The Only Basis for Boasting

I’m reminded of a comment by the late George Burns, the little comedian, who said on an occasion such as this, on an evening like this, with the temperature like this, if you are entrusted with the privilege such as is now afforded to me, it is imperative that you have a good beginning and a good ending and you keep the two of them as close together as you possibly can. I think that was well stated, and I have been at many a graduation event where the person entrusted with the privilege that is now mine extended his sell-by date and disappointed everyone—people wishing they had graduated years earlier.

Tomorrow, the graduating class will walk out into a world in which they have emerged in a culture that has encouraged men and women to believe themselves to be the center of the universe—a culture in which it seems perfectly normal and reasonable to have been ferried to school in a minivan bearing a bumper sticker that proclaims the genius of the inhabitant of the minivan—namely, you. In his latest book, The Road to Character, David Brooks observes that while in an earlier era “there was [a] stronger social sanction against … blowing your own trumpet, getting above yourself, being too big for your britches,”[1] we now live in a culture of self-promotion that says, “Recognize my accomplishments; I am pretty special.”

Now, lest you think that I, an aging baby boomer, am here to suggest that my vintage avoided this selfism, let me quickly disavow such a notion. I think in large measure, we could be said to have generated the extent to which it has flourished in the last quarter of a century. As the oldest of the baby boomers reached sixty-five, which was four years ago, Dan Barry, writing in the New York Times, noted of these baby boomers, “They are living longer, working longer and … nursing some disappointment [at] how their lives have turned out. The self-aware, or self-absorbed, feel less self-fulfilled, and [are thus now] racked with self-pity.”[2] In 1965, when I was thirteen, Paul Simon proclaimed this theme of individualism in a song that began,

A winter’s day
In a deep and dark December;
I am alone.

He wasn’t bemoaning the fact; he was announcing the fact. He went on to say,

I built walls,
A fortress deep and mighty
That none may penetrate.

Don’t talk of love;
I’ve heard the word before.
It’s hidden in my memory,
And I won’t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died.
If I never loved, I never would have cried.

And after all, I’ve got my books
And my poetry to protect me.
I’m shielded in my armor,
Hiding in my room,
Safe within my womb;
I touch no one, and no one touches me.[3]

The culture in which you have grown up is a culture that produced and fostered that kind of mentality. And consequently, those who have lived through it for the longest time find that they are in many cases marked by indecision and by loneliness. When Dreyfus and Kelly wrote their book a couple of years back now, encouraging people to look for significance in their lives, they pointed out that men and women, because we live in such a secular environment, are forced to try and make meaning for themselves[4]—which, of course, is a very tough assignment. And when they do, what do we discover? Well, we discover that the passage of time hasn’t changed things very much at all.

A part of our reading this evening came from Jeremiah chapter 9—about two and a half thousand years ago. And here in that section of Jeremiah 9, the prophet was warning people about trusting in anything other than God’s revelation of himself if they’re to learn how to live and if they’re to discover how to die. Now, the background to all of that I’m going to assign as your homework—which, as you’re graduating, you won’t do in any case. Not that you necessarily did it before! But nevertheless, you will discover that it is a context of death and disaster. He says, “I want you to teach your daughters a lament. Death has come up and climbed in our windows.”[5]

In other words, what he’s saying is that the world there in that day was broken. And in attempting to fix it, they were prepared to trust themselves and to trust their own judgment. Essentially, in the words of Lennon and McCartney, “Hey, we can work it out.”[6] “We’ll work it out. Don’t you worry about it.”

Three Inadequate Sources of Confidence

And so, as a result of that, God sends them a prophet—sends them a prophet who speaks sympathetically to them in their need and speaks with striking honesty to them in their rebellion. And as he does so, he identifies three sources of self-confidence as being inadequate in themselves. They’re all there in the text.

Number one: wisdom, or intelligence, or education. You’re sitting there saying, “Does this fellow know that he’s at a baccalaureate, that he has 150 members of the faculty in front of him, five-hundred-plus graduating people, and all these parents that have invested a fortune in getting them this education? And he’s here to say, ‘Look out; it can really do you some harm’?”

