Coe Co)lege
Cedar Rapids, fowa

Baccalaureate Cammencement Address
May 20, 19906

John M. Buchanan, Pastor
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

PROVISIONS FOR THE JOURNEY

Some things never change. Comé May and June, year in - year out, one
generation gathers and tries to find appropriate words to say to the next
generation; as yet another younger generation fidgets, Wiggles in pews, on
folding chairs and generally laments the length and sobriety of the whole
exercise. The older anes - the audience, as it were - sit up and take
notice. Having had the unusual opportunity of sitting there as a parent
and standing here as a Baccalaureate preacher - an equal number of times -
my sense is that they are the ones paying the most attention, They have a
very great deal invested - of their hope, and love and cash, They are
filled today with pride and relief. They will reach for hankies a lot
teday: they'll touch hands and pat one another today without having to say
a thing. They've done it... maybe the most important thing they ever did
or ever will do. They're feeling like they've launched the future... and
it's you... and they're feeling pretty good about the whole enterprise.
The supporting cast for this drama, the faculty and administration
of the institution, are also proud and relieved. They hope you have paid
your bills: they will follow you, be watching with attentiveness as your
Jives unfold. They'll be very pleased if you remember their names. And
you, the actors in the drama - the principles for whom all this hoopla is
arranged - you're excited and pleased, as proud as you normally allow
yourselves toa be; maybe a little humble and even grateful, uncertain,
frightened. And, I do recall, very distracted.

[t's one of those occasions that looms a little larger than life..,
and a lot larger than anyone's ability to speak meaningfully to it. Some
things never change. Garrison Kellor told a graduating class a few years
ago that the one thing they could always count on in this life was their
parents' worrying. He was right, of course. They always have worried
about you. They always will. In fact, right now they're worrying whether,
underneath those robes you are properly pressed, tucked in, and have a
clean handkerchief in your pocket. I've been there. 1 know they're
worried about whether you have secks on. They may even be worried about
what you have under those robes with you. Some things never change.

But some things do, and while part of this exercise today is as
predictable as long speeches and a champagne cork popping at an inopportune
moment later this afternoon, the other part of this exercise is about
change.

Unprecedented change in the world. No one anticipated the changes
that happened and are happening politically. It was just a year ago that
the students began to gather in Tiananmen Square; seven months ago that the
wall began to open; six months ago that the candles filled Wenceslas Square
in Prague; four months ago that the people of Timisoara said no to
tyranny; three months ago that Nelson Mandela was in jail. We are living
this morning in a very different world from the one we were living ina
year ago. No one - not the intelligencea community, the academic
community - anticipated it. And thrilled as we are, thoughtful people are
also wary. Change is frightening - risky.

And so, among the gifts we trust your education has given you for the
journey, we pray is adaptability, creativity — the ability to live
purposefully with enormous unpredictability.

You know far more about technological change than we do, of course.
You adapted to word processing more quickly than we adjusted to autamatic
transmission and pop-up toasters. Some of us still have to wait until you
come howe from college to reset our digital watches and show us how to
“racord” on the VCRs you persuaded us to purchase

Seven years after Mepatrends swept the nation, John Naisbett and
Patricia Aburdene published an up-date, Mepatrends 2,000, Ten New
Directions for the 1990s. The opening sentences set the pace.

“We stand at the dawn of a new era. Before us is
the most important decade in the history of
civilization, a period of stunning technological
innovation, unprecedented economic opportunity,
surprising political reforn, and great cultural
rebirth. It will be a decade like none that has
come before." [p. 11]

That's quite an assertion - “the most important decade in the history
of civilization." Even after allowances for graduation-day hyperbole,
that's still quite an assertion. No wonder you, we - maybe we more than
you - are worried, uncertain, anxious.

A journey begins for you and for all of us today and its outcome is
not at all clear.

That, 1 propose to you this morning, is not unlike one of the mast
consistent motifs in the tradition of Judeo-Christian religion. The
Biblical tradition.

The story is about people moving from security to freedom, from
certainty to riskiness, from predictability to happiness, from safety to
salvation. That's the story from the beginning.

