It
is a great pleasure to be with you today and it is a great honor to serve, for
a while, as the chair of the EDS board of trustees. Over the past several
months I have been working closely with our President and Dean, Frank Fornaro,
and I have come to learn what everybody here already knew about him: that he is
the perfect person to lead EDS in this moment, possessed of great leadership
ability, theological depth, and a compassionate heart. I know that when Frank
and I are finished with our work together, EDS will have thrived under his
visionary and caring stewardship, and I thank him for the invitation to be with
you today.
It is hard for me
to believe that, on a September evening 42 years ago, I signed the
matriculation book here in St. John’s Chapel as a member of the last class to
enroll at the Episcopal Theological School.
This was in the fall of 1973, and though we had heard that a merger with
PDS might be coming, nobody then knew what the new school would feel like as a
lived reality. And as a first-year student who had come all the way to
Cambridge from California, I had even less sense of what seminary would have in
store for me. As it turned out, the external peace and justice movement
cataclysm I had been part of at U.C. Berkeley was nothing compared to the
internal transformation that seminary would hold for me, my classmates, and our
spouses and partners. But that’s another story.
So
enough about me. Today is about the EDS community and those who today are
joining it. I’d like to say a general word about EDS and a particular word to
those who are matriculating.
It is no secret
that the Episcopal Divinity School has been through a rough patch. I don’t mean
a rough patch just recently. I mean for its entire existence. This school was
born in the struggles of the movement for women’s ordination. Nine years before
the merger, ETS Jonathan Daniels had been killed in Alabama. The Cambridge
school had its origins in the quest to teach the higher criticism of the Bible
and explore the implications of the rise of science in the 19th century
free of ecclesiastical interference. And after the merger, things hardly cooled
down. There was the establishment of a Feminist Liberation Theology program in
the 1980s, the open acceptance of LGBT students in the 1990s, and (this one may
only seem like a controversy to us academic nerds, but believe me it’s
contentious when you go to ATS meetings) the extension of seminary education
through distance learning early in this century. In its 40 years of existence,
the Episcopal Divinity School has been ahead of the church and academy on
almost every issue. And it is no wonder that those of us who serve the church
and have graduated from this school are often viewed with some suspicion. EDS
has staked out a prophetic role in the life of the church and the world. It’s
no wonder that we are often seen as more of a problem than a resource. If I meet one more bishop who says, “I’m
really glad that EDS exists; I just don’t want any clergy in my diocese who
have gone there,” I don’t know what I’ll do.
So here’s the
problem. We feel called to be bold and prophetic, and then we’re surprised when
the establishment sees us as troublemakers. I’m reminded of what the
philosopher Jonathan Lear says about the character Cordelia in Shakespeare’s King Lear. You may remember that
Cordelia is the one daughter in the play who refuses to tell her father what he
wants to hear and is banished as a result.
Here’s what Jonathan Lear says about her:
To identify with Cordelia is to
want to be blunt, to avoid embellishment, flattery, or hypocrisy-and to want to
be loved for doing just that. This is not a set of desires which get satisfied
often. By and large, people prefer to be flattered. They
find it hard to recognize love in a blunt appraisal; and they find it even
harder to reciprocate such love. Cordelia's strategy is not the route to massive
popularity. -- Jonathan Lear, Open Minded: Working Out the Logic of the
Soul, p. 3
In
other words: we want to tell the truth,
and we want to be loved for doing it—not, in Lear’s
words, “a set of desires which get satisfied often”. We shouldn’t
be surprised that when a community like EDS experiences some internal tensions
as this one has, many on the outside will be quick to dance on our grave. And
that is why it is important, in moments like this, to remember what we came out
to do in the first place. As an educational faith community shaped by the Gospel,
EDS will always be one or two steps ahead of the conventional wisdom of
institutional Christianity. This has consistently been the school’s
vocation, and if we are to be true to our calling we will ever risk being
unpopular and misunderstood. That perception simply goes with the territory.
But it cannot be otherwise.
I
have always found these words from the 11th chapter of Hebrews both
personally and corporately inspiring:
All of these died in faith without having received the
promises, but from a distance they saw and greeted them. They confessed that
they were strangers and foreigners on the earth, for people who speak in this
way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking
of the land that they had left behind, they would have had opportunity to
return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.
Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; indeed, he has prepared a
city for them. [Hebrews 11: 13-16]
The
author of Hebrews is talking about a certain kind of holy restlessness which
motivated the matriarchs and patriarchs of Israel. They knew themselves to be “strangers
and foreigners on the earth”, people who desired a better
country. And because they were faithful in their search for that homeland, God
has “prepared
a city for them”.
