William H. Willimon - "1492 to 1992" Baccalaureate Service (May 15, 1992)
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| (enchanting pipe organ music) | 0:02 | |
| (man mumbles) | 10:10 | |
| (church choir singing gospel hymn) | 10:20 | |
| (enchanting pipe organ music) | 11:22 | |
| (church choir singing gospel hymn) | 12:00 | |
| - | You may be seated. | 15:23 |
| On this joyous occasion, | 15:37 | |
| it is easy to get so caught up in the world around us | 15:39 | |
| that we cannot hear the voice of God | 15:43 | |
| or feel the presence of all that is holy. | 15:46 | |
| Let us look closely now | 15:49 | |
| that we might see ourselves in the presence of God. | 15:51 | |
| Let us confess our sinfulness together. | 15:55 | |
| Most merciful God, | 16:00 | |
| we confess that we have sinned against you | 16:02 | |
| in thought, word and deed | 16:05 | |
| by what we have done | 16:08 | |
| and by what we have left undone. | 16:10 | |
| We have not loved you with our whole heart, | 16:13 | |
| we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves, | 16:16 | |
| we are truly sorry and we humbly repent. | 16:20 | |
| For the sake of your son, Jesus Christ, | 16:24 | |
| have mercy on us and forgive us | 16:27 | |
| that we may delight in your will | 16:31 | |
| and walk in your ways to the glory of your name, amen. | 16:33 | |
| For as the heavens are high above the earth, | 16:41 | |
| so great is God's steadfast love toward those who fear him. | 16:44 | |
| As far as the east is from the west, | 16:49 | |
| so far does God remove our transgressions from us, amen. | 16:53 | |
| (enchanting pipe organ music) | 17:23 | |
| (church choir singing gospel hymn) | 18:16 | |
| - | Let us pray. | 23:29 |
| Almighty God, in you are hidden all the treasures | 23:33 | |
| of wisdom and knowledge. | 23:37 | |
| Open our eyes that we may see the wonders of your word | 23:40 | |
| and give us grace that we may clearly understand | 23:45 | |
| and freely choose the way of your wisdom | 23:50 | |
| through Jesus Christ, our Lord, amen. | 23:54 | |
| Our Psalter is found on page 758, | 23:59 | |
| Psalm 27 verses one through four. | 24:04 | |
| Please stand and read responsively. | 24:07 | |
| The Lord is my light and my salvation, | 24:25 | |
| whom shall I fear. | 24:28 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 24:31 | |
| When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh, | 24:36 | |
| my adversaries and foes shall stumble and fall. | 24:40 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 24:45 | |
| One thing I ask of the Lord that will I seek after. | 24:55 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 25:01 | |
| (enchanting pipe organ music) | 25:12 | |
| (church choir singing gospel hymn) | 25:22 | |
| - | Please be seated. | 26:14 |
| The lesson for today is from the Book of Numbers, | 26:26 | |
| selected verses from the 13th and 14th chapters | 26:30 | |
| using the new revised standard version. | 26:34 | |
| And the Lord said to Moses, | 26:39 | |
| "Send men to spy out the land of Canaan, | 26:41 | |
| "which I am giving to the Israelites. | 26:44 | |
| "From each of their ancestral tribes, | 26:46 | |
| "you shall send a man everyone a leader among them." | 26:49 | |
| Moses sent them to spy out the land of Canaan | 26:54 | |
| and said to them, "Go up there into Negev | 26:58 | |
| "and go unto the hill country | 27:02 | |
| "and see what the land is like, | 27:05 | |
| "and whether the people who live in it are strong or weak, | 27:07 | |
| "whether they are few or many, | 27:11 | |
| "whether the land they live in is good or bad, | 27:14 | |
| "and whether the towns they live in | 27:18 | |
| "are unwalled or fortified, | 27:20 | |
| "and whether the land is rich or poor, | 27:23 | |
| "and whether there are trees in it or not. | 27:26 | |
| "Be bold and bring some of the fruit of the land." | 27:29 | |
| Now it was the season of the first ripe grapes. | 27:33 | |
| So they went up and spied out the land | 27:37 | |
| from the wilderness of Zin to Rehob, Lebo-hamath. | 27:40 | |
