Baccalaureate Message

Do you remember your first love? Mine was in grade 7. I was about 11 or 12 years old. The Police had just released their "Synchronicity" album. The song? "Wrapped Around Your Finger." I've been hooked ever since. Did you think I was talking about girls? I didn't really start getting silly around girls until I got my first girlfriend in grade 11. Music has always been my first love. I can remember eras of my life according to which album I was listening to at the time. I have certain songs imprinted into my memories, where I just have to hear the opening chords and I'm instantly transported. But this should come as no surprise to you. Do you remember your first RE assignment way back in Grade 9? Remember I asked you to listen to your music, your favourite artist, give me some of their lyrics and tell me what the message was in it. What were they trying to preach? I love music.

Well I was in Grade 9 once, way back in ancient history just as the last of the dinosaurs was dying out. And in Grade 9 I had a very strange near death kind of experience. I won't tell you what exactly happened since the details don't matter, and it's kind of embarrassing. But the result was that I was left shaken by my own mortality and thinking about life and death for the first time. That night as I was lay awake I made a commitment to God whoever or whatever that was. I prayed something like: "I'll do whatever you want me to do, even if I don't want to do it." The result? I put away my Police and U2 albums and would force myself to listen to religious music for the rest of my days. I knew people who listened to this religious music, and my parents had given me a few Christian music albums in the hopes that I would head in the right direction. I absolutely hated it. And for some reason I got it in my head that whatever I was listening to was unspiritual and unholy because it was unreligious, and I liked it. The flipside to that, for some strange reason, was that I felt like to make a commitment to God was to become religious and therefore to listen to religious music. And if I hated it then, of course, it was to embrace the way of suffering, and therefore must have been from God.

What I experienced over the next few weeks was the closest thing to purgatory that I've ever experienced. I forced myself to listen to this religious music. It was torture, and self-inflicted at that. Why must so much of it sound so corny and the lyrics be so recycled and cliché? Not all of it of course. There is quite a bit of good religious music. But so much of the contemporary stuff is, to me, almost unlistenable. Give me poetry, give me interesting chord structures, or as John Lennon says: "just gimme some truth". Needless to say, I was listening to my old favourites within a few short tortured weeks. I've gotten over those sorts of hangups. I still love music. I've mp3'd my hundreds of cd's, and sometime just for fun I put it on "shuffle all songs". The weirdest songs come up beside one another. I can be listening to it on shuffle, and have some punk music come on right after an old hymn. And Led Zeppelin comes up right next to some bhajans and worship songs. But when Rage Against the Machine comes up next to some of our old chapel worship songs, it's downright surreal. But it's all there in my 50 gigabytes of music. And it's all shuffled. I've shuffled up all the old false divides between religious and non-religious.

What was my problem? I had a false idea of "holy" versus "unholy". I thought religious meant "holy" and spiritual, while non-religious meant "unholy" and unspiritual. It's only a small step from there to come up with the idea that one is "good" while the other is "bad". Or that one is God's domain, while everything else is up to us.

In the passage from Isaiah chapter 58 that we just read these people had this same false divide between religious and non-religious going. And look at the result.

For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them. 'Why have we fasted,' they say, 'and you have not seen it? Why have we humbled ourselves, and you have not noticed?'

Yet on the day of your fasting, you do as you please and exploit all your workers. Your fasting ends in quarreling and strife, and in striking each other with wicked fists. You cannot fast as you do today and expect your voice to be heard on high. Is this the kind of fast I have chosen, only a day for people to humble themselves? Is it only for bowing one's head like a reed and for lying in sackcloth and ashes? Is that what you call a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD? "Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter- when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the LORD will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the LORD will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.

The Hebrew prophet Isaiah put it so succinctly and so clearly. His countrymen were doing all kinds of prescribed religious things. They were going to the temple, lighting their incense, praying, etc. In this case they were fasting, for religious reasons abstaining from food, and looking all very humble and holy doing it. The problem was, they couldn't figure out why it seemed as thought nothing was happening. It seemed as though God simply wasn't listening to them. What was wrong? Aren't we being religious enough? Aren't we listening to the right music?

The Prophet responds: You want to know why nothing's working for you? You want to know why you're not getting all those blessings you're looking for? Well let me tell you. All your fasting and prayers are useless. Why? Because you've divided up the religious from the non-religious - the "holy" from the "unholy", the "spiritual" from the "unspiritual". "So what does God want?" the people ask. What is God looking for if not for our worship, prayer, fasting, going to the temple, mosque or church? The answer?

To loose the chains of injustice To untie the yoke of the oppressed To share your food with the hungry To provide the poor wanderer with shelter To clothe those who don't have any.

That's what God is looking for. Just as an aside, it's interesting, this connection the prophet has made between fasting and justice. Now more than ever in the history of the human race, once you start looking into it I think you'll find that food production, consumption and waste are the biggest justice issues today. Did you know that if the whole world consumed like North America consumes that we'd need 5 planets? Are you okay with that? I'm not. Many or most of you will be going to college in Europe or North America. Think of that as you go for your first grocery shop in those vast temples we call supermarkets.