Well, in actual fact, that’s what the writer of Ecclesiastes says: “It’s a miserable kind of business, ultimately, left to itself.”[7] Einstein concurred with that. Einstein wrote in his journal that he had found that the people who know the most are themselves the most gloomy.[8] Because the pursuit of wisdom divorced from the fear of the Lord is a dead-end street. Wisdom in and of itself, intelligence in and of itself, divorced from the basis of any ultimate kind of knowing, leads you up a blind alley. Wisdom: It’s an insufficient prop upon which to build your life.

Secondly: might, or strength, or your body. Your body. This is a generation that is fascinated with the body. It’s revealed in all kinds of ways. And the Bible is so clear about it: God has given to us a body. He has inhabited a body himself. It really, really matters. But it matters that we understand that as all flesh is like grass and the glory of man is like the flower of the field, so the grass withers, and the flower falls.[9] And we are like a vapor that appears for a wee while and then vanishes away.[10] Think about what a multibillion-dollar industry is involved at the moment, at this point in Western culture, to try and proclaim what the Bible says as being absolutely wrong—that “No, no, we’re really going to live forever. We can fix this. We’ll be able to work it out,” just because we’re not prepared to admit what we know.

The pursuit of wisdom divorced from the fear of the Lord is a dead-end street.

And many of you are young—of course you are—but some of you are like me. Gentlemen, may I say to you without embarrassment: It’s a long time since many of you shaved without wearing a T-shirt, and the reason being that you just can’t stand to see yourself in the mirror, if you’re honest! Or you’re frightened that your wife comes in and catches you. Because it is patently obvious that things are not as they were. You’re actually collapsing. You’re fading away. You have a furniture problem: Your chest has dropped down into your drawers. You are in deep trouble.

And the writer of Ecclesiastes makes that clear. That’s why he begins chapter 12 to say,

Remember your Creator
 in the days of your youth,
before the days of trouble come,[11]

before you find that you’re not standing as straight as you were, before you have discovered that your arms begin to tremble, before you’re dealing with inadequate occlusion (that you have few enough teeth on the front at the top to meet the few you’ve got left on the bottom), when you wake up at the sound of birds, and yet you can’t get to sleep, and so on[12]—in other words, when you suddenly discover that there are aisles in the drugstore which you have never paid attention to for an entire lifetime, and suddenly, you have to go in them, and you’re frightened that anybody sees you. Dear, oh dear, oh dear!

Who would trust in this, an inadequate prop—my brains, my body, or, thirdly, my bucks, my money, my resources, my riches? There are two problems with wealth: Wealth may leave us while we are living, and we will leave wealth when we die. Our culture has embraced the notion that money is the universal passport to everywhere, but it isn’t the passport to heaven; it’s the universal provider of everything, but it is not the provider of happiness. And the songwriter of the ’60s, again, the country-western fellow, had those memorable lines in his song “Mr. Businessman” where he says,

[You’re] spending counterfeit incentive,
Wasting precious time and health,
[And] placing value on the worthless,
[And] disregarding priceless wealth.[13]

It’s a delusion, says Jeremiah, of thinking even for a nanosecond that our lives may make sense, that they may be granted significance by the pursuit of simply an agile mind or a healthy body or a fat portfolio.

“Oh,” you say, “this is phenomenally gloomy. This is all very negative.” Well, it is negative, but then there is a positive, and he turns it around. He says, “This is, then, the way in which you need to approach things: having an understanding and a knowledge of God.” In other words, what we cannot finally settle by way of investigation we may know, by God’s grace, through revelation. Everything will fade. Heaven and earth will pass away. His words will never pass away.[14]

Three Unfading Glories

And so he says there are these unfading glories, which are first of all gifts to us before they’re expectations from us. And what are they? Well, again, just three.

