Go and Do Likewise

By Dr. Andrew Silver
Associate Professor of English
College of Liberal Arts

So this is what is supposed to happen in a baccalaureate speech: I’m supposed to give you a sense of what a tremendously far distance you’ve come in four short years.  I’m supposed to give you this sense by listing things that have happened in the world since you were freshmen way back in 2003.  I’m supposed to say things like “in 2003, when you were freshmen, most people still had dial-up, there was no such thing as an ipod without buttons, there were no itunes, ipod photo, ipod mini, ipod nano, ipod shuffle, ipod video, and in 2003, it’s hard to believe, but there was no Facebook at Mercer.  If you don't know about Facebook, let me try to enlighten you. Facebook is a "social utility" that "connects you with the people around you." If you don't have facebook, you don't have social utility. And that can be sad.  Now, parents, I know what you’re thinking: you're thinking "but I feel connected to the people around me. . . because I live in a place called 'a neighborhood'. . . and I go to something some people refer to as a 'church.'" That is so 2003.

After giving you this sort of information about the way the world has changed in your four years at Mercer--so you can tell your grandkids, “when I was in college, Facebook was invented!” – I’m supposed to send you away with some tidy tidbit of moral uplift.  Something that’s mildly challenging, but not so challenging that you think that after all this education you still need to be challenged all that much– something like these fine sentiments, from actual baccalaureate speeches: “let wisdom and Knowledge be your guardian angels” –yes! – or “growing is something you’ll be doing as long as you live” – how true! – or, and this is my favorite – “There are no goodbyes for people who love and care for each other, there are only farewells.”  I don’t even know what that means.

But I’m not going to give that kind of baccalaureate address.  And that is because when I graduated from college, I don’t remember my baccalaureate address, and that is because when I graduated from college, I was really messed up, and that’s because Jesus messed me up.  Jesus ruined my life.  And these are the sorts of things one should not say at a baccalaureate.  Not in front of the parents.  Because I don’t have an “answer” for you.  I only have a question, and it’s the same question I had when I graduated college: how can we live as Jesus wants us to live in this world?  Now.

Let me back up.  I was raised Jewish, and though I was raised in a majority Christian culture, I had never read the New Testament before I got to college.  I had never really read the Old Testament, for that matter, in its entirety.  And when I got to college, like most Mercerians, I took an Old Testament and New Testament class.  That first semester, reading the Old Testament prophets nearly broke my spirit.  Let me give one example.  The holiest day in Judaism is Yom Kippur– it’s like Jewish Easter season, but without the bunnies, eggs and candy– without the things that make Easter fun for children, rather than hide-under-the-covers frightening.  So you can imagine my feelings as a tender child on Yom Kippur, when, in three-hour services, Jewish worshipers– in the middle of a 24 hour fast– solemnly repent of their sins, work to undo them, and plead to an awesome and mysterious God for forgiveness as He writes our names into either the book of life or the book of death for the coming year, and then closes the book.  How I yearned as a child for the Easter bunny. 

So in college I was shocked to read Isaiah knocking all of this piety when it takes place in a world of injustice:  “Is such the fast I choose, a day to humble oneself?,” he writes, quoting God: “Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?  Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the Lord?”  And that’s a rhetorical question, because Isaiah’s answer is “no”:  God’s got other things in mind.  “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice. . . to let the oppressed go free?  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them?  Then your light shall break forth like the dawn.”  So. Yom Kippur: holiest day of the year– day where I had to wear a suit to temple, speak in hushed tones, fast and cry out to God in praise and atonement for my sins– that stuff wasn’t all that God was after?  I really wished I could have told my parents that when I was a kid. 

Except that Isaiah wanted us to do something much, much harder.  Take the homeless poor into your house?  Who does that?  Share my food with the hungry?  I’ll take that repentance stuff over this justice stuff any day.  Repentance is hard, and belief is hard, but it’s a cakewalk compared to taking the homeless into my house.  I’ll believe anything you want, especially if my eternal life is on the line, before I’ll do that.