Think of it, the prototypes, Adam and Eve, mother and father of us
all, get kicked out of the garden, where everything is safe and secure and
predictable. Human history starts when their security ends. Now
traditionally that story is evidence of God's displeasure at their

disobedience, but the best of our theologians have always suspected that
there isn't room in the Garden of Eden for human history: that human
beings have to take charge, start making decisions - including some very
bad ones; have to be thrown out of paradise before they can be whole and
happy and saved. God, the old stery reminds us, not anly throws them out,
God knits them garments for life outside paradise,

And then, in what Biblical scholarship knows is the primal Bible
story, Abraham and Sarah, elderly, settled, stable, hear a voice that says
samething preposterous: “Go from your country and your kindred, and your
parents' house to the land I will show you."

Can you imagine the day they tried to explain that to the neighbors?
Abraham is seventy-five. He and Sarah have no children. They have lived
in one place for fifty years. They are comfortable: up at 7:00 for coffee
and the newspaper at 7:30: walk the dog at 8:00, lunch, nap, cocktails,
dinner, TV till bedtime, the buffet at the club on Thursday. Can you
imagine the day Sarah and Abraham tell their neighbors they are selling
their place, having a Barage sale, cashing in their C.D.’s and leaving?

- “Where are you going, Abraham? To a retirement village?"

- "Well, actually not. Actually we don't know where we're going.
We're headed for the promised Jand, but we really don't know where it is.
So we're trusting God to show us and to provide for us. And we hate to
bring it up, but we're expecting that sometime soon, Sarah's going to be
pregnant. So we'll be parents, not just of a child, but an entire nation.
That's a whole other story! Anyway, we're out-of here."

Think about what that primal story is saying about human life and
about God and about what we really need for the journey.

Think about the assertion - the breathtaking assertion - that the
creator God, the one who calls being out of nothingness, form out of chaos,
penetrates history and human enterprise and calls people to get up and
move; the assertion that God's reality is accessible not merely in history
- tradition -— custom — but the future; that God's reality is not pushing us
from behind, but out ahead, pulling us into the future. Think about that
incredible theological assertion that God is making new and unlikely things
happen; that God expects people not to be too settled, to be mobile enough
to respond, This is, the story will tell us, @ pecutiiar God who prefers
tents to buildings: a God who is suspicious of temples and religion because
temple religion has a way of becoming so tied up in its traditions, it
forgets about God, a God who likes to be on the way -— in the wilderness
with the people; a God who promises to provide love and courage sufficient
enough for the journey.

It emerges again, generations later. This time it's a loose
confederation of tribes, descendants of Sarah and Abraham. They've been
living in Egypt for several generations. They have settled there; thrived,
prospered so much that the Egyptians get worried and start turning them
into slaves - making bricks for Pharoh'‘s ambitious construction projects.

Moses organizes them, presents their demapds to Pharoh, negotiates,
threatens Pharoh relentlessly. And one night under the cover of darkness,
{hey gather the sheep and cattle, get the children and old folk organized,
look around at the old neighborhood one last time and walk inte the
wijderness...

And start to complain. Egypt wasn't all that bad. As a matter of
fact, Egypt was home: had been home all their lives, and their parents
before them and their grandparents before then. It might look like slavery
to a young radical like Moses, but it is also home. They're barely out of
Egypt when they start to complain.

"There's no water oul here in the wilderness; no houses - not even a
Red Roof inn. At least we had a roof over our heads and food on the table
in Egypt.

"tt would have been better to serve the Egyptians than to die in the
wilderness," they murmur.

Sometimes uncertainty is so frightening we toy with the idea of
settling for security - even if it is limiting and oppressing.

Bruno Bettleheim, who died two months ago, was a pioneer in research
and treatment of autistic children.

In his popular book, The Uses of Enchantment, he wrote about the
psychological importance of fairy tales, noting how many of them express
this dynamic. He ebserved:

“in many fairy tales, being pushed out of home stands for having to
become oneself. Self-realization requires leaving the orbit of home, an
excruciatingly painful experience fraught with many psychological dangers.’
Bettleheim taught that the experience happens at every stage in life, not
simply childhoad.

