COURAGE TO BE

Baccalaureate Sermon
May 10, 1997
Presbyterian College
Clinton, South Carolina

John M. Buchanan, Pastor
Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago, Winois

There is something wonderfully timeless about all of this: a warm and beautiful graduation
weekend on the campus of an attractive liberal arts college. I’ve attended a fair number of them,
as participant and parent, and if 1 stretch memory back several decades, I recall sitting there,
where you are sitting this morning, in a kind of suspended animation, savoring a mixture of
feelings including relief that I had actually made it, a little nostalgia about leaving (not much at the
moment; that came and will come later!) — and a bit of boredom; the addresses and sermons on
the occasion always seem to be about the same All over the country during these few weeks, very
serious and scholarly and eloquent men and women will take an average of 25 minutes to tell
graduating seniors:

Point 1 — The world is a mess.

Point 2 — You now have the ability and are
old enough to make it less messy.

Point 3 — Go out and do it.

I recall one memorable graduation in the Ohio State stadium which holds 90,000+ and was one-
half full. It was very hot. The speaker was a Nobel Prize winning chemist. His speech was about
some esoteric formula in organic chemistry he was working on. I hadn’t the slightest notion of
what he was saying, nor what relationship it had to the occasion. Nor did anyone else, for that
matter, The M.B.A.s were reading The Wall Street Journal, en masse, the Law School was
shooting the Business School with water pistols, the Medical School was conducting a
champagne brunch, the veterinary students, I recall, were inflating rubber surgical gloves with
helium and launching them into the warm spring air, The sound system went out, or perhaps
God, in infinite mercy and good humor, intervened. In any case, suddenly we could no longer
hear about organic chemistry. It made no difference — on he went for thirty more minutes.

And so one does wonder about the sermonizing and speechmaking to which we subject one
another on this occasion. The people who really listen carefully, of course, are parents. Parents
have-a very great deal invested in the occasion, of their hope and love and cash. They are filled
with pride. Some of them are a little giddy. “Tomorrow,” they think, “we are going to be rich!”
They will reach for their hankies a lot. You are one of the most important things they ever did.
Garrison Keillor told a graduating class that the one constant in this life, the one thing you can

count on forever, is your parents worrying about you. He was right. We always did. We always
will, We're worried right now about whether under those robes you’re properly dressed, tucked
in and have a clean handkerchief in your pocket. We’re hoping you have socks on, or that you
still own socks.

The supporting cast, the faculty and administration, are also proud and relieved. They like this
weekend alot. They hope you have paid all your bills. They will follow you and be watching
with attentiveness as your future unfolds. They’ll be pleased if you remember their names.

And you, in addition to relief, nostalgia and eagerness to get this over with, I suspect you're a
little uneasy about the future, about what to do next, about whether you will live up to others’
expectations, about making the right decisions.

And there is a story almost 3,000 years old, that is “tailor made” for the situation.

Back almost on the edge of recorded history, a loose federation of nomadic people are wondering
what in the world they were doing there, and what in the world to do next. In fact, that vignette,
it seems to me, is an almost perfect metaphor for a graduating class on a warm May Saturday in
the year of our Lord, 1997.

For those people, too, it was a time of high anxiety, fear, excitement, potential and not a little
dread. The children of Israel are standing on a hill, and see, for the very first time, the Promised
Land. They had escaped from Egyptian slavery a full generation before. For 40 years they had
been living as nomads in the vast desert of Sinai, wandering from oasis to oasis; Moses, their
liberator and leader, always pushing, prodding, pulling, scolding, teaching — like a parent or
professor or advisor. But now Moses is old. He’s not going across the river with them. His time
has come. And so he does a lot of summing up and gives them a lot of advice. You know, the
kind of common sense things your parents always tell you: wear a hat, eat vegetables, get enough
sleep. Moses tells them, “Do the right thing, obey the law, hold on to one another.” And the
climax of what he says is this.

“I call heaven and earth to witness. I have set before you life and death. Choose
life so you and your descendants may live,”

There’s a remarkable idea in that little sentence. They, the people, had responsibility for their
future — who they would become. It was a choice they had to make. It would require will and
courage. The matter was in their hands. The choice to live — to be — is theirs.

The remarkable thing about that sentiment is that people have always been told that what is to
become of them, what they are to be, will be determined by the state, economy, caste or class
system, or your DNA and genetic structure. Religion has weighed in by suggesting that your
future is in the hands of the fates — of God. But here is Moses, with the radical suggestion that
you and I have a lot to do with it. And that God intends for us to have that responsibility.

In that vignette from our Hebrew scripture, the matter is placed in the hands of the people.
Choose — choose life. It is an idea that has intrigued the philosophers and theologians and artists.