And then, if the prophets weren’t hard enough, the next semester, for the first time, I read the words of Jesus.  Now I had known about Jesus from what my culture told me, and, other than Christmas sales, the Jesus they told me about said that if you believed in Him, you were saved.  And that was there in the gospel of John all right, but it was like one of those telephone games you played when you were a kid– one person whispers in another’s ear and by the time it gets to the tenth person it sounds completely different.  Because I saw there were other things Jesus was saying in the Bible– things Jesus said that I had never– heard– anywhere– before.  Remember: I had come to the New Testament without an entire childhood and adolescence of theological training that told me that some things that Jesus said to do were really, really important –and those things go in sermons and on bumper stickers, t-shirts, billboards and greeting cards– and then other things Jesus said to do you could sort of ignore. . . like this bit of advice to a rich follower: “sell all you have and distribute it to the poor.”  I didn’t know any better.  I supposed that when Jesus said do something, he meant what he said.  And I was from a fairly wealthy family.  My father voted for Reagan.  I didn’t want to sell what I had and give it to the poor.  But since I never saw that verse on a bumper sticker, I ignored it, turned the page and found this: “How hard it is for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!”  Or how about this– this one really shocked me: Matthew 25– when Jesus says that all nations will be gathered before the Son of Man and the sheep will be separated from the goats.  And the sheep were those people who saw the face of God in the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the naked, the sick, the imprisoned– Jesus’s words!– and the sheep did unto the least as though the least were God.  And the goats, like me, were those who did nothing for the least.  And the sheep get eternal life, and the goats get eternal punishment.  And I thought Isaiah was tough. 

I wondered why had I never heard about this Jesus in twenty years of life in a majority Christian country?  I think it’s because this Jesus makes graduating from college very, very difficult.  Because, like the lawyer in the Good Samaritan story, we’re ok with loving God– we’re clear on that part– it’s this neighbor stuff that we can’t quite understand. “But who is my neighbor?” the lawyer asks, trying to limit his love to his first century sub-division.  And Jesus, true to form, messes up the man’s life.  He tells him the story of a traveler robbed, beaten, and left half dead on the road to Jericho.  And two religious authorities– in my tradition it would be two rabbis, in yours, maybe a Baptist minister and a deacon– these are pious people, and they know all the right Biblical passages, all the right words, believe all the right things– and they walk straight by this naked beaten man like he doesn’t exist.  And then this heretic, this scum, this Samaritan, this person from a community shunned by Jesus’s audience– in today’s world, think a Muslim or illegal immigrant– this heretic stops, touches this man’s beaten body, bandages his wounds, and delivers him to an inn, where he agrees to pay all of his expenses.  When I read that in college, I looked around at my culture, and I thought: who does this stuff?  Who even pays attention to it? 

I was in my sophomore year when I read the New Testament, living in Washington D.C., and it was early February, when the weather dips below freezing and sometimes below zero, when the winds whip through the district’s flat parks and city streets, and I would step over homeless people on the way to my heated dorm room after reading the words of Jesus.  I brought the homeless food from our cafeteria– it didn’t cost me a dime– but I knew that this wasn’t nearly enough for Jesus or for Isaiah.  They wanted me to bring these homeless into my home.  They wanted me to pay for their lodging, their hospital bills, to make them my brothers, to treat them like family, to love them like I loved God.  And I couldn’t. . . do it.   And so when I was about to graduate, my world had been turned upside down by Jesus and the prophets.  And I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that I couldn’t do what I thought I was going to do my entire life, which was become a lawyer. . . not that there’s anything wrong with that. . . depending on the lawyer.

I had majored in Christianity, but I couldn’t become a minister, because I was Jewish, and I thought that might be a handicap.  And so instead I went off to a big research university, and studied religion and literature in a big English department.  And the professors were worker bees who devoted themselves to research in specialized micro-areas of inquiry, and they had no contact with any department outside their own, and they didn’t seem to speak to each other that often, and they weren’t involved in the surrounding community, and everybody seemed miserable– like little research zombies, hamsters running in a wheel– and nobody spoke of spiritual life, and nobody was asking the questions that I asked in college, and there were no sheep.

