Florida Southern College Graduation 1973

May 11, 1973

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Scripture: I Kings 8:1-13

Dr. Thrift, Bishop Blackburn, distinguished Trustees, platform guests, honored graduates, proud parents....  Gee, this is getting so formal I think I’ll throw up...

Anything to change the mood.  It’s unnerving.  I’m so used to the hostility of Convo.  Quietness and receptivity in Branscomb is a little bit eerie.  I keep expecting something to happen.  I think I’d better get moving before the bomb call comes.

I do deeply appreciate those exceedingly gracious words of introduction.  They are, of course, exaggerated.  I am reminded of the old story Hal Luccock tells about the instructions that were handed out to a group of photographers who were covering a certain speaking event.  The instructions said, cryptically, “Please do not take pictures of the speaker while they are actually engaged in speaking....  Shoot them before they reach the platform.”  This is probably good advice on an occasion like this, and I promise to do my best to remember it.

This little preoration this afternoon is not billed as a sermon – that word carries definite negative connotations nowadays – it’s billed, rather, as a commencement address... you can see it right there on the program... yet those of you who know something of the programming of a preacher know perfectly well that no matter what you call it, no matter how you restrict him, you’re not going to dam up for long the natural propensity of a homiletician to degenerate to the level of exhortation.  There just ain’t no way.

Secularize him, dehumidify him, perfume him all you like... a preacher’s gotta preach, and I’m not about to let this chance get away without responding to the call of the wild.  It’s the last chance I’ll ever have with some, and I might add it’s the first chance I’ve had with a number of others.

So fair warning, and with out apology, I read a passage of scripture from the Book of First Kings.... That, in case you’ve forgotten your Religion 205 is in the Old Testament.

The setting briefly is Jerusalem, and the dedication of the great Temple Solomon had built....

You remember the background.  David before him had wanted to build one but was refused permission.... Nathan said, “You can’t do that, David, God doesn’t live in a house.  Never has and ought not to,” so David, wisely held back.

But Solomon was a different breed of cat. When his time came, he built one anyway – one of the architectural jewels of antiquity.  It really was a marvelous piece of construction... took him 7 years to get it up.  He spent 13 years, incidently, on his own palace complex.  We often forget that, but that’s what the Record says, and that is just about the right ratio for Solomon. – 1 for God and 2 for me.

Yet the Temple was magnificent, no question about it.  It had everything Temples were supposed to have, whatever that means, it was the last word in Temples, and the scene before us in this passage is the dedication, the scene where after construction is completed, the Ark of the Covenant, representing the presence of God, is brought forward to be housed inside the new, splendid building.

Read I Kings 8:1-13

That last verse is the text:  “I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in forever.”

Right then, I think, was when he blew it.  How could he have said something like that?  It was idiotic, stupid, and dumb.... Besides that, it wasn’t very smart.

Of course I use it as a symbol for the whole undertaking.  The whole project was a mistake.  The biggest blunder of Solomon’s career was when he built that Temple.

I say it against a background of stupid things that Solomon did.  I know his reputation, but I’m not sure its justified.... I know that Jesus referred to him as “Solomon in all his glory” but I’m afraid it was a tainted glory.  All throughout his long, opulent career he alienated people right and left, he exploited the citizens, he cultivated a mass of hostility, that soon after his reign erupted into revolution.  It didn’t take long.  Someone has said that the King who built the Temple undermined the kingdom, and I suspect that’s an accurate appraisal.  He simply didn’t have the humanity of his father.

They called him wise, but he was really a manipulator, that’s what he was, a shrewd, conniving string puller, whose mind behind the glory of the façade was really only interested in what was good for Solomon.

I don’t mean he was all bad... He did some worthwhile things for his country.  He built up the economy, he instituted a favorable balance of trade.  He made some smart treaties with foreign countries....

But there was a fatal flaw somehow near the center of his administration.  I don’t think I would have bought a used chariot from him.

