…And we are committed to walk alongside them in this. Freedom of speech issues are not going to go away; they never have. Freedom of speech is a messy, maddening, controversial, wonderful, life-giving thing. It says that all voices matter, which in every age has been a dangerous thing to say…
This was a prayer I wrote for the Dean to read on the closing night of Sexual Violence Awareness Week 2016.
One pinwheel was placed for each current female Biola student who (if national statistics held true) had likely been sexually assaulted.
There were hundreds of pinwheels...
In our world, truth seems to be in short supply. Power, persuasion, prevarication, pandering, provocation…but not truth. Some would say there is no such thing as truth.
Fear, though… there’s no shortage of fear. Our candidates, our media—and our infernal enemy—they would all tell us that we should be fearful and anxious. But as one wise fellow once said, long ago and far, far away, “Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.”
But that is not the way of the Cross, and it is not the way we will teach these students.
Unless you’re consciously avoiding the news, you know that the media spotlight has moved from Ferguson and Baltimore to Missouri, from police conduct to college campuses. Students of color on multiple campuses have publicly protested unequal and unfair treatment, and out of these protests, stories of prejudice, ignorance, insensitivity, and cruelty have come to light.
I often wish you could meet them; those who came before… the 65,000 former students who in years past sat in those chairs, walked these sidewalks… left their mark. Maybe some of them were your sisters and brothers, your parents, friends, family.
We have alumni in the U.S. Senate and in the House of Parliament in Canada, in the capitol in Sacramento, and in the boardrooms of Manhattan and Silicon Valley. We have alumni directing major motion pictures, writing best-selling books and taking award-winning photographs, performing in symphonies, singing at the Met, and winning Grammy awards.
Changes indeed. Every time I do one of these lists, I’m struck by how much has changed…and the changes seem to come faster and stranger every year. It may seem like the world is becoming a different place, an unfamiliar and perhaps unfriendly place…and it’s perhaps understandable for a child of God to feel lost, like all the road-signs have disappeared and the ground has shifted.
There are really only three questions you need to be able to answer by the time you graduate from Biola. So as you’re going through your years here, keep these 3 questions in mind:
Who is God?
Who am I?
And based on my answers to those first two questions, How then shall I live?
The answers to those 3 questions are the core of a Christian college education.
The media spotlight is beginning to fade in Baltimore, just as it faded in South Carolina, and New York, and Ferguson, and (23 years ago) in Los Angeles. And it might be easy for us to sigh and think, “well, that’s over,” and act as if nothing has happened.
Until it happens again.
Because it will happen again.
Around here, we talk a lot about ‘community’. We talk about the Biola community. And this generation sitting out here today seems to have a greater passion for community than we have seen in decades.
But one of the things your English and Philosophy professors will teach you is that, before you begin a discussion, be sure to clarify your terms. And so I want to clarify what I mean when I say community:
Building a community, especially a community within the Kingdom of God, is not finding a bunch of people who are just like you… in fact, it is precisely the opposite.
Dr. Walter Mishel of Stanford once did an experiment with four-year-olds and marshmallows.
He would bring a four-year-old into a room with a table, and on the table was a small plate of marshmallows. And he would say, “Now, I have to run a quick errand. You can eat this little plate of marshmallows now, while I’m gone… but if you wait and don’t eat it until I get back, you can have a big plate of marshmallows.”
And then he left.
And while we enjoy nature, and play in nature, and use nature to make our own lives better, for many of us it is only recently that we've begun to really think about nature… to celebrate nature as a gift from God, and to recognize that Biblically we are stewards, not owners… and therefore to wonder: If this is truly God's property, then how should we be treating it?
But for this generation, even personal transformation is not enough. They want to change the world, too.
This world, where the phrases “Hands Up” and “I Can’t Breathe” represent something very different than they did a year ago…
This world, where hate and violence and God are sadly all twisted together…
This world, where push always comes to shove, and it’s said that love is just not enough…
I was thinking that most of us, by the time we get to college, we don’t have to carry that big backpack of books anymore… but a lot of us are bent over anyway. Maybe we’re carrying a backpack full of other things.
Things like regret, blame, fear, doubt, anger, frustration, shame… things that have been done to us; things we’ve had to go through; pain we’ve had to endure; wrongs we’ve had to suffer. Things that we didn’t deserve… things we can’t let go of.
And so, to all these successful students, I want to encourage you… to fail.
Not the massive fail. Not the epic fail that ends up on YouTube. Not the kind of spectacular flameout that ends with you in a smoldering heap in front of the Provost’s office.
I mean ‘fail’ as in, ‘not be perfect.’
These students, these of the class of 2016, have come to Biola out of a culture that inundates them with trivia… interesting but useless factoids, provocative soundbites, tantalizing eye-candy, meaningless spectacle, inflammatory but empty political speech, a google-plex of disconnected data and content without context, and a 24-hour news cycle that knows everything about immediacy and nothing about importance…
…a culture often full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
We’re not just talking about rape, or abuse. We’re talking about sexual violence. Which means we’re talking to, and about, a lot of people here in this room.
That’s uncomfortable. It’s uncomfortable to ‘give voice’ to such things at Biola.
College will NOT be the best four years of your life; God forbid your life should peak between 18 and 22. God forbid!
The season you spend here at Biola is a season of impossibly late nights and improbably good friendships; of growth and goal-setting and global awareness; of choosing and challenge; of redemption and reconciliation. However, it will also be a season of surrender, of impossible decisions, of lonely days and fearful nights, with moments of pain and failure and loss.
See, college is not your best life; it’s about laying a foundation for your best life.
By the time you graduate from Biola, you will have spent thousands of hours with faculty, helping you develop your minds. You will have experienced hundreds of chapels and ministry opportunities, helping you develop spiritually. Biola has a mandatory PE requirement and dozens of intercollegiate and intramural sports teams, to help you develop athletically.
But when it comes to dating and relationships, well… you’re pretty much on your own…