And then I came to Mercer.  And I met the faculty, and I saw that, despite the workload here, they lived; they were real people; they spoke to one another; they had families and communities; and they were unafraid to speak and speak often of a life of the spirit, and of service, and they wanted their students to do the same.  And this was really strange: they actually seemed interested in subjects outside their areas of specialization.  There were biology professors like Tom Huber who loves literature as much as any English professor, and there were English professors like Gordon Johnston who loves nature as much as any biology professor, and there were Great Books professors renovating blighted urban communities, mathematicians advocating for kids with downs’ syndrome, IDS professors helping AIDS patients, French professors leading prayer groups, Christianity professors building houses for the poor, and then it got really freaky– there were chemistry professors rappelling off of trees in the woods and philosophy professors playing guitar in ska bands.  It was like some sort of X-Men school.  There were mutants here!  Professors who were first and foremost human beings and teachers– people of spirit in academia!

And then I met the students.  And the best of them were unlike any students that I’d ever met anywhere before.  I had never known that sheep– the kind that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 25– existed in the world outside of history books– that Good Samaritans really walked the earth– until I came to Mercer and met students who weren’t world-weary and cynical– people who actually wanted to do what Jesus said! 

Now there are plenty of proud goats at Mercer, and many, many more goats who think they’re sheep– we’ve got our fair share of priests and Levites– but we’ve also got hundreds of students like Mo Leverett, who graduated from Mercer in 1988, who took his entire family straight to the ninth ward of New Orleans– to the worst housing project in the nation– because he felt responsible for their poverty– and he and his family lived in the ninth ward for fifteen years, coaching football, setting up an urban ministry, tutoring, operating a school for at-risk children, hosting health clinics, and, in Mo’s words, “loosening the chains of injustice through the word and the work of the gospel.” “God really cares about justice in the here and now, not just justification in the hereafter,” he told me, “but we’ve jumped off of His train, and recreated Jesus in our own image, created our own religion devoid of justice for the poor, devoid of any suffering.” 

Brooke Miller, 2004 graduate of Mercer, didn’t jump off that train.  She read a book in her FYS 102 class with Anya Silver describing the hell of inner-city education in America, and like Mo Leverett she realized, as she put it, “I was the beneficiary of a system that was unjust.”  And she read and re-read the New Testament, and she was always in conversation at Mercer about Christianity, about the gospel imperative: “it wasn’t like Sunday school,” she said, “but there were constantly conversations in which I felt a divine or higher power existed, and that was happening all the time at Mercer, in class and out of class.” And though she majored in English, and though she loved her books, and though she received a generous fellowship to study in a fine graduate school, she turned it all down to go straight to New Orleans to teach remedial middle-school math to students who had failed the entrance exam to high school, numerous times, who had been forgotten, written off by the educational system–who were taught in a converted machine shop with broken desks, holes in the wall, no working bathrooms in their building, sewage backing up into the sinks in their classroom, and no books that they could bring home to do their homework.  “I didn’t think ‘all right I’m going to live out the gospel.’” Brooke told me.  “The Good Samaritan didn’t think ‘man I’m going to get points for this!’” But, she said, “when we’re not concerned with other people, or just concerned about other people at holidays or convenient times – we’re continuing the cycle, we’re allowing injustice to happen.”  And the gospels don’t want us to do that.

And there was no thinking at all when John Carroll, 2005 Mercer graduate, Christianity major, got a call from Daniel Hardeman, a Mercer business graduate now working at Geico, telling him he was headed to Indonesia to help with tsunami relief.  “It wasn’t something I had to think about or consider,” he told me. “Something in me yearned to answer the call that was going forth.”  And he didn’t think of Mercer either, though it was in an FYS 102 Engaging the World course with Mary Ann Drake where he first found his conscience challenged to understand the suffering beyond his church, beyond his community, beyond his nation. 

And he went to Indonesia, saw destruction that he had never seen before and that he cannot to this day put in words, and he simply did what was asked of him: he helped haul tons of rice, put up tents and temporary latrines, organized medical clinics, pumped out wells filled with salt water. . . and he recovered and buried hundreds of bodies.  And as the family members– Muslims– came to claim their loved ones, he heard the stories of survivors from towns like Leung, where 17,000 people had lived, and where only 18 had survived the tsunami, some of them having had their children ripped from their arms by the water.  And John listened and suffered with them, and he wept with them, and he broke bread with them, and he loved them enough to help them begin their lives again.  Sitting in Joshua Cup, a coffee shop run by Good Samaritans here in town, I asked John how he could reconcile what had happened in that tsunami with his understanding of God.  And he looked down at the table, and he paused.  “I don’t know how to answer that,” he said:

I think that, for awhile. . .  I kind of lost sight of a sense of hope, a sense of hope of resurrection, of new life, just because of the horror, the hard things that I’d seen . . . but when I read the stories of Christ in the New Testament, I see him engaging directly in those places of horror.  There’s not an attempt to explain it away, to give a pretty answer as to why suffering exists, but there is compassion that is poured out. . . And there’s still a struggle sometimes with why, why, why does this happen, and I can’t give you a reason why, but I know that Jesus approaches that fallen-ness, that horror, and the ugliness of the world, and pours compassion into it and pours himself into it to the point where the existing powers. . . kill–kill him for speaking about a faith where love and justice and equality reign.  And Jesus calls his disciples to follow, to take up the cross, and the only way to begin taking up the cross is by trying to create a world where love and justice and equality reign.

Here was the sheep that Jesus speaks of in Matthew 25.  And this is what it means to be a Mercerian: to live out Christ’s call to love in the gospels.  And you don’t have to go to Indonesia or inner-city New Orleans.  I spoke to Sarah Holik, one of the many, many Mercer students sitting here today who has taught me what Christ’s love means, and she told me she had decided to switch career paths and study family therapy at Mercer’s McAfee School of Theology.  And I asked her why she switched.  She said: “I want to spend the rest of my life loving people.”  Sheep exist here. 
          
When you entered Mercer as freshmen, my wife was pregnant, and in your second semester– and in her second trimester– she was diagnosed with the most lethal known form of breast cancer: inflammatory breast cancer.  The love you all showed us–I have no words . . . I had never felt in my life that I belonged to a spiritual community, a temple, a church.  I always felt a stranger, always asked the wrong questions.  But the faculty and students here have given me the gift of community, of brotherhood.  And Anya, now in remission three years later, our son, Noah, this week celebrating his third birthday, she her third Mother’s Day, also shares her thanks for your love. 

And so working here, and meeting you, I know that Jesus exists. . . that he lives yet.  I see him in you, at work in your love for God and for the least– in the gospel that you embody.  What a remarkable place Mercer is.

Mercer is about to graduate along with you, into a new era.  And there are good people, my friends, who want to see Mercer measured by our secular research, and there are good people, my friends, who want to see Mercer measured by statements of belief– creeds, mission statements.  But I’d rather see Mercer measured, as we have been for the last hundred years, by how we love here, what we choose to love, and how deeply we love, and with what conviction, and at what expense.  I know it’s hard– and I know, it’s hopelessly inarticulate.  But Jesus gave the Good Samaritan no metaphysical words– he doesn’t speak as he aids the robbed and beaten.  He says only something very practical, “I’ll pay for his care”– so un-theological of him: no metaphysics, no creeds, no tracts, no notion of self– just the messy, hopelessly inarticulate work of love.  And Jesus tells us, “go and do likewise.”

In the days after our long and productive and sometimes turbulent history with the Georgia Baptist Convention ended last year, many of you in this graduating class stood together on the quad at a peaceful, prayer-filled rally.  You didn’t all agree with each other– that’s not what Mercer’s about; you’re a diverse group– but you’re free, and you came together freely, as a community, to talk, to pray, to love.  And together you said, “this is who we are at Mercer.” And at the end of that remarkable gathering, a student named Timothy Durski, now finishing his senior year overseas at Oxford, stood up on the bench next to Jesse Mercer, and spoke these words as a closing prayer.  More than anything I know, they speak to what makes Mercer an extraordinary place, a unique place, and a vitally important place in this new century, in this new work that we must all do together.  And they speak to the students we have here, of the lives you intend to live, and of your love, and of your commitment to creating the kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.  This is Timothy’s prayer.  I think it’s Mercer’s prayer as well:  

God, we recognize You as sovereign over us, as the Author of peace in our lives. The hope we have in You can unite us as a community. Though we often miss the mark, we know You love us and give us strength enough to do what You have demanded of us. May we be a community of peace and of progress. We ask in humility that we may be agents of light in this dark world, sharing in Your work -- inwardly that we might seek harmony with and understanding of each other, in the classroom and out; and outwardly in the larger community, that we might seek justice and be agents of peace and charity.  Let Your work begin in this community and through this community, and may we be mindful of Your presence over us and in us. All praise is Yours, Almighty God. We pray this in Your Name, for our sake, and for Your glory. Amen.