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The Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau once said that “Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.” And Robert Orben commented that “A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success.” My college commencement was spectacular, but the address itself was not very memorable. Or at least it wasn’t to me. It was given by a foundation president, and it was only years later that I thought, perhaps somewhat cynically, that the invitation to speak might have moved the college’s grant proposals further up the stack on the desk. My seminary commencement was also spectacular, for different reasons. By then, I was ready to roll up my sleeves and get to work. The speaker has since become an acquaintance, and every time I see him I assure him how memorable his address was. Jon Stewart spoke at William and Mary’s commencement a few years ago, and received an honorary degree. He said: “I am honored to be here and to receive this honorary doctorate. When I think back to the people that have been in this position before me from Benjamin Franklin to Queen Noor of Jordan, I can’t help but wonder what has happened to this place…as an alumnus, I have to say I believe we can do better.” We can do better than that… The writer Anna Quindlen at a Mount Holyoke commencement: “When I quit the New York Times to be a full-time mother, the voices of the world said that I was nuts. When I quit it again to be a full-time novelist, they said I was nuts again. But I am not nuts. I am happy. I am successful on my own terms. Because if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all. Remember the words of Lily Tomlin: If you win the rat race, you're still a rat.” Or finally, Bob Newhart, to Catholic University: “In preparation for today, I read a number of other commencement addresses. There seems to be an obligatory reference to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. And also to give the perception that you are intelligent…you don't actually have to BE intelligent, but just create the perception. This can usually be accomplished by a reference to Kafka - even if you have never read any of his ... or her works.” There are many more. Track them down, read them, have your own commencement exercise. My point, and I hope I have one, is in a way an extension of a point offered to us a week ago from our guest preacher, Cynthia Campbell, President of McCormick Theological Seminary, herself a commencement speaker. Cynthia’s point was welcome, the assertion that because God welcomed us, accepted us – God showing no partiality, God being no respecter of persons – we should do the same to others. She lifted up the spiritual practice of hospitality, hospitality as more than Emily Post, good etiquette, nice manners, but hospitality as openness, welcome to the stranger, and, at a deeper level, openness and welcome to what the stranger may offer us. One more word to toss into this mix of commencement and welcome and hospitality: evangelism. Yes, evangelism. Evangelism defined broadly and widely, and defined clearly and urgently. Evangelism that is not about whacking someone over the head with the Bible, or force-feeding a particular fear-based version of Christianity, but evangelism that is open to invitation and welcome, and, yes, hospitality. I’d like to unpack the sermon title – “Yes, Evangelism” – in two ways: * “Yes, (this is) evangelism” and We saw a version of the first this week, a kind of civic evangelism. It is what got me thinking about all this commencement speech stuff in the first place. Perhaps you heard about President Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame. I mean not to get into the debate about choice in all this, though it may be inevitable. But if the conversation is about sharing truth, and speaking the things we believe in to the world – as Jesus insists this morning that it is – then certainly we must find ways to do that faithfully and effectively. For some, one abortion ever, any time, any place, will always be one too many. And for others, whatever the opposite end of the spectrum is will be the only acceptable reality. But most of us do not wake up each day in such postures. So our President said: “The question…is how do we work through these conflicts? Is it possible for us to join hands in common effort? As citizens of a vibrant and varied democracy, how do we engage in vigorous debate? How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?” He continued: “Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature...Because when we…open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do - that's when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.” These words may not resonate with you, but they surely do with me. Call it “civic evangelism,” because it imagines opening ourselves to the stranger, in this case, to one who disagrees with us, and inviting them into conversation. Politics doesn’t really work that way these days. We each read our own websites, tune in to our particular radio stations. What would common ground look like? What would political hospitality look like? Or to change things by a degree... What would such hospitality look like in the church? What would “ecclesiastical evangelism” look like? You may have been following the vote in our Presbyterian Church on what was called proposed Amendment 08-B. This proposed amendment, a version of which was supported by our session and presbytery and sent out somewhat surprisingly by last summer’s General Assembly, would have significantly altered the current prohibitive language in our Presbyterian Book of Order about who can get ordained and who cannot, based solely on the practices of intimate behavior. The amendment lost in the past few weeks. In 2001, the last time we voted on this, the final presbytery tally was 46-127. This time around, 78-93. 34 of our presbyteries changed their minds. 