Graduation Liturgy
Archabbey Church
8 May 2010

During the night Paul had a vision.
A Macedonian stood before him and implored him with these words,
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

The light of faith has always been enlivened by visions. Some of these visions have been highly personal, engaging the mystic in a particular experience of the Divine Presence even as he or she goes forward in the life of the Church. Other visions, however, have been more community-minded, the vision of God, the vision of the human person, the vision of relationship.

In these days, we have not yet slipped out of the immediacy of the paschal mystery and Easter is a time of visionary excess. The disciples of Jesus were given a vision of the future even as they endured the agony of Christ’s passion and death and the rejuvenation of the resurrection. Those men whom Jesus had chosen from backwoods towns and fishing villages, from counting houses and distant fields, those men so fallible and prone to fail, Jesus chose them to be His followers and in the brightness of the Master, under His careful tutelage, their daily darkness was filled with the light of visionary zeal. They became fearless, bold preachers of the Word, men willing to travel to the ends of the earth and lay down their very lives to witness to the visionary power of the Gospel.

During the night Paul had a vision.
A Macedonian stood before him and implored him with these Words,
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

The disciples became visionaries and by them the early Christians, men and women from every walk of life, fierce Pharisees, God-fearers and casual observers of the Law were given a vision. The preaching of the apostles and the witness of the power of Christ alive in them gave the Chosen People a vision, hope for a new life, a new world, and a new cosmic reality. The early Christians, those Jews who had so long hoped and dreamt and prayed for the coming of Chosen One, the Messiah, the Savior of Israel were inspired by the visionary prospect of His coming to be more than they ever could have imagined under the Old Law. But that was not enough.

During the night Paul had a vision.
A Macedonian stood before him and implored him with these Words,
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

Come over to Macedonia and help us!
And so this powerful Word burst forth from its cultural and religious confines to dawn upon a world, desperate, longing to hear the Good News proclaimed in every tongue, in every culture, in every place. Now not only Macedonia, but the ends of the earth have witnessed are witnessing, the saving power of God, the Word of God racing down the corridors of time and place and insinuating itself into every nook and cranny of the human experience.
In the power of His command that prophetic preaching has been heard in every place and its sacred syllables have reverberated against the walls of human power, human prestige, human wealth and divinized the cultures of human kind offering them a new message, the message of the Kingdom.
Simply because
During the night Paul had a vision.
A Macedonian stood before him and implored him with these Words,
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

The Word of God cultivated itself among the nations, and was uttered in the dim light of the domus ecclesia, the barrel vaults of basilicas, the cavernous cathedrals of the Middle Ages. That Word resounded against the ramparts of prejudice and discord, against the walls and mighty fortresses of reformation and enlightenment. That Word suffered the indignity of ridicule and reductionism and revisionism and redundancy but it was not quieted, never muted, neither was it destroyed but rather, that Word is still heard today, it trumpets today, it is pondered profoundly today …
In the new Macedonias, in our Macedonias

A Macedonian stood before him

And who are those Macedonians of today? Who are those men and women inviting, begging us to come to them and preach the Word of God, teach the mighty message of the Gospel?

They are the desperate and afraid, the poor and the outcast, the neglected and the ridiculed.

They are our own suffering brothers and sisters. The sick and the psychologically fractured. Wanderers and immigrants, the lost and uncertain.

They are our mothers striving to feed their children, our fathers in search of meaningful labor, our children abused and worn down by life so early, so cruelly.

They are the hard-pressed farmers of the Great Plains
The factory workers of Korean cities
The denizens of tiny towns in Kentucky
They are the bureaucrats and the technocrats.
The weary and the stout of heart
The yearning and the complacent

They call to us, not in dreams but from the streets of Memphis, Indianapolis, Phoenix and beyond.
They cry and lament, desperate for a hearing, desperate for hope, desperate for change.
And so to Macedonia we go. Having neither silver nor God, we give what we have. The name of the Lord Jesus.
That name that is …

Crying out, clamoring against the indifference of so-called developed worldviews and false understandings of little truths that never satisfy.

That name that brightens the eyes of the lonely, the desperate, the outcast, the old, the dying

That name that lilts lullaby-like on tired ears that long to hear the dulcet tones of peace in a world in which the din of war and the pulsating perniciousness of poverty still resound.

That name is heard in Macedonia and in towns and villages across the globe because of men like our graduates today who will heroically serve the Church as priests, because of men and women like our graduates today who will selflessly minister to the Church as laypeople.
Why?
Because during the night they had a vision.
A Macedonian stood before them and implored them with these Words,
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

Brothers and sisters, we are the inheritors of that vision and the fulfillment of that promise. We are the ones who have been called to proclaim boldly and without compromise the message of the Church, the message of the Gospel, the message of Christ.

