Baccalaureate Service Baccalaureate Address
BACCALAUREATE 2009
BACCALAUREATE SERVICE
May Twenty-Fourth -- Two Thousand and Nine -- Eleven O'Clock
Newlin Hall -- Norton Center for the Arts -- Danville, Kentucky
SERVICE OF WORSHIP
The congregation will remain seated while the choir, clergy, faculty,
and graduating seniors enter during the processional.
There will be no recessional at the close of the service.
PRELUDE............................................Prelude in F Major ....................................Fanny Mendelssohn
PROCESSIONAL ........................Fanfare and Trumpet Tune......................................David Maxwell
WILLIAM J. JONES , Organ
WELCOME ...................................................................................................................JOHN A. ROUSH
President of the College
INTROIT.......................................God is Gone Up With a Shout....................................Eric H. Thiman
The Choirs of Centre College and The Presbyterian Church of Danville
BARBARA L. HALL, Conductor
ANDREW BOYLAN, NICK LEFEVRE, and JAKE THROOP, Trumpets
WILLIAM J. JONES, Organ
CALL TO WORSHIP........................................................................................................JIM STEWART
Pastor, The Presbyterian Church of Danville
LEADER: The earth is the Lord's and the fullness thereof,
ALL: The world and those who dwell therein.
LEADER: For God has founded it upon the seas,
ALL: And established it upon the rivers.
LEADER: Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in God's holy place?
ALL: Those who have clean hands and a pure heart, who do not lift up their souls to what is false...
LEADER: They will receive blessing from the Lord.
ALL: Such is the generation of those who seek the Lord, who seek the face of God.
(Psalm 24: 1-6)
INVOCATION....................................................................................................................JIM STEWART
HYMN.....................................................................................God of the Ages, Whose Almighty Hand
(Congregation standing)
ANDREW BOYLAN, NICK LEFEVRE, and JAKE THROOP, Trumpets
WILLIAM J. JONES, Organ
LITANY...............................................................................................................................RICK AXTELL
College Chaplain and Associate Professor of Religion
LEADER: God of Grace, we pause to offer our thanksgiving for the satisfying
journey that has brought us to this moment, and to look forward
to a future full of promise, challenge, and hope.
SENIORS: Like a shepherd, You have led us beside still waters, through
deep valleys, and into green pastures. We give thanks for
the rich
gifts of Your grace along the way:
LEADER: For the rich heritage and ongoing mission of Centre College, from
which we have benefited immeasurably;
SENIORS: For a place that has expected so much of us, given so much to us,
and become so much a part of us;
LEADER: For mentors who have taught and challenged, inspired and nurtured;
SENIORS: For those who have expanded our vision, sharpened our skills,
cultivated our passion, and prepared us for the challenges ahead;
LEADER: For supportive family and friends who have accompanied us on our journey;
SENIORS: For those who have comforted us in our sorrow, joined us in our
celebrations, and encouraged us to pursue our dreams;
LEADER: For opportunities to learn and grow, for discoveries about ourselves
and our world, and for people who have enriched our lives.
SENIORS: All these we recognize as gifts from You, and so we give You thanks.
LEADER: Good Shepherd, You have sustained us, guided us, and gifted us.
We know You have called us not only to offer our thanks to You, but to
offer ourselves to Your people, for the healing of Your world. Now
strengthen us for the task of advancing Your reign on earth as it is in heaven.
ALL: Lead us in paths of righteousness that we might be dedicated
servants in an indifferent and self-indulgent world.
LEADER: Where the way is blocked by prejudice and ignorance,
ALL: Teach us to build bridges of understanding and respect.
LEADER: Where once green pastures have been spoiled by the poison of
oppression and exploitation,
ALL: Teach us to sow seeds of truth and compassion, that all people
might reap a harvest of justice.
LEADER: Where once still waters have been troubled by division and violence,
ALL: Inspire us to be peacemakers who work for justice and promote
reconciliation.
LEADER: In the deep valleys where human need cries out in desperation,
ALL: Call us beyond mere charity to genuine community.