The “steadfast love” of God. The “steadfast love” of God—the covenant love of God, the love of God that is made known to us in the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We have read it in Romans 5;[15] we have referred to it in our prayers: the depth of the love of the Father for us, “that we should be called [the] children of God! And [this] is what we are!”[16]—the foundation of your existence, the exercise of your brain, the pursuit of your usefulness, grounded in the covenant love of God.

What we cannot finally settle by way of investigation we may know, by God’s grace, through revelation.

Also in the fact of God’s “justice”—that God rules in equity, that he deals in truth, that he’s not arbitrary in what he does. His actions are always in keeping with his character. Because he is just, sin must be punished. Because he is love, he has provided a substitute to die in our place.

And thirdly, his “righteousness.” It’s interesting to note that when Jesus comes to John the Baptist to be baptized and John the Baptist says to him, “Don’t we have this the wrong way round? Shouldn’t you be baptizing me?”[17]—to which Jesus replies, at least in the King James Version, “Thus it is fitting now to fulfill all righteousness.”[18] And the Lord Jesus Christ fulfilled the Father’s will, establishing his righteousness, providing a righteousness, so that we might understand that, knowing God as he has revealed himself, we know him both as Creator and as Sustainer and as Savior and as King—so that when we think about saying to our culture the things that we have learned in an institution such as this, we’re not suggesting that somehow or another, we, as coming from a Christian biblical worldview, are denigrating the nature of man’s aspirations, either in the pursuit of wisdom or in the exercise of physical prowess or in the ability to earn and to get gain. What we’re actually saying is that there is a glory that outshines all of this glory. And it is this glory to which we seek to invest ourselves as we walk out into the future. “This,” said Jesus, “is eternal life, that they know you”—he’s speaking to his Father in prayer in John 17—“that they know you, the … true God, and [that they know] Jesus Christ whom you have sent.”[19]

Our Culture and Our Future

Now, as you think of this… And I hope you will. I do know that very little is remembered on an evening like this, so the best you can hope for is an odd phrase here or there, and glean as you can, and gather as you may. Let me end my remarks by trying to ground it again in the context of our culture and in the future of your lives.

In the Wall Street Journal, at the very middle of 2013, Henry Allen, who’s a pundit and a commentator, began his article with the phrase, “For the first time in my 72 years, I have no idea what’s going on.” “I have no idea what’s going on.” He says as a political commentator, he used to think that he understood things, but he now finds, in his early seventies, that we’ve lost any sense of a purposeful beginning and a meaningful end. There seems to be, he says,

no arc, no through-line, no destiny. As the British [soldiers] sang in the trenches of World War I, to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.”

Well, there’s a bumper sticker for you, isn’t it? There’s a T-shirt to be worn. Just such an expression of sadness! He says,

I don’t know what’s going on. I doubt that anyone does. …

I used to think the world would go on the way it was going on, with better medicine … the arrival of an occasional iPad or an earthquake. [But] that was when I knew what was going on.

I worry that reality itself is fading like the Cheshire cat, leaving behind only a smile that grows ever more alarming.

What a strange time it is to be alive in America. It can’t stay this way, can it? Or can it?[20]

Now, what are we going to say to that? Well, we’re going to say humbly, purposefully, graciously, and straightforwardly that we do know what’s going on. Because we do not believe ourselves to be the product of some chance universe. We’re not simply molecules held in suspension. We were purposefully created in our mother’s womb.[21] He has designed us for the express purpose of giving glory to him. And that glory emerges from the hearts and lives of those who walk humbly before him.

One of the ways in which you can figure how to deal with Old Testament passages is by looking to see if the Old Testament passage is mentioned anywhere in the New Testament. And, of course, the verses from Jeremiah 9 are found in 1 Corinthians chapter 1. And here’s where they come:

For consider your calling, [graduates]: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many [of you] were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; [he] chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; [he] chose what is low and despised in the world, even [the] things that are not, to bring to nothing [the] things that are.[22]

Why? So that human beings might not boast in the presence of God.[23] So that they wouldn’t drive around in minivans declaring their genius. So that they wouldn’t say, “Here I am. The world has been waiting for me. I am the answer! We are the graduating class,” you know, “that holds the answer to the universe!” Really? I’ve met some of you. That’s a surprise to me! No, “that might not boast in the presence of God”: “Because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.””[24]

When he writes in his second letter, he makes the point even more graphically when he says that God has put this treasure in old clay pots, so that the transcendent power might belong to God and not to us.[25]

If we do not embrace the reality of the ordinary, the immediacy of the routine, the privilege of the little bits and pieces that make up life, we’re in for a sore disappointment.

