Graduation Day
Speaker: Rev. Dewey Knowles
Location: Whitney United Methodist Church
Date: June 14, 2009
I’ve been writing this sermon for a month. It’s short. This is actually notes about graduation day, so you’re going to fill in the blanks in your own minds about the graduations you’ve been to in the last 10-15-20-30-40-50 years, whatever, and the communion services you’ve been to in all that period of time so that this will just be a prompt for your thinking.
I am blessed with four children and twelve grandchildren so I’ve been to many graduations including…let’s see, all my kids made it through high school? Yes. We had to work on one of them. Rob didn’t really think he aught to bother with it. And then I went to three college graduations for three of my kids. Susie is living in a different way so she didn’t really bother to go. Instead she’s PTA president and raising four boys and her husband. And then a month ago I was up in Pullman for one of my granddaughter’s graduation from Washington State University with a BS in architectural something or other. I don’t know what she’s going to do with it yet. She hasn’t decided. And then last Sunday….Friday, Saturday, Sunday….I was in Richland, Washington for the graduation of Alex who graduated from Richland High School. Alex is just like his Uncle Rob. He wasn’t sure he was going to make it or not but he finally did. He’s been going to school in Hollywood. He’s a fantastic choreographer and dancer and there’s no limit to what he can do so I’m hoping this school will challenge him so that he actually does the homework. And then, lets see, next year Samantha should graduate from Central Washington University in theater, I think, probably, and Richard, Katherine’s son here in Boise will graduate from Borah High School.
So, looking back on all that I thought….graduations are the stuff of life. They’re time for a family reunion. The only time that all four of my kids get together is at somebody’s graduation. We don’t have time we’re all and busy planning for somebody else’s graduation. So I thought about what graduation means to the graduates. It’s a new life. Now I remember helping Jamie pack up all the stuff at her dorm. She couldn’t even really get to the door to carry it out and take it home and all this is going to be new. She’s going to be moving back into a room but then she’s going to do something different so that will be brand new. And then we sort of helped Brianna because Brianna was at Pullman also but she decided she’s going to move over to the wet side of the mountains and go to Wesleyan, I think, next year.
So there are mixed feeling about leaving all these friends you’ve had for three or four years or more, (they say now you’re lucky if you get through in six) mixed feelings about going to a new place, finding a job or whatever it is you’re going to do afterwards, or some of them will give up and go on to graduate school, or they they’ll go down and talk to the Army recruiter or the Navy recruiter. Because they’re leaving the familiar so there’s this sort of anxiety, a fear of the unknown future and what’s going to happen to me now. And when you stop to think about that you just kind of sit like a chicken. And there’s also the thrill of the new and maybe, if you’re lucky, an epiphany which is a big, fancy word meaning “God’s there,” “God breaks in,” “God carries you along.” I used to address God when I was trying to find houses or apartment houses in Tacoma, and I’d say “Lord, what am I going to do now? I don’t know how to get there,” but I made it and the old lady got her groceries.
So, graduations, annual conference that’s just finishing up is a graduation. Every year there’s some new people coming in, there’s some other people who’ve retired, there’s some people who retire because of medical disability, or they are being assigned to another location outside the Conference, maybe to teach or to be a chaplain in a hospital or something like that. And then at this year at Conference when the Bishop reads names of people who are planning to go to particular churches, he reads all the churches and then he reads the names of the people who are going to go there. Matthew will be going down into southern Oregon and Cristina will be coming here from Seaside, Oregon. So the Bishop gives the marching orders for 2009-2010 and the Conference has worked out a hopeful budget and they have worked on line items and they’ve talked about this and that and the other thing and what kind of programs we should be doing and what the importance things are to do in this Annual Conference. So then when David and David and Matt get back we will hear some of the highlights of what happened at Annual Conference. So Conference is new every year, and it’s old because you get used to a routine and what the Bishop’s trying to do is wiggle it a lot so you won’t get too used to it and you’ll have to think.
So Paul in 2nd Corinthians talks about the new life. This predates the book of Revelation by…oh, let’s see….30-40-50 years I think. But when you read the book of Revelation there’s a lot of Paul in the book of Revelation. He talks about this new life in Christ, that we are to be the people who please God, who follow the say of Jesus, because the love of God in Christ controls us (as long as we let it happen) and urges us on. This is how I found the apartment houses in Tacoma. We see the world and people through God’s eyes so that we become colorblind, so that the color or the shape or what kind of glasses they wear or what their dress is is really irrelevant because we’re talking about people and we’re talking to people and we want to know them and this is the part that’s in here. So it would be better if we wear dark glasses so we couldn’t see as much but just hear them. And the result, Paul says, and you can read this and expand on it as you will, the result is a new creation. The old things, he says, have passed away. We are re-born so there’s a new way of seeing and a new way of thinking and you have to figure out how this is going to work for you. God through Christ reconciled the world to himself and this has made all the difference in western history. Read your history for a while.