| At the end of 40 days, | 27:46 | |
| they returned from spying out the land. | 27:47 | |
| They came to Moses and Aaron | 27:51 | |
| and to all the congregation of the Israelites | 27:53 | |
| in the wilderness of Paran at Kadesh. | 27:56 | |
| They brought back word to them | 28:00 | |
| and to all the congregation | 28:02 | |
| and showed them the fruit of the land and they told him, | 28:04 | |
| "We came to the land to which you sent us. | 28:08 | |
| "It flows with milk and honey, | 28:11 | |
| "and this is its fruit. | 28:13 | |
| "Yet the people who live in the land are strong | 28:16 | |
| "and the towns are fortified and very large, | 28:18 | |
| "and besides we saw the descendents of Anak." | 28:22 | |
| But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, | 28:26 | |
| "Let us go up at once and occupy it, | 28:30 | |
| "for we are able to overcome it." | 28:33 | |
| Then the man who had gone up with him said, | 28:35 | |
| "We are not able to go up against the people, | 28:38 | |
| "for they are stronger than we are." | 28:40 | |
| So they brought to the Israelites an unfavorable report | 28:42 | |
| of the land they had spied out saying, | 28:47 | |
| "The land that we have gone through as spies | 28:50 | |
| "is a land that devours the inhabitants | 28:53 | |
| "and all the people that we saw in it are of great size. | 28:55 | |
| "There we saw Nephilim | 29:00 | |
| "and to ourselves we seemed like grasshoppers, | 29:03 | |
| "and so we seemed to them." | 29:06 | |
| Then all the congregation raised a loud cry | 29:09 | |
| and the people wept that night, | 29:12 | |
| and all the Israelites complained against Moses and Aaron, | 29:15 | |
| and the whole congregation said to them, | 29:20 | |
| "Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! | 29:23 | |
| "Or would that we had died in the wilderness! | 29:26 | |
| "Why is the Lord bringing us into this land | 29:29 | |
| "to fall by the sword? | 29:31 | |
| "And our wives and our little ones will become booty! | 29:34 | |
| "Would it not be better for us to go back to Egypt?" | 29:38 | |
| So they said to one another, | 29:42 | |
| "Let us choose a captain and go back to Egypt." | 29:44 | |
| And Joshua's son of Nun | 29:48 | |
| and Caleb, the son of Jephunneh, | 29:50 | |
| who were among those who had spied out the land, | 29:54 | |
| tore their clothes and said | 29:57 | |
| to all the congregation of the Israelites, | 29:58 | |
| "The land that we went through as spies | 30:01 | |
| "is an exceedingly good land. | 30:04 | |
| "If the Lord is pleased with us, | 30:07 | |
| "he will bring us into this land and give it to us, | 30:09 | |
| "a land that flows with milk and honey. | 30:12 | |
| "Only do not rebel against the Lord | 30:15 | |
| "and do not fear the people of the land, | 30:19 | |
| "for they are no more than bread for us. | 30:21 | |
| "Their protection is removed from them | 30:24 | |
| "and the Lord is with us, | 30:27 | |
| "do not fear them." | 30:29 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 30:31 | |
| Thanks be to God. | 30:34 | |
| (enchanting pipe organ music) | 30:55 | |
| (church choir singing gospel hymn) | 31:02 | |
| - | Class of 1992, | 36:43 |
| there you are and here am I, | 36:46 | |
| there you are preparing to cross | 36:49 | |
| a great threshold in your life, your graduation. | 36:54 | |
| And at this threshold, we gather again in the chapel. | 37:00 | |
| Do you remember when we first met? It was | 37:04 | |
| the first day of your orientation four years ago, | 37:09 | |
| in the afternoon we gathered here in the chapel. | 37:14 | |
| I prayed to God to ask God to give you what you needed | 37:18 | |
| in this strange new world named Duke. | 37:22 | |
| And then a professor, as I remember spoke to you, | 37:26 | |
| and I sat up here and looked at you, | 37:31 | |
| and that afternoon you looked so | 37:34 | |
| young and eager and virginal, | 37:38 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 37:42 | |
| now you look older. | 37:42 | |
| Are you ready to go? | 37:45 | |