87 votes are needed for change, a majority of our 173 presbyteries, 9 more than were achieved in this vote. Something is going on. I believe that soon our Presbyterian law will change. I am less sure about how Presbyterian practice will change. We have been ordaining women for more than 50 years, but a stained glass ceiling still exists. So what I could imagine, and hope for, is a season of ecclesiastical evangelism, of church common ground, whereby regardless of the tally on the votes, we talk together about what change will look like in the practice of ordination in the Presbyterian church. It won’t happen the day after the constitution changes. It will happen as we find ways to live together in this changing world. In my own little way, I try to do that. I speak formally and informally with evangelicals, conservatives, across the church, nationally and in this area. Once we each realize that we aren’t heretics – either narrow-minded bigots or rule-flaunting radicals – we find that we share much common ground. We love the church, love Jesus, read the same Bible, though admittedly sometimes differently. But if the question is about common ground – asking how we can find a way to live together as we work into this new reality – rather than how can I defeat you in a polemical debate, things begin to look different. I will not give up my convictions; nor will they. That is true whether it’s abortion or human sexuality or anything else. But how we talk, how we share, how we welcome the stranger when the stranger is one who thinks differently from us, how we extend hospitality to one with whom we might never otherwise connect, feels to me like a gospel mandate. That’s one kind of “yes, evangelism.” There are many others. Here is one more. Cynthia Campbell mentioned “hospitality” as an emerging spiritual practice. There are books and essays and workshops galore. Ana Maria Pineda’s chapter on “hospitality” in Dorothy Bass’ important work called Practicing Our Faith reminds us that “in the traditions shaped by the Bible, offering hospitality is a moral imperative.” She argues that in our contemporary culture, many of us are stranger to, or estranged from, one another. She asks: “Can we move beyond strangeness and estrangement to learn the skills of welcoming one another and to claim the joy of homecoming?” (Page 32) Pineda acknowledges that hospitality is hard and risky work, but the gifts of becoming a hospitable people reflect our gratitude for being welcomed by God. In her fine book called Christianity for the Rest of Us, Diana Butler Bass writes that “Contemporary Americans are nomads, (using Henri Nouwen’s terms) ‘a world of strangers, estranged from their own past, culture, and country, from their neighbors, friends and family, from their deepest self and their God.’” Nouwen wrote that “’if there is any concept worth restoring to its original depth and evocative potential, it is the concept of hospitality’…Hospitality,” Bass says, “opens the possibility of…’free space’ where strangers become friends… (It is not) a code word for promotion, with the church as the primary product…(It is not) an instrument used for another end: to sign people up as pledging members…(It is) not a recruitment strategy designed to manipulate strangers into church membership. Rather, it is a central practice of the Christian faith – something Christians are called to do for the sake of the thing itself…Although hospitality takes on many forms…the core practice remains the same: Christian people, themselves wayfarers, welcome strangers into the heart of God’s transformative love.” (Pages 79-87) So while it is “yes, evangelism” of the civic and ecclesiastical kind that brings together unlikely conversation partners to find common ground, it is also “yes, evangelism” to those who may be strangers, awaiting the hospitality of this faith community. That may be hard for we Presbyterians, members of a congregation now more than 180 years old and a tradition now some 500 years old, described at times as God’s frozen people. It is not that we lack passion, or commitment. It is that we have been conditioned to think of evangelism is some other way, and to behave accordingly. * This is not about converting, not about pounding the Jesus
story into some helpless and unsuspecting heathen. In John’s gospel, Jesus talks about giving and receiving people and giving and receiving words. It is a dense passage, what is sometimes called his “high-priestly prayer,” a commencement speech in a way. He is about to be arrested; he is talking to God. “I have given them (that is, us) your word.” We have been given God’s word to share with the world. We have been sent into the world to share God’s word. At the beginning of the story of the Third Presbyterian Church of Rochester, the world-renowned evangelist Charles Finney preached in this church for six months. Finney was a leader in the abolition movement, though a little softer on alcohol. But he was fierce on personal conversion, what we would know as evangelism. His revivals brought people to tears and then to emotional conversion. Later in this church’s history, as Finney had moved elsewhere and his ministry was coming to an end, the leaders of this congregation declined to invite him back to preach here. It wasn’t that they disagreed with his religious positions – each generation would have been considered conservative and evangelical by our current definitions. But the later generation did not like Finney’s revivalist style. Too emotional. Too demonstrative. I am never quite sure what to do with that story, but it conects us with the deeper question of what evangelism is, and what inviting someone into this community of faith might look like. There will be times when the evangelism is political – whether abolition in the 1830’s or human sexuality in the 2000’s. There will be times when the evangelism is ecclesiastical – what will the church look like, and need to be doing, in order to meet the needs of its particular era. But in all times the answer to the question of evangelism will be “yes,” and that “yes” will happen because we have been sent into the world by a God who journeys with us and who gives us a word of welcome and hospitality to share. Our continued vitality and sustainability will depend on how we engage the culture around us and in our ability to welcome people – even the stranger – into our ongoing and always commencing journey. Amen.
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