The weather is beginning to change here in Seattle. While the summers are always welcome, the return of the clouds brings a familiarity that is comforting. Changes are all around as a new class begins their year at MHGS. Convocation weekend, our time to welcome the incoming students, was a time filled with new conversation with fresh students. As we listened to the dreams and hopes these students come to MHGS with, our own passions are sparked and encourage us in our ongoing work.

The convocation service was held at St. Mark’s Cathedral and was followed by an impromptu picnic at the school (seems the rain came a bit earlier than expected.) What follows is the transcript of President Keith Anderson’s first speech to the incoming class:

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Some say the academic convocation has its roots in the story of ancient Israel.  In times of crisis, transition, challenge,or need—the elders called for a sacred assembly, a convocation of the people.  They came as we do—to pray, to remember who we are, to sit in the doorway between what was and what will be.   Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar speaks of reverberations of God—echoes of presence.

Something in me longs that God was always present, visible, and that I could live everyday within the audible sound of God’s voice.  In my experience it is not always that way.  I have known a moment or two of brilliant light and an unmistakable voice but more often it comes in whispers, shadows, and even absence.    Perhaps that is because God is not tame, domesticated, but fully alive, free, and unrestrained.

Perhaps that’s why I find myself stuck with a text I cannot escape on this morning.  It is a text of the exile.   Exile.  Hear the word and let it pour over you—exile.  Can you feel what it might mean?  The synonyms are many and the images are painful for many—Trail of tears, a forced march, homelessness,  desperation,  distance, absence a step into the unknown where you are not in control.

It is a period of transition—whatever else it is—that which was is no longer.  That which will be is not yet so we live in between—a season of uncertainty.  But exile is more than transition.  That which was—failed us—or so it seems—so we are a people with a history that is no longer glorious or successful.  That which was supposed to be strong and true— did not hold strong and true.  What we thought we know about God and God’s presence—didn’t stand this time.  This time, we lost the battle.  And Israel—those who knew themselves to be the people of God—is left with lament.  “How can we sing the songs of Jerusalem now?” A fair question—that which they thought would hold did not. How can we sing in this reality?

How can we sing?  If we feel God failed us.  How can we sing?  Our faith failed us. How can we sing? The liturgies we recited all of our lives seem hollow now. How can we sing? The Torah we were taught and the community that taught us—have failed. How can we sing? The times have changed.  The landscape of faith is new and changed. How can we sing those old songs now?

But sing they did. Anyway. In seasons of absence as they did in seasons of presence.  In seasons of uncertainty as they did in seasons of pillars of fire.  In seasons of shadow as they did in seasons of light.  They were people who lived by faith and not by sight.  That means they claimed the faith of Torah and preserved what it was at its best.  They practiced Sabbath in that land of exile and they practiced the disciplines of the people of God.  They refused to bow the knee to their own sense of a history that let them down and they refused to bow the knee to the empire of Babylon and its culture of power, wealth, success, and might.

They did what people of faith have always done—they subverted that which was through outrageous practice of faith. They sang, anyway.  They subverted the culture for the sake of something far greater—the kingdom of God.

How can we sing? I don’t know but they did.

They claimed their identity as daughters and sons of God.
They claimed their story as people rooted in a faith and history that preceded the moment in which they lived.
They built schools called synagogues.
They taught the next generation to believe and trust and follow.

Even in the midst of the exile.

The greatest threat to Torah faith was that the next generation would look at Babylon and say, “why would I claim the faith of Moses, Miriam, Jacob, Esther, and all the rest when I can bow to Marduk who is strong, powerful, successful, and who won?” The greatest threat was that they would turn away from the story of faith of those who had gone before.

It has been said that those who believe in the future always commit themselves to education.  We recognize the story of the past that has brought us to this moment.  And we believe in a future we have not yet seen. Education is an outrageous act of bold faith.  We plant seeds that we might never see to fruition.  That’s our faith.  EB White, the writer tells of seeing his wife in the garden planting seeds and bulbs in the spring of the year.  What makes the scene so poignant is that she was dying of terminal cancer; she would not live to the fall to see the fruit of her labors.  It was an act of resurrection faith.

Well, we could do worse—in a  season when many are not certain about the church or faith, we could do worse than claim that which claimed those whose  story in which we participate.    We could do worse than to know ourselves claimed by that story of exile and resurrection.