| I ask that because there is a melody, | 37:49 | |
| which sometimes occurs in seniors | 37:52 | |
| this time of the year called, | 37:54 | |
| there's still one more course I want to take syndrome. | 37:56 | |
| Strange, people who their sophomore year could not find | 38:01 | |
| anything in the curriculum worth having | 38:06 | |
| now say that their education can be complete | 38:08 | |
| only by taking one more course. | 38:11 | |
| (students laugh) | 38:14 | |
| Other symptoms: strong desire to spend | 38:16 | |
| one more night in Krzyzewskiville. | 38:19 | |
| (students laugh) | 38:22 | |
| Particularly bizarre is the wish for | 38:22 | |
| another meal of the Duke food service. | 38:24 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 38:26 | |
| Can I stay another year? | 38:29 | |
| No, dear, we say we've already | 38:30 | |
| given your room to three others. | 38:32 | |
| You've got to go, goodbye, | 38:34 | |
| adios, this is it. | 38:37 | |
| You and I have a way I'm saying of meeting | 38:42 | |
| in these liminal moments, these moments, | 38:44 | |
| these thresholds between the old and the new, | 38:47 | |
| between hello and goodbye. | 38:49 | |
| People on the outside | 38:55 | |
| frequently ask me, "Well, what are today's students like?" | 38:59 | |
| And I know it's hard to generalize, | 39:04 | |
| but I say, well, the seniors are scared. | 39:05 | |
| And I know that characterization does not fit you all, | 39:11 | |
| but many of you it seems to me this year are scared. | 39:16 | |
| It's an unattractive characteristic in the young. | 39:20 | |
| I, like your parents, was a student in the 60s, | 39:24 | |
| and we thought there was a lot wrong with our world, | 39:28 | |
| but nothing was wrong that | 39:31 | |
| we couldn't fix once we were in charge. | 39:35 | |
| Now we are in charge. | 39:40 | |
| And our baccalaureates 60s self-confidence | 39:43 | |
| seems almost laughable now. | 39:45 | |
| 54% of you in a recent survey said | 39:52 | |
| that you believe your future | 39:55 | |
| will not be as good as your parents' present. | 39:59 | |
| And your pessimism may not be unjustified. | 40:05 | |
| Your senior year on-campus recruitment | 40:08 | |
| by corporations was down 50%. | 40:12 | |
| We had to beg IBM to come talk to you. | 40:15 | |
| One of your classmates met one of last year's graduates. | 40:19 | |
| One of the ones that heard my, | 40:26 | |
| You are The Hope of Tomorrow baccalaureate in 1991, | 40:27 | |
| here's the way she described it in The Chronicle. | 40:32 | |
| "The day we had dinner | 40:35 | |
| "he spent all afternoon playing Nintendo. | 40:36 | |
| "He was bored because his sisters started back to school | 40:39 | |
| "and didn't have anybody to bully around. | 40:42 | |
| "His mother had been dropping hints | 40:44 | |
| "more like bombs about how nice it would be | 40:46 | |
| "if he would get a job. | 40:50 | |
| "He was scheduled to start | 40:52 | |
| "the next day at a temporary agency, | 40:54 | |
| "one of those places that we thought | 40:56 | |
| "a Duke education would prevent us from ever entering. | 40:57 | |
| "And he'd memorized the TV guide. | 41:03 | |
| "I hear he's managing people | 41:06 | |
| "who sell perfume on street corners. | 41:08 | |
| "I am scared." | 41:11 | |
| Graduation 1992, it strikes me | 41:16 | |
| that it's a long way from say | 41:18 | |
| Columbus 1492. | 41:22 | |
| I don't know about you, | 41:26 | |
| but as a child we learned that story | 41:27 | |
| as children in the poem of 1492. | 41:29 | |
| Behind him lay the gray Azores, | 41:33 | |
| Behind him lay the Gates of Hercules; | 41:36 | |
| Before him only shoreless seas. | 41:38 | |
| Lo! even the stars are gone. | 41:42 | |
| Why, Columbus, why 'Sail on! sail on! | 41:45 | |
| And it's a long way, a kind of great psychological gap | 41:52 | |
| between that 1492 and our 1992. | 41:55 | |
| A great gap. | 42:01 | |
| Not only because thanks to your Duke PC education, | 42:03 | |
| you know the Columbus story to be a deeply problematic, | 42:06 | |