You
could say that EDS is a community of faithful learners who desire a better
country. You could say that we are
strangers and foreigners not only on the earth but in the church. And you could
also say that, to the extent that we are faithful in our perseverance in
seeking that homeland, God has prepared a city for us. We often talk about working for peace and
justice as if it is the bitter pill of faithfulness. But anyone who has done
justice work knows that the work itself is liberating. If EDS sees its reward
as enduring all this justice work so that we will be popular across the
Episcopal Church, we will miss the point.
If we see our justice work as allowing us already to inhabit the city
that God has built for us, then we will be standing now together in our true
homeland.
And
these thoughts about our corporate pilgrimage lead me to say a word to those
who today embark on this more personal sacred journey of theological education.
You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t
experienced yourself as a stranger and foreigner in the place you came
from. You wouldn’t
be here if you weren’t seeking a homeland. You wouldn’t
be here if you didn’t want a better country for yourself, your
household, your nation, your world. You have seen and greeted the promises from
afar. You have come here to figure out how further to step into the pathway and
pursue them.
Theological
education is a wonderful, bracing, invigorating experience. It is also really
hard. It is hard for a couple of reasons.
First, you’re trying to take in four new disciplines from a
dead stop. In my first year of seminary,
I soon realized that I didn’t have enough Bible to
understand theology. I didn’t have enough theology to
understand the Bible. I didn’t
have enough history to understand either. Ethics was a total mystery. And who
had time for pastoral care?
The
point is: you are embarking on a process which is inherently destabilizing. And
that leads to the second reason that seminary can be hard. Not only are you
trying to wrap your head around an interlocking series of intellectual
challenges; you’re doing this in the context of trying on a whole
new set of cultural and vocational attitudes. You might have a spouse or a
partner who didn’t think that this was the life they signed on for.
You’re
going into hospital rooms and people are looking to you to have something
healing to say. And then there will be those ridiculous GOEs. This is hard
work. It’s hard intellectual work. It’s
hard spiritual work. It’s hard interpersonal work. I don’t
say this to scare you off. I say it because as a former seminary professor and
dean myself, I know something of the internal dislocation that this experience
can cause.
And
I say it not only because I know that you, as seekers after a better country,
will persevere through that dislocation.
I say it because—and this is the experience of
everyone who goes through theological education—it
actually gets better. There will come a
day, not all that far off, when you will begin to integrate all this. There
will come a day when Bible and history and theology will come together and
inform the way you understand both God and yourself. There will come a day when
your internal sense of your own vocation will align with your personal and interpersonal
relationships. There will come a day when the process not only helps you
prepare for a life in ministry but gives you the intellectual and personal
skills to reflect on your life, your ministry, and the contextual situation in
which you find yourself. There will come
a day when you will realize that theological education is not about downloading
all the right answers and perfect things to say. It is about getting the skills
and tools to access and live out the deep truths that you uniquely know and can
tell about God.
People
who graduate from seminary remember it so fondly because so much happens to
them there. So think of signing this matriculation book as signing your
passport to adventure. Both you and the school itself are embarking today on a
pilgrimage together toward that better country, that city which God is
preparing for us. What you discover when you’re
on it is that we encounter the heavenly city in the steps of the pilgrimage
itself. And that is why the speakers of Psalm 126 have always had it right:
1 When the Lord
restored the fortunes of Zion, *
then
were we like those who dream.
2
Then was our mouth filled with laughter, *
and
our tongue with shouts of joy.
3
Then they said among the nations, *
“The
Lord has done great things for
them.”
4
The Lord has done great
things for us, *
and
we are glad indeed.
Translation: God is already doing for us
now that which we hope for. As we walk together on this sacred pilgrimage
toward God’s heavenly city, we endure both personal and corporate disruption.
It cannot be otherwise. But we do not experience that dislocation for its own
sake: we endure it for the sake of the vision of personal peace and social justice
and shalom that Jesus holds out to
those who cannot do other than walk with him.
And
so, to the EDS community at large and to those who now join it today, not I
say, but Jesus says: “Do
not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about
your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more
than clothing? . . . But strive first for the kingdom of God and God’s
righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” [Matthew 6:
25-34] It really will be OK for you. It really will be OK for us. So let’s take
up that passport to adventure. Let’s get
on that road and walk together with Jesus and each other--with the poor, the
oppressed, the sick, the grieving, the homeless—let’s walk toward that better,
heavenly country and help God build it, all the while advancing the work of
peace, justice, and liberation among ourselves and in the world. Amen.
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