But do you get the point about being religious? Do you really think that somehow God is fulfilled by our worship, prayers and fasting? As if God needs any of that. No, all of that is good for us really, because it is acknowledging the reality of the divine around you. But there is something God is looking for. The prophet Amos said it even more sharply. He went so far as to say:

"I hate, I despise your religious festivals; (were the Chapels really that bad?) I cannot stand your assemblies. (some of you might have felt the same about Woodstock assemblies. Well you're in good company.) Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings, I will not accept them. Though you bring choice fellowship offerings, I will have no regard for them. Away with the noise of your songs! I will not listen to the music of your harps. (It seems even God gets tired of our happy clappy religious music) But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!"

Are you seeing the pattern? Is it starting to become clear? If you're not going to bother being just, and kind and merciful and compassionate in your daily transactions then don't even bother going to the church, temple or mosque, because you're not going to find God there. You're going to find God in your daily transactions. You're going to find God in how you shop, where you shop, how you treat the people who serve you. If you become a CEO, how you show respect and justice to your employees. If you're in high finance, how ethically you invest. Are the decisions you will be making in your sphere of influence going to release and free people? Or further bind and oppress them? Are those decisions going to just keep a small handful of the world's population fantastically wealthy, or will you be part of sharing the resources around?

These prophets are asking the people "Did you really think you could live however you wanted in your "unholy" and "unspiritual" business transactions, and then come to some religious place, and perform some religious ritual to make it alright? Well think again." Here's another statistic I recently heard. According to some estimates, the wealthiest 200 people in the world own the combined wealth of the poorest 2.5 billion people? Are you okay with that statistic? Let me rephrase that. Let's pretend that this room full of people had in it the wealthiest 200 people. They would own the combined wealth more than the size of the population base of India and China! Are you okay with that? Are you okay with political, social and economic structures that are designed to keep a small handful of people obscenely wealthy while vast multitudes can barely scrape together an existence? Some even starve to death just from lack of resources. I'm not okay with that. And according to these prophets, God is not okay with that either. A wise man once said: "money is like manure. Pile it all up in one place and it just smells like dung. But spread it around over a field and you might be able to grow something." But in our own day and age of 800 billion dollar bail out packages we're still laying off the workers and paying off the CEO's. Are you going to change this or perpetuate it?

So these ancient Hebrew prophets from 2700 years ago are calling us to think again. Maybe all of life is sacred. Maybe your business dealings are a spiritual matter. Maybe that person you're stepping over, around, or heaven forbid, even stepping on, is none other than the image of God. Let justice roll on like a river and righteousness like a never failing stream. Can I give you a little capsule to help you remember all this? We've heard from the prophet Isaiah. Then we heard from the prophet Amos. Now in closing let's try the prophet Micah. Notice how he says the exact same thing that the other two are saying. Is there a pattern here? Are you getting the point? Listen:

With what shall I come before the LORD and bow down before the exalted God? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?

Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?

Then a couple verses down:

Am I still to forget your ill-gotten treasures. Shall I acquit a person with dishonest scales, with a bag of false weights?

And isn't all that happening now on a large globalized scale? Isn't that why buying fair trade matters? Listen to this verse, Micah 6.8, my all time favourite verse in the Bible.

He has shown all you people what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

Here's the point. Think of those scales. That's the picture the prophet Micah is giving you. On one side of the scale, in one pan there is "justice". On the other side, in the other pan there is "mercy". There are those who come down way too heavy on the "justice" side. They come across as harsh, judgmental, and self-righteous. Their God comes across as the Judge Jury and Executioner. But there are those who come down heavy on the "mercy" side. They turn a blind eye, and in the name of 'live and let live' and 'just be nice' they sweep greed, violence and oppression under the rug. But their God is more like the senile old grandfather who just gives out candy to everyone - the cosmic vending machine.

Do you want to know what God wants for your life? You can choose whatever college, career, husband or wife, place of residence you want. Those details are up to you, your parents and whatever else informs those decisions. But God has a will for you graduates. All of you - whether you believe in God or not. Whatever you choose your life to be about:

Do justly, love mercy

Let your justice be tempered by mercy, and your mercy tempered by justice. But how do you keep them both in balance? Here is where part three comes in.

Walk humbly with your God. And if you don't believe in a God, then start by just walk humbly. Walking humbly means every judgment you want to pass onto others, first pass it on yourself. Or as the Lord Jesus says: "if you want to help your brother out with the speck in his eye, then first take the beam out of your own." Then you can see clearly enough to help others. Walk humbly with God. Consider the wisdom of putting others before yourself. Consider the wisdom of putting the earth and its inhabitants before your own bank account. Maybe we do, after all, need to consult the collective wisdom of humanity, our religious traditions - the very traditions that business, politics and the media is trying so desperately to either vilify or ignore. Maybe your RE classes were the most majorly important minor subjects you took in High School. Walk humbly with your God. That will give you the wisdom you will need both to "do justly" and "love mercy".

Wherever it is you go on to study. Whatever it is you go on to do as your career. Remember these three things.

Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly

Oh, and listen to some good music every now and then. May I recommend the Police "Synchronicity"? It's still a classic after 26 years.

Brian Dunn '89, former Chaplain