| culturally falsified myth, | 42:10 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 42:12 | |
| (congregation applauds) | 42:14 | |
| but also because the prospect of your voyage | 42:17 | |
| into the new after-1992-world has got us, well, | 42:22 | |
| scared. | 42:29 | |
| Which brings me to another story | 42:32 | |
| of expiration of new worlds, a Bible story. | 42:34 | |
| In the story from Numbers 13 and 14, | 42:41 | |
| we are at the threshold of the promised land. | 42:44 | |
| The children of Israel been wandering for 40 years, | 42:46 | |
| and now these former slaves are about to see land. | 42:49 | |
| They stand on the threshold of this new land, | 42:55 | |
| these slaves who had nothing, | 42:59 | |
| and Moses has led them | 43:01 | |
| through the wilderness to the promised land, | 43:03 | |
| but there is just one small problem. | 43:04 | |
| The land is already occupied. | 43:08 | |
| The place is crawling with Canaanites. | 43:11 | |
| A friend of mine was teaching out in Texas, | 43:17 | |
| and he was lecturing on this very passage | 43:20 | |
| from the Book of Numbers. | 43:22 | |
| He was lecturing to his students about this | 43:24 | |
| taking of the promised land, | 43:26 | |
| and there was a hand, | 43:28 | |
| yes, what is it, Mr. Running Bear, what is it? | 43:29 | |
| He said, the questioner said: | 43:31 | |
| "who promised this land to the Hebrews?" | 43:35 | |
| "Well, God did." | 43:39 | |
| "Well, did God tell those Canaanites | 43:43 | |
| "that he had promised their land to somebody else?" | 43:45 | |
| "Could we go on with the class, Mr. Running Bear?" | 43:48 | |
| Moses sends some scouts to reconnoiter the land, | 43:52 | |
| find out what things are like over there, | 43:56 | |
| how big a force it will be required to take it. | 43:58 | |
| And after a few days they come back | 44:02 | |
| and there are two reports given. | 44:04 | |
| There is a majority report | 44:06 | |
| and then there is a minority report by Caleb. | 44:08 | |
| And in hearing these two reports | 44:12 | |
| we're impressed by the gap in their perception | 44:14 | |
| of what this new land looks like. | 44:16 | |
| The cities are fortified, impregnable, | 44:20 | |
| the land devours its inhabitants. | 44:24 | |
| It devours its inhabitants, what does that mean? | 44:27 | |
| Is there famine, is there disease, are they cannibals? | 44:29 | |
| The people over there looked like giants, | 44:35 | |
| in the Hebrew, sons of the long neck. | 44:39 | |
| Compared to them we are to ourselves as grasshoppers. | 44:43 | |
| People over there, they just looked like giants. | 44:50 | |
| They have a great educational system, | 44:53 | |
| they don't do drugs, they work hard at the factory, | 44:55 | |
| they eat diets low in saturated fat. | 44:57 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 45:00 | |
| Why compared to them we just looked | 45:01 | |
| to ourselves like grasshoppers. | 45:03 | |
| And the story says that the people went crazy | 45:06 | |
| when they heard this majority report. | 45:09 | |
| "What have you done?" | 45:13 | |
| They screamed to Moses. | 45:14 | |
| "Bring us all the way up here from Egyptian slavery | 45:16 | |
| "only to perish at the hands of these giants. | 45:19 | |
| "At least in Egypt we knew our place | 45:22 | |
| "and we had three square meals a day." | 45:24 | |
| "Yeah, but you were slaves," said Moses. | 45:28 | |
| "Well, we had it better in the safety of slavery. | 45:31 | |
| "We might have lived like grasshoppers, | 45:36 | |
| "but at least we were well-fed grasshoppers." | 45:38 | |
| Then comes the minority report, Caleb says, | 45:43 | |
| "I can't believe we saw the same place. | 45:49 | |
| "The land is rich, the Lord is with us, ours for the taking. | 45:51 | |
| "Let us go at once and take what the Lord has given us." | 45:56 | |
| Here in this ancient story, | 46:03 | |
| the threshold of the promised land, | 46:06 | |
| the graduation from slavery to freedom | 46:09 | |
| is rendered as a kind of a epistemological dilemma. | 46:13 | |