The late Paul Tillich, in one of the most important books written in my generation, from which I
have shamelessly lifted the title for this sermon, said:

“Courage as the universal and essential self-affirmation of one’s being is an
ontological concept. The courage to be is the ethical act in which humans affirm
their own being in spite of those elements of their existence which conflict with
their essential self-affirmation.”

William Shakespeare said that a little more poetically and clearly:

Hamlet laments, “O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to
me all the uses of this world.”

And then, in lines that put the matter powerfully and clearly:
“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”
The late Rollo May, psychiatrist, philosopher, has written a lot about it.

“Courage,” he said, “is not one virtue out of many: it is the foundation of all
virtue. Courage is necessary to make being possible. Acorns become oak trees
and kittens become cats automatically. But a man or woman becomes fully human
only by his or her choices. People attain worth and dignity only by the multitudes
of decisions they make from day to day. Those decisions require courage.”

The truth is — and if you haven’t discovered it yet, you will — the truth is that life sometimes
knocks that courage out of us. Paul Tillich said “theré are elements of existence which conflict
with our essential self-affirmation.” What was he talking about? Well, fear, for instance. Fear of
the future. Fear of failing. Fear of criticism. Fear of death. Fear of falling down. Someone
quipped that if Michaelangelo had been afraid of falling, he would have painted the Sistine Floor.
Fear, in Moses’ case, of the people already living in the land. Fear causes us to give up, give in,
lower our sights, expectations, hopes, aspirations and choose non-being instead of being. Fear
would have caused those people to turn around and return io slavery in Egypt — where there was
food and job security, or perhaps — to remain right there, on the verge, peering into the future but
afraid to proceed.

Isn’t that what happens every time you and I decline to try something adventuresome and
demanding and exciting because we're aftaid we might fail, or that we’ll be inconvenienced, or
that we don’t know how it will turn out? Isn’t that what happens when you and I look out at the
world and see a multitude of horrendous problems and shudder, or wring our hands and then turn
our backs? We see, for instance, a political and educational system that can’t seem to figure out
how to pay for quality education for all our children; a healthcare system that cannot seem to get
services to all the sick people, or even immunize all the babies; an urban environment
characterized by a crisis in the simple existence of civil society, enclaves of second and third

generation unemployed men and adolescent mothers selling drugs to and shooting at one another.
Isn’t it a denial of our being as humans, to walk away from all that and retreat to privileged
enclaves of affluence?

Sometimes we back away from the courage to be — because what’s going on out there is so big,
so pervasive, that we simply retreat. “Compassion fatigue” William Rasberry called it in a column
he wrote on homelessness. The problems of the urban underclass, the man or woman who sleeps
on the steam grates or huddled in a doorway, who is chemically addicted, physically and
emotionally sick, unemployed and unemployable — the problems are so huge, people simply are
worn out from caring, Rasberry said, and choose to step gingerly around them — or avert our eyes
so as not even to see them.

In his recent book, Peter Gomes, preacher to the University at Harvard, says that when students
talk about living the good life, the talk inevitably gets around to economic security and making
lots of money. “I’m not greedy,” a Harvard undergrad told him, “I just want all I can get.” Not
unlike that wonderful New Yorker cartoon, two Pilgrims, leaning on the rail of The Mayflower —
Plymouth: “My immediate goal is religious freedom: my Long Range Plan is real estate.”

I’m always inspired by women and men, great and small, who simply refuse to give up, to
relinquish part of their own being, because a problem, a social structure, is so powerful: Rosa
parks — who reached down into her soul and affirmed her being by refusing to sit in back: Jackie
Robinson who changed not only professional baseball, but the way African-Americans —
particularly men — see themselves. I learned this week about Norman Borlaug. I'll bet you never
heard of Norman Borlaug. I never did. But I learned recently that along with Henry Kissinger
and Elie Wiesel, he is one of three living American winners of the Nobel peace Prize.

Here’s what Atlantic Monthly said about him:

“Though barely known in the country of his birth, elsewhere in the world Norman
Borlaug is widely considered to be among the leading Americans of our age.
Borlaug is an 82 year-old plant breeder who for most of the past five decades has
lived in developing nations, teaching the techniques of high-yield agriculture.”
“Borlaug’s Africa project is a private-sector effort run by an obscure Nobel Peace
Prize winner and a former American President whose altruistic impulses are made
sport of in the American press. Its goal is something the West seems almost to
have given up on — the rescue of Africa from human suffering. Recently Western
governments have been easing out of African aid, pleading ‘donor fatigue,” the
difficulty of overcoming corruption, and fear of criticism from the environmental
lobby.

