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For Pentecost/Baccalaureate Sunday, 1987
Charles W. Allen
Community of Christ the Servant, Whitewater, WI
Ephesians 3:14-19
Pentecost Sunday is often called the birthday of the church. For the apostles, though, it was another stage in their development. A period of learning had ended, and now they were ready for new tasks, for greater responsibilities. They were ready to be taken seriously, now, and so they were. In the Gospels the apostles never seem to understand what's going on. They're very unsure of themselves, and we're very unsure of them too. But in Acts things have changed. Now they speak with remarkable assurance, and what's just as remarkable is that people actually listen to them. We listen to them. It's as if they've become different people, and of course to some extent they have. Pentecost is the day the apostles grew up. To put it another way, it's the day they recognized they had grown up and the day others began to recognize it too. Pentecost may be the day the church was born, but we could just as easily say that it was the day the apostles graduated, or the day they were confirmed.
It's no wonder, then, that on this day we not only remember the church's birth but also recognize graduates and confirmands among us. For each of these people a period of learning has ended; they're now ready for new tasks and responsibilities, and by recognizing them today we're letting them know that now we're ready to take them a little more seriously than before. We're making it official. And we had better mean it when we say it. They have responsibilities of their own to assume, but this is our responsibility: our recognition needs to be genuine, because recognizing growth is part of what makes growth happen. When you're treated as a responsible person it suddenly becomes much easier to act like one, and when you're not treated that way it becomes nearly impossible. Those of us who are parents and who still have our own parents around know this from both sides. Our parents are usually the last people to treat us as adults, and until they do we don't usually act as grown-up around them as we do around our peers. We may swear we'll never treat our kids that way, but that's a promise no one ever keeps completely. We soon learn that every time our children have a chance to grow they also have as good a chance of getting hurt, or of hurting others. That makes us want to hold them back, and sometimes we're right to hold back, just as sometimes our own parents were. Sometimes. But we know we can't always be right. Sometimes we have to give our children enough rope to hang themselves with and then pray they think of something better to do with it. To those being recognized today the rest of us have to promise to let go a little more than before, and to encourage them to remind us whenever we seem to have forgotten that promise. And we all need to promise one another to try to understand when we can't agree on how much to let go, because we're guaranteed to disagree. Let's not be afraid of that, for a church's ability to love is gauged mostly on how much disagreement it can live with out in the open. Today we're not pledging to agree with one another on everything but to keep from giving up on one another.
Confirmation is an initiation ceremony-a rite of passage-that takes place only in church. It's a peculiarly Christian observance. Graduation is somewhat different. It's an initiation ceremony our surrounding culture recognizes, and it will continue to happen whether we recognize it in church or not. We recognize graduates in our worship today because we realize that God's work is not confined to our community. John Calvin was not exactly a champion of academic freedom, yet even he recognized what he called "the admirable light of truth" shining in writers outside the church, and he declared, "we shall neither reject the truth itself, nor despise it wherever it shall appear, unless we wish to dishonor the Spirit of God." Calvin was right, at least on this point. Wherever education is not blind indoctrination, that is, wherever education means striving for nothing less than truth, even where striving for truth brings conclusions we may not want to hear, we are bound to recognize God's Spirit luring people forward. We're not going to let cries of "secular humanism" frighten us away from learning, because we believe that if it's really humanism it can't be completely secular, no matter what the skeptics and the TV evangelists try to tell us.
I chose a prayer from Ephesians for today's sermon text because it seems to include both confirmands and graduates in its blessing. Listen to it again.
This, then, is what I pray, kneeling before the Father, from whom every family, whether spiritual or natural, takes its name: Out of his infinite glory, may he give you the power through his Spirit for your hidden self to grow strong, so that Christ may live in your hearts through faith, and then, planted in love and built on love, you will with all the saints have strength to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth, and to know the love of Christ, which is beyond all knowledge, until you are filled with the utter fullness of God.
Paul, or whoever wrote this in his name, gives his blessing to all striving for truth. He recognizes that every group united in a common enterprise takes its name, finally, from God. God is the source and inspiration of all labor for the common good of humankind. Paul's wish aims finally at our knowing the love of Christ, and we'll return to that. But first let's notice that at its fullest knowing the love of Christ includes grasping "the breadth and the length, the height and the depth." Paul uses an expression current in his day for referring to the whole universe. For Paul understanding the world around us is a stage in coming to know just how much the love of Christ embraces. In recognizing graduates today we're saying something like this. We honor all striving after truth, because all efforts to understand our world better display the love of Christ to us, provided that we have the eyes to see it.
So recognizing graduates is a valuable part of our worship today. But it ought not to surprise us that the service centers around confirmation. I just said that if we're to see the love of Christ in every corner of the universe, we'll need eyes that can see it. Confirmation celebrates acquiring that new vision of our world. At least it celebrates our beginning to acquire it, because if we're honest we'll admit that when it comes to seeing things in the light of Christ's love we remain beginners throughout our entire lives. Much of what we learn about our world may be within our grasp, though even that is open to question. We've at least learned how to predict and control lots of things. But the love of Christ can't be predicted or controlled. It can't be grasped. We may glimpse enough of it to chase after it-that's what we're called to do, after all-but nobody ever catches up with it, much less catches hold of it. And it's a good thing we can't catch it, because if we could it would lose all its attraction. We never grasp the love of Christ, but it does sometimes grasp us. And all we can do in our worship and education is to teach and remind ourselves to be open enough for that to happen to us-whenever it does happen. John Updike says in one of his novels that church services are most of the time like billboards advertising soft drinks. Instead of quenching our thirst they wind up making us even thirstier. That's no criticism. It's all we should ever expect from our worship. Those unexpected moments when our thirst really is quenched, for the time being, are sheer gift. We can't type them into the bulletin. And we can't make them happen by putting water or hands on each other. That's not why we do those things. We baptize and confirm to say that we're ready to stop trying to make things happen and are willing to wait for something to grab hold of us, no matter how long the waiting takes. And we don't have to be able to see anything yet for Christ's love to be making us over for the day when we finally do glimpse something. In confirmation we don't have to claim any special insights. We claim only that we're ready to learn how to wait with our friends in Christ for whatever happens. And there will be plenty to do while we're waiting.
Graduation and confirmation are both forms of initiation; to initiate is to begin. So on the day the church began we're here to celebrate being lifetime beginners. And the Spirit celebrates with us. Let's enjoy it. Amen.