And then finally he says because of what God has done in Christ, we are now ambassadors of that Good News, telling the truth that the Kingdom of God has begun. An ambassador is someone who goes out….for royalty or a president….or he’s sent to a particular place to help particular people, in this case to tell the good news of Jesus Christ. We have a new calling. We are witnesses of what we know. We can’t tell people ….well; just giving them theology is interesting but it kind of up here and they’re just going to pass it over their head like water on the back. So we’re telling them what we know, what’s happened to us. I don’t know about you but this is what happened to me. So we are ambassadors, we are witnesses, and this is a kind of graduation. After each reading of the Scripture, or graduation from college, high school, job, all the work you’ve got to learn to do your job and you have to graduate and get the certificate to hang on your wall in your cubicle.
Communion is also a graduation day….celebration. The sacrament is a festival with family. We’ve been doing this now for, let’s see, if you figure up on your calculator, quite a long time, and we are following what Paul gave us in 1st Corinthians 11 and some other places about…this is what I’m passing on to you because this is what was passed on to me. This is, evidently, what the early church had been doing for quite a while before Paul wrote this letter, the first letter to Corinth. He calls this meal a holy meal. In Greek society it would be a meal which belongs to the emperor. So this is a holy meal. In this case Christ is the emperor if you want to think about it that way. We break bread with Christ who is at the head of the table (if we did this right we’d have a circular table here) We fellowship with each other in a continual new beginning and we also receive a commission as followers, as Disciples of Christ, filled with his spirit, directing our life, making all things new.
I was looking for some poetry to add to what we’re doing here and, uh, let’s see. This one I found which is for fishermen and people who like boats. It’s called “Launch Out Into the Deep.” I was in the Coast Guard for a while and they said you had to go out but you had to come back.
Long may they toil, those men of Galilee
Casting their heavy nets into the sea
And taking nothing, when dawn stained the sky
They made for shore; prepared their nets to dry
“Launch out into the deep,” a voice they knew
Dispelled their gloom and courage winged anew.
“Launch out.” His words in this new day
Become a challenge to that depths the soul may plumb.
For love and service and comfort and joy and peace
Shall overflow the cup and still increase.
“Launch out. Let down the nets.” That voice again
Brings hope to lift the troubled hearts of men
And this is by Ida Munson and if she’d been writing today she’d have said “many women and children.” Then this poem by John Oxenham who wrote, I think, in 19th and 20th centuries and probably a group of hymns in the hymnal besides and this is his charge,
Live Christ!—and though they way may be
In this world’s sight adversity,
He who doth heed thy every need
Shall give thy soul prosperity.
Live Christ!—and though thy path may be
The narrow street of poverty
He had not where to lay His head
Yet lived in largest liberty.
Live Christ!—and though the road may be
The strait way of humility,
He who first trod that way of God
Will clothe thee with His dignity.
Live Christ!—and though thy life may be
In much a valedictory,
The heavy cross brings seeming loss
But wins the crown of victory.
Live Christ!—and all thy life shall be
A High Way of delivery,--
A Royal Road of goodly deeds
Gold-paved with sweetest charity.
Live Christ!—and all thy life shall be
A sweet uplifting ministry,
A sowing of the fair white seeds
That fruit through all eternity.
Then I was listening to some music of Howard Hansen. Howard Hansen was a Swede and when he was studying music his teacher pointed out that….let’s see, there was a Norwegian and there was a Dane but no great Swedish composer. So Howard Hansen was to be the great Swedish composer. And one of the pieces of Howard Hansen’s is a take off and using words of Walt Whitman (some of you have heard of Walt Whitman) in fact there was “Leaves of Grass.” This is one part of one poem called “The Mystic Trumpeter” and this is just the eighth stanza of that poem. He starts out with the idea of a mystic trumpeter, probably God, blowing his trumpet down through the ages and then Whitman saying “Blow this and blow that.” Now he says:
Now trumpeter for thy close
Vouchsafe a higher strain than any yet
Sing to my soul, renew its languishing faith and hope
Rouse up my slow belief, give me some vision of the future,
Give me for once its prophecy and joy.
O glad, exulting, culminating song!
A vigor more than earth’s is in they notes,
Marches of victory – man disenthral’d – the conqueror at last,
Hymns to the universal God from universal man – all joy!
A reborn race appears – a perfect world, all joy!
Women and men in wisdom innocence and health – all joy!
Riotous laughing bacchanals fill’d with joy!
War, sorrow, suffering gone-the rank earth purged–nothing but joy left!
The ocean fill’d with joy – the atmosphere all joy!
Joy! joy! in freedom, worship, love! joy in the ecstasy of life!
Enough to merely be! Enough to breathe!
Joy! Joy! All over joy!
These are the words from Paul. Probably Walt Whitman knew the works of Paul. Read about Walt Whitman sometime, a very amazing man who wrote thousands of poems. He was a….I think he was a nurse during the Civil War and a number of his poems come about because of what he saw in the Civil War and the deaths of friends and family in the Civil War.
So, with Joy we follow Paul and Jesus and hundreds of millions of Christians through time and we share in the Lord’s Supper and we graduate with a degree, Ambassador of Christ.