| Who knows what the future looks like | 46:18 | |
| and who shall name that future? | 46:21 | |
| The fearful majority or the faithful minority? | 46:24 | |
| We know, we know this story well. | 46:31 | |
| It's a story about how | 46:36 | |
| every journey's end as an invitation to wander into some | 46:39 | |
| and perhaps more perilous new path. | 46:44 | |
| Every victory we get in life always has a way of | 46:48 | |
| landing us right into the unknown. | 46:52 | |
| At the threshold between a land we knew | 46:56 | |
| and a land we do not know | 47:01 | |
| between the grinding the humanizing world of the slave | 47:04 | |
| and this risky unknown promised world of the free, | 47:08 | |
| a great deal depends on how we describe | 47:14 | |
| what awaits us. | 47:18 | |
| The majority saw Canaan as a land | 47:21 | |
| of these impregnable fortresses, | 47:24 | |
| unscalable heights, these giants. | 47:26 | |
| But Caleb spoke of Canaan as God's land. | 47:30 | |
| Even the Canaanites as God's people, | 47:37 | |
| a land promised to do with his God pleased. | 47:40 | |
| Could they have been describing the same place? | 47:45 | |
| There's a vast epistemological, theological gap | 47:48 | |
| which lies between the, they're giants, we're grasshoppers | 47:52 | |
| and the God is with us, | 47:56 | |
| let us put our fears aside and go forth. | 48:00 | |
| Now I'll admit it even as I tell this tale | 48:05 | |
| that Numbers 13, 14 is a very risky story to tell | 48:07 | |
| among people like us. | 48:11 | |
| So risky that I thought for awhile | 48:13 | |
| about not telling it to you | 48:15 | |
| for the risk of the damage it might do if poorly told. | 48:16 | |
| Because you know that this is the Bible story | 48:21 | |
| that's been told for centuries | 48:24 | |
| by the possessors of the land | 48:26 | |
| to justify how they got land. | 48:29 | |
| And now they must retain it with murderess possessiveness. | 48:31 | |
| In calling what was really a very ancient world | 48:36 | |
| the new world, | 48:41 | |
| we became giants in our own eyes | 48:44 | |
| and treated millions of God's people like grasshoppers. | 48:48 | |
| There were no Canaanites' voices in the 1492 Columbus story | 48:54 | |
| because most of the history we know | 49:01 | |
| silences the cries of the people who are vanquished. | 49:04 | |
| This Bible story, I believe, is the one that my ancestors | 49:10 | |
| in South Carolina love to tell | 49:15 | |
| as explanation and justification | 49:17 | |
| for why people of our color had land | 49:20 | |
| and people of their color had none. | 49:23 | |
| It is the 1492 story retold in 1992, | 49:28 | |
| Belfast and Soweto and Jerusalem and Durham | 49:33 | |
| up this day | 49:38 | |
| by the possessors in an attempt to give | 49:40 | |
| ideological justification to our dispossession of others. | 49:42 | |
| But I'm telling it to you this afternoon | 49:48 | |
| because I hope that you can see | 49:50 | |
| how such a telling of this story | 49:53 | |
| is an ideological perversion of the story | 49:55 | |
| rather than the story. | 49:58 | |
| I think that this story from Numbers only makes sense | 50:03 | |
| if we remember that it was first told by landless people. | 50:06 | |
| The people who told this empowering tale were slaves | 50:12 | |
| and before that nomads. | 50:17 | |
| They were people who had never known | 50:18 | |
| what it was like to have land. | 50:19 | |
| This is the tale meant to be told | 50:23 | |
| in the ghetto, in the barrio, at the bottom. | 50:25 | |
| It's meant to be told in the refugee camp, | 50:29 | |
| a tale meant to electrify those who have nothing, | 50:33 | |
| but who may be imaginative enough, | 50:38 | |
| if they hear the story, to believe the promise | 50:41 | |
| that the land is not ours, it's God's, | 50:44 | |
| and this is God's world and God intends them to have it. | 50:47 | |
| The question: can this story of the landless | 50:55 | |
| have any meaning for us, the landed? | 51:00 | |