And the whole thing is epitomized somehow in this scene of the dedication of the Temple... the pompous, grand, but totally self-centered Solomon with one eye on God and the other on the Press, piously intones:  “I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in forever.”

That was the biggest blunder of his career.... It changed things.  It represented a whole new way of thinking about God... and about life.

Let me spell it out – before this time God had lived in a tent.  Call it crude and primitive if you like, I suppose it is, yet I submit to you that it embraces a pretty profound idea.

God is mobile, with all that that implies.... He can move.... He’s not limited.  He can go from place to place – and did.

The people thought of themselves as pilgrims because of it.  It was an inheritance from their years of wilderness wandering....

They were not homesteaders.  They were sojourners, itinerants, in good, traditional Methodist fashion.  It’s fantastic how orthodox the Bible is when you really get into it....

Pardon the sectarian reference, but this is how the people thought of themselves.  They were itinerants, they were people on a pilgrimage, taking their possessions, their ideals, their values, even their God with them everywhere they went.

They were a people who traveled light, unburdened by the weigh of things that don’t really matter.  They were a dynamic people, who precisely were not limited to a place, or a condition, or a particular set of circumstances, but who thought of themselves as going somewhere, as moving, always moving continually moving, from bondage toward greater freedom and fulfillment.  This is the nature of communal life in the Old Testament, and it’s a magnificent concept.

And then this Temple bit... giving God a permanent home. “I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place for thee to abide in forever.”

I can’t really believe you said that Solomon, Baby.  That was when you blew it.

Well, you see, it really did change things.  It changed a whole perspective.  Something died at this point in the life of a pilgrim people.  The “Settled Place” mentality was the antithesis of all that had gone before.

When God settled down, the people settled down, and the sense of dynamism disintegrated.  Challenge was out and conformity was in....  Demand was out and dependence was in.  Growth was out and gangrene was in.... the zip was gone.  Doing right turned into being nice.  Passion turned into pleasantness, justice turned into “law and order.”  Outreach turned into “peace of mind.”  The whole deadly process of what the sociologists call acculturation descended on the land like a pall.  Religion and patriotism became interchangeable and the sense of pilgrimage was shot.  There wasn’t any place to go because you were already there....

Life ceased being an adventure... it wasn’t a matter of discovering, and caring and serving, and sending, and laughing at the consequences... it became a matter of preserving the status quo, and oiling the machinery, and keeping up appearances with the least possible expenditure of energy.

You paid your bills, you kept your nose clean, you were nice to Granny and the cat... you settled down in the comfortable niche of a comfortable life in a comfortable country, and then you lived until you died.

It was the very way of life the prophets were most scathingly to tear apart over the next 4 to 5 hundred years.

Well, that was 3000 years ago, nearly.  Does that mean its out of date because it is old?  Have we outgrown the Solomon syndrome?  It’s seniors I’m talking to primarily this afternoon, though maybe not only seniors need to wrestle with it.

Let me say this to you.  This is a great moment in your own personal pilgrimage.  I congratulate you, heartily, on the educational house you’ve been able to construct up to this point.

Now, what are you going to do with it?  That’s the question I want to needle you with a little bit.  What are you going to do with it?  Are you just going to move in and spread out in blissful comfort and abide in that settled place forever?

My God, if you do we might as well throw in the towel.  What we’re doing today is not an achievement, it’s a commencement.  It’s not a crowning, it’s a christening.  This is not where it ends, it’s where it takes off from.

We who work here bear some responsibility for the perpetuation of the college will forever have to hang our heads in shame if it should turn out that this moment proves to be the high point of your intellectual and spiritual quest.

Despite the grandeur of the occasion, you are not now educated, just as the colorful birds seated to your immediate right bedecked with splendiferous academic regalia are not really educated. (Is there such a word as splendiferous?  You see, that only shows you....)

