White Horse Hall Commencement Address, 5/7/22
by Jonathan McIntosh
In this commencement address, I want to offer you all a blessing. My blessing is an attempt to impress upon you just how strange you all are. I know most but not all of you, but this is White Horse Hall after all, and you are graduating from White Horse Hall—or at least you would be graduating if this were a normal school with a normal graduation ceremony. But that just illustrates my point: White Horse Hall is a very strange school, which makes you a bunch of weirdos. You are weird. Your families are weird. The education you have received at White Horse Hall is weird. The churches you are all members of are weird, including your pastors. More importantly, and the thing I want to dwell on in my remarks here, is that your religion is weird.
You are Christians, you have been brought up as Christians, which means that you have had the immense blessing of never knowing what it’s like to be outside of the faith. And hopefully, prayerfully, you never do. But as much of a blessing as this is, it also means that it is especially easy for the faith to become something familiar to you, something mundane or ordinary. Not ever having seen the faith from the outside, it can be a challenge to appreciate from the inside just how strange this business of believing in and following Jesus really is.
Sadly, this is also one of the chief reasons many Christians brought up in the faith end up later abandoning it. One reason, of course, Christians leave the faith is that they simply fall into some particular sin, and rather than giving up the sin that they’ve come to love, they give up on the God who has loved them. Another, very tragic reason Christians fall away is that, while they may have been brought up in the Church and taught the things of God, they weren’t brought up in an environment where they were well loved in the way God really loves them, and so they end up associating that lack of love they received from others with a lack of love from God. But a third reason those who are brought up in the Church and who were otherwise well loved, as I trust you have been, but then fall away, is that at some point in their life they get exposed to new ideas, or new experiences, and these are new ideas and experiences that they see the Christian faith as somehow unable to explain or account for. In other words, they come to see the world, which they were not familiar with, as something vast and mysterious, and as either far more attractive than they realized, or possibly far more harsh than they realized, or perhaps both. In comparison with the world, they come to see the Christian faith, which they at least think they know and are familiar with, as something oddly small, trivial, and strange. Having sized things up in this way, they then leave the Christian faith in which they were brought up for the world.
If so, then I think much trouble, much wasted energy, to say nothing of much heartache for their families and much pointless misery for themselves, might have been spared if they only had come to see beforehand the Christian faith for the true wonder and oddity that it is. Consider this mind-bender that Beatrice and I were talking about a couple of days ago: you believe that the world was brought into being by a God who in his infinite, fully realized perfection stood to gain absolutely nothing by creating the world. This means that in creating the world, there is a very real sense in which God didn’t even “become” a creator, for God can’t “become” anything. Even crazier still, you believe that this infinite perfect God who cannot change nevertheless “became” man, suffered, died, rose from the dead, and is still incarnate to this very day, ruling over all of creation. I have been studying the history of philosophy professionally for 24 years, and I can tell you that I find these two mysteries at the heart of our faith far more interesting, far more exciting, and yet far stranger than anything the mind of man has been able to come up with. The Christian faith, in a word, is weird.
But don’t take my word for it—take the Apostle Paul’s. In our Scripture reading from 1 Corinthians 1-2 that Mr. Hill read, the Apostle says that the Cross of Christ is not just weird, but he puts it even stronger: he says that it is folly to those who are perishing. Listen once again to that series of rhetorical questions Paul asks: “Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age?” In other words, Paul is asking, can you find me the respectable, intelligent man who thought that saving the world in this way was a good idea? Paul goes on to say that “it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” Think about that for a moment: he doesn’t just say that it pleased God to save us, and that the means by which he saved us happen to appear foolish to the world. What he says, rather, is that it pleased God to save us precisely by those means which the world viewed as foolish. So God delights to surprise us, and not just surprise us, but surprise us in a way that messes with us, provokes us, and even offends us. To use a modern expression, there is a sense in which, in the gospel, Paul says God is trolling us. And if that image seems too irreverent for you, what words would you use to capture the calculated grotesquerie of Jesus’s words when he tells his disciples in John chapter six that unless you eat his flesh and drink his blood, you have no life in you, but that whoever feeds on his flesh and drinks his blood will abide in him, and he in them? After saying these things, we are told, many of Jesus’s followers turned away from him at that point. There were people, in other words, who were followers of Jesus, but when he said that to have eternal life, you need to eat his body and drink his blood, they felt that this went too far, that Jesus had stepped over the line. This was indecent. Jesus was being an extremist. This is not a respectable religion. Only the most rabid cult leader would ask his followers to do such a thing, and yet that’s exactly where Jesus goes with it.
So yours is a very weird religion. But we should not think of it as weird for weirdness’s own sake. When Jesus asked his disciples who remained if they, too, wanted to leave, they answered: “Lord, to whom should we go? You have the words of eternal life.” So your religion is weird, but it’s not esoteric. It’s not weird in a small way, but in a very big way. It’s infinitely big, and eternally weird. G.K. Chesterton put it well when he described his own conversion to the Christian faith this way.
I did, like all other solemn little boys, try to be in advance of the age. Like them I tried to be some ten minutes in advance of the truth. And I found that I was eighteen hundred years behind it. … When I fancied that I stood alone I was really in the ridiculous position of being backed up by all Christendom. It may be, Heaven forgive me, that I did try to be original; but I only succeeded in inventing all by myself an inferior copy of the existing traditions of civilized religion. … I did try to found a heresy of my own; and when I had put the last touches to it, I discovered that it was orthodoxy.
My exhortation to you, then, is this: your religion is weird, weirder than you can possibly know, so lean into that weirdness. Make sure you are understanding your faith correctly, and not just some human notion of what’s weird or counter-cultural, but do make sure that your understanding of the faith never falls into the rut of mere familiarity, where you have feel like you have figured out this Christianity thing. And when God by his grace gives you a vision for just how weird following Christ is, don’t be embarrassed by, but as Jude puts it, contend earnestly for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints. And make sure that in and through your own proclamation of that faith, when you tell others that they need to be baptized into Jesus, and eat his body, and drink his blood, that in the way in which you say it, and in the way in which you live it, others might detect that herein are the words of eternal life.
So, to the graduating class of 2022, or as I am here designating you, to the Weirdos of White Horse Hall: may your lives and careers after this be lives and careers of stubborn, irrational loyalty to your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Don’t apostatize into normalcy. Keep the faith. Keep the folly. Keep it weird. Thank you.