Loud Laments, Quiet Joy
By James D. Bratt, Professor of History

Distinguished Graduates, Ordinary Graduates, By-the-Skin-of-Your-Teeth Graduates, and History Majors:

We have come to the parting of the ways, you who are about to enter the allegedly real world, and we, faculty and staff, who are staying on to run a campus beset enough with the world's demands. Yes, you'll drop by for the occasional visit and be most welcome; we'll visit you via the alumni magazine and the annual appeal for gifts, and expect a like welcome. But the relationship we've had for the past four or five years is over, so it is only appropriate to ask, `Where do we go from here?'

Into the future, of course; that is to say, into the past. Whatever pictures we might think we have of the future are concepts, expectations, held just this moment, only to pass, with all other moments, into memory. To borrow a metaphor from Garry Wills, we hurtle into the future at the wheel of a car with an opaque windshield. The side windows offer only fleeting glimpses at a scenery set on rapid rewind; whatever perspective, whatever sense of bearings we get, comes from the rear-view mirror.

That being so, when asked to give this commencement address, I began thinking about past commencement addresses. This being Calvin College, I thought about past Calvinist commencement addresses. And this being one of the select 5,283 North American colleges truly distinguished by excellence, I thought of excellent past Calvinist commencement addresses. Somehow, my mind did not long linger on the CRC. It did fall quickly upon Jonathan Edwards, a Calvinist if there ever was one, an excellent mind by any measure, and the commencement speaker at Yale College some 250 years ago.

Don't worry: I'm not going to give you what you deserve: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Nor what you really fear: `Graduates in the Throes of a Sluggish Economy.' Rather, since you are commencing upon your life's work, and since we will continue here with ours, it is fitting to reflect upon what might make our work Christ's work, or in the words of Edwards' title, what are "The Distinguishing Marks of the Work of the Spirit of God."

Edwards, in 1741, was positive he had just seen a work, a mighty work, of God. He had seen and heard it in the groans and shouts, the confessions and raptures of an extraordinary religious revival that had been sweeping New England for the previous six years, indeed, that had begun in his own parish. This movement historians call the Great Awakening, the first instance of the mass revivalism that has marked evangelical Protestantism down to our own day. But, now addressing the Yale seniors, Edwards also sensed that things had started to go wrong. It was not only the carping criticism of liberals at Harvard that troubled him, but also the excesses of too many of the converted. Just a week before, some of these had disported themselves in torchlight parades through the night streets of New Haven, chanting hymns to Christ whose love had given them a new birth in the spirit, but also—rumor had it—embracing each other in the sort of love that would produce new births in the flesh nine months later. Beset by his enemies and scandalized by his allies, Edwards had to find some path of hope through the thicket of promises betrayed.

That is our burden, too. Many of you started elementary school in 1976, a date proclaimed by Time magazine to be "the year of the evangelical." The span of your formal education has seen that evangelical resurgence rise, crest, and then fall into scandal, acrimony, and, in some cases, outright paranoia. In a culture that desperately needs the Gospel, the most familiar form of preaching the Gospel seems to have run into public witch-hunting or private therapy, but in any case, to have run out of gas. Commissioned to live the Gospel nonetheless, we must search anew for the way God works.

Edwards came up with a long list; his text ran to 60 pages. Mine must not exceed six. (Wonderful, is it not, that with 10,000 more colleges than in Edwards' day, we have one-tenth the attention span?) Never mind, we can cut to the core. Those upon whom God truly works, Edwards said, "have been in great distress...[from] an apprehension of their sins and miseries" and "have been overcome with a sweet sense of the greatness, wonderfulness and excellency of divine things." Distress and sweetness, loud laments and surpassing joy—these, Edwards saw, marked the revival where it ran true. Calvin College does not do well at revivals; that is why, at its best, it doesn't try them. Rather than pushing you to peak moments, we have sought to help prepare you for the long run. But we aim at the same marks Edwards discerned. Keen anguish and profound peace—we hope your education here has acquainted you with these. We hope, in fact, that your lives, as they unfold, show that here these marks were driven into the very center of your soul.