We are called to be visionaries
Saint Meinrad is just such a place of vision, of conversion, of evangelization.
All of us have experienced it in one way of another …
We came here intimidated and afraid and in the power of His visionary Word we leave here with the boldness of St. Paul and the fierceness of the prophets.

We came here thinking we knew everything there was to know about the mystery of God and in the power of His visionary Word we met the God of infinite possibility in a horizonless soulscape.

We came here men and women whom Jesus chose from backwoods towns and fishing villages, from counting houses and distant fields, women and men so fallible and prone to fail, Jesus chose us to be His followers and in the luminescence of the Master, under His careful tutelage, our daily darkness has been filled with the light of visionary zeal.

We came here without purpose, wavering, wandering on the way and in the visionary power of His Word we have found our way in the One who is the way, we have discovered the Truth, in the One who is the Truth, we have been given new life by the source of life himself.

We came here without hope and have heard His voice chanting in our ears, the voice of Jesus crying to us: I have chosen you out of the world.

And how has He done it: In His power, by His authority, by His witness, in His boldness, by His grace. And we have prayed, and worked, and cried, and deliberated, and discerned and laughed and studied and thought and prayed, and prayed and we have seen it all happen.
During the night Paul had a vision.
A Macedonian stood before him and implored him with these Words,
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

If there is anything I hope our graduates take away from here today, it is the vocation to be a visionary.
The vocation to go over to Macedonia.
And so we go. Go now. Get out.
The visionary power of Saint Meinrad as prepared you and the visionary power of this place is fueled by what we celebrate here, now.

Here we celebrate a new vision not only in the bread and wine, but in ourselves. We witness here the daily miracle of God’s presence that gives us the courage, strength and will to rise up and see the Glory of the visionary power of God even as we step away, even as we move from this place to another place upward and upward to His place in heaven and all the places in between – After all, has he not promised His salvation to those who accept His invitation:
During the night Paul had a vision.
A Macedonian stood before him and implored him with these Words,
“Come over to Macedonia and help us.”

Lord to whom shall we go?

It didn’t take long for the first scandal to break out among the disciples.

Jesus said in yesterday’s Gospel: Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you cannot know the life of God.

Harsh words that even today cause division in the Body of Christianity.
Harsh words that caused some of the earliest followers of the Way to walk away.

And of course, with Jesus the potential for scandal is always present. He himself was a scandal.

He presented to the word the scandal of the eternal God born in time, born in poverty.

He presented to the world the power of God, born in the weakness of a dependent infant.

He presented to the world the might of God, consumed by real temptation, plagued by real emotion, encompassed by the real human condition.

He presented to the world the strength of God, beaten, spat upon, ridiculed, condemned and nailed to a cross.

He presented to the world the all encompassing reality of God encompassed in the circumference of a piece of bread.

Is that not scandalous? Doesn’t the very premise of the incarnation, the glorious and gross admixture of the human and the divine lend itself to scandal.

Should we be surprised that the prolonged event of Christ in the world, an event we call the Church should continue to be plagued by the very humanity that it represents at its core.

And as we know, for some of the disciples there might always be the temptation to walk away.

But don’t we say: Lord to whom we shall go?

For while there is weakness in the Body of Christ there is also strength.
While there is temptation in the Body of Christ, there is also the ability to overcome that temptation.
While there is scandal and confusion in the Body of Christ there is also the reality that allows us to make sense of the confusion.

Christ gives us his Body and Blood to consume and in doing so becomes weak for us, a scandal for us, and our only hope, our only strength, our only grasp at Divinity.

And so with weakened minds and hearts, with spirits contrite and confused we don’t walk away, but come forward to this table and with hands outstretched, hands of scandalous repute, reach for the God who alone has the Words of everlasting life.

My brothers, in these weeks we come to the end of our common journey in this house of the Lord’s service, at least for a while. Some of our brothers will be going forward on different paths, following the will of God in their lives by seeking His face in other vocations. Most of us in the coming months will walk that wide circle through many experiences that will be eventually draw us back to this Hill to test the power of a scandalous God to change our lives. All of us will continue to live in the reality of the Incarnation, a strange and wonderful reality that asserts itself by drawing us to the power of God even as it points to the reality of our weakness, our internal scandals. Brothers, in faith, for those of us who have seen how God works, by experiencing his power in the weakness of our sin, in the Eucharist, in reconciliation, in the wonder of this community of love, support and formation; there is nowhere else to go. Thus we all depart this year in the glorious realization of the Easter mystery, the mystery of loss and gain, of hope, of great hope. Go with the blessing of the rector and the staff and be always who you are: The Body of Christ announcing His presence to a scandal-ridden world.