The great prophet Jeremiah knew something of the pain of Israel’s failures.  He was a prophet of the exile.  But he also deeply knew his story was given for something greater than himself.    Do you remember the words to him:   “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you  and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” Consecrated means set apart for the Kingdom.  In the great “before” of our lives, God already did something to you, for you, about you and  in you which calls it forth from you.

I consecrated you.  I set you apart.  I set you aside.  I created you for holiness.  God intends something with your life.  God sets us apart to participate in something of grandeur that God is doing in this world.

What is God doing?  Well, God is planting, uprooting, tearing down and building, scattering stones and gathering stones together, embracing and refraining from embracing, keeping and throwing away, tearing and mending, being silent and speaking; God is rescuing and blessing, providing and judging, healing and enlightening. God is battling and resting.  God is doing and waiting.  Jeremiah was already chosen, enlisted, called to write the story of his life of Torah faith.

15 years after I graduated from seminary  I interviewed for a job at my alma mater.  The president was not someone I knew.  We were scheduled for 45 minutes.  2 ½ hours later, we finished the interview.  It hadn’t gone well.  At one point,  he said to me, “you have a reputation at the seminary as a troublemaker.”  To be truthful, it made me proud.   I knew what it meant.  It had something to do with my views and practices in protest of the war in Vietnam.  It had something to do with the work I was doing in baby steps in the work of  racial reconciliation in the early 70’s.  It had a lot do my publicly stated positions in favor of the ordination of women.  It had something to do with my sense of call to the urban mission of the church in a suburban and rural denomination.

I was in trouble because I sang songs that didn’t quite fit.  But for me they were the songs of the text we call the Word of God.  I practiced my education as best as I could. I knew enough then to know that my education did not stop at the edge of the campus or when I left the classroom or when I finished my reading for the week or when my paper was done.

I told you as new students the other day that we stand in the doorway—at the threshold of something we don’t yet know.   The truth of the matter is that when I got to speak to you, I had in my hand notes for something entirely other than what I had planned to bring to you on Tuesday.  But the image of threshold is powerful for me.  Writer Anne Lamott tells of her experience of threshold which came as each week she heard the singing of Christians at worship. It happened that the church building was near a market she would go to, often hung over from alcohol and drugs.  She found herself drawn to stand in the doorway of the little church. “…it was the singing that pulled me in and split me wide open.”  Now listen carefully,  “Something inside me that was stiff and rotting would feel soft and tender.  Somehow the singing wore down all the boundaries and distinctions that kept me so isolated.  Sitting there, standing with them to sing, sometimes so shaky and sick that I felt like I might tip over, I felt bigger than myself, like I was being taken care of, tricked into coming back to life.”

That’s grace.  That’s who we are as people of God.  People who have been loved and given grace.  “You are the beloved God.”   That’s what I charge you to know, to sing this year.  Who knows what might happen if you let those words shout into your soul.  How can we sing the songs of Jerusalem?  I don’t know what to say but I know that at certain breakthrough moments in time, the glory of God has been visible to me.  I know that I have been touched by something of Jesus that has healed me and from which I cannot escape.  It calls me and it sends me.  And thus I teach and we teach and we learn.

And that is my charge you to as we begin this year.  That together, we—all of us—will learn to sing songs in Exile—songs of future and hope and grace, songs of Jesus and of resurrection.  It won’t come easily.

And so I close with the words of a benediction I believe is from the very heart of God:  May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that you will live deep in your heart.  May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people and the earth so that you will work for justice, equity, and peace.  May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer so you will reach out your hand to comfort them and change their pain into joy.  May God bless you with holy restlessness whenever people are dishonored so you will not rest until all people, tribes, and nations are treated as those created in the image of God. May God bless you with the foolishness to think you can make a difference in the world, so you will do the things which others say cannot be done. May you have an openness for new ideas, an honor of old ideas, a readiness to grow and pugnacious desire to met by Jesus in all your learning. May you learn to love the text of Scripture even as you learn an openness to its meaning.  May your know yourselves to be loved deeply by Jesus of Nazareth whose life and call is gospel. May you go into this year, not as an educated elite, but as those who know themselves to be sent forth into this season of education by the Father, in the name of Jesus Christ the Son, in the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.