They are not really educated.  Not yet.  They’re on their way, but not one of them would claim to have arrived... except maybe Crowley.  But even he in his heart knows better.  At best we are only students to Truth that’s all any of us can claim....

We are people who can never do more than see dimly, who are ignorant about different things, and whose best and most precise knowledge is riddled with uncertainty.

Education is a pilgrimage that’s the point of it.  You never arrive, and when you think you have that’s the clearest proof you haven’t.  Don’t ever think you have all the answers and avoid like the plague the man who would tell you that he does have them.  How little we really know, when you get right down to it... about anything.  I read not long ago that an expert in the field of electronics estimated that the place we stand now in electronics development is roughly comparable to that in exploration at which Christopher Columbus stood when he first pulled up the gangplank of the Santa Maria.  How little we know.

Some time back there was an article in the New Yorker magazine.  You all ought to subscribe to the New Yorker magazine.  Do that when you become affluent alumni.  Cancel your subscription to the Christian Advocate and subscribe to the New Yorker.  It’ll do you more good.  Anyway, this was an article by an eminent scholar which dealt with some of the big questions science can’t answer and it closed with this observation... “Today,” he said, “on all sides, we live at the edge of mystery.”

Not long after there was a clipping in the paper that beautifully illustrated what he was saying.  A certain substance in human tears was being investigated because it was though possibly that it just might have an arresting effect on cancer cells.

Wouldn’t that be an irony if it should pan out... talk about the edge of mystery. Do you see?  Beauty, sorrow, love causing tears... tears arresting cancer.... Therefor love wiping out cancer....  Is that possible?  What if it should be?  Who can say?  How precious little we really know.

What I’m saying is don’t think it’s all over now, because it’s not.... That’s the worst mistake you can make.  There’s more out there than we’ll ever know – If we live to be a thousand.

But you either keep moving, or you die, there’s not anything else in between.  The alternative to pilgrimage is settling down, while the tentacles of intellectual death wrap tighter and tighter around you.

“I have surely built thee a house to dwell in, a settled place to abide in forever....”

You don’t have a finished house, yet.... You have a few tools, that’s good. You have, hopefully, some perspective.... You know, I trust what some people have said, about some things --- Plato, Jesus Christ, Kenneth Clark.... I had to work him in somewhere.... You know what some others have said.  You know, hopefully, at least some of the big questions....  That’s a great beginning.

Now the real work comes --- taking your partial truths, and incomplete answers, and limited perspectives and testing the honesty in the light of time and experience.

Of course it’ll take a lifetime... but this is what education in the deepest sense is... not accumulating, but utilizing, not aggregating, but sifting, not piling up bricks, but building roads, not constructing shelter to get away from life, but fashioning some tools to discover life.... Moving from bondage to freedom.

We’ll never know how well we’ve done until we see what happens to you in distant decades.  There’s now way to measure a college’s success except in terms of what it makes its graduates want to become....

That’s hard to measure, and maybe impossible, but that’s the crux of the matter.  For us, the grades are not yet in.... You look pretty good, but it’s yet to be seen.

If you never read another mind-bending book.... If you never again say, “I wonder how this principle applies to that problem?” .... If you never again go to hear another symphony orchestra, or piano concert, if you never again take the time to see another Raphael, or a Renoir, or a Picasso print, if you never again say, “In the name of God, this ought to be different,” then we’re both dead, you and us, and the story of Solomon is repeated all over.

Go then my beauties... and hit the road running.... Remember that Truth may be bigger than we know....

Remember that to perceive it, you have to approach it on its own terms.... Remember to keep pursuing it where the leads seem most promising...  Remember to be responsive to it when it reaches out to grasp you.

Remember that only one Many who ever lived could truly say, “It is finished.”  Remember that that Man loves you, and in His name, so do we.

We who remain will be watching and following your pilgrimage with intense interest.  Our prayer for you would be that you may be denied peached in order that you may find life, and live it abundantly....  Keep moving, keep growing, keep on truckin’... and the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you always.