Honored seniors, Westminster 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 I am very proud of your accomplishment.
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. In this case, brevity may prove also be the better part of valor. 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.
I do have to say at the outset, that I do not at all appreciate the sidelong glances and giggling that I have had to put up with from the faculty in the back halls. It is not at all professional. I have TOLD you that I didn’t pick the color of my stole – pink signifies a major in music – it is not a sissy color as some of you seem to think. So just grow up, will you?
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 first grade -- 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 I can do to help 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.
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 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 into Damascus, God speaks to a fellow called Ananias, and tells him to go heal Paul’s blindness. 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 choose Paul?
Who can fathom the plans of God? 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 was 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.
A side bit of advice – it is not unusual not to know what you are going to be doing. 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. So, hold those plans loosely – you may find one day that you are stoning the wrong people, and you don’t want God to have to blind you to get your attention…
So how did God’s chosen spokesman know where to preach? In Acts chapter 16, we read that Paul desires to turn north and east into the eastern world, probably toward Byzantium, 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 immediately does so, 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.
In his remaining missionary work, he repeats his trip to Greece and points west, and finally goes to Rome. Rome, of course, is even further west than Athens. 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 Augustine, Boethius, Bede, Anselm, Suger, Thomas, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, Leonardo, Shakespeare, Milton, Rembrandt, Handel, Bach, Pascal, Newton, Burke, Mendelssohn, Prokofiev, Eliot, Chesterton, and even what’s-his-name who authored the Prince Caspian story, 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 Africa, India, China, SE Asia, and in the dense jungles of Bartlett owe their knowledge of the Savior to the Western culture that was born from Paul’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? 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. 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 might be equipped to live out the gospel, and be witnesses to God’s work of redemption in the world. 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 to speak and write 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, should the Lord tarry. 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.
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. What a load of nonsense! 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, save perhaps your valedictorian, will have much of a future in the NBA. You can’t be ANYTHING, but 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 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 – 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. If we are each faithful in our own generations, God will use us for His glory, and what better thing is there than that?
May God bless you each and keep you safe as you enter into the world of college academics, and give you great joy as you stand with Him there. And now I want to ask you to promise me something: promise that you will never apologize for holding both to revelation and reason – they are your inheritance as godly men and women of the West.