral, or something beyond the church’s visible structures, but a ministry nonetheless.

Nobody knows how the church will develop or the specific forms its obedience to God will take under the direction of the Holy Spirit. To our new graduates, I’d say, if we fill your minds with too much specification, we train you for obsolescence. For a moment, let’s think about progress. The end of April issue of The Economist had a special report on the coming wireless revolution. I want to quote a little. “The computing revolution was about information—digitizing documents, photographs, and records so that they could more easily be manipulated. The wireless communications revolution is about making digital information about anything available anywhere at almost no cost.” It continues: “It is hard for anyone—politicians most of all—to picture how wireless will be used, just as it was with electric motors and microprocessors…Wireless technology will become part of objects in the next fifty years rather as electric motors appeared in everything from eggbeaters to elevators in the first half of the 20th century and computers colonized all kinds of machinery…in the second half.”

New technology will stimulate new language and concepts. It will have to and you’d expect that. Hence we have “ubiquitous computing”; “embedded networking”; and the “pervasive internet.”

Progress always has hurdles to surmount. The Economist goes on to note: “As is usual in the early days of a new industry, all kinds of proprietary systems abound.”

Progress, when it comes, will always be unexpected. “Wireless technology is akin to the electrical grid, which was originally intended for a particular use, the lightbulb, but whose “killer application” turned out to be the power socket that allowed a multitude of new and unforeseen devices to draw energy from it. In time, the new wireless technologies will likewise reshape society in unpredictable ways.”

How will the church develop and change? It’s the sheer unpredictability I draw to your attention. It’s not knight’s move. That’s predictable. Progress comes through recognizing innovation and serving it humbly. That’s what Bill Gray has done with the United Negro College Fund.

To succeed, which is what I so much want for you, you must engage in open-ended and unscripted dialogue. Do not become locked into proprietary brands—neither academic departments nor academic guilds will exist in the kingdom of heaven.

Beware of the sanctimonious. Here’s a quotation for you.

“Who steals my purse steals trash—‘tis something–nothing,

‘Twas mine, ‘tis his, and has been slave to thousands—

But he that filches from me my good name

Robs me of that which not enriches him

And makes me poor indeed.’ [Othello: Act 3, 3, 159–164].

Where does that come from? From Shakespeare, of course, and I’m pretty smitten by Shakespeare. But who said it? It’s spoken by Iago, the very nastiest person in Othello. What I want you to see is that it is empty rhetoric. Iago didn’t live out those words in his life. That’s the irony. The play addresses racism, but not in the easy way handling it as an abstract, but through a thick description taking account of envy, ambition, and sexual jealousy.

Here’s the point: in face of your challenges, in the shock of the new, how familiar is Iago’s barricade of injured dignity? If you shelter there, you will get nowhere.

A few days ago Boris Yeltsin died. Alexander Solzhenitsyn called him “almost too Russian.” Here’s a quotation from an obituary: “For millions of Russians, it seemed that Mr. Yeltsin’s liberalization of prices in 1992—not the bankruptcy of the Soviet Union—had plunged them into poverty. He refused to back off. Unlike Mr. Gorbachev, he did not want to reform the communist system. He wanted to break its neck.”

When Boris Yeltsin handed over power to Vladimir Putin, he asked for forgiveness from the Russian people. He said: “I ask you to forgive me for not fulfilling the hopes of those people who believed that we would be able to jump from the grey, stagnating, totalitarian past into a bright, rich, and civilized future in one go. I myself believed in this. But it could not be done in one fell swoop.”

The flexibility permitted by granting and receiving forgiveness is central to being open to progress. It also happens to be central to the teaching of Jesus. Forgive and be forgiven. Do this and you will live.

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April 28–May 4, 2007.

Ibid, p. 11.

Ibid.

The Economist, April 28–May 4, 2007, “A world of connections: A special report on telecoms, April 28th 2007,” p. 6.

Ibid, p. 98.

Ibid.