He had been a prisoner at Dachau. Later he wrote a controversial
essay for the New Yorker in which he suggested that the people who survived
the concentration camps were the ones who lived for something more than
security, their own comfort and predictability: that is, those who lived
for more than survival. Human life, he observed, becomes something less
than human when the oppressor manages to reduce it to a struggle to find
the next meal, the next drink of water.

it is a universal human theme. There is a sense in which life is
always calling us to leave security behind if we are to do and be all we
can: a sense in which life is diminished to the degree it is focused oniy
on the provision of comfort and security. You inherit a culture that seems
at times utterly obsessed with its own comfort; a culture so hooked on
materialism, on what George Carlin calls accumulating “your stuff," that
its epitaph is characterized in that infamous BMW bumper sticker — “The One
With The Most Toys Wins."

The issue has to do with our development and maturity as human
beings. it has to do with our living life to its fullest. It has to do

with creativity and accomplishment. Playwright Neil Simon said that it is
always very risky business to express oneself creatively in the arts,
business, professionally and relationally. But, said Simon, the
possibilities are enormous. Had Michelangelo been afraid of taking chances
he would have painted the Sistine floor and it would have been rubbed out
long ago.

And this we must not miss - this issue has to do with faith: with
living in good faith with the one who created us, has given us life, and
calls us to live with integrity and purpose and courage,

God, in all these stories, comes to people in the wilderness, on the
journey. It's almost as if you have to be in some kind of wilderness,
which means vulnerable, dependent, in order for God to break in. The great
mystics knew that, knew that to experience God you have to let go of
everything else... not an easy lesson for people who have a lot to begin
with. Henri Nouwen, who writes beautifully about spirituality, says that
you can't pray with your fists clenched: you have to epen your hands; let
go of what you own - let go of your familiarities and securities; and
acknowledge your emptiness, your hunger and thirst.

The old stories suggest that what lies ahead is not randomness and
luck and chance, but a journey to which God calls you. The old stories
suggest that when we let go of the securities upon which we have became
dependent and trust God, we will become the free and whole human beings Gad
has created us to be.

And the story makes a very daring promise. God will provide. God
will give us the resources we need for the journey. Not necessarily what
we want, but what we need: water for our thirst; living water for that
deeper thirst inside every one of us; confidence to take chances; courage
to live with uncertainty; grace to give ourselves to those we love: and
peace, in the certainty that we are not alone, not ever.

"The threshold of religion,” someone said recently, "is at that point
when the thirsty soul] stands squarely in front of the hopeless, barren
desert, the seemingly impossible."

So for each of us comes a day when we must leave security behind, a
day like the one years ago when we walked out the door and down the
sidewalk, away from the insular safety of home on the way to school and
began the adventure of becoming, the journey that is still going on...

- or the day twelve or so years later when our parents dropped us off
at college and drove away.

- or the day when we find ourselves standing in the front of a
church, with a relative stranger and without much preparation actually,
make a breathtaking commitment, ".,.for better or worse, in sickness and in
health, as leng as we both shall live."

- or later when the company downsizes, realigns management, and we
find ourselves in the wilderness of unemployment or an unplanned second
career.

- or the day when we decide we can no longer cling to old realities
and remain alive and we find ourselves starting all over again.

- or that day that can come, and does come without warning, when
someone dear to you dies, cor a dream has to be abandoned and you know your
own mortality with a terrible clarity.

Comes a day for al] of us and each of us when all we can see of the
future is uncertainty and we know that cur own resources are not adequate:
that if all we have going for us is our college degree, our strength,
vigor, youth, good looks, our professional accomplishment, our position in
the community, our bank account... that if our resources, considerable as
they are, are our only resources - we really are rather poor and weak.
Comes a day for all of us when we are hungry and thirsty and know it.

And on that day the promise is that God will provide.

Jesus said one time, "I will be with you always, to the end of the

Lid

age,

The mystery of faith is that when we trust God, when we cpen our
hands, when we know our hunger and thirst - there will be bread and life
and living water, courage and strength and love sufficient for the future.

Ged calis each of you to a sacred journey. God provides what you
need, God bless you on your way.

God of creative love, you call us into the future where you are,
sometimes away from everything we use to establish our security. Give us
courage to live faithfully. Give us food and drink sufficient for the
journey, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.