“If overpopulation anarchy comes, it is likely to arrive first in Africa. Borlaug
understands this, and is using his remaining years to work against that cataclysm.
The odds against him seem long. But then, Norman Borlaug has already saved
more lives than any other person who ever lived.”

I call Heaven and Earth to witness. I have set before you death and life. Choose
life.

The courage to be, the will to choose life can be knocked out of us ...in the very middle of life by
sudden and unexpected unemployment, for instance, which often leads to self-doubt, then self-
dislike, self-hatred and eventually depression. Or the basic courage to be can be knocked out of
us by fear — fear not so much of death, but of life. What if I fail? What if I stumble? What if]
don’t get ajob? What if he leaves me? Or it can be an addiction, a dependency which leaves you
powerless. Or the courage to be — can be slowly drained from us by spiritual apathy, which, in the
frantic busy-ness to work hard and get ahead and make more money, so we can buy more stuff —
the deadly “fast-track” to which every one of us is subject — simply squeezes out of our
consciousness any awareness of grace and forgets, because it has no time, no energy left,

that all is grace

that life is a miracle

that every new day is God’s gift

that every person given to us to love and
respect and revere is God’s special gift ...
that every hour — every moment of this
miracie of your life is God’s personal gift
to you and along with it comes the
responsibility to choose to live it —
gratefully, fully, passionately.

Dr. Bernie Siegel, a surgeon and professor at Yale Medical School, author of several best-sellers,
works mostly with people who are very sick. Hearing the three words, “You have cancer,” often
destroys the will to live, the courage to e. So Siegel works hard to nurture that fundamental will
with each of his patients, no matter how little or much time they have left.

One of them, an 85 year-old woman, gave him a poem she wrote:

“Tf [ had my life to live over ...

I would take more chances,

I would take more trips,

I would scale more mountains ...

Swim more rivers,

Watch more sunsets,

Eat more ice cream and fewer beans.

I would have more actual troubles

And fewer imaginary ones. You see...
I was one of those people who lived
Prophylactically and sensibly and sanely,
Hour after hour and day after day ...
I’ve been.one of those people who never went
Anywhere without

A thermometer, a hot water bottle, a gargle, a
Raincoat and a parachute ...

If I had it to do all over again,

I'd travel lighter, much lighter ...

I would start barefoot earlier

In the spring, and I'd stay that way
Later in the fall, And I would

Ride more merry-go-rounds, and
Catch more gold rings, and greet
More people, and pick more flowers,
And dance more often.

If T had it

To do all over again.

But you see,

I don’t.”

“Choose this day,” Moses said.

Three times he says it ... “today ... this
day ... today.”

That is, the choice to be responsible for life is made, not once and for all, but every day. And,
may I suggest, it is almost never as clear and simple as that ancient picture of Moses admonishing
the children of Israel to choose life. Rather the choice, the occasion for courage, comes wrapped
up in other choices: to love or not to love: to get involved or to hold back: to serve and help or
withdraw: to give your life to something important or to retreat and settle for a good credit rating
and secure retirement: to commit self passionately to some improbable and wonderful dream like
the peace of the world, the reconciliation of all God’s people, the healing and feeding and housing
of all God’s children — or the staying at arm’s length, being a spectator instead of a participant.

In Washington, D.C., with a few free hours recently, we visited the U.S. Holocaust Museunt; an
unrelenting three hours of pictures, exhibits, films, showing common good folk, implicated by
little choices, by averting their eyes, by refusing to care, and then, The Hall of Remembrance, a
large room, quiet, with candles, a pool, and inscribed on the wall -—

“T call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you
life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your
descendants may live...”

More than 3,000 years ago, peering into an unknown future which also happened to be the
Promised Land, Moses cast the issue in terms of a decision, a choice. “Choose life,” he said.

So — in the midst of all the advice, the good wishes for success and happiness, may I have the
privilege of this challenge?

Don’t be afraid. Have the courage to care passionately. Find something you care about enough
to weep, and work; something to live for, something you love enough to die for.

The gift of life is given to us without condition. It is yours to live, to enjoy, to give, How you do
that is a matter of courage.

The choice is yours this day ... every day ...
The courage to be.
God bless you on your way.

' Tillich, Paul, The Courage To Be, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1952, p.3.
* May, Rollo, The Courage To Create, Bantam Books, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 1975, p.5.

‘ Basterbrook, Gregg, At/antic, January 1997 as quoted in Context, Christian Publications, Chicago, Illinois, May
1, 1997, Vol. 29, p.1.

* Siegel, Bernie, $., M.D., Peace, Love And Healing, Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1989, p. 245