LEADER: When the worn pathways of daily life tempt us to close our eyes
to suffering and strife in our midst,
ALL: Awaken us to hear Your call in the voice of the other, that the
work of compassion might be the substance of our commitment. Amen.
FIRST READING................................................................................................................Jonah 4: 1-11
BENJAMIN COOLEY
SECOND READING.....................................................................................................Psalm 139: 1-11
DEYSI HERNANDEZ
ANTHEM WITH CONGREGATION
(Congregation standing)
All People that on Earth Do Dwell (Old 100th)......................................Ralph Vaughan Williams
The Choirs of Centre College and The Presbyterian Church of Danville
ANDREW BOYLAN, NICK LEFEVRE, and JAKE THROOP, Trumpets
BEN COCANOUGHER, Timpani
WILLIAM J. JONES , Organ
Verse 1 (Congregation and Choir)
All people that on earth do dwell, sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.
Him serve with fear, his praise forth tell. Come ye before him, and rejoice.
Verse 2 (Congregation and Choir)
The Lord, ye know, is God indeed; without our aid he did us make.
We are his folk; he doth us feed, and for his sheep he doth us take.
Verse 3 and 4 (Choir only)
Verse 5 (Congregation and Choir)
Praise God from whom all blessings flow, the God whom heaven and earth adore,
From mortal, from the angel host, be praise and glory evermore.
THIRD READING..............................................................................................................Luke 10: 25-37
TYSHAUN LANG
BACCALAUREATE SERMON.................................................Believing Fewer Things More Deeply
CAROL A. TATE
Pastor, Emmanuel Presbyterian Church, Nashville, Tennessee
HYMN............................................................................................Eternal God, Whose Power Upholds
(Congregation standing)
BENEDICTION......................................................................................................JAMISON NORWOOD
RESPONSE...............................The Lord Bless You and Keep You .................................John Rutter
The Choirs of Centre College and The Presbyterian Church of Danville
WILLIAM J. JONES, Organ
POSTLUDE....................................Toccata from Symphony V ...........................Charles-Marie Widor
WILLIAM J. JONES , Organ
BARBARA L. HALL is Stodghill Professor of Music.
WILLIAM J. JONES is Minister of Music at The Presbyterian Church of Danville
and Centre College Organist.
BENJAMIN COOLEY, DEYSI HERNANDEZ, TYSHAUN LANG,
NICK LEFEVRE, and JAMISON NORWOOD are members of the Class of 2009.
BEN COCANOUGHER and JAKE THROOP are members of the Class of 2011.
ANDREW BOYLAN is a member of the Class of 2012.
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BACCALAUREATE ADDRESS
By Carol A. Tate
Now I have a reading. It is a Billy Collins poem, entitled: "Introduction to Poetry." (1)
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
We live in a world in which most people of faith seem to know what everything means. Believe these things, do these things, and everything will work out. Believe these things, do these things - especially give liberally to the earnest and winsome preacher - and the prosperity that God desires for you will transform your life. They make it sound as if there is a formula, an equation to be solved, a riddle to be answered, a marching band routine to be learned that will guarantee perfect rows and the prize at the end of the day. What it means to be a human being and what it means to be a person of faith and how to live as one who is open and responsive to the mystery of the Holy - I have always found that those questions required qualified, limited answers. They are questions that urge me to live in thoughtful silence, questions that often require me to say what I believe, what I intuit, what I hope, even what I am willing to give my life for, but not necessarily what I know.