| Because you and I don't live in a ghetto or a barrio, | 51:03 | |
| we live at Duke. | 51:06 | |
| And we are here in great part | 51:08 | |
| because we have been the possessors | 51:10 | |
| of all that this society has got to offer, | 51:12 | |
| the best homes, the best schools, the best advantages, | 51:16 | |
| and we would love to get together at graduation | 51:22 | |
| and think that we are here just because we worked hard | 51:24 | |
| and have taken advantage of our advantages. | 51:28 | |
| God is with us, let us go forth and take it. | 51:31 | |
| But is there no part of us able to admit somewhere down deep | 51:36 | |
| that everything that we've got, | 51:42 | |
| which we shall celebrate this weekend came as a gift? | 51:45 | |
| We're gonna pray that in just a moment, | 51:51 | |
| confessing our indebtedness | 51:53 | |
| to parents and benefactors and teachers and, | 51:56 | |
| but do we believe it? | 51:59 | |
| Do we believe that everything we've got | 52:02 | |
| was God's before it was ours? | 52:04 | |
| And is there no part of us able to be 1992 surprised? | 52:07 | |
| Having been assured at least since 1492 | 52:14 | |
| that we are landed and entitled | 52:18 | |
| and titled and secure and gifted. | 52:21 | |
| That maybe all of that could kind of be a lie, | 52:25 | |
| a hype of a society much more internally troubled | 52:29 | |
| than it dares to admit to its young. | 52:33 | |
| Isn't it odd to find ourselves 500 years after Columbus | 52:38 | |
| feeling so strange, so old in this allegedly new world? | 52:46 | |
| Our little North American 1992 noses | 52:51 | |
| pressed to the shop window | 52:54 | |
| peering at other nation's material achievements, | 52:56 | |
| coming to feel like the dispossessed | 53:00 | |
| in the technological, industrial world that we created. | 53:03 | |
| And this is important, because if we can | 53:09 | |
| make that imaginative leap | 53:12 | |
| and imagine ourselves not as lords | 53:15 | |
| of everything that we survey, | 53:18 | |
| but as frail, unsteady, scared immigrants | 53:20 | |
| in a 1992 threshold of the future | 53:25 | |
| that we may not control, | 53:28 | |
| maybe then this old Bible story could speak to us. | 53:32 | |
| Can we trust the beckoning of a living God | 53:38 | |
| who doesn't stand in the old world, | 53:43 | |
| but he's always in the new on the other side | 53:45 | |
| in the unknown, in the threshold over in the New World? | 53:47 | |
| Can we trust that God? | 53:50 | |
| Let's admit there is part of us | 53:54 | |
| that would just love to go back to Egypt, | 53:55 | |
| to the narrow, but at least secure world | 53:58 | |
| that we once had. | 54:01 | |
| But I think the story says with Caleb, | 54:04 | |
| don't go back because back there is slavery, | 54:07 | |
| not life. | 54:12 | |
| Maybe you do think that your future will be smaller | 54:14 | |
| than the present of your parents. | 54:18 | |
| I know from the poll that most of you | 54:22 | |
| do not expect to make as much money as your parents. | 54:24 | |
| And why should you? | 54:30 | |
| You have grown up in perhaps the most selfish generation | 54:32 | |
| ever to rule the United States, | 54:35 | |
| having taken from your children | 54:38 | |
| and your grandchildren to finance our false prosperity | 54:41 | |
| and thereby run up the largest deficit ever. | 54:46 | |
| No wonder you worry. | 54:51 | |
| It's a sign of intelligence. | 54:54 | |
| But I've come before you today to predict | 54:58 | |
| that your future may not be just simply smaller, | 55:00 | |
| but it may be different and maybe even better. | 55:04 | |
| Because from my brief expeditions | 55:10 | |
| spying out your generation, | 55:12 | |
| there's a lot that I like that I see. | 55:16 | |
| I just don't think it's any coincidence | 55:20 | |
| that it was your class | 55:22 | |
| that pioneered Duke's Student Volunteer program, | 55:24 | |
| cleaning up the mess | 55:28 | |
| that we and your parents made of Durham | 55:30 | |
| and the public schools and the healthcare system, | 55:33 | |