Now, people are going to say, “So what did the fellow from Scotland say at your baccalaureate?”

“Oh, he said we’re just a bunch of old clay pots.”

“Wow! That was nice of him! They brought him all that way just to say that?”

“Well, no, he said that he’s an old clay pot. He said that on his best day, he recognizes himself to be an unprofitable servant.[26] He recognizes how quickly it has been”—from the day I was where you are to the day where I am now, and that I’ve got less in front of me than I have behind me, and that I’m aware of these things in a way that I wasn’t. And that’s the value of age: so that old fogies like me can come and speak to young people like you and say, “Here, listen to the warning of Jeremiah.” And realize this: Most of us won’t even be a footnote in history. Therefore, if we do not embrace the reality of the ordinary, the immediacy of the routine, the privilege of the little bits and pieces that make up life, we’re in for a sore disappointment.

Did you read George Eliot’s Middlemarch? Do you remember how she ends? You say, “‘She’? I thought you said it was ‘George’?” Check with the English department; they’ll fill you in. Do you remember how she ends with this picture of the humble person and the great explanation of the humble life? Speaking of this individual, she writes,

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you … as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.[27]

I invite you to live faithfully a largely hidden life—hidden in the protective mercy of God, who has made you—exercising justice, proclaiming a righteousness in Christ alone, and in the awareness of the fact that, to move from one prophet to another, Isaiah says,

This is the one to whom I will look [says the Lord]:
 he [or she] who is humble and contrite in spirit
 and [who] trembles at my word.[28]

Father, thank you that your Word is a lamp to our feet and a light to our path.[29] Thank you for the privilege that we’ve had of having our thoughts constrained from a biblical perspective. Grant that as we anticipate tomorrow, and all of our tomorrows, we may walk in the path of righteousness for your name’s sake.[30] Amen.

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[1] David Brooks, The Road to Character (New York: Random House, 2015), 5.

[2] Dan Barry, “Boomers Hit New Self-Absorption Milestone: Age 65,” New York Times, December 31, 2010, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/01/us/01boomers.html.

[3] Paul Simon, “I Am a Rock” (1965). Lyrics lightly altered.

[4] Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011).

[5] Jeremiah 9:20–21 (paraphrased).

[6] John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “We Can Work It Out” (1965). Lyrics lightly altered.

[7] Ecclesiastes 1:18 (paraphrased).

[8] Bertrand Russell, Albert Einstein, et al., “The Russell-Einstein Manifesto,” https://pugwash.org/1955/07/09/statement-manifesto.

[9] See Isaiah 40:6–7; 1 Peter 1:24.

[10] See James 4:14.

[11] Ecclesiastes 12:1 (NIV).

[12] See Ecclesiastes 12:3–4.

[13] Ray Stevens, “Mr. Businessman” (1968).

[14] See Matthew 24:35.

[15] See Romans 5:8.

[16] 1 John 3:1 (NIV).

[17] Matthew 3:14 (paraphrased).

[18] Matthew 3:15 (paraphrased from KJV).

[19] John 17:3 (ESV).

[20] Henry Allen, “The Disquiet of Ziggy Zeitgeist,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2013, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324110404578626314130514522.

[21] See Psalm 139:13.

[22] 1 Corinthians 1:26–28 (ESV).

[23] See 1 Corinthians 1:29.

[24] 1 Corinthians 1:30–31 (ESV).

[25] See 2 Corinthians 4:7.

[26] See Luke 17:10.

[27] George Eliot, finale to Middlemarch (1872).

[28] Isaiah 66:2 (ESV).

[29] See Psalm 119:105.

[30] See Psalm 23:3.