The voices that speak with the most authority, of course, base their pronouncements on their interpretations of scripture. But I do not know how those interpreters can hear the one voice they wish to hear in the throng of all the others that are speaking. It is stunning that people hear the storyteller weave not just one, but two differing accounts of creation, and continue to try to fit a 21st-century world into an ancient cosmology - the Bible theme park near Florence, I read, has dinosaurs grazing near the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve happily within. Scripture has been used to defend indefensible positions and has been used to justify deeply unjust things. Israel clings to its chosenness; the early Church maintains its stranglehold on women and dismisses Jew and Gentile alike who speak in differing accents about Jesus of Nazareth, who was captured and co-opted by a Constantinian world. Some of the most beautiful poetry about physical, intimate love ever to be written is a part of scripture in the Song of Songs, and most interpreters have been trying to torture this erotic language into saying it means something else. "You are stately as palm tree, and your breast are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches" (Song of Songs 7.7-8) - and that is the tame part! The rabbis who included it and the Church Fathers who adopted it have been trying to say it was a conversation about the love between Israel and God; or it is a conversation between Christ and the Church. No - says anyone who have ever been in love. It is poetry about the intoxicating experience of loving another human being with all of one's body and spirit.
And yet, scripture takes away all the smugness it helps to foster in startling ways. The Book of Jonah is not a cute story about how a human being could fit into a big fish, about which literalists have endlessly obsessed. It is a stunningly subversive folk tale that confronts Israel and all of us about the universality of God's love. It must have been a jolting word to hear, even in a folk tale, that God cares for the Ninevites, the violent and rapacious enemy of Israel, the Assyrians, the last word in the outsider - and even their cattle! It is a jolting word to hear that God also loves our enemies.
If the best we can do, when we tie down the story of the Good Samaritan, is to torture a moralizing tale out of it, then we have not heard the contrary word scripture wants to speak. The arrow that flies straight into the heart of any hearer of Luke's story is not that we should be compassionate people; that we should do the right thing even when other people do not, although that is true. The kicker is that it was a Samaritan, the most reviled, most despised person in the society of the day, who cared for the victim. And the realization that has to come quickly behind it is that we are the person in the ditch. Who is my most detested enemy? Who is yours? Who is the Other I do not wish to acknowledge or include - that one, Jesus says, is your savior, your lifeline. Tell me who you wish to exclude, someone has said, and I will tell you about your God.
The historian John Lukacs has written: "Human knowledge is neither onjective nor subjective. It is personal and participant - which places us at the center of the universe...because the purpose of human knowledge - indeed, of human life itself - is not accuracy, and not even certainty; it is understanding." (2) I am more comfortable in the mystery and less sanguine about absolute truth claims in the life of faith. I try to bring to bear upon my biblical study and theological inquiry the love of learning that was first nurtured here at Centre. But it was not the knowledge that I gained here that I want to celebrate, although my education has enabled me to engage and to succeed wherever I have gone.
It was the deep struggle to understand what is Other that has profoundly shaped my life.
There is nothing more Other in this life than to expend one's whole being on something as ephermeral as a musical phrase. I am still grasped by the mystery and transcendence of coming to understand a piece of music artistically, spiritually, and physically. Anyone who attempts to create art or to interpret the work of others knows what a singularly lonely and intense experience it is. This hall, Newlin Hall, has absorbed hundreds of hours of my struggle to become a musician, first as a student who labored to become proficient in the craft; and later, as a person who came to direct choirs at my beloved Presbyterian Church and to serve as the college organist. My teacher at Centre, Robert Weaver patiently shaped and prodded, demanded and cajoled until the day came that I knew that the art of music was beginning to become my own. I am forever indebted to him for the intellectual and artistic rigor he brought to the task and for the deep love he fostered. Music connected me with people's unspoken aspirations and longings. Music helped me to find a way into a deeper humanity and beyond to the mystery and joy of what I know as the divine. Centre provided the opportunity and encouragement I needed to offer all that I was before the Transcendent Other in the music I loved.
But the second experience that I am certain has shaped my life and ministry came, not with the ephemeral, but with the messy and complicated world of human relationships. Two worlds collided my freshman year at Centre College. I entered the women's restroom on my hall one afternoon in the fall. It was in the early 70's, not so long after the bitter race riots of the late 60's, not quite at the end of the soul-shattering Viet Nam War, not so long after the student unrest across the country. I was a young girl from a rural community, raised by
salt-of-the-earth parents, with a mother who was a feminist in some ways before most people knew there was such a thing. I was precocious in intellectual ways, and so naive in social ways. I had on pretty nice clothes purchased by my comfortably middle class parents - except for the fact that my pants were a little too short for the boots I was wearing. Not particularly style conscious, I didn't really care. In the restroom was a very short African-American girl whom I had not met yet. She was from an area in a city not so far away that was known in a racially disrespectful way, and from a family grouping that did not fit the traditional profile as mine did. I do not remember what she was wearing, but I remember that she was picking her Afro with a large black comb. We spoke. I brushed my teeth as she worked on her hair.
Then she said, "Nice high waters, honky."
It is hard to believe that I did not know what either part of that greeting meant. I did not know what high waters were and I had never heard the phrase, "honky." I am certain my look of total perplexity was so disarming that even this angry, combative, wonderful, amazing, bright young woman was left speechless. She didn't think that people like me existed on the planet; she could hardly process someone as naive as I was.
And that was the beginning of my liberal arts education. I was in the ditch and she was my Good Samaritan.
She and I wrestled all through college with what it meant for a black woman like her and a white woman like me in our time and place to be best friends. We saw each other as the Other, in the theological parlance of Levinas - the person who was fundamentally a stranger, fundamentally unlike the other - and the struggle to see each other as sister was ferocious at times. Both sides of our families could not understand, with people of our "own kind" to love, how was it that we were the only best friend for the other? Both of us experienced peer disapproval, she more than I. And yet, on the campus of Centre College, I came to understand and to respect this person who forced me to learn about empathy, who taught me about sacrificial love. It was a friendship that was wrought not just out of racial prejudice on both sides, but out of very different temperaments and out of evolving worldviews of two women who aspired to be educated people. Once you have that kind of struggle; once you experience that kind of depth and even joy; once you learn how like the Other you really are, or more importantly, once you become the Other yourself, you can never be the same. The cat is out of the bag. How can race or ethnicity, how can gender or orientation, how can socioeconomic categories, how even can religious differences stand before one profound experience of the Other? Central to my liberal arts education was the examination of what it means to be a human being. Central to my understanding of faith and the mystery of God continues to be the examination of what it means to be a human being in the inclusive love of God.
When my son heard that Centre had invited me to deliver the baccalaureate sermon for your graduation, he sent me a link to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education: "6 Ways to Make a Commencement Speech Soar." His memorandum to me said, "Granted, it is a sermon...(And you know, you will have another shot this afternoon at a commencement speech that soars.) I am not sure whether he was questioning the form or his speaker mom. But Class of 2009, I wish you as much joy as I have known in my lifetime thus far of trying to live in the mystery of it all, trying to free poetry and story and theological reflection from the narrowness of those who think they have the truth and spend their passion on trying to exclude Others. I wish you both the struggle and the joy of being in relationships with Others who challenge the very foundations of the person you have known yourself to be thus far. I believe fewer things now, but I believe in them more deeply: I believe in a God who is Love and in the Son, in whom I see a reflection of deep compassion for those who stand apart from the status quo. I believe in the Spirit that bears witness with our spirits in the profundity of art and in the beauty and wildness of nature and in our struggles to understand both the darkness and light of our humanity.
I believe in dreams of the impossible possible that Christians call the kingdom of God, which has everything to do with what together we can do in this lifetime, here and now. I believe in a world in which redemption and transformation are possible, but not without Muna, my Muslim friend, or AJ, my Jewish friend, or Jan, my lesbian friend, or Rita, my Buddhist friend, or James, my recovering friend, or Charles, my unbelieving friend. The poet William Stafford says it better than I can say it:
If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star. (3)
More than anything else, Class of 2009, what I wish for you is the same wish I have for my own children, something that has happened for me and began here at Centre College. Howard Thurman said it, and you will remember that he was a great teacher and mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr.
"Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what make you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs to people who have come alive."
(1) Billy Collins, Sailing Alone Around the Room (New York: Random House, 1988), p.16. Originally from the collection The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1988.
(2) John Luckacs, "Putting Man Before Descartes," The American Scholar, p.18.
(3) William Stafford, "A Ritual to Read to Each Other" in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems (New York: Viking Press, 2002), p. 212.
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