| one person at a time. | 55:37 | |
| And I love that your class | 55:40 | |
| gave a huge senior gift for the care of children. | 55:41 | |
| And I love that your commencement speaker | 55:47 | |
| is a woman that The Chronicle never heard of. | 55:49 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 55:52 | |
| (congregation applauds) | 55:55 | |
| I guess not. | 55:58 | |
| I guess not, not only is she from South Carolina, | 56:01 | |
| but she has spent her whole life speaking up for people | 56:03 | |
| that don't have a voice in this society, the children. | 56:07 | |
| (congregation applauds) | 56:11 | |
| And so what I'm saying is that in a weird way | 56:12 | |
| you are going to the promised land, | 56:14 | |
| though it looks a good deal different | 56:17 | |
| and maybe even better than the one | 56:19 | |
| that your parents thought God had promised to us. | 56:21 | |
| So class of 1992, | 56:27 | |
| lay aside your fears, | 56:30 | |
| get out of here, go for it, | 56:33 | |
| not because you're smart, talented and gifted, | 56:36 | |
| though many of you are. | 56:38 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 56:40 | |
| No, because of our faith that God is with us, | 56:41 | |
| let us go forth, | 56:46 | |
| God is with us. | 56:48 | |
| Man | Amen. | 56:53 |
| (congregation applauds) | 56:55 | |
| (enchanting pipe organ music) | 57:08 | |
| (church choir singing gospel hymn) | 57:57 | |
| - | Please join me in the responsive prayer. | 1:00:31 |
| Almighty God, as you've granted us | 1:00:36 | |
| a place in this University, | 1:00:39 | |
| allow to us now this day | 1:00:41 | |
| when we dedicate ourselves to the life | 1:00:44 | |
| and work to which you have called us, | 1:00:46 | |
| that we may remember with gratitude | 1:00:50 | |
| the families and friends who have cared for us. | 1:00:53 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 1:00:57 | |
| That in the life ahead, | 1:00:59 | |
| we may keep faith with those who loved us | 1:01:01 | |
| and trusted us and whose hopes follow us. | 1:01:04 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 1:01:08 | |
| That we may enter with good courage and constant purpose | 1:01:12 | |
| upon the task which await us. | 1:01:15 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 1:01:18 | |
| From all vanity and pride as if our accomplishments | 1:01:20 | |
| were of our sole creation. | 1:01:25 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 1:01:28 | |
| From neglect of the opportunities, which are all about us, | 1:01:30 | |
| and from distrust of our ability | 1:01:34 | |
| to meet the duties of each dawning day, | 1:01:36 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 1:01:39 | |
| that the example of wise and generous people | 1:01:41 | |
| who have gone before us in our families | 1:01:45 | |
| and here in this university | 1:01:47 | |
| may save us from folly and self-indulgence. | 1:01:50 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 1:01:53 | |
| More especially that you would show us | 1:01:57 | |
| to us your way of love, | 1:02:01 | |
| and all that we do or say | 1:02:03 | |
| that we should come to love the Lord, | 1:02:05 | |
| our God with our soul and mind and strength | 1:02:07 | |
| and our neighbor as ourselves. | 1:02:11 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 1:02:13 | |
| These things and whatever else you see needful | 1:02:16 | |
| and right for us, we ask in your holy name. | 1:02:18 | |
| (congregation mumbles) | 1:02:23 | |
| And now class of 1992, | 1:02:31 | |
| the Lord bless and keep you, | 1:02:34 | |
| the Lord make his face to shine upon you | 1:02:37 | |
| and give you peace. | 1:02:39 | |
| The Lord lift up his countenance upon you | 1:02:41 | |
| and be with you this day and forevermore. | 1:02:44 | |
| (church choir singing gospel hymn) | 1:02:51 | |
| (enchanting pipe organ music) | 1:03:30 | |
| (church choir singing gospel hymn) | 1:04:11 | |
| (enchanting pipe organ music) | 1:07:05 |
Item Info
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