Great agony and profound peace—these must mark the work of Christians and, I suppose, especially of Reformed Christians, because we hold to three basic convictions:

1. that God is a loving sovereign over all things;
2. that evil is real, bedeviling all things; and
3. that we live in one unified cosmos.

A moment's, or a lifetime's, reflection makes clear that these convictions together put us in a persistent paradox, in contradictions so painful that we are tempted to seek escape by denying one or another of these principles: either, with some religious liberals, to mute the sovereignty of God; or, with the pumpkin heads of the New Age, to deny the reality of evil; or—the evangelicals' temptation—to divide the unity of the cosmos and so locate evil in those persons, that nation, this passion, such and such a domain, and thus to miss the point that evil attends everyone and all things, also ourselves, also ourselves as redeemed people, and particularly—as Edwards warned his allies—in our religious experience, at those spiritual moments when we believe "ourselves as being now some of the most eminent of saints and particular favorites of heaven, and that the secret of the Lord is especially with us, and that we above all are fit to be approved as the great instructors and censors of this evil generation." Nothing so readily defamed the revival, Edwards came to realize, as censorious judgmentalism; nothing demanded more repentance. Given certain ignoble expressions heard here this past month, it would seem that Calvin College also needs to learn that lesson, over and over again.

Whatever else you might have learned and wherever else you might have learned it, by the grace of God you have not so learned Christ here. We follow Christ's path when we close off all escape hatches and, by the power of his love, live in and through the pain of our world. There is no grace but by anguish. Nor, as Edwards recorded, need there be anguish without grace. But first grace is not the end of the process, only a commencement. Easy proclamations of our redeemed state or of our redeeming theories Edwards would recognize as signs of our being still more entranced with ourselves than with God. Back on the forge of grace, then, to be melted and hammered some more. When is the work finished? At this sign: "whereas many [at first]," Edwards recalled of the revival, "did too much forget their distance from God and were ready...to talk with too much of an air of lightness, ...[now] their rejoicing...only abases and solemnizes them [and] breaks their heart...." After long anguish, heart-breaking grace; after loud laments, quiet joy, a still peace; but out of that still peace, a restless heart that seeks the good of every creature and all creation to the glory of the Creator.

Edwards' cycle of the conversion experience Calvin College commends to you for the course of your life—one long course that will end when we meet our source of joy face to face; but also a cycle repeated round upon round through all our days here. If Calvin doesn't do well at revivals, the lives of its alumni whose ranks you join today testify that by the grace of God it has done fairly well at engendering a kind of dogged faithfulness, low on glamour, high on tenacity. We should not boast of this but we should not be ashamed of it either. Edwards was well experienced with both the spectacular and the routine in God's work and, with the revival over, had come much to prefer the latter. "The blessed image of God consists" in the ordinary, not the extraordinary; "the root that bears infinitely more excellent fruit" sits in the mundane, not in the marvelous. Pertinent to his commencement occasion and ours, Edwards declared in particular that the work of the Spirit flourishes not from prophetic inspiration but from education—the grinding study that kept Edwards at a desk 12 hours a day every day of his life and that you might remember from exam week.

How, then, should you evaluate your education and your educators at Calvin College? If you leave here with books closed, if today does not indeed mark a new commencement of hard study and learning, then we will have failed. If you go out eager to learn but see learning as acquiring more information, that great cancer of our culture, we will have failed. If you are hungry for only knowledge, we will have failed. We would have you seek not these but wisdom, also the wisdom that keeps you from simply imitating us. God knows we have failed you often enough, letting fatigue overtake our faith and cynicism canker our hope. You can do better, and you must try. For our weaknesses we ask your forgiveness. But we hope that you have caught sight of the grace glimmering through our weakness because you treasure this college for its better intentions. We hope you have begun to see, as we have tried to teach, that in the most heinous of sinners there still abides the image of God, but that we still cannot compromise with evil; that every earthly joy is fleeting but must still—no, must all the more—be treasured for its quick passing; and that over every poem and proton and social policy lies the shadow of the cross where pain and beauty were joined to save us. May your lives and ours, together and apart, be marked by a faithful bearing of that cross and so be distinguished, truly, as works of the Spirit of God.